Shooting Blans Poem by gershon hepner

Paper power, when it’s blank,
exceeds the power of the screen,
a place more suitable to wank
in front of or to vent your spleen
than paper, which when blank abhors
the vacuum that must be filled
not by a website that explores
the seed by other scholars spilled,
but ex nihilo by a mind
that generates from blank gestation
first chaos, and then, far behind,
the light of your imagination.

(Roberta Smith writes about the way that the outsider artist Martín Ramírez discovered the power of blank paper [“Outside In,” NY Times, January 26, 2007]:
The American Folk Art Museum’s transporting exhibition of the scroll-like drawings of the Mexican artist Martín Ramírez (1895-1963) should render null and void the insider-outsider distinction. Ramírez, who created the roughly 300 drawings that make up his known work between 1948 and 1963 while confined to a mental hospital in Northern California, is simply one of the greatest artists of the 20th century. He belongs to the group of accessible, irresistible genius draftsmen that includes Paul Klee, Saul Steinberg and Charles Schulz. Well selected and beautifully installed by Brooke Davis Anderson, a curator at the folk art museum, this show of 97 drawings, some mural-size, is the first museum exhibition of Ramírez’s work in New York and one of the best shows of the season.
Whatever ideas about art you hold dear, expect them to be healthily destabilized here. If a purely visual, white-cube experience of the autonomous art object is your thing, you may be startled by the illuminating correlations between the artist’s newly excavated biography and his pulsating images. If you think art is anything but autonomous and that, rather than speaking for itself, it mainly says what we want it to say, then you must deal with the way these works made enough noise to survive against almost impossible odds. If you revere outsider artists as pure, isolated, often insane visionaries who exist outside time and place, make way for a so-called outsider whose work reflected many of the specifics of his cultural and historic moment. In addition, Ramírez’s art was in step with the explorations of many “insider” artists of his time, especially in his use of collage and images from popular culture.
Ramírez had an indelible style built on a supreme sense of economy and shot through with a mix of sly humor and sunny optimism that coats deeper, darker feelings. He had his own way with materials and color — buoyed by an unerring sensitivity to the power of blank paper — and a cast of unforgettable characters, including mounted caballeros, levitating Madonnas, and deer and dogs on high alert. But most of all Ramírez had his own brand of pictorial space, which he regulated with rhythmic systems of parallel lines, curved and straight. He played spatial illusion as if it were an accordion, expanding and contracting it in a mesmerizing play of stasis and movement. He might orchestrate the curved lines into stepped, hivelike hills punctuated by dark tunnels where ornate trains and buglike cars or buses chug in or out along extravagantly banked roadways or railroad beds defined by further lines. The straight lines might form fluted, beautifully shaded proscenium stages that bring to mind old-time movie screens. Here we usually find the caballero aiming his pistol in one direction while pointing his reined-in steed in another, as if ready to wheel and dash to safety. This character is Ramírez’s signature motif: the show begins with a posse of 19 caballero drawings, double- and triple-hung on a

1/26/07)