legalization -- there all along

Time to talk about dope, substances which alter perception, and to consider their relevance to art and their effect on both the makers of art and their audience. There are two major drugs in opposition in our culture, already almost equally divided between two different versions of reality, mingled together and yet living on different planets, seeing remarkably different stuff. The contrast in attitude engendered by each first became apparent in the Viet Nam era on both sides of the ocean as Jimmy Hendrix solos becoming a shared experience in clouds of smoke, while liquor-loving politicians and generals plotted strategy and carpet bombed. In Vegas, Sinatra appeared at the microphone with whiskey and a cigarette talking all patriotic like a war hero, apparently because he played one in a movie, but he only did it when he was drunk. We all know the drill, families have both, and haven’t all of us dabbled? Maybe it’s time to ask, when it comes to art can these different states of mind be seen? Artists are known to engage in fringy behavior in the first place, many experiment with substances and sometimes we can guess.

There are other drugs that influence art, variants and subgroups with their own characteristic intoxications. Beardsley I’ll bet was doing opium, he left clues. In a complex fantasy drawing a small pan can be seen throwing his pipe down in disgust, such as that. Picasso once allowed that the smell of opium wasn’t the worst smell in the world -- sometimes he talked backwards. Diz needed his ‘vitamins’ to blow real high and fast on his flugelhorn while Coltrane became so introspective he finally left all together, but society couldn’t sustain their particular predilections wide spread, coke and skag. It’s either booze or weed in the USA, each used as an escape from the oppressive dullness of sobriety, but they’re not the same.

Abstract expressionism arose in the early fifties, drenched in alcohol, its practitioners on their way to early graves. This drug shrinks reality and isolates its user on an island of dependency until finally they only see themselves, and this would include the ‘privatized’ vision they applied to canvas. As a painter Jackson Pollock was categorically nihilistic, his universe was chaotic and a tantrum was his response. It’s all there. His entire movement was enamored of drug store Freudianism which proposed a deeper wiser layer than this sorry twisted self-effacing rag we call a personality. This brilliant sub-conscious was bound to be a better painter, much more profound, and its extremely large color explorations featuring drips, smears, and pours were baffling and impervious to criticism from any corner. This sort of art values reputation and provenance, and a discernible price point, over whatever image is on the front -- a matter of taste who cares?

These days the variety of art available is staggering, a gamut of styles from first attempt accidental to compulsively precise renderings of almost anything, and the question becomes what does the public respond to. Well times they are a’changing and it’s encoded in the law. A native plant which could have caused a person just ten years ago to lose their vehicle, their house, the entire farm, along with their personal liberty, has suddenly unmasked, the menial despised reprobate morphing into the jedi hero here to save the world, a boon to agriculture, medicine, on and on. I wouldn’t know what artists are using, but do suspect that when the medieval sanctions are lifted for everyone, an art that was there all along will begin to be seen.

art for the poor -- actually owning

On the last page of today’s paper there’s a little filler article, ‘5 ways to freshen up a room this fall,’ and number three and four are about art. Number three suggests arranging a ‘collage’ of artworks on one wall, and number four notes ‘picture rails are chic,’ and suggests putting up narrow shelves to hold the art and avoid making all those little holes. The illustration shows a rectangular coffee table and a thinly upholstered bench in front of a wall full of art, sketches and prints. This apartment is identical to the other couple of hundred two and a half room efficiencies in this block, and if there was only some way to soften the stark brutality of this drone-like existence, to establish some notion of individuality and aspiration in this little box sanctuary. You could call finding art worth looking at number six.

That’s not what they say in the sunday paper. In the homebuyer’s guide there’s always a centerfold featuring a palatial contemporary million dollar estate with landscaping, pool, and tennis courts but there's never any art on the walls. At best the professional designer considers art an accessory and even at that an unpredictable element likely to influence everything else, so some sort of abstract complementary to the carpet and drapes is a daring as it goes. Folks who live at this scale have so much stuff to do -- they can jump in the pool, watch gigantic television, and maybe hang out with friends in one of those pristine department store displays they call living rooms. By an large people who live this way are too insulated, too distracted, too sated to be interested in art, and it shows.

On the other hand, it’s not unusual for poor people to know an artist or two, neighbors also getting by with old cars and paying low rent, and a piece of their art is a friendly reminder of that person. Along with maybe a painting or two handed down and a couple of sketches, an arrangement of art can be made that reflects the personality of a home’s inhabitants. A wall covered with art, different styles in different shapes and sizes, tends to take the attention away from worn places in the carpet, a chipped and dented formica kitchen set, and the odd mix and match thrift store furniture many folks start out with, and sometimes live with all their lives. If the art is pretty good those things won’t seem so important. Not just that, but a poor person is more likely to be familiar with success and especially defeat and has had to scramble to adjust to conditions as they are. As a result they're more likely to revere the accomplishment making art at all represents.

The rich have enough money to buy art, but mostly they just want to outbid their friends, and vacuous non-objective time-bound trophy art is their reward, a DeKooning on everyone’s yacht so chic. Poor people must sacrifice to own art, ensuing trips and foregoing newer furniture, an investment in a future more humane and realized than various kinds of fighting for entertainment and name calling politics are likely to provide. A product made by hand, the creation and expression of a single human being ought to have reasonable value against all else made by machines, and poor people feel the financial bite of adding it to their lives, a certificate of ownership they’ll feel whenever they see it ever after.

art’s job -- perceptual aerobics

The world you live in is as broad and as deep as your perception only, reflecting just what you pay attention to, and for some it can be extremely limited. In totalitarian states the world of the masses is kept as small as possible, limited to symbols of authority and ritual, the leaden oppression leavened with a constant round of parades, noisy festivals, and pointless competitions. By contrast, here we have freedom to see anything we want, experience the world anyway we choose, on paper at least, but instead we’re presented with a constant streaming of commercial messages suggesting what we should buy and what we should think and who we should vote for -- a closed box.

If you’re going to try to find your way out by thinking, good luck. You’ll find the language you’ve been given has been constructed like a fish trap, narrower and narrower, until you find yourself active and aggressive, passive and fatalistic, and won’t know why. Are there subjects and verbs in your thoughts or just states of being, logical conclusions or mindless conventions, all sticky webs to crawl out of. If you would like to broaden your own horizons, don’t read reports and go to lectures, try using your eyes. Just look at stuff. The more you look the more you’ll see, and there isn’t any end. The suggestion was made long ago, that ‘seeing is the only form of eating that provides its own meat,’ probably more graceful in the original, and in its time, but the paradox is clear.

A good place to start seeing more is by noticing shadows, clouds in the sky, anything you might normally take for granted and dismiss. For you it isn’t there, not even if you want it to be. Stand at the rim of the Grand Canyon with the warm updraft in your face so much like the subway, you’ll get that part, but you’ll wonder why other people are taking pictures, it’s just a big hole. Same goes for large swaths of experience other folks seem to value, since for you these realms don’t exist, living a monochromatic  life, nothing much beyond traffic and the evening news, what’s for dinner? Well OK, maybe you aren’t as limited as that, but what are your limits, really? Compared to everyone else, how wide is your perceptual net and how much in your immediate surroundings are you aware of and responding to -- there’s no way to know this directly, but it’s fairly certain anyone can make improvements. 

A work of art is like exercise equipment for perceptual tone and fitness, not actually productive in itself, but a stand-in that will ultimately make seeing everything else easier. Deciphering a painting requires levels of recognition the mind usually bypasses in a normal day. You may think you see a city street, an arrangement of fruit and flowers, bathers on a beach, but your visual apparatus had to scramble to figure it out. The artist is leaving cues, making suggestions, leading you toward conclusions about what you see, but it’s really just colors on a flat surface and not that thing at all. It’s up to you to engage and apply your own imagination to make the image work, to recognize and find meaning in the clever imposter. As a result of looking at art something changes, and senses are on alert, jolted awake by some artist tricking them so boldly, and the average person is bound to notice the difference. Spend two hours in a museum looking at landscapes and then go for a drive in the country, a perfect sunday afternoon, and the question won’t be asked again. There’s not a lot of theory here, really, just a practical rational suggestion that art doesn’t just hang on the wall, it pushes the walls back, expands the vision and opens the mind, that’s its job. 

islands in the streaming -- works of art

There’s nothing wrong with the way you live, not so different from others in your neighborhood, but how does it compare with the life of average humanity in, say, the last hundred thousand years, our time on the planet? Life just slides by these days, new models every year, new kinds of media, updates all directions, the kids keep up but will be back in the pack soon enough. There was a time not so far back when the chestnut tree down by the livery would become even taller and more robust in a lifetime, but no one even noticed. The prominent buildings in the town were constructed at least a lifetime ago and for common citizens might as well have always been there. Life had signposts, safe harbors, stable anchorages, and all this formed a foundation for facing the world. No need to look back with nostalgia, but it might be handy to account for what’s been lost, and to consider our own inborn psychology, how we construct our identities and see the world.

For the thoroughly modern person adept at surfing the digital tide all around us, go be free, don’t let the nasty organic flesh part of existence, so subject to fatigue and breakdown, inconvenience you over much. Any remaining, average people who find themselves here but who see further than the latest app, who feel some kinship with people of different times and even respect them for their accomplishments, might want to consider owning art. It’s this era’s personal hitching post, so nice to come home to, and even makes the new place home whenever you move. From the moment you acquire it, art’s never supposed to change, that’s the deal. Art carried home under the arm and hung on the wall will always be there, absorbing and recording major events in your life, reading back when you look at them years from now.

Original art burrows into your brain, bonds with your point of view, and becomes an old friend before it’s over -- ask anyone, anyone who actually owns art, although that’ll exclude all sorts of arts administrators and academic experts willing to live with reproductions, it’s all the same, right? If you intend to spend real money don’t listen to them, don’t listen to anyone, just look. The artist has been putting colors on the canvas trying to find common ground with someone, anyone, maybe you, and it’s something you just recognize. If gallery personnel go buzzing in your ear about famous celebrities who collect the work, honors and awards, understand they’re discussing price, selling you up, it’s just their job. Focus your attention on the piece in the room that looks back at you, simple as that, and do your best to go home together. 

art, art, everywhere -- but not that much to see

You’d guess people must love art. There’s art up everywhere, in offices and reception areas, across from the elevator, in waiting rooms and down the hall, even in rest rooms.  Smears and spatters are popular, patches of color to coordinate with carpet and upholstery, and in molded gilt framing it’s all so common as to be easily unseen, not even noticed. Seems a lot of famous, big time art sold at auction isn’t all that difficult to emulate, and sweatshop factories in low wage countries produce stuff that looks sorta similar on an assembly line, strictly for export. Just order from a catalogue, take it out of its box, hang it on the wall and forget about it.

Let’s start over. All painting is an arrangement of colors on a flat surface, going all the way back in human history to the smoothest, flattest cave wall that can be found. Sorry to say, all those separate categories of abstraction and realism are only in your head, arbitrary distinctions propagated by aesthetic scholars and salaried academics busy damming up their own little duck ponds. Forget all that, it just makes understanding art more difficult. A successful work of art attracts and holds the attention, no matter its form, or how much it costs, or who painted it. It’s a simple test, and it depends on two things -- the talent and ability of the artist to create a design which compels a person to look, and the viewer’s open-minded willingness to consider this alternative to their own experience.

It’s this interaction, the engagement of the viewer with the artist, that is the essence of art, and it’s in the space in between where art happens. This quality of art may be missed by people who only consider price and reputation, and many more, almost all of us, have just become visually numbed by all the meaningless art up everywhere. For the individual artist it’s an interesting challenge and worthy of a best effort, creating an image so compelling it causes people to look up from their devices, which even stretches their attention span back out to seconds, minutes, and hours week to week, so that they enjoy having a painting around even more over time. How to go about it is an open question. There aren’t any requirements, and there aren’t any rules. Here’s your canvas flat and white and your colors and brushes are close at hand, so with all of the history of art behind you and all the stuff that hasn’t been thought of yet, make a picture that a typical twenty-first century person, slowly drowning in digital quicksand, is going to see and want to look at.

Sounds hard but it could be even easier these days. Original art has permanence which can be a grounding influence, and it’s the sole possession that becomes more noticeable, more present with time rather than fading into its surroundings, like a permanently charged battery of human effort and intellect there on the wall. No matter the current state of affairs, in this uneasy time of transition it’s the artist’s job to establish the value of visual art in the lives of ordinary citizens, and they have to do it with pictures. Without always knowing why and for no one reason, average people are beginning to look.

the art of class struggle -- what's seen by who

The blog ‘owning art’ is really about class struggle, has been all along. We’re talking revolution, but not with guns and barricades -- it’s like a mental thing, an altered vision. As denizens of a small planet we’ve flogged materialism about as far as it wants to go, tearing up the landscape for short-term gain, enforcing our will with explosives, and imagining money was the most important thing. We find ourselves teetering at the edge of a gaping void with the momentum to go over. Religion has attempted to stay relevant and offer consolation, but delusional optimism expressed through cheesy rock lyrics just makes it all seem worse, and the sincere suburban dad in jeans who preaches vanilla self-satisfaction will be renewed for asses in the pews, not spiritual insight. Fads and gurus, diets and pills, nothing works. Sorry to spread the news, but the very structure of present society had better evolve in a hurry or it’s curtains for the lot of us.

A thoughtful person suggested that human societies began to evolve in an organic manner when the brain became so large that childbirth became problematic, physical evolution having reached its limit. If we track the progress of humankind over the last three millennia, prosperity has tended to generalize, and so has the freedom to realize individual potential and to seek unique destinies, just feels good, although old forms lay in wait to reassert themselves. Corporate control of mass media has helped to resurrect the old monarchies and dynastic fortunes, the lot of them living behind security walls and bulletproof glass. It recalls a time when an extremely wealthy few dictated what art would be for everyone, and their endlessly replicated sky-pie mythology became the visible analogue of their hidden corruption, false piety and opulent excess, and wouldn’t you know, here we are again.

The art of the international art fairs speaks for itself, and it’s a coded smirky entanglement of half-baked social causes, board game tokens and trivial conceits, we get it. With world-weary sardonic disdain, the ultra-wealthy believe it because it’s absurd, and it’s as though the middle ages never left. Let’s leave them there. Their stuff is way too expensive and a tad chic for the average house anyway. Doesn’t it follow that if there’s a change in the mentality of the general population and average people are left to ponder questions of personal identity, citizenship and selfhood, that their seeking would be reflected in visual art for all to see?

Turns out the answer to corporate avarice, abusing working classes and thriving on inequality, doesn’t depend on changing anyone’s mind. The solution is the emergence of a new mentality bursting from MBA programs everywhere, a trans-generational cadre of future CEO’s with a different set of values, people who as a group see their role in society in broader terms. J P Morgan just this week announced they aren’t going to be doing it that way anymore, ripping off pensioners and evicting widows. It was an acknowledgement of pressure from below, an industry wide movement. Other fundamental changes are happening all around, you keep score. The point is humanity is changing direction, and anyone around for more than a couple of decades has been a witness to the flux. Art’s mission in this period of transition is to convey a new consensus, mind to mind, and it’s about to acquire a significance for average people it hasn’t had before. If you’d like to participate in the changeover, the demise of corporate feudalism and the advent of trans-national environmental cooperation and equitable distribution, or whatever happens next, taking an interest in art may help you keep up.

It’s not easy to decide what to like at first, but no need to overthink it. Just look at bunches of art, and what everyone else is thinking will somehow come through you, let it happen. It won’t be long before your friends, and new ones you haven’t met yet, will all begin to like a similar sort of art, and no one will know exactly why. If the source of the art taken home and hung on the wall is local, affordable and knowable, something interesting takes place. As the audience gains sophistication, production in local studios, no longer dependent on outside income, will get better to match -- more time at the easel, simple as that. It’s a mutually rewarding relationship that after long suppression seems suddenly about to awaken all at once with original art displayed in businesses, up on city walls, and even used to lure tourists to upscale hotels. There’s a large enough array of art available these days for the average person to begin to recognize themselves, their interests and attitudes, just by looking. Everyone has this capacity. Visual art, inclusive and accessible, can be the universal channel for new definitions of self and peaceful reconciliation among communities, soon to prevail everywhere. Despots despise art because it can’t be censored, figurative images need no translation, and even though no words are spoken somehow art communicates a revolution in the head.

visiting independent studios -- the nuclear reactors of art

Previously a post suggested that art studios were each outposts of a separate sovereignty, neither geographically bound or limited to a particular era. This pervasive nation with its own standards and codes of conduct, its own notions of integrity and honor, can be found existing within the matrix of any semi-free society with an open economy. Can’t deny there are extravagant studios in the movies, and trust-fund dabblers can have anything they want, but that’s not how most studios begin, clearing out storerooms and repurposing garages. Founding a studio is a romantic enterprise in itself, already defying reality.

It’s not possible to aspire to be a serious artist without one, the studio is the artist’s most basic tool. No one makes much progress if they have to put it all away to prepare a meal, and the resentment of inconvenienced housemates isn’t conducive to creation -- art needs a separate space. Still, it isn’t reasonable to expect a studio to pay for itself for a long, long time, maybe never, and just the obligation of rent becomes the cornerstone of the artist’s commitment, a constant reminder to either be steadfastly productive or use the money for something else.

Once in a studio, the struggle begins, since without a boss there’s no job order to fill, no clear indication of what to do first, and there’s also no time clock, no scheduled breaks, and, perhaps most relevant of all, no paycheck. Without a customer, and at this point without a product to sell, there’s no clear indication of how to fill up the day. Once in a studio the artist is figuratively and literally faced with a blank page, the existential dilemma made graphically clear, finding themselves at a null point before stepping off in a new direction. The clear directive is to simply work, to paint and draw enough to find a voice while trying not to burn through a ton of supplies, since that money ain’t coming back, and to not waste time because the studio is being paid for with a day job.

Becoming rich and famous isn’t usually the prime motivator for those who step out on this path -- that’s on a different avenue in another part of town. Some are damaged people attempting to find wholeness, while others may be seeking relief from a mind-numbing occupation or perhaps they just enjoy spending time alone, and after all, it’s an inherited human trait, the desire to make things. Still, sorry to say, in most cases the world will be against the person who tries -- family members tend to be skeptical and in-laws don’t hide contempt, academics at all levels sneer reflexively while galleries demand that an artist be successful already, asking where else do you show before they even look. It’s a grueling soul-depleting gauntlet, and the attrition rate is high. For some the day-job wins out, a talented and motivated person working a semi-menial occupation might rise quickly, or just become addicted to a regular paycheck. Others learn to sustain themselves by adopting some regionally accepted genre, replicating a single subject over and over until they’re good enough to enter a local market, where some may thrive, but many artists with something original to say may as well stuff notes in bottles, since without a window to the public they’re likely to become isolated on an island of their own.

Studios pop in and out of existence at probably a greater rate than the galleries, the entire enterprise of art is in a constant state of ferment. They exist on a spectrum from new-age trendiness to bare-bones desperation, while many are productive and efficient workshops, and since they were just an empty space before the artist moved in, every inch reveals the personality of the artist perhaps more candidly than their art. Visiting several studios in an afternoon, look for local tours, reveals a lot about how art is made, offering the opportunity to ask questions and observe works in progress, all the while assessing the commonality and uniqueness of each situation. For anyone interested in truly learning about art, appreciating and eventually owning art, it’s a very good thing to do.