Contemporary Modern Art

Part One, Defined.

I just spent a few days in La Jolla, California. While wandering the streets of La Jolla with my wife, we ventured into a handful of galleries. Many of these galleries proclaim themselves to be purveyors of fine Contemporary Modern Art. I started wondering exactly what this moniker actually meant. In the process I've decided on a sure fire way to identify if a piece of "art" is contemporary modern art or not. This method may not guarantee you will identify all art that is professionally labeled as "modern," but it will guarantee you that any art you personally identify as "modern" is, in fact, truly contemporary modern art.

If you are looking at a piece of "art" and the first thought in your head, the first words from your lips, are: What the F? You, my friend, are gazing upon Contemporary Modern Art of the highest order!

Since I just took off in a jet, I had the thought, in much the same way, most airplane crashes--for the passengers aboard anyway--almost always qualify as Contemporary Modern Art. Given the right situations we can go through life finding Contemporary Modern Art almost anywhere. Keep your eyes open for examples of this fine "found art" form. Anytime you catch yourself saying, or even thinking, "What the F?" just remember that you are in the presence of art.

Part Two, Nothing.

There's a big expanse of nothing. Lots of them, actually. Expanses. Of nothing. We never notice them, though, so we don't even realize they are there--be it in the comfort of our climate-controlled automobiles or sitting and sipping a cocktail in the pressurized cabin of a jet. Our every need is met and there is no challenge or hardship in travel. Maybe there should be. There certainly used to be. All of those homesteaders, miners, and pioneers could not stop off at the nearest exit, pull in to the Fast Foodplex Plus and grab a Starbucks and a triple cheeseburger with fries. Many of them never even made it due to disease, lack of water, even starvation or predation by other people. Imagine how much more we would appreciate our San Diego beach adventures if first we had to run a gauntlet of danger and duress, making our way of our own accord across hundreds of miles of open desert and rugged mountainous passes.

Looking down from 30,000 feet, club soda in hand and a book propped on my drop-down tray table, I see an odd strip of farmland. There in the deserts of western Arizona, large green circles spread out along the landscape in a swath of controlled lushness. Crops are grown in round fields to accomodate rotational sprinklers that pump water and turn in slow, lazy circles, creating unnaturally green dots across the desert. Some of these big green alien pies have a piece cut out, be it a sprinkler arm that goes back and forth in a three-hundred and forty degree arc, just short of a full circle, or some other unknown reason. Without irrigation nothing of use could grow here. Each lush green circle is an artifice. And that's the odd thing.

These "farms" stretch out for many, many miles in a narrow line that follows, presumeably, the Central Arizona Project (CAP), the water supply system that snakes over three-hundred miles across the state delivering Colorado river water to the farms and ever-growing cities of Arizona. You see these circles of varying shades of green and reddish tones, some brilliant green, some dull and nearly earthtone, stretching out. It's vastly long. But it's not wide.

As I said, this strip of farming circles goes for what seems hundreds of miles--it's so hard to judge distance from 30,000 feet in the air--but it can't be more than a quarter of a mile wide. I'd be surprised if it's that wide. And at the edges, this artificial greenery simply melts away and dissolves into rocky, rugged desert. The edges are literally fuzzy and indistinct. You look down upon this thing, this snaking spine of circular farmland; you see the narrowness of it, the crumbling edges being nibbled away by the voracious appetite of the awaiting desert; you look down and you say to yourself, "What the F?" Arizona's version of Contemporary Modern Art.