The Challenge of Art to Psychology

Last rant ago I mentioned that Dad & Mom had tried to put together and publish on a regular basis a little magazine about arts & crafts. It was a hard haul for them, I'd guess, because the first such venture, Tagalong, didn't get past the second year. The second such try, when we'd moved from Amarillo to Indianapolis, also died a short time after re-entry into the arts & crafts world. That second attempt, The Hobby Shopper, was less print-oriented and more general in scope. The few issues that I have from that time had columns worth of classified advertising, much more than the Texas attempt had had.
     I think it'd be safe to venture that the post-WWII world was not quite yet up to speed on arts & crafts as a general activity for the average white American family. Those who were involved in it had other sources of income that allowed for what today would probably be the "Martha Stewart" school of pastimery. To be sure, the print shop was a hobby shop for Dad but it also made a few shekels on the side. The "little magazine" movement was tempting but the realities were something else entirely.

Today I suspect that things are not much different, even with all the TV shows about home-making & crafts & the sorts of busy-hands activities that someone in the broadcast industry thinks will pull in the viewers. Those involved in making money off arts & crafts items seem to put in a lot of overtime just making sure the buying public knows the stuff is out there.
     And then there is the so-called "Arts & Crafts" movement, the tip of which iceberg I noticed when I came across the Arts & Crafts Press, publishers of The Tabby, the "Chronicle of the Arts & Crafts Movement."
     About six lines into discovering that it costs $65 for a year's subscription to The Tabby, I realized that my parents' attempts at getting into the arts & crafts publishing business was another case of being born too soon. Obviously, and considering that they'd have to give up their day jobs to do it, they would have flourished at least enough to pay their own bills with today's InterWeb allowing people to discover online that which they would pay good money for to read off line.
     No, that's not a note of sarcasm.
     It's a note of reality.
     The reality lies in the obvious amount of time that obviously goes into producing The Tabby. One does not do nouveau arte deco with the colors and typography on the cover (shown above) without some serious time in the linoleum block/wood block engraving room with an order of color separations on the side. All that and the temptation to believe that the journal is printed letterpress (or maybe at least the cover) makes me remember the huge amount of time that my parents spent on just trying to get their dreams running.
     The simple realities of my parents' experience, I am sure, drove Mom to go back to grade school teaching and the eventual masters in education which helped pay the bills and allowed my father to get out of printing the "hits list" for his employer's radio station. And even then I know that Dad did odd job printing for other folks with whom he was acquainted. Lawyers, doctors, city officials & the like.

Doing go-it-alone publishing is a killer & whoever goes into it – at least with my parents' lives as witness – should be ready for the interminably long late night hours, the constant attempts at cutting costs without cutting quality and a damn big pile of money growing somewhere to make it all worthwhile. Or to put it another way: if it's too much like real work, it's an enterprise best left to the gifted, wealthy or those blessed with a nearly limitless supply of caffeine or crystal meth.
     Falling well outside those limits as I do, you can bet I'll never get involved, even if I have spent weeks and hours hand-setting & printing a twenty-four page whatnot for a printers' hobby organizations "bundle."
     Sure, it'd be sweet to have a regular publishing bit to run off as proof that I am among the gifted, even if it were obvious that I ain't wealthy. And I've had enough experience with caffeine and crystal meth to know better.

Thus I am in awe at "The Arts & Crafts Movement" while at the same time envious of them what are able to involve themselves in it enough to make money off it.
     It would be nice – and probably run if it weren't such a job – to produce, as I have often before for hobby printers outfits, some trifle of a few dozen pages that would elicit joy or a smile or a laugh or a shake of the head from some reader who, unlike the putative readers of blogs, would take joy from the reading. Be sweet, actually.
     I suspect, however, that most of the stuff goes into the various "bundles" of hobby printers' and "amateur journalism" organizations' monthly mailings goes directly from the top of the desk into the recycled paper bin without too much more than a passing of the hand across the sheet. There are only so many joke cards or business cards of four page flimsies that one can collect and tolerate in the domestic environment. A couple years' worth of "bundles" is a huge pile of real estate and a considerable weight. And for as much of a hoarder as I can be (with 18 radios in one room & ten domestic cats running about la estancia) there is only so much ephemera I can handle at one time.
     This should make it pretty clear that, while I do enjoy thinking that what I write and print is appreciated deeply over time, I am hip enough to my own assay of the way things work to know better. As I have said elsewhere, I ain't an artist. I don't live in an artists' commune with artists and I am not surrounded by artists sipping mint tea on the front porch while clove cigarettes smolder in the ash tray.
     Or maybe I'm wrong. Maybe art doesn't have to do anything. It just is, man.
     Or not.
     Probably or not.
     All of this cogitation brings us back to a very simple problem, one that has been explored again and again over the course of human investigations into consciousness. As Lev Vygotsky so quickly noted, art is a challenge to psychology. Art stands in the doorway and blocks the smell of the passing trains. It gets in the way of perfectly hideous waste by giving us sunsets and people sitting on the grass with a Victorian picnic. It gives us literature and statues and even printing presses. And it serves no other purpose, in which state it does posit a direct affront by its place in human consciousness.
     And for the life of me I can't figure out what's wrong with that any more than I can figure out why I enjoy printing stuff with old metal type, even if the stuff is something I consider slightly less brilliant than my ruminations in blogolandia. Not that anyone else is gonna notice.
     And yeah, that is a "gimme."