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Remember Barbara Greene? Check out Greenemann v Bluemen: Round 1



Portrait of a Cancer Survivor
Trying to spin the life and work of the artist known to me as Barbara Greene, who somewhere along lost years became Barbara Greene-Mann, is critical folly. If there exists any spin, it is a (super) natural phenomenon, like the female Elijah sucked up in whirlwinds and transported from one enthusiasm to another, or one despair to another, from heaven to hell, ever-chronicling in one art-form or another the vertiginous view. She paints and she tap dances. She sings and she draws. She plucks feathers from passing birds and makes collages. is critical folly. If there exists any spin, it is a (super) natural phenomenon, like the female Elijah sucked up in whirlwinds and transported from one enthusiasm to another, or one despair to another, from heaven to hell, ever-chronicling in one art-form or another the vertiginous view. 

In 1973, I saw my first Barbara Greene work, a lithograph of a large Cass Corridor house that stopped me in my tracks with a singularly somber vision of the charming dishevelment of Detroit. It was pleasing to behold, and I needed one. I had never seen the artist, but wanted to buy a copy, and tracked down her studio, cash in hand.

She made me frame it myself, but showed me how to do it. She was churning out art still influenced by her training and I suspect doing rather well, so busy was that holiday season. When she discovered education and selling well did not equate to greatness or immortal works, she opted for the strangeness of the self-in-Bloom.

When I discovered her in her studio, I found her person a most desirable pistola, with a burgeoning bodily Bohemianism dreamt of by schmucks like me.  I purchased her work then due to the work, and over the years continued to buy pieces as her work ever-changed. Then I lost track of her until fairly recently.
 
When B Greene had gone B Greene-Mann I cannot say, but between the lines of her difficult-to-decipher new work (online) my eyes heard the dissonant strains of a perilous Universal Grappling Match--coming from Canada, where she had taken refuge. It was the Blue Men Group v. the Greene-Mann artist. I saw depicted a pained, credulous waif against the infinite telomeres of a short-sighted cancer gang, yet the narrative voice had the same unflappable quality as ever. 



This time, something was trying to kill her. That was the only difference.

If she or some Mesmerist can psychically contact the malignancy in question, and let it know that it will die should it kill her, she may wring more years of life for herself out of its reformation. Delivering the revelation to those retroviral malefactors that they are traitors to their own species might persuade them not to kill their hostess-host. Of course, she may have already tried that.


The Early Dog Gets the Berm

The last time I saw Barbara Greene was in the ice-bound heart of Detroit, very early in Reagan's first term. What a fun winter that was. 1981 or 2, your guess is as good as mine. Nobody was shopping for the holidays, so broken was the local economy but news of an opening art exhibition--Barbara Greene's latest suite of large canvasses, displayed at some piece-of-shit gallery on 8 Mile Road--compelled me to go and be among the cognoscenti of Detroit for a glorious hour or two.

The entire show was dedicated to 15 or 20 outsized black on white images of minimal stroke in tar-style, capturing the pointless(?) but beloved antics of her dog, whose name I never learned. It was the pinnacle of the true iconography of turning times for northern industrial cities, as contrasted to the real full-color artifice of sizzling ham and restored hopes--brainwash then saturating the national media to conceal a new, elitist realpolitik taking seed among the banking class. You could smell the rot escaping from the dangerous canned ham that Ms. Greene's Dog Series had scavenged, puked out, and then eclipsed. 

The pathos of the dog show may have been perceived as bathos in simple minds unprepared for the future. The paintings barked out an overdetermined minimalism, huge, dumbed-down--and amazingly ahead of their time in so many ways. I have reconsidered a thousand times, and often think still, of those images unseen for nearly four decades now. 

They were forerunners of the digital avatar style so prevalent and essential to today's young e-consumers, except these elements of avatar were laid in tarred slashes of supergraphic scale, waiting for their processor to be invented and their DNA to be recombined. 

In each image dwelt a galaxy of pixel-ready versatility, but in 1981 seen from inside the computer, as beheld by an object the size of a retrovirus--a stupid, suicidal retrovirus.

Then came Fate to the gallery door, to round up the score of Barbara Greene's Eight Mile Road exhibition of The Dog Series from nonplussing to immortal, based on the following categories.

1) Contextual Multi-Dimesionality. These were icons of time and place, yet also anachronisms meant for alien space, and times remembered, officially obscured, and also yet come.


2) Exhibition Location as National Emblem en utero. The choice to stage the premier exhibition of Barbara's Dog Series at the sole address in Detroit that would eventually become known to tout l'monde, or all the world, as the emblem of Detroit (post-apocalyptic)--Eight Mile Road--shows the artist's knack for finding ugly corners which her presence elevates to international landmark. Tigers? Strohs? Sanders? No speakee English. Eight Mile Road? Ah, Dee-troit.


3) Content Evocative of Truth's Demise. The bleakness of the medium--a minimalism totally unlike BG's usual tap-dancing--still resonates like cleats on wood in the mind, even though the works have remained unseen for nearly four decades. The world retreat from truth is reflected in its tar-stroking black on white in every overdetermined lie heard on current waves of propaganda. Black and white represent not only the hidden truth and visible spin, but also the international resurrection of Hindu-style caste hierarchy.


4) Art Sealed by Divine Imprimatur. God, Fate, or the All-Seeing Eyes of Masons in kiddy-cars stamped its notice on Barbara Greene's Dog Series from on high, a sure sign of historical import. The subject of the paintings, The Dog, wandered out of the gallery show for a break to sniff and piss and scour the curbside of depressed Detroit. Being not the smartest creature of the universe, he strayed into the fabled avenue where he was immediately struck by a speeding vehicle and killed deader than a cartoon cat on 8 Mile Road, just about the time his exhibited images inside the gallery had accrued the necessary exposure time--to drink the wine, to overcome the shock, to noodle out such bold, new visionary work . . . and meet and greet the star of the show, The Dog.  Like Oscar, it was mad, bad, and dangerous to know, that show. So . . .


How do you spin events born of the independent muse dismal, in the case of Barbara's Dog Series culminating in the death of the subject--real-time, in real-life on the real Eight Mile Road before it became the avenue of international repute? Who could without a cosmic connection spin an exhibition fearlessly synchronized to so many elements--the blackened ice season, the new fuck-you world economy season, the idiotic digital age ahead, and the still yet-to-be-detected paradigm shift from the true to the real?


I wish I had been able to afford one of the pieces. For the show proves in retrospect that art--created outside the guidelines of calculated investment, and borne upon strata high above the heads of cultured curators--need only await the failure of popular wisdom. Only God could have arranged such a miserably triumphant, colossally failed exhibition opening. I am fully confident the show and Barbara will be added to the annals of Art History--lore and values yet to be appreciated or fully recognized. This is true, and you learned of it here first.
She sings and she tap-dances, as I mentioned, and from a friend I learned during the pre-Reagan rapture she enjoyed an active romantic life. Oh, how I envied the carnal knowledge he must have gained from close-up experience with the instrument of a God/Muse that punishes free-spirits and generous hearts with insatiable hypergraphic longings, dead dogs, and accomplishments never understood by contemporaneous critics. But Jehovah has long been characterized as a God inclined to abuse his special humans.
Only recently has she reappeared in media, and presently fights for her life.Let's cross that out. She's gone to Germany for an opening in Munich. Check out her tone for yourself


I suppose it is all to her just another unspinnable event, guided by the whirlwind that apparently follows her wherever she goes, safeguarding or torturing her, depending on the mood of a muse or God Almighty. What those two talked about I cannot imagine.


2015

She is scheduled for a show in Europe. I hope she will not despise me for writing this, or offering the following advice: consider opening communication with the incorrigible organisms within, and talk your parasitic retrovirus out of doing anything stupid by telling them what they will miss if they don't back off. I believe disease can sometimes be persuaded to cooperate, but only out of the germs' self interest. A poem about the process:

She's back in the saddle but riding much faster
Trying to outrun an untutored cancer
She should warn them of success's disaster
To their own ambitions, the stupid bastards.

When parasites run aglee and kill their own host

with misguided zealotry to make it a ghost
Don't pathogenic fools know they're going to die with her?
They can help her instead of making her their dinner.

All the art shown on this blog (c) Barbara Greene-Mann

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