Phil Semler

With the release of his last work of fiction, the novella Scattered Parts, Semler, as prolific as he is, suggested he might be done. Perhaps he meant done with fiction, because here we are just a few months later, presented with a monograph on Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty. Or rather, a monograph on how Heidegger might help us think about the Spiral Jetty.

This sounds as if it might be challenging. Indeed, we are told “Most people, even intellectuals, cannot read Heidegger nor would want to, even if they could.” Now I count myself among “most people” here, one of those who would not want to read Heidegger, certain as I am that I could not… of his being over my head. But with Semler as a guide, what might otherwise be impenetrable helps us see more deeply the impact of earthworks and other art which takes us outside the museum. This includes consideration of the “earth” and “world” of the title and how in Heidegger’s understanding of them, art takes place in the tension between the two, that in this rift artworks can reveal the truth.

Much of the pleasure in reading this essay is in discovering new or different ways of seeing. This reading has taken me outside of the museum, yes, but also outside of myself in an unexpectedly delightful way.

On this, my first reading, I missed most of the footnotes. Be careful not to.… (més)

The book declares itself a monograph but can it be if the artist under discussion is invented? I guess the answer’s “yes” since that’s what we have here: an examination of fictional Jack Fulton’s life and work as a walker artist.

Luckily (for this reader at least) the monograph also turns out to offer a thorough overview of what a “walker artist” is and how such an artist’s work can be understood.

On the surface walker art seems more Sierra Club than it does art. Walker artists literally go for walks, albeit significant ones, often taking up many days or weeks, covering many miles, over terrain not easily traversed. When they’re out there, in nature, they are usually alone and the experience is all theirs. But when they return, they share with gallery goers a few photos (not particularly good ones, none of them are Ansel Adams), some lines of text (dates, locations, distances), perhaps a few rocks or the worn out boots they walked in.

That’s about it. Except that Semler won’t settle for anything quite so banal. He surveys the art’s evolution from Turner and the landscape painting of the 19th Century to Richard Smithson and the land art of today. He ranges widely in considering Fulton’s motives, not just “the conceptualist goal of object-less art” but his “walking the land to be woven into nature.” And as readers of Semler’s other books will expect, there are some pretty heavyweight philosophical ideas to be wrestled with (Heidegger on shoes painted by van Gogh). There are plenty of literary allusions too, from Melville and Kafka to Kerouac and Wallace. You’ll even come across some early Pink Floyd.

There are lots of footnotes. I mean lots. While they are often useful, reading this on the Kindle for PC soon became a bit of a chore. Yes, one can easily link to a footnote and quickly link back to the narrative, but it’s disruptive nevertheless. A writer as established as Semler now is - with both literary and entertaining novels to his credit, a biography about his travels (not unrelated to the work under discussion) - deserves a print edition of this new book. Perhaps one in which the footnotes appear on the page they relate too? (Semler, I think, prefers endnotes.) But most desired would be an edition including illustrations of the works and the locations covered in the text.

Even in its present form, Jack Fulton: The Walker Artist, is a fascinating and informative introduction to a field of art less frequently encountered by many readers.… (més)

Mackenzie River got lucky as a young hippy in San Francisco. I don’t mean he got high and got laid, although he did. He got lucky when he wrote a song - (You Gotta) Flow Like the River - that was recorded by many different bands, used in TV commercials, played at football games. A song profitable enough to bring River (not his real name of course) enough royalty payments to keep him in his apartment in the Haight, listening to his comprehensive collection of blues records, free of the need to seek gainful employment.

Until now, that is, when his landlord decides to take advantage of San Francisco’s explosive real estate market, sell the house and move to Thailand.

But not before we meet Mary Cho, a young Korean-American, determined to extort the wealth she mistakenly believes a successful songwriter like River must have.

We meet his landlord, John Cooper, a successful young lawyer who wonders if he isn’t the last black man in San Francisco. And through John we meet his father, Hawk, now dead but for many years River’s closest friend and the embodiment of both the black migration from the south and the struggle to make a life in an often hostile, urban environment.

While River and Cho are the characters moving the story forward, the novel’s core is really with Hawk and the family he made. The city is revealed to us largely through Hawk and his memories, his family and his home. Through his wife’s losing battle to create a place for herself in an academic world that rejected her. And through the polarized lives of his two sons: one a dropout who doesn’t find himself until the months before his death in Vietnam, the other a lawyer with the city government.

San Francisco, a place Semler knows better than most, is the other main character here. Occasional visitors will find within this compelling story of individual memories and dreams a veritable key to the city. The same will probably be true for many current residents as well.… (més)

In the year 2115 San Francisco, Old Frisco, is a gated city isolated from the devastated communities surrounding it. Enough expertise remains for the population to don the Tsuits which protect them from the polluted environment but, for the most part, “the plug has been pulled.” There’s no more electricity to power the information technology of the past. There are only shortages.

It’s in this dystopian future that we meet our hero, Tony Kruger, in a story which closely echoes Thomas Mann’s Tonio Kroger.

Tony is determined to be an artist in a world that has none and sees little value in drawing and painting. He doesn’t fully understand where his compulsion to draw comes from but he knows enough to see that the artist is inevitably an outsider. In fact, before his career even gets underway, his mother has warned him that to be an artist is to be dead to everyday life. He sees himself as a romantic figure, as the disillusioned artist who did not have any feelings for humanity. He’s “an artist born and damned.”

But he’s a “burgher” too, a bourgeois bohemian. And it’s dichotomies such as this that the novel is most interested in. Tony’s austere father and sensual mother, intellect and nature, art and life. “I stand between two worlds. I am at home in neither.”

Tony has sympathy for simpler souls nevertheless, a desire to combine life and art, a love with “a touch of contempt and no little innocent bliss.” An art which, with “knowledge of the soul would unfailingly make us melancholy if the pleasures of expression did not keep us alert and of good cheer.”

The Quest of an Artist is a thoughtful novel with much to ponder beyond any future apocalypse.… (més)