lonesome Ed -- pandemic resonance

Visual art is not about thinking. Thinking about art is possible but thoughts are made of words and we’ll call that form ‘literature,’ criticism or commentary, poems or jokes, doesn’t matter. Visual art is about perception and attention and it enters the brain on its own channel and is interpreted in its own set of circuits. In a fundamental way art conveys information directly into the mind of the viewer without using words, without verbal thinking.

This is very difficult concept for writers about art to grasp. Their business is primarily selling their own words and they look for action metaphors and clever associations no one else has considered, and even come to think of themselves as full partners with artists. They don’t really see the art because they don’t know how to look, so they make up stories. Recently there’s been renewed interest in Edward Hopper for all the right reasons but it’s significance is missed by the literary crew. They’ve been happy to relate the solitude of his subject matter to the pandemic, a clever and superficial reading of his recent popularity. Odd isn’t it that the mexican muralists are also being rediscovered, and this shifting of public taste toward representational art could be bigger and more lasting than a disease.

The quality that made Hopper perhaps the premier painter of the twentieth century with ultimately the greatest influence on the future of art wasn’t in the lady looking out a window, a few patrons at a diner or a lady sipping tea. Anyone could make those paintings and they do, closets full of them, but those are ideas in words and they weren’t his secret. Sad to say the essence of his greatness is mostly lost in reproduction, and in a magazine or on a screen you see just a schematic of the actual art. In a museum his paintings seem to generate their own light and are alive with detail from across the room. He’s not particularly interested in the people, their rivers of internal angst or even their motive for being there. For him figures were static props put there to demonstrate his main concern. He wanted to start with the same paint box everyone uses and pull from it a totally uncanny representation of afternoon light streaming in a hotel window, the descent of evening in empty city streets. These are the very same things everyone else has seen themselves, yet depicted with an immediacy and tangibility that both enhances the flavor of the viewer’s own experience and suggests seeing the very same things more deeply.

I can say this with some authority because I read what he said about his art and I believed him, while critics and commentators invested in abstraction have no ears for the qualities of representational painting and never see beyond subject content. Representational art is about seeing the world through the eyes of others, and if you have the opportunity to see original work from the hand of Van Gogh, or Ed Hopper, or any painter who made it into the museum you can compare it to what you see back home. It’s not wrong to think about art, but learn to pay attention to your own responses because visual art enters the mind without climbing the stairs, while all that witty prose about it never makes it past the ground floor.

the art of dreaming -- waking up with art

Some people have accused the president of lying and I’m pretty sure he doesn’t look at it that way. It’s more likely he thinks of what he says as ‘salesmanship,’ deal-making lingo, and he doesn’t necessarily see the connection between what he says and what actually is, and in fact there’s no connection. He’s speaking to a population that’s asleep, more of an opiated stupor, and they hear him in a dream. Here’s how it works. The super bowl happens in the middle of the NBA season and basketball playoffs overlap with the beginning of major league baseball. The world series is played in the middle of football season, and they’re building a new stadium for soccer but who knows where they’ll fit it in. That takes out the middle hump of the population, they might as well be asleep. Their minds are filled with trades and statistics and their emotions are drained, elation with each touchdown turning to anger and frustration with each interception, and they talk that stuff when they’re not watching. When the cycle is suddenly broken, as it has been, some will wake up and begin to wonder what their congressman’s been doing, how other people are living and maybe even how they’ve been living themselves.

Women have recently found themselves let off at a bus stop that’s existentially nowhere, nothing but a faint horizon line and a light blue mist. The old movie parts won’t fit anymore, and they've had to set off in some new direction and redefine themselves from scratch. They call it being woke and it seems to be literally correct, a percentage of mainly younger women measuring each step as a conscious choice and looking for meaning in the mirror. Everybody has been confronted with the ubiquitous skull on everything from mud-flaps to baby clothes and the dawning realization that it’s a sign of imminent death, and the pandemic possibility of premature mortality has sobered up a few. It’s a bit like a slow thawing, a population emerging from its old shell and in this vulnerable yet mutable condition capable of assuming a more cooperative, eco-friendly and sustainable way to behave on the planet. How do these newly questioning citizens communicate and how does the word spread of a new community consciousness? Now would be the time to suggest the actual value and utility of art.

If you feel the need to spend fifty million dollars on a painting that’s essentially only a big price tag with some color smeared here and there, there’s no law says you can’t. You’re dreaming, of course, and the world will shake you awake soon enough, but everyday folks participating in art, making it, buying it, owning it and hanging it on the wall makes the transition to a new awareness quicker and easier. Art on the wall will make recognizing the like-minded less of a guessing game and leads to better conversations, and as a bonus art broadens and deepens perceptual function and you’ll see more detail in the world. Will a piece of art alter the universe and bend reality, maybe not enough to notice, but it can provide a bit of traction in a very slippery place for the determined climber, attempting to realize their own human potential, awake. 

a prize for lies -- art zombies

Fictional portrait of Jo and Edward Hopper wins Walter Scott prize   £25,000 award for the year’s best historical novel goes to Christine Dwyer Hickey’s The Narrow Land, which depicts the artists’ marriage.....   The Guardian, US edition
 
In the name of science archeologists use sophisticated technology to desecrate burials all over the planet, all the while bemoaning the damage done by grave robbers before the legitimate scientists arrived to catalogue all that sacred stuff and put it in boxes, but at least they don’t lie. Do they keep things to themselves, we’ve always wondered, but they don’t make stuff up if they want to stay in the club. Scientists insist on integrity, no making up stuff and no borrowing without attribution, everything must be original to be signed by an author. They do this to protect the truth.

Art is like science, constantly churning with new discoveries and conceptual breakthroughs by famous personalities, except that it isn’t connected to the real world by anything. No repeating an experiment to verify nothing, it’s all just conjecture and truth has to run for its life. In art they dig up dead people too but they put them to work, leech off their poignant life stories to animate unworthy art, happens all the time. Along comes a book, could be good but that’s doubtful since the author has had to dug up corpses for characters and made them do stuff they’d never do in real life. What order of desecration would this be? This book has won a prize awarded by people who have no more respect for a dead artist, or honest originality, than the author.

Ed Hopper was a real person with a notoriously private private-life and the expression he made to the world was in his artwork. There’s no real reason to know about his personal trials, but for someone to use his name to pump up some second-rate word pie is just sad. Art has respect for the truth but it’s verified on an individual basis, and oddly enough it starts with you. Art is about self-concept and it’s up to you to pick and choose, but don’t suppose you can disregard honesty in art and find it in politics or recognize it in business. I’ve seen Hopper paintings so luminous they seemed to cast a light on the museum floor in front of them, and the notion of some literary ghoul gnawing his bones to win a prize and sell some books is beyond tawdry and cheap, it’s probably unhealthy for anyone who touches it.

Hannah Gadsby -- loving and hating Picasso

Is Hannah Gadsby, the Comedian Behind Netflix’s Viral Standup Special, Today’s Most Vital Art Critic?  At a time when the art world still hasn't quite figured out how to address icons who have done abominable things, Gadsby's special "Nanette" should be required viewing.  july 16, artnet news online  

Here is a female comedian performing a withering commentary on the way women have been depicted in art by old white guys, irredeemable pigs if you must know. That the entire culture has been warped by an all male religious order in the employ of a totally masculine creator of the universe is too big a chunk for her, so she castigates the artists, mostly men of their time. She's down on Picasso special for having a much younger mistress, not supposing she may have liked older men, she wasn’t asked. Let’s concede that Picasso was an overbearing egotist since it shows in his work and even made him rich and famous. He may have caused women to weep but I've never heard he refused to let anyone leave, so none of my business, his critics’ or yours.

Hannah’s not in favor of banishing him from the museums however, because ‘Cubism is important. Picasso freed us from the slavery of having to reproduce three-dimensional reality on a two-dimensional surface.’ It’s not really technically correct since no matter how he rearranged stuff, his art was always referential, but wait a minute. Did she say ‘slavery?’ The word has a meaning and I’m not sure it applies here. Let’s face the bloody truth for a change. Freedom from ‘having to reproduce three dimensional reality on the two dimensional surface’ is really just a license to make messes, look around.

In the history of art, world-wide and all time, non-objective abstract art is destined to be seen as aberration rather than emancipation, evidence of a failure of nerve and a vast intellectual laziness brought on by the mesmerizing backbeat of pervasive commercialism, citizens climbing over each other to own a more luxurious pickup. Well it’s all over now, a new day dawns. Art has the power to heal and unify, the recently resurrected mexican muralists proved it years ago, and interpreting the three dimensional world on a two dimensional surface is the carrier for a message that resonates deep inside. Let’s grant that the personal lives of artists are note-worthy if they’re celebrities or if there's little that can be said about their art. In all other cases it isn’t really necessary to know the artist’s gender and orientation, skin tone and ethnic background, political views or domestic entanglements. Ask of art that it demands your attention and dominates the room it’s in, and that it filters the world through the artist’s eyes and onto a flat surface so that you can compare it with your own. How consenting adults behaved long ago won’t come up.