Acrylic painted on wood panel, 8″x8″
Latin for ‘remember that you have to die’, acrylic painted of wood panel, 8″x8″
25 panel series on VW bug, acrylic on wood panels, 6″x6″.
America
Jean Baudrillard
“The point is not to write the sociology or psychology of the car, the point is to drive. That way you learn more about this society than all academia could ever tell you.
The way American cars have of leaping into action, of taking off so smoothly, by virtue of their automatic transmission and power steering. Pulling away effortlessly, noiselessly eating up the road, gliding along without the slightest bump (the surfaces of the highways and freeways are remarkable, matched only by the fluidity of the cars’ performance), braking smoothly but instantly, riding along as if your were on a cushion of air, overtaking you (there is an unspoken agreement on collective driving here; in Europe we have only the highway code). All this creates a new experience of space, and, at the same time, a new experience of the whole social system. All you need to know about American society can be gleaned from anthropology of its driving behaviour. That behaviour tells you much more than you could ever learn from its political ideas. Drive ten thousand miles across American and you will know more about the country than all the institutes of sociology and political science put together. “ p. 54,55
“They build the real out of ideas. We transform the real into ideas, or into ideology. Here in America only what is produced or manifested has meaning…” p.84
“ The American flag itself bears witness to this by its omnipresence, in fields and built-up areas, at service stations, and on graves in the cemeteries, not as a heroic sign, but as the trademark of a good brand.” P. 86
It must have seemed like the end the world at the end of World War II, particularly in Berlin, German. The country suffered massive destruction from both the air and ground forces of the Allied Armies. Berlin was left in rubbles and Germany was divided between USSR, France, England and the Americans.
The Germany economy was destroyed and as one historian described post–war Germany in the following manner:
“At the end of World War II, Germany was in a shambles. Fire bombs—more destructive than the atomic bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki—had completely destroyed Dresden. The population of Cologne had dropped from 750,000 before the war to less than 32,000. Germany’s storybook castles and great cathedrals lay in ruins, while makeshift shanty towns housed hundreds of thousands of Germans displaced by the Soviet occupation of the Eastern Provinces.
Industrial output was at a standstill, and German currency was practically worthless. A pack of American-made cigarettes could fetch more goods on the black market than hundreds of German marks.”
By 1948, the German economy was rebounding in what has been called Wirtschaftswunder, German for “economic miracle” . This occurred through currency reform, an end to wage and price controls, turning to a market economy and with the help of the Marshall Plan (there is great podcast by Planet Money with NPR on the plan https://www.npr.org/2019/09/06/758392077/episode-938-the-marshall-plan).
The Americans guided the Germany economy to be like its own consumer–driven market economy. The worker and producers of goods would also be the consumer of those goods, which was the idea that Henry Ford had introduced and scaled in America. If the Model A Ford was the exemplar of the car made for the “every person” the VW beetle was to be even more successful.The VW Volkswagen is one of the most successful cars in history. And Volkswagen was a significant force in rebuilding Germany.
“A man paints with his brain not with his hands”
Michelangelo
“There is sound reason to believe than man’s brain was from the beginning far more important than his hands, and its size could not be derived solely from his shaping or using of tools; that ritual and language and social organization which left no material traces whatever, although constantly present in every culture, were probably man’s most important artifacts from the earliest stages on and that so far from conquering nature or reshaping his environment primitive man’s first concern was to utilize his overdeveloped, intensely active nervous system, and to give form to a human self, set apart from his original animal self by the fabrication of symbols-the only tools that could be constructed out of the resources provided by his own body: dreams, images and sounds.” p. 14
Lewis Mumford,Technics and Human Development: The Myth of the Machine Volume One
“What the Israelites saw, from high on the ridge, was an intimidating giant. In reality, the very thing that gave the giant his size was also the source of his greatest weakness. There is an important lesson in that for battles with all kinds of giants. The powerful and the strong are not always what they seem.”
Malcolm Gladwell, David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants
“Only God creates. The rest of us just copy”
Michelangelo
“The way you see the natural world around you determines much about the kind of world you are willing to live with. It you are aware that whales once swam in your local waters, than you can ask yourself whether they might belong to those straits and bays one again. If you’re unaware of the animals’ past presence, than their absence will seem perfectly natural, and the question of whales in the future simply will not occur to you. “
J.B. Mackinnon from The Once and Future World: Nature as it was, as it is, an it could be
On medium and long-term expectations for growth
“We expect to see growth. Not at the rates we saw back in the 1990s to the early 2000s when we were seeing growth of six, eight, or ten per cent. We’re expecting medium-term growth of three to four per cent with GDP hopefully ending back in the two per cent and up range. So perhaps not the three times GDP growth as was in the past but closer to one and a half to two times GDP growth. Independent forecasts show continued long-term growth in container trade and we are expecting and planning to ensure we are prepared for growth. If we look at the exports, the picture is equally robust for different reasons. Assuming the global economy continues to grow, countries such as China and India are going to continue to develop their middle class and grow their cities. As part of this overseas urbanization, we would expect an increase in steel-making coal exports. In addition, as the world population continues to grow, we are expecting the strong growth in the demand for potash and grain. You have to look at each of the commodities separately, but we would say that growth fundamentals are still there.
We then look at what’s happening in the gateway and see those who know even more about commodity flows investing in our port and that reinforces our confidence. Almost whichever segment we look at, we see investors in the gateway who spend their lives and their businesses in those segments, having the same confidence about growth. I think we’re all recognizing that growth will still be there, just not at the rates we saw in this commodity supercycle over the last decade.
Robin Silvester, President and chief executive officer of the Vancouver Fraser Port Authority
“In China, when we grew up, we had nothing … But for even the poorest people, the treat or the treasure we’d have would be the sunflower seeds in everybody’s pockets.
It’s a work about mass production and repeatedly accumulating the small effort of individuals to become a massive, useless piece of work.”
Ai Weiwei
“We live amongst ghost always trying to reach us from that shadow world. They are with us every step of the way…”
“The soul is a stubborn thing, it doesn’t dissipate so quickly. Souls remain, they remain herein the air, in empty space, dusty roots, in sidewalks that I knew every single inch of like I knew my our bod, as a child and in the songs that we sing. That is why we sing. We sing for our blood, for our people because that is all we have at the end of the day”
Bruce Springsteen