A Moveable Feast
November 8, 2005
Dear Kelly,
Ernest Hemingway spent the years between 1921 and 1926 in
Paris. Living in cramped quarters and newly married to Hadley
Richardson, they warmed themselves by a small brazier and kept
things simple. This was his time of self-directed
apprenticeship in the art of writing fiction. Much later, in
Ketchum, Idaho, and in Cuba, he was to gather some unfinished
business from his Paris years into "A Moveable Feast." This
small book can be read on a medium length airline flight. It's
full of wit, personality and wisdom--of value to all creators.
"I always worked until I had something done, and I always
stopped when I knew what was going to happen next. That way I
could be sure of going on the next day," he wrote. When
finished for the day, he would read something completely
different, or go for a walk--this in order to allow his
subconscious to continue work on the project. "I was free then
to go anywhere in Paris, to exercise, to become physically
tired. Then it is also good to make love to one you love."
On the beginning of work, he writes: "Start with a true
sentence and you can go from there." Hemingway found that
sometimes it took a little while to find that truth. When he
did, he was off and away. "The only thing that could spoil a
day was people--and if you could keep from making engagements,
each day had no limits."
Regarding style--but more to the nature of art itself--he says:
"You could omit anything--if you knew that you had omitted
it--and the omitted part would strengthen the story and make
people feel something more than they understood." Even an
important turn of a plot or a climax might be left out.
Hemingway understood that art is a co-project between an
artist's skill and the imagination of the art consumer. Absence
strengthens. Brevity heightens. To obscure is to intrigue.
Leave it out and the reader's imagination can make it stronger.
During this period Hemingway demonstrated a remarkable ability
at willful concentration. "The Sun Also Rises," his second
novel, was written in just over six weeks in La Closerie des
Lilas, a Montparnasse restaurant. A busy environment, he found,
does not necessarily mean interruption. Hemingway was not
without humour, humility and self deprecation: "Sometimes," he
said, "I have good luck and write better than I can."
Best regards,
Robert
PS: "We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever
becomes a master." (Ernest Hemingway)
Esoterica: Hemingway is giving himself counseling in
self-understanding and personal efficiency. "I still need more
healthy rest in order to work at my best," he writes. "My
health is the main capital I have and I want to administer it
intelligently." Back down on the ground, I'm sleeping long and
walking vigorously. In my studio I've been consciously leaving
out stuff that I might normally put in--the features of a face,
a part of a landscape, some overly busy shapes--any element
that might just be telling too much. Thanks to Ernest.
Sunday, November 13, 2005
Thursday, November 10, 2005
Dave Hickey & Sari Carel
The art world from the late eighteenth century to the present has worked in a language of generations. Artists worked with their peers and among them to overthrow and supplant the generation in power. Then suddenly in the '70s you have artists who, rather than overthrowing their seniors, are pleasing them in order to get grades and public funding. That is exactly what my problem is with serving on National Endowment panels. I did it, and participated in it, but I have to admit that this is the first time in the history of American Art that an older generation has the authority to decide which works of the younger generation are privileged. This slowed down the style wheel to a virtual stop, and created a culture of mentors and protegés—a hierarchical, parental structure that would last as long as the National Endowment and the big museums and foundations had absolute power, say from '72 to '88.
During this time, it was almost impossible for anything to change, because our culture is composed of a public academic and museum sector that changes slowly, and after the fact, in 30 year cycles, and a private gallery and magazine sector that changes rapidly, sometimes overnight. In the last ten years the academics who have been retiring from American universities are Abstract Expressionists and Formalists hired and tenured in the late '60s, just as these practices lost public credibility. They are being replaced with Deconstructionists who are already out of date, and who will be in power for the next 30 years, talking about stuff that is already over now.
SC: So you see that as the origin of the shift?
DH: The first paradigm shift really had to do with the influence of French Theory in the '50s and the '60s. That's the world in which I was educated, and in its secular formulations it still has its virtues. I continue to believe that the bad thing about French Theory is that it has no heart, and the good thing about French Theory is that it has no soul. In the early '70s the influence of French Theory was considerably altered by the resurgence of German Aesthetic Theory—particularly that of the Frankfurt School whose academicized Marxism lent itself very well to the academicized Marxism that was practiced in American universities. And also, I think there was another set of problems. The powerful arguments of French Theory—as it might be applied to art—revolve around its critique of Metaphysics and the discourse of origins that manifest in speculations about the death of the artist, and the structural ideology of institutions.
If your in an institution teaching artists, you can't kill the artist or critique the institution with much credibility; if you believe in group identity and identity politics, you just restored the author in another guise. If you are tenured in a university you have to limit your critique of institutions considerably, because you are part of an institution. In other words, Post Structuralism is not an academic discourse; Frankfurt School and Marxism is. Also, in the '60s new English translations of writers like Adorno, Benjamin, and Lukacs became available.
They were much needed because, loosely interpreted, they allowed us to be Mystical and Romantic, to talk about authenticity again, about what artists feel and their identity. In the world I grew up in, the artist was really presumed to be dead, and to most of my contemporaries, issues of artistic identity mean nothing. They mean nothing to Warhol, they mean nothing to Bruce Nauman, Ed Ruscha, Bridget Riley, or Richard Serra. It's bullshit as far as they are concerned.
From my view, it is a bunch of Romantic bullshit. I think that we are having now a kind of Counter-Reformation that has to do first of all with the fact that for 25 years, the market for works of art was the kunsthalle, the museum and the university. You were being paid by the state to make art that couldn't sell, and the art itself, because it was totally isolated from the market, simply didn't change. All of that begins to change when the National Endowment no longer gives as much money, when jobs in universities are no longer available, when art stops being a nice safe place to go. Because for 30 years being an artist was a safe thing to do. You filled out forms, got your check, taught in classes, you flew to Berlin and put up press type on the wall, poured a bunch of leaves in the room, and a bunch of people came, and you had wine and cheese. Then you flew home, and taught your classes, and went to faculty meetings, and applied for a merit raise, which the university gave you because you had a show in Berlin.
And that works fine, although it does not create art that changes. So I think we are seeing now the restoration of sibling society, a society of peers. Most of the young artists that I know are interested in what their contemporaries think; they don't give a fuck what old people think. Your peers are who you live with till you die. You can please a lot of authority figures, but they're dead before you need them. So I think it's changing, in good ways but in a lot of silly ways too.
Another reason it is changing is that in the history of art, the tides of influence tend to go back and forth, they tend to be reactive. One generation reacts against another; the next generation, reacting against the previous one, goes back to the generation before that, which is to say the tides of influence in the art world tend to skip a generation.
So now I have students who are really into Bridget Riley and Richard Serra; students who study Warhol, mostly as a colorist. When you are a young artist, you look around and you say, 'Gee everything sucks, I am going to go back to the moment right before everything started sucking, and try to find a new way out of that'. So you have a lot of artists trying to find a new way out of '60s art, much in the same way artists in the '80s tried to find a new way out of '40s art—in the sense that Julian Schnabel, David Salle, and Francesco Clemente looked back to the early figurative sources of Abstract Expressionism as a place to start. So that's perfectly natural, and it happens all the time.
The problem today, of course, is that art cannot change so fast because it is so highly institutional. The people in the museum are going to be there forever, the people in the university are going to be there even longer. The institutional super structure of the art world, which is always out of date by definition, is really out of date now. I think that you do begin to see small undergrounds, although its hard to stay underground for very long just because if you're any good at all, people really want to look at it, because there is so much boring fucking art. Anybody who sees anything they like, they go crazy. I know artists just coming out of school and they already have a waiting list of 40 paintings, and that's not because they are great artists, it's just that they're not bad artists.
SC: I am assuming that there has always been quite a lot of bad and boring art, no?
DH: Not ideologically bad and boring. We have lived with an ideology that says, "If it looks good, it's bad. If people like it, it's bad. If it's appealing it's reactionary". So you have artists consciously making the worst looking art that they can. And it can really be bad, because it usually looks bad even when you are trying to make it look OK. So I'm pretty optimistic.
SC: So you think the whole premise of underground arenas and artistic practice is not a bankrupt idea to try and work from?
DH: It works if you want it to work. It depends on what you want. I grew up in a world in which what artists aspired to was to be able to go to their studio, make art, sell a work occasionally, so they can buy some Wheaties, and some records, and listen to records, and make art, and eat Wheaties. And that was their goal: stay away from the straight world, and stay away from the university, and live their lives. So if that is your aspiration, then yes, I know quite a few young artists that are achieving that now. Most young artists don't want that.
SC: What do they want?
DH: They want to fly to Berlin, and put up press type, and that's fine 'cause there is an audience over there for that. But I argue all the time that painting today is much more like Jazz than it is like installation art. It is a discourse that people who know know, the people who care care, and the people who don't care we don't give a shit about. Painters are famous the way Jazz musicians are famous—which means the people who care about painting know them. I just wrote a piece for Art Forum about John Wesly. He has been a famous painter for 40 years among people who love painting. I can go over to Cal Arts and ask them if they know who John Wesly is, and they would go, "Huh? What discourse does he participate in?" I am in the art world only insofar as there are interesting things for me to write about. When that stops, or when I stop getting offers to write things, I'll be out. I won't be going around looking for work; it's not like its any fun. When I was a kid, I had a gallery in Texas, I met Leo Castelli, and I thought Leo was cool. And I would think, "When I go to New York, maybe I will have lunch with Leo, or maybe I can have lunch with Sidney Janis." I would be hard put to think up anybody in the art world I would like to have lunch with today. Maybe Leo Steinberg.
SC: How was Leo cool?
DH: Well, he liked art and he was a business person who wasn't obsessed with money. He liked gossip and he had a good eye. He understood how it works. He virtually invented the '60s. He treated his artists right: he never let them go, they always left him. When I was a dealer, he told me good things. "David" he would say, "The art goes out, the money comes in."
SC: So an environment working under the title "Museum of Contemporary Art," is that a paradox to you? Say, institutions that produce shows like the "Whitney Biennial" and the "Carnegie International," are they dramatically failing to present us with successful surveys of the present state of affairs?
DH: I think it's pretty peculiar. I think it's a little unnatural. I don't think you should grant appointed conservators, which is what museum people are, the power to determine the course of art. I don't think they are worthy, I don't think they are committed, I don't think they know what's going on. Traditionally, contemporary art museums exhibited artists that had a large constituency in the culture of people who cared about art, and wrote about art, and bought art, so when an artist achieved a certain level, a certain vogue in that world, then they would get a show. Museums represent, in my view, constituencies for people who care about art in that area. The presumption that some fricking teenage curator who went to school in Chicago is going to know more about art than a person who has travelled all over the world looking at it, but doesn't happen to have a degree—it makes no sense to me. I don't see why these people should be telling us what to think. I don't think that contemporary art benefits from being publicly administrated.
The main thing is Americans don't like art, they won't pay for art, they don't deserve art. That's just a fact. This is a Puritan republic in which nobody gives a shit about art. When I came to the art world, there were maybe 2000 seriously committed people who would do it whether they got payed or not. Today there are about 2000 seriously committed people who would do it whether they get paid or not. That's fine, those 2000 people created Abstract Expressionism, Minimalism, Pop, and Post-Minimalism in its early days. There have been now for 30 years people working for salaries administering the art world, and what have they done? Art can have public consequences, but it's not very educational. I keep challenging people, "Tell
me one thing that you've learned from art." It is not an educational activity. But we like education, and we like things that go away. You don't need to know anything to understand good art. The only justification for an exhibition these days is some educational purpose, or if it's a box office. At the MoMA what goes is what will get them a box office; the MoMA is more market driven than Mary Boone is. Mary Boone will sometimes put something up just to see if people like it. The MoMA would never do that. And there are a lot of artists that would benefit from a show at the MoMA, who are Modern artists like Bradley Walker Tomlin, James Brookes, and many others who never had a major show. The MoMA will put up Picassos, because people will go see that. The perfect MoMA show would be Picasso's paintings of the Holy Land from the collection of Jacqueline Kennedy.
SC: I understand you are going to do one of these "hŸber" shows. What are your ideas to make it different?
DH: Well, its called "Beau Monde," beautiful world, and I am interested in doing a show that has length as well as width. Most shows are comprised of people from age 35 to 45, of all nations, genders, ethnicities etc, etc. My show will start with people from the oldest practicing generation, and also include some people in their '20s, all of whom are interested in fabrication. Rather than dealing with cultural identity, I am interested in the interface of cultures—the impurity and reconciliation of various cultures, about how one culture impacts another.
SC: You critique works of art with regards to their ideological stance, positioning generosity and inclusiveness against exclusivity, and speaking about works that practice contingency rather than autonomy, and are anti-hierarchical and anti-authoritative at their core. How does that influence your taste?
DH: I am interested in works in which something happens when you look at them. And also I am interested in works that have either the simplicity or the complexity to change their meanings. Good art, to survive, must change its meaning. If we still had to think about a Pollock the way he thought about it, we would hate it. He was crazy, he was an asshole. He thought he was doing Jungian Expression or something. Works of art have to be free enough in the culture to sustain reinterpretation over the years, and they have to continue to happen, and that's very difficult. Works of art don't have messages. They don't have determinate meanings. They're not just formal objects. Deleuze has a book about Lewis Carroll, The Logic of Sense, which is exactly about the way we perceive and sense things. Lewis Carroll has lines that don't mean anything, but they have meaning. And that's how art works. A Pollock doesn't mean anything, but it has meaning, we can find meanings for it, if we care to. I am really not concerned with what the artist meant. It's totally irrelevant. I have written a lot of fiction, I don't know what it meant, I know that the story doesn't mean what I thought it meant. Artists don't know what they're doing, so why ask them? What matters is, what the consensus of opinion of what the work means on a particular moment. And it really matters that a work of art can survive the changing of its meanings.
I am very concerned with the process of thinking and the process of meaning; I am not really concerned with thought or with what things mean. Works of art, according to TS Elliot, are objective correlatives; they are things in the world that we use to correlate our opinions about. That's not meant to discount the artist. It's meant to free the artist, so they can do what they want, because they don't know anyway. I know some grown up artists who know pretty well what they are doing. Ed Ruscha knows what he expects to get, so do Bridget Riley, Richard Serra, and Ellsworth Kelly. But these are people in their sixties and seventies. Anyone who is much younger than that, if they are any good, are still improvising. And then there are people, like Rauschenberg, who are 70 years old and are still improvising. Bob doesn't have the faintest idea what he's doing, but he is doing it every day. I am interested in that, I don't like rules. I think art is for people who like art, who like to talk about physical things in the world. I don't think there is any difference, say, between talking about the Lakers and talking about Terry Winters. Maybe that the Lakers are better, and you talk about them with different people. They are both occasions for discourse.
SC: Your art criticism seems to be a choice you've made within the sphere of writing. You use art criticism to write just as much as you use writing to criticize art.
DH: Yeah, I am a writer. My whole idea in life is to be able to make a living doing what I like to do. I like to write, and I like to write about hard things in the world—I don't usually like to make things up—although I do occasionally. It's fine to make things up at times, because it's so hard to write about things in the world. I am a pretty good writer. I mean some days I write better and some worse, but I have skills, and my view of the world is solid enough that regardless of the topic you give me, I will say some version of the same thing. I wrote a piece called "Earth Scapes, Land Works and Oz" back in '72 for Art in America about Land Art and my position has not changed since then. I have spent most of my career writing about Post-Minimalist art. I write about Bruce Nauman, John Baldessari, Ann Hamilton, Robert Gober. Only recently, because of the shift in taste, do I get to write about people whom I have deep temperamental affinities with, like Warhol or John Wesly. For 30 years you couldn't get a job or occasion to write about these people. I like getting assignments, if I didn't get them I would probably not write anything, except maybe Rock N Roll songs. God, I thought of a really good name for a band the other day, I saw it in Newsweek; 'Cloning Pigs for Parts' . . . "We're,
like, Cloning Pigs for Parts and we're from San Bernardino . . ."
SC: You should go into business.
DH: Yeah, I make up pretty good band names. My other best one was 'Clown Meat,' which I like a whole lot.
SC You being an art critic, as well as a gallery owner in the past, I'm curious to hear what in your mind is the relationship between artists, critics, gallerists . . . what's going on between all these people?
DH: Well. The art world is very easy. When I was a dealer I used to say, "The artist makes the work, I sell the work, the artist's girlfriend or boyfriend tries to get me to give them the money." That's all it is, it's as simple as that. It's all about the public adjudication of value. I prefer today, since I don't really do reviews anymore, to write for commercial galleries.
SC: You mean catalogues?
DH: Yeah. If you write for magazines there is all that educational bullshit you have to put in.
SC: You mean like general art history stuff?
DH: All these magazines are written for sophomores in Southern Illinois University. So you have to say things like "Andy Warhol, the Pop artist." You have to tell everybody who John Wesly is. And I find that to be kind of boring. I just did a catalogue on Picabia for Michael Werner Gallery.
SC: That was a great show.
DH: It was a great show, I love Picabia. And it was really fun; I could just sit down and write about Picabia, and presume that everybody could read and write, and knew who Picabia was, and who Alfred Barr was. Also you're working with professional editors. Art magazines don't have professional editors. Their idea of good writing is Derrida or something. And also it pays better, and it can have some impact on the life of the work. Nothing you write in a magazine, except for maybe a review, has much impact.
SC: Doesn't it have a direct connection to the market value of the work?
DH: Oh certainly, but the market value also has direct connection to the general esteem in which the work is held. Picabia has for many years been a complete cult artist. I was into Picabia, in the mid '70s I bought one for one thousand dollars and sold it for four. He has been an artist held in high esteem by a lot of people for a long time, but without essential market value, and there are people with great market value, Cecily whatever . . .
SC: Brown?
DH: Yeah, Brown, I don't know many artists who hold her in high esteem. She has skill, she may get better. Obviously, there is no direct correspondence between market value and sophisticated esteem. But at the same time you can't separate these things. Put it like this, if you've been an art critic as long as I have, it is very important to be what they call "bankable." Which means if you look at all the people you have written about, it is important that their prices go up. In other words, you're not going to spend all your time writing about some bumpkin who carves tree stumps in Seattle. It doesn't matter, the word's not out there, people are not talking about it, its just vanity writing. I do that sometimes, but not very much. Nor is there much good to be gained from doing theoretical analysis. Theory is easy, practice is hard. I used to say theory is playing poker with no spots on the cards. I like to critique the hard world, so the hard world becomes a critique of what you write. And you want to have influence; you want to make people take what you value seriously, and you want people to question what you don't take seriously.
I don't write negative criticism very much. I would never write a negative review of a young artist. There are certain sort of hyper-inflated reputations, which I will occasionally take a shot at. I took a shot at Clemente's Neo-Expressionist paintings, and I love some of his work. I took a shot at Christopher Wool as well, who seems to me an incredibly pretentious artist. But I don't usually do that—it's easy to critique and it's hard to praise—so I would rather tell you why I think something is good. There is really no such thing as an art critic having power; works of art have power, and you have to kind of be right and persuasive at the same time. It helps to understand commerce for what it is, which is a way to make a living doing what you like to do. I don't have a fancy family, I didn't go to Harvard, I don't have a trust fund, I never got a fucking grant and I am not likely to, because I don't have a grant-friendly sensibility. If it weren't for the magazine world, I would probably be teaching Melville in some junior college, and drinking. I would be dead, or still out with some sleazy garage band playing "Free Bird," and "Rock N Roll Hoochy Coo," that's not something you look forward to.
SC: Yeah, that's not a pretty thing. I remember reading you dropped out of grad school—
DH: Yeah, I hated it.
SC: What was wrong?
DH: Well, I always thought it was about intellectual adventure, and it was really about a lot of people who wanted to be junior professors in a school and that was it. It wasn't exciting. My idea of embarking upon graduate studies was to go some place where the smart people are. Unfortunately, the smart people are no longer in universities, the smart people are writing for [The Simpsons, the smart people are writing for LL Cool J. There are exceptions, and that's an exaggeration, but most of all academic culture is just one big handicap, and I live in it with colleagues that I respect, but it ain't where the thoughts are thought. I kind of like teaching—I mean, I enjoy working with artists. But what I do with graduate students now, is exactly what I did with the artists I represented when I was a dealer. I go to their studios, we sit around and talk about the work with the idea of how can we get this shit looking like something. That's it. I like being around people who work. All of my social talk is with people who have done something between the time I talked to them last, and the time I talk to them now. University people really don't do very much, so you have to talk about pets. I am mostly interested in people who are doing things and are busy. I get along with them.
SC: So when did you start teaching?
DH: Well, I was doing semesters here and there, and then I decided I wanted to move to Las Vegas, so I kind of bullied the people here into hiring me, because I had a good resume, and I wanted to have health insurance, and I wanted to have contact with young artists, but not as a critic. Since I have a lot of apparent leverage in art world, young artists don't behave "normally" around me anymore. I enjoy working with young artists, I find myself in the midst of a generation of young artists with more temperamental affinities than I had with young artists for many years.
SC: Do you like TV?
DH: Well, I watch it all the time.
SC: What's you favorite thing?
DH: Basketball. I'll watch anything. I liked Perry Mason so I like Law and Order which is like Perry Mason. The first half is law the second is order, it's a type of Formalism. The density of the variations they run on that sort of thing becomes interesting. I watch kickboxing movies, which seem to be the most orderly movies that are made. Some guy kills some guy's brother and then there's explosions. I like them because all the people that work on these movies are extremely professional and the plots are very orderly—they all have a kind of coherence that your standard Hollywood movie doesn't have any more. I was telling somebody the other day it looks to me that Hollywood is making foreign films. I mean what fucking universe does Runaway Bride live in. It's like it comes from Belgium or something, what the fuck is that about. The last one I really understood was Encino Man, which was pretty good.
SC: What was that about?
DH: It's a high school comedy in which a bunch of kids living in Encino defrost a Neanderthal man who becomes the most popular guy in school.
BEN BUCHANAN: What about reality TV?
DH: Oh, I hate that.
SC: What about cops?
DH: Kind of, I like the song. The song is great and I like the idea that as long as I keep my fucking shirt on, I won't get arrested. I don't like baseball. I don't like most things, I mostly channel surf. The Simpsons are cool.
SC: Consistently cool.
DH: Yeah. I like actually that cartoon on MTV, Daria, with the little girl . . .
BB: The disaffected youth?
DH: Yes, the disaffected youth, I think she's great. I recognize that family. I watch whatever comes up. I usually watch Biography but I don't really like it. There is only about one in ten that's any good, but it's interesting to know shit about peoples' lives, and it's also interesting to speculate on what their lives are actually like, as opposed to what you have been told that they were like. I hated Survivor because I teach at a faculty and Survivor is about how bureaucracies work. First you cut off the odd and the weak, then you cut off the strong, then you form an alliance of mediocre people, and the administrator of that alliance gets to be dean. And that's what Survivor is about.
SC: And they get the cash.
DH: Yeah, they get the cash. I watch TV without the sound. I am actually kind of annoyed that there isn't any music on MTV anymore, that there are all those reality shows and sit-coms. I'll leave MTV on, and if the picture looks good, I will put the sound on, although the music video industry has collapsed. Its one of those genres in which the first ones were the best ones.
BB: That's very true.
DH: Also, I was a songwriter, so I hated MTV. I didn't like that they got their shot at my song, I would rather have them send me a video with a clip track, and let me write to their video. Rather than putting my teenage love song on Mars or something like that.
SC: I guess you've been around America a lot since you were a kid, moving around with your family, and later on your own.
DH: Yes, I am a habitual traveler.
SC: So . . . what's this place all about if it's about anything?
DH: I don't have any idea. It's interesting, and its perpetually amazing. It is less amazing than it used to be because a lot of the eccentricity and the regional differences have been smoothed out. In a sense, I like that. I like that anywhere I go, I can stay at the Holiday Inn, and I know where the bathroom is. But I am really interested in people who make it up as they go along and there are still some out there. Regardless of what my colleagues say, you have in this place, still, a lot more options, and a lot more freedom than I see in other places. You can really do some weird shit. You can always leave town as well; go to the edge and declare that the center. You can always leave town and start again and then start 'againagain.' It is possible in good times to live on the margin. Like in the '60s and '70s, their was enough money floating around to get by. I have no idea how I supported myself between '68-'78. This kind of money and fluidity is coming around again, so there is enough money that there is a margin that you can survive on. And that privileges improvisation. I think it is going to get better, I believe in Darwin.
SC: You believe in evolution and progress?
DH: No, I believe in deviation. What you want is a maximum field of deviation. And anything that tries to keep things from deviating is against my principles. The more deviation there is, the more new things you have to select and not select from. And that interests me. That's why I didn't like art from '75 to '85; that was against deviation. You had to be a certain kind of person to be an artist, and believe certain kinds of things that I stopped believing when I quit the SDS. So that's my aspiration for the art world, that it would be a place that tolerates intellectual tumult.
Sari Carel : Often you discuss in your essays and writings a principle shift that occurred in American culture and economy as well as in the Art World starting in the early '70s. You describe this change as having considerable influence on the course of Contemporary Art since then. What are the origins and consequences of this paradigm shift?
Dave Hickey: The art world tends to be driven by its market, and throughout the '50s and the '60s it was a relatively small art world with dealers and collectors and one or two small museums. It was during that period that the most powerful and permanent American art in this century was made—from Abstract Expressionism and Pop, to Minimalism and Post-Minimalism. It was, in a real sense, a great Mediterranean moment created by 4000 heavily medicated human beings. And then in the late '60s we had a little reformation privileging museums over dealers and universities over apprenticeship, a vast shift in the structure of cultural authority. All of a sudden rather than an art world made up of critics and dealers, collectors and artists, you have curators, you have tenured theory professors, a public funding bureaucracy—you have all of these hierarchical authority figures selling a non-hierarchical ideology in a very hierarchical way. This really destroyed the dynamic of the art world in my view, simply because like most conservative reactions to the '60s it was aimed specifically at the destruction of sibling society—the society of contemporaries.
During this time, it was almost impossible for anything to change, because our culture is composed of a public academic and museum sector that changes slowly, and after the fact, in 30 year cycles, and a private gallery and magazine sector that changes rapidly, sometimes overnight. In the last ten years the academics who have been retiring from American universities are Abstract Expressionists and Formalists hired and tenured in the late '60s, just as these practices lost public credibility. They are being replaced with Deconstructionists who are already out of date, and who will be in power for the next 30 years, talking about stuff that is already over now.
SC: So you see that as the origin of the shift?
DH: The first paradigm shift really had to do with the influence of French Theory in the '50s and the '60s. That's the world in which I was educated, and in its secular formulations it still has its virtues. I continue to believe that the bad thing about French Theory is that it has no heart, and the good thing about French Theory is that it has no soul. In the early '70s the influence of French Theory was considerably altered by the resurgence of German Aesthetic Theory—particularly that of the Frankfurt School whose academicized Marxism lent itself very well to the academicized Marxism that was practiced in American universities. And also, I think there was another set of problems. The powerful arguments of French Theory—as it might be applied to art—revolve around its critique of Metaphysics and the discourse of origins that manifest in speculations about the death of the artist, and the structural ideology of institutions.
If your in an institution teaching artists, you can't kill the artist or critique the institution with much credibility; if you believe in group identity and identity politics, you just restored the author in another guise. If you are tenured in a university you have to limit your critique of institutions considerably, because you are part of an institution. In other words, Post Structuralism is not an academic discourse; Frankfurt School and Marxism is. Also, in the '60s new English translations of writers like Adorno, Benjamin, and Lukacs became available.
They were much needed because, loosely interpreted, they allowed us to be Mystical and Romantic, to talk about authenticity again, about what artists feel and their identity. In the world I grew up in, the artist was really presumed to be dead, and to most of my contemporaries, issues of artistic identity mean nothing. They mean nothing to Warhol, they mean nothing to Bruce Nauman, Ed Ruscha, Bridget Riley, or Richard Serra. It's bullshit as far as they are concerned.
From my view, it is a bunch of Romantic bullshit. I think that we are having now a kind of Counter-Reformation that has to do first of all with the fact that for 25 years, the market for works of art was the kunsthalle, the museum and the university. You were being paid by the state to make art that couldn't sell, and the art itself, because it was totally isolated from the market, simply didn't change. All of that begins to change when the National Endowment no longer gives as much money, when jobs in universities are no longer available, when art stops being a nice safe place to go. Because for 30 years being an artist was a safe thing to do. You filled out forms, got your check, taught in classes, you flew to Berlin and put up press type on the wall, poured a bunch of leaves in the room, and a bunch of people came, and you had wine and cheese. Then you flew home, and taught your classes, and went to faculty meetings, and applied for a merit raise, which the university gave you because you had a show in Berlin.
And that works fine, although it does not create art that changes. So I think we are seeing now the restoration of sibling society, a society of peers. Most of the young artists that I know are interested in what their contemporaries think; they don't give a fuck what old people think. Your peers are who you live with till you die. You can please a lot of authority figures, but they're dead before you need them. So I think it's changing, in good ways but in a lot of silly ways too.
Another reason it is changing is that in the history of art, the tides of influence tend to go back and forth, they tend to be reactive. One generation reacts against another; the next generation, reacting against the previous one, goes back to the generation before that, which is to say the tides of influence in the art world tend to skip a generation.
So now I have students who are really into Bridget Riley and Richard Serra; students who study Warhol, mostly as a colorist. When you are a young artist, you look around and you say, 'Gee everything sucks, I am going to go back to the moment right before everything started sucking, and try to find a new way out of that'. So you have a lot of artists trying to find a new way out of '60s art, much in the same way artists in the '80s tried to find a new way out of '40s art—in the sense that Julian Schnabel, David Salle, and Francesco Clemente looked back to the early figurative sources of Abstract Expressionism as a place to start. So that's perfectly natural, and it happens all the time.
The problem today, of course, is that art cannot change so fast because it is so highly institutional. The people in the museum are going to be there forever, the people in the university are going to be there even longer. The institutional super structure of the art world, which is always out of date by definition, is really out of date now. I think that you do begin to see small undergrounds, although its hard to stay underground for very long just because if you're any good at all, people really want to look at it, because there is so much boring fucking art. Anybody who sees anything they like, they go crazy. I know artists just coming out of school and they already have a waiting list of 40 paintings, and that's not because they are great artists, it's just that they're not bad artists.
SC: I am assuming that there has always been quite a lot of bad and boring art, no?
DH: Not ideologically bad and boring. We have lived with an ideology that says, "If it looks good, it's bad. If people like it, it's bad. If it's appealing it's reactionary". So you have artists consciously making the worst looking art that they can. And it can really be bad, because it usually looks bad even when you are trying to make it look OK. So I'm pretty optimistic.
SC: So you think the whole premise of underground arenas and artistic practice is not a bankrupt idea to try and work from?
DH: It works if you want it to work. It depends on what you want. I grew up in a world in which what artists aspired to was to be able to go to their studio, make art, sell a work occasionally, so they can buy some Wheaties, and some records, and listen to records, and make art, and eat Wheaties. And that was their goal: stay away from the straight world, and stay away from the university, and live their lives. So if that is your aspiration, then yes, I know quite a few young artists that are achieving that now. Most young artists don't want that.
SC: What do they want?
DH: They want to fly to Berlin, and put up press type, and that's fine 'cause there is an audience over there for that. But I argue all the time that painting today is much more like Jazz than it is like installation art. It is a discourse that people who know know, the people who care care, and the people who don't care we don't give a shit about. Painters are famous the way Jazz musicians are famous—which means the people who care about painting know them. I just wrote a piece for Art Forum about John Wesly. He has been a famous painter for 40 years among people who love painting. I can go over to Cal Arts and ask them if they know who John Wesly is, and they would go, "Huh? What discourse does he participate in?" I am in the art world only insofar as there are interesting things for me to write about. When that stops, or when I stop getting offers to write things, I'll be out. I won't be going around looking for work; it's not like its any fun. When I was a kid, I had a gallery in Texas, I met Leo Castelli, and I thought Leo was cool. And I would think, "When I go to New York, maybe I will have lunch with Leo, or maybe I can have lunch with Sidney Janis." I would be hard put to think up anybody in the art world I would like to have lunch with today. Maybe Leo Steinberg.
SC: How was Leo cool?
DH: Well, he liked art and he was a business person who wasn't obsessed with money. He liked gossip and he had a good eye. He understood how it works. He virtually invented the '60s. He treated his artists right: he never let them go, they always left him. When I was a dealer, he told me good things. "David" he would say, "The art goes out, the money comes in."
SC: So an environment working under the title "Museum of Contemporary Art," is that a paradox to you? Say, institutions that produce shows like the "Whitney Biennial" and the "Carnegie International," are they dramatically failing to present us with successful surveys of the present state of affairs?
DH: I think it's pretty peculiar. I think it's a little unnatural. I don't think you should grant appointed conservators, which is what museum people are, the power to determine the course of art. I don't think they are worthy, I don't think they are committed, I don't think they know what's going on. Traditionally, contemporary art museums exhibited artists that had a large constituency in the culture of people who cared about art, and wrote about art, and bought art, so when an artist achieved a certain level, a certain vogue in that world, then they would get a show. Museums represent, in my view, constituencies for people who care about art in that area. The presumption that some fricking teenage curator who went to school in Chicago is going to know more about art than a person who has travelled all over the world looking at it, but doesn't happen to have a degree—it makes no sense to me. I don't see why these people should be telling us what to think. I don't think that contemporary art benefits from being publicly administrated.
The main thing is Americans don't like art, they won't pay for art, they don't deserve art. That's just a fact. This is a Puritan republic in which nobody gives a shit about art. When I came to the art world, there were maybe 2000 seriously committed people who would do it whether they got payed or not. Today there are about 2000 seriously committed people who would do it whether they get paid or not. That's fine, those 2000 people created Abstract Expressionism, Minimalism, Pop, and Post-Minimalism in its early days. There have been now for 30 years people working for salaries administering the art world, and what have they done? Art can have public consequences, but it's not very educational. I keep challenging people, "Tell
me one thing that you've learned from art." It is not an educational activity. But we like education, and we like things that go away. You don't need to know anything to understand good art. The only justification for an exhibition these days is some educational purpose, or if it's a box office. At the MoMA what goes is what will get them a box office; the MoMA is more market driven than Mary Boone is. Mary Boone will sometimes put something up just to see if people like it. The MoMA would never do that. And there are a lot of artists that would benefit from a show at the MoMA, who are Modern artists like Bradley Walker Tomlin, James Brookes, and many others who never had a major show. The MoMA will put up Picassos, because people will go see that. The perfect MoMA show would be Picasso's paintings of the Holy Land from the collection of Jacqueline Kennedy.
SC: I understand you are going to do one of these "hŸber" shows. What are your ideas to make it different?
DH: Well, its called "Beau Monde," beautiful world, and I am interested in doing a show that has length as well as width. Most shows are comprised of people from age 35 to 45, of all nations, genders, ethnicities etc, etc. My show will start with people from the oldest practicing generation, and also include some people in their '20s, all of whom are interested in fabrication. Rather than dealing with cultural identity, I am interested in the interface of cultures—the impurity and reconciliation of various cultures, about how one culture impacts another.
SC: You critique works of art with regards to their ideological stance, positioning generosity and inclusiveness against exclusivity, and speaking about works that practice contingency rather than autonomy, and are anti-hierarchical and anti-authoritative at their core. How does that influence your taste?
DH: I am interested in works in which something happens when you look at them. And also I am interested in works that have either the simplicity or the complexity to change their meanings. Good art, to survive, must change its meaning. If we still had to think about a Pollock the way he thought about it, we would hate it. He was crazy, he was an asshole. He thought he was doing Jungian Expression or something. Works of art have to be free enough in the culture to sustain reinterpretation over the years, and they have to continue to happen, and that's very difficult. Works of art don't have messages. They don't have determinate meanings. They're not just formal objects. Deleuze has a book about Lewis Carroll, The Logic of Sense, which is exactly about the way we perceive and sense things. Lewis Carroll has lines that don't mean anything, but they have meaning. And that's how art works. A Pollock doesn't mean anything, but it has meaning, we can find meanings for it, if we care to. I am really not concerned with what the artist meant. It's totally irrelevant. I have written a lot of fiction, I don't know what it meant, I know that the story doesn't mean what I thought it meant. Artists don't know what they're doing, so why ask them? What matters is, what the consensus of opinion of what the work means on a particular moment. And it really matters that a work of art can survive the changing of its meanings.
I am very concerned with the process of thinking and the process of meaning; I am not really concerned with thought or with what things mean. Works of art, according to TS Elliot, are objective correlatives; they are things in the world that we use to correlate our opinions about. That's not meant to discount the artist. It's meant to free the artist, so they can do what they want, because they don't know anyway. I know some grown up artists who know pretty well what they are doing. Ed Ruscha knows what he expects to get, so do Bridget Riley, Richard Serra, and Ellsworth Kelly. But these are people in their sixties and seventies. Anyone who is much younger than that, if they are any good, are still improvising. And then there are people, like Rauschenberg, who are 70 years old and are still improvising. Bob doesn't have the faintest idea what he's doing, but he is doing it every day. I am interested in that, I don't like rules. I think art is for people who like art, who like to talk about physical things in the world. I don't think there is any difference, say, between talking about the Lakers and talking about Terry Winters. Maybe that the Lakers are better, and you talk about them with different people. They are both occasions for discourse.
SC: Your art criticism seems to be a choice you've made within the sphere of writing. You use art criticism to write just as much as you use writing to criticize art.
DH: Yeah, I am a writer. My whole idea in life is to be able to make a living doing what I like to do. I like to write, and I like to write about hard things in the world—I don't usually like to make things up—although I do occasionally. It's fine to make things up at times, because it's so hard to write about things in the world. I am a pretty good writer. I mean some days I write better and some worse, but I have skills, and my view of the world is solid enough that regardless of the topic you give me, I will say some version of the same thing. I wrote a piece called "Earth Scapes, Land Works and Oz" back in '72 for Art in America about Land Art and my position has not changed since then. I have spent most of my career writing about Post-Minimalist art. I write about Bruce Nauman, John Baldessari, Ann Hamilton, Robert Gober. Only recently, because of the shift in taste, do I get to write about people whom I have deep temperamental affinities with, like Warhol or John Wesly. For 30 years you couldn't get a job or occasion to write about these people. I like getting assignments, if I didn't get them I would probably not write anything, except maybe Rock N Roll songs. God, I thought of a really good name for a band the other day, I saw it in Newsweek; 'Cloning Pigs for Parts' . . . "We're,
like, Cloning Pigs for Parts and we're from San Bernardino . . ."
SC: You should go into business.
DH: Yeah, I make up pretty good band names. My other best one was 'Clown Meat,' which I like a whole lot.
SC You being an art critic, as well as a gallery owner in the past, I'm curious to hear what in your mind is the relationship between artists, critics, gallerists . . . what's going on between all these people?
DH: Well. The art world is very easy. When I was a dealer I used to say, "The artist makes the work, I sell the work, the artist's girlfriend or boyfriend tries to get me to give them the money." That's all it is, it's as simple as that. It's all about the public adjudication of value. I prefer today, since I don't really do reviews anymore, to write for commercial galleries.
SC: You mean catalogues?
DH: Yeah. If you write for magazines there is all that educational bullshit you have to put in.
SC: You mean like general art history stuff?
DH: All these magazines are written for sophomores in Southern Illinois University. So you have to say things like "Andy Warhol, the Pop artist." You have to tell everybody who John Wesly is. And I find that to be kind of boring. I just did a catalogue on Picabia for Michael Werner Gallery.
SC: That was a great show.
DH: It was a great show, I love Picabia. And it was really fun; I could just sit down and write about Picabia, and presume that everybody could read and write, and knew who Picabia was, and who Alfred Barr was. Also you're working with professional editors. Art magazines don't have professional editors. Their idea of good writing is Derrida or something. And also it pays better, and it can have some impact on the life of the work. Nothing you write in a magazine, except for maybe a review, has much impact.
SC: Doesn't it have a direct connection to the market value of the work?
DH: Oh certainly, but the market value also has direct connection to the general esteem in which the work is held. Picabia has for many years been a complete cult artist. I was into Picabia, in the mid '70s I bought one for one thousand dollars and sold it for four. He has been an artist held in high esteem by a lot of people for a long time, but without essential market value, and there are people with great market value, Cecily whatever . . .
SC: Brown?
DH: Yeah, Brown, I don't know many artists who hold her in high esteem. She has skill, she may get better. Obviously, there is no direct correspondence between market value and sophisticated esteem. But at the same time you can't separate these things. Put it like this, if you've been an art critic as long as I have, it is very important to be what they call "bankable." Which means if you look at all the people you have written about, it is important that their prices go up. In other words, you're not going to spend all your time writing about some bumpkin who carves tree stumps in Seattle. It doesn't matter, the word's not out there, people are not talking about it, its just vanity writing. I do that sometimes, but not very much. Nor is there much good to be gained from doing theoretical analysis. Theory is easy, practice is hard. I used to say theory is playing poker with no spots on the cards. I like to critique the hard world, so the hard world becomes a critique of what you write. And you want to have influence; you want to make people take what you value seriously, and you want people to question what you don't take seriously.
I don't write negative criticism very much. I would never write a negative review of a young artist. There are certain sort of hyper-inflated reputations, which I will occasionally take a shot at. I took a shot at Clemente's Neo-Expressionist paintings, and I love some of his work. I took a shot at Christopher Wool as well, who seems to me an incredibly pretentious artist. But I don't usually do that—it's easy to critique and it's hard to praise—so I would rather tell you why I think something is good. There is really no such thing as an art critic having power; works of art have power, and you have to kind of be right and persuasive at the same time. It helps to understand commerce for what it is, which is a way to make a living doing what you like to do. I don't have a fancy family, I didn't go to Harvard, I don't have a trust fund, I never got a fucking grant and I am not likely to, because I don't have a grant-friendly sensibility. If it weren't for the magazine world, I would probably be teaching Melville in some junior college, and drinking. I would be dead, or still out with some sleazy garage band playing "Free Bird," and "Rock N Roll Hoochy Coo," that's not something you look forward to.
SC: Yeah, that's not a pretty thing. I remember reading you dropped out of grad school—
DH: Yeah, I hated it.
SC: What was wrong?
DH: Well, I always thought it was about intellectual adventure, and it was really about a lot of people who wanted to be junior professors in a school and that was it. It wasn't exciting. My idea of embarking upon graduate studies was to go some place where the smart people are. Unfortunately, the smart people are no longer in universities, the smart people are writing for [The Simpsons, the smart people are writing for LL Cool J. There are exceptions, and that's an exaggeration, but most of all academic culture is just one big handicap, and I live in it with colleagues that I respect, but it ain't where the thoughts are thought. I kind of like teaching—I mean, I enjoy working with artists. But what I do with graduate students now, is exactly what I did with the artists I represented when I was a dealer. I go to their studios, we sit around and talk about the work with the idea of how can we get this shit looking like something. That's it. I like being around people who work. All of my social talk is with people who have done something between the time I talked to them last, and the time I talk to them now. University people really don't do very much, so you have to talk about pets. I am mostly interested in people who are doing things and are busy. I get along with them.
SC: So when did you start teaching?
DH: Well, I was doing semesters here and there, and then I decided I wanted to move to Las Vegas, so I kind of bullied the people here into hiring me, because I had a good resume, and I wanted to have health insurance, and I wanted to have contact with young artists, but not as a critic. Since I have a lot of apparent leverage in art world, young artists don't behave "normally" around me anymore. I enjoy working with young artists, I find myself in the midst of a generation of young artists with more temperamental affinities than I had with young artists for many years.
SC: Do you like TV?
DH: Well, I watch it all the time.
SC: What's you favorite thing?
DH: Basketball. I'll watch anything. I liked Perry Mason so I like Law and Order which is like Perry Mason. The first half is law the second is order, it's a type of Formalism. The density of the variations they run on that sort of thing becomes interesting. I watch kickboxing movies, which seem to be the most orderly movies that are made. Some guy kills some guy's brother and then there's explosions. I like them because all the people that work on these movies are extremely professional and the plots are very orderly—they all have a kind of coherence that your standard Hollywood movie doesn't have any more. I was telling somebody the other day it looks to me that Hollywood is making foreign films. I mean what fucking universe does Runaway Bride live in. It's like it comes from Belgium or something, what the fuck is that about. The last one I really understood was Encino Man, which was pretty good.
SC: What was that about?
DH: It's a high school comedy in which a bunch of kids living in Encino defrost a Neanderthal man who becomes the most popular guy in school.
BEN BUCHANAN: What about reality TV?
DH: Oh, I hate that.
SC: What about cops?
DH: Kind of, I like the song. The song is great and I like the idea that as long as I keep my fucking shirt on, I won't get arrested. I don't like baseball. I don't like most things, I mostly channel surf. The Simpsons are cool.
SC: Consistently cool.
DH: Yeah. I like actually that cartoon on MTV, Daria, with the little girl . . .
BB: The disaffected youth?
DH: Yes, the disaffected youth, I think she's great. I recognize that family. I watch whatever comes up. I usually watch Biography but I don't really like it. There is only about one in ten that's any good, but it's interesting to know shit about peoples' lives, and it's also interesting to speculate on what their lives are actually like, as opposed to what you have been told that they were like. I hated Survivor because I teach at a faculty and Survivor is about how bureaucracies work. First you cut off the odd and the weak, then you cut off the strong, then you form an alliance of mediocre people, and the administrator of that alliance gets to be dean. And that's what Survivor is about.
SC: And they get the cash.
DH: Yeah, they get the cash. I watch TV without the sound. I am actually kind of annoyed that there isn't any music on MTV anymore, that there are all those reality shows and sit-coms. I'll leave MTV on, and if the picture looks good, I will put the sound on, although the music video industry has collapsed. Its one of those genres in which the first ones were the best ones.
BB: That's very true.
DH: Also, I was a songwriter, so I hated MTV. I didn't like that they got their shot at my song, I would rather have them send me a video with a clip track, and let me write to their video. Rather than putting my teenage love song on Mars or something like that.
SC: I guess you've been around America a lot since you were a kid, moving around with your family, and later on your own.
DH: Yes, I am a habitual traveler.
SC: So . . . what's this place all about if it's about anything?
DH: I don't have any idea. It's interesting, and its perpetually amazing. It is less amazing than it used to be because a lot of the eccentricity and the regional differences have been smoothed out. In a sense, I like that. I like that anywhere I go, I can stay at the Holiday Inn, and I know where the bathroom is. But I am really interested in people who make it up as they go along and there are still some out there. Regardless of what my colleagues say, you have in this place, still, a lot more options, and a lot more freedom than I see in other places. You can really do some weird shit. You can always leave town as well; go to the edge and declare that the center. You can always leave town and start again and then start 'againagain.' It is possible in good times to live on the margin. Like in the '60s and '70s, their was enough money floating around to get by. I have no idea how I supported myself between '68-'78. This kind of money and fluidity is coming around again, so there is enough money that there is a margin that you can survive on. And that privileges improvisation. I think it is going to get better, I believe in Darwin.
SC: You believe in evolution and progress?
DH: No, I believe in deviation. What you want is a maximum field of deviation. And anything that tries to keep things from deviating is against my principles. The more deviation there is, the more new things you have to select and not select from. And that interests me. That's why I didn't like art from '75 to '85; that was against deviation. You had to be a certain kind of person to be an artist, and believe certain kinds of things that I stopped believing when I quit the SDS. So that's my aspiration for the art world, that it would be a place that tolerates intellectual tumult.
Sari Carel : Often you discuss in your essays and writings a principle shift that occurred in American culture and economy as well as in the Art World starting in the early '70s. You describe this change as having considerable influence on the course of Contemporary Art since then. What are the origins and consequences of this paradigm shift?
Dave Hickey: The art world tends to be driven by its market, and throughout the '50s and the '60s it was a relatively small art world with dealers and collectors and one or two small museums. It was during that period that the most powerful and permanent American art in this century was made—from Abstract Expressionism and Pop, to Minimalism and Post-Minimalism. It was, in a real sense, a great Mediterranean moment created by 4000 heavily medicated human beings. And then in the late '60s we had a little reformation privileging museums over dealers and universities over apprenticeship, a vast shift in the structure of cultural authority. All of a sudden rather than an art world made up of critics and dealers, collectors and artists, you have curators, you have tenured theory professors, a public funding bureaucracy—you have all of these hierarchical authority figures selling a non-hierarchical ideology in a very hierarchical way. This really destroyed the dynamic of the art world in my view, simply because like most conservative reactions to the '60s it was aimed specifically at the destruction of sibling society—the society of contemporaries.
Wednesday, November 09, 2005
A collection of quotes by artists on how to deal with criticism.
"It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly; who errs and comes short again and again; because there is not effort without error and shortcomings; but who does actually strive to do the deed; who knows the great enthusiasm, the great devotion, who spends himself in a worthy cause, who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement and who at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly. So that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat." - Theodore Roosevelt
”Lots of people will protest that it’s quite unreal and that I'm out of my mind, but that's just too bad” -- Claude Monet
“It is a well-known fact that we see the faults in other's works more readily than we do in our own.” -- Pablo Picasso
“I paint for myself. I don’t know how to do anything else, anyway.” -- Francis Bacon
“If you hear a voice within you saying, ‘You are not a painter,’ then by all means paint, and that voice will be silenced.” -- Henri Matisse
“The artist must scorn all judgment that is not based on an intelligent observation of character. He must beware of the literary spirit which so often causes a painting to deviate from its true path – the concrete study of nature – to lose itself all too long in intangible speculations.” -- Paul Cezanne
”When I judge art, I take my painting and put it next to a God-made object like a tree or flower. If it clashes, it is not art.” -- Marc Chagall
“To escape criticism – do nothing, say nothing, be nothing.” -- Elbert Hubbard
”Do what you feel in your heart to be right, for you'll be criticized anyway .” -- Eleanor Roosevelt
”I read an article on me once that described my machine-method of silk-screen copying and painting: 'What a bold and audacious solution, what depths of the man are revealed in this solution!' What does that mean?” -- Andy Warhol
”[People] want me to finish things. But I see them in such a way and paint them accordingly. … Nothing is simpler than to complete pictures in a superficial sense. Never does one lie so cleverly as then.”-- Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec
”Skill without imagination is craftsmanship and gives us many useful objects such as wickerwork picnic baskets. Imagination without skill gives us modern art.” -- Tom Stoppard, author
”Each one of us, in his timidity, has a limit beyond which he is outraged. It is inevitable that he who by concentrated application has extended this limit for himself, should arouse the resentment of those who have accepted conventions which, since accepted by all, require no initiative of application. And this resentment generally takes the form of meaningless laughter or of criticism, if not persecution.” -- Man Ray
“I've done what I could as a painter and that seems to me to be sufficient. I don't want to be compared to the great masters of the past, and my painting is open to criticism; that's enough.” -- Claude Monet
“The attacks of which I have been the object have broken the spring of life in me... People don't realize what it feels like to be constantly insulted.” -- Edouard Manet
“Creativity takes courage.” -- Henri Matisse
”Lots of people will protest that it’s quite unreal and that I'm out of my mind, but that's just too bad” -- Claude Monet
“It is a well-known fact that we see the faults in other's works more readily than we do in our own.” -- Pablo Picasso
“I paint for myself. I don’t know how to do anything else, anyway.” -- Francis Bacon
“If you hear a voice within you saying, ‘You are not a painter,’ then by all means paint, and that voice will be silenced.” -- Henri Matisse
“The artist must scorn all judgment that is not based on an intelligent observation of character. He must beware of the literary spirit which so often causes a painting to deviate from its true path – the concrete study of nature – to lose itself all too long in intangible speculations.” -- Paul Cezanne
”When I judge art, I take my painting and put it next to a God-made object like a tree or flower. If it clashes, it is not art.” -- Marc Chagall
“To escape criticism – do nothing, say nothing, be nothing.” -- Elbert Hubbard
”Do what you feel in your heart to be right, for you'll be criticized anyway .” -- Eleanor Roosevelt
”I read an article on me once that described my machine-method of silk-screen copying and painting: 'What a bold and audacious solution, what depths of the man are revealed in this solution!' What does that mean?” -- Andy Warhol
”[People] want me to finish things. But I see them in such a way and paint them accordingly. … Nothing is simpler than to complete pictures in a superficial sense. Never does one lie so cleverly as then.”-- Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec
”Skill without imagination is craftsmanship and gives us many useful objects such as wickerwork picnic baskets. Imagination without skill gives us modern art.” -- Tom Stoppard, author
”Each one of us, in his timidity, has a limit beyond which he is outraged. It is inevitable that he who by concentrated application has extended this limit for himself, should arouse the resentment of those who have accepted conventions which, since accepted by all, require no initiative of application. And this resentment generally takes the form of meaningless laughter or of criticism, if not persecution.” -- Man Ray
“I've done what I could as a painter and that seems to me to be sufficient. I don't want to be compared to the great masters of the past, and my painting is open to criticism; that's enough.” -- Claude Monet
“The attacks of which I have been the object have broken the spring of life in me... People don't realize what it feels like to be constantly insulted.” -- Edouard Manet
“Creativity takes courage.” -- Henri Matisse
Friday, November 04, 2005
Digital Artists: A Tale of Three Photographers
Digital Artists: A Tale of Three Photographers
By Lorraine A. DarConte
Today, there are almost as many different ways to create a photograph as there are photographers, and digital technology has only made the list longer and more interesting. Just as some photographers prefer Canon over Leica, or Kodak as opposed to Pentax, they are picking and choosing the digital tools that best serve them in their photographic pursuits.
Juliya Lezhen, a young student originally from Russia, submerged herself in the world of junkyards and rusted metal and emerged with a series of colorful, abstract images reminiscent of Rorschach tests and Pollack paintings. Joe Deiss, a master of large format photography, has temporarily abandoned his Deerdorf to work on a series of botanicals that are one-hundred-percent digital. And I, myself, have been busy leading my own personal digital backlash by returning to photography’s roots and learning the fine art of alternative processes, with a little help from digital technology (so much for that revolution).
My current series, Plant Abstracts, combines new, 21st century digital technology with early 19th century photographic processes including Vandyke, cyanotype and gum dichromate. I chose to photograph plants – foliage and flowers – for several reasons. One is the challenge of presenting the subject matter – which has been photographed, sculpted and painted by most everyone – in a new light. Plants are also readily available models with good attitudes that are, simply put, beautiful and hard to resist, no matter how commonplace.
Printing the images using these early processes allows me to produce photographs on a wide range of paper surfaces that result in prints with beautiful textures and tonal range, adding to their unique quality. The digital technology – in this case, scanning and manipulating images, and then making computer-generated negatives – allows me to create an image that exists in my mind’s eye and work with traditional photographic processes.
All images are first photographed with film and then scanned. I transform the images via Adobe Photoshop and an iMac with one or more filters such as "twirl" or "noise." Images are also converted to black-and-white. Some of the photos are heavily manipulated while others I barely touch. I then invert the images in Photoshop to create a negative (a positive can also be used). To make a negative, I print the inverted image (any size from 5x7 up to 11x17) on Pictorico Premium OHP Transparency Film with a color printer. I use an Epson Stylus Scan 2000. That’s the digital portion of the process. The prints are created individually, by hand, with a few well-mixed chemicals, some fine cotton/rag papers, a contact frame, hake brushes, UV light and water. The paper is coated with light-sensitive chemicals, dried and placed in a contact frame with the negative. I then expose the image outdoors (a UV box may also be used), typically for about two minutes (time varies with negative density, of course). The prints are developed mostly in water (for all three processes), although Vandyke prints must also be fixed. Since the photographs are printed on 100-percent cotton rag papers, I can also add color by painting them with traditional watercolors.
Recently, I was asked why I go through the hassle of hand-making prints when I can get a similar effect using digital software. For me, it’s about acquiring new skills and honing old ones and mixing new technologies with old-fashioned craftsmanship. It’s about the texture of the paper, the curve of a brushstroke, and rich, beautiful colors. It’s about a quality print that is truly one-of-a-kind.
Rusty Revelations
"The light here in Tucson is incredible," says photographer Juliya Lezhen. "There’s hardly ever a cloudy day, so I never need to use a flash or other artificial light. Every day I can go out and photograph something." Lately, that "something" for Lezhen has been metal, mostly of the rusting, peeling and decaying variety. "I started noticing little details and imperfections on metal, and so I concentrated on photographing these flaws, up close and personal. I find the process of deterioration and erosion intriguing," she notes. "Neglected, discarded and antiqued objects can be found almost anywhere, and because they’re exposed to the elements, they are changing every day. Most of these things," says Lezhen, "no one pays any attention to. They’re just part of our everyday lives. But I discovered, while looking through the camera lens at a tiny portion of peeling paint, a whole new world created by bright colors and beautiful light."
Indeed, Lezhen’s images, although surreal, emulate landscapes, moonscapes, and perhaps even a few very strange dreamscapes. One photograph resembles fried eggs dripping down the side of a wall and another appears to be a screaming robot. They are also reminiscent of images seen and imagined via those infamous Rorschach tests—with one glaring difference – Lezhen’s are bright and colorful, although both may be viewed while prone on a couch. "Different people see different things while looking at my photographs," reiterates Lezhen, who does have a background in psychology. "In a way, many photographers are psychologists," she adds, "because of their ability to look at, analyze and see something different through the camera lens."
States Lezhen, "I chose to do this particular series by shooting 35mm transparencies, which I then scanned at 5000 dpi using an Agfa scanner. I used Adobe Photoshop 7 as a digital darkroom where I burned, dodged and made minor color adjustments. Most of the images are not manipulated or even cropped," she says. "I try to crop in-camera as much as possible. I did a little color management, which I learned through trial and error, but I did not change the original colors. I saturated the colors somewhat, because after scanning, some color and sharpness are lost." The prints were made on an Epson 2200 printer using Epson’s 13x19 Enhanced Matte Paper and Epson’s archival inks.
"I consider myself very fortunate," says Lezhen, "to be able to use today’s advanced technologies to help me create my images. By shooting film I am able to preserve that special warmth and grain that it provides. But by outputting digitally I can take advantage of the advanced digital tools, which provide me with more flexibility and a greater control over the final product."
Digital Photograms
Joseph Deiss has created the ultimate series of botanicals by placing his subject matter directly on a scanner, resulting in images with precise detail and color reproduction. The images are, in a sense, modern-day photograms, but with a lot more information. "Last summer," said Deiss, "my son, Julian, returned from Alaska with a portfolio of algae pressings that I so admired, I had to scan them. After my initial attempts, which were less than stellar, Julian constructed a box so that I could make cleaner scans. The box keeps out miscellaneous light and allows me to work with three-dimensional plants. It’s a simple black box that fits over the scanner and has a hinged flap at one end so plants with long stems can be scanned without being disturbed. This," explains Deiss, "is my equivalent of a digital camera."
"I scanned the best of Julian’s algae pressings, then moved on to other plant life. I began collecting weeds and flowers and whatever else caught my eye and started pressing and drying some and scanning others. As of now, I have about forty pieces. I’m really indiscriminate about what I pick; it doesn’t have to be beautiful, it can be almost any growing thing. In fact, I just brought some nasty looking thistles back from the beach and they came out absolutely beautiful. I spend a lot of time maneuvering the plants on the scanner so they take on a form that is interesting, pleasing and challenging to the eye," says Deiss. "The scanner has very little depth of field, so pressed plants are always sharp, but the freshly picked plants are only sharp up to about three sixteenths of an inch and then quickly fall out of focus, as well as falling into darkness."
Deiss works with an Epson Expression 1680 Pro scanner with Epson software, a Macintosh G4, 1.25 GHz multiprocessor with 2GB of RAM, a 23-inch Apple Cinema HD Display, and a 15-inch LCD monitor. "I am religious about keeping the monitors calibrated," Deiss emphasized. He uses a ColorVision Spyder with OptiCAL software for monitor calibration.
While in Photoshop (version 7.0.1), Deiss spends about 10-12 hours per image doing touch-up work. "There’s always bugs, pollen and sap to deal with," he notes. "Bugs that move during the scan have to be repaired. And, because I can’t leave well enough alone, I work with 16-bit files, so I can make color and contrast changes without losing too much information.
My file sizes are about 600 to 800 megabytes." Deiss does most of his work using curves, color balance and the lasso and stamp tools. "Before I make a test print I use an edge sharpening routine so that I get a nice crisp image. Ultimately, these images are meant to be about 30x48-inches. I see an Epson 9600 printer in my future…"
Deiss currently prints his images on an Epson 2200 with Epson Enhanced Matte paper. "I’ve always chosen the matte papers. It’s probably a hold over from my (woodcut) print-making days.
Sept2003, Digital Output
By Lorraine A. DarConte
Today, there are almost as many different ways to create a photograph as there are photographers, and digital technology has only made the list longer and more interesting. Just as some photographers prefer Canon over Leica, or Kodak as opposed to Pentax, they are picking and choosing the digital tools that best serve them in their photographic pursuits.
Juliya Lezhen, a young student originally from Russia, submerged herself in the world of junkyards and rusted metal and emerged with a series of colorful, abstract images reminiscent of Rorschach tests and Pollack paintings. Joe Deiss, a master of large format photography, has temporarily abandoned his Deerdorf to work on a series of botanicals that are one-hundred-percent digital. And I, myself, have been busy leading my own personal digital backlash by returning to photography’s roots and learning the fine art of alternative processes, with a little help from digital technology (so much for that revolution).
My current series, Plant Abstracts, combines new, 21st century digital technology with early 19th century photographic processes including Vandyke, cyanotype and gum dichromate. I chose to photograph plants – foliage and flowers – for several reasons. One is the challenge of presenting the subject matter – which has been photographed, sculpted and painted by most everyone – in a new light. Plants are also readily available models with good attitudes that are, simply put, beautiful and hard to resist, no matter how commonplace.
Printing the images using these early processes allows me to produce photographs on a wide range of paper surfaces that result in prints with beautiful textures and tonal range, adding to their unique quality. The digital technology – in this case, scanning and manipulating images, and then making computer-generated negatives – allows me to create an image that exists in my mind’s eye and work with traditional photographic processes.
All images are first photographed with film and then scanned. I transform the images via Adobe Photoshop and an iMac with one or more filters such as "twirl" or "noise." Images are also converted to black-and-white. Some of the photos are heavily manipulated while others I barely touch. I then invert the images in Photoshop to create a negative (a positive can also be used). To make a negative, I print the inverted image (any size from 5x7 up to 11x17) on Pictorico Premium OHP Transparency Film with a color printer. I use an Epson Stylus Scan 2000. That’s the digital portion of the process. The prints are created individually, by hand, with a few well-mixed chemicals, some fine cotton/rag papers, a contact frame, hake brushes, UV light and water. The paper is coated with light-sensitive chemicals, dried and placed in a contact frame with the negative. I then expose the image outdoors (a UV box may also be used), typically for about two minutes (time varies with negative density, of course). The prints are developed mostly in water (for all three processes), although Vandyke prints must also be fixed. Since the photographs are printed on 100-percent cotton rag papers, I can also add color by painting them with traditional watercolors.
Recently, I was asked why I go through the hassle of hand-making prints when I can get a similar effect using digital software. For me, it’s about acquiring new skills and honing old ones and mixing new technologies with old-fashioned craftsmanship. It’s about the texture of the paper, the curve of a brushstroke, and rich, beautiful colors. It’s about a quality print that is truly one-of-a-kind.
Rusty Revelations
"The light here in Tucson is incredible," says photographer Juliya Lezhen. "There’s hardly ever a cloudy day, so I never need to use a flash or other artificial light. Every day I can go out and photograph something." Lately, that "something" for Lezhen has been metal, mostly of the rusting, peeling and decaying variety. "I started noticing little details and imperfections on metal, and so I concentrated on photographing these flaws, up close and personal. I find the process of deterioration and erosion intriguing," she notes. "Neglected, discarded and antiqued objects can be found almost anywhere, and because they’re exposed to the elements, they are changing every day. Most of these things," says Lezhen, "no one pays any attention to. They’re just part of our everyday lives. But I discovered, while looking through the camera lens at a tiny portion of peeling paint, a whole new world created by bright colors and beautiful light."
Indeed, Lezhen’s images, although surreal, emulate landscapes, moonscapes, and perhaps even a few very strange dreamscapes. One photograph resembles fried eggs dripping down the side of a wall and another appears to be a screaming robot. They are also reminiscent of images seen and imagined via those infamous Rorschach tests—with one glaring difference – Lezhen’s are bright and colorful, although both may be viewed while prone on a couch. "Different people see different things while looking at my photographs," reiterates Lezhen, who does have a background in psychology. "In a way, many photographers are psychologists," she adds, "because of their ability to look at, analyze and see something different through the camera lens."
States Lezhen, "I chose to do this particular series by shooting 35mm transparencies, which I then scanned at 5000 dpi using an Agfa scanner. I used Adobe Photoshop 7 as a digital darkroom where I burned, dodged and made minor color adjustments. Most of the images are not manipulated or even cropped," she says. "I try to crop in-camera as much as possible. I did a little color management, which I learned through trial and error, but I did not change the original colors. I saturated the colors somewhat, because after scanning, some color and sharpness are lost." The prints were made on an Epson 2200 printer using Epson’s 13x19 Enhanced Matte Paper and Epson’s archival inks.
"I consider myself very fortunate," says Lezhen, "to be able to use today’s advanced technologies to help me create my images. By shooting film I am able to preserve that special warmth and grain that it provides. But by outputting digitally I can take advantage of the advanced digital tools, which provide me with more flexibility and a greater control over the final product."
Digital Photograms
Joseph Deiss has created the ultimate series of botanicals by placing his subject matter directly on a scanner, resulting in images with precise detail and color reproduction. The images are, in a sense, modern-day photograms, but with a lot more information. "Last summer," said Deiss, "my son, Julian, returned from Alaska with a portfolio of algae pressings that I so admired, I had to scan them. After my initial attempts, which were less than stellar, Julian constructed a box so that I could make cleaner scans. The box keeps out miscellaneous light and allows me to work with three-dimensional plants. It’s a simple black box that fits over the scanner and has a hinged flap at one end so plants with long stems can be scanned without being disturbed. This," explains Deiss, "is my equivalent of a digital camera."
"I scanned the best of Julian’s algae pressings, then moved on to other plant life. I began collecting weeds and flowers and whatever else caught my eye and started pressing and drying some and scanning others. As of now, I have about forty pieces. I’m really indiscriminate about what I pick; it doesn’t have to be beautiful, it can be almost any growing thing. In fact, I just brought some nasty looking thistles back from the beach and they came out absolutely beautiful. I spend a lot of time maneuvering the plants on the scanner so they take on a form that is interesting, pleasing and challenging to the eye," says Deiss. "The scanner has very little depth of field, so pressed plants are always sharp, but the freshly picked plants are only sharp up to about three sixteenths of an inch and then quickly fall out of focus, as well as falling into darkness."
Deiss works with an Epson Expression 1680 Pro scanner with Epson software, a Macintosh G4, 1.25 GHz multiprocessor with 2GB of RAM, a 23-inch Apple Cinema HD Display, and a 15-inch LCD monitor. "I am religious about keeping the monitors calibrated," Deiss emphasized. He uses a ColorVision Spyder with OptiCAL software for monitor calibration.
While in Photoshop (version 7.0.1), Deiss spends about 10-12 hours per image doing touch-up work. "There’s always bugs, pollen and sap to deal with," he notes. "Bugs that move during the scan have to be repaired. And, because I can’t leave well enough alone, I work with 16-bit files, so I can make color and contrast changes without losing too much information.
My file sizes are about 600 to 800 megabytes." Deiss does most of his work using curves, color balance and the lasso and stamp tools. "Before I make a test print I use an edge sharpening routine so that I get a nice crisp image. Ultimately, these images are meant to be about 30x48-inches. I see an Epson 9600 printer in my future…"
Deiss currently prints his images on an Epson 2200 with Epson Enhanced Matte paper. "I’ve always chosen the matte papers. It’s probably a hold over from my (woodcut) print-making days.
Sept2003, Digital Output
Harnessing Digital Art Media
Harnessing DIGITAL ART MEDIA by Jeremy Sutton
Challenges, Choices and Opportunities
Artists today have use of a new generation of powerful digital tools that have opened up new vistas of possibilities. Digital prints are now in the collections of prestigious museums, art galleries and private collectors throughout the world. More professional photographers than ever are crossing the boundary between creating pure photographic prints and making fine art images, where the original photograph serves only as a launching point for artistic interpretation rather than an end product in itself. Using digital tools in creating fine art raises a host of questions: How do you describe your artwork? How do you value your work? How do you address issues of originality and longevity? This article examines the challenges, choices and opportunities for the artist today, sharing the perspectives of art collectors, gallery owners, art critics, artists and fine art printers.
Throughout history artists have used and experimented with the latest tools, technology and media. They often met resistance and skepticism from a public that tends to resist change. Much of the art media we take for granted today, such as canvas, photography and acrylic paints, were revolutionary when first introduced. “Every tool has been new technology at some time,” says Donald Farnsworth, founder of Magnolia Editions, whose clients include renowned artist Chuck Close. “From the invention of handmade paper 2000 years ago to the invention of acrylic paint in the 1960s, there has always been new technology.”
I’m interested in content, not media,” explains Catharine Clark, ownerdirector of the Catharine Clark Gallery. “Good art is not about the medium; it’s about the idea.” The artists’ ideas drive the art, not their choice of tools, technology or media. For Clark, art is content-driven, not media-driven. Art collector Robert Pritikin echoes Clark’s sentiments when he expresses, “I couldn’t care less about digital media.” For Pritikin, the inherent value of an artwork is related to the subject matter and the historic nature of the artwork. Founder and director of Trillium Press, David Salgado, describes art as “the physical manifestation of philosophical ideas” and explains, “Art is not media specific, it is a process.”
“People at first didn’t realize the computer was a medium that allowed you to process ideas,” says Griff Williams, artist and owner of Gallery 16 and Urban Digital Color. “Originally, photographers used the medium to enlarge and create different substrates. It was used as a reproductive medium.” Gallery 16 works with artists to extend their studio practice by exploring new possibilities opened up by the digital printing medium.
Characteristics of the Digital Medium
“Every medium has a signature look,” Williams explains. “An intaglio print, such as an etching, has a characteristic look that is associated with that specific type of printing press technique. By contrast, the digital press can faithfully reproduce the look of graphite, layers of overlapping tissue paper, collage, silver-halide photographic prints, and so on. It acts like a funny hybrid or chameleon of a medium. That is the danger and the beauty. The danger is the implication that it’s something it isn’t. The beauty is that it is a remarkably eloquent tool for creating images on almost any absorbent surface, from matzah to silk.
“Historically in printmaking, restrictions were placed on size and substrate materials. Now, with the digital press, we can print on virtually anything at any scale, and we can control how the print is perceived, such as making it a sculptural element in an installation.”
George Krevsky, owner of the George Krevsky Gallery, tells the story of a collector wanting to purchase a digital photographic print. The artist of the desired work wanted the collector to have an original silver gelatin print. The collector came in and looked at the prints side-by-side and was unable to distinguish between the two. Krevsky explains, “This goes to show how the digital printing technology is now so advanced. It is difficult to differentiate digital photographic prints from the more traditional method of printing photographs.” While acknowledging its technical excellence, Krevsky is skeptical about the maturation of the digital medium. “The jury is still out on digital works. The nuances, where are they? Where is the depth? How will it hold up with time?”
San Francisco Chronicle art critic Kenneth Baker fears that “there’s too much freedom (in digital media) to give the right kind of friction to give artistic results. Art requires resistance to give results… Resistance is essential.” Artist Dawn Meson agrees with Baker in that the digital medium can make it harder for the artist to let accidents be, since “it is too tempting for many artists to correct and make perfect.”
Trillium Press’ Salgado sees the artist as a boxer wherein the medium (the “punch”), digital or otherwise, invites a reaction (the “counterpunch”) from the artist. An example of punch/counter-punch in digital media is the way artist Hung Liu used the water solubility of the Iris dye inks (“punch”) to create dripping effects (“counter-punch”) by running water down the prints. Farnsworth echoes Salgado’s sentiment by explaining, “Everything I’ve ever invented began with a mistake, and you only make mistakes by doing.” In other words, treat digital media like any other: Dive in, try things out, and react to what emerges. I encourage my students to take risks on the canvas, to be committed to their brush strokes and the creative process. Building up history on your canvas, embracing and working with serendipity and “mistakes,” whether working digitally or traditionally, is what brings your canvas to life and adds nuances and depth.
Words and Meaning
We are pioneers at the dawn of a new digital age where the earlier definitions of what constitutes fine art are transforming. New paradigms and vocabulary are needed.
The traditional distinctions between painters, sculptors and printmakers are breaking down. Clark explains that many of the artists she represents “describe themselves as working across media.” She recommends that everyone take the time to visit galleries and museums, to look at art, to see for themselves the mixing of media and how the content relates to the media.
Original Versus Reproduction
There is a vital distinction between original prints, where the print itself is the final artwork, and reproduction prints, where the original artwork exists in another medium. Clark emphasizes the importance of educating the public about the difference between original and reproduction prints. Gregory Lind, owner of the Gregory Lind Gallery, finds it troubling from the perspective of fine art when “instead of new media being used to create new art, technology is used to duplicate existing works.”
Top: Hung Liu with a series of original mixed-media artworks based on a common digital print
Middle: Gregory Lind with a Will Yackulic goache and ink on paper.
Bottom: Using a digital loom in Belgium, Magnolia Editions published a 15-foot-high tapestry of Chuck Close’s portrait of musician Philip Glass, seen here with Magnolia Editions founder, Donald Farnsworth.
“Giclée” comes from the French word for a spray or spurt of liquid. According to Williams, it was first introduced in the digital printing industry by Mac Holbert of Nash Editions in Los Angeles. At the time, Nash Editions were using early Iris printers with dye-based inks that were designed for proofing, not for longevity. Holbert apparently called their prints “Giclées” to fend off questions about longevity. Subsequently the term has come to refer generically to all types of inkjet printing. It is largely used today in reference to reproduction prints. There is some confusion in the marketplace due to the presence of “embellished Giclées” (reproduction prints that have some hand brush strokes added, not always added by the original artist). The intrinsic value of an original print is significantly more than that of a reproduction print, including embellished Giclées. The consensus of the people interviewed for this article is to avoid using the term “Giclée” to describe your original prints.
When a digital print is combined with non-digital media, we may ask ourselves, “How do we describe the end result?” Artist Liu goes beyond the print by building up layers of paint and resin and assemblage over the original print in order to create a solid structure that bridges printing, painting, collage making and sculpting. The artwork is not a painting or a print; it is not purely digital or traditional. It is an original one-of-a-kind artwork, and yet the source print for the image is reproducible.
Clark’s approach to describing artwork is to provide a literal and specific description of what makes up the artwork. If it is a digital print, she describes the type of print and what substrate it is printed on such as “pigment print on Rives BFK 100 percent rag cold-pressed watercolor paper.” A digital painting where traditional media has been applied to a digital print could be described as “mixed media.” Gallery 16 Editions describe their original prints as either “Iris prints” when created using the Iris printer, or as “pigment prints” when created using any of their pigment-ink-based inkjet printers.
I describe my paintings as “combined media on canvas.” They originate as paintings created in Corel Painter (sometimes based on photographic reference); they are printed out on canvas and then have various media, such as acrylic paint and pastel, applied on to the canvas surface. I avoid using the terms “digital art,” “computer art” and “computer-generated art,” all of which imply that artistic skill is secondary to the fact that the computer was used. After all you’d never describe a Van Gogh painting an example of “oil paint-generated art!”
Multiple Originals
“An artwork created with the use of digital media and which has the physical form of being a reproducible digital print,” Clark explains, is an example of what can be termed “multiple original.” That is, there is no other original artwork other than what is expressed on the digital print. The term multiple original is widely used in galleries and museums when referring to traditional fine art prints such as woodcuts, engravings and etchings, lithographs and screen-prints. In all these cases, there is a matrix or plate of some kind that the print is based on, but that matrix does not constitute the actual artwork. In the case of digital paintings the digital file is equivalent to the matrix or plate. The print is the artwork.
Above: Artist Hung Liu applying oil paint onto a resin-coated digital print at Trillium Press.
Multiple prints can be made from the matrix. Each print may vary slightly due to the way ink is applied (or rubbed off) or due to further working of the print surface with other media. Even with these unique aspects to each print, which make them each one-of-a-kind artworks, they are still linked to each other by coming from a common matrix, and are thus multiple originals.
Creating multiple originals carries the responsibility to track the edition in order to imbue them with value to collectors and clients. An edition may involve some artist proof prints and a limited number of actual artwork prints available for sale. Clark says she likes to keep the length of editions down to between three and seven in the total number of prints. Many artists choose to have larger editions. For artwork created with digital media choosing an edition length is the same decision that any printmaker faces. With a digital file and high-quality digital printer, an unlimited number of multiple prints can be made that are almost identical; with traditional prints, the matrix or plate eventually degrades, and that sets a natural physical limit to the length of an edition.
When hand artwork is applied individually to each print, the artwork takes on a one-of-a-kind stature yet is still related to the other artworks based on the same print. At Trillium Press and Urban Digital Color, they refer to such prints as “Edition Variée” (EV).
No matter how an edition is defined, or how long it is made, an edition represents a symbol of trust between the artist and the art buyer. Lind points out that for him there is a boundary between what is acceptable in terms of the integrity of an edition (for instance, a limited edition of five well documented prints) and what is not acceptable (for instance, editions of hundreds of reproduction prints with hand brush strokes added by people other than the artist, with different editions for different size prints, and with the false implication that these prints are original works of art).
One way to ensure the integrity of an edition is to provide detailed and specific print documentation with every artwork. At the Catharine Clark Gallery, the buyer of an artwork has, included on their invoice, a statement of exactly what constitutes the edition, referring to size, substrate, printing method and the number of the print in the edition.
Preservation, Archival Integrity and Longevity
Williams says, “Longevity issues and color fastness were concerns people had about digital. At the end of the day these concerns are a little hypocritical since many other (non-digital) media will have more archival problems than digital prints. That’s why we have conservationists.” On a similar note, Pritikin points out, “Visual art comes in infinite forms, from pastels, oils, and pencil drawings, to sky writing and sand sculptures, some art only lasting nanoseconds.” So the issue of longevity is always relative.
Digital printing technology has made enormous progress over the last 15 years in terms of longevity, durability and color fastness. Today’s generation of pigment inks are far more stable than traditional watercolor paintings. One question that arises regarding preserving artwork is the need for fixatives. Williams held a pigment print on paper, one that had not been sprayed with any fixative, under running water and showed that it didn’t run at all. He doesn’t use fixative, but I have found that a spray fixative helps prevent pigment inks coming off my canvases when I work into them with acrylic gel medium or pastel.
Looking Ahead
“The stuff we don’t know is the most exciting stuff!” exclaims Noah Lang of Trillium Press. The best is yet to come. Looking ahead, Pritikin points out that “there are countless media for art, and, of course, all the media that haven’t been invented. God knows what they’re going to have 20 years from now.”
Jeremy Sutton is a San Francisco-based portrait artist, author and educator, working in combined media. Jeremy has a M.A. from Oxford University and studied at the Ruskin School of Fine Art and Drawing, Oxford, and the Vrie Akademie, the Hague, the Netherlands. Jeremy has authored several books, videos and DVDs on Painter and digital art, the most recent being Painter IX Creativity: Digital Artist’s Handbook (Focal Press, 2005) and Painter IX Simplified for Photographers (six- DVD set). See www.jeremysutton.com and www.paintercreativity.com/.
Challenges, Choices and Opportunities
Artists today have use of a new generation of powerful digital tools that have opened up new vistas of possibilities. Digital prints are now in the collections of prestigious museums, art galleries and private collectors throughout the world. More professional photographers than ever are crossing the boundary between creating pure photographic prints and making fine art images, where the original photograph serves only as a launching point for artistic interpretation rather than an end product in itself. Using digital tools in creating fine art raises a host of questions: How do you describe your artwork? How do you value your work? How do you address issues of originality and longevity? This article examines the challenges, choices and opportunities for the artist today, sharing the perspectives of art collectors, gallery owners, art critics, artists and fine art printers.
Throughout history artists have used and experimented with the latest tools, technology and media. They often met resistance and skepticism from a public that tends to resist change. Much of the art media we take for granted today, such as canvas, photography and acrylic paints, were revolutionary when first introduced. “Every tool has been new technology at some time,” says Donald Farnsworth, founder of Magnolia Editions, whose clients include renowned artist Chuck Close. “From the invention of handmade paper 2000 years ago to the invention of acrylic paint in the 1960s, there has always been new technology.”
I’m interested in content, not media,” explains Catharine Clark, ownerdirector of the Catharine Clark Gallery. “Good art is not about the medium; it’s about the idea.” The artists’ ideas drive the art, not their choice of tools, technology or media. For Clark, art is content-driven, not media-driven. Art collector Robert Pritikin echoes Clark’s sentiments when he expresses, “I couldn’t care less about digital media.” For Pritikin, the inherent value of an artwork is related to the subject matter and the historic nature of the artwork. Founder and director of Trillium Press, David Salgado, describes art as “the physical manifestation of philosophical ideas” and explains, “Art is not media specific, it is a process.”
“People at first didn’t realize the computer was a medium that allowed you to process ideas,” says Griff Williams, artist and owner of Gallery 16 and Urban Digital Color. “Originally, photographers used the medium to enlarge and create different substrates. It was used as a reproductive medium.” Gallery 16 works with artists to extend their studio practice by exploring new possibilities opened up by the digital printing medium.
Characteristics of the Digital Medium
“Every medium has a signature look,” Williams explains. “An intaglio print, such as an etching, has a characteristic look that is associated with that specific type of printing press technique. By contrast, the digital press can faithfully reproduce the look of graphite, layers of overlapping tissue paper, collage, silver-halide photographic prints, and so on. It acts like a funny hybrid or chameleon of a medium. That is the danger and the beauty. The danger is the implication that it’s something it isn’t. The beauty is that it is a remarkably eloquent tool for creating images on almost any absorbent surface, from matzah to silk.
“Historically in printmaking, restrictions were placed on size and substrate materials. Now, with the digital press, we can print on virtually anything at any scale, and we can control how the print is perceived, such as making it a sculptural element in an installation.”
George Krevsky, owner of the George Krevsky Gallery, tells the story of a collector wanting to purchase a digital photographic print. The artist of the desired work wanted the collector to have an original silver gelatin print. The collector came in and looked at the prints side-by-side and was unable to distinguish between the two. Krevsky explains, “This goes to show how the digital printing technology is now so advanced. It is difficult to differentiate digital photographic prints from the more traditional method of printing photographs.” While acknowledging its technical excellence, Krevsky is skeptical about the maturation of the digital medium. “The jury is still out on digital works. The nuances, where are they? Where is the depth? How will it hold up with time?”
San Francisco Chronicle art critic Kenneth Baker fears that “there’s too much freedom (in digital media) to give the right kind of friction to give artistic results. Art requires resistance to give results… Resistance is essential.” Artist Dawn Meson agrees with Baker in that the digital medium can make it harder for the artist to let accidents be, since “it is too tempting for many artists to correct and make perfect.”
Trillium Press’ Salgado sees the artist as a boxer wherein the medium (the “punch”), digital or otherwise, invites a reaction (the “counterpunch”) from the artist. An example of punch/counter-punch in digital media is the way artist Hung Liu used the water solubility of the Iris dye inks (“punch”) to create dripping effects (“counter-punch”) by running water down the prints. Farnsworth echoes Salgado’s sentiment by explaining, “Everything I’ve ever invented began with a mistake, and you only make mistakes by doing.” In other words, treat digital media like any other: Dive in, try things out, and react to what emerges. I encourage my students to take risks on the canvas, to be committed to their brush strokes and the creative process. Building up history on your canvas, embracing and working with serendipity and “mistakes,” whether working digitally or traditionally, is what brings your canvas to life and adds nuances and depth.
Words and Meaning
We are pioneers at the dawn of a new digital age where the earlier definitions of what constitutes fine art are transforming. New paradigms and vocabulary are needed.
The traditional distinctions between painters, sculptors and printmakers are breaking down. Clark explains that many of the artists she represents “describe themselves as working across media.” She recommends that everyone take the time to visit galleries and museums, to look at art, to see for themselves the mixing of media and how the content relates to the media.
Original Versus Reproduction
There is a vital distinction between original prints, where the print itself is the final artwork, and reproduction prints, where the original artwork exists in another medium. Clark emphasizes the importance of educating the public about the difference between original and reproduction prints. Gregory Lind, owner of the Gregory Lind Gallery, finds it troubling from the perspective of fine art when “instead of new media being used to create new art, technology is used to duplicate existing works.”
Top: Hung Liu with a series of original mixed-media artworks based on a common digital print
Middle: Gregory Lind with a Will Yackulic goache and ink on paper.
Bottom: Using a digital loom in Belgium, Magnolia Editions published a 15-foot-high tapestry of Chuck Close’s portrait of musician Philip Glass, seen here with Magnolia Editions founder, Donald Farnsworth.
“Giclée” comes from the French word for a spray or spurt of liquid. According to Williams, it was first introduced in the digital printing industry by Mac Holbert of Nash Editions in Los Angeles. At the time, Nash Editions were using early Iris printers with dye-based inks that were designed for proofing, not for longevity. Holbert apparently called their prints “Giclées” to fend off questions about longevity. Subsequently the term has come to refer generically to all types of inkjet printing. It is largely used today in reference to reproduction prints. There is some confusion in the marketplace due to the presence of “embellished Giclées” (reproduction prints that have some hand brush strokes added, not always added by the original artist). The intrinsic value of an original print is significantly more than that of a reproduction print, including embellished Giclées. The consensus of the people interviewed for this article is to avoid using the term “Giclée” to describe your original prints.
When a digital print is combined with non-digital media, we may ask ourselves, “How do we describe the end result?” Artist Liu goes beyond the print by building up layers of paint and resin and assemblage over the original print in order to create a solid structure that bridges printing, painting, collage making and sculpting. The artwork is not a painting or a print; it is not purely digital or traditional. It is an original one-of-a-kind artwork, and yet the source print for the image is reproducible.
Clark’s approach to describing artwork is to provide a literal and specific description of what makes up the artwork. If it is a digital print, she describes the type of print and what substrate it is printed on such as “pigment print on Rives BFK 100 percent rag cold-pressed watercolor paper.” A digital painting where traditional media has been applied to a digital print could be described as “mixed media.” Gallery 16 Editions describe their original prints as either “Iris prints” when created using the Iris printer, or as “pigment prints” when created using any of their pigment-ink-based inkjet printers.
I describe my paintings as “combined media on canvas.” They originate as paintings created in Corel Painter (sometimes based on photographic reference); they are printed out on canvas and then have various media, such as acrylic paint and pastel, applied on to the canvas surface. I avoid using the terms “digital art,” “computer art” and “computer-generated art,” all of which imply that artistic skill is secondary to the fact that the computer was used. After all you’d never describe a Van Gogh painting an example of “oil paint-generated art!”
Multiple Originals
“An artwork created with the use of digital media and which has the physical form of being a reproducible digital print,” Clark explains, is an example of what can be termed “multiple original.” That is, there is no other original artwork other than what is expressed on the digital print. The term multiple original is widely used in galleries and museums when referring to traditional fine art prints such as woodcuts, engravings and etchings, lithographs and screen-prints. In all these cases, there is a matrix or plate of some kind that the print is based on, but that matrix does not constitute the actual artwork. In the case of digital paintings the digital file is equivalent to the matrix or plate. The print is the artwork.
Above: Artist Hung Liu applying oil paint onto a resin-coated digital print at Trillium Press.
Multiple prints can be made from the matrix. Each print may vary slightly due to the way ink is applied (or rubbed off) or due to further working of the print surface with other media. Even with these unique aspects to each print, which make them each one-of-a-kind artworks, they are still linked to each other by coming from a common matrix, and are thus multiple originals.
Creating multiple originals carries the responsibility to track the edition in order to imbue them with value to collectors and clients. An edition may involve some artist proof prints and a limited number of actual artwork prints available for sale. Clark says she likes to keep the length of editions down to between three and seven in the total number of prints. Many artists choose to have larger editions. For artwork created with digital media choosing an edition length is the same decision that any printmaker faces. With a digital file and high-quality digital printer, an unlimited number of multiple prints can be made that are almost identical; with traditional prints, the matrix or plate eventually degrades, and that sets a natural physical limit to the length of an edition.
When hand artwork is applied individually to each print, the artwork takes on a one-of-a-kind stature yet is still related to the other artworks based on the same print. At Trillium Press and Urban Digital Color, they refer to such prints as “Edition Variée” (EV).
No matter how an edition is defined, or how long it is made, an edition represents a symbol of trust between the artist and the art buyer. Lind points out that for him there is a boundary between what is acceptable in terms of the integrity of an edition (for instance, a limited edition of five well documented prints) and what is not acceptable (for instance, editions of hundreds of reproduction prints with hand brush strokes added by people other than the artist, with different editions for different size prints, and with the false implication that these prints are original works of art).
One way to ensure the integrity of an edition is to provide detailed and specific print documentation with every artwork. At the Catharine Clark Gallery, the buyer of an artwork has, included on their invoice, a statement of exactly what constitutes the edition, referring to size, substrate, printing method and the number of the print in the edition.
Preservation, Archival Integrity and Longevity
Williams says, “Longevity issues and color fastness were concerns people had about digital. At the end of the day these concerns are a little hypocritical since many other (non-digital) media will have more archival problems than digital prints. That’s why we have conservationists.” On a similar note, Pritikin points out, “Visual art comes in infinite forms, from pastels, oils, and pencil drawings, to sky writing and sand sculptures, some art only lasting nanoseconds.” So the issue of longevity is always relative.
Digital printing technology has made enormous progress over the last 15 years in terms of longevity, durability and color fastness. Today’s generation of pigment inks are far more stable than traditional watercolor paintings. One question that arises regarding preserving artwork is the need for fixatives. Williams held a pigment print on paper, one that had not been sprayed with any fixative, under running water and showed that it didn’t run at all. He doesn’t use fixative, but I have found that a spray fixative helps prevent pigment inks coming off my canvases when I work into them with acrylic gel medium or pastel.
Looking Ahead
“The stuff we don’t know is the most exciting stuff!” exclaims Noah Lang of Trillium Press. The best is yet to come. Looking ahead, Pritikin points out that “there are countless media for art, and, of course, all the media that haven’t been invented. God knows what they’re going to have 20 years from now.”
Jeremy Sutton is a San Francisco-based portrait artist, author and educator, working in combined media. Jeremy has a M.A. from Oxford University and studied at the Ruskin School of Fine Art and Drawing, Oxford, and the Vrie Akademie, the Hague, the Netherlands. Jeremy has authored several books, videos and DVDs on Painter and digital art, the most recent being Painter IX Creativity: Digital Artist’s Handbook (Focal Press, 2005) and Painter IX Simplified for Photographers (six- DVD set). See www.jeremysutton.com and www.paintercreativity.com/.
Thursday, November 03, 2005
Bashing Them Out
Artists and art-material suppliers come together at Pearl
Paint's "Great American Art Event" in New York. "Secrets" here
are bought, sold and given away. Popular instructors
demonstrate "trees, rocks and water" or "fruit, vegetables and
lace," or "how to paint 'itty bitty' paintings," or "how to
master abstraction." With lots of free paint, brushes,
stretched canvas and art boards it's a creative rummage. For
many, the gods are in the equipment. Others come for motivation
or inspiration. Most are looking for techniques to match the
quality of today's materials.
A feeling of entitlement pervades. People are attracted to
making art, and while they may have the idea that a period of
apprenticeship may be necessary in order to develop quality,
they also have the inclination to hold their noses and jump in.
My group completed two or three 11" x 14"s in a day. This while
watching my acrylic demos, looking at my slide shows and
listening to me pontificate. People are introduced to new
systems and they try things they wouldn't normally do. Some of
them screw up. Others excel--you can see them growing in front
of you. It's all part of the game and everybody understands.
Generally speaking, they leave happy.
This business of "bashing them out" has value in and out of the
personal studio. Painters, particularly beginning painters,
need to lose the sense of preciousness about their work. I've
noticed that preciousness often means "stuck." After a lifetime
of wonder it's still a mystery why some people improve and
others don't. Desire, character and even economic pressure are
factors. Talent maybe. Ego and a longing for uniqueness are
also in there somewhere. I look at folks and try to see in them
an "iron will and a butterfly mind." It seems that the
imaginative ones who also work hard ("WF"--Working Flakes) are
the ones who are soon subsidized by this worker's edge. It's
through production itself that people grow. Whether they do it
at a workshop or in a workroom, it's the working habit that
pays for the art supplies--and eventually that big studio with
the panoramic view. To get to that place a certain amount of
sacrifice may be necessary. I've told so many people: "Go to
your room." I've suggested that they go for six months or a
year. To work. To dig around in their potential. To really find
out. This morning, in New York, it may be an illusion but there
seems to be fewer people on the streets.
Best regards,
Robert
PS: "He rose early, worked strenuously, and retired late. He
seemed to forget the ordinary hours for meals and would have to
be called over and over again--unfinished work frequently being
taken in hand just at this time." (Otto Bache on J. M.
Whistler)
Esoterica: The Working Flake efficiently prepares ahead more
than enough supports for her work. The time-line can be an hour
or a life. Bashing them out, one to another, the works develop
and techniques and skills are honed. Some works are honoured
and put under another light. Some become Frisbees. The WF has
the feeling she is the caretaker of a giant personal event
where freshness, understatement and growth are a byproduct. Joy
prevails. Sweat forms. Ideas breed.
Paint's "Great American Art Event" in New York. "Secrets" here
are bought, sold and given away. Popular instructors
demonstrate "trees, rocks and water" or "fruit, vegetables and
lace," or "how to paint 'itty bitty' paintings," or "how to
master abstraction." With lots of free paint, brushes,
stretched canvas and art boards it's a creative rummage. For
many, the gods are in the equipment. Others come for motivation
or inspiration. Most are looking for techniques to match the
quality of today's materials.
A feeling of entitlement pervades. People are attracted to
making art, and while they may have the idea that a period of
apprenticeship may be necessary in order to develop quality,
they also have the inclination to hold their noses and jump in.
My group completed two or three 11" x 14"s in a day. This while
watching my acrylic demos, looking at my slide shows and
listening to me pontificate. People are introduced to new
systems and they try things they wouldn't normally do. Some of
them screw up. Others excel--you can see them growing in front
of you. It's all part of the game and everybody understands.
Generally speaking, they leave happy.
This business of "bashing them out" has value in and out of the
personal studio. Painters, particularly beginning painters,
need to lose the sense of preciousness about their work. I've
noticed that preciousness often means "stuck." After a lifetime
of wonder it's still a mystery why some people improve and
others don't. Desire, character and even economic pressure are
factors. Talent maybe. Ego and a longing for uniqueness are
also in there somewhere. I look at folks and try to see in them
an "iron will and a butterfly mind." It seems that the
imaginative ones who also work hard ("WF"--Working Flakes) are
the ones who are soon subsidized by this worker's edge. It's
through production itself that people grow. Whether they do it
at a workshop or in a workroom, it's the working habit that
pays for the art supplies--and eventually that big studio with
the panoramic view. To get to that place a certain amount of
sacrifice may be necessary. I've told so many people: "Go to
your room." I've suggested that they go for six months or a
year. To work. To dig around in their potential. To really find
out. This morning, in New York, it may be an illusion but there
seems to be fewer people on the streets.
Best regards,
Robert
PS: "He rose early, worked strenuously, and retired late. He
seemed to forget the ordinary hours for meals and would have to
be called over and over again--unfinished work frequently being
taken in hand just at this time." (Otto Bache on J. M.
Whistler)
Esoterica: The Working Flake efficiently prepares ahead more
than enough supports for her work. The time-line can be an hour
or a life. Bashing them out, one to another, the works develop
and techniques and skills are honed. Some works are honoured
and put under another light. Some become Frisbees. The WF has
the feeling she is the caretaker of a giant personal event
where freshness, understatement and growth are a byproduct. Joy
prevails. Sweat forms. Ideas breed.
The kids arent all right
OCT. 28 - NOV. 3, 2005
The Kids Aren’t All Right
Is over-education killing young artists?
by AARON ROSE
In the summer of 2004, I got a call from Arty Nelson, who often writes about art for this publication. He had just attended the much-lauded “Supersonic” show. For those who aren’t familiar, “Supersonic” is a large exhibition, now in its second year, that features the work of MFA students from esteemed area programs like CalArts, Art Center, UCLA, etc. When I asked the writer how the show was, he simply said: “The kids aren’t all right.”
Having not yet seen the exhibition, I was more inclined to give the young artists the benefit of the doubt. Considering they were just finishing years of school, I wouldn’t have expected to see the most developed work in the world, but I would still have hoped for something to blow my socks off. After seeing the show, though, I had the same sinking feeling. While the overall installation was impressive and the space at Art Center in Pasadena was amazing, the work left me mostly empty and with a few exceptions seemed like nothing more than a rehash of conceptual ideas that were mined years ago. I was out of town for the 2005 show at the newly renovated L.A. Design Center, but I heard similarly dismal accounts. It made me wonder why, when we live in such a socially and politically volatile time, are these students producing stuff with little or no social relevance when they should be delivering edgy, urgent, thought-provoking work?
For the last 15 years — first as a painter, then as a gallery owner and now as an independent curator, publisher and filmmaker — I have had the good fortune of dealing almost exclusively with young, aspiring artists — artists with chips on their shoulders and fire in their hearts. I have worked with university-trained and self-taught artists. For the last two years an exhibition I co-curated, “Beautiful Losers,” has been on the American museum circuit. The show focuses on a loose-knit group of artists (Chris Johanson, Barry McGee, Margaret Kilgallen, Ryan McGinness, Thomas Campbell, etc.) who came up from the streets and, for the most part, entered the art world through the back door.
Many of the artists in “Losers” have gone from relative obscurity to international renown, and along the way I’ve witnessed all the positive and negative trappings that come with that success. I’ve seen the underground go overground and, in some cases, lose much of its original power and charm. Still though, I have a never-ending hunger for new art created by young artists. In fact, it is the energy of youth that has kept me in the art game so long. In my opinion, it has always been the job of the young artists to shake things up, to throw out old ideas and usher in a new way of thinking. I want to be a part of that.
So why was the “Supersonic” exhibition filled with such uninspired work? I’ll take a stab at trying to answer that here. I should interject that this is not meant to be a rant against any particular artist, educational institution or exhibition. I mention “Supersonic” simply because it represents a larger trend that I have noticed around the country and the world for some time now.
It has always been the function of artists to tell the narrative of our times in a way that isn’t filtered through big-media spin or the historical revisionism of academic pundits. Recent and historical precedence tell us that it should be young people, and particularly the artists among them, who are most passionately voicing this narrative. But they’re not. In fact, there is a critical lack of voice among young artists, and I believe that art schools are to blame for this crisis.
There are quite possibly more quality art schools in and around Los Angeles than anywhere else in the country. These institutions are staffed with amazing talents (Mike Kelley and John Baldessari among them). Legions of creative young people flock to our city every year to work alongside their heroes and develop their talents with hopes of making it as an artist. That’s great; an education, particularly in art history and technique, can be valuable to a young artist, and studying with your heroes can be inspiring. What happens too often in these situations, though, is that we find young artists simply emulating their instructors, rather than finding and honing their own aesthetics and points of view about the world, society, themselves.
In the beginnings of an artist’s career, the power in his or her work should lie not in their technique or knowledge of art history or theory or business acumen, but in what one has to say. Artists might as well hang up their paintbrushes before they even begin if that voice isn’t in place. Ideas and a point of view are the backbones of the artistic process. In fact, L.A. art school gurus such as Kelley and Baldessari were wild cards when they began. Their works were constantly infused with socioeconomic and political agendas that went against the art world’s status quo. In can be argued that it was the rebellious attitudes and iconoclastic positions of those artists’ first works that built their current international success. But now they are part of an art establishment that seems distant to many young people who should be getting inspired by art.
While some may argue to the contrary, contemporary art is not a luxury. I believe it is a necessity. It satisfies not only a visual need, but also an educational and, most importantly, a spiritual need for us. Art should teach us about how we relate to the world. It seems ironic, then, that the curriculum taught in most MFA programs addresses almost everything but fulfilling these needs. Art institutions today work more like business schools than any kind of creative laboratory. As is often the case with such professional schools, the credential has come to mean more than any individual biography or personal point of view. From the creative side, art theory has begun to play such a dominant role in art school that I feel it has lobotomized many young creative minds. Young MFAs are required to read endless texts, many written more than 20 years ago by stuffy Frenchmen with navel-gazing theories holding little or no relevance to life in Bush’s America. They are then asked to somehow relate their work to these deconstructionist theories and then be judged by how successfully they do this.
The primary problem with this kind of education is that by diving deeper and deeper into the theoretical and self-referential, artists lose touch with their public. As a result, the public, particularly the young public, often feels alienated from art. Intentionally or not, people have been made to feel inferior to the art intelligentsia. What inevitably follows is that art becomes simply something to be bought, sold and understood by a very small sector of the population and it loses its urgent role as a means of communication or as a catalyst for social or cultural change.
On more than one occasion I have felt the urge to spray-paint “Mike Kelley is the Enemy” on walls around the city. Nothing against Kelley; his early work in particular was a big inspiration and holds great meaning for me. Rather, I want to do this as a statement to young artists that they need to kill their heroes to discover themselves.
Of course, I’m generalizing. There are many young, emerging artists working today who truly believe in the relevance of what they are doing and have the chops and points of view to back it up. And this isn’t to suggest that all artwork should be political. I believe that a personal statement that is drawn from the heart can be more powerful and effective than propaganda. Works that have inspired me recently include those by Ashley Macomber, a Los Angeles artist who creates intricately painted human/animal hybrids that could be said to resemble those campy American Indian paintings found on truck-stop T-shirts. Upon deeper consultation, however, they provide a strong commentary on our relationships to each other, nature and ourselves. Also of note is the East Coast collective Paperrad, whose multimedia installations include everything from sculpture to animation to printed fanzines. The collective’s innocent yet sophisticated approach to art consistently leaves me feeling hungry for more. Other artists of interest include Masaki Kawai, Matt Leines, Tauba Auerbach, Jim Drain and Jo Jackson. Needless to say there is much good work out there.
Some of these artists are MFAs and some are not. The point of all this is that if young artists had the courage and the encouragement to focus more on their art than the “art business,” there would be even more inspiring work to see and less distance between art and the public. Maybe all it takes is a little less thinking and a lot more feeling. If we could open our hearts amazing things could happen.
The Kids Aren’t All Right
Is over-education killing young artists?
by AARON ROSE
In the summer of 2004, I got a call from Arty Nelson, who often writes about art for this publication. He had just attended the much-lauded “Supersonic” show. For those who aren’t familiar, “Supersonic” is a large exhibition, now in its second year, that features the work of MFA students from esteemed area programs like CalArts, Art Center, UCLA, etc. When I asked the writer how the show was, he simply said: “The kids aren’t all right.”
Having not yet seen the exhibition, I was more inclined to give the young artists the benefit of the doubt. Considering they were just finishing years of school, I wouldn’t have expected to see the most developed work in the world, but I would still have hoped for something to blow my socks off. After seeing the show, though, I had the same sinking feeling. While the overall installation was impressive and the space at Art Center in Pasadena was amazing, the work left me mostly empty and with a few exceptions seemed like nothing more than a rehash of conceptual ideas that were mined years ago. I was out of town for the 2005 show at the newly renovated L.A. Design Center, but I heard similarly dismal accounts. It made me wonder why, when we live in such a socially and politically volatile time, are these students producing stuff with little or no social relevance when they should be delivering edgy, urgent, thought-provoking work?
For the last 15 years — first as a painter, then as a gallery owner and now as an independent curator, publisher and filmmaker — I have had the good fortune of dealing almost exclusively with young, aspiring artists — artists with chips on their shoulders and fire in their hearts. I have worked with university-trained and self-taught artists. For the last two years an exhibition I co-curated, “Beautiful Losers,” has been on the American museum circuit. The show focuses on a loose-knit group of artists (Chris Johanson, Barry McGee, Margaret Kilgallen, Ryan McGinness, Thomas Campbell, etc.) who came up from the streets and, for the most part, entered the art world through the back door.
Many of the artists in “Losers” have gone from relative obscurity to international renown, and along the way I’ve witnessed all the positive and negative trappings that come with that success. I’ve seen the underground go overground and, in some cases, lose much of its original power and charm. Still though, I have a never-ending hunger for new art created by young artists. In fact, it is the energy of youth that has kept me in the art game so long. In my opinion, it has always been the job of the young artists to shake things up, to throw out old ideas and usher in a new way of thinking. I want to be a part of that.
So why was the “Supersonic” exhibition filled with such uninspired work? I’ll take a stab at trying to answer that here. I should interject that this is not meant to be a rant against any particular artist, educational institution or exhibition. I mention “Supersonic” simply because it represents a larger trend that I have noticed around the country and the world for some time now.
It has always been the function of artists to tell the narrative of our times in a way that isn’t filtered through big-media spin or the historical revisionism of academic pundits. Recent and historical precedence tell us that it should be young people, and particularly the artists among them, who are most passionately voicing this narrative. But they’re not. In fact, there is a critical lack of voice among young artists, and I believe that art schools are to blame for this crisis.
There are quite possibly more quality art schools in and around Los Angeles than anywhere else in the country. These institutions are staffed with amazing talents (Mike Kelley and John Baldessari among them). Legions of creative young people flock to our city every year to work alongside their heroes and develop their talents with hopes of making it as an artist. That’s great; an education, particularly in art history and technique, can be valuable to a young artist, and studying with your heroes can be inspiring. What happens too often in these situations, though, is that we find young artists simply emulating their instructors, rather than finding and honing their own aesthetics and points of view about the world, society, themselves.
In the beginnings of an artist’s career, the power in his or her work should lie not in their technique or knowledge of art history or theory or business acumen, but in what one has to say. Artists might as well hang up their paintbrushes before they even begin if that voice isn’t in place. Ideas and a point of view are the backbones of the artistic process. In fact, L.A. art school gurus such as Kelley and Baldessari were wild cards when they began. Their works were constantly infused with socioeconomic and political agendas that went against the art world’s status quo. In can be argued that it was the rebellious attitudes and iconoclastic positions of those artists’ first works that built their current international success. But now they are part of an art establishment that seems distant to many young people who should be getting inspired by art.
While some may argue to the contrary, contemporary art is not a luxury. I believe it is a necessity. It satisfies not only a visual need, but also an educational and, most importantly, a spiritual need for us. Art should teach us about how we relate to the world. It seems ironic, then, that the curriculum taught in most MFA programs addresses almost everything but fulfilling these needs. Art institutions today work more like business schools than any kind of creative laboratory. As is often the case with such professional schools, the credential has come to mean more than any individual biography or personal point of view. From the creative side, art theory has begun to play such a dominant role in art school that I feel it has lobotomized many young creative minds. Young MFAs are required to read endless texts, many written more than 20 years ago by stuffy Frenchmen with navel-gazing theories holding little or no relevance to life in Bush’s America. They are then asked to somehow relate their work to these deconstructionist theories and then be judged by how successfully they do this.
The primary problem with this kind of education is that by diving deeper and deeper into the theoretical and self-referential, artists lose touch with their public. As a result, the public, particularly the young public, often feels alienated from art. Intentionally or not, people have been made to feel inferior to the art intelligentsia. What inevitably follows is that art becomes simply something to be bought, sold and understood by a very small sector of the population and it loses its urgent role as a means of communication or as a catalyst for social or cultural change.
On more than one occasion I have felt the urge to spray-paint “Mike Kelley is the Enemy” on walls around the city. Nothing against Kelley; his early work in particular was a big inspiration and holds great meaning for me. Rather, I want to do this as a statement to young artists that they need to kill their heroes to discover themselves.
Of course, I’m generalizing. There are many young, emerging artists working today who truly believe in the relevance of what they are doing and have the chops and points of view to back it up. And this isn’t to suggest that all artwork should be political. I believe that a personal statement that is drawn from the heart can be more powerful and effective than propaganda. Works that have inspired me recently include those by Ashley Macomber, a Los Angeles artist who creates intricately painted human/animal hybrids that could be said to resemble those campy American Indian paintings found on truck-stop T-shirts. Upon deeper consultation, however, they provide a strong commentary on our relationships to each other, nature and ourselves. Also of note is the East Coast collective Paperrad, whose multimedia installations include everything from sculpture to animation to printed fanzines. The collective’s innocent yet sophisticated approach to art consistently leaves me feeling hungry for more. Other artists of interest include Masaki Kawai, Matt Leines, Tauba Auerbach, Jim Drain and Jo Jackson. Needless to say there is much good work out there.
Some of these artists are MFAs and some are not. The point of all this is that if young artists had the courage and the encouragement to focus more on their art than the “art business,” there would be even more inspiring work to see and less distance between art and the public. Maybe all it takes is a little less thinking and a lot more feeling. If we could open our hearts amazing things could happen.
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