the naked and the sane

Sir Kenneth Clark wrote a lot about the nude in art – a couple of big books, and hosted a series about the nude through history on educational TV. Seems the body hasn’t changed since the beginning but its presentation varies widely, and since the denominator stays the same we gain a little insight into how different cultures thought about themselves and everything else. As an example, in modern times Hugh Hefner became famous and rich depicting the female nude in the form of retouched photos. Almost anyone can see these photographs reveal much more about Hef and his readership than about women, humanity at large, or the world around them.

The reason, by the way, for not wearing clothes is because clothing indicates period and rank, and art sometimes aims for something more universal. Beyond that the nude makes an excellent subject because we grew up in families, see each other and have mirrors – we all know the subject well. In some periods the nude demurs and looks away, and everyone expects this. Economic change occurs, society changes, and then one day a nude looks directly out of the picture and into the eyes of the viewer, causing quite a scandal. This assertion of personality on the part of the nude person eventually changes the way people see themselves, as does the character and dignity of the whole presentation. Art is the mental mirror of any culture and the unchanging nude human figure is its key.

Recent distortions in body image which the experts trace largely to advertising have caused both men and women to make fetishes of their own bodies, saving up their nickels to be surgically altered. It’s like an epidemic. Researchers have found skeletal people see themselves as fat, stout folks see themselves thinner, and lots of people obsess about some part or other -- it just seems unhealthy. And then there’s contemporary art.

Metaphoric and ironic are ways to avoid what’s actually there, and it isn’t always as clever as it is sort of sad. Consider the “Nude Show” at the Lexington Art League, a venerable and tax supported non-profit cultural asset to our community. As body images go, it’s all really kinda creepy. They did say in advance that they wouldn’t be interested in rational arms and legs sorts of images but that doesn’t keep the entire enterprise from having evolved into something deranged. This notion that thoughts are better than deeds, that process is more important than product, and that contemporary art is an honest expression of the culture which supports it could use a little distance, an objective assessment, a comparison with everyday reality. Remove the feeding tube of everybody’s money from these cultural charities with their presumption of knowing what's good for the rest of us, and art will begin to bend back toward a common sensibility, and will more truly represent who we are and how we see ourselves.

paleolithic me

Ever since that movie, “Cave of Dreams”, the painters from that Paleolithic era watch me while I work – a painter myself, you understand. They dress in leather and fur and are in person ripe in modern terms, but smell doesn’t come across – only their murmuring and shifting shapes, usually five or six, and just a few occasional comments. Sometimes one of them will nudge another and they all laugh at once – a deep rumbling. They also watch me while I cook. I explain that animals are raised and slaughtered to be cut up and repackaged in plastic skin and they’re vaguely interested. I tell them metal weeps from rock in a great fire and then it’s pounded into knifes, and pots, and sinks and stuff and they believe me but don’t care to know more. They won’t come around at all when I watch TV. They say it’s all about zombies and I become a zombie, too, when I watch it. I can’t argue.

What they want to know about is painting, and they comment to themselves when I change colors or add some new feature. I explain that the colors I use aren’t much different from what they used, ground from elements they had found themselves plus a few others more difficult to get to, and finished out better, which they concede. As a binder I use polymer plastic instead of fat from the cooking fire, but it does pretty much the same thing. They don’t care for the bridges and overpasses but they get excited when I paint animals. They laughed and pointed at the longhorn, so similar to the cattle they knew – they understood it was real. We are just alike – humans who see each other across thirty thousand years.

IS BAD ART RUINING AMERICA?

The Andy Warhol authentication board is disbanding. No longer will they rule on the legitimacy of each piece of Andy’s work so now we’re just on our own. Since Andy didn’t limit his editions or even keep track, and since he stayed away from actual production as much as possible, volatile screenprocess solvents are thought to be harmful to health, and since quality control wasn’t part of the system, it’s quite possible to create a Warhol with little more than a sign-making rig, and who could tell the difference? Nobody seemed to mind that the images were borrowed or that the product looked cheap and tawdry since that’s the beauty of it don’t you see?

Well what this all has to do with junk bonds and phony mortgages I couldn’t say, but it doesn’t seem to be completely different, now does it? Could the same mentality that accepted Andy as a great artist for reproducing soup can labels and cleaning product boxes really fool itself into believing that bogus financial instruments could go on forever – yeah, it’s possible. A market capable of paying out seventy one million dollars for an ugly green smear of a double offset print without the slightest notion of how many were made or how many still exist would be perfectly willing to piss away the future.

Better art may not fix our problems overnight, but images and practices which embody the self-regard, personal integrity, and the character to create the significant instead of just what sells couldn’t be a bad thing to hang around the house. When America starts to evolve and heal from its orgy of self cannibalism, a new art will emerge – the expression of a mature, objective, rational culture.

MLK Mao -- a story of cultural confusion

I came across an image with ceremony online a couple of days ago and I found myself wondering why the American people would erect a thirty foot statue of the demigod Mao emerging from a mountain wearing an impassive, expressionless Martin Luther King mask there on the National Mall. Then I found out it was made in China. The politics of it are over my head, and as a symbol of cultural and economic imperialism it’s too complicated. Simply as art it’s less than eloquent.

Couldn’t fault the Chinese artists, commissioned to represent a great man in a struggle far away, martyr to an issue that they, living in the most homogeneous society on Earth, probably couldn’t really even comprehend. Through Chinese eyes they made the best monument they could make, but I wonder about my fellow citizens here who don’t seem to notice or care that it looks more like an ‘imported’ bobble head toy, only real big, than an appropriate and thoughtful expression of honor and gratitude.

did painting die?

So I hear that painting is an obsolete form and nobody does it that way, any more. Art has branched out, explored new territory and now can be anything. Just call it art and digitalized or hot-glued, it’s art. Actually though, really, it’s sorta all the same. It’s pretty much gotten necessary to know if the artist is just a student or hugely famous before it’s possible to tell if it’s, whatever, any good or not.

Not so long ago, actually half a century, popular music was squeezed through the taste lowering filter of commercial radio and the product wasn’t the best. An ever aggressive market had manipulated soulless technology to demean the public taste for financial advantage. Well, it might have gone on forever but along came Bob Dylan, and everything changed. The public discovered it liked being taken seriously.

The form he chose to cut through the ‘wall of sound’ recordings of the high-powered studios wasn’t just old fashioned – it was ancient. The tradition of troubadours, from Homer down through the middle ages, had almost withered away when young Bob started perform using only his own instrument and voice. Somehow he was heard through all that well established media machinery using simple tools, being direct, commandeering a commercialized, trivialized medium to speak mind to mind.

So, all I’m saying is painting has been around a while, too. Painting in oils gave artists the ability to create a field of believability potent enough to transfer thought and emotion in a stable and enduring form, and that unique feature of visual art has more value now in an increasingly temporary reality. Painting didn’t die. Painting was sick and neglected but is starting to recover now. A serious painting stands as a beacon on a rock when the digital sea is blowing whitecaps and we find ourselves drowning in froth, just as any original art at all can be a life preserver.

has art been undervalued?

If the nutrition could be drained out of food and be replaced with some sort of vegetable/animal dreck from stainless steel holding tanks, would it be offered to the masses as food, and would they eat it? Yes, they would for a while, but they’d catch on. They’d see themselves turning to lard and start demanding green stuff, a calorie count on the menu, and fewer “additives” all around. It’s happening now.

If those same commercial wizards could siphon off the humanity, the ingenuity, the art in art, and replace it with brand-name shoddy sensationalism, reducing art in the process to a game token, a trading card, a sideshow entertainment, would they? Oh, they’d try -- lowering everyone’s gaze by demeaning their aspirations and their expectations of themselves, reducing their sole expressions of self to the right brand of beer. For them art becomes a souless commodity without a face or content, just a name, just an autograph to be traded up or down, an empty beachhead for phony conversation.

That's too bad because we could use something better. Does anyone else feel themselves in the tow of a sucking vortex of occupational dementia, reducing thoughts to emoticons, chewing through the attention span, turning everything grey making everything taste the same? Are we going to just keep turning up the volume? If we could see ourselves as our perceptual interfaces with world, we wouldn’t be fat – we’d be skinny, skinny and pale. Perceptually speaking, we’re hardly here at all – media-impaired zombies flickering as we walk. Does art cure it? Well, no, doesn’t cure, just provides the vitamins to fight back, the exercise to lift our heads, and it scrapes the scales from our eyes so we can see.

leverage

Archimedes claimed he could move the planet with the right leverage. He was just making a point, but isn’t that what we’re all looking for -- the biggest bang for the buck, the most reward for the least effort, the pivot point where pure thought becomes potent force. Well, that’s what art is. Not just art but the very making of art is an exercise in obtaining maximum mileage from materials, studio space, and studio time. Unless art is supported from the outside, a trust fund or a teaching position, maximum efficiency is prerequisite across the board, in lifestyle as well as actual art production. In fact, without occasional help and timely good luck, making art for a living can be a very difficult passage and people fall away.

The ones who make it through to self-sustaining studio status have found a use for every scrap of paper, every inch of pencil, and every hour of studio time, usually because it’s all borrowed or stolen from earning a living working for someone else. What they’re actually trying to do is more amazing, something very close to alchemy, that ancient mythic quest. In the popular imagination artists attempt to transform base material, traditionally canvas, paint, and wood, into an object worth the cost of beans and a roof to someone else. Since selling art in a commercial age conditioned to beer-sign expectations is obviously improbable from the beginning, most artists instead attempt to create an object worthy of the days, weeks, and years devoted to finding a voice, the sacrifice of income 'being creative' sells for in industry these days, and so on. Artists have done this in the past.

The real mythic quest is to use the common materials available to all mankind to create an object which represents the artist and their time with some dignity, in the course of human events. Gold is only a shiny metal.