Reviews for Where to Go, What to Do, when You Are Bern Porter: A Personal Biography - James Schevill - P...

The average rating for Where to Go, What to Do, when You Are Bern Porter: A Personal Biography - James Schevill - P... based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2016-10-05 00:00:00 Karla Schools Recruited by the U.S. Govt, physicist Bern Porter was one of those scientists whose work built the first Atomic Bomb. The scientists were working assembly-line fashion, compartmentalized, working on their own specialties. Porter and his colleagues were far removed from Oppenheimer's leadership. The speculated that what they were working on was beneficial to man, a source of power that could replace coal and oil. They did not know that they were working a weapon capable of awesome destruction. When the bomb dropped, Porter felt immensely guilty. By doing this work, he had contributed to the slaughter of a city: women, children, old folks, babies. He quit his government work on the spot and didn't look back. This decision would impact the rest of his life. For decades the U.S. Govt security apparatus looked askance at Porter, building a file on his activities, barring him from work, studying his artistic output. Because yes, in addition to this, Bern Porter was an avaunt-guard poet and artist. In his mind, science and art should be one-and-the same: Sciart he called it. Most of his art was harvested from the world around him, forms that he called "Founds," objects turned on their end, mounted or juxtaposed with others to create something new. He also composed "Found Poems" pulling from the cultural detritus of advertising, magazines, print products and arranging them away from their orginal context. He tried other jobs: he was involved in the creation of TV, figuring how to coat a cathode ray tube so that it could reflect images. He thought that TV would be used for educational purposes and was crushed when it was turned over to advertisers. By the 1950s, Bern was fully committed to his art. He lived meanly. His eccentricities isolated him from mainstream America. The files on him grew thicker. What Bern realized is that the government's security apparatus was wholly undemocratic. That in order to be "safe," the United States had abandoned its core principles. This is still happening. By his old age, Bern was living at the poverty line. He ate charity meals. He still made art. He lived his life without compromise. Not many people know who Bern Porter was. He really should be more famous.

Review # 2 was written on 2008-06-17 00:00:00 Lynn Libel Bern Porter led a big American life: Maine potato farmer turned Ivy League physicist, unwitting worker on A-Bomb, then TV and Saturn capsule researcher, achievements debouched into footlong security file, an Iliad, of mid-American repression and fears. Porter turned his wasted career into a searching aesthetics of waste—Mail Art, “Sciart” (Science + Art), and a remarkable series of “Founds,” tight Cornell-boxy collages of ads, data tables, and sly consumerist come-ons that ensure his place as one of America’s Yankee secrets, jeremiads bright as fireflies. Schevill’s got the only bio in town, but read this and change that. We can’t afford to lose our Berns.