vision's ninety percent

Vision, the faculty you’re using at the moment, is a complex process. Ten percent is light through the eye and the rest is on file, ready with comparisons and associations to tell us what we’re seeing. The blank new-born stare sees everything but understands nothing – just two black dots, probably mommy’s eyes. Everything else is learned by biting, twisting, and pulling until we find out what’s in our crib, and we go on catalogueing all we come across until we grow up and understand everything. That’s how come what we see is heavily conditioned by where we’ve been and what we’ve seen before.

Art really isn’t about what you see. Art is about how you see it. Art operates in the back ninety percent, moving the furniture, polishing the mirrors. All those dusty, taken for granted old visions we hardly pay attention to any more – the different colors of cars in traffic, clouds in the sky, the worn spots on our favorite chair can all fade to grey and begin to disappear if we’re not careful. Familiarity isn’t the only enemy. Modern media chases our desensitized perceptual apparatus right back into our skulls with laser light shows and mind-blowing special effects, so that day to day life becomes a dim lit corridor through endless weeks of salacious advertisements and brutalizing entertainment.

Art is the antidote, the vitamins for our modern deficiencies, the home cooking in our franchised food existence. Original artwork already stands in contrast to a perfect world produced by robots, and its organic genesis makes it chocked full of nutrients inkjet printers can’t help but leave out. Owning a piece or two of original art and seeing them on the way out to work can make the idea of getting home seem better, and make the idea of owning a couple more, maybe from the same artist – maybe something completely different, seem more of a possibility.

same sex marriage

Joe Biden said he thought it was programs like “Will and Grace” that evolved public thinking about gay marriage, and he was just being factual. Public thinking about anything is largely determined by dramatic art, and seeing gay people acknowledged and respected on TV is enough to turn survey polls upside down. It’s just too bad there’s so many violent cop shows. See previous post.

florida

Bill Cosby said it’s not about race, it’s about guns, and I think that’s closer but it isn’t fundamental. The reason for all the guns and the screwy laws is the deadly paranoia everyone soaks up four or five hours a night in cop shows. It’s about art. The writers and actors call themselves artists but the sole criteria for good they are is how many trucks get sold, and that is biblically a bad idea.

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 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.