"Hetz and Nachhetz"

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DelARTe.com

MMXXIV

The idea was to produce photographs of the American Experience, pictures not readily available to the EU market. I had a good camera (Hasselblad 6x6 with all kinds of lenses). Very expensive gear and little experience how to use it, above all: No patience to do the calibrations necessary to get the proper exposure, fumbling and stumbling as we went. Operating under many homespun assumptions which turned out not to be true. The biggest stumbling block: Nobody gives a shit about photography unless you already have a name. Ultimately, between deductions and subsidies from an engineering job in Berkeley. All the efforts paid for equipment and expenses. This opened a gateway into the Art-world, by attending shows and receptions we got to meet Ansel Adams, Immogine Cunningham, Jack Welpots, Judy Dater, Hunt Witherill, Steve Crouch and many others. The concert of my engineering day job and Kathy’s law-librarian position allowed us to set out all over California taking pictures and learning “how to see”. My best pictures I submitted to the Fralit-agency in Germany, the photo's were the stolen by these swine. Truly a setback. But we got around, all over, we went on organized photoshoots to Yosemite and Baja with the Ansel Adams School of Photography, all in all a good experience, but not necessarily good business. More Art than business in the 70’s when such was possible.

Got started as a fine art screen printing press producing my own art production of fine art prints. By that time I had taken a degree in ”Fine Art printmaking” at what was then labeled CCAC, the College of Arts and Laughs in Oakland. All in a quest to find out why there was so much crap on the market and in the museums, works that commanded extraordinary prices. I made some serious connections during that time. Attended the SF Papermaking Convention where I learned a lot and met Theresa Camozzzi, an Artist with whom we are still friends. Little money was made in this time, only prints, the ones I didn’t really like, sold; drawings and Prints for which I didn’t want to be known for. But we managed to buy a house, the place we still live and work in. Slowly I managed to build up my studio, working in the evenings and nights after my day-work and got some drawing and printing in. Our first child, Bryan, subtracted much time from my efforts. There wasn’t much business except some small amounts of money that paid at best for materials. But the setup grew, slowly, to include my own color photo darkroom and tables and and and ….. I also began to realize the difference between art and art-history.

Together with a friend, a machinist I met at Up Right Inc. I managed to design and build a series of etching presses for sale. Great machines that could adjust to serve as etching, type high relief and Litho presses. The artists who had interest didn’t understand the universality of the design, the had to have the traditional approach. Not only could the press be worked from just one side against a wall, but the universality of the adjustability allowed for all manner of printmaking. They didn’t get it, all they wanted was brass handles and or motorization of the press. Nauseating customers, insufferable, making me realize I as not made to sell to people what they really not wanted but somehow desired. I learned: It’s not the product that counts, but the image it projects. If you want to be successful you have to become what you hate the most. Post sale handholding was equally repugnant. I still have the demo model, rusting away in the studio. Another lesson learned: Use it and shed it as soon as possible and for profit.

A great idea: Make oriental carpets in the image of what you see under a polarizing microscope the pictures look just like Persian handwoven carpets, beautiful patterns with a modern looking design. With my partner Emmet Eiland of oriental rug fame (still catering to the rug-habits of his customers) and my designs drawn 1:1 by Roxane Gilbert and furnished with wool samples for color verity, telephone, fax and copyright notices* to be produced in India, China Pakistan, Turkey and other places such as Nepal. Beautiful products of superior quality at a good price. All I got as feedback from the electronic industry was; “Can you produce doormats with the competitors name on it so we can wipe our feet on them?” Philistines! Lesson learned: “You cannot overestimate the bad taste of the American Industry or it’s operatives.”

*As a note on the side: The drawings, were taken literally overseas and resulted in rugs with copyright, telephone and fax plus address of the business woven or hand knotted into the otherwise beautiful rugs. Even more amazing: These were the rugs that sold first. QED

My diversion/excursion into Turkey. To build the EURO-Star #1, a PC Mac emulation that booted up in Turkish, manufatured or rather assembled in Istanbul. A disaster, playing out in Istanbul where some rich sociopath governing Polypec International was building up the first mid-eastern PC-business. Settling me with the impossible task of re-writing the PC BIOS system by myself, on the spot, to accommodate the still export-restricted 386 chipset (which I incidentally carried openly in my luggage – nobody objected?!). Before my inability to alter the BIOS significantly (for lack of access to install the modifications) was discovered, the big boss had literally stolen billions of company funds and was on the run to London where he was briefly apprehended before buying himself out of jail. My contract was terminated because of the vanished money. The surface mount facility I had begun to set up just outside of the city was abandoned leaving the Avenue of the Sultans with a skyscraper of sorts containing the surface mount station and assembly line and its seemingly unending supplies of chai, the awful over-sweetened tea. I actually was paid well for this effort, but not entirely according to contract. The experience was of course invaluable. (It took place in the middle of the US Iraq Iran turmoil.)

Note: What landed me the job more than anything was my having learned Arabic while commuting. My partner thought Arabic was close enough to Turkish to pass. Little did he know, the Turks hate the Arabs …….

My extensive EMI experience spawned through employment with HSQ Inc. where I had started as tech-writer (in South San Francisco) but quickly became manager of the drafting department and electronics engineer dabbling in alarm and control systems. Here I had opportunity to work with FCC regulations and with qualifying systems under FCC Class B rules and regulations. A few clever waveguide maneuvers applied to the control boards allowed me to reroute unwanted microwave energy in such a manner as to flexibly flush said energy to where it caused no concern. This effort did not go unnoticed and quickly brought me to the attension to the EMI engineering community and in contact with the management of Rockford Engineering (an EMI testing firm) who hired me to represent them in Munich at a major electronics trade show. Oh what a scrub that turned out to be. The big firms in Europe had no interest in subcontracting, the simply bought equipment and set up their own labs while absconding with my ideas. I ultimately landed on my feet, hired by Hercules Computer Technology in Berkeley. (Gone from stalag 13 at HSQ to club Med at Hercules, what a difference in corporate culture.) Mind you all the while I had been teaching Math and Electronics at National University in Alameda – night classes. Exhausting but necessary income because we hade a second child at hand, my son Jeremy.

While at Hercules (of Hercules Computer-Graphic-Card fame) as engineer and because of my EMI experience I came to be contacted by one Karl T. (Harlass Roth GmbH, Germany) who needed expertise in such matters and coupled with my international experience and know- how of setting up corporations in CA. I ended up working on the side as “partner”. What a sociopath! A lousy communicator who just wanted everything to go his way without doing anything useful, he wanted harvest without planting. After several blunders on his part I finally terminated the connection and gave up on pursuit of this line all together.

Everybody thought that the Exploratorium would be the ideal post for me, an amalgamation of art and science applied. Little did they know about the museum culture that had grown out of bounds since Mr. Oppenheimer, the founder. The underpaid and overpowered misfits that hover between volunteering and getting some pay for their efforts but mostly in terms of recognition of the "noble things" that they do. I was supposed to bring industrial grade order into this soup of pseudo industrial psychosis. My manager, an uneducated riser, at the time in management, was into political powerplays. He was chief procurer of franchising contracts worldwide and in all fairness had scored sever contracts. When I tried to hand him a contract with the Dortmund Industrial Museum that I had managed to align because of my consulting work, he refused a multimillion contract because he didn’t want me to get any recognition for having facilitated the deal.

He set me up to do the right thing but denied me the support necessary to actually fix the problems. Exhibits were done by sketches and relied largely on the good will of some machine shop in Mendocino. Everybody covered ass by knowing how things were done in the past, but they refused to document procedures or let me document them. When I cleaned up the sketched into drawings I made sensible decisions about tolerancing and standardizing materials and dimensions which earned me a reputation for “not being able to measure” and other such games. After many similar skirmishes labor issues were conjured up. Even though I was very flexible about working hours in my shop I refused to sign off on allowing any one employee (self-admitted dope users) to work alone in the middle of the night using all sorts of machines in the large production facility. My boss insisted I should allow the worker but of course refused to sign off on the matter himself figuring I would be the fall guy should something happen while assuring himself the benefits of meeting schedules. So he fired me, which didn’t exactly fix his problem. I later found out that all my proposals had been adopted, computers were installed and my drafting format for exhibits was also adopted; under his signature after my departure. I am still good friends with the chief engineer of exhibit services who understood it all but couldn’t intervene for his own positions sake.

Bringing art to the Internet, hopefully raising the circle of the interested. Nobody understood, nobody cared, nobody had the equipment. Like my attempt at adding an eMail to artwork so that interested parties could contact the artist themselves cutting out the middleman. Hopeless again, nobody cared about art, they only care about appearing in the context of art as enlightened, cultured citizens. A chance to freeload again, stealing my ideas and productions. Many gleamingly announced to me that they had downloaded all my images. Some even went so far as asking me how to download my stuff; damn the copyright laws.

A lateral arabesque into graphic design lands, the reward: one or two paying contracts but mostly volunteer work for friends. Some original type faces that went unnoticed. Record covers and the beginning of my video recording bust. Customers were insufferable once you made a proposal they not only didn’t want to for the efforts, but got their heads filled with ideas from friends and consultants the implementation of which they also didn’t want to pay for. But there was always some “nephew” who would do some work in this context; I am sue he didn’t get any money either.

Great idea, started before all the internet competition (like Amzon) got on the bandwagon. “Shop on line”, it actually worked until they turned the supply spigot off; i.e.: Even though all suppliers promised to deliver we couldn’t get supplies timely enough to fill orders. Lesson: Can’t pull a thing like that up on a shoestring, it requires venture capital and massive amounts of money. Not to speak of the programing talent which was always too syntax intensive for me (boring!). Also people were not ready at the time to see the potential either. The biggest mistake was not to automate operations right away thinking that a labor force could manage transactions.

A venture with the VP of Silicone Graphics Computers who’s name I no longer remember. Creating artificial climbing walls wearing monitors to assess body performance and change the difficulty of the climb with moving parts to increase with the stress level. Your sweat, your heart rate etc. will make it harder; the more relaxed you are the easier the climb. Lots of talk, but never got the money together Atrophied after three, four weeks of detailing.

Now there was an interesting idea: Whear a piece of jewelry that bears a program which would mutually resonate when a profile match of a certain compatibility between two people is detected and issue a mutual alert that could lead to making contact easily if some mutual sympathy is detected; a sort of icebreaker to tear social distancing down. Well venture capital was interested, a patent search showed that nothing compatible was out there at the time, but money could only be had if the at least three alternate applications requiring similar action could be furnished. Time and money required to just get started on a whim prohibited me from further persuit. I would have had to risk a lot of my own money to hire programing and developing staff, money I didn’t have on the margines I operated on at the time. Two kids, house cats …. Too much risk w/o protection against possible competition. Just trusting a non-disclosure agreement was pushing it.

Now here was a scheme I could pull of myself. Make an interview DVD free to the artist, an interesting electronic business card of sorts free for the artist to distribute as giveaway at shows and such. The rights to the content remained with me. And printing in quantity should have led to orders from me as I had the rights to the cover graphics and the equipment to replicate. Technical issues on part of the customers, they couldn’t do the copying and lost interest too quickly, plus no one cared until the artist had died, the requests and fan mail came in. Too late for the economics of the thing to make a difference; great experiences in logistics and just doing the interviews and the programing was most interesting. AVID software, which I used at the time was a capable but syntax intensive, a dog of a program, one I could not recommend for anyone to use! Got some very satisfying results, but now even DVD’s are obsolete. I might just post the files for free download on my website soon. See also one of my write-ups about the logistic nightmares connected to a recording effort overseas in Vienna, Austria. Which can be found on my web-site.

Well, since I had the studio set up for printing, photography and graphic design it came upon me to do all kinds of designs for mostly friends who needed design help. Album covers, Calligraphy, photo work, leaflets, posters and such. I even subsidized things doing picture framing. This brought some rewards, at least it paid for materials and kept me in the fray …..

Translating FXM (Franz Xaver Messerschmidt, the definitive book about the Batoque sculptor)

Carrying a personal interest to the altar of “labor of love”. When I was a child my father would of ten take me to the Belevedere Museum in Vienna. Sunday mornings was free entry at all Museums in town. In the Belevedere was a permanent exhibit of FXM – heads and of Messerschmidt’s work during Maria Theresia’s reign. I was fascinated with those heads, always. So I decided to do a little research while visiting in Vienna. In the Academy of Arts library I came across the definitive Book on the subject matter Maria Poetzl Malikova’s dissertation about FXM. I read it there and then over the course of three days at the library. To my astonishment there was no English translation of this book. I decided, no matter what it takes to translate the work. Having contacted the author I got permission and her blessing to do so. It took years to complete in draft. When it was finally presentable the author failing to understand the concepts of word processing started to knit-pick about certain word I had chosen (e.g.: studio vs. workshop, which, when consistently used, could just be globally replaced throughout the book without further ado.) This became a bone of contention be cause she, not a native German speaker, not only stumbled over the languages but over nuances of her lives work. Understandable but not tolerable, she wanted to withdraw her consent over this, not understanding contract law or the laws governing translation either. Add to this that Microsoft’s MS Word program had some serious issues with file structures that have only recently been solved the book is still on my back burner, ready by without any interest, no readership (save one exception, I actually sold one copy to some Chek scholar who couldn’t read German.)

Further translations include “The hunting of the Snark” (E->G), Nick Knatterton (Nick the Dick), Christina Rosetti’s: Goblin Market (E -> G) and many other, lesser works, many still unfinished. At one time I cooperated with a translator in Austria who got landed an assignment sent it on to me and had it ready the next morning to the astonishment of his clients. Petty money transfer squabbles ultimately did these efforts in, it was always necessary to spend two hours getting the transfer process straight and the banks bagged all kinds of fees diminishing the business efforts. There are translations of humorous jokes that seem no longer funny. Assorted poems some better that others and philosophical writings, notable my FGA’s (Frequently Given Answers) and the FAQ pages (Frequently asked Questions.)

A note on dealing with German publishers: My experience with translating “Nick the Dick” they expect you to do the work, bear the burden of getting the translation published and then settle for 7% of what might be had in the end if there is success. Pfffft!

While teaching Math and Physics and Electronics at first at Heald Colleges and later at ITT and National University I came to realize how inefficient the books at hand were, so I began to condensate specific themes into “Smart Pills”, short, concise tractate that addressed one segment of a subject into an infusion to help understand the thing at hand. There was no money to be made and the whole thing morphed into Frau Dulent’s Almanach. Another dead end, but at least a n interesting experience.

Set up a studio in Vienna Austria and in the Schloessl in Stockerau. Much effort went into finding the right space and furnishing it so it could be used. I lucked out, found marvelous quarters in Vienna right next to the Spanish embassy on the third floor up, high ceiling five bedrooms plus, plus for $1000.- a month and a shared studio space in a chateau in Stockerau a few miles outside of Vienna. Imagine a baroque chateau already fully furnished with drawing table etching press and sandwiched between two venues: one gallery and one theater / gathering facility sporting near daily events from both, the theater and the gallery, I got all the incidental leftovers: Wine, food, snacks and materials etc. Alas, just a few sales occurred, another deficit proposition even at low rental cost and perks.

April 2010, “Communicating Vessels” at the MUMOK (Museum of Modern Art) in Vienna, Austria

March 2005, Art exhibit at the Vienna International Center, Vienna, Austria.

. Link to an approximate time line up to 2011.

What started it all

(The show that launched me on the art track)
Curriculum vitae largely expiated for the Art spectrum:
https://www.delarte.com/xbio/HARcurriculumvitae10.htm