No Art Status
I was looking at some paintings in this cafe today in Portland, and they were pretty good. But it made me think about how painting iteslf is pretty much a dead art except as something decorative (not necessarily being pejorative there). The idea of a dead art is a dead art, related to progress and art world prejudices that haven't been in place since at least the seventies. It's ridiculous to place a structure around art itself, a shape with limits and nodes. But I can't think of art in a way that's not related to its function for the viewer. I've internalized a Protestant dichotomy of useful/frivolous, and that's why I make comics. My personality won't allow me to be content in the presence of beauty unless it has a linear aspect. Which is paradoxical because beauty is the sublime, its implication is the void.
17 comments:
that's a feeling
yeah i feel that way too when i look at bad paintings. (i saw those paintings, btw.) and it does seem irrelevent as a practice right now, especially the "on the wall" kind. but there are good paintings out there, especially experiential kinds of paintings, like rothko and all, which fuck with the viewer in "constructive" ways. is this useful/frivolous bunary sort of like sex/love?
Yeah, but are they for putting on walls? That form just seems vestigal. But I love Rothko and Panter and Cezanne. I didn't articulate the metaphor very well. I love lots of paintings, but I just don't know what to do with them. Beauty makes me uncomforttable because I don't know what to do with it. And making a series of paintings to be displayed on a wall really does seem a little ridiculous to me. There's pleasure in making them, sure, but what do you do after that?
paint over them and start again
funny you say that jason because your own way of drawing seems painterly. using textures and bringing attention to surface. rather than delineate form, which is what drawing is more traditionally about (isn't it?) in relation to painting.
Oliver - that's the best answer!
Blaise - I feel the same way about drawings. I see drawing and painting as part of a continuum, not wholly separate disciplines. But, I guess a drawing on a wall more often has the aura of something made for pleasure then put up on the wall incidentally. I don't usually draw for pleasure, though - it's mainly in the service of a project, mostly comics. I'm not saying that this makes any more sense, just that I'm able to justify spending lots of time making comics pages to myself but I couldn't justify (due to some subjective, unknown internal criteria) self-consciously making a series of paintings (or drawings). The comics seem less self-important, maybe? Or it's that their objectness is not the point since they're made for printing (or web-viewing)...
um, please see previous post for retardedly mis-matched comment. should appear here guys.
not to butt in either, but i think the reason people paint is to feel like they're engaging in probably the oldest western tradition of creating 'static' illusion. i mean, it's a pretty big deal. not that comics isn't obviously, but i don't see painting as ever dead or lifeless. it absorbs other media pretty effortlessly.
JT: Thanks! I'll get a mini out to you asap.
You're right, of course, but I can't get rid of the gnawing feeling when I go into a gallery (or cafe) that there's something silly about the whole enterprise (in a Nausea kind of way)...
And, btw, I've struggled with comics in the same way. It's hard not to feel like a dilettante when you're building goony drawings into syntactic contraptions while your wife's about to have a baby..,
snap. my wife's busy growing our son in her belly while i finished 'working' on a comic book.
I often feel implicated within those quote marks while I sit in my studio when Michelle's home with Rita. There's a razor's edge between artist and wastel.
Yeah, but a happy skint artist father is much more use to his kids than a frustrated bread winner. At least that's what I'm hoping.
(apologies for getting of topic)
That's what I keep telling my wife!
i know i'm late to the party by a few months, but what?
how can something engaged in a constant flux of creative thought all over the world be a "dead practice"? that's like saying carpenters should stop building furniture or businesses should stop innovating in the marketplace. painting isnt anymore "art" or anymore irrelevant than any of those things.
You're totally right, but carpentry is relevant to the real world. There's a functional aspect to a table, cabinet, etc. beyond the aesthetic pleasure you derive from it. But, really, there's no reason not to make a painting or sculpture that's purely about aesthetic pleasure. It's just that that's probably not what I'll be doing. And, maybe, that's a defect in my character. I wasn't very clear in my original post, but I was trying to say a couple things. The first was that in the Art world, painting is not relevant to where they're at. If you are someone who is engaging with the concerns of that group of people, you wouldn't make painting unless there was some kind of conceptual, medium-as-message part to it. The second thing I was trying to say was that this is stupid, that people will always and should always make art for the fun of doing it and that I would be a lot happier if I could figure out to divorce myself from an historical context and just make some fucking rad drawings!
i agree.
...but at the same time, drawing is still a big thing in the art world, as is painting, and the concerns sometimes have less to do with the concerns of painting than others might make you think. or their concerns arent as confrontational or as large in scope as their predecessors. i mean, all star painters drawers in the 'fine arts' world like Dana Shutz, Marlene Dumas, Marcel Dzama, and Kiki Smith are all engaging with much different ideas than looking at the foundation of their medium. Pictures, whether people want to admit it or not, will never die. As long as their are innovative communicators out there the "Art" world will find pleasure in guys like Ai Weiwei to even Henry Darger. I think the art world has become less of single entity moving forward lately. I think what i was basically saying is that creative thought is creative thought. "art" is a word invented by the West that has become more of a really ugly institutional idea, a word some cultures dont even have.
but forget it anyways. Just draw whatever you want, however you want. end of story.
Yeah, man!
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