The Rake Magazine

Author: Jon Zurn

  • The Flour Mills of My Mind

    After a long winter of channel surfing, The Rake took heed of the growing evening light and resolved to check out some of the local culture that those freezing nights had held at bay. The other night, we trekked down to a new local favorite, the Mill City Museum, where a lecture was underway by Gail Peterson, a professor of psychology at the University of Minnesota. The subject? How the Washburn A Mill was used during the forties to develop weapons of war.

    According to Dr. Peterson, in 1943 Betty Crocker wasn’t the only one cooking up ideas at the flour mill, now the ruin that so romantically embraces the museum. In a shed atop the twelve-story building, a team of scientists was conducting top-secret experiments.

    Their project quietly proceeded behind the two-story-tall neon sign that happily beamed the word “Eventually,” General Mills’ motto at the time. Was it exploding flour? Nerve-agent pancake mix? Not quite. It was nothing less than the development of the first “smart bomb.” These were the early days of long-range rocketry. Hitler was ahead in this arms race, maybe months away from being able to bomb any city on the planet. The U.S. War Department responded with zeal, developing a rocket propulsion system dubbed the “Pelican.” Still, a confounding hurdle confronted them: How to guide that rocket over hundreds of miles to find its target.

    Enter B.F. Skinner. Yes, that B.F. Skinner, the famous researcher and theorist who wrote an entirely new branch into the lexicon of psychology known as Applied Behavior Analysis. Most people remember Skinner for his experiments on “shaping,” a method of modifying behavior—be it human or animal—using certain enticements and reinforcements. By 1936, Skinner was well on his Behaviorist path when he received his first professorship at the University of Minnesota. Over the next few years, he had rats performing a circus of elaborate functions, all for the promise of a few pellets of kibble.

    When World War II broke out, Skinner decided to lend his skills to the cause, and began experimenting with the unique abilities of pigeons to recognize distant targets. The government asked General Mills to help fund Skinner’s “Project Pigeon.” (This may seem odd, but local industry jumped to help the cause in any way it could. A small Minneapolis thermostat manufacturer created the first autopilots for B-52s at about the same time; that company was later known as Honeywell.) By 1943, Skinner and a team of graduate students crossed the river to become employees of General Mills, riding a treacherous conveyor belt to the top of the building and setting up shop on the roof. Pigeons were plentiful and their experiments showed slow, but promising results. Pigeon “pilots” were trained to recognize a photo image of a distant target and, with slight movements of their heads, guide their missiles to destiny. The Pelican rocket was fitted for three valiant pilots. Unfortunately, while Project Pigeon was proving that birds could fly bombs, another secret project, this one called Manhattan, was proving that an atom could be split with a remarkable outcome. The rest is the birdseed of history.

    Things weren’t over for Skinner, however. During his experiments, the professor made the important discovery that by interacting with his subject—leading it, rather than waiting for the birdbrain to do most of the figuring—he could guide behavior with remarkable speed and accuracy. It would become fundamental to shaping methodology. and revolutionized fields such as physical therapy to recover lost motor function, and the education of autistic children. Then again, maybe Skinner was merely putting words to an ancient technique. Willful spouses have been shaping our behavior for centuries. Come to think of it, what did rouse me from the couch to hear a lecture on Skinnerian psychology in an industrial museum?—Jon Zurn

  • Robert Bly: The Dude Abides

    In his seventy-seven years, he has established himself as a world-class poet, teacher, social critic—and founder of the controversial “expressive men’s movement.”

    Standing in his studio—a nineteenth-century stable behind what was once a lone farmhouse atop Lowry Hill—Robert Bly is surrounded by books, papers, and icons. This is a monk’s cell. In one nook stands a simple bed. There is a prayer room, where gatherings of chanting and drumming are held for a regular group of initiates who sit cross-legged on Persian carpets.

    Bly himself is a tall and solid man. On these wintry days, you’ll find him cloaked in an enormous overcoat and black ushanka hat. He looks like a bear just out of the forest. Though he’s just embarked on his seventy-seventh year and his thick hair is frosty white, he displays a youthful vigor that reminds you he has lived a very active life.

    Like the heroes of so many fairytales he has told, Robert Bly is an archetype in his own history. Such mythic journeys require tasks that prove fortitude, and Bly has duly tilled the soil, fought with dragons, and lived as a hermit. He is legendary for banging down institutional doors and tackling giants. As an outspoken poet, philosopher, and societal gadfly, he has written the laws of the world as he sees them, and he’s gotten himself into plenty of trouble for it. Most people are more familiar with Bly’s opinions than his poetry. Many don’t know much of either. It’s not easy following his mystical lead. Yet his longevity and conviction have earned him the begrudging respect of many critics, even on the nasty battlefield of literature.

    As a studious pupil of many teachers, he learned the scholarly ways. He has been a supplicant in the church of Jung and knows the songs of Abraham, Muhammad, Shiva, and Odin. Bly has faced his share of demons along his far-flung path. Today he meets with me between his engagements as a still-active writer, speaker, and babysitter for his nineteen-month-old grandson.

    Although he is an accomplished poet, a renowned translator of poetry, and a National Book Award recipient for his 1967 collection The Light Around the Body, Robert Bly is probably best known for his role in the men’s movement. It has been a long path, but suffice it to say that by the eighties, Bly’s studies of Freud and Jung and the world at large had led him to see the struggle of human consciousness as the result of a breakdown of our masculine and feminine sides. Not only were they at odds, they were largely lost. He took up these themes in his writing and in his activism, and in so doing he became the subject of at least as much ridicule as admiration.

    Bly’s work with the men’s movement was inspired by his previous exploration of the Great Mother as a poetic theme, and by watching his two sons confront the cruelties of life. “My daughters were older than my sons. Daughters have a self-regulating mechanism. But sons are a problem. The world has so cuffed them about with such fantastic cruelty that becoming an adult male is a huge problem. Once I was with a thousand men at the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco. I had an idea that overnight we cut up like two or three thousand pieces of red cloth and then I said, ‘I’d like all of the men here who have a wound on their body to tie a piece of cloth around their wound.” Bly shakes his head in sadness. “There were men with eight of those ribbons on their bodies. Motorcyle crashes, fights, war, everything.”

    The “father consciousness” needed tending, Bly decided, and masculine roles were rooted in violence. “It’s easier to socialize a young man into being a warrior than to be a father. You can do that in the Marines; men are geared for that in some way. But to socialize them into being fathers is a different matter.” Bly started the Minnesota Men’s Conference in 1984 near Sturgeon Lake, mixing teachers, poets, psychologists, and musicians. “In the seventies we were doing workshops with men and women. I’d always used the story theme of fairy tales, which is the old Jungian way to do things—but when I decided I wanted to teach a fairy tale to men, I didn’t have any. I read through the whole Grimm Brothers and finally found ‘Iron John.’ It is clearly a way of a man overcoming his shame. After all, he’s in the bottom of the lake.” Thus the “Expressive Men’s Movement” was born. When Bly put his work into book form in 1990, Iron John became an instant bestseller that inspired a competing reaction of acclaim and disdain.

    Feminists were livid. Women Respond to the Men’s Movement, edited by Kay Leigh Hagan, collected several highly charged reactions from writers of merit, including Bell Hooks, Laura Brown, and Barbara Kingsolver. Kingsolver expressed dismay. “When I try to understand the collection of ideas and goals that has come to be called the men’s movement, what disturbs me is that it generally stands as an ‘other half’ to the women’s movement, and in my mind it doesn’t belong there. It is not an equivalent. Women are fighting for their lives, and men are looking for some peace of mind.”

    Activist Hattie Gossett was perhaps the most reactionary, when she spat, “Well, what do they mean? What’re they going to the woods for then? Oh? Really? Sensitive? Does that mean they’re against rape now? When they come back from the woods do they issue statements against child abuse, wife battering, incest, lesbian battering? Do they pledge that, the next time one of their street-corner or health-club buddies is running off at the mouth about how he snatched him some pussy then kicked that bitch in her ass? These guys who paid all this money to go to the woods with what’s-his-name, will they silently organize a small group to take their brother for a little walk and show him some tongue- and penis-restraint exercises guaranteed to permanently clear his mind of all thoughts of ripping off pussy, or bitches, or kicking ass?”

    Susan Faludi swung back hard in her 1991 book Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women. She painted Bly as a particularly fiendish perpetrator of the suppression of feminism, calling him the “general of the men’s movement.” She wrote, “The true subject of Bly’s weekends, after all, is not love and sex, but power—how to wrest it from women and how to mobilize it for men.” Her tome dedicates several pages to what today seems a hateful attack.

    Bly looks quizzical and a little sad. “The women thought that the men’s movement came up to try to combat feminism. On the contrary, it was like a planned growth. It appears at a certain time. A tree doesn’t grow up because there’s another tree nearby. It’s got its own growth pattern. Women used to think of me as a huge enemy and attack me all the time. But now I find that a lot of women stop me in airports and tell me, ‘I’ve been reading Iron John. I can’t tell you how helpful that is in dealing with my own male side.’”

    Whatever the verdict, the hubbub brought Bly a measure of celebrity that still lives. The highly respected Bill Moyers produced A Gathering of Men for PBS, bringing Bly and his Wild Man into our national living room. Spin-off books by spin-off Jungians, shamans, and visionaries flooded the media. A cottage industry of men’s conferences of innumerable stripes flourished from church basements to Fortune 500 boardrooms.

    Dialogue was lost in the shouting of standard-bearers who had climbed into their opposing towers. Even politically motivated Jungians pecked at Bly’s interpretations as conservative. People took from Iron John whatever suited their own agendas. Feminists who were nervous in 1990 could point by the middle of the decade to scores of highly conservative and chauvinistic new men’s groups. It doesn’t take a psychic leap to guess that organizations like the Promise Keepers drew some of their energy from what Bly had started. Even worse, Iron John made for some of the best lampooning material in years. Men crying en masse, drumming, and chanting; it was all so easy. The image of a herd of naked white men plunging through the forest still comes to mind.

    Yet, fourteen years later, Iron John’s drum can still be heard. Bly offers a grandfatherly smile. “The Minnesota Men’s Conference will celebrate its twentieth year in September. I think men have been helped somewhat. I was over at Powderhorn Park one day and I saw a lot of men there playing with their sons. My wife said, ‘That’s part of the work that you and the others did, that many more men are taking part in raising their children.’”

  • Last of the Mohawks

    John “Macker” McMahon has a bright green mohawk, skull-shaped rings, lots of leather, and boots definitely suited to toppling statuary. On top of all that, as if for verification, he sports an Irish accent as green as his hair. Not the kind of guy you’d expect to see making housecalls in Kenwood or Linden Hills. But Macker also happens to be a carpenter, and a good one at that. In the marketing game, you sometimes have to play to your strengths: He is the owner and operator of Mohawk Remodeling.

    Macker learned his skills during his Dublin youth when his grandfather and uncle put him to work in their construction business. When his father signed the whole family up for the emigration lottery, Macker made his way across the Atlantic, following his dad to San Francisco. There he continued to ply the McMahon trade. His talent got him work, but the green hair got him noticed. “I realized I had an image going,” he recalls.

    He found his way to Minneapolis. “My friend here kept telling me how great it was. You could afford to live and buy a house. People had gardens. Punkers had businesses.” So he made the move and opened up shop with a van painted to match his hair. Meanwhile the punk craftsman also became a regular local with his wife, Smoggy (“We met at the anti-poll tax riots in Trafalgar Square,” he smiles wistfully of a bygone day), three daughters, and a house in southeast Minneapolis. “I like it here. People are nice. It’s true, the Minnesota nice thing, it reminds me of Ireland, especially of people in the country.”

    But hasn’t he heard about Minnesota ice? After all, he’s striking out into some very unpunk territory. “I get along with most everyone. I’ll never know about the rest because they don’t call. It’s at the stage where I can choose the job.” Besides, he doesn’t do suburbs. “I like staying in Minneapolis. A lot of my crew bikes. We draw attention, then it’s up to us whether it’s good or bad attention.”

    Still, it takes a little mental scaffolding to bridge the notion of a guy with a mohawk and shredded jeans as licensed, bonded, and insured. Punks are supposed to tear things down, not build them up. He can’t help it if he has a thing for fine oak.

    The lads on Macker’s crew all have mohawks too, even when they’re lassies. But McMahon says it’s not a job requirement. “I’ll hire anyone and give ’em a try. They just have to be open-minded. They have to be able to laugh on the job site. It’s good to have people that enjoy workin’ together.” Agreeing to Flogging Molly on the boombox all day certainly can’t hurt.—Jon Zurn

  • Portait of the Artist as an Old Master

    Thirty-three years ago, Richard Lack started his atelier for classical realism. The modernists laughed, groaned, and went back to their wine. Decades later, the arts movement that found a happy home in Minneapolis may be the most exciting thing happening in the nation.

    You walk up a flight of stairs and down the flourescent-lit cinderblock hall of a faceless warehouse in the industrial heart of East Hennepin Avenue. You push through a set of black steel doors labeled simply The Atelier, and you enter a space where time and the outside world have lost their hold. The stinging smell of oil and turpentine hangs on the air, and the pristine white walls are punctuated by long gray curtains hiding innumerable rooms beyond. Dividing the walls like a riot of unrelated windows are hundreds of paintings.

    The paintings are landscapes, still lifes, and a small army of figures, mostly nudes looking on. They are solitary images, some in color, many in black and white or sepia, each with its own demure elegance. Pull back one of the curtains and a cascade of cool, northern light dapples the small room as if it were a private chapel. More paintings line the perimeter of the room, stacked upright four or five deep. Opposite the window is a table covered with blue silk, a white porcelain pitcher, a silver tray, and a clutch of pink roses. From one wall, a plaster face, milky and deathly in its bone-like monochrome, frowns down at a disheveled assortment of paint tubes and brushes. The silence is vast, the scent of mineral spirits dizzying. The stillness is both mesmerizing and foreign.


    But the sensation suddenly evaporates when a voice chimes out from behind. A small woman with a flash of brilliant blond hair appears from around the corner. Her greeting reveals an easy Texas drawl as she introduces herself as Cyd Wicker, co-director of the Atelier, a school for fine art painters. Wicker’s name reappears over her shoulder, attached to a large painting of Arctic explorer Ann Bancroft. It’s a relief to know this isn’t a time warp anymore. As we stroll through room after room of pedestals, easels, still-life props and paint carts, Cyd explains the courses that would-be painters pursue at the Atelier. Four years full-time, drawing the figure three hours every day, five days a week. Pencil, charcoal, painting in black and white, painting in color, portraiture, still-life, interiors. She speaks in terms of tonality, light, nature and observation.

    Then she ticks off a list of names: Burne-Jones, Millais, Godward, Waterhouse, and Bouguereau (yes, the beautiful child and mother offering an apple at the MIA—the one that’s on all the posters). But mostly the names are unfamiliar, long dead. Foremost, Wicker talks of lineage, the ancestry of the Atelier—as if it were a family tree. Still more names: Ives Gammell, the Boston School, William Paxton, Jean-Leon Gerome, Jacques-Louis David— these men, too, long past. Except one, Richard Lack, who founded this institution in Minneapolis more than thirty years ago.

    At 74 years old, Richard Lack is an institution in his own right. “It’s really been incredible what he’s accomplished,” says Steven Levin, a successful painter and one-time Lack pupil. Lack has been an artist nearly all his life. A well-regarded portraitist and landscape painter, he has works in collections all across the county, including governor’s portraits at our Capitol. Moreover, as the founder of Atelier Lack, the forerunner of the current Atelier, he’s taught his craft to dozens of others. His students consider him to be one of the most influential teachers alive today, a teacher of whom they speak in the same breath as Rembrandt and Rubens. Steve Gjertson, in his recently published biography of Lack, unabashedly calls him “one of the most significant American realists of the second half of the 20th century.”

    Yet Lack’s success hasn’t made him a household name by any means, and the fact that people have come from all over the country to study with him has gone largely unnoticed by the cognoscenti. “He stayed on his own path, and it’s always been an uphill struggle,” Wicker says. The established art world looks at Lack as an anomaly, part of something abandoned a hundred years ago in the tidal wave of modernism and its tangle of currents. While Lack may not appreciate the dismissive posturing of the moderns, he doesn’t give them much heed. It’s the past that he really cares about. He is an apostle of a tradition of painting that all but perished in the 20th century. Yet it’s a tradition with roots reaching back to the Renaissance—to the imagery, style, and techniques of those still known as the giants of art history, the likes of Titian, Michelangelo, Raphael and da Vinci.

    Lack is a purveyor of realism. “Classical Realism” to be exact, a term his biographer claims Lack himself coined in 1982. And the company of the old masters suits him just fine. It’s their impulse he lives by. For Lack and his followers, what is good in art today should be judged by the same merits it was judged by then. As he wrote more than twenty years ago, “Our criterion is broad and simple: A picture must be beautiful in line and color, and the representational element skillfully achieved. Only then can we dwell on matters of taste, style, innovation, historical significance, relevance of subject matter, paint handling…”

    The teacher wasn’t writing about Cherry Spoon Bridges. “The rest of the world can have it,” he says in a satisfied undertone, on a glorious autumn day in his studio. His snow white hair and quiet gaze give him a countenance that is at once ancient and full of life. Somehow his aluminum walker and blue robe have a regal dignity, lit from north facing windows set at 45 degrees, just as da Vinci dictated. In a way, you could call it a matter of perspective.

  • State of the Arts

    According to the guidebook at my dentist’s office, we live in one of the best metropolitan areas in America, and recent census figures say our incomes are among the highest nationally as well. Indeed, the McKnight Foundation reported recently that more people visited the five major Twin Cities museums in 1998 than went to see the Twins, Timberwolves, and Vikings combined. Dance and theater is growing by leaps and shouts. The Walker Art Center is an unabashed world player in contemporary art, and Bruce Dayton and director Evan Mauer seem driven to put the Minneapolis Institute of Arts on the international map. Ask the National Endowment for the Arts and you’ll learn that more cultural centimes are spent here per capita than any other state in the country. But still, where are those artist types? The vanguard? The painters, sculptors, photographers, videographers, multi-mediaists, the ones who actually make art, who are the scene, who put a place on the map?

    By and large, they’re waiting your table, or painting your house, or doing freelance ad layout for Best Buy. Being an artist in these parts means you’re doing it in your spare time—after you’ve brought home a paycheck. Many have chosen to swim for friendlier waters. Nancy Robinson, a painter who’s been working in Minneapolis since the mid-80s, has watched the scene—and artist friends—come and go. Two years ago she received a travel grant from the Jerome Foundation in order to pursue exhibiting in Chicago. She visited Chicago and later New York, and had the almost unheard of fortune to get shows in both cities. In the process, leaving Minnesota became an option. “There was just so much more going on elsewhere,” she says.

    The experts estimate that Minnesota has an abundance of the creative poor. McKnight counted 300,000 artists a few years ago. But that same survey also noted that more than 60 percent of those artists were making less than $7,000 per year. There’s a lot of art being made here, but not much of it is selling.

    The gap between local art and local pocketbooks is longstanding. Big collectors pick up Artforum or Jansen’s History of Art and they’re off to Chelsea or Madison Avenue. They buy it there, bring it back here, and—voila!—we’re a cultural capital. It’s reassuring to be told what’s good. Just so, small collectors are an endangered species. Galleries have been closing over the past five years as if a plague had gone through, and visual arts coverage in the local press has been little more than an afterthought. But the oft-heard cry over shrinking show space and a blind press is only begging the question. If the interest is going elsewhere and the money is going to the estates of Picasso and Rothko, then maybe there’s no reason to open the gallery doors or dedicate the column inches. Certainly there are plenty of people here who are passionate about art, but most of them are the ones making it, the ones with the empty pocket books. “I know plenty of people who didn’t make a dime on their work last year,” laments one painter friend. The few galleries that are shouting in the wilderness, like Flanders and Kellie Rae Theiss in the Warehouse district, are struggling valiantly for every penny. “We celebrated our fifth year in January,” says Theiss. “Things have been hard, but this year there’s been a turn for the better.” Heidi Andermack, former president of the Northeast Minneapolis Arts Association, adds, “The number of artists in Art-a-Whirl went from 150 to 300 in just a two-year period.” In the studio enclaves of Nordeast Minneapolis and Lowertown in St. Paul, artists have organized open house-style tours like Art-a-Whirl and the St. Paul Art Crawl. They’re festive events. But at a combined seven nights out of a year, they still seem like a novelty.

    Elsewhere, scattered widely across this gulf, are a handful of islands known as nonprofit/alternative spaces. Irrigated mostly by mercurial grant dollars (thank God for the likes of McKnight and Jerome) and led by a new generation of hardworking art prophets, local artists have found a few good places to mix it up, even sometimes with bigger boys and girls from the coasts. The Soap Factory is the grandaddy provocateur on the scene, with a truly impressive history of exhibits going back to 1988. Dozens of emerging artists have found a friend in director Christi Atkinson, who offers an open door but high standards. PARTS Photographic Arts has been doing the same for its genre nearly as long. PARTS’ presence, along with Intermedia Arts and more recently Jungle Theater, has turned a little corner of Lyn-Lake into an oasis. New to the ’hood are Soo Visual Arts Center and High Point Center for Printmaking.

    Suzi Greenberg, executive director of Soo, is pleased with her accomplishments thus far. “Many artists are having their first real shows here and the response has been great.” High Point, maker of very fine, limited-edition prints, has been drawing on local as well as national and international talent. Across town, in a former porn theater near the corner of Franklin and Chicago Avenues, is Franklin Art Works. Executive director Tim Peterson is jubilant. “We’ll have had three years of programming come November and expect this fall to be big. We’re adding a video gallery, a reading room, and the bathrooms are being redone.” That’s in addition to shows by two highly respected artists—Argentinian Santiago Cucullu, opening September 14, and Mary Esch, opening November 13. FAW is also unique in that it’s dedicated to solo exhibits. “It’s an important step,” says Peterson. “We’re pleased to offer such an opportunity for the first time to many of these artists.”

    Ironically, while the events of 9/11 and the sagging economy have had a chilling effect on finances, the effect on attendance has been the opposite. “People are definitely looking for something, a reflection of their feelings, their fears,” says Kelly O’Brien at PARTS. Last February, the show “Image of Afghanistan” by British photographer Simon Norfolk, depicting the war-ravaged country, was a highlight of the season and went on to tour the country. On September 11, PARTS will open “Promised Land,” four topical exhibits including John Sharlin’s “Letters from the Middle East,” a haunting installation of large-scale portraits of Palestinians and Israelis printed on transparent film. On the same evening Soo will open “Twins,” an unusual meditation on self and sibling. This comes on the heels of another introspective show at Franklin Art Works by Patrick Maun.

    Clearly there’s fine work being made here. Twin Cities artists are beginning to reach outside the narcissism of an arts scene that is never given an opportunity to mature through real financial and moral support. Maybe in the near future, more people will have a yearning—and a reason—to support local artists. More important, perhaps we’ll start buying the great art that’s right under our noses.

    Jon Zurn is a Minneapolis writer.