Henri Art Magazine

I know, this studio photo is a bit creepy, yes? Matisse looks like a frickin’ doctor already. I mean, I wouldn’t be surprised to see a metal table with a paper cover and some elevated stirrups. I can’t imagine that this is how it was done in his studio, at least, I hope that’s not how it was done in his studio. I’m talking about his art – I think? This picture is posed after all. The easel is loaded with a finished painting. The low side table with the flowers is positioned to fill the frame behind Matisse while holding open the door for light. The whole thing just looks really uncomfortable. Basically, this photo is staged and staged for a reason. Rather than seeing the wild, color dude painting nude chicks, what we are meant to see is a photo of a staid professional clinically involved in a reasoned and reasonable interaction with a subject. There isn’t a SHRED of heat or emotion in this set up. And this “pose” is in stark contrast to the way Matisse talked about his life, his work and his reasons for making art in the first place. Our Matisse spent a lot of time denying the label of wild man (fauve.) He felt that in order to find respect he had to appear as a reasonable man. He did, after all, study to be a lawyer. But if you’ve read Hilary Spurling’s or Jack Flam’s books about his life, you know that this picture only makes sense in the way Matisse crafted his public persona. His life was far from conventional. And that “fauve” came through in his personal correspondences.

“…occassionally he [Matisse] lets down his guard, and in a letter to a friend he expresses his delight in the sheer physical presence of the women themselves. “She’s a big girl,” he wrote of one model, “a colossal woman with tits like 2 liter chianti bottles!” Matisse and Picasso by Jack Flam

So much for the staid professionalism…

Artists present themselves in all kinds of ways and for all kinds of reasons – to each his own. But what is the truth of these presentations and how do they form out of the studio lives that artists lead? Above are the artists Gustav Klimt and Julian Schnabel. Both were/are known for their outsized lifestyles and their nonchalant attire. Klimt wore self-designed monks’ habits in order to exist in a kind of profaned artistic religiosity. Schnabel is known for wearing designer silk pajamas; a pilgrim’s habit donned on the road to a Postmodern Luxe Internationalism. These are artists playing the parts of Dantean tour guides through the Heart of Hollywood Darkness. Both of these presentations allude to an extreme disregard for social convention. But they also portray something deeper, showing us that the creative is and must be connected to another reality. These artists live in an ecstatic world in a way that most of us could not, would not understand. They both reside somewhere in the realms of magic, somnambulism and inspiration. They are natural, decadent, unbridled, sexy, effete and in-human – like Byron in his oriental robes or Lawrence in his kaftan or Prince in his purple trench coat. These artists are ready, willing and able to engage with a heightened dream state, life lived as ecstasy, where clothing and convention become hinderances to artistic communion. To roll from the bed into the studio, unshaven, unwashed; to listen to the call of the muse at any moment; to forego the conventions of constructed time – all of these constructs are there in these photos. These men are otherworldly artists – at least that’s the presentation.

In a more contemporary view is this photo of the marvelous Cecily Brown by the fantastic David LaChappelle. Cecily’s paintings were/are presented in a very specific way. First in her work there is the idea of painterly touch and the historic connection that has been made to Willem De Kooning’s oft repeated bon mot, “flesh was the reason that oil paint was invented.” Next is the subject matter of her work which is garnered not only from art history but from pornographic photographs. Finally, there is the press that has followed her every move from the very beginning of her career; her parentage, her boyfriends, her stellar career and mostly her immediate acceptance into the top tiers of NY fashion culture. Cecily has been featured in nearly every “hot” magazine in the business. In the picture above she is presented by LaChapelle and all you have to do is google to find out about the spectacular high-stakes world that he inhabits and photographs! In this photo all of that spectacle is evident. The artist appears in a working class neighborhood dressed in an outfit appropriate for a night of rave and trance, cigarette and cocktail in hand. Her large painting, a huge erection front and center, is at odds with the ordinary life of the Mom and child making their way down the ordinary street. In the back of the scene the words True Value underscore the artist and her work. Cecily is the artist of flesh and sex, the hot new celebrity artist connected to the streets, transcendent through her youth, beauty and art – Kiki of Montparnasse NY, heir apparent to the world of ABEX fleshiness! Now, all of this is interesting because she’s being presented in this way by a well known and highly-sought-after glamour photographer as an “advertisement” about a contemporary artist/celebrity. He has taken the basic PR story of her glamorous life and blown it up into grand proportions giving us not Cecily, but “CECILY!”

I find pictures of artists and how they present themselves fascinating. I often wonder what they’re thinking, what images they are looking to present of themselves, because it’s also speaks of their work and their lives. For me, it all comes out of the studio – the world that’s created there. Now I know a lot of artists, or I did at one time. Many of the studios I’ve been to over the years kind of look alike. Large-ish empty spaces with white walls and painted grey floors – a desk to the side (sometimes), an uncomfortable paint smeared chair to sit in, a place to store finished canvases (usually near the desk) and at least one long wall to paint on. This is a cookie cutter work convention we all learned in college. It smacks of the professional, the worker, the serious clerk. I, however, look for the tell-tale slip – the piece of material hidden near the papers, the black & white picture of a beloved or the postcard purchased at the museum shop. It opens something human in this “profession.” And it is the human part of all this Art Entertainment that has been missing. And it is the human part we should be looking to, involving in our work.

In September we will be bringing you a series of articles by and about artists and their lives in the studio. It will be Henri’s “Art Issue” if you like. Just in time for the new Art Season!

“We are led to believe a lie
When we see not through the eye…”
William Blake

I have been fascinated with Bernini’s sculptures since my first trip to Rome. Winding ’round Scipione’s old house and coming upon this vision had my heart in my throat. Truth be told, I could care less about its narrative structures, the textual histories that the figures are acting out – that stuff mostly feels like annoying background noise. I’m always looking for the HOW and the WHY things come together. Real visual moments, as many of us know, are very hard to accomplish, and when they do come together, it’s always a compelling experience. In Bernini’s work, if one engages visually and looks deeper, what one always comes to see is the moment when reason degenerates into a swell of physical passion. There’s always an onslaught of difficult and tough emotions wrapped up in the carving. Many great artists have created compelling work about this very subject, and quite frankly, many have lived it in their lives. Even the wondrous Bernini, beloved genius that he was, had his out-of-control, Gibsonish moments. Ah, but Bernini…well he was a master, No?

What I look for are the realities in a visual moment – something specific that creates a deeper visual connection and understanding of the rising subject. I want to get stuck in with the give and the blur so that I might be able to feel that physical, involving, thickness that only happens when one finally does come to actually “see” something. All the other stuff, the storyline, the text, or the narrative falls back into the ground. What let me in to this carving was the hand grasping the flesh of that thigh. The strong fingers digging into that flexing leg. They are trying to hold on to and control what is straining to get away, what doesn’t acquiesce. That’s where the meaning is focused, and to achieve that focus, one has to move in, to be close to the action. The screaming face, the flowing beard, the flying cloth, or the finely carved tears – though those things are great to look at and comment about – they’re theatrical embellishments. But with those few small, thick parts, as seen in the photo, we can understand exactly what Bernini had in mind. Over time this particular lesson on visual economy has grown larger in my memory. And it’s lead me to a different idea of what abstraction can accomplish in the 21st Century.

I want to explain again a particularly overlooked reality in our new visual culture, the idea of being in close. First of all, and I should be quite clear about this, we are not talking about the blow-up. Increasing the size of an image/object while maintaining its proportions is something we are familiar with just as we’re familiar with the fact that lenses are now ingrained into nearly every aspect of our everyday realities. With the replicating lens we can take any image, any object, and blow it up (or reduce it for that matter) into any size, into any medium, without diminishing our accepted cultural understanding of that particular image or thing. For instance, Angelina Jolie is the same in a thumbnail, as a poster girl or on a billboard. The larger than life image/object doesn’t actually change our relationship to the meaning of the image – we accept the mediated sign and regard the text or context as its meaning. What this proportioned event does do is create a sense of distance, a nebulous consumerist desire, and a sense of the surreal. Inflation is used as a contextual adjustment – the image/object as symbol can be appropriated, replicated and manipulated because it has become a program, a construct rather than a thing in itself. This particular photo is not a blow up in that sense. In this image there is something older at work. Rather than increasing the proportions of the sculpture or replicating the image/object, we viewers have moved into the action, we are a part of the action within the grouping. We are in close – our vision is intimate.

There have been a lot of photographers through the years that have moved in close to create a kind of abstraction in their work, and it’s produced some wonderful pictures. It’s a visceral way of seeing. We also experience this type of viewing in movies, TV shows and especially pornography, because, when done well, it can create an instantaneous physical visual connection to our tactile natures. The truth is it’s a quick and easy way to emotion. The idea of moving in close, of being a part of the action is something a lot of theorists talk about when they discuss Caravaggio’s work and the radical innovation that his work proposes. Their claim is that by putting the scene into our space, by making the viewer intimate, we visually become a part of what is happening in front of us. And it’s true. It’s a kind of visual reality that we encounter in our lives. For instance when we are in an elevator we can be pretty sure that the folks around us have not only a front and back, but sides, tops and bottoms as well. We are also aware of the way they move, they way the smell, the way they exist, but mostly, our relationship to them whatever that might be. We are seeing and feeling all at once and that actively alters our perceptions. We have an instant understanding of what I call the thickness of reality. We see more fully and create a deeper, more connected kind of vision. Now this kind of thickness is a very rare occurrence in photographs, and to be honest, in a lot of painting as well. In Simon Schama’s Power of Art episode on Caravaggio he’s discussing the painting The Lute Players and he puts it like this -

“Now there were lots of paintings of young boys with lutes in Baroque Rome. But never anything like this. Nothing this close up. Nothing this fleshy and close to us. It’s like this – four youths in a closet. “Excuse me. So sorry. Don’t mean to intrude. Oh No! Come on in darling, pull up a cushion. We’re just rehearsing.” The claustrophobia has a point, and it’s not erotic. What he’s doing is demolishing the safety barrier between the viewer and the painting. Carravaggio’s art crashes the safety barrier of the frame. It tears away the separation. It reaches you.”

This idea of painting “reaching you” is a very old one, and one tied up to ideas of illusion, space and time. (But we’ll save those ideas for the part II.) Modernism in all its permutations has been all about removing the safety barrier between you and the art. And just think, it all started in the 17th Century. Well, maybe even before if we really look hard. And that was Hockney’s point in Secret Knowledge – the lens, so obvious in so much of our history of painting, was used and could be used differently by painters in order to change our relationship to our own vision. We’ve used the lens to enhance, to make specific certain relationships to life and reality, to make us sharper and more economical painters. We have lied to tell the truth. And time and time again we’ve carved out reality from a flat surface. All in the attempt to convince us that what we are seeing IS real. And it’s that intimate reality that many of us struggling with abstraction are looking for. Delacroix said as much as he looked into the Modernist future from his drawing room in the early 19th century. However, here in the 21st century, the lens tool is now the reality, not the way to a reality. And that is our problem, and very few of us seem to be asking the question – How do we see?

Susan Sontag talks of the democratization of the image through photography in her book On Photography. Her essays were written at the end of a long experimental arch and the beginning of the institutionalization of that experiment. Today, the democracy is finished and we live with the fascism of the image – an optical world militarized with corporate texts, programmed contexts and the imagery of the New New. And all of it, ALL of it is done through the programmed lens.

“Photography is the reality; the real object is often experienced as a letdown. Photographs make normative an experience of art that is mediated, second-hand, intense in a different way. (To deplore that photographs of paintings have become substitutes for the paintings for many people is not to support any mystique of “the original” that addresses the viewer without mediation. Seeing is a complex act, and no great painting communicates its value and quality without some form of preparation and instruction. Moreover, the people who have a harder time seeing the original work of art after seeing the photographic copy are generally those who would have seen very little in the original.)” Susan Sontag On Photography

So many of my friends think that I’ve gone ’round the bend with this “lens obsession.” And it’s a fair cop – I do go on. But what they don’t understand is that I love many works made with the lens, made through the machine. And why not? I was raised looking at that imagery, through that lens. I understand it. But there’s more to making a painting than transferring the image, replicating in paint what the lens has already replicated. Painters must find a way to actually SEE differently, to understand their involvement in what they are painting differently. We have a long history of painters who pushed the boundaries of HOW & WHY they made paintings, challenging the accepted versions, the institutional mandates of seeing. To do that in our age I believe that we must define again what our intimate lives are all about. Like Bernini, we must struggle with what is trying to get away from us. And for me, that seems to be where painting is – both in abstraction or realism. We don’t push our images into the lineage of our painted history or really use our visual inheritance. We are not thinking and translating our thoughts and feelings into vision. We remain cool and distant, replicating imagery just as the lens separates and flattens. Can abstract painting, any painting, give us the same visual thrill that we may have in front of the best works of Titian, Velazquez, Caravaggio, Rembrandt, Tintoretto, Picasso or Matisse? Can we take our flat surfaces, our processes, our mania for materials and translate that into something THICK, palpable and visceral in its way? Like Georgina we have to confront our “own devils” and we have to risk that confrontation in our paintings. We must rethink the way Caravaggio’s figures emerged not only from the darkness but from his hand, from the paint. Or we have to see the way “reality” forced its way through the mythology, the text in Bernini’s sculpture. We have to use the mechanics behind our lens saturated world and push it through our own physical visual involvement, mixing it up with our own lives. What has been missing in so much paint is not technique, not accepted standards, not professionalism or competence, but visual intimacy.

We’ll discuss this further in part II ….

“After dinner they looked at the photographs which Durieu has been kind enough to send me. I persuaded them to try an experiment that I made quite by chance a couple of days ago. After examining the photographs of nude models, some of whom were poor physical specimens, with parts of the body overdeveloped – not very beautiful to look at – I showed them some engravings by Marcantonio. We felt repelled, indeed almost disgusted, by the inaccuracy, mannerism and lack of naturalness, in spite of the excellence of style. It is his only admirable quality, but we were incapable of admiring it at that particular moment. As a matter of fact, if some genius were to use dagguerrotype as it should be used he could reach untold heights. Above all, when you look at these engravings, the admitted masterpieces of the Italian School that have exhausted the admiration of every painter, you realize the truth of Poussin’s remark that ‘compared with the Antique, Raphael was an ass.’ Up to the present, this machine-made art has done us nothing but harm: it spoils the masterpieces for us, without being able to satisfy us completely.” The Journal of Eugene Delacroix

In this pleasant evening in the mid 1800s we are seeing artists discussing the difference between Mannerism and a new reality. The lens won the day. Unlike Delacroix and his friends we are not discovering photography and the power of the lens. We have lived with it in our everyday lives. EVERYTHING is filtered through it. As you stand at the cash machine, make your way through the airport, drive your car down the street, live on a block, upload into the programmed internet – EVERYTHING is being captured and replicated, categorized and indexed. We have all become data – data searching for other data. For instance if I’m doing research and I search on google for X – am I any different than a programmed spider looking for information – am I not also pulling information, classifying and categorizing as I go. My research, once posted, will also be part of that giant index. And somehow, for me, that removes a piece of my humanity. I am a program in the vast program – I’m not Mark, I’m not real and that bugs me, makes me viral. At first the promise of internet programming was that it would mirror and replicate the outside world, “bricks and mortar” as it was called. But like all machines, they can not work efficiently if they actually copy the way things work in the “real world.” They must work like machines. A car does not have legs, an airplane does not flap its wings and the internet does not actually see, think or remember. We are immersed in the ground and we adapt quickly to its “reality.” From the beginning of our Postmodern age we began to confuse the reality of our electronic extensions with the reality of our fleshy existence. Today we are not confused. We expect life to run like a program and look like a picture – Postmodern life is a program.

Dehumanization Part 1 from Kimberly Butler on Vimeo.

I found this wonderful series of videos by Kimberly Butler that discusses many of the issues that we’re facing and we’ve been discussing here on Henri. McLuhan comes up quite a bit in each of these discussions. Obviously, he was prescient about the effects of electronic media – and he wasn’t afraid to take the logic of his discussion as far as it would go. What I’ve found to be truly fascinating in his work was the idea of the tetrad. “The tetrad is a means of examining the effects on society of any technology/medium (put another way: a means of explaining the social processes underlying the adoption of a technology/medium) by dividing its effects into four categories and displaying them simultaneously.” The final stage of this process is always a reversal, usually at the point of medium over saturation. The reversal then redefines and reincorporates the old processes that were supplanted by the ascendancy of that very medium. If we use the tetrad in our own POMO art world we can see that the retrieval and reversal of Postmodern mannerism has begun to take place, and we are starting to see a swell of some new ideas on the horizon. For example – the emphasis on “reality” as seen, as experienced is part of that retrieval. It takes us away from the all-encompassing ground and takes us into the rising subject. The reexamination of certain Modernist academic techniques – like the drippy brush stroke and our reliance and surety of the primacy of Greenbergian literalness. A reconsideration of the ubiquity of Postmodern provisional painting, and a deep refutation of the mannered use of Modernist flatness, Duchampian inconsequence, Warholian replication and Neo-Surrealist nihilism. Many of us are experimenting just as Delacroix did in his day.

What we are talking about is reality, not in the program, but through the program – what comes out on the other side. How do we see after our eye has become a lens – do we understand things only through that machine, are we forever tied to that program, is that the reality? Or is there something else, something deeper that we might need to learn, to retrieve and reverse. Something that will allow us to move beyond the program, beyond Modernism and Postmodernism into the new century. I keep thinking of Georgina’s quote – “We are our own devil.” And for me that means we must question, transgress and risk.

reality will continue…