Surviving Summer...and So Much More in the New Place
And our Autumn Open House is Saturday, October 26
So, hello, yes, okay, the Toucan Newsletter—well, it took a little break over the summer, after all the storm and stress, the, dare I say—literary, pretentious—Sturm and Drang, of getting moved and open at the new location for Toucan at 1002 2nd Ave N. in Billings.
But Toucan is open, we had our grand opening, and it’s starting to feel like business as usual…as usual as a more than 40-year-old business moving from its original and heretofore only location to a state of being open for just eight months in a wholly new place…reimagined, redeveloped, reconstituted. As Joseph Conrad wrote: “Thus ended the first and adventurous part of his existence. What followed was so different that, but for the reality of sorrow which remained with him, this strange part must have resembled a dream.”
But before we essay along too far here, I first want to let everyone know what’s coming up at Toucan through the end of the year.
AUTUMN OPEN HOUSE
On Saturday, October 26, from 10:30 am to 4 pm, we will be hosting our Autumn Open House. There will be some snacks and seasonal beverages, and it will be a good way to get a preview of the art and artisan-made items (some pictured herein) we have available for your holiday shopping. In fact, you could do some holiday shopping, if you’re the kind to get started early. (Or just get something for yourself, which is always an option.)
A HEADS UP
Toucan will be closed Thursday, November 7 – Tuesday, November 12, so that Allison and I can briefly and properly escape Montana’s borders, something we haven’t been able to do since we started the project to make a new Toucan.
HOLIDAY OPEN HOUSE
We will be hosting a Holiday Open House on Saturday, November 30, which also happens to be Small Business Saturday, which we have “celebrated” (is that the word? We are a locally-owned, small business, after all) since the very founding of SBS in 2010.
And now for the readers, the connoisseurs, the aficionados of a certain searching discursiveness, well, let’s get back to our dispatch, which is something about Toucan, but then more, other, as these sorts of things tend to go, unfurling in a way unknown at the start but hopefully coalescing into something meaningful at the end, something about whatever it is that Toucan represents, this manifestation of human hope, expressed in both architecture and enterprise, ideology and good will, and cogged into a community that is unrelentingly, with all the attendant frustration and angst, still becoming.
Like anything new, the new Toucan has had some idiosyncrasies to either (under duress) remedy or (with patience) assimilate. For example: the alarm system (of which the glass break sensors started going off when we merely opened the door), the leaking windows (revealed in two ferocious summer storms and sleuthed out with the aid of a pressure washer by our contractor to be the result of preexisting, long-existing, holes in the facade leftover from a past awning or similar attachment, the water entering the wall cavity and pooling above the storefront window penetrations until breaching the building envelope entirely in a drip-drip-drip of dihydrogen oxide...um, water...on the inside of the glass and down to the sill, enough to cause a scramble for towels and now, we hope, mitigated into nonexistence with the holes properly plugged), the HVAC system (with its “smart” thermostat and its “app,” the contemporary digital dance, awkward at best, of humans with their, overstated but comfortably anxiety-inducing, robot overlords), and, of course, the way you can’t really be in the breakroom doing the lunch dishes when someone enters the building because you can’t hear someone enter the building when you’re in the break room doing the lunch dishes. None of which is catastrophic and all of which are merely intrinsic to the process of making something meaningful, useful, better. Of course, if George Bernard Shaw had his say, which he still does: “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.” (Or woman, of course, human, ultimately, which is how Shaw was using the word, its usage as such fraught and evolving today.)
In any case, at the end of summer, I always feel an undeniable sense of relief, because beyond the essential, shall we say, unreasonableness, of a new Toucan, I am not, in general, a summertime person. Summer is not without its dandelion-wine charms, of course, but I tend to find those more in its myth, the words of Bradbury, say, than I do in the unrelenting indignities of its reality—heat, weeds, cultural expectations—everything combining into a seemingly purpose-made slurry meant only to suffocate my increasingly fragile joie de vivre.
Allison and I discuss this every summer, our discomfort with the season (yes, she’s in on it, too), but we survive, as we always do. Making pictures, growing vegetables, preparing and eating good food. This year, it was also welcoming our friends, colleagues, clients, and customers to the new Toucan that helped to ease our way, even as we had to figure out the ideal setting for the thermostat in our new building (which can be done with the app!) for that cool but not too air-condition-y cool when it was indeed the absurd temperature of 104 degrees outside: the sun both heater and light, and producing too much of each, our human sweating and squinting, the body electric, retinas burned, the photograph of our being thoroughly overexposed.
The French literary critic and theorist, Roland Barthes, in his book, Camera Lucida, slim of page count but plump with intention, both a eulogy for his mother and perhaps the most influential analysis of photography to date, writes of the photograph, whatever the state of its “exposure”—over, under, or perfectly so—as containing two essential elements: studium, which Barthes takes from Latin and which, in his words, “doesn’t mean, at least not immediately, ‘study,’ but [does mean] application to a thing, taste for someone, a kind of general, enthusiastic commitment…but without special acuity.” This is the general interest a photograph conveys. The second element Barthes termed punctum, and it is that thing that disturbs or punctuates the studium. As he describes it: “A photograph’s punctum is that accident which pricks me (but also bruises me, is poignant to me).”
This photograph I made of Rilie Zumbrennen working on a mural (a collaboration with Ruby Hahn) near Toucan for the Wild West Walls mural festival in the East Billings Urban Renewal District in September might be understood to contain these elements. The studium is the general cultural relevance the image conveys and which you feel: it’s an artist painting a mural on the side of a building. The punctum is, however and ultimately, for you to decide, personal and touching. What is it that elevates this photograph to “wound” you, as Barthes would ask. Is it the pink respirator, the messy up-do, the stilled stream of spray paint, the red top of the spray can, the matching thumbnail, the compromised metal soffit looming over Rilie? Anything? Something? That a photograph can even be analyzed like this is for the most part novel in the mainstream, a picture often thought to be nothing more than a record of the real, unanimated and informational. What’s a wound got to do with it?
But then what of when your internal medicine MD thinks he feels something in your abdomen at an annual exam, but then understanding that touch can be suspect where seeing is believing, and so “we should get a picture” becomes a reasonable response? Except for the fact that the first available time to accommodate a CT scan at the Billings Clinic is a full week from this inciting incident, a week to contemplate one’s existence—not that this isn’t something I don’t continually do (oh, yes, this is me I’m writing about not “you”), enjoying an apricot cocktail with Simone de Beauvoir at Les Deux Magots in Paris, discussing being and nothingness, except I’m the third wheel because she’s there with her boyfriend, Jean-Paul Sartre, who is going to write Being and Nothingness and all but invent existentialism—until the picture is finally taken, with radiation rather than light, an iodine-based contrast agent intravenously administered, things not particularly compatible with human tissue, but then if seeing really is believing, how else are you going to get a glimpse inside of something so intrinsic but impenetrable.
The studium here is basic human anatomy, a normalized field with “average affect” (as Barthes writes) to the eye of a diagnostic radiologist, and, in this case, the punctum, well, there was none. The interpreter’s sensibility was not disrupted. To quote the report, a particular kind of communication, the writing not artful but blunt in its preciseness: “No mass lesion identified in the abdomen or pelvis.”
Okay, then. Life goes on. Which leads me to this:
In Barthes’s analysis, the photograph sits between The Operator, who is the photographer, and The Spectator, who is you and me and anyone else who would experience the photograph...or whatever the work of art, as I would like to extend it.
Because what if we were to reconsider the relationship between artist, art, and those who would experience it as something more akin to the physician/patient relationship, where the art object is akin to the CT scan, a contemporary X-ray of the soul, the soul, in this case, of the artist. The artist then is the “patient,” a word that derives from the Latin, patiens, meaning one who suffers. And then you and me and anyone else who would examine the art produced by the artist would be, well, the diagnostician, examining the patient via this “picture” they have provided us of their inner being. We are the analyst, to use Freud’s term, or Dr. House, to use television’s term. It is up to us to determine the punctum in the picture, to reveal the source of the artist’s suffering in such a way that the scan—and this is where the metaphor metastasizes—then reveals us, you or me, our diagnosis becomes self-referential, and art has done its job. Maybe we can’t cure the artist, but in our diagnosis, maybe, just maybe, we can save ourselves.
We hope you will stop by our Autumn Open House on Saturday, October 26 from 10:30 am to 4 pm. We look forward to continuing the great and enduring conversation that is Toucan!