SUNNY THOUGHTS ON A SUNNY DAY

I NOTE THAT MY IDIOTSHEET BANNER may need to be updated, but then again the images and historical significance of a former studio space and its impact on my own development as an empirical artist, as opposed to what we may call, a public artist, should qualify it for an extended stay. Two point three years at 52 O Street Studios both strengthened and weakened me as a man on two legs, but the quickening impact of those years, the winsome fellowship of other artists working in the building and the lingering insights of unspeakable enigmas which presented themselves for Solomonic discourse cannot be quantified, except in terms of my own artistic movement, and emotion from which I derive whatever clarity the muse I call GOD, imparts.

This muse is neither male nor female, exists both inside me and outside me, is both grounded in history, and immune to history, for it is personal in nature. I expect one day to make sense of these statements, but today, these fragments are all I have to offer.

But yes, I shall soon begin to post, and comment on my work in this space. All in due time, dear strangers.

ORIGINATING STATEMENT

Art is not a bargain! Art is available to 5% of our human race at any time. Leonardo da Vinci said it. Communists tried to make art public! Did not work. Andy Warhola even named his art POP art! Did not work either. Art belongs to the ones who deserve it, to the ones who are seeking it.
—Andrey Bogoslowsky, 2009

I SHALL NOT check my generalizations at the door, but am eager to embrace exceptions to those rules of thumb or fluctuating stereotypes which, despite obvious extenuating circumstances, comport with the same reality we expose when we come in out of the rain or choose to enjoy its wetness across our brow.

To paint images without the questioning the tools of meaning is to declare that painting is dead as a medium worth serious consideration in today's terse political climate for the simple reason we find it is historically self-evident that the exertion of all important art is political in nature and in nuture.

That painting is not dead as a medium for communicating the insights and travails peculiar to our own times while admitting that it may very well be classified as undead is a declaration of independence the revolutionary artist must express then sever from the petty crimes committed by those who prefer the spacious cult of idols and pedestrianism. This doesn't mean that happy and beautiful, simple or whimsical pictures cannot or should not be acclaimed in some measure, but to note that one plus one equals two is not quite the same as submitting that negative b plus or minus the square root of b squared minus 4ac over 2a is a solution less formisable.

Thus "painting" as "generalized propaganda" or "cultural artifact" should by definition reflect the "conflicting" forms of representation doing battle for supremacy in order to aptly address the social fissures of today's art pool, and that the painter must strive and push diligently into the breech of whatever fuller truth hides within a depicted situation in historically, as well as contemporary terms, while avoiding the ease of sustained pause at the reflection of fundamentals informed by the strong positivism of the herd instinct, or conversely, the ever hip and trendy faux negationism of more recent movements in the field of artist expression.

I admit, I have not reached a point in my own work where I can say I have mastered my stated objective. But the struggle continues and is as reflexive as expressing wonder that it even rains at all anymore.

ART'S LAST GASP?

“In the last years of the boom, numerous artists came to the fore who have their aesthetic heads up the aesthetic asses of Gerhard Richter, Andy Warhol, Richard Prince, Cady Noland, and Christopher Wool. They make punkish black-and-white art and ad hoc arrangements of disheveled stuff, architectural fragments, and Xeroxed photos. This art deals in received ideas about appropriation, conceptualism, and institutional critique. It’s a cool school, admired by jargon-wielding academics who write barely readable rhetoric explaining why looking at next to nothing is good for you. Many of these artists have sold a lot of work, and most will be part of a lost generation. They thought they were playing the system; it turned out that they were themselves being played.”

Seems I've been having this thought myself, ever more frequently since abandoning the DC art scene in a hail of sinking financials. Now, several months into my exile, I have created a phlegmatic video short to explain that defection. Glad I've gotten off that whirligig. Still, weaning oneself off ambition and the need to express oneself is difficult.

Indeed, who are the experts, and who are the fakirs?

Read it all.