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Vision – Left Overs

Tuesday, February 7, 2012

If you haven’t played the video above you won’t get this.
This scene begins with Modernism. Right there on the beach are perfect modernist abstractions. They are like sculptures that we come across in museums all over the globe. Only these are not sculptures, they’re barricades, omens for the coming day. Inside the landing craft we’re experiencing the visual past. Beautiful photographic portraits of faces, faces that are trying to confront the inevitable. What we’re looking at is a narrative of emotion, like Walker Evans portraits – pictures, photographs, static moving images. We are looking at the end of the 19th Century, the end of narrative, the end of the enlightenment, and quite frankly, the end of the individual. As the door drops the whole world changes. Suddenly the camera is no longer outside the action detailing individual moments, but it’s within the moment, guiding the vision, pushing the world along. The lens condenses and abstracts, flattens and obscures at breakneck speeds. Structure, Design, Form and Composition break into a thousand pieces unable to maintain visual presence in this hyper-reality. There are no stories to outline, no visions to detail, only the capture of the turbulent churning and flow. Subjects quickly rise into view and fall back into the ground again. Confusion, violence, fear, distortion, all of it, all of this optical SPEED, is being directed and captured by the constantly moving and angling lens. We are everywhere on that ground, all at once. We are not seeing, we are experiencing, and this is the major difference between the optical and the visual. It’s the difference between experience and contemplation. In this new world there are no reference points, no sense to be made of the situation. There’s only the next ground, the next moment, the past forgetting. There is no history, no future, only this very instant played out, captured and replayed by the lens/program.

Perfect Moments


Edward Weston

In our last post we examined the WAY the lens worked; the warping and enclosing of our vision, the flattening of space, the off kilter instant compositions, the detailing of our sight. At first photography was considered a low form, a popular one, one used to quantify and elucidate. But the early photographers were also trying to define this new medium as a tool to make “fine art.” They wanted their work to be taken seriously, and so, they modeled their approach after the history of painting. There was however a difference – the hand. Painters had a long history of laboring “genius.” They created fleshy magic in order to manifest a vision. Their claim to a personal vision was tied to the skill of their hand, to the way they overcame their physical limitations. (Think of the learning curve that Cezanne or Van Gogh underwent.) The photographer realized that in order to make a claim for Art he had to get past the democratic ease of the machine. The thought was to put the focus on the disposition of the artist while in the act of “creation.” In other words the fine art photographer would not be about the labor of making. Instead photography would be all about the moment of performance. One had to wait like a fisherman, wait for the perfect light, the perfect moment, then flip the switch. The composition would be “always already” in the position of the lens, in the angle of the light, but that particular revelatory moment was only understood by an “artist.” The fine art photograph was a vision unimpeded, a vision captured in an instant of pure clarity. This is unlike a painter’s understanding, which was always grasping at a “truth” over time, through labor, through the hand and the eye. The photographer’s hand had absolutely nothing to do with the “making” of the image. It was understood that a photographer’s vision would not be hamstrung by a painter’s physical limitations, by the labor and expertise that went into the facture of the work. Rather, the lens/prosthetic would enhance one’s immediate relation to reality, to the moment, ultimately freeing the ARTIST to become a more perfect visionary.

It didn’t take long for the photographer/artist to be recognized in this way. But the artistic glorification of the perfect moment wouldn’t last very long. It was found that one could capture these images from life over time, first with multiple cameras, then with a motor. By the end of the 19th Century those single perfect images became a stream of images, a chunk of existence permanently quantified for replaying whenever we wished. Images captured in time could be replayed through time. The photographer didn’t have to lie in wait for an image to appear. Theoretically this meant the machine could run without the artist, indefinitely. Time streamed onto a strip of film (today into a chip.) The idea of a single “discovered” image became something else – it became one moment representative of a series of moments – an icon, a compilation, a poster. Real time viewing did away with the singular thing, the photograph, and vision became something else entirely, something that had never before been experienced. The making of an art work, the physical involvement in the process, the crafting of specific moments, no longer mattered. The machine captured everything. All images became found images, always already, a vast storehouse of documentation. Rather than makers or hunters, we became choosers. “The fine art photographer” quickly became an anachronism along with painters. Photography is no longer about the camera or the moment, but about the lens/program. It has been untethered from any medium and any history. The lens is the perfect Postmodern vehicle.

In the meantime painting was playing an endgame it did not quite understand. In the early 20th Century the Parisian avant garde had discovered that moving pictures were breaking up time and space, unfolding shattered images across the surface of the ground. Representation, movement, light, space, imagery; all of that history as we inherited it, suddenly looked old-fashioned, rigid, awkward and incomplete in comparison to the immediacy and directness of the picture plays. How could it not be? Electric communications, lights, gasoline powered engines, flight, speed, movies and television; all of these super powered inventions were changing our relationship to how we saw and experienced our world, and to our chagrin, we painters found that painting was far too slow to describe this new world, far too slow to keep up. Painting found itself in the rearguard scrounging for whatever glimpses of reality it could find. By the middle of the 20th Century the static image had finally been discarded by painters in favor of representations of processes and materiality, and most of that “painting” began to define the primacy and ubiquity of the lens/program. Today we paint grounds, we collage, and we “process.” We don’t challenge the lens image, we don’t dare define the world outside of the frame. We find images from among others. We contextualize those captured moments. We see only what is there on the screen.

iPhones and Private Parts

There is a peculiar heroism abroad in the world since the invention of cameras: the heroism of vision. Photography opened up a new model of freelance activity—allowing each person to display a certain unique, avid sensibility.
Susan Sontag On Photography

Even with so many images available there is an unrelenting sameness to the way photographs show us the world. The lens/program treats everything in the same way, it works with predictable and unbending codes. It makes no distinctions, offers only certain choices. Absolutely EVERYTHING it appropriates becomes Art – flattened, abstracted, quantified and composed. It doesn’t matter what one photographs, there is an egalitarian sameness to all photographic images. It makes us all connoisseurs of choice. We admire someone’s selections, collections and displays – tumblr pages, flickr sites, and photo networks. Today most of us carry a lens at all times. We use it to extend our memories and document our existences for the program. It all LOOKS and FEELS the same. We use the lens to present the human figure in exactly the same way that we do food products or automobiles. Look at these videos – watch HOW the camera works, HOW it levels all vision to the SAME vision:

The lens prosthetic has become another seamless tool for living just like computers, flat screens and spectacles. In our electronic lives these lens captured moments have become the “content” streaming on the internet, images of our passing. We carry our cameras into the most intimate moments of our lives. We hump from POV. We “read” and “write” journals and diaries on projected and programmed representations of “paper.” These programs shape the content of the lenses. They allow us to instantly access a kind of outsourced “professionalism” without the pain of study or practice, without the flesh. We become auteurs of our own lives. And in order to share and participate in this artificial world, in order that we move from “out here” to “in there,” we have learned to live through our lenses. We are photographing and photoshopping, iLifing our lives in ways that culture never could before. Today this new “reality” is found where consciousness streams without the filter of the failings of flesh. We have moved beyond “making,” or “creating,” we simply have to show up, appear before the lens. It turns out that the 20th Century was about something we did not expect. Painters could not capture the REASON for the collapse of the Loud family in the 1970s nor do they understand the basis for a multi-billion dollar IPO by Facebook. Let’s face it, Painting didn’t have a freakin’ chance….

But what of the stuff outside the frame – What kind of reality is that?

Left Over Vision

If space-junk is the human debris that litters the universe, Junk-Space is the residue mankind leaves on the planet. The built (more about that later) product of modernization is not modern architecture but Junkspace. Junkspace is what remains after modernization has run its course, or, more precisely, what coagulates while modernization is in progress, its fallout. Modernization had a rational program: to share the blessings of science, universally. Junkspace is its apotheosis, or meltdown . . . Although its individual parts are the outcome of brilliant inventions, lucidly planned by human intelligence, boosted by infinite computation, their sum spells the end of Enlightenment, its resurrection as farce, a low-grade purgatory . . . Junkspace is the sum total of our current achievement; we have built more than did all previous generations put together, but somehow we do not register on the same scales.
Rem Koolhaus Junkspace

So much of the painting, especially abstract painting, that we see today absolutely HAS TO BE completed by the lens. It doesn’t make sense otherwise. It must be captured and re-presented in order for it to be “seen” or completed. Rem Koolhaus’ essay on Junkspace dovetails with this idea of lens based vision. Photography makes all things into interesting things; a long corridor to nowhere, a leftover room, an empty strip mall, a foreclosed home, a forgotten billboard, a food court, an empty canvas. All these things only exist when the camera captures them. Junkspace is the entropy felt after the interaction of the lens in the failed designs of the artificial world. There is no Junkspace in nature. It is the proliferation of the ground, the endless looping of billboard space upon which we collage our passing moments. Yet that collage can never be visual, it is must be experiential, re-played in real time, a passing televised reality moment. The collage submerges back into the ground, becomes the ground, because it is never about a singular moment, a rising subject, but about the experience of disparate moments or contextual inferences. In this Junkspace we believe that the representation of the ground will set us free. I know this because Siri tells me so…

For us, painters, here in the 21st century our interest should be the world NOT captured by the program, the one that lies just outside the edges of the viewfinder, the unquantified existence. Granted our eyes are not used to that space, it is bland and boring, but it is where we might engage a new and different kind of reality. As Fran Liebowitz said, “…the world went inside the television and became the world.” What’s left for painters is the detritus left out by the lens. That’s the fleshy seen world, the tactile world of emotion and feeling, the world that smells funky after the all night bender. As it stands now we no longer work with our own imagery or paint images from our unmediated visual lives. Look at the painters most admired in this time – most all are in thrall to the lens or the way the lens replicates and reproduces its own reality. We cut and paste these found images across a billboard space and then do what’s leftover with the paint in our hands – we accost the image, mostly with a rough hand, hoping to maintain some semblance of critical relevance or angry control. We have been forced to collage and “treat” the ground. And it is to the ground that we return to OVER AND OVER AND OVER again. The ground allows us to be present in this Postmodern “world,” present in the electronic reality, present FOR the lens to complete us. But the ground can not define, it can not provide meaning, it does not individuate experience or vision; the ground merely validates.

Why do I still make the case for painting? Because I believe that we painters can still make something visually compelling even in an age blinded by the screen. But in order to do that I believe we must come to a new kind of hybridized sight and vision. I find the lens necessary to communicate in our time, but it’s far too limiting a tool. My vision is much larger than the confines the screen imposes on me, and I’m sure yours is as well. I want to see something “thickly” taking cues from both our vast visual history and our new lens realities. The anachronism of the static painted image can actually become a strength if we ask the right questions, if we approach vision with smarts and panache. I want to make the case for new images, new abstractions born of this kind of hybridized vision. I want these works to be “familiar” and novel at once, neither one nor the other, yet engaging both the screen and the world around it. What we need to accomplish this kind of vision are a set of different questions about what painting can be, what we might be looking at in the world. And so we’ll begin with these – What if we leave the ground behind? What if it we no longer allow the viewfinder to organize our looking, drawing, imagining, seeing? What if we engage Junkspace in a more thoughtful and purposeful way? What if things, the actual things in our fleshy world, suddenly became much more interesting to paint than collaging the relationships between those things? How would one confront the thing in itself, the rising subject, the visual encounter without the lens, without Postmodernism’s contexts, without the reliance on Junkspace materiality? What kind of painting would that be, would that look like? How would you make it?

more to come…

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De Koo 4 U

Wednesday, January 11, 2012

I highly recommend you check out d richmond’s recent run down of the Great De Kooning show at MOMA @ immaterial culture. There’s a fantastic visual dialog going on between the d’s. But my favorite part of these posts is the postscript where we get a taste of the painters’ lives, not so much de’s life which we all, painters I mean, seem to know about, but d’s life which is as real and as rich. And that, my friends, is priceless.

“The past year was a financial disaster as many artists of my age who haven’t made it are finding a difficult time to find even occasional work. But seeing De Kooning and knowing his personal history of financial difficulties and personal problems and yet still forging ahead with a determination to do whatever he wanted to do despite the commercial pressures to maintain a certain style and not giving a damn about various artists or critics disgust with the Women paintings, etc was fortifying.”

Speaking of de’s end times… There is a wonderful Charlie Finch article on the last day at MOMA on artnet. I agree with Charlie in his assessment of de’s work, though I did think the show was extraordinary, exciting and engaging. However, we are a long, long, long way from that kind of painting and that kind of vision. And I totally agree with Charlie’s assessment of the reinstalled contemporary collection. Though I will say that many of those works were just lost on the Super-sized walls of those galleries. Note to Starchitects – we are there in your building to look at art works not to inspect the underbelly of a Boeing 787, though that particular idea would produce wood (both male and female) in quite a few contemporary artists’ super lows.

money quote: “But that was all the candy to be found, for, per MoMA’s rigid Eurocentric habits, where the dry candy of the mind is everything and what dazzles the eye is nothing, Temkin has hewed to the pretentious intellectualism of MoMA’s contemporary “vision.”"

And finally there has been a recent spate of spent credibility in the Art World with a few folks reaching the ignominy of intellectual bankruptcy. Hirst’s tongue in spotty cheek world tour, Prince’s constantly morphing court narrative around the term “infringement,” and, dare I say it, Jerry Saltz’s game show conundrum. The Postmodern endgame has become a spectacle of the ethical. Who’s the real deal and who’s posing? It’s going to be an interesting year!

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Show: After Duccio

Tuesday, January 10, 2012

This Friday is the opening for After Duccio at Ventana244 in Brooklyn. Friends of Henri Michael Zahn and George Hofmann will be featured! And we highly recommend that you get off your duffs and make your way out to the opening! There are a group of wonderful artists involved in the show and here’s a bit of the PR for the exhibit.

Artist Andrew Huston selects multimedia works by Michelle Ceja, Matthew Eiraldi, George Hofmann, Sherrie Levine, Gerhard Mantz, and Mike Zahn….
WWW.AFTER-DUCCIO.COM, the title of the show, is also a domain name created by Mike Zahn. It’s linked to a Tumblr page where the artist has uploaded more than two thousand image files that resist anachronistic taxonomies of genre or style. In this respect, Zahn has followed the archival impulses of Larry Sultan and Mike Mandel, Robert Heinecken, or Bernd and Hilla Becher to a ridiculous end, but a deep engagement with the brilliant color, subtle tactility, and historical recognition of his subject cites the irreducible facticity of any object’s remainder. In this respect, Zahn’s position isn’t so far afield from the one staked by painter George Hofmann, whose luminous Duccio Fragments navigate metaphorical abstract space by means of expressive gestures that metonymically recall passage from the Byzantine to the Renaissance. Matthew Eiraldi’s untitled sculpture is presented as an actionable bootleg version of the piece thumbnailed on the Saatchi Gallery website, and reproduced to approximate scale without the artist’s expressed permission. This ‘reblogging’ of a depicted thing within the nominal space of the white cube exponentially factors the equation of authorship with value and originality with legitimacy, variables of which Sherrie Levine, through her distinctive appropriations of Walker Evans, George Herimann, and Constantin Brancusi, is an acknowledged master. Michelle Ceja and Gerhard Mantz each conflate the actual and the virtual by animating surface, texture, and volume. The sculptural quality of their documents record the accession of light to our empirical senses by presenting fungible points that speed along vectors to infinite places where the viewer, at any particular moment, is not, but given time could potentially be.

I’m sure you’ll also come across Paul Corio and Dennis Bellone in deep conversation about the state of painting somewhere in the audience. Don’t be afraid to grab a beer, introduce yourselves and have a chat with all of these fantastic folks.

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Vision

Thursday, January 5, 2012

“…essentially the camera makes everyone a tourist in other people’s reality, and eventually in one’s own.”
Susan Sontag On Photography

I experience a recurring dream of being in a crumbling house filled with malevolent memories, angry ghosts, shameful failures. I understand why I have the dream, but it doesn’t make me feel any better about having it. Sometimes in the middle of this dream I tell myself, “OK, this is that same fucking dream,” and I can stand back from it and watch it unfold, safe from it’s violent emotions. Other times I’m caught in it, and I find myself involved in its manipulations. On these occasions I don’t have a choice. I’m pushed along by the narrative, enclosed and swamped by the breadth of it, swept up by the force of it. When I’ve finally awakened I’m breathing hard, my pulse is racing, and I’m covered in sweat. I’m filled with uneasy emotions – deep, harsh, and unrelenting. There’s no distance between me and the effects of what’s just happened. I know it’s not real, but at that moment, it is my reality, the only reality. I am in close, a part of the unfolding experience, seeing the inevitable outcomes of something out of my control.

We begin Vision with this, a photograph by Irving Penn No. 58.

What you are looking at is in our age an “accepted” way of seeing a figure in a photograph. We don’t question this kind of viewing any longer. It’s what we’ve come to understand of ourselves and how we interpret the images of others. But let’s have a real look at it, let’s go a bit deeper into the mechanics of it. Right off we can see that the perspective is skewed. It’s not necessarily how we would see this perspective if we were laying there on the floor with this model. The image itself is a captured interpretation of the figure, a severely cropped view of a momentary reality. The len’s curved surface and one point perspective, it’s focal length and the shutter speed, have determined the way the form is “seen”. Her right knee is formidable, right in our face. The left leg is in the process of moving, either down onto the right leg, or maybe she’s about to swing that leg over. Her hips are caught in the movement. Her torso twists in a very exaggerated way, at hard angles to her legs. You can see her muscles pulling. Michelangelo would approve. There is no space in the photo, it’s unclear where this figure is, where it exists, other than on the floor of some ambiguous white space. The figure’s been isolated and abstracted, presented to us as a thing, a form, an idea. What is clear is that the harsh foreshortening makes this figure look powerful, encompassing, engaging, and even though it’s abstracted, truncated, it’s sexy and very, very human. But it denies specificity, personality or deep understanding. It is an icon.

Postmoderns easily accept this kind of optical engagement. We understand it. We expect it. It’s coded into our visual vocabularies. Today, academic photographers everywhere engage in this kind of lens warping and skewing. This technique’s become a quick means to present an intimate abstract experience of a rising subject. And in fact, this type of image is par for the course in most all of our electronic lens based experiences. There are literally, what must now be, billions and billions of truncated naked figures photographed in similar ways floating through ethernet just waiting be clicked on and downloaded. Why they are there, well that’s an interesting question that we’ll try to tackle as we go on in this series.

This is a photograph (apologies to the unknown author of this found image) of our old friend Giambologna’s sculpture of the Rape of the Sabine. The sculpture itself is an eye grabbing theatrical tour de force, so much so that Urs Fischer appropriated it for his work in the last Venice Biennale and received a lot of accolades for his choice. Look at the hand grasping that woman’s buttock and you’ll recognize something else. That hand will later become grist for Bernini’s mill. Talk about appropriation! (OK, we’ll leave that idea for another time as well.) What we are looking at in this photo is the extreme angle of sight within the image itself. Again the subject rises into view against a blank ground. It is ALL form and rising composition. And in a Postmodern twist we get two eras of different kinds of vision slamming into one another. There is the Mannerist vision of OTT figuration as learned through Master Michele; the twisting torsos, the vibrant movement, the overwrought, balletic experience of the naked figure – all action, power, and movement used to intensify the impossible physical drama going on between the figures – rape depicted as a ballet among beautiful bodies. The sculpture emphasizes the major forms, the power and tension in the torsos, buttocks, legs and arms, but it also adjusts our vision, teasing our feeling with the more delicate sculpted moments – the fingers pressing the flesh, the hair falling out of place, the perfectly formed feet and hands. Mannerists were master visual manipulators especially with the dainty bits… But we are not looking AT the statue are we? That would actually be a very different visual experience – Mannerism in the round so to speak. What we are looking at is an extreme angle of a thing in-itself captured through the lens. And it’s that photo composition which is of interest. We are experiencing the distorting view of one point perspective seen through a framing lens. We see the violent foreshortening and flattening of space that we’ve come to expect in a photograph, and one that we’ve come to expect to see in abstractions of the figure – in painting think of Picasso and de Kooning, or for that matter, Yuskavage and Currin.

Additionally this extreme foreshortening abstracts our understanding of the connection to the thing in itself. Though we are seeing figures and they look correct, they are not. Not simply because this is a Mannerist sculpture of exaggerated proportions, but because the sculpture has been flattened, distorted and objectified by the lens machine, removed from our vision so to speak. We would not, could not see it in just this way if we used the naked eye even if we stood in the same position. We need the prosthetic to isolate a thing in this manner. Our vision, our minds don’t do this without it. Our machines change our perceptions. We accept that we are looking up, because we know how a body is structured, but in this spaceless, airless ground we may also be falling. There are no points of visual reference outside of that composition itself. So we accept the reality of the statue because we “know” that this is a photo of some thing. We accept that the image must be correct, it’s a captured image of a lived moment after all.

Another part of this kind of lens seeing is that it not only isolates and distorts, it allows the eye to move in closer, it magnifies. And we have adjusted our vision to understand and expect this closeness as well. Below is an Irving Penn photograph of Barnett Newman.

There are distortions here as you can see, but what I want to discuss is the intimate vision of this photo. When we move in to the subject, when we get close in this way we become part of the image itself. We begin to have a different relationship to that rising subject. I love this photo for a number of reasons but mostly because of its incongruous elements. I’ve never been able to take these contradictions of meaning very seriously. First of all because of the ridiculous cigarette being delicately held in that meaty hand. The space and angles again are ambiguous, abstract, and though we “know” that hand is Barnett Newman’s, for Chrissakes, it could be anyone’s hand. Barney may be walking past someone, or maybe turned into someone who’s just tapped his shoulder while holding the camera in the other hand, or maybe there’s someone crouching below holding the cigarette. Then there’s the ridiculous monocle. It’s like Barney’s a decadent visual fighter pilot and only one of his eyeballs has succumbed to the rigors of his craft, like a wounded WWI flying ace. All that in combination with the fuck-you mustache and slightly raised brow over the monocle and you have a cliched image of a classic autocratic ruler. So much for the All American Painter.

We are in close for a reason. We are there to become instantly intimate with this face, these features. And the closer we get, the more our vision becomes something else, something that, in essence, disengages our vision, disengages our objectivity. We are not able to maintain our distance from the rising subject, we can not get to clarity even though we see every pore on that face. We are abstracting a form at such a rate that the rising subject engages us without thought, so that our encounter reaches into our own physical experiences. We are heating up a visual encounter in a very cool medium by moving in close, so that we don’t have to think, so that we “feel”. We see this mechanism in movies all the time, it’s what brings us to an involvement in a character’s “emotional arc”. We move in close, especially to the eyes of the subject. That overpowering closeness is primal, involving, disconcerting. We are swallowed up by what is happening, we are overcome by this ground which is the subject itself, submerged in the narrative of proximity. I’ll leave you to go through the Freudian aspects of this kind of involvement, but let’s just say that a good optical storyteller will always look you straight in the eyes stretched across a 30 foot screen. Calling Sergio Leone…

What these tropes of lens based vision accomplish fairly easily is an eroticized optical engagement. You are not looking for meaning in this type of viewing, you are engaging in an experience of seeing. Meaning is always already known, pointless in the presentation of the image itself. In the photo above (I don’t know its provenance, my apologies to the author) there are a number of mechanisms at work to give one just this kind of experience. First there is the very dramatic chiaroscuro. The lighting on the figure is right out of the Baroque; a form emerges from the darkness, highlighting our own visual consciousness, intensifying the tautness of the muscular back. Second is the drastically foreshortened torso which places us in an ambiguous perspective. We may be face to backside, but we don’t know where we are in the space. We could be falling, upside down or sideways, in heaven or hell for all we know. Our only reference, the only known space in this composition is from buttock to shoulder. Our understanding and experience is directed only through that one point, everything else falls into blackness. Third is the erotic optical charge implicit in both the figure itself, the lighting of the form and our closeness to it. We are meant to experience this torso in a heightened physical state. The upper torso is lit like it’s cool marble which then flows down into a fleshy, cushiony posterior – we move from “art” (sculpture) to something “real” (flesh). Hell, we don’t know for sure if this image is of a male or a female, we are given only the ambiguity of its flesh. We have abstracted not only the image, the lighting, and the Baroque historical references, we have eroticized the processes of these abstractions. We are not necessarily responding to the “naturalness” or “reality” of the naked figure, but to the optical mechanics and appropriated references in the image itself. We don’t engage the erotic lens image as a passionate encounter for a specific, unique experience, but instead we are titillated by the closeness of the lens and the manipulation in this optical encounter itself. It’s an encounter that has no place, no face, no space presented to keep one in a perpetual state of desire. This kind of viewing is at the base of most Postmodern art. It “works” in nearly every situation, in every mediated construct. We can experience these kind of optical desires indefinitely without ever actually being passionately, physically involved. It’s without consequence like video game violence, aerial drone killing, online sex, Facebook friendships, youtube confessions, and most importantly, theoretical art blogs…

Once upon a time the advertisers would have draped this vehicle with a scantily clad model reasoning that tits and ass would sell the thing, make you, the consumer of the image, WANT IT, desire the actual product. But as time has gone on the Ad Men, the best of them anyway, have realized that it wasn’t the T&A that was selling the car but the lens, the mechanics of the lens. The intimacy and distancing of the lens actually manipulated the viewing of the thing, actually worked down to the viewer’s fingertips so to speak. And it did so because this kind of viewing is how we experience our “reality”. This short video advertisement has all the lens mechanics going on in it that we see in the photographs above; the sleek sheen of the hubs, the extreme foreshortening, the angled perspectives, the in close viewing. (Watch it without the sound.) All of it we respond to without thinking. It creates desire almost automatically in the viewer. These moving images are abstracted, the ground ambiguous, the engagement cool, then suddenly heated up with extreme optical proximities. We are being seduced and manipulated into the experience, into the engagement. But unlike the images above, this image has an additional purpose, one just beyond our acceptance of disjunctive viewing. There is the program guiding the lens images alluding to that fact that you may actually purchase the thing desired. This programming is of great interest as well, but it will have to wait for a future discussion.

We’ll be discussing color, programs, movement, sight and vision over this next series in order to dissect Postmodern viewing. We’ll also be reaching back to some favorites in order to explain a kind of hybridized sight, something we’ve discussed before, and we’ll now elucidate further, make more clear and alive for you. It’s the 21st Century. Let’s understand that we are complex visual beings and make a new vision for our times.

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Romanticism – Final Rites

Wednesday, December 28, 2011

“The media has replaced every institution. It’s the only authority. I mean, it seems to be an authority. It’s replaced all other institutions. When they first invented TV, people thought TV would be a failure. They thought that, if people could see around the screen, they wouldn’t be absorbed by it, because they would be distracted. They would see, like, the lamp and the sofa and they wouldn’t be absorbed by it….But no-one could have imagined what really happened, which is that the world went inside the television and became the world.” Fran Liebowitz Public Speaking

I’ve been looking for a way in, or better yet, a way through. All this past summer and into the fall, somewhere between my studio, the electronic world and my own world of flesh and blood failings, I’ve found myself without continuity, reality, or firmament to stand on. In the wider world outside our insular Art World there have been major upheavals playing in the media; the Middle East uprisings, the pull out from Iraq, the forecast of yet more economic depression, OWS and the slow motion death of the Euro. All of it fueled by and funneled through the electronic world. Some of these reality dramas have been “paid for” with physical violence, crushing uncertainty and violent death. Yet change, real change, has been illusive. Here in the 21st Century Postmodernism is still a fucking bitch. Its mechanisms and schemes, practices and theoretics, absorb and dissipate, remove the threat of new ideas by re-packaging them in media friendly episodes while enfolding them into the larger “critique”. Nothing is different, nothing has CHANGED, except that those who run the system, who code the program, have consolidated even more economic and political power. Don’t get me wrong there are moments when I pause, when individual moments of sacrifice and dissent somehow get through…. The example of that brave, brave woman who was dragged and beaten in Tahrir square by officially sanctioned jack booted thugs was one recent story that’s stuck with me. She said she did “not want her name revealed because of her shame at the way she was treated.” She was simply standing for her right to participate, to determine her future, to vote, to be counted. The shame isn’t hers. I haven’t words for this woman’s kind of bravery and sacrifice, and because I don’t, it changes how I see the world, how I feel about the world around me. I guess what I’m hoping for, the change that I’m seeking, has to be in me, and because of this understanding, I find I have to be larger than my many, many failings.

AH poverties, wincings, and sulky retreats!
Ah you foes that in conflict have overcome me!
(For what is my life, or any man’s life, but a conflict
with foes—the old, the incessant war?)
You degradations—you tussle with passions and appe-
tites;
You smarts from dissatisfied friendships, (ah wounds,
the sharpest of all;)
You toil of painful and choked articulations—you mean-
nesses;
You shallow tongue-talks at tables, (my tongue the
shallowest of any;)
You broken resolutions, you racking angers, you smoth-
er’d ennuis;
Ah, think not you finally triumph—My real self has yet
to come forth;
It shall yet march forth o’ermastering, till all lies be-
neath me;
It shall yet stand up the soldier of unquestion’d victory.

Walt Whitman Leaves of Grass

For me art should follow life, should be the result of experience. Art should begin with questions and end with even more questions. The Romantic experience will always push at the boundaries of one’s thought, adjusting one’s vision as one moves on through the years. The De Kooning show at MOMA was revelatory in this respect for a number of reasons. First, it showed that one must always push against one’s achievements no matter the cost. Careerists today don’t exhibit this kind of courage. Case in point is Damien Hirst who claimed that he was retiring certain “lines” of his work after the auction of 2008. He’ll be having a worldwide showing of one of those lines in the Gagosian Empire Galleries. Who knows, maybe it’ll be the-greatest-thing-ever-to-have-been-witnessed-in-the-history-of-painting-did-I-say-ever?-ok-then-ever! For the collecting oligarchs it probably will be just that. Second, De Kooning showed us that we, WE POSTMODERNS I mean, don’t EVER, NEVER EVER EVER, NEVER have to make painting like this or about this kind of vision EVER again. ABEX is an anachronism, just as seeing in the old ways is an anachronism. The show looked OLD, OLD MASTER OLD. And that says a lot about our contemporary failings, because this show made a whole lot of painters that followed in De Kooning’s wake, whether they were pro or con, look just ancient, lazy in ways he wasn’t and tired, worn out, and exhausted. Let’s face it ABEX has been critiqued, appropriated, reproduced and replicated in EVERY form possible, in every medium. At this point to paint in this style, to continue the replication of it, is nothing but Porn – an endless spectacle of mechanical procedures. Stop it! Please! Now! Third, this kind of life and approach to art, though it may be successful and fruitful, is a long, hard, lonely struggle. What I found really breathtaking about the show was that all through the years there were periods of real visual connection and then real visual disaffection, but always a questioning, a running dialectic of means. When he fell short I guess you could blame the drink, the personal problems, whatever, but his life, the ebb and flow of it, made the art, not the other way around. De Kooning, the last Romantic artist, was also the last great Amateur. The Professionals, with their even, work-a-day productions, followed in his wake.

Dissatisfaction

Just before the Biennale in June I determined that I would have to look deeper, to see further, to think around the screen. I wanted to test yet again my work and my thoughts about painting. These Final Rites began in Venice, surrounded and buoyed by the great painters I love. By chance, while there in my garden, I came across a reproduction of a drawing of Giambologna by Goltzius. Then I happened on a reference photo of the swimmer that Cezanne used to make his famous bather. I hadn’t seen this photo before, and I was absolutely stunned. Finally, I felt like I was getting nowhere with my own continuing contrarian struggle to find a way through late 20th Century abstraction, Postmodernism, and the thick, boring, institutional 21st Century art world of art fairs, chic galleries and elite luxury goods economies. Everywhere I went to see art, no matter where I went, I found that I experienced it through the airless sheen of a Corporate Art Experience. Seeing Christopher Wool’s work in Venice was also stunning, cold as ice, and everything that I am not. It is what I needed to push against, something to challenge. I’d really had enough. I felt there had to be an alternative, but how to explain, how does one change the temperature, explain the world outside the screen while being lost in it. Henri began to feel like it was no longer a tool, a platform for thought and ideas, but just another art blog, yet another ridiculous Art entertainment scheduled and broadcasted. And with that realization I found myself at a crossroads. I felt the need to travel, to see something old, to not know the language, to watch things unfamiliar, to experience WARMER art, and also, to immerse myself in the history of vision, to shed my American-ness, my “practicality”. So between airports and short-term apartment stays, cafes and metros, filterless cigarettes and smokey tasting bourbon, I found myself trying to clear my mind. And I found myself at a painting ancestor’s home…

The Garden

In Delacroix’s garden on the bench opposite there’s a couple having a bag lunch. Just in front of me is the studio with its huge window which allowed Delacroix to flood the red damasked room with a great deal of light. This place was a reward in the last decade or so of his life when he was already a master. It’s filled with the kind of ease you feel around someone who lives comfortably within themselves. He wasn’t interested in setting the world on fire any longer, those days were a memory. I thought of Manet’s visit to Delacroix which ended Eduard’s hero worship. Before he went Manet was warned by a friend that Delacroix was a cold fish. During the visit Delacroix blathered on and on about Rubens, and Manet found he had no time for it. Afterward he said to his friend, “Delacroix isn’t cold at all, but his doctrine is frozen. Anyway, we’ll copy the Barque. It is a fine piece.” Indeed it is, look at the splash of water running down the figure’s hip on the left and you’ll find Rubens. What strikes me about Manet’s quote is the idea of a frozen doctrine. Delacroix’s work is Romantic, hot, sexy, and alive. But he had reached the point when he stopped questioning, became stagnated. Romantics are great in their youth, but most burn out quickly their ideas in ashes. They have to work from some other place, from a physical need. It’s why we here in the 21st Century don’t trust them, and it’s why they won’t ever be, can’t be, professionals. They work from passion.

Delacroix’s great works are of course in great museums, but you’ll find a couple of intimate paintings left here at his last studio that smolder and smoke; a study of a foot, a portrait of a beauty, and a notebook of vicious drawings – wondrous, spectacular bits and pieces of a visual life connected intimately to understanding and feeling existence through one’s eyes. Even in these last days dictated by a frozen doctrine his vision could still smolder and burn. The couple got up and left, and I sat for a while listening to a televised soccer match commentary coming from an open window above. Something about a winger passing into the center and a missed opportunity – at least that’s what I could put together from my rudimentary French menu reading skills. Was this studio the icy tomb of a Romantic’s frozen doctrine or was there a lesson to learn, one that might open a way into our own day?
Would Eugene have enjoyed this as much as I was?

The 19th Century was radical in ways we don’t quite get here in the distance. Most of the 20th century and its vicious infamies began right there. Painting certainly wasn’t immune to these doctrines. For the most part naked vision was quickly being replaced by lenses and chemicals, and later, machines and programs. There were still wonderful works to make and see, but the idea of painting, the Grand Art of Painting, would never exist as it once had in the minds of artists. We would instead be Modern while we tore out our eyes. And of course this began a new discussion, a deeper involvement in the minds of artists about what Art could be, should be. The truth is – the proliferation of Photography changed EVERYTHING for those of us who love images. But there at the onset of this lens based Modernism Delacroix and Ingres had differing ideas about the future and importance of photography; one hot, the other cool. Delacroix thought it a great tool and used it as a reference point, a way to enhance his imagination and vision. Ingres railed against photography actually leading a cranky chorus of academics who claimed to be dead set against it. The irony is, as Hockney has pointed out, that Ingres and the others in his crew must have used a lens for many of their portrait drawings, actually tracing outlines just as a Postmodern Warhol would do. And this difference between Delacroix and Ingres became a cross roads where art history made a decision. And we, here in the distance, are not a part of the questions that were being asked. We forget the larger context, the other answers to those questions that may have been as valid and compelling, that may have made exciting art, exciting painting. As we all know History belongs to the winners, but what might we have forgotten about the fight? This is one of the many reasons that I love Hockney’s detective story. It opens up all kinds of questions that we assume to be answered. Hockney’s Secret Knowledge offers another thought about HOW WE SEE THINGS at this stage of the game…. It helps us see around the screen.

It began with a drawing:

This is a portrait of the Mannerist sculptor Giambologna done by Hendrick Goltzius in 1591. It was drawn right at the moment when Mannerism had begun to implode. In Northern Italy the Caracci were calling for a new realism in painting, and in Rome, Caravaggio had just begun to reformulate intimate lens images into grand theatrical visions. If one looks closely one can see that this drawing has all the earmarks of “tracing” just as Hockney explains. This is especially apparent if one looks to the lower part of the drawing with its quick descriptive lines and specific contours. I say this because once you know what to look for it really does become visually apparent when a lens reference has been used. Now I am mesmerized by this drawing – it looks to me like a contemporary vision, it feels like a reality that we know, a person we might see on the street. It remains doggedly naturalistic and familiar, never slipping into the hyper-real image programming that we are used to experiencing in our lens saturated age. Its vision, its familiarity is found in the movement of the line, the moment of its realization, the connection of the eye and the hand as they create an image. Its physical realization is also an internalization of the limitations, boundaries and specificities of the lens image – it’s natural perspective is a guide. Further it’s a sublimation, an humanization of the way a lens works. The portrait is fleshy, corporeal, and it speaks of a specific time and place – a long, unfolding moment. What’s missing for us in this drawing is our mechanical programs, the sheen of the airless code that distorts and modifies the lens captured image. This image is built up, hand hewn, SEEN in real time, fashioned with the understanding of the world around the lens. This drawing has the feel of being both worked and yet easy, tight and loose, real and abstract all at once. And what all of that adds up to is the idea of PROCESS – a truly Modernist material sensibility. This portrait FEELS contemporary, looks of the moment and yet encourages us to rethink how we accept our images on the screen in front of us. It has something that we don’t see much of in our electronic images – an unfolding of a hard won visual understanding in a single visual moment. It is hot, alive, compelling. And that for me is Romantic.

Then I had to reconsider some things:

One of the most influential paintings of a figure in the 20th Century was based on a photograph. Cezanne’s Bather broke a lot of rules with the redrawing of the figure’s head, the reworking of the figure’s outline. That hesitation, that re-figuring would unleash both Matisse and Picasso. Even more surprising is that the painting incorporated the natural flattening of the lens that Cezanne instinctively understood. Look at the lower right corner of the photo, the way it flattens into the blackness of the edge of the thing. The abstract pattern on the floor also provides a weird upended depth against the flat lower wall, a stiff line marks out the rigid back ground. The head is slightly distorted by the angle of the lens, either that or the guy in the photo’s head was HUGE. We see this effect nearly everyday in those Paparazzi photos from the red carpet – the photographer holds the camera over the head of the photographer in front, and aims and shoots downward at the starlet. We are used to that kind of skewing of vision, but for a Modernist in the 19th Century this was revelatory. All of those strange bits and pieces provided by the lens are translated into the painting in which Cezanne added some suggestions of his own passion for tromping through the countryside. For Cezanne this isn’t a just a “bather” but a giant striding over a flattened back drop. If we stretch a bit further we can also see that the treatment of this particular figure harkens back to the processes we see in the Goltzius portrait. The line work, the materiality of hatching. He’s seeing this figure through the lens and then reworking that image through his lived experience. Cezanne’s painting of this photo incorporates the world around and outside the photo, namely his memories, to enhance the experience of the lens with both lived time and his own existence. His painting becomes the emotional experience of the bather that Cezanne wants us to see – an everyman trying to step out of the ground, the Romantic individual, himself, the rising subject, us.

Finality

And so we come to an end of these Final Rites for Romanticism. Final because we no longer experience the same kind of ground, the same kind of visual need or visual acuity that is needed for a Romantic rebellion. An individual, an individual vision, can not, will not emerge. We are a society within the screen, we are constantly overwhelmed by the all encompassing electronic ground, in fact we are that ground, a hyper-reality made up of a sea of immaterial beings, bits of information. There are no longer individuals, we no longer have individual visions. We are nothing but connections, way points, collectives, pacts of constantly reforming and replicating information. We prefer the coolness of the ever expanding sea of electronic interaction, the endless flux of refining critique, the dematerialized vision. And it is that coolness of interaction which seduces us, keeps us in place while dispersing us all through the ethernet. We form ourselves for a moment, before the click, right there on the screen in front of us, and then we are gone, back into the ever-expanding ground. And because we now live there, we’ve forgotten about the world around the screen, we see it through our online experiences. Cezanne could not paint that Bather today. That figure is unfettered, individual, he rises out of the ground, he challenges us rather than placates us. Make no mistake, today there are very strong painters making wonderful Postmodern work, work that describes this very moment. But what we don’t see, and further, what we don’t want to see, is a strong challenge to that theoretical base. Something, an idea, a vision, that doesn’t become reactionary, but that is alive with the world when we emerge back into our fleshy selves, when we notice the world that isn’t broadcasted, that isn’t relayed through the lens, that isn’t programmed. That changed world and that different perspective may be where we can begin to discover a new Romantic critique.

“There are no more actors or spectators, everyone is immersed in the same reality, in the same revolving responsibility, in the same destiny, which is only the completion of a collective desire. Here again, we are not far from the Stockholm Syndrome: we are hostages of information, but we secretly acquiesce to our captivity.” Event and Non-Event By Jean Baudrillard / Translated by Stuart Kendall

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Back

Wednesday, November 30, 2011

Ok – Henri is getting back on track once again. During this enforced sojourn I’ve been keeping up with the artosphere, and quite frankly, have been bored to tears. Crickey, the drivel that passes for meaningful discussion about Art is astounding. If I read one more defense of the Guggy’s Catalan show I think I’ll plotz. Seriously, haven’t any of us got the huge clanking balls, or even the little tinny ones, to walk away from this kind of posh display of disdain. Look, I know the wealthy collectors love it, and they’re willing to pay through the nose for it, but these empty, Rococo gestures of academic conformity are so done. Who, at this late, very late date in the history of Postmodern entertainment is shocked, skewered or bewildered by any of this? And if you think this kind of art is edgy or challenging you need to check yourself before you wreck yourself. Hanging rich men’s entertainment conceits to look like a billion dollar construction site in Dubai is kinda like building a peasant’s cottage on the grounds of Versailles for a clueless teenage princess….And we all know how that turned out. Douche Chills ensue…

Meanwhile I’ve been entranced by the various media dramas being woven about the economies around the world. As I write this CNBC, my incessant and darkest televisual fascination, is fully erect at the sales numbers coming in from Black Friday – the starting point of the Christmas shopping season. “U.S. retailers racked up a record $52.4 billion in sales over the Thanksgiving weekend…” It seems that American consumers are reverting back to the profligate use of their credit cards even as they earn less money, watch their home values plummet and teeter on the edge of financial ruin. That said I’ve never seen so many business men and women deep in the throes of monetary ecstasy. Watching this is almost like walking in on your parents while they’re having sex…eeewww! and worse, catching them really enjoying themselves…omg, I’m gonna hurl! OK…TMI. As for the economy – well, there have been so many reports lately about the shrinking middle class, the expanding class of poor, and the incredible unending redistribution of wealth that I’m having trouble keeping my everyday existence in perspective. Of course for the majority of artists this means an even bigger boot with an even thicker waffle sole stomping shoe prints on our necks. I have friends and family that I’m very worried about, that are bravely struggling – some I can help, some I can’t, and I find the whole mess – heartbreaking.

I have been in the studio making some black and white paintings that I’m very happy to see, and I’ve been thinking a great deal about the differences between the direction of painting as I see it and the Postmodern orthodoxy. We’ll have the final discussions for our Romanticism Series shortly…

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Romantic Vision – Opening Position

Thursday, September 29, 2011

“For Nature, who abhors mannerism, has set her heart on breaking up all styles and tricks, and it is so much easier to do what one has done before than to do a new thing, that there is a perpetual tendency to a set mode.” - Ralph Waldo Emerson Nominalist and Realist


What you are looking at is David Reed’s painting from the 1970s entitled #90 – it’s somewhere after Pop/Minimalism and right at the beginning of Postmodern Neo-Abstraction (an amalgamation of 80′s Neo-Geo and 90′s Conceptual Abstraction.) In this work he’s commenting both on the ubiquitous material formalism of the period and the idea of the previous generation’s “signature” Action Painter’s brush stroke. His challenge incorporated both the Pop/Minimalist theoretics and media contingencies inherent in reproduction and replication AND the physical/material theoretics of institutional academic painting. He’s doing it by synthesizing these programs through the still viable (in the 70s) construct of a Postmodern critique. His solution to the painting conundrum is one of the most elegant reformulations of America’s dueling endgame painting movements of the 60s. It’s also the beginning of a new form of institutional Mannerism that quickly became THE WAY to approach the problem of endgame painting. His work has the look and feel of the lens-based image, but it is not. It is painting made to look like a reproduction. There has been a plethora of artists working in this same manner ever since, with hundreds, if not thousands of artists, coming to very similar conclusions about Postmodern painting, brush strokes and vision. In the meantime David has gone beyond this painting’s emphatic materialism to earn his place as  one of the foremost Mannerist imagist painters of the last thirty years. His works have explored nearly every incarnation of the brush stroke; what it does, what it means and how it exists in painting history. And he has done it by expanding and breaking the grounds of the Corporate Postmodern Billboard and collaging his “manufactured” painted images across the surfaces of an highly artificial spatial/temporal ground. David Reed is abstraction’s Bronzino.

The construct that delivered this idea of the brush stroke, the ongoing Postmodern critique of painting in general, is based on the complementary techniques of both replication and reproduction. Replication refers to imagery, reproduction to process. The second generation of this Neo-Abstractionist critique is of course embodied in the now very popular work of Christopher Wool. And it looks like this:

“The first duty of life is to be as artificial as possible.”
Oscar Wilde “Phrases And Philosophies For The Use Of  The Young”

This painting is not. For all of its technological impressiveness it is yet another clever and timely reiteration of Magritte’s pipe. With this kind of painting we have arrived at that point in the Postmodern critique where the image of paint has become the “paint”. We reference yet again what has been referenced, and we are doing so through yet another medium. Basically, this is a reproduction of a lens replication of a painting happenstance – the splotch, the drip, the remainder of the brush stroke. It’s a technique quite unlike Reed’s which examines painting as-if through a lens.  Its subject is the emptying ground, the media itself, swallowing up the disappearing reality of the act of painting, the act of anything, really. In Wool’s work we don’t encounter abstraction straight on any longer. Nor are we constructing or composing a painting in order to engage with it in a visual sense. Instead we have moved behind the lens and within the synchronous program in order to feature the workings of machine-made images themselves. All that is left to see on these overtly mannered, computer-collaged surfaces, is the idea and fabrication of the ground itself, or rather, an image of the ground – a secondary studio experience of some form of a former vibrant painted reality. As Raphael Rubenstein described it, this is how Provisional Painting works. For so many painters in this school, painting as a visual experience is something lost to the past, some former human condition, something that can not and probably should not be done any more. And because visual painting can no longer be engaged outside the mediated experience, what we are given instead are “painted” objects, things to encounter, things to purchase, stockpile and trade in the moment that we look up from our screens.

“Photographic seeing, when one examines its claims, turns out to be mainly the practice of a kind of dissociative seeing, a subjective habit which is reinforced by the objective discrepancies between the way that the camera and the human eye focus and judge perspective.”
Susan Sontag “On Photography”

Advanced painting in the early 21st Century, especially abstract painting, leans heavily on Provisional visual techniques enhanced and disseminated through programmed replication. This kind of work made for a certain kind of optical engagement is described by Sontag’s above observation about dissociative seeing. And make no mistake, that dissociative viewing is the difference between optical painting and visual painting. In order to find meaning in the provisional we must see THROUGH the machine, the program. The object itself must also remain provisional, in other words, an art-like thing. And so there is a preference toward mannered actions or highly “theatrical” presentations of painting processes. It’s a new kind of action painting without any outright action taking place. The paintings employ “hand-made” fucked up grounds overlaid with machine-made reproductions of institutional studio techniques scattered upon the endless surfaces of  billboard junk space. This type of “painting” must then be  disseminated through lens based media, experienced online in photos and blog commentary or published in Taschen-style presentations. When we see and experience the object first hand, in the flesh so to speak, the actual physical encounter, more often than not, reveals that the object is shoddy, unmade, and indeed, provisional. It looks like a Hollywood Prop, something made specifically for the fracturing gloss of the lens/program, a suggestion of something that “appears” FOR the lens while it dematerializes before one’s eyes. In this regard the “real” experience of the work becomes the after-experience, the Post-game wrap-up, so to speak. The “painted” object finds its meaning not in its being, not as it’s revealed, or in its experience, but as it’s re-presented, contextualized through other media. This third generation of Postmodern Neo-Abstraction, can and does, reproduce painting-like products without addressing first person visual involvement with originality, talent, quality, beauty, ugliness, specificity, thought, critique or irony. All of these “qualities” of former Art have now been quantified and subsumed into the lens based programs preferred by this new institutional elite. Painters no longer have to be accomplished, practiced, eloquent or expert – our job has become to simply re-contextualize replications of paintings, or indeed, absolutely anything that has been uploaded. Once a context, any context, has been incorporated and disseminated about the work by the program, it can and does turn everything, even the most abject or overworked product, the most absurd or grand idea, into Art, and further, into Critique. We are no longer bounded and defined by the realities of our fleshy experiences, we no longer HAVE TO SEE anything in the first person, never confront our own limitations in order to participate as an Artist, Critic, Curator, Collector, Theorist, or even as a Culture Consumer. The seamless len based program replicates and reproduces “Art” by, for and of the masses.

“I am the poet of the body,
And I am the poet of the soul.”
Walt Whitman “Leaves of Grass”

In the past it was the connection to Nature that was the catalyst for a new critique, a new vision. This is a large part of the Romantic attitude. It was the way to move from the strictures of an artificial existence and an artificial mode. All through Art History when an idea had reached a Mannered apex there would suddenly appear a new idea connected to fleshy vision, to an actual encounter with the world right in front of the artists’ eyes. When we’re looking at Manet’s picnic the world slips sideways. Why? Well it’s not only the critique of academic vision and institutional indoctrination that’s being presented, it’s Manet’s version of vision, his own understanding of his life in the painting. He’s describing nature through a changed vision. Temporal space collapses in this new Modern world and Manet SEES it, paints it. What makes the painting new, dramatic, disturbing is exactly this temporal shift to vision. He’s rebelling against the strictures of history and the artificiality of his own profession, his own time, and ultimately his own understanding of what he is seeing. However, our time is different. And I’m not so sure any longer that this sort of visual rebellion can happen – simply because we no longer connect to Nature, we no longer engage in it, no longer SEE it.

“I am Nature.”
Jackson Pollock

What I’m trying to understand, what I’ve been struggling with all this past summer, is the nature of Nature itself. What is it, how do we experience it, how do we interpret it, how do we express it, where do we find it? McLuhan made the assertion that once the first satellite rounded the globe, there was no longer Nature. We had contained our entire world through our media. Today, you can’t walk down the street without having your life documented, cataloged and used in some way by some device, some lens, some program. So I’ve looked inward to see if there might be anything close to “nature” existing there, and truthfully, I’ve been horrified by my own artificiality, the ease with which I participate in the program. Look, when I thought about it, I came to the conclusion that nearly every physical occurrence within our bodies can be modified and controlled by electronic, chemical, or surgical means. Christ we are, nearly all of us, cyborgs, mechanized humans (Yeah, Yeah, Yeah…fact and fiction, Marko, keep it real, please.) I then turned to my emotions, surely something there? But even those personal experiences can be and have been controlled and focused through social mores, copious amounts of pharmaceutical concoctions (ritalin anyone?) and the “realities” of electronic existence. Everything, including our most intimate relationships, are defined by these new programs, by the ever present “realities” of programs, both analog and digital. So what is natural, what is real, in this environment, in us? What exists outside or in spite of the program? Does anything? And if so what does it look like? Can any of us, especially now at the beginning of the 21st Century, truly claim, as Jackson did, to be “Nature”?

The problem, as I see it, isn’t necessarily in discovering “truth” – what it means to be human etc. We are a new kind of animal, like it or not. Yes, truth may set one free, but as Postmodernism has shown us, EVERYTHING we encounter in the program, every thing swallowed up by the program, has a kind of “truth” (truthiness?) and that truth can be and always is manipulated. So in desperation we’ve turned our search toward Reality hoping that in our daily encounters we might find some moment that isn’t programmed, a moment outside of the program – what’s Real today? But this is problematic as well. For instance in NYC recently we experienced an earthquake and a hurricane within the same week. Unprecedented experiences to say the least. They would have seemed WAY out of the ordinary, scary even, just 10 years ago. But the speed and deftness with which the media encapsulated the physical realities of those fleshy occurrences was truly astonishing. Astonishing because the program made these once life defining moments into everyday events. In one grand moment a commentator was televised actually standing in foamy raw sewage in order to illustrate the “reality” of the narrative. And none of us thought that this programmed “reality” was out of the ordinary. Not even Nature, as we once knew it, once were in awe of it, once were slaves to it, interrupted or changed the course of the narrative formed through the constantly streaming media reality.

We can not, do not, acknowledge the reality of our own existences, our own natures, any longer. We can not see outside the program, can not remove ourselves from the artificial existence in which we exist. The rebellion is programmed, the Romantic inclination to question codified and incorporated like a virus. For me this describes the Postmodern Condition.

Which brings me back to my concerns for vision and painting. If our bodies are manipulated by our products and procedures, our minds overwhelmed by a streaming narrative, our vision blurred and refocused by lenses, then what is Real, what is Reality, and further, what is Natural, what is Nature? And then how do we see it, how do we paint it?

End of the first part…

 

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Paul Corio – Pattern Logic

Saturday, September 17, 2011

I called from the street and then made my way up a few flights of stairs. This old building in Brooklyn is a working place, stuffed with “small businesses” – Asian men and women sewing piece goods in a loud crowded room on one floor. Another floor chocked full of electric machine tools ready to be used for fuck all. And as always in NY you’ll find a few artists’ studios filled with old paintings and half finished projects. Paul Corio had invited Michael Zahn, Dennis Bellone and me over for a studio visit. As usual I was running late – always…. Paul had been pulling out his works and lining them against the painting wall. Michael and Dennis had just finished the first round on the six pack and were deep in discussion about the last painting they’d seen. Artists tend to take studio visits deadly seriously especially among friends… I was happy to be there and looked about for signs of Paul’s studio life before really having a look at the work (I enjoy seeing how artists incorporate their lives into their work.) On a few table tops and shelves there were stacks of jars of paints, mixed and labeled in sequence, hues and values morphing from light to dark, precise and orderly. Used painters’ tape was scrunched into balls discarded here and there. I thought it was wonderful – a working production studio filled with 21st Century electrically colored paintings contrasted by a bank of windows looking northward over a view of Brooklyn’s 19th and 20th Century manufacturing detritus. Glorious.

As I was looking at Paul’s paintings I kept thinking about his blog postings on No Hassle at the Castle and the post he did here on Henri about his painting processes and studio life. Numbers and patterns are extremely important to Paul. He is interested in the specific mathematics of horse racing and betting. Paul is also a jazz musician, a drummer to be precise, and for me all of these things come across in his work in a very specific way. His vision is connected to rhythms and time, color, space, pattern, movement. Paul has a real way of involving the viewer across the surfaces of his works using specific kinds of optical repetitions. The paintings become physical and direct through their temporal movements. Color fades in and out and then turns on a dime into its compliment. The geometries break into packets, keeping time in moments of explosive visual energy. He’s constantly building signatures through these algorithms, pushing the viewer along to his visual beat. Christ, you can feel your body start to move as you look – I caught myself bobbing my head to these back beats a couple of times. It’s hard not to feel time slip and slide in front of Paul’s paintings. But there’s more going on here than music. His imagery pushes into the ground, exaggerating the pulsing efficiency of his colors. What you begin to feel as you look and follow is your own subjectivity sliding into this time frame. The visual experience is sharp, electric and thorough.

Paul has pushed back the literal optical surfaces and mannered surfaces of the 1960s. He’s playing with the idea of a deeper illusion – taking these algorithms and floating them against and above the expanding ground. In the most successful works Paul reaches for something darker and more emotional in his patterns. Unlike the Postmodern appropriation critiques of the 80s and 90s based on geometric/op abstractions (for example like those found in the work of Bleckner or Armleder), Paul examines a more direct idea of a visual and transcendent painting unmoored from irony. Rather than critique a style, keeping us at a distance, his illusions push the geometric patterns further and deeper into our consciousness, involving us in the rhythms. These paintings represent a kind of faith in the constant flow of repetition and movement that defines our world. The visual impetus behind the work is more Modern than Postmodern. There are no pretty bows or glittering curtains of material painted on the surfaces to hold us back from a direct physical vision. Paul is demanding that we engage in these rhythms and patterns and feel how they move us in this particular moment. In some paintings he raises this geometric imagery just above the ground allowing the subject to float and pulse there before our eyes. We are uplifted, transported out of our material concerns. And this is where Paul breaks with the Postmodern. His work is not held to the ground. Paul is fucking with those surfaces, reaching over the optical billboard to grasp older ideas of visual conflict and consternation – those Modernist concerns related to pattern, decoration, and transcendence. What he’s getting at is the fragility of vision in the optical overload of our time.

What was truly impressive, what really stuck with me was the large black painting that Paul let rest against the wall. It kept drawing me back in. I had only seen it in reproduction, but in person it hums and vibrates in a very dark and moving way. I kept feeling a kind of landscape like one sees in Asian paintings – where the eye travels along the length or width of the painting. You watch the world fade into the light and mist and then reappear further back, like you’re moving along space through time. This dark painting plays on that kind of temporality as it keeps regenerating – top becomes bottom, bottom top. Paul’s rhythms catch and break, and that’s when he pulls the shifting ground out from beneath you. You begin to feel that you’re upside down, folded back on yourself. I thought of Jasper Johns’ paintings that push the words and images around the sides of his canvases making the viewer realize that he’s stepped into an endless loop, there’s no escape. Again, there isn’t a hint of irony, not a bit of “aside” or commentary. This is a first person experience, fast, slow, broken and whole.

Lately Paul’s work has taken on the corporate, the logo, the straightforward presentation of power. What’s really interesting in these “word” works is the way Paul has skewed the visual approach and impact. We don’t see the work straight on, it’s as if he’s moved the perspective to one side to show us the optical workings beneath the logo and the program. They fly past us, breaking into geometric codes as they do. The program is false in these works, and once we catch that fakery, we quickly find another vision within it. The works take us back into our own understanding of color, light, space and time outside of and through the programmatic corporate vision. For me these paintings are hopeful, joyful and alive. And in a new clever twist Paul re-presents this work within a work. He’s doubling down on his bet against Postmodern irony, appropriating his own work, his own studio into a painting within and about the studio and himself. He’s patterning the flows of both his creative experience and his work-a-day life, documenting and glorifying the temporal space of that studio. It’s a very clever 21st Century self portrait – like Matisse’s Red Studio – a painting of the studio as a doppleganger for the artist himself.

We no longer speak of transcendence with any seriousness here in the 21st century. Most artists are content to make a work that looks good, that says something passably intelligent. Usually it’s not that personal, or that deep, but it looks good, you know? We have tons of work that does just that, stacked to the rafters in the Chelsea galleries. But Paul is looking for something else. He wants to get at an experience of visual contact, communication, and in that way, he’s quintessentially American, wholly himself. He’s reaching back to a tradition of abstraction that begins with Cezanne and culminates with Rothko and Newman. His vision is connected to a more physical and literal visual experience of the geometric and abstract, emotion and vision. You get a similar feeling standing in Paul’s studio – the heady mixture of brilliant color and fast pattern, the clash of time and history going on out the window – it’s a sense of place, solid and ephemereal at once. Paul wants you to see, to feel, experience in a visceral way and in that, his work embodies our great American Romantic visual tradition.

For more about Paul Corio – website and No Hassle at the Castle.

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Poke in the Eye, Punch in the Gut

Tuesday, September 6, 2011

Sometimes they come late to an understanding…

“The ubiquity of cameras in exhibitions can be dismaying, especially when read as proof that most art has become just another photo op for evidence of Kilroy-was-here passing through. More generously, the camera is a way of connecting, participating and collecting fleeting experiences. For better and for worse, it has become intrinsic to many people’s aesthetic responses.” Roberta Smith “When the Camera Takes Over the Eye”

Lenses define our realities – we’ve been discussing this for ages…

Sometimes they still haven’t got it…

You see much more of art viewing via a digital filter in museums and biennials than you do in art fairs and less still in actual galleries.
Edward Winkleman What Has Art Got To Do With It?

Where would gallery budgets be without the lens based web, the sale of work through jpegs, and the endless coverage by the online art press taking pictures and disseminating…oh fuck it…why bother refuting this?

And sometimes you come across something REAL…

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Big Ups for Henri

Thursday, September 1, 2011

The marvelous artist and theorist George Hofmann has included Henri as one of his go to art mags! Artcritical, helmed by the indefatigable critic and round table impresario David Cohen, has begun a new series entitled Bookmarked in which artists discuss their favorite online art sites etc. George also mentions some other wonderful sites including No Hassle at the Castle and immaterial culture. Thanks George for your kindness!

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