Pablomatic for the people

 

Gadfly Patrick Marlborough offered something of a defense of Australian quasi-comedian Hannah Gadsby's critical and creaky post-feminist takedown of Picasso with a piece claiming to detail what Americans are missing about her show. It's because Americans are unfamiliar with the Australian vernacular, goes the article's claim. You might expect a brief linguistics lecture to be offered here, since it couldn't be anything as obvious that maybe Gadsby isn't really all that funny. 

It's clear from the outset that Gadsby's has no love for the artist, and is committed to debunking his myth and exposing his misogyny with a late comer's vigor. (I seem to remember quite a few books and magazine articles about Picasso over the decades that hanged him in effigy for being a brute and all-purpose lout, but no matter). If enough people “miss” what an artist is trying to do or attempting to tell us / teach us/ lecture us about, and if it takes a nervously apologetic essay in a major online platform to direct us to the wisdom that was waiting for us, it's a safe bet the artist flubbed the chance to do anything interesting at. 

It's impossible for every misunderstood artist to be an anonymous genius. The odds are not good for even most of them to be any good as visual artists.  The more I think about, it seems to be the case that most artists striving to make big statements in abstract fashion are rather muddle-headed fools who have the talent, none of the less, to secure grant money to fund their projects and pay their rent. Her worst sin, it appears, is the smug obviousness of what she's up to with Picasso. Naming this project with the anemic and obvious pun “Pablo-Matic” previews a level of banality that is ironically break—taking. Is this comedy? Criticism? Post-feminist grave digging? Is this any sort of attempt to get us to see Picasso differently through a specifically focused lens? It is none of these things. Worse, it's none of the things in any interesting way. It's a slight shrug of the shoulder, a flat punchline, a cocked head, a side glance, another shrug, another try at irony.  All gesture, no ideas. 

A DOZEN BLACKBIRDS

 

There are a
dozen black birds
perched on the power lines
and fuse boxes
who guard the roads to the supermarket,
the liquor store, the beauty shop
place where infamy
is bought and worn as a wig,

 Each bird catches

a ray of vanishing sun light
and swallows it whole. 

There is a glow from
their stomachs
that radiates through skin
and the snug
fit of feathers.

 

Junk food disappears from
supermarket shelves,
and shoppers set up for dinner
in every aisle.

 

There isn’t a pack of cigarettes to
be found anywhere in the store,
and all the booze dries up in the
bottles, leaving only the dust of flavor.

 

There are no brawls
or wife beatings
under this light of night
or a grinning moon,

 

Many a woman takes off her wig
and washes her face,
there can’t be a trace of anything
they’ve tried to be,
 

It’s time to lower the
arms, loosen the ties,
undo the elastic band

that keeps these
masks cutting into our faces
until the blood
stops and no one cares
about the happiness
their neighbors used to know,

 

The sun rises and sets
as always with only
deeds in between those
far hours,

 

A card game between cars
at the end of the highway
where the workman lean against
the machinery, asking themselves
about where it was they had
to get to before the last days of earth,

 

And a woman, wigless and sober,
laughs, points to the intersection,
she points to the sky,
she points into the center of the night
at a dozen pointsthat light up with each chirp,
and crooning quarter note squall
forming a string of lights
over the freeway bridges,
talons of blackbirds gripping the wire
because nothing else would do.

 

She says
“A dozen birds have each
swallowed a ray of the sun,”
and leaves it at that as she enters her house,
closes the door, and does God knows
what else when the birds stop singing in the dark.