People Need A Safe Place To Freak Out
I was walking to my mural job late last night when I passed a stinky no-nonsense tavern. Not a scenester bar, mind you, but a pinball playing and beer drinking tavern. Outside stood a young, baggy panted and Elton-John-glasses-wearing girl who was flapping her arms in blissfull amazement. There was a posse of dread-locked dudes flaunting their Brookes Brothers suits. And to top it all off was an Izod kook showing a homeless busker some sloppy arpeggio. People were fearless and it seemed contagious.
No judgement is where it is at.
I want to participate in a blogosphere where we can post our comments, possibly even anonymously, and not worry about being called names. If a fearless environment is the goal, we should be able to voice our opinion, especially if that opinion is out of sync with someone else. I wish my blog and its shadow of a comment section could be like that tavern.
I get to my mural job and set up the scaffold and turn on the random shuffle. Elvis Costtello, Beth Orton, and The Aliens(mp3) are the stand out, stop-what-I'm-doing artists. As I'm standing in the focal point of the four walled mural, it occurs to me that I am creating the sensation of standing within an enormous camera obscura.
The mural can only "work" from one privileged focal point (actually three, but that is for another post). As the public walks past, or through the stairwell, there are three points where the mural snaps into cohesion. A step in any direction and the perspective begins to twist in a nauseating and cubist sort of way. It occurs to me that the vanishing point is Representation's crutch. Does that mean that Abstraction was invented when perspective was introduced? Who were those cats? Giotto wasn't it?
How did we see before this was invented? Isn't it amazing that the stationary view point was something that was invented? Were we living in a soup of Abstraction before this learned way of seeing started to sink into our collective consciousness? (Anybody who has taught a class on perspective drawing and witnessed the tears can tell you that this is a learned way of seeing). Why were they called the "Dark Ages"? Weren't they, like, totally into God and stuff? Shouldn't those years of "emptiness of mind" be the "Enlightened" ones? Why is losing a fundamental connection to the big picture a Renaissance? 
6 comments:
i had written about all this on my blog awhile back, but i will state it here again (fearlessly) because i am rather amused by it still... the funny notion that around the time these Euros were figuring out the world is round was the about the time they started painting it like it was flat. what does this mean?
The more scientific reasoning we rely on (the information gathered by our crude senses) the more we begin to put things into some perspective, or their "right place" (a radiohead song translated)? (A sill notion on par with having rich, white males determine what is best for the world... oh wait...)
This is exactly what i was referring to in my post... abstraction and representation are both tools of illusion and are, especially in painting, irrelevant.
If we paint people, or if we blow ink around with a straw... we are not referencing a person or a blob... we are churning the void with wish to nurture some quality.
i point as an example to master portraits of people we could no longer know. Velasquez, Goya, Rembrandt... The people are long gone, and compassion for a quality is all that remains to pull us in. Now add Rothko to the mix, or even a cave painter... the same applies.
It may or may not interest you to know that recently i have written on the wall above my portrait painting area, "It's not a face."
Excellent post and comment, Steve and Geoff -- you're messing with my mind, dudes! Get out of my mind!!!
In realism and abstraction we're simultaneously struggling against and swimming with evolved perceptual abilities. This give and take is ticklish, gives a sense of intrigue, of moving somehow towards a larger meaning that we can never reach.
It's highly human. Dogs don't do this -- yet.
Your posts underscore further our need to stand outside all of it, and to freely access all of it as need be -- all styles, formats, paradigms. We can use whatever we need to develop and implement concept.
History is free for the ransacking.
i suppose we can choose to see the outcome of deconstruction as leaving us with nothing (and/or) complete freedom. That we can even see the choice is lovely, but i think it is time to explore actively (personally).
How does understanding a face is not a face and a pipe is not a pipe change our work/lives?
(i might move some of this discussion back into my own blog too SL... only because i feel rude writing long essays here, and i need record of all this for myself as well)
oh and bill, i totally agree! It is something like the Matrix, eh? but without all the ass kicking, and minus keano reeves...
Thanks fellas.
Too much to elaborate on this weekend. Lets just say, here are some possible umbrella titles for my upcoming show;
"irrelevant tools of illusion"
"churning the void"
"it not an accident"
"Dogs don't do this -- yet"
b/t/w geoff, i've found that various sizes of surgical tubing are more versatile than a stiff straw. also, "How does understanding a face is not a face and a pipe is not a pipe change our work/lives?" Is this week's assignment. And long essays aren't rude. I'm guilty of the opposite of a long essay, which I often feel is twice as rude.
b/t/w bill, i've been stewin' on your robot post from the other day. I've been thinking that I am a robot following a (seemingly) self-imposed, self-generated, program. I could write up a recipe/formula/code for my ink drawings so that everyone could make their own. Would that formula be part of an artificial intelligence? Could a teach my dog to make drawiwngs? Can they make a machine that mimics Pollock's paintings? Is history truely free for the ransacking? can we just boot-up knowledge like Neo?
hmmmm...
I could write up a recipe/formula/code for my ink drawings so that everyone could make their own. Would that formula be part of an artificial intelligence?
Maybe, in some sense. Not sure. AI as it's used now seems a bit above my head.
Could a teach my dog to make drawiwngs?
Maybe. Strap a charcoal to his snout and see what he does. Interesting to think that the dog could be an art tool.
Can they make a machine that mimics Pollock's paintings?
I think they tried but he's more complex than they are. Don't you agree? They didn't really seem to understand him at all.
Is history truely free for the ransacking? can we just boot-up knowledge like Neo?
I don't see it as though you'd now be painting like Pollock or da Vinci, as though it was somehow sincere. You can't inject yourself into a fifteenth century worldview.
I think it's more like, if there's a meaning that's best communicated through a Pollock style or a da Vinci style, have at it.
Thing is, you can't be Pollock anyway. You don't drink enough and you're not as pissed off at Picasso as he was. Your use of that technique would undoubtedly be different and would come off that way. Yves Klein did some swirly painty things if I recall correctly, as did Hans Hofmann -- but just a few in both cases.
I recall reading an interview with Robert Longo in which he admitted using a Pollock technique to lay splatters over a painting that featured the lead singer from Talking Heads.
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