Conceit

I find myself constantly amazed, too often in a negative way. Self-absorbed people lost in the reflective screen of their mobiles, busy texting or staring mute at the screen and all to often in the most inconvenient of places, like walking up the stairs of the subway like a zombie, the sidewalk, in the middle of the street ….

Posters that advertise shows like “Glee”, what the hell is that? I gave up my TV years ago, I have enough of my own reality to contend with, thank you very much.

The economy is in the tank after 30+ years of trickle down economics, the trickle it turns out to be is the errant drop of piss that lands on you after the rich are finished with the job and putting it back in their pants. The government is run by two corrupt parties that are opposite sides of the same coin, that coin happens to be in the pocket of the wealthy and your concerns about jobs, climate change, the environment, your mortgage or the future of your children means nothing.

Change you can believe in happens to be the few coins rattling in the paper cup you shake at passerby’s on Fifth Avenue carrying their shopping bags, shades of Barbara Kruger’s “I shop therefore I am.”

We live in an increasing national security state which the Stasi would admire because here in America people not only don’t care that the state data mines phone calls, emails, etc but they put their status on Facebook with glee, maybe that is what glee is?

The internet supposedly helped spawn the Arab Spring but here in the U.S. our over abundance of technology keeps us in a state of constant arousal, hyped and overfed with images, marketing and obedience. Is there an app for that?

What happened to any real dissent about the issues that face us? Even those have been co-opted, you can wear your dissent carrying your WNYC bag while you shop at Whole Foods buying local produce or fair trade goods because it is only through the expense of capital that your voice will be heard, NOT.

So where does this leave art? In too many cases narcissism reigns supreme. It’s about me, me posing in a girlscout uniform while two buildings burn in the background or in the remaking or more branding of an older performance artist redoing her work.

That’s the industry though, the monster that absorbs everything indiscriminately. It is somehow appropriate that the blob oozed through the projection booth of the movie theatre and swallowed those less attentive. Me, I prefer to imagine myself a little latter as Steve McQueen trying to outrun the Nazi’s on my motorcycle.

I remember when I first moved to New York in the late 80’s catching James Rosenquist in an interview describing art as “an abstract mental garden for people to live, think, work and exist in.” Yeah, that is what art does for me and I say art with a small a.

I had a studio visit with an artist about ten years older than I a few years after that when I was struggling with a series of new works that questioned my taste and ideas of beauty. He casually said “it looks like Art with a capital A” and then gave me a knowing glance. That glance withered me but in a good way. Art with a capital A is the academy, is the approval given to one by the culture like the kitchen ratings now becoming ubiquitous on restaurants in New York City. Over thought, over worked, over consumed and about as nutritional as a McDonald’s hamburger, McCulture. The late stages of consumerist capitalism where all that matters is market, market, market.

But that is only one side of the culture. See I have this garden in my studio, I don’t intend to keep it a secret. In it I work out all kinds of ideas, mostly my concern is about the nature of images.

I’ve been reading Joseph Leo Koerner’s “The Reformation of the Image” a book dealing with images within the nascent Lutheran Church. Highly recommended. These lines popped up- pg 148 “How exactly are words less deceptive and more communicative than images? Pg 150 “Do words teach more effectively than images simply because their content can be rephrased in other words?” They are rhetorically asked in line of the argument Koerner is making but they struck me and I took note of them.

Because when I read the second line I realized for myself at least that is one of the ways I approach my ideas about images. Take Manet’s “Le déjeuner sur l'herbe” isn’t this a rephrasing of Titian? Or Picasso’s late copies of Velázquez’s “las maninas”?

It is out of some personal torment of love that drives me, my personal need to deal with as Paul Valery stated-

“A pleasure which sometimes goes so deep as to make us suppose we have a direct understanding of the object that causes it; a pleasure which arouses the intelligence, defies it, and makes it love its defeat; still more, a pleasure that can stimulate the strange need to produce or reproduce the thing, event, object, or state to which it seems attached, and which thus becomes a source of activity without any definite end, capable of imposing a discipline, a zeal, a torment on a whole lifetime, and of filling it, sometimes to overflowing -- such a pleasure presents a singularly specious enigma, which could scarcely escape the attention or the clutches of the metaphysical hydra.”

So enough death art for me, no need for clownish sailors on the high seas or celebrity portraits that only reaffirm the worst of our narcissistic tendencies. I’ll look elsewhere thank you, reality outside of McCulture has more to offer.

Passing Time

Been two months since I wrote, not that the thoughts stopped but ones day to day life takes its toll. I had thought about the development of modernism via the French, about the era after 1830 when French art had its own 'pluralism' not unlike our own. How the Academy became more important in the creation of 'culture', how art became more like what we know it to be as culture commodity.

I think time and I don't mean this in a literal sense is like a spiral and not circular. I find this in my own studio practice now going into its third decade, themes long forgotten mysteriously find their way back into works, themes that aren't formal but about what it means to make art.

Formal, I've been thinking about the Germans of late, post Beuys and beyond Capitalist Realism. Their art was about things beyond formal motifs to paint, it was a dialogue with culture and what it meant, it had an ethical character and was addressing artistic identity within culture. From Richter and his addressing what it means to make a picture, I find his arguments with Buchloh to be very enlightening and his personal writing also; Polke with his sense of humor, tongue in cheek but yet somewhat serious mystical leanings; and finally Kippenberger who savaged German bourgeoisie cultural conservatism. American artists at times seem to take the formal elements and use them for their own needs but miss the heart of the matter, I am thinking specifically in this case of Schnabel and Salle.

Of late the recent talk of Relational Aesthetics has also occupied some reading time. John Perreault's essay on Rirkrit Tiravanija leading to Nicolas Bourriaud's From Relational Aesthetics and finally to Clair Bishop's "Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics". I personally find Relational Aesthetics to be mostly soft and too much in bed with the culture machine. In general its feel good optimism is lacking in more serious ethical necessity, Bishop's essay really hits the nail. I played with Relational Aesthetics some years ago, lets just say I was a sideline bit player (and hence the pseudonym I take). The most interesting thing about Relational Aesthetics is the critique of it, the critique of in my opinion; its total careerism, its ass kissing 'I like you, would you like me too', its need to take place in the gallery and museum because it wants to be a player in the game. Relational Aesthetics has few enemies in the halls of culture.

Yet this is the point to me, I don't want to be or care to be an enemy of culture. I am deeply concerned about it or I wouldn't make art. But I find the so called gate keepers of our "hallowed institutions" to be hypocritical self serving buffoons who are no different than the gate keepers of old, I guess it goes with the territory.

The avant-garde tropes of Relational Aesthetics or the Institutional Critique game are nothing more than poses and posturing, they are today’s academic art and were from the very start. Art Schools mill out ambitious social climbers whose only stake is to be part of the game with nary a care to the hypocrisy and indifference to culture, life, art, what have you.

And in case you, the one or two readers who might stumble on this who do not know my real identity and think I might make conservative figurative art and am just moaning, I make large ugly abstract paintings. I played my part in the Institutional Critique game, showed in Europe a fair amount, have some work in a few major museums and then came to the conclusion that it was a shallow lifeless game.

No matter what one does the machine will eat it. If it all becomes fodder for it, then what better way to hide and be free than to work in a manner that no one would care about and at the time of the nascent Relational/Institutional game I decided just that, to make paintings, ugly abstracts that made me question my taste, my aesthetics, my values, my purpose and my life.

Because for me, art is life and questions what life means in a profound way.

Two

I don’t really want to write a treatise and feel that is where I am heading but in some respect some of the information although easily available if you want to crack open a few books is there, the information that has led to some of these thoughts.

When I went to art school back in the 80’s as an older student there was little discussion about the content in paintings in our art history classes, suffice to say there was the usual mention of the subject matter but no real delving into the meat and potatoes as it were. Take David for example, I think we are all familiar with a variety of his paintings like The Oath of the Horatii 1785, Socrates at the Moment of Grasping the Hemlock 1787, Lictors Returning to Brutus the Bodies of His Sons 1789, Marat at his Last Bath 1793 and The Intervention of the Sabine Women 1799. The painting of Marat is his most overt propagandistic painting of this grouping but when you put the other paintings above within the historical context of their time other meanings become evident.

The Oath as a call to Nationalist fervor, Socrates commissioned by a French jurist whose life ended at the guillotine, Lictors about the sacrifice that must be made to maintain the nascent Roman republic and the Sabine Women interceding in a battle to prevent further bloodshed between two royal houses; each of the paintings corresponding to current events and address those issues metaphorically.

Historical events in French history play a large part in the development of the Academy and also in our conception of the role and placement of art. We all know of Napoleon as a historical figure but very little about his rise to power, the reasons for the wars that led him to conquer most of Western Europe and his subsequent downfall at Waterloo. After his successful coup d`état and subsequent crowning as Emperor there is a lot of hagiography, see David Napoleon at the Saint-Bernard Pass 1800, Ingres Napoleon on the Imperial Throne 1806, Gros Napoleon in the Plague House at Jaffa 1804 and finally although it may not be a painting of Napoleon it plays into the mythos of the Napoleonic thema, Géricault The Charging Light Cavalryman 1812.

During this time Neo-Classicism as practiced by David and his heirs is also dominant but like all movements it loses momentum, meaning and purpose over time. Often art or philosophical movements are treated as if they are completely independent of their antecedents, take Romanticism for instance, I was taught that it was opposed to Classicism but it actually is an outgrowth out of it, an evolutionary response to deadened practice. What are the images of Napoleon if not romanticized? Napoleon did not ride over the Saint-Bernard Pass on a rearing charger but on the back of a donkey.

With the Bourbon Restoration of 1815 the tricolour flag is replaced by the royal white flag and subject matter is now Royalist in flavor and as Thomas Crow states “the ease with which such opportunistic transformations could be effected did as much as anything to drain the moral authority from the Davidian figural canon”*, with former students of David now using the Neo-Classical style to validate the Bourbon’s such as François Gérard’s Entry of Henri IV into Paris 1817. David incidentally went into a self-imposed exile in Brussels where he died in 1825. There are a few renegades, notably Géricault with The Raft of the Medusa 1819 and its indictment of corruption and Delacroix who in the 1820’s paints The Massacre at Chios.

*Nineteenth Century Art- A Critical History, Thames and Hudson, page 67 Classicism in Crisis; Gros to Delacroix, Thomas Crow

Part One- the past

I’ve been itching to write but it has taken time to do the research to back the hypothesis or thoughts about various items regarding academization and how an art work actually works. Not that I had any doubts about my thoughts but it led to a very good jag of good reads and some not so good but worth it nonetheless.

First I must recommend the following books-

Clement Greenberg- Between the Lines by Thierry de Duve published 2010

Realism by Linda Nochlin published 1971

What led to this was a series of conversations about art practice and imagery with a group of artist friends.

It is my opinion, that we are in a severe period of academization within the commercial art world. Not that this is news, this is a cyclic occurrence and it is a result of post modernism, post-modernism though as an actual historical condition rather than a conceptual conceit although the end result is that we are belabored with far too many works that are based on the conceptual conceit or more succinctly thinking within the box. That boxed thinking art is or was based on rather grotesque misreadings of Baudrillard and Lyotard and only ended up showing the strong hand of the Modernist Master Narrative.

I am talking specifically of Western culture, there are many examples of alternative narratives in Eastern cultures.

I take as my personal starting point the end of the master narrative as posited by Lyotard. I think that it is the human condition to create narratives, it is built into our DNA as it were to try and construct meaning and this construction of meaning is an outgrowth of language.

For centuries of human existence the master narrative was mediated by religion until the Reformation. The Reformation questioned the hegemony of the Catholic Church and sets the seeds for the Age of Enlightenment. No longer is the Pope the infallible voice of God but man can have a direct experience of the Christian God unmediated by the Priest, the Pope and the Church. This “idea” is a powerful one and that along with the fortunate invention of the printing press allows the dissemination of ideas and theological questioning on a social scale heretofore unheard of. The Reformation also is the first questioning of religious imageries purpose and function with many Catholic Churches stripped of their paintings and sculptures, as images of God or Christ are considered sacrilegious. In the Dutch Republic the first signs of what Arts role and purpose is witnessed with the development of landscape, still life, genre and portraiture motifs along with the first marketing of art along with the attendant poor starving artists as there no longer exists the stable patronage of the Church or Royalty. (see late Hals, Rembrandt, Vermeer)

Comes the Age of Enlightenment and within this period there was a desire to contain ideas and posit them within the Protestant religious views of the time. The universe in Newton’s time was seen as God’s creation and through understanding the mechanics of the universe we would become closer to fulfilling God’s master plan, God as the watchmaker. This Enlightenment thinking led to the concepts of freedom, democracy and reason hence the final questioning of God’s existence and if God doesn’t exist then the divine right of Kings also falls to the wayside. Up until the time of Louis XVI artists such as David painted images of the King or Classical Themes that justified and reinforced the political and social situation at hand.

The French Revolution marks the end of the Classical Enlightenment Period and the beginning of class struggle as we know it, this historical moment and the ones that followed set the stage for what we now call Modernism. The revolution and the seizure of Catholic properties along with the Terror doesn’t last long before the other Royal Houses in Europe feeling the Imperial necessity to stop this social experiment lest it get out of hand, attempt an intervention to reinstate the monarch, King Louis. With the Declaration of Pillnitz, the following War of the First Coalition, the Battle of Valmy, the execution of Louis and the following military campaigns which lasted for ten years one man rises to power, Napoleon. When Napoleon takes control by a coup d`état in 1799 and formally becomes Emperor in 1804 art practice once again comes back to the aggrandizement of the new king. The Restoration of the House of Bourbon after the Hundred Days and final defeat at Waterloo of Napoleon leads to the striking of the French Tricolor and the arts now change once again.

This is the beginning of salon era as we know it and the establishment of the academy.

Research

In my research on Courbet I found the need to acquire a book on 19th Century art as I had no good overview on my shelves. I picked up “Painting and Sculpture in Europe 1780-1880” by Fritz Novotny. Not a bad overview but one lacking in that it focuses primarily on the artists whose names are remembered and they are remembered because they influenced other artists although a large majority of them died with little relative recognition within their lifetimes and mostly penniless at that.

However artists who were quite famous in that century but have fallen out of favor are missing, there are only two entries that address Meissonier and no plates illustrating his work. On Meissonier “..show where unlimited naturalism in history-paintings executed by specialists can lead- to the costume piece and a ghostly, entirely unreal form of reportage.” Further “..it is astonishing how devoid of all art art can be.”

To fully understand the development of Modernism it is important to see what, in it’s early incarnations it was up against and what was the function and status of art at that time. As an artist I can’t help but say that there is a timeless aspect to art, by that I mean I can look at a Carravagio or an unknown Sienese Master and suddenly be stricken with what is labeled as Stendhal Syndrome and not know a damn thing about the usually Christian narrative being illustrated. That said though, art and artists are not living in vacuums, each generation has the weight of the far past, recent past and societal change, the present that is hazy and a future unknown and it is when they wrestle with these various things simultaneously that great things happen.

The Creative Act by Marcel Duchamp

Let us consider two important factors, the two poles of the creation of art: the artist on the one hand, and on the other the spectator who later becomes the posterity.

To all appearances, the artist acts like a mediumistic being who, from the labyrinth beyond time and space, seeks his way out to a clearing. If we give the attributes of a medium to the artist, we must then deny him the state of consciousness on the esthetic plane about what he is doing or why he is doing it. All his decisions in the artistic execution of the work rest with pure intuition and cannot be translated into a self-analysis, spoken or written, or even thought out.

T.S. Eliot, in his essay on "Tradition and Individual Talent", writes: "The more perfect the artist, the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates; the more perfectly will the mind digest and transmute the passions which are its material."

Millions of artists create; only a few thousands are discussed or accepted by the spectator and many less again are consecrated by posterity.

In the last analysis, the artist may shout from all the rooftops that he is a genius: he will have to wait for the verdict of the spectator in order that his declarations take a social value and that, finally, posterity includes him in the primers of Artist History.

I know that this statement will not meet with the approval of many artists who refuse this mediumistic role and insist on the validity of their awareness in the creative act – yet, art history has consistently decided upon the virtues of a work of art through considerations completely divorced from the rationalized explanations of the artist.

If the artist, as a human being, full of the best intentions toward himself and the whole world, plays no role at all in the judgment of his own work, how can one describe the phenomenon which prompts the spectator to react critically to the work of art? In other words, how does this reaction come about?

This phenomenon is comparable to a transference from the artist to the spectator in the form of an esthetic osmosis taking place through the inert matter, such as pigment, piano or marble.

But before we go further, I want to clarify our understanding of the word 'art' - to be sure, without any attempt at a definition.

What I have in mind is that art may be bad, good or indifferent, but, whatever adjective is used, we must call it art, and bad art is still art in the same way that a bad emotion is still an emotion.

Therefore, when I refer to 'art coefficient', it will be understood that I refer not only to great art, but I am trying to describe the subjective mechanism which produces art in the raw state – à l'état brut – bad, good or indifferent.

In the creative act, the artist goes from intention to realization through a chain of totally subjective reactions. His struggle toward the realization is a series of efforts, pains, satisfaction, refusals, decisions, which also cannot and must not be fully self-conscious, at least on the esthetic plane.

The result of this struggle is a difference between the intention and its realization, a difference which the artist is not aware of.

Consequently, in the chain of reactions accompanying the creative act, a link is missing. This gap, representing the inability of the artist to express fully his intention, this difference between what he intended to realize and did realize, is the personal 'art coefficient' contained in the work.

In other words, the personal 'art coefficient' is like an arithmetical relation between the unexpressed but intended and the unintentionally expressed.

To avoid a misunderstanding, we must remember that this 'art coefficient' is a personal expression of art à l'état brut, that is, still in a raw state, which must be 'refined' as pure sugar from molasses by the spectator; the digit of this coefficient has no bearing whatsoever on his verdict. The creative act takes another aspect when the spectator experiences the phenomenon of transmutation: through the change from inert matter into a work of art, an actual transubtantiation has taken place, and the role of the spectator is to determine the weight of the work on the esthetic scale.

All in all, the creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualification and thus adds his contribution to the creative act. This becomes even more obvious when posterity gives a final verdict and sometimes rehabilitates forgotten artists.

Published in: Robert Lebel: Marcel Duchamp.

New York: Paragraphic Books, 1959, pp. 77/78.

Session on the Creative Act

Convention of the American Federation of Arts

Houston, Texas, April 1957

Participants:

Professor Seitz, Princeton University

Professor Arnheim, Sarah Lawrence College

Gregory Bateson, anthropologist

Marcel Duchamp, mere artist

current readings and obsession

I’ve become obsessed lately with the development of art, more the evolution of art in 19th century France within and without the Salon, the era that gave us the idea of the avant-garde with artists and personalities such as Courbet, Manet and leading to the Impressionists and finally the master of Aix-en-Provence, Cezanne.

The obsession is born out of a feeling or thought that the current situation we live in now in the still nascent 21st century is somewhat similar, only now the official Salon is the Museum and gallery system. More on that later.

A friend loaned me his copy of Michael Fried’s “Courbet’s Realism” which led me quickly although I am still wading through Courbet to his book “Manet’s Modernism”, then T.J. Clarks “The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and his Followers” and finally to what I would consider more a summer beach read of Ross King’s “The Judgment of Paris: The Revolutionary Decade that Gave the World Impressionism”, the problem with the King book is that the color plates are cropped and only artists familiar with the works would recognize such, nothing worse or more taboo than to talk about a particular artwork and then show it in cropped form, bad enough it’s nothing more than a reproduction in a book, why add to the issue?

The interesting thing about art history is that things are left out and then brought back in, sometimes for better or worse. Vermeer was forgotten shortly after his death to be rehabilitated in the 19th Century by Gustav Friedrich Waagen and Théophile Thoré-Bürger. The interesting thing about the King book is that it talks about Jean-Louis-Ernest Meissonier, an artist I know from some of his paintings but know little about. According to King, Meissonier was the most successful artist of his time and now basically sidelined. Frankly, he deserves to be in my opinion. Meissonier is the archetypical artist of the academy and the Salon, a historical painter of sorts with a focus as all good academicians of the French school on Napoleonic themes.

Meissonier is not up for revitalization like Jean-Léon Gérôme has been of late by the traveling exhibition by Getty, the Musée d`Orsay , etc. I recently saw the catalogue for the show at the Strand and was tempted to purchase it out of some obscene need to fling it across my room. It, Meissonier and Gérôme’s art is the kind of art you like when you are 10 years old, all theatrics and exoticism. I will posit in another upcoming essay that Matthew Barney is the contemporary equivalent of Gérôme.

Why this current need to revitalize Gérôme? A search on Amazon shows the catalogue I am referring to along with another book titled “Reconsidering Gérôme”, in these two Product Descriptions we find in the later “…was an undisputed professional success during his lifetime” and the former “analyzes his bountiful expression of a visual grammar that takes illusionist obsession to the limits of the bizarre.” The catalogue for the show I would like to point out has Gérôme’s 1872 painting “Pollice Verso (Thumbs Down) on the cover.

Success is what matters now, theatricality and modern day gladiatorial battles to mask the impotence of the individual, give the masses entertainment, it is only fitting that in the revisitation of Gérôme that the catalogue display that particular painting. It is where we are as a culture but is that where we should go?