Summer Camp

_{from my notebook}

I find myself to be absurd. For the summer, I’ve taken a studio in Brooklyn to try to make some paintings. Most days, I take the L train out, then walk a few blocks through a working-class business district to an old warehouse, and then climb down into a sweaty summer space to tackle a bit of abstraction. 

It didn’t occur to me that playing the artist again would bring up a lot of old memories, most of which are not pleasant. Surprise! It has also led me to reconsider a great deal of what I know about abstract painting. Let me explain. 

There is a certain grit and seriousness to this business district. It has all the cliches, box trucks, graffiti, MSG, diesel, hard men, and lost souls. And as I walk through this metal workers’ Mecca, I become deeply self-conscious. My skill set and my presence are unnecessary or unwelcome here. I am irrelevant, ridiculous, and frivolous. I’m there to make abstract paintings for an audience of one. Could anything or anyone be more out of space, out of time, or over the top? 

I find that these complicated feelings make me angry, unable, and unwilling to accept seriousness in any context, least of all work by anyone who makes “serious” abstract paintings. I have discovered that I am not a “serious” person, which has become apparent in this harsh working world which supposedly manufactures profound experiences. I am play acting in my Old Navy Khakis. But in all truth, I began this adventure by thinking that I was serious, or at least, that I should be serious. My first steps back into painting last month yielded nothing but inert, staid, academic, thick-as-asphalt visions, and I absolutely loathed what was going on, both on the canvas and inside my head. 

Look, most of the abstraction I see today is decidedly butch, tough-minded, and institutional, decorative, process-oriented, historically obedient, and tasteful, and quite frankly, none of this describes my mindset here at the end of the world. It seems like the art industry, its private equity fucknuts, and an online audience filled with self-important social media blowhards evangelizing about the second coming of AI have sucked all the joy and power out of art and painting. So there I was, looking down at this ridiculous turd of a painting when Coach Beard came to rescue me.
Hello.

Willkommen, bienvenue, welcome! 
Leave your troubles outside!
So, life is disappointing? Forget it!
We have no troubles here! Here life is beautiful…
[Cabaret]

I’ve rediscovered my campy self. Over the last couple of weeks, every abstract indulgence, garish display, and ridiculous Modernist metaphor have been showing up to dance across the surfaces of these absolutely ludicrous paintings. And I’ve been loving every minute of my lurid bad taste. My experiment goes on until the end of August. I’ll shut off the studio light show, the hula hoop will come off, the bejeweled pants will be dry cleaned, and I’ll leave behind the soy sauce purveyors, the metal workers, the auto body shoppers, and the struggling artists trapped like lotus eaters in this altogether “serious” world. I know now that I will have won over my audience of one! I truly am an unserious person.