Getting Off the Treadmill

The Boston Marathon GSX Treadmill (Gym Source)

What is the point of exercising if you’re only going to shrivel up and die? A well-toned body is nice, but it’s prone to atrophy. When a cast is removed from a broken leg, the sight of the diminished muscle is unnerving. Injuries or not, at a certain point you’re facing a losing battle. In order to maintain strength, you have to exercise, but the very exercising itself takes it’s toll, due to the decline of the lungs and heart. It’s a Sisyphean struggle. The Second Law of Thermodynamics underscores the entropy that’s a natural condition of all matter. Heat flows from warm to cold, but the reverse isn’t true. Contrary to what experts tell you exercise has relatively little to do with future health or how long one lives. Some people die faster than others. No pain no gain goes the popular saying, but the gains are not about the future. While the effect of exercise on longevity is purely hypothetical (with some people facing death by aerobics on the treadmill), it’s true reward comes in the here and now. Exercising is all about the present. It increases a sense of awareness and mastery and like Zen aids its practitioners in being more mindful and present. Exercising helps you to live in the moment. Mark Greif, an editor of N+1 wrote a controversial essay entitled “Against Exercise” (N+1, Issue 1, Summer 2004). If Susan Sontag’s legendary Against Interpretation made an argument for leaving art alone, Greif extended the sentiment to the body commenting that exercise is “a set of forms of bodily self-regulation that drag the last vestiges of biological life into the light as a social attraction.” The problem with Greif’s point is that he fails to make the mind/body connection. Exercise may start from the physical, but it’s value lies in its metaphysical component—which ultimately makes it a form of prayer.

Barney’s Wall

Barney Rosset was the founder of Grove Press and Evergreen Review and was a proselytizer for among other things the Theater of the Absurd. He brought the works of Beckett, Genet, Pinter and Ionesco to the reading public and also was famous for fighting the right to publish Henry Miller’s Tropics (of Cancer and Capricorn). He released seminal works as varied in their locus of rebellion as Last Exit to Brooklyn and The Autobiography of Malcolm X. As the publisher of Evergreen Review he crossed paths with literally every esthetic and political avant-gardist who was anybody. He was married to the seminal abstract expressionist artist Joan Mitchell and a kind of comrade-in-arms of the writer Norman Mailer, with whom he shared a love of wine, women and provocation. At the end of his life when Barney’s enterprise had been diminished by financial problems, he was no longer capable of employing his voracious appetite for life and manic energy in the same arenas he did as young man. But as the old expression goes one door closes and another opens. Barney turned his attention to a 22’x12' wall of his loft which he turned into an enormous mural. Besides leaving a powerful literary legacy when he died in 2012, he also left behind “his wall." Free expression was Barney’s turf and the cause he fought for and his wall is a mixture of abstraction and figuration, of life and art, that is the epitome what might be termed the  “free expressive style." The mural is really a three dimensional collage that contains sculpture as well as paintings within the parameters of the larger work. It’s outsider art, done by a consummate insider. Barney’s Wall is a picaresque journey through the history of 20^th Century modernism and it conforms to the dictates of the modernist view of what art should be. To quote Susan Sontag it’s Against Interpretation, being not a window onto the world, but a world in and of itself. The impresario's final act was to add himself to his own name to the list of luminaries whose careers he championed. And Barney’s Wall is something to be reckoned with. Yes there are fragments of his obsessions from Thai Bar girls to a pool table that might have existed in some of the famed downtown watering holes Barney frequented like the Cedar Tavern (where Pollock and other abstract expressionists held court). Now filmmakers Sandy Gotham Meehan (writer, producer), Williams  Cole (producer, director) and David Leitner (cinematographer) are creating a film entitled Barney’s Wall in which a number of visitors including writers, curators, analysts of varying persuasions, an anthropologist, a paleontologist and others, most of whom have never seen the wall, have been given an opportunity to free associate or riff about the wall’s effect on them. However, filmmaking aside, what will happen to the sui generis monument to the intersection of political and esthetic revolution--when Barney’s widow, Astrid, gives up the loft on Fourth Avenue where “the wall” now proudly stands? Hopefully MoMA, the Guggenheim, the Whitney or one of the downtown arts institutions like the New Museum  will take it upon themselves to preserve it for posterity.