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reality_broken

Thursday, June 17, 2010

“What am I in the eyes of most people – a nonentity, an eccentric, or an unpleasant person – somebody who has no position in society and will never have; in short, the lowest of the low. All right, then – even if that were absolutely true, then I should one day like to show by my work what such an eccentric, such a nobody, has in his heart.” Vincent Van Gogh

“Only the suspect artist starts from art; the true artist draws his material elsewhere: from himself. There’s only one thing worse than boredom — the fear of boredom — and it’s this fear I experience every time I open a novel. I have no use for the hero’s life, don’t attend to it, don’t even believe in it. The genre, having squandered its substance, no longer has an object. The character is dying out; the plot, too. It’s no accident that the only novels deserving of interest today are those in which, once the universe is disbanded, nothing happens — e.g., Tristram Shandy, Notes from Underground, Camus’s The Fall, Thomas Bern hard’s Correction, Duras’s The Lover, Barry Hannah’s Boomerang.”
David Shields, 611 Reality Hunger

“Today, when we can eat Tex-Mex with chopsticks while listening to reggae and watching a YouTube rebroadcast of the Berlin Wall’s fall—i.e., when damn near everything presents itself as familiar—it’s not a surprise that some of today’s most ambitious art is going about trying to make the familiar strange. In so doing, in reimagining what human life might truly be like over there across the chasms of illusion, mediation, demographics, marketing, imago, and appearance, artists are paradoxically trying to restore what’s taken for “real” to three whole dimensions, to reconstruct a univocally round world out of disparate streams of flat sights.”
Jonathan Lethem, The Ecstacy of Influence

“The lack of general historical life also means that individual life as yet has no history. The pseudo-events that vie for attention in spectacular dramatizations have not been lived by those who are informed about them; and in any case they are soon forgotten due to their increasingly frenetic replacement at every pulsation of the spectacular machinery. Conversely, what is really lived has no relation to the society’s official version of irreversible time, and conflicts with the pseudocyclical rhythm of that time’s consumable by-products. This individual experience of a disconnected everyday life remains without language, without concepts, and without critical access to its own past, which has nowhere been recorded. Uncommunicated, misunderstood and forgotten, it is smothered by the spectacle’s false memory of the unmemorable.” Guy Debord, 157 Society of the Spectacle

“A one-hour episode of reality TV can take as long as sixteen hours to film. The shots where judges like myself give mean looks to the artists before pronouncing decisions on their work last something like three seconds onscreen, but require fifteen minutes of us all staring at one another. (The cameras have to be moved around and positioned so each person can be filmed.)”
Jerry Saltz, “Work of Art Recap: Harsh Reality”

“Now, this triumph of the idea of art over art itself, and, with the ready-made, the triumph of the idea of the object over the object itself are but an aspect of an immense feed-back, of an instant recycling of all events and images in the visual universe and to the realm of media. But also our intellectual and political life, our actions and our thoughts are affected by this automatic selfrefraction. Everywhere the process of image-feedback (“retour-image”)induces everything to focus on itself, to duplicate itself in advance, cutting short the process of representation – a phenomenon particularly noticeable in the field of photo-graphy, where very few images, be it a face, an event, a human being or a landscape, escape that image-feedback. Most of our images mask themselves with a con-text, a culture, a meaning, an idea of themselves and this leads to a kind of blindness described by Sanchez FERLOSIO (a spanish essayist): ” There is a terrible form of blindness, which allows you to look at things and not to see them. Time before, we did not look at things, we just saw them. Today all is wrapped in duplicity, no impulse is pure and direct. That is how the countryside has become a landscape, that is to say a representation of itself … Wherever I set my eyes, I see that terrible scenery that people glorify under the name of landscape ” It is our faculty of perception itself, our immediate sensibility that have been aestheticized. Sight, hearing, touch, feeling, all our senses have become aesthetic in the worst, the most banal sense of the term. And any new vision can be born only out of a radical deconstruction of this image-feedback, a resolution of this process of countertransfer that obstructs our vision, in order to reinstate the world in its radical illusion – its original state indeed, for the world itself is actually without return, without screen, without selfreflection. This process of reduplication, of cyclical confusion with our own image must be clearly distinguished from our mirror-relation, where on the contrary we take distance from our own image and enter within an open process of alienation and alterity. The mirror, the glance, the gaze, the scene open up to a tranfer, eventually to a poetic transfer, to a whole culture of the metaphor which is quite the opposite of that visual and aesthetic enclosure.”
Jean Baudrillard Integral Reality

It is as if I was to take my eye, to throw it away, and still be able to see. Video is originally a de-corporation, a disqualification of the sensorial organs which are replaced by machines…The eye and the hand are replaced by the data glove, the body is replaced by a data suit, sex is replaced by cybersex. All the qualities of the body are transferred to the machine…We haven’t adjusted yet, we are forgetting our body, we are losing it. This is an accident of the body, a de-corporation. The body is torn and disintegrated.
Paul Virilio Cyberwar, God And Television

Today, one often hears that the art of our time functions increasingly in the same way as design, and to a certain extent this is true. But the ultimate problem of design concerns not how I design the world outside, but how I design myself—or, rather, how I deal with the way in which the world designs me. Today, this has become a general, all-pervasive problem with which everyone—and not just politicians, movie stars, and celebrities—is confronted. Today, everyone is subjected to an aesthetic evaluation—everyone is required to take aesthetic responsibility for his or her appearance in the world, for his or her self-design. Where it was once a privilege and a burden for the chosen few, in our time self-design has come to be the mass cultural practice par excellence. The virtual space of the Internet is primarily an arena in which MyFace and MySpace are permanently designed and redesigned to be presented on YouTube—and vice versa. But likewise in the real—or, let’s say, analog—world, one is expected to be responsible for the image that he or she presents to the gaze of others. It could even be said that self-design is a practice that unites artist and audience alike in the most radical way: though not everyone produces artworks, everyone is an artwork. At the same time, everyone is expected to be his or her own author.
Boris Groys Self-Design and Aesthetic Responsibility

In my experience, you always think you know what you’re doing; you always think you can explain, but you always discover, years later, that you didn’t and you couldn’t. This leads me to suspect that the principal function of human reason is to rationalize what your lizard brain demands of you. That’s my idea. Art and writing come from somewhere down around the lizard brain. It’s a much more peculiar activity than we like to think it is. The problems arise when we try to domesticate the practice, to pretend that it’s a normal human activity and that “everybody’s creative.” They’re not.
Dave Hickey Interview

A few ideas to think about. Reality will continue….

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reality_drawn further in

Thursday, June 10, 2010

The other day I was reminded of the way Postmodern excess continues to hum blithely beneath the thin veneer of our everyday realities. I was standing among a group of folks waiting for the crosswalk sign to change. Another ordinary moment in the city, but in this case, there were two straggling SUVs traveling at a high rate of speed trying to beat the light. Like most impatient NYC drivers in “the box” they were determined to make it through the intersection before the people clogged the crosswalks. The “walk” signs had already lit up giving the pedestrians the all clear, and immediately, the people around me poured into the street. The two automobiles nearly mowed down at least 15 people – it was like watching a horror movie’s inevitable plot unfold. A barrage of four letter words ensued, and a lot of outraged pedestrians stomped across the street.

When I finally had crossed the street I was feeling a bit on edge, and I began to really think about what had just occurred. It seemed to me that both the drivers and pedestrians paid more attention to the “reality” of the signs than to the reality of the situation and the surroundings. For the drivers the visual world outside the window is easily ignored in the womb/cocoon of the automobile cockpit. Let’s face it, these days, a car interior may as well be a Vegas Lounge – touch screen monitors, programs, onstar, cel phone service, climate control, speed control, blind spot video monitors, entertainment panels, HD-LCD touch screens, GPS systems, electronic comfort adjustment, etc – the only thing missing is a stripper pole. And to top that off, drivers develop a weird disconnect between the personal spaces of their car interiors and the public spaces of the potentially violent machine itself. Pedestrians are hardly any better. Those people in the crosswalks were mesmerized by the media light show on display in Times Square. Many of them were chatting on phones or texting on blackberrys. Not one of them paid attention to the fact that a couple of tons of speeding metal was headed straight toward them. But what really seemed to irk this crowd most was that the “reality” implied by the “walk sign” had, suddenly and emphatically, been called into question. In our world of untethered electronic consciousness mediated signs have come to define and direct our experience of reality, and as such, we expect the physical world to adhere to these signs. We believe the reality of the text, the ubiquity and certainty of the sign over physical visual experience. In layman’s terms our beliefs are stronger than our eyes.

In a recent post on Japanese art we briefly discussed the fact that most contemporary artists have settled into a kind of academic somnambulism in their approach to drawing. I thought I’d concentrate a bit on this topic, because radical visual exploration through drawing has always been the first foundation of great painting. But today, our drawing remains mired in the academic practices of the 20th Century.

It’s been my experience that many artists today “see” no further back than the 1950s. If we look to anything “older” we immediately go blind. Sure, we pay lip service to the geezers Matisse and Picasso, but we act as if their accomplishments are set in stone, their art an exception and indifferent to our times. If we go back to the once radical Impressionists we see them as bourgeois makers of Kitchen Calendar schlock (I beg to differ – check out the compositions in Monet’s late work!) If we go further back, we tend to treat the Venetian painters as if they were mere decorators of a quaint and expensive tourist destination. We are so self absorbed and myopic that we can not for the life of us find anything “real” in what these artists might have to offer – nor can we find a way to use their legacies to make anything truly NEW. Our references are brittle and insular, our appropriations are narrow and shallow.

For example, I was speaking with a painter the other day that claimed that Matisse could not draw. Bald-faced. Unrepentant. Granted, this artist is a realist using lens-based programs to make his work, but c’mon man, what the fuck? You can’t be serious? His contention was that it didn’t look like reality. I pointed out to him that “reality” as he saw it, came through a lens and his computer – Matisse didn’t need a prophylactic to define “reality” – he worked it bareback so-to-speak. (OK, it got a bit heated.) I prefer my encounters with “reality” to be unprotected visions. Another artist I know has been to Venice three times without seeing the work in the Scuola di San Rocco. No curiosity at all. But for now let’s just concentrate on abstraction and drawing.

Modernism emphasized the way an artwork was made – process and materials. From the first half of the 20th Century – Matisse all the way through the AbEx painters – the ground and the process became the focus of any interaction and declaration. “The resulting work often emphasizes the physical act of painting itself as an essential aspect of the finished work or concern of its artist.” It was a way around, a way under the vast wall of Western visual history. American artists, especially, found that by rephrasing the question about what painting could be, they could ignore the weight of visual history and begin again. This is a very American thing to do – we’re good at ignoring consequences while we take a bow for figuring out how to slice the Gordian Knot. We constantly “cheat” the “real world” in just this way – steroids in sports, financial statements on Wall Street, environmental disaster estimations, military incursions, government regulations and Presidential elections. We are great at shifting the ground beneath your feet. Which brings us to “American type” painting at the end of Modernism, and with it, we began the first truly American theoretical art movement – Postmodernism.

Since the 1960s Postmodernism has institutionalized and fetishized the processes and practices of Modernism. And this institutionalization is defined, mostly, through the manipulation of context – the constantly shifting ground that quickly submerges any rising visual subject. In this regard POMO is all about references and revisionism – interpretation of an appropriation. But before I get lost once again in these larger issues, let’s get back to drawing. There are a couple of styles of drawing that seem to predominate in POMO, but I’ll concentrate on the one that I learned and the one I continue to see a lot of. It is also a style of drawing that I put aside in favor of something different. That style is based on the working of the drawing – lots of smearing, erasing and re-drawing. This is by now an academic feature in universities the world over. For example:

Now in this drawing Matisse was still engaging the rising subject, the thing in itself. The model posed before him and he would draw, redraw, erase, and smear, trying to get at an emotional connection to the subject through his vision. Matisse was trying to process the connection between hand and eye in order to come to understand and abstract the rising subject. He searches for a line, pushing and pulling it back and forth, until finally, he has worn a path around the reality he is engaging. He is looking for a composition, for a truth in what he sees and what he draws. He wants the eye to move over the subject, engage with it understand that it is separate and real. Matisse and the early Modernists were hanging on to the idea that the drawing process is connected to the rising subject, the visual world outside of themselves. Or as I discovered the other day on that corner – the world of speeding cars, sweating bodies and awkward moments.

Later this process would become the focus of the AbEx painters, and I’ve chosen DeKooning’s work to make the point. Here the rising subject is already an abstraction, a totem. It is not a specific woman in the world, seen and made into an abstraction, but it is an idea of a woman made material through process. This idea was revelatory for American painters and offered a way out, hemmed in as they were, by the visual dictates of the Scylla and Charybdis of Modernist painting – Matisse and Picasso. Painters found that they could not challenge them directly, there was no room to maneuver past their experimentations. Instead they had to up the ante, move away from the visual world. Painting and drawing became more about process – the ground. The arena won out as the visual world slipped away. Matisse’s tentative lines and fearless reformations of outward visual reality are now, in DeKooning’s work, shot through with a persuasive belief in materials, physicality and process.

Postmodernism doesn’t engage in the physical world in the same way. We accept the uploaded image, the media image as our totemic reality. In our “reality” Shrek is as real to us as the Venus of Villandorf was to a Paleolithic crotch grabber. The rising subject doesn’t interest us, but the constant flow of information does. We exist in the ground, in the processes of abstraction. We look no further than the surface of things because everything we know is always already known – we live in a Corporate World of Signs. We no longer process our images as DeKooning did, we aesthetisize them – we “treat” them. We add “finish” value to the media image. We inflate its worth in just this way. We are beyond engaging with the image itself or finding a new meaning in or for the image. We know what it means. We merely provide a more desirable context in which to present it. We alter the ground. We focus the process. For instance in Joyce Pensato’s image we have a banal cartoon character removed from its media/graphic presentation and given the Postmodernist contextual treatment.

“Cartoons depend so much on their own plastic surface, and this is something Pensato vigorously takes on, using the eraser as a tool in its own right to transform any semblance of plasticity or sheen. Her palette of pastels and charcoal is limited, another push against the full fluorescent spectrum of cartoons. The figures are reduced down to what could be thought of as their “essence,” if cartoons had essence, and then pushed outward again by Pensato’s strong hand: Homer ’08 has the eyes, bald pate, and mouth recognizable to watchers of The Simpsons, but the texture and surface of the piece is all about painting and its visual engagement.”

Once again this process is about adding value, customizing a graphic image through physical engagement, mark making and burnishing the ground – trying to bring about reality through the sign and the system. This is not about vision, or visual interaction, but about the fetishization of Modernist processes through Postmodernist contextualization – the assertion of self through an avatar, a sign. In this Postmodern action the subject and the ground are treated as the same thing, folded one into the other. The drive of the piece is to enhance and exemplify its physical embellishments – the paper, the materials, the process. The context of the image is changed from Pop culture meta-character to Fine Art critique. But nowhere in this transformation is there an outward engagement with other, with the world outside the various Modernist theoretical/material techniques and the abstract sign.

Now I bring this up, yet again, because lately, there have been a number of articles discussing the end of Postmodernism. I find this all a bit hip and specious mainly because THERE HAS BEEN NO DIRECT AND SUSTAINED CRITIQUE IN OUR ART WORLD ABOUT HOW POSTMODERNISM WORKS AND WHAT IT DOES. Nor has there been any NEW theoretical advancement either in opposition to Modernism (outside of the POMO critique) or Postmodernism itself. A lot of folks seem content to point out that we have new technologies – computers, internet 2.0 and interactivity – and make the claim that these new technologies have moved us into a new type of theoretical critique. The problem for me is that even with the new technologies we remain tied to a way of thinking, a way of “not seeing” that doesn’t allow us to use these new technologies in a different way, to “think different.” And again I have to make the case for vision, for the way we use our eyes and the way we interpret what we see. We must look beyond the world of signs and define our reality outside of the lens programs.

In this video I was intrigued by the line – “…drawing laid the foundation for a new world of art.” The rebirth of drawing and painting began with a different kind of visual engagement. For centuries religion, a system, a program, had limited the scope and practice of how artists saw and experienced their work. Their works served the dictates of the church until Giotto began to fill those abstractions with the life of his time. Faces began to become more “real,” spaces began to flow in time and light moved across the surfaces of things. We started to see the world around us instead of the systems in front of us. The floodgates were opened for new expressivity, new ideas and a new reality, and an old way of seeing life began to take shape in a new way. And for this crew, it all began with the intimacy of drawing, of moving the hand along with the eye. Reality is what wakes us up, breaks our view of the signs guiding our interpretations, and it reminds us, that we are indeed, alive! To make an end to this long and looping post I’ll leave you with one of my favorite movie quotes of all time from Blade Runner – “I want more life…fucker!”

MOMA has an excellent resource of drawings online. Check out the link and study the Postmodern age!

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the end of a long week…almost…

Wednesday, May 26, 2010
The Daily Show With Jon Stewart Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c
Hoarders
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Tea Party

My head exploded this week, and boy, it was a mess. BP, Halliburton and Transocean, the stock market, Postmodernism revived once again at Greater NY, and three contentious discussions about these very things, left me to deal with the fact that either I’m not being CLEAR ENOUGH with artists about what’s at stake, or most people just don’t give a good goddamn that nothing, absolutely nothing, has changed. All of which makes me sound like an out of control crank – and I hate that. So there I am watching Jon Stewart hoping for a laugh, when suddenly, out of nowhere I get a moment of vindication…. Thank you Jon – maybe I haven’t completely gone ’round the bend….

Plus Check out James Kalm’s wonderful walk through of GNY. In one CLASSIC throw away line James gives us the most marvelous and memorable critical assessment of Leidy Churchman’s work ever. I’ll leave it to you to discover and luxuriate in James’ genius!

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POMO is the New Black

Wednesday, May 19, 2010

I don’t know if Ben Davis has been reading Henri, but what the hell, I’ll say it – it sure reads like he does. WELCOME Ben – c’mon in – the POMO’s fine! Or more to the point – the Demise of POMO is totally Bitchin’ Dude! Ben winds out the recent history of POMO in a discussion about whether or not it still exists for art and artists. He takes the economic route to understanding in the end, finding the cultural and theoretical ones crammed with traffic and going nowhere…
It’s a wonderful, thoughtful piece about our current theoretical dilemma, and it comes to the conclusion of many other art writers – we’re in a transition:

“As of this writing at least, what we have looks like a minor inflection in the dominant ideology, not any full-blown change of direction. Glance again at the factors Lyotard lists above as providing the correlate for “postmodernism,” and ask yourself, how many of these things have actually been reversed? None. If anything, for the moment, there seems to be a radicalization with regard to all of them — the instability brought on by “vigorous” economic competition, the erosion of U.S. hegemony, the lack of a political alternative that anyone can believe in, etc. So, where, finally, are we at? On the level of theory, you have the waning of something, but an inability to articulate anything that actually sounds like an alternative.”

I take issue with that last statement. We’ve been discussing these problems for quite a while. And we’ve offered a few new ideas about where we might find fertile ground to make new painting. Oh well, I guess you just can’t make that horse drink the water – even if your hosing it down. These days it seems the discussion of the “end of Postmodernism” really is – the new black.

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DIY Aesthetics

Tuesday, May 18, 2010

Lately there have been a number of artists’ DIY projects on view. Many are looking to break the monolithic mass of aesthetic sameness that clogs up the NYC gallery system. These hit and run tactics have been, well, hit or miss, but in this case, it’s definitely a hit. Michael Zahn dropped an invite to see this DIY project (sponsored by Lisa Jacobs and Non-Objectif Sud) of the painter Dennis Bellone’s works from 1990-2010. The space being used for the exhibit is in a building that comes with a literary pedigree – “This exhibition is housed in an old fire house, Engine 216, which was mentioned in the best selling novel, “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn,” which was later made into a classic movie. Engine Co. 216 functioned as a fire house for 125 years before it closed in 1971.” The location makes a wonderfully funky backdrop for the paintings on view and a hopeful statement about the resilience of art and artists.

Dennis has been steadily working at his craft since the 90s. I wasn’t familiar with his work, and we spent the afternoon discussing his history and his approaches to abstraction. We share the idea that at the beginning of the 90s there was an exodus from painting, which left a gaping hole in the imaginations and practices of a generation of painters just coming of age. After the maximalist 80s and the sudden disappearance of money following the market collapse, the art world turned its attention to video, installation and performance leaving painting to a school of mannered abstractionists. Dennis found recognition during this time for his performances, critiquing and extending the Warhol/Nauman/Beuys legacy. His experimentations came to a head with a wild and wooly televised boxing match in Belgium when he stepped into the ring with then SMAK curator Jan Hoet. But all the while he was painting away, breaking his work across the conceptual catechisms and root-bound mannered abstractions of the time – reducing painting to its elements in order to find a new expression. There were other painters just beginning to mine similar ideas, and many have come and gone. But what makes this work real and timely is Dennis’ color – it is instinctive and thorough, strained and specific. And even as these compositions begin to fall apart in front of our eyes – he manages to pull them back together with his hue – watery Impressionist pastels melt into the ground flowing this way and that, a brush scrubs over an ultramarine field like Matisse, a naples yellow stroke is tightly pulled into existential ABEX crisis, a saturated red field is streaked through with titanium – tracing that candy colored surface with hot pink edges. He is a real believer in process and hue. As a painter you have to admire his willingness to push away nearly everything to get at essence and presence. And it would not be a stretch to say that he should be included amongst Raphael Rubenstein’s pantheon of Provisional Painters – Christopher Wool, Albert Oehlen, and younger painters like Josh Smith. Make some time to head out to Williamsburg and catch Dennis’ tight wire act.

Paul Corio – No Hassel At The Castle – has written a wonderful post on Dennis’ work – check it out here.

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Drawn to Kuniyoshi

Monday, May 10, 2010

A couple of weeks ago I went to see an exhibition at the Japan Society of one of my favorite artists, Utagawa Kuniyoshi. Truth is, I am in awe of many of the artists from the Ukiyo-e period, especially Kitigawa Utamaro. The sophistication of vision and the clarity and speed of execution in these artists’ work is fascinating. But what is really interesting to me is the emotional impact of many of the images themselves – the way they involve you, intimately, in what is being represented. It is a vision determined through direct drawing, memory and touch, then reproduced using woodblock printing techniques. Woodblock printing! Christ, most of us have NO CLUE how labor intensive and difficult this is. Images are backwards, you must work from the negative and the entire thing is hand carved – meaning it takes great skill and technique to do it well. In order to make a line you must remove the material around the line. Not only is it laborious, but you have to think from the end rather than work to the end – making the whole process even more conceptually driven.

Kuniyoshi is a marvelous story teller and a brilliant technician. His work is about movement and drama – theatrical in the best sense. The exhibitors had placed an open sketch book of his drawings at the beginning of the galleries. The page of drawings on view were stunning – all process and reworked lines. In this sketch book the creative act was on view, and it looked extremely contemporary. But what really took me aback was the strength of the line, the sureness of the execution. When he decided on something he was emphatic. We don’t draw like that any longer, unless we are tracing an image. Oh, we play the drawing game, sure, but it is removed from the act of seeing. By that I mean we start the drawing knowing that we’re going to erase it, smear it, work the paper, tear into the surface. Our drawing is about the processes of working the drawing rather than involving ourselves in forming an image, and this “process” has become an academic/institutional preoccupation in so many studios. We don’t look or see our way to moving a line; we process the line, we distress and/or antique the paper, we concentrate on the effect of the materials. So, it’s always wonderful to see and be reminded of real visual thought in action – ideas pushing the image into view through the artist’s hand. You get a real jolt of this difference in our time and in this sketch book. But there were even more delights on the walls! Kuniyoshi was a master of technique and his work is dramatic, cinematic and way OTT. But for me it is his composition that is divine – in piece after piece he drives you straight into the visual sweet spot – pushing and pulling the rising subject through the ground.

There were just a few people in the galleries, a couple of wonderfully tatooed Manga fans drawing copies, an old couple discussing their trip to Tokyo and a family pointing out the minute details of each print to their totally bored nanny. Basically, I had the place to myself and I spent a bit of time going back and forth between the images. One of my favorites was the image on the left. The linework is incredible and it literally enervates the entire image. Everything in the piece is moving. The wind is blowing life around the figure, leaves, clothing, hair, all of it in motion. The line IS process, like DeKooning’s brush strokes, but here, conceptualized for vision, bringing the rising subject into sharp visual focus. The figure struggles against the heavy wind, his left foot about to step into our space, as if he is leaving the frame. The long grass moves in waves, leaves blow across the glade. You get a strong sense of fall, of the chill in the air, like late October. This figure has a purpose and is resolved to move forward – the rather nasty looking hook and tether in his right hand allude to some serious goings-on. But what I truly love are the textures that Kuniyoshi has created using only line – short bursts, long flows, thick stubs, long razor-like shards, all of it designed to move your eye – the silk of the robes, the thick fur of his cloak, the landscape, the dried leaves, the woven hat. Van Gogh did a very similar thing with line in his drawings and paintings, and he appropriated the power of these techniques from the Japanese woodcut prints that were all the rage amongst the Parisian avant garde of the time.

As I was leaving the show I wondered why our drawing practices today have little in common with the visual feast going on in those galleries. I have grown tired of the naive ham handedness and itchy scratchy line or the singleminded pursuit of the “badly made piece” that passes for “expression.” I want more sophistication in drawing. Sophistication that isn’t based on academic posturing or lens based “reality.” I don’t care about verisimilitude, especially if it’s clumsy, but I do care for understanding and simplicity – like Ingres’, Delacroix’s or Michelangelo’s drawings. Picasso was a master of technique, and he would use that mastery to get at and simplify his vision. A good friend of mine used to say that Matisse was dangerous with a nib, like a deadly fencer, and with just a few quick flicks of his wrist an odalisque would appear. I thought about this as I made my way back to the subway. A lot of gallery shows these days like to show off a wall of drawings to go with the paintings on view, and I’m always struck at the wierd disparity between those drawn works and the paintings. I think this is so for two reasons. First, drawing is an intimate visual experience connected to thought. Most of us do not experience visual thought in this way any longer – we prefer to lens capture on our phones and airbrush with an app. We do not see in a physical sense – we conceptualize through lenses and programs. Robert Hughes used to complain that the Postmoderns couldn’t draw and in this sense he was correct – we have been concerned with processes. The second (and probably a reaction to the first) is our reliance on materials and the effects that they can produce. There are many painters who are wonderful technicians and materialists. They can move “stuff” – dripping, erasing, scraping, sanding and scumbling the work with torrents of physically pliable things. They are creating effects and backgrounds – and it happens in both painting and drawing. But what is left out of this process is seeing the world around us. When the Parisian avant garde went nuts for Japanese prints it opened them up to new ideas about composition, flatness and visual economy. For Van Gogh these prints challenged him to change his ideas about the way his hand worked, the way his drawing techniques could express an emotion through vision. For me, when I go back to see the Japanese masters, I see the movement, the linework and the visceral pictorial composition as a way to enliven and engage our media saturated scanning eyes.

If you can, I suggest you find an afternoon for Kuniyoshi.

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Painting…eh?

Saturday, May 8, 2010

My mind is all over the place these days – no continuity of thought, whatsoever. I’m pretty sure that I know that there’s been a shitload lot of painting on show in NYC lately, and most of it looks professionally “bad,” “interior decorator” colorful and academically re-worked – as in artful pentimenti. All of this continues the current Postmodern trend of re-making and re-using Modernist painting while ignoring the irony, or if one wants to say it plainly – artists are painting like irony is now “the new sincerity.” But if you’re looking for thoughtful visual ideas or challenging imaginative groundbreaking work – well, you’re definitely looking at the wrong medium. Charlie Finch took notice of this trend, and ramped it up in a recent devastating critique about some of these shows.

“I guess the rationale for esthetic distortion to the point of entropy is that we live in a multi-valent, overstimulated technical world, so that it is simply amazing that any painter can make anything at all. Yet, even the formalists are bad…The soft, haphazard gesture beckons to the lazy collector and painting is reduced to nothing but shades of gray.”

Charlie is, quite rightly, critiquing our lazy eyes, our reliance on academic propositions and our half-assed imaginations. At the beginning of the last century Picasso and Matisse were stretching the boundaries of vision for a new century. Today, most painters prefer to see through lens programs, cowtow to Duchampian prigishness, and mush mud around photographs. I remain unconvinced that this trend will abate anytime soon, and I’m struck by the sameness of so much of the work on view. I find that I don’t carry the works that I’ve seen. I thought that this was a personal thing, but after talking with my friends, it seems that I’m not the only one. Anyway, not everyone I know shares my favorable opinion of Charlie’s critiques. What I like about his work is that he’ll give us a piece of his mind, poking us in the eye while doing so. Maybe it’s hyperbole, but we can take his sharp-eyed critiques as a reminder that we are not doing our jobs.

The other “big” art world news was the so-called blacklist that shut out a collector. I’m sure you’ve all read about it in some form. The collector sued, a gallerist testified, and phony outrage ensued. Guess what we discovered? Business being done in the art world is an elitist whores’ game, and we’re being manipulated by money, power and some super-secretive backroom finagling. OK, we’ve all heard that before. Many of us have seen it go on right in front of our faces, and for the most part, many of us anxiously manuever to be a part of that system. The most stunning revelation is that even as the economy continues to “pancake” nothing much has changed, especially our aesthetic preoccupations, because WE, artists, refuse to challenge the endless sameness of our thought. As an aside, I can’t tell you how disappointed I am that so many of you artists, critics and art world denizens, especially a few that I know, went to the NuMu for the recent collector sponsored dry hump. All I can say to you art bitches, and you know who you are, is don’t even try to justify that bullshit. Reprehensible isn’t a strong enough word – let’s just say disgraceful. Angry? Just a touch.

Additionally, my distaste for the Postmodern edifice has grown even deeper as its effects keep floating into view during this so-called economic “recovery.” The theoretical schiesse slide keeps whisking bucket loads of public money into the grasping hands of connected and corrupt institutions. They, in turn, use this money to bilk the public out of even more money and goodwill. The most galling part is the “feel good” PR that the powers-that-be continue to bulldoze into our collective consciousness. Right now on our TV screens in one of those “feel good” about renewal commercials is the CEO of General Motors, telling us that the bankrupt company has repaid the government loan that bailed them out. But as this article in Forbes by Shikha Dalmia succinctly points out, the “reality” of the rising subject is much different than the advert’s Postmodern “interpretation” of the all-encompassing ground.

“…most ordinary mortals unfamiliar with bailout minutia would assume that he is alluding to the entire $49.5 billion (the money invested in government takeover of GM.) That, however, is far from the case. Because a loan of such a huge amount would have been politically controversial, the Obama administration handed GM only $6.7 billion as a pure loan. (It asked for only a 7% interest rate–a very sweet deal considering that GM bonds at that time were trading below junk level.)”

The article goes on to discuss the fact that GM was provided a “working capital” escrow account to ensure the continuing operation of the company. However, this money is being used to pay back the government loan (so proudly detailed in the commercial) – not profits from sales. And if that weren’t enough:

“…the company has applied to the Department of Energy for $10 billion in low (5%) interest loan to retool its plants to meet the government’s tougher new CAFÉ (Corporate Average Fuel Economy) standards. However, giving GM more taxpayer money on top of the existing bailout would have been a political disaster for the Obama administration and a PR debacle for the company. Paying back the small bailout loan makes the new–and bigger–DOE loan much more feasible.”

Now who can argue with that? Suffice it to say that what is being serviced and maintained with our tax legacy and sold to us with POMO dialectics is the well being of the Power Elite. This political/economic/cultural shell game that defines our realities has been designed to keep the public’s gaze fixed firmly on the constantly sliding ground while the subject walks out the door with the cash – widows and orphans indeed. Now before I’m accused of being a part of a cultural bunko squad or whipping up some Marxist/Leninist scariness, I’ll try to make my way back to the “clean world”. OK, Marko, so what has all this impotent outrage got to do with Art? Just this…

“OPTIMISM has returned to the multibillion-dollar art market. Expectations are so high that many will be disappointed if Picasso’s 1932 painting “Nu au Plateau de Sculpteur (Nude, Green Leaves and Bust)” doesn’t break the record for a work of art sold at auction when it is offered at Christie’s on Tuesday.” And sure enough – “At $106.5 Million, a Picasso Sets an Auction Record.”

Ah, the stimulus and the bailout! The trillions of tax dollars piled into the stock portfolios of the hedge fund classes has been like a double dose of viagra for the secondary market! Holland Cotter – in this recent column for the Times – comments on the ubiquity of blue chip size queens currently cruising the auction houses. “Despite the high figure, the whole thing feels a bit ho-hum. These days so much money is in so many hands, and so many of those hands are after trophy art, that record breaking has become routine, de rigueur. Two, three, four million extra? Worth it. After all, if you’re the evening’s big spender, you not only get to own an object you’ve just helped to make fantastically valuable, but your extravagance, with your name attached or not, also buys a mention in the news.”

And then there’s this Bloomberg article – “Wealthy investors can see the rebound is real,” said John Rogers Jr., chief executive of Chicago-based Ariel Investments, which held 3.2 million Sotheby’s shares at year-end. “This is a confidence game. They’re more confident,” he said after watching last night’s auction with his 20-year-old daughter, Victoria, an art-history major at Yale University.” I’m sure the double entendre about the “confidence game” was a sly critique of the global art economy by Mr. Rogers. But my favorite cliche was delivered by a VP at Citigroup “Art Advisory” – “Historically art follows the money and the money is in emerging wealth,” said Suzanne Gyorgy, Senior Vice President of Citigroup Art Advisory Service, referring to collectors from Russia, China and the Middle East. “These paintings follow the wealth.”

Does all of this “wealth” effect what comes out of the studios? The new sincerity says “No” without a hint of irony.

We’ll have another reality post coming soon…stay tuned!

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Color, Light & Space – Brian Quirk

Thursday, April 29, 2010

It’s been awhile since our last post on Color, Light and Space, but I’m determined to continue to ask other artists questions about the subject, especially, how they go about confronting these issues in their work. I am fascinated by the thought processes that artists use when they consider color, light and space. In this post I’ve asked the playwright, actor and artist, Brian Quirk, a few questions about how he uses these tools when he is developing his scripts.

MS: As a playwright I suspect the ideas and processes of color, light and space are integral to the way you develop the scenes, the characters and the atmosphere of your play. In painting we have to develop this all at once, and these things unfold as one looks – I’m thinking here of Caravaggio especially, who set his scenes for a dynamic visual overload that then unfolds.

BQ: Yes, I love how that works in Caravaggio. He is such a theatrical painter and visual overload is right! There is such realistic detail in his work and gorgeous light too.

MS: How does color, light and space unfold in your writing?

BQ: It really depends on which play I’m writing. In MAPPLETHORPE/The Opening, it was all about visualizing space in black and white. With PLUSH LUST, interior decorators are moving in together and then moving apart so color was vital. Palladin, the lead character, develops a substance abuse problem and his best friend, Marion, stages an intervention. She, literally, draws back the blinds and lets the healing light in. In my play CRASH which deals with obsession and imagined scenarios, the lighting changes depend on the mood; more threatening scenes imagined in reds, whereas lighter scenes have a softer palette. There is a character, Lucille, in a train station and blue is prevalent. At the end of the play, we realize it has all been imagined and the light of reality shines harshly. How these elements will unfold depends on the play.

MS: Are you concerned about these issues as you develop not just the scene, but the characters in the scene?

BQ: Yes. In the Mapplethorpe play the “portraits,” characters based on his images, were imagined in black and white. Whereas, the people in the world of the gallery were imagined in color. In my most recent play NERINE about a young girl’s awakening and breaking away from a dysfunctional family, space is almost another character in the play. They are living in cramped quarters and that confined space informs the scenes. Nerine, the young girl, discovers gardening. The open space offers to her the possibilities of a different life, of being an artist.

MS: Do you consider spaces between characters or character and audience as part of the tension or release of a scene?

BQ: Absolutely. When John Stix directed the Mapplethorpe play, he had the “portraits” off center and staged at a bit of a distance from the audience. Giving the audience space to take in these very extreme characters. However, the artist’s grandmother, another character, is played almost in the audiences lap. She welcomes the audience into the gallery space and makes them feel safe. In PLUSH LUST, the characters cohabit and there are silent scenes which document their life. This is all done visually with their pulling together and breaking apart and tentatively coming together again. These silent tableaus help tell the story of their love affair.

MS: Do you specify direction toward the audience, the way they are seated, how the play is seen, how they might participate, etc?

BQ: I don’t specify direction toward the audience. However, my writing has a lot of direct address in it (where characters speak to the audience.)

MS: Does the design of the theater itself play into the idea of the text?

BQ: Not really, though I do visualize the space when I write I do not at this point write with a particular space in mind. Of course this could change if I was continually writing for a specific theater!

MS: Can you alter that (the limitations of the theater itself) with the lighting, the color or the space that you describe in your writing?

BQ: Yes. With my Mapplethorpe play, we had to alter each of the spaces that I performed in so that it would be that neutral space called for by the text. At Dixon Place, we had to deal with an all white space, so the designers had to create shadow. In Provincetown it was such a large space, so a platform was built to define the playing space, and in San Francisco, the theater was painted to look almost like a Polaroid.

MS: How do you use color as you develop a character or a scene?

BQ: Again, it all depends on the project. In my play SUMMERLAND based on the Fox sisters, I drew. I was on two fellowships at The MacDowell Colony and was inspired by all the great visual artists. Frustrated in my writing process, I ended up drawing (badly) colorful circular forms. I was trying to imagine the supernatural. I made dozens of drawings and cut out collages, trying to wrap my mind around the “ghosts,” both real and imagined in the play. While working on PLUSH LUST (I was at The Virginia Center for the Creative Arts on a fellowship) and I made collages and drawings to both imagine and define the spaces that the designers lived in and the spaces their imaginary firm designed.

MS: Brian, as a visual artist, I like the fact that you move to a visual practice to help you define your characters. I find this true of other playwrights and directors, I’m specifically thinking of Robert Wilson, whose drawings relate directly to the light and spaces of his productions. Orson Welles would draw his productions out before he began – translating the text into a visual experience. In your drawings you used circular images to refer to the supernatural – you were searching for a way to represent the un-seen or unknown. How do you translate your visual images back into the text in this regard?

BQ: The images that I drew became clues to me as far as the text and also the character. In a way, the drawings made me realize that the girls were just regular normal children (this was the solid element that appeared in the drawings.) Their “gift” (the ability to speak to the dead) was the lines that were spiraling out all over the page.

MS: Has this become part of your process when you’re writing (using visual practices) to define the text?

BQ: I am very inspired and influenced by visual arts. I have used this visual practice to develop two scripts and I’m sure I will again but for the last play I wrote NERINE, I did not define the text visually.

MS: As the play forms on the page lighting must become a great concern. How do you indicate the light or the spaces of light in your writing?

BQ: Yes. Extremely important and it varies piece to piece. As a production approaches, I rely on a designer to help realize the various scenes I have imagined. Sometimes with stage directions such as “the light of reality shines in this scene.” Sometimes guiding the designer with a specific color suggested for a scene. I sometimes specify it in text and sometimes I just know what I’d like to see and this comes out in collaboration with the production team.

MS: Are you thinking in tableaus or is there a more natural unfolding of light and space?

BQ: It all depends on the world of the play. PLUSH LUST has a series of silent tableaus which are very stylized and staccato. In NERINE, the light is all natural (cramped and dirty inside, and beautiful California bright outside.)

MS: Can it become a character in your play as well?

BQ: Yes. In SUMMERLAND the ghost is only light.

MS: There are always the inevitable changes from the page once something goes live. What processes of color light and space are you looking for when the piece becomes physical? What tensions or releases?

BQ: It is going to be a challenge when PLUSH LUST is staged. There is the silent tableau world of fabulous interiors and an upwardly mobile career. There is then the interior private world of Palladin and I think the light becomes more severe and the space more confined as his addiction spirals out of control. In the final scene after Palladin’s best friend Marion intervenes, I think there is a big release. The light will become more natural, warm and kind. Whereas earlier, the world will become harsher, crazier, unnaturally bright and smaller – mirroring addiction. At the end, there is hope and more room for the audience and the characters to breath.

MS: How are those elements heightened by color, light and/or space?

BQ: As the character spins out of control I think the color and light become “crystal methed” out, as does the space. Then with recovery there is warmth and natural light.

MS:In your work “Mapplethorpe: The Opening” you created a black and white space to open one’s imagination to the stories behind the images. How did the idea of the photographic space and light play into the writing of the piece?

BQ: When I first started writing the play, I went to the Strand to look at the S&M portraits that Mapplethorpe had photographed in the late 1970’s. I could not afford to buy the book at the time so I would return again and again to live with these black and white images. When I imagined them, they were always in a black and white world. Even the presence of Mapplethorpe himself seemed to be in black and white. That world was always the world of the studio, of defined, specific and bright light.

MS: Mapplethorpe’s images, though at times disturbing, have a classic all-over light and space. Did this imagery affect how you wrote the staging, lighting etc for the play?

BQ:I actually did not specify any lighting directions. Lance Horne’s brilliant sound design really helped define the difference in the worlds between the “portraits” (one reality) in black and white and the world of the gallery (another reality) in color. The lighting design then gave the gallery an overall natural wash with color. The world of the portraits was studio-like lit and confined white light.

MS: How did you animate that light and space to re-present that imagery and that camera process – that moment when the image was captured?

BQ: It was a square of light in which I would suddenly appear. There would be a music cue then a transition and we would be in this hot confined space and the photography session would be in process. The “portrait” monologues were all about a dialogue between artist and model. Private moments that were helped by the “gallery” colored lights coming out and just the hot “studio” light coming on. The transitions were rehearsed endlessly so it really happened so smoothly and quickly, like a camera click. Then zap, we would be back at the gallery and Mapplethorpe’s first opening in 1977.

MS: It seems to me that there are a lot of visual cues that you have to take into consideration as you write. This also is part of the process for painters – we have to lead the eye so to speak. I’m interested in how you build an interaction between the audience and the play itself. Is this something you write into the text or does this fall more to the director’s interpretation?

BQ: I think that I give a lot of suggestions for visuals in the text but in the end it really falls more to the director’s interpretation. Ultimately theater is a collaborative.

Brian Quirk will have a reading of his new play, Nerine, sponsored by the id Theater this July 19th.

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Agent of SHIELDs

Thursday, April 15, 2010

The marvelous David Shields appeared on the Colbert Report last night. David is great playing the straight man to Colbert’s out of control faux Fox Network pundit. Lots of fun!

The Colbert Report Mon – Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
David Shields
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor Fox News

Link to the show if the video doesn’t load…

All Art is Theft. Let’s face it – “appropriation” is a hip catchword for an old process. And as we all know the best art continues a dialog with the past while infusing it with the reality of the present. The strong artist finds a way to overcome the past in just this way. However, with so much “appropriation” everywhere we look in our artworld, it would be great to see more of it infused with the reality of our existence and this is where “reality” comes in – a tool is only as good as the artist who wields it. To be clearer about this issue I think we should define what “Theft” might mean, or what it means for an artist to “Steal.” I’ll leave that for another post.

“Embedded in Tchaikovsky’s “1812 Overture” is the French national anthem. Aaron Copeland based a significant part of “Appalachian Spring” on the Shaker melody “Simple Gifts.” Manet’s “Olympia” is an overt reworking of Titian’s “Venus of Urbino.” Genius borrows nobly. Art is theft. Good poets borrow; great poets steal. James Joyce said, “I am quite content to go down to posterity as a scissors-and-paste man.” Who owns the words? We all do, though not all of us know it yet. Art is not a patent office. It’s a conversation between and among artists. Reality can’t be copyrighted, especially in the digitized universe we now occupy.”

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reality_further in

Thursday, April 8, 2010

I’ve been following the Shepard Fairey case through the last few months. I find this case interesting because the issues that are being litigated touch on so many current cultural/theoretical problems facing artists in the Postmodern art world. The first is the technique of appropriation, which is always POMO’s first salvo against Modernism. However, this critique has been supplanted by a further cultural one connected to use – free use of culture as a found object. This has been going on in visual art for hundreds of years. Titian and Giorgione, Tintoretto and Michelangelo, Leonardo and Raphael, every Mannerist known to art history, the Pre-Raphaelites, well you get the idea. Strong artists steal from other strong artists. It boils down to a kind of ongoing dialog with the past, precedent and innovation – art about art.

There are a deeper issues today since our tools of appropriation allow us to replicate images exactly, and now, the idea is that we must try to determine when an image has been transformed just enough to make it into something not duplicated. But unlike the old masters struggling with precedent our cut and paste studio technologies aren’t designed to transform the past, they customize it. Replication exists before transformation and use is “originality.” Artists no longer feel that they have to make up their own images, they simply retread the found imagery that has been ingested through all of our electronic outlets. For artists this has created a conceptual endgame aimed at re-contextualizing this found culture – making “context” far more important than the replication – ground over subject. Originality is now determined by how one manages the ground rather than how one uses the subject. There is a further element to this endgame practice in that most all of our “culture” is now copyrighted. With everything institutionalized in this way we no longer have to overcome precedent – the “agon” described by Harold Bloom is not the anxiety that drives the next generation of artists. Today cultural production’s anxiety is about business and the proliferation of that business throughout the media – who owns it, who uses it and who gets paid for it. Originality, transformation are not the point – customization and accessibility are. As culture of all type, high, middle and low, has merged with business, style and theoretical change has all but disappeared. We are content with upgrades, reformulations and revivals of existing software – we have come to believe that this is the only kind of change that matters.

Appropriation

The Fairey case brings up many these same philosophical issues for artists – economic, political, cultural, theoretical, moral and ethical. How do we use these images – what does it mean to use these images – how do we change them – if we create our own images can they be used by others in this same way – where does money begin to play into the equation – does this change the aspect of the use of these images? Do images still carry power – how do they service power? The questions are endless.

Unfortunately for Shepard, he has become the poster-boy for many of these issues. His Obama poster was an iconic image during the last campaign, and it helped to define a new political reality for the United States. (This too may be part of his legal problems, there are many who did not want power to shift hands.) Fairey has always acknowledged the fact that he used copyrighted images, that isn’t necessarily a problem under the concept of fair use. In this instance his work’s use of the copyrighted image had changed the original enough for this new work to be considered “original” in the legal sense. I’m sure he would have had no problems in court – it was a fairly straight-forward fair use case. But that’s not how this whole affair has played out. We found, as the case has gone on, that evidence had been destroyed, and that he had purposely mislead the court about which photo was used to make this now-famous image. In the blink of eye so many other factors about how and why artists appropriate imagery have come into play. There is now a criminal case pending even as the civil case continues. None of this bodes well for Fairey or for the artists that will have to appear in courts to defend their use of copyrighted culture. Surprisingly for Postmodernists everywhere, it turns out that making Art may very well have moral, ethical and philosophical considerations after all.

Artists can’t simply slough off questions about what we do and how we do it any longer. To continue to hide behind the Postmodern monolith does not bode well for the future of “appropriation.” Which brings us to the questions we might begin to ask ourselves in our own studios. Should we create our own styles, our own images or do we continue to use what we know, what we understand? What should we question, what should we accept, what should we create? Do we customize or innovate? Again these questions are endless. They are the shifting realities we create in our studios, and that may begin to count for something in our quest for innovation and style change. Paraphrasing Dave Hickey from his speech at SVA in the fall – if you follow the rules your art disappears, it becomes just another thing on the wall. As we continue to look into reality, it is that thing on the wall that will become our focus, not the ground that supports it. We will turn away from context and look closely at how we might change the reality of the thing in itself.

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