Blogging in tongues

I’m still wondering what’s really relevant about ancient art, aside from its esthetic economy, which parallels a contemporary sense of chic spareness. I think there’s a directness in ancient art that we today read as meaning. No wobbling and ruffles. They’re SYMBOLS, we say. Symbols make us feel profound. I suppose symbols are in fact profound. But I’m not sure those symbols are apt for our times. Unless those symbols are something we need now. That’s what I wonder.

The Ancients didn’t think they were making art. Artness is a value that was imposed much later. I don’t really know what they thought, but from what I gather, visual representation was a tool for them. It showed something. It served as something. I think artists today hope their work will do the same, but it can’t really in the same way, because we have a category called art. So we can’t really go back to art as use. Although art can speak like symbols.

Directions

(Still from a Ryan Trecartin video)

The Occupy Wall Street protesters are teaching me a lot about horizontal. There have been accusations, critics, worries that the movement has no leaders, no demands. But what I’m seeing is that it is precisely this widening of the field that is allowing for the movement to embrace other groups and complaints and to grow. This horizontal can also be called non-hierarchical. I’ve heard Ryan Trecartin’s videos being described as non-hierarchical. I suppose they could also be called horizontal.

But frankly I’m more attracted to vertical for it’s concentrated energy and strength. In terms of social movements, there is of course the word “uprising.” That surge is vertical. In terms of art, I see columns, standing figures, even seated figures, back straight.

The problem with vertical is that it is narrowing. It’s a funnel, and in terms of art, I personally need to let it spill out so as not to be constrained. But really, I guess you need both directions. The base of the horizontal, the thrust of the vertical.

Going beyond

What I’m trying to figure out is why mankind’s first images have such a contemporary feel. Is that work relevant to – even significant to - our times other than formally, esthetically?

Formally, esthetically speaking, the work lives on today because it lives: high-contrast patterns are energetic and bold lines are vectors. Furthermore, when images are schematic, they go beyond a specific time. Why is there no respect for the schematic? Is it because it’s not observed, because it’s not what we see with our eyes? Some schematic images can look like generalizations, but others are metaphors, they point to something bigger.

Schema: A pattern imposed on complex reality or experience to assist in explaining it, mediate perception, or guide response.

But why is it relevant to our times? I’m not really sure.

This art is pre-self. There is no turning inward, no me-reflection, no depiction of subtle emotion (brains then just didn’t do that yet). The images these cultures made served as consciousness. They were used as consciousness. Art today can expand our consciousness. So the connection must have to do with consciousness. With letting go of the self. With making a leap outside of ourselves and into understanding.

Hallucinating

(Georges Braque, Lying Nude (The Bather IX), 1932)

I’ve been thinking about hallucinations. Generally we associate the word with acid and mushrooms. That doesn’t interest me so much mainly because I’ve never tripped and I never want to. I don’t need it, I’m scared enough as it is. I suppose it has be powerful. New York Times art critic Ken Johnson just published a whole book on the influence tripping has had on modern art.

Georges Braque also used the word “hallucination” to describe the process of artmaking. Miro did too. In a statement in Minotaure, December 1933, the latter said:

It is difficult for me to talk about my painting, since it is always born in a state of hallucination, brought on by some jolt or other – whether objective or subjective – which I am not the least responsible for.

From what I gather, these artists were both using the word to describe what we might now call a process of “making the unconscious conscious.” I doubt many would use the word “hallucination” anymore in this way in our times, because we’ve become so familiar with psychoanalysis, dream interpretation and representation, etc. It doesn’t really qualify as halluncination, in my mind, because it’s familiar (now). We can explain it, whether it’s accurate or not. I think a hallucination must be something that feels outside the self.

Direction

(Thomas Hirschhorn, Tool Family, 2007)

I don’t see my drawings before I make them. I don’t have a vision or a continuous voice that dictates what’s next. I just do and work with what comes out. If I have a preliminary idea, it never works. So what is it that moves the work? Because they are moving as a body, the drawings keep coming out, and they change. I must therefore have some kind of inner direction. I just don’t know what that direction is.

I suppose I have a position: that art is best when it’s personal. It doesn’t have to be about you – and please, spare me - but I like it when it’s your verve, stripped of pretension. For example, I like Thomas Hirschhorn, despite what I used to think. His work isn’t about him, but it is deeply personal. And it is deeply visual. Yes, I also think art at its best is visual, that it’s its own language, not dependent on explanation.

One definition of consciousness is that it is generated by language. Language describes and then we have what it describes as part of our awareness, as part of how we conceive of the world. There was a time in history when language wasn't as developed, when a mind couldn’t reflect on itself, couldn’t describe itself, guide itself. This mind, a pre-conscious, two-part mind called the bicameral mind (Julian Jaynes), hallucinated voices and figures as guides. Sculptures and effigies were made not as a reflection of these voices but in order to aid these voices.

This is all related, I just don’t know how.

La Pointe Courte

Agnes Varda’s first film “La Pointe Courte” from 1955 combines staged narrative with reportage. As such, she has been named the grandmother of the French New Wave. The film itself follows the existential discussions of a couple as they stroll through a poor fishing community – the husband’s native village - in the south of France. Or maybe we’re following the town and their residents, which include this couple. Both elements have equal weight. The film can be somewhat tedious – especially the staged narrative – but it sticks with you nonetheless. I can’t stop thinking about it.

Varda was a photographer before she turned to film, so many shots look like well-composed stills with movement. It’s precisely this movement - not precious – that makes what you’re watching so alive. And cats. So many cats doing their thing, making life bearable. See the one in the background here?

Happy art labor day

(Peter Bruegel, The Harvesters, 1565)

I’m translating the writings of a well-known international artist (TBA). This artist has nothing to do with Peter Bruegel.

What I’m noticing about his language is his assurance. I want X, I will do XX, it will be XXX. It is, to say the least, confident and assertive. I don’t see how any of his readers could suspect doubt. And if there is any, he’s assertive about it.

This is in fact the artist’s strategy; partly how he communicates his intention and partly how he convinces hesitant dealers. The actual and painful doubt of the creative process is kept to himself because it’s not part of the piece as he sees it. Actual doubt is personal; this art is about ideals.

When one of his pieces is ready for viewing, it has to stand on its own, and separate from the viewer. The viewer looks at something that is outside herself. It may become part of her, or resonate with her, but at first, it’s always outside. Sometimes the artist helps the viewer into the piece. I suppose writing can help do that.

Of course, this artist - and artists in general - can’t and don't have full control of what the viewer sees and what all kinds of viewers see. The piece, once outside the artist and once outside the viewer, has a life of its own.

Commercial Perks

I completed one of my first commercial job last week through Artstep: a 35 foot restaurant mural made to look like old advertising on the side of a building. I was part of a two-person team who rendered the design and execution.

A few things I noticed. First, a large swath of people complimented me on what I was doing, and that’s recognition, whether it’s the kind I had in mind or not. One construction worker on the site asked me if he understood what he was looking at. He did. Seeing it on top of “getting it” seemed to be a perk to his day. To mine too.

Of course, there’s the puritanical artist's panic that doing commercial work is unpure, and that real artists should be focusing on more profound concerns in the studio. Do I want my name associated with this? Does it mean a gallery won’t take me seriously? Will this work effect my “real work”? Who the F cares. I like what we made and I actually have enough money this week to buy some sneakers.

And in any case, back in the studio last night, I noticed a playfulness, a willingness to expand my visual vocabulary. Maybe the mural made me – briefly – less sanctimonious.

Courtiers R Us

(Francisco Goya, Portrait of the Marqués de Sofraga, ca. 1795)

If I want to use the word “metaphor” in a sentence, can I say “The courtier is a metaphor for our times,” or does a metaphor have to be a thing? Perhaps it would have to be the “court of France” is a metaphor for our times. Or maybe I have to use the word “figure” instead: “the courtier is a figure for our times.” In any case, it is.

Among the words associated with “courtier,” is “favorite;” people close to a ruler who are ambitious and climb the social and political ladder because of his or her connection to power.

“Courts” are worlds of hierarchy, intrigue, rules and backstabbing. Courtiers are sycophants with little regard for others. They can also be frustrated servants or middlemen. In historical painting, donned in fashionable clothing, they look as if they were caught in their times. As such and posing stiffly, they are often endearing, ever human.

Can’t we recognize ourselves playing the roles we find ourselves playing?

Creative facial hair

(Master of St. Giles, active 1490-1510. French)

This is the head of Saint Giles, who took the arrow aimed at a hind. What peaks my interest is the asymmetry of his beard: it’s attached to his lip and mustache on the left of the face, but not on the right.

The rest of the painting presents realistic perspectives and details. I’d have to think the unusual facial hair is true to some fact the artist learned. But maybe not. Maybe it’s a visual reflection of the artist’s own experience of looking – a “mistake” he let slip, but that gives the work a vitality that the rest of the image doesn’t quite possess, being as it is, stiff with reality.

The stripes of the hunter's shirt lend some pizazz too, no?

The mind's eye

(Mycenaen woman, 1300 BC)

I’m very much enjoying Julian Jaynes’ The Origin of Consciouness in the Breadkdown of the Bicameral Mind. It’s not at all impenetrable, despite its title and austere cover. In its pages, the author engrossingly traces the development of consciousness, defining it along the way. It is a total trip.

How about this:

… the early Greek art of the Mycenae and its period shows man as an assembly of strangely articulated limbs, the joints underdrawn, and the torso almost separated from the hips. It is graphically what we find again and again in Homer, who speaks of hands, lower arms, upper arms, feet, calves and thighs as being fleet, sinewy, in speedy motion, etc., with no mention of the body as a whole.

The idea here being that words and pictures reflect what is in a mind, a mentality. When there’s no word for body, it means we don’t have it as an image, we don’t have the mindspace for such a concept or thing.

Even though I have a whole body in my mind, for almost a year now I’ve been drawing unattached heads and detached limbs. I think it’s experiential in that I feel my own body only in parts, sometimes physically unable to feel others.

Unfreedom opens in Ulm

I'm happy to announce that Unfreedom opened today in Ulm.

Here's our press release (which I wrote).


Unfreedom

Molly Stevens, Carin Riley, Jean Hannon Douglas

July 21 - September 24

Smudajescheck Galerie, Rabegasse 16, 89073, Ulm, Germany

www.smudajescheck.com


Entrenched is the habit of looking at art through dualistic categories: abstract or figurative, pencil or paint, light or dark. These can certainly be helpful as conceptual tools for approaching visual language. But they also can be arbitrary, simplistic and at times even tyrannical. As they pile up, a work’s immediate, nameless punch is crushed. The art is unfree. Free your mind and the art will follow.

Now consider these words uttered in a 1974 lecture by artist Philip Guston:

When you begin painting you’re too free. That’s why it’s always so painful to start a new picture, or to start the process again, because you have to go through the whole thing again and again. To get rid of the freedom, you might say. I think what is happening is that you’re getting to a state of unfreedom. […] And paradoxically, when you can only do this and not that […] you’re more free in some mysterious, metaphysical way.

Unfree your mind and the art will follow.

Unfreedom is an exhibit about this contradiction inherent in art-viewing and art-making. And also about the vibrancy of contradiction itself.

Carin Riley’s dry pastel and paint drawings communicate like a visual koan, a paradox admitting no logical solution, but demanding intuitive understanding. In the narrative here involving a bird, a dress and a tree, her lines are lithe but solid, fluid but unwavering. The work obeys the dictates of form and movement, which are in a delicate balance.

In Jean Hannon Douglas’s plants, the leaves are uncertain, erratic, quirky, and as such, represent the impermanent individuality of the repeated subject. At the same time, what you’re looking at is elemental brush and ink, its strokes, bleeds and varying densities of black. We are in between representation and material properties, illusion and marks on a page.

Molly Stevens’s heads in oil stick are meaty, simplified forms rendered with vigor. Although bound to the Ancients and even pre-history, they are decisively contemporary. Their saturated color and sturdy linework are bold yet unexpected, simultaneously familiar and out of whack.

These three Americans have come together not in the name of freedom but to defend unfreedom, a deferment to conflict.

Home Sweet Home

(James Castle, Untitled (blue house) 20th c.)

I’m just back home after 10 days of subletting. My apartment feels foreign. A friend suggested I pee in the corner to reclaim my territory.

I’ve spent the past hour positing things around the house in a faux-haphazard way in an effort to re-create my home. It’s fiction, really. Maybe home is a place we make up.

Businesses do it all the time: they create an environment to remind you of somewhere that has made you feel comfortable. Or maybe it’s an environment you fantasize about. Really, it’s all Epcott center mini-worlds.

And I’m thinking art does the same. It’s a place we make or see that feels right, but it’s all made up. Narratives and portraits, but also abstract images. Whatever our intention, it’s an order, a metaphor, a gesture we approve of, whether bleak or dreamy. Either way, it’s entirely personal, and comes off, from an objective standpoint, as arbitrary.

Spirit

(Matt Jones, 2011)

Ok, fine. Maybe I’ll start blogging again.

I’ve joined the IDP Art Group, which meets every other week. We meditate a bit then talk about art (that I know about) in a way that makes sense to me.

I’m noticing two divides, neither unconquerable, neither surprising, but then yes, surprising, because they are so obvious. One is age, the other is gender. Today just a bit about the former.

I’m somewhere in the middle in terms of age (I’m 39), but I’m clearly not among the youngest. (One girl said to me (in a discussion about Cory Archangel), “For MY generation, Mario Brothers was part of how we grew up. She apparently thinks of me as her mom). The youngest seem to want art to push the envelope and break away from art history. Sure, I can see the appeal, although I don’t think newness is really that new, or that interesting as a focus. What I want to feel is a spirit in what I see. It’s hard to describe what I mean by that word, often an eye-roller. One member (on the older side of our spectrum) explained feeling wowed by the release of a Christopher Wool spray painted arch. I get it. Release is a good word to qualify spirit. In my mind, medium, technology, even subject, are vehicles.

One dude, younger, but not the youngest, has made drawings of his iPhone weather page. He finds pleasure in waking up to sixty-nine (degrees). Sure. I do like this drawing, but I find more long-lasting pleasure in the marker marks, the color, the touch, which are the difference between a drawing and the impersonality of the weather screen. So in this case, the spirit, is the person’s twist.