by Kirby Congdon…….

I passed by my neighbor’s house the other day and was struck by a display of eleven totems in front of their house. The house belongs to John Putnam, a Blues composer with his own group of musicians and Ellen Putnam who describes herself as “a middle-aged Jewish woman with a desk job who has entirely too much fun.” One can assume by these abbreviated identities that eleven totems did not appear there overnight by accident. They had been acquired from a local artist, Michael Fitzgerald. My immediate reaction was to stop and look.

As totems their shapes were irregular, evidently having originally been the stumps of small trees or heavy brush. The top parts consisted of aborted branches that were eroded by exposure to the weather giving, for me, several interpretations suggesting the tragedy of a casual death from a dearth of nutrients to keep them alive on the one hand or on the other the presentation of a humorous sculpture representing disdain or impatience. But what transformed these pieces which had been retrieved from some abandoned tract was the application of a gay miasma of coloration wherever the original bark may have been. This treatment had no rhyme or reason, consisting, as it did, of continuous threads of every shade running up and down and around the entire trunks and the truncated branches like a two-dimensional vine with nothing left except the veins of life that crawled over each other in this color and that one. The incongruity of so much obvious attention in paint caught one’s eye’s immediately with a spirit of that joy we’re supposed to find in good behavior. The very abnormality of this approach on a dead leftover of life provided a sense of resurrection in itself. The imaginative conception that went into this absurdity is transferred to the viewer’s sense of unexpected surprise and comes to us as a pleasant collapse of all our innate reservations because there is nothing here, or there, to censure or forbid. One has to conclude, as with any successful work of art, that indeed it does work!

Returning to my own home, I was embarrassed by the United States flag drooping on its staff, put aside in a corner, waiting for some holiday to come back to life. I thought to myself, if I steal one of Mr. Fitzgerald’s constructions would anyone notice that now there are only ten instead of eleven of them? Since I was having dinner with my neighbors that evening I decided in all my wisdom that perhaps I should leave well enough alone.