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 through their art 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 the 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.

Cy Twombly is dead

Cy Twombly is dead. I couldn’t tell his work from that of the more seriously challenged clients of an adult daycare facility, and neither could any art expert on the planet. Drawings in caves rival the very best graphic people we’ve got – Picasso would have to stretch. So what’s going on here? Is contemporary art a hoax, a quasi-religious cult of personalities, a mass delusion, a conspiracy of thieves? Any or all, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t art. I think Andy Warhol and the mortgage swindle are different faces of one identity – art, not reflective of life, but a direct expression.

These processes work both ways, and messing with either the chicken or the egg affects the omelet. It’s a good time to look at art differently since no one we know is going to change banking. Art doesn’t function here, in central KY, as an expression of the community. Since I’m one of them, the common folk, I share their assessment of Cy Twombly and every museum director, uptown gallery owner, and millionaire art collector can look at his stuff all day – I wish it on them. Visual art doesn’t care what language you speak, and cares even less about academic awards, financial ranking, or the condition or style of what you have on. Pictures bypass the censorship of verbal thought, with its locks and gates of cultural conditioning and official sanction. Pictures can say anything, but not all pictures do.

golden calf and other animals

Now I don’t know if Jeff Koons has ever made a golden calf, but maybe he should. The golden calf has had symbolic meaning since the first was made, about 3500 years ago, out in the desert east of the sea. Seems Moses needed time to think, and went off into the wilderness for forty days – a European vacation. When he came back they had setted up an alter and on it placed a golden calf. They don’t describe it in detail, but it isn’t necessary. A bovine of shinny metal, even on Wall Street these days, always means the same thing – “We’re all in for the material world, wealth and carnality.” Moses took exception, because, he said, it would turn out badly. He suggested a list of simple rules he hoped would get people thinking about something besides money.

Seems we keep slipping back, and we pay the price. Thinking about money all the time turns humans into pigs, and commercial TV pours on vicarious sex and violence to seal the deal. Where’s Moses with his almighty authority to save humanity from winding up in the gutter, again, herded like sheep by great wealth with private security? You say he’s gone away, and no one would listen to him now, anyway? Maybe we’ll have to throw down the golden calf ourselves this time, and in its place establish an art that asserts human dignity has a higher value than yellow metal dug from the ground, made into the shape of a muscular phallus with horns.

devolution

Just saw ‘Cave of Dreams’, about artwork so old, 32,000 years, and so graphically sophisticated it calls into question what it means to be human. It was preceded by previews of two animated movies, one the antics of blue elves and the other about anthro-racecars, apparently produced to entertain morons, or, in the case of young children, morons in training. Oh what have we become, my only friend…………….

truth, lies, and vampire art

Andy was absolutely truthful, and his art helped a generation lie. Instead of creating an engaging, thoughtful image people would want to see, he reproduced the Brillo box and the soup can with the most varieties, already the most commonly seen images by the largest number of people, banal and empty. This inversion of cognitive process became his brilliant gimmick, selling out art with a candid panache, and universally lowering expectations with his crude counterfeiting. He ran a sweatshop art production operation he called “the factory”, without irony, and expressed total disinterest in the subject of art –- “that’s a man’s name”, said he. He derided human aspiration, most famously stating that, “in the world of the future, everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes.” The ensuing total desolation of the human spirit he kept to himself.

So the evening news degenerates into tabloid sensation, communal credit cards have been maxed-out, and we are confronted with presidential candidates simply unworthy of ridicule. Surely, there’s no connection. Could it be that reducing the notion of art to blotty celebrity posters and squeezing the dollars out of the corpse is the direct visual metaphor for the atavistic mentality that wrecked the economy, abandoned and exploited vast constituencies, and declared the highest attainment of all to be the acquisition of enormous wealth, banal and empty? If there was a connection, not a correlation but, actually, an identity, art would be ‘real’, and would both reflect and determine how we see ourselves and how we see the world. Time to take art more seriously --

the welfare queens of art

At a time when municipalities are laying off firemen and cops, when legal aid is shutting down, when health and housing benefits are being withdrawn from the poor, non-profit arts organizations petition, demonstrate, and politically intimidate for more money. The cultural benefits they enumerate come from the creativity of people in the community who probably also work day jobs, while they get along quite nicely with just forty hours.

If the community is going to invest in art, more money needs to go to the artists. Instead it goes to organizations that are all overhead, doling out drabs to impose radical-chic agendas on artists seeking their recognition, any recognition, while keeping the audience at bay. Performers need community support to supplement ticket sales, but community response is part of the equation. Supporting visual art means looking at enough art to get to know the artists in your area, and buying some simple piece of original art, sometime – maybe a hand-made print or a watercolor. The money will go to a good cause, and you can keep the art.

the buy and hold collector

These are people who buy art only to put it in storage for ten years, intending to bring it out again when the price has quadrupled, prices pumped ever higher at widely publicized fake auctions, convicted and time served. These collectors don’t care what's on the front -- colors, talent, craft, or vision. What they do care about is celebrity and favor, trends and revivals, all based on the name, the trademark, the brand. Well, it can’t go on forever. Like a cartoon coyote, big-time art can only stay up in the thin air so long as it doesn’t look down, and then it’s spiraling free-fall to a little puff miles below.

New money and old envy could keep their autograph business going for a while, raw petroleum transmuted into a magazine’s fashionable living room, but they won’t produce significant art. Google Damien Hirst, Jeff Koons, and Richard Serra to see why. At some point society’s gaze will shift, a culture in crises reexamines, higher fuel prices will bring about a new seriousness, a deeper introspection, and a new respect for the clarity and immediacy of visual art. Sometime, in not that many years, Warhol’s entire output will suddenly appear tawdry and tattered as an abandoned carnival, all smeary posters and sloppy plagiarisms, and people won’t admit to owning any of it. One ugly auction without enough "clients" and the rest of big-time art starts to leak, hissing and sagging, turning all that warehoused ‘buy and hold’ art into rotten cantaloupes.

just art

What art expresses, first of all, is self-regard, and it applies to cultures and to individuals. In modern times artwork is an amalgam of craft and vision, and just its making, regardless of content, demonstrates the dedication and commitment of a serious person. The viewer who admires the art for its effort and accomplishment is taking them self seriously, as well. Somehow in this exchange viewer and artist acknowledge each other, although they’re separated by time – a message sent and received, both directions. That’s good enough – it’s what’s needed. Art doesn’t sell anything, not even itself, and that’s a reason to buy it. Sometimes it’s just good to get a friendly nod as you’re heading out the door – we’re all in this together.

the one thing

Computers can do everything better than we can, except for one thing. Computers can’t make art. Computers can make stuff that looks like art, but it isn’t the same. Thirty two thousand years ago somebody made pictures of the animals in their world deep in a cave. Somehow we moderns can look at the marks they made and recognize animals that no longer exist in Europe, animals that have been extinct for tens of thousands.

In the art they made to represent the world, they revealed themselves, and, as it turns out, made a statement that stands for us all. Wouldn’t phase a computer – its gut and heart wouldn’t feel a wave of deep nostalgia for such an eloquent expression of awareness from so far beyond our earliest recollections. A computer would have no clue why people stand in line to see Van Gogh, and be at a total loss to explain why they go back. Smarter, faster, harder to kill they may be, but they don’t know our history on this planet as carried in our genes, and they can’t create images which resonate in human consciousness. Only art and artists can do that.

real estate adventures –

heard this amusing story about a house showing where the owners have to be gone, and the real estate agent tells them later the clients didn’t want to buy their house, but, based on the art hanging on the walls, did say they’d like to be friends.

looking at the man in the mirror

The ethic of post-atomic American culture has been a savage commercialism lowering and leveling our expectations of ourselves, as reflected in our art. Does an old movie magazine photo of Marilyn Monroe, proclaimed as art by Andy Warhol, really reflect our inner being? Maybe. On the other hand, the whole art enterprise bears the earmarks of a winking-nodding conspiracy of cruising sharks. Does the entire tawdry matchstick castle have to crumble before people begin to shake off the corruption of our taste, the evasion of taxes to stock museums -- more winking and nodding, the unquestioning support of vast teaching operations leading to no visible means of support? Maybe not.

wrong orifice

Vision takes up half the brain and auditory just a corner. Words go in through the ear, and even when we read with our eyes the information processes through language decoders in our ears – we “listen” to the written word. Much called art, these days, goes in that way too, and it’s the wrong orifice.

proof

I’ve read where art students were right most of the time when trying to decide if the art in front of them was made by a professional artist or by a farm animal/small child. This “research” was cited as irrefutable proof that abstract art is – what? Are we really having this conversation? Is this serious or is it a joke, and could it be either, since we’re only talking about art? What this research actually reveals is something about the expectations of the researchers and the respect they feel for making art.

art and tears

Ever see a piece of art that made you cry? It’s a quaint idea. An artist can make you cry when they touch a place so far down tears seem to come for no reason. It’s not unlike putting your finger in the back of your throat and making yourself gag, an automatic reflex. It’s happened to me twice I can think of – once in front of a Picasso in the LA county museum, and once in front of a Van Gogh in Amsterdam. Didn’t feel sad, but each piece caught me unexpected, and I had to sit down – made my eyesight blurry. Except for that, it really wasn’t so bad.

Now, it might sound whimsical to those who haven’t experienced it, but another crew pads through every art museum they come to, and checks out the galleries, hoping to find the artist who has something personal to say just to them. Tears will probably come under control, but being open to a path of information which goes into the brain direct, without translation, can broaden the insights that shape the words. Mostly, what I feel but can’t explain is an acknowledgment of fundamental connection -- like finding a friendly island in the seas of modern times.

school days

What if art school was sabotage? Maybe not a conscious effort to pull up the ladder, to cripple future competition, to strangle a serious voice, an authentic art, the possibility of a self-sustaining career; it would be more like an unseen institutional imperative, an inbuilt self-preservation mechanism, a poisonous coating of goo around the profession of being an artist.

How does anyone expect to learn about becoming an artist from people who have never sold art for a living, never paid for their own studios or art supplies, and have no life experience beyond the insular confines of campus? It’s sorta like going to a priest for marriage counseling. What they know about is keeping their head down and progressing, year by year, toward the department chairmanship – art is their day job.

The awful truth, kids -- Duchamp was pulling a prank, and had the dumb luck to be taken seriously. Art is about finding hidden places in common with others, and it’s not the same thing as just hiding. Everything they told you is wrong.

abstract truth

Peter Schjeldahl, resident visual art critic for the New Yorker stated while reviewing a MOMA exhibit of Abstract Expressionists from the fifties, “They embraced abstraction as the shortest route to universal meaning and significance.” It’s a patent absurdity, one that undermines our culture, our thought, and our integrity.

Visual art, like music, has been a manifestation of human expression since the beginning, and while flutes and drums have been lost to time, paintings still survive on rock walls. Visual art preceded writing by millenia, encapsulating and conveying meaning, and representing us, one to another. It isn’t tool-making that separates us from the rest of the animals, but the making of art, and these days, it separates us from the machines, too. Only humans make art, and only humans recognize it.

Abstract art is a negation of meaning, and its early practitioners were nihilistic, disappointed because art is difficult, and because life is hard -- lessons learned at the open end of a bottle. Suicidal drunkenness ‘in’ isn’t going to yield anything pleasant coming ‘out’ – abstract expressionism is ugly. The rise of abstraction paralleled other fundamentalist reactionary movements seen since, and the destruction of the twelve hundred year old sandstone Buddha by the Taliban embodies the early abstractionist’s attitudes toward the foundations and heritage of visual art.

After a devastating purge, life usually returns chastened and different, brighter and with new vigor. Time to jettison the whole mess – the enormous state apparatus of schools and grant agencies, the celebrity status of cynical hustlers, and the gallery system with its dollar rankings based on some invisible consensus and sheer mystery. Time to wake up. Time to start over.

blame art

It isn’t Rush and Sarah caused the violence – they’re just bumps on the log. The awful fact is that art is real. It shapes our perceptual net, tells us what the world’s about, and it forms the reality we share. Can anyone face the idea that it’s our entertainment that makes it seem natural to carry instant mayhem in the coat pocket, in the purse, under the front seat? Our gun laws are bald-faced irrational, and it’s because crime shows have been substituting intimidation and violence for our own natural memories, which have become seriously diminished while we’re watching crime shows. Avid TV watchers, action movie addicts, video gamers are all here to testify they don’t feel safe outside without a gun.

Why would art do that to us? It’s because this art is in bondage, sold into slavery and prostitution, destined to give us distorted visions of life because it’s being used to sell us something – spotless kitchens, the suburban pickup truck, medicine for the dreary lives we lead, unable to relate to each other while dodging phantom spies and dope dealers in every parking facility. Well, we can say we didn’t know we were poisoning ourselves, our culture, the future of the planet and everything on it, with just a little vicarious ultra violence, but the proof is in the way we pass out real guns and ammunition.

The fault is not in our stars, but in our taste for art – most popularly a pastiche of gun violence and pornography, or maybe just gun violence pornography. We don’t think art is real – we say all this gore is cathartic, an entertainment, an honest depiction of anyone's life, and we’re fooling ourselves. If you want to think better thoughts, look at better art.