the disposable plane
The suburbs and exurbs are permanent destruction of both land and culture. There will be no re-building of the old landscapes, the ranches, farms, groves, swamps, and forests which were replaced by the rotting, cheaply-built stucco-boxes. They will become ghettos and dangerous wastelands and kudzu-covered shells. No land is disposable.
Unlike some other products, the collapse of the market for these overpriced houses will not be followed by a quick “correction” which will make everything right again. The investors who currently own the loans will not be willing to loose half or two-thirds of the value of mortgages which they were not responsible for selling to the homeowners in the first place. Home prices will rise so gradually, that the owners will not live to see the day that the purchase price is recovered. The contractors and real estate agents who built and sold these pieces of garbage were the only winners in this scam.
Now this is the modern and future landscape, geographically, economically and politically; not some ultra-urban, high-density abstraction of New York, Chicago, Berlin or Tokyo. The mega-city is the truth for some people, but certainly not most. The future for most Americans will be the unending expanse of polluted, low-density ghetto.
The problem in the United States has been that we treat land like a concept, an imaginary disposable plane, an infinite supply of ideas, a painting, or rather a collection of paintings that can always be expanded; there are always more canvases and sheets of paper to buy at the store on which we can just keep ruling and scribbling. In places like Europe people know their land is limited; they just have the one canvas to play with, so they don’t go wrecking large portions of it quite as often. One day we will see our land in this way, maybe not, either way we don’t currently treat it that way, only as zones of more or less monetary value. We have not yet completed our manifest destiny of paving over the continent.
Land is our one truly limited and irreplaceable resource. When we run out of oil and coal we may have alternative energy plans. There are no alternative land plans and no renewable land resources.
ontology and Robert Ryman
This past July my girlfriend and I took a trip to New York and New Jersey, mostly to see art (she has an art history degree) and of course to do some touristy stuff like see a Broadway show, Ground Zero, the High Line, Chinatown and St. Patrick’s Cathedral, among other things. After four intense days of New York City we had plans to drive an hour upstate to Beacon, NY to see Dia: Beacon, a huge museum dedicated mostly to large-scale artworks such as those of Donald Judd, Michael Heizer, Fred Sandback, Dan Flavin, John Chamberlain, Richard Serra and others.
Dia: Beacon also has a significant amount of work by Robert Ryman, a painter whom I had underappreciated as a sort of academic, theoretical painter; no one with much relevance to my own ideas on painting. Having been there to see several of his pieces in real life and really think about them I have changed my tune completely. He is one of the most important painters alive and it’s unfortunate that more students, artists and “civilians” are not enlightened to his work. I don’t know what’s going on in art schools today but he was never mentioned in the entirety of my undergraduate education, save for a small piece of his being included in a university museum show of contemporary abstract painting.
The initial reaction by most people to his work is, naturally, “It’s all just white!” and that’s mostly true, except for his very early work, but what I say to people to get them to re-focus their attention on what his work is really about is to compare it to how a blind or a deaf person experiences the world. When you remove one sensory experience, the others become heightened, more attuned to the ontological (the philosophy of reality itself as opposed to how it is mediated by our senses) reality around them. Ryman’s paintings use only white paint because he is essentially painting everything except color (although technically white is a color). We are force to look at what paint really is: surface, volume, molecules, to imagine what it would be like to touch it, how light reflects off of it, how it was applied, how it interact is various ways with its support surface and apparatus. Ryman has painted in innumerable different ways in order to fully enlighten us on all these factors and perhaps to make us realize just how arbitrary our typical methods of painting really are, such as “acrylic on stretched canvas” or “oil on panel.”
Why white? It’s not only the most neutral or “absent” color, Ryman makes it beautiful in a way no one else has. In art school I make a giant spaceship-like structure using only cardboard and kraft tape, and one of the revelations of the project was to really see the color of cardboard. It’s orange! I had never thought of that before. Similarly, Ryman makes us see color in a whole new way when he removes it, and only it, from our experience of painting. It’s a simulation of an ontologically pure object, as close as we can get to “seeing” without looking.
That epiphany this summer yielded many others on the seemingly arbitrary components of painting: Why is it viscous? Why is it on a flat surface? Why does it dry faster or slower? Why do we apply it with brushed or rollers, or other tools? Why oil or acrylic or gouache? It is much easier to contemplate all the dimensions of painting: hue, value, viscosity, texture, opacity uniformity, surface (both optic and haptic) and therefore make better, more informed decisions about how to paint, when you remove a dimension you are used to having around all the time.
aesthetics and value part i
There is plenty written about aesthetics in art, more so than any other aspect of art, but that’s probably because any formula for explaining why we feel the way we do about aesthetic experiences is so elusive. We generally don’t like to think of things as completely subjective; we want to qualify and quantify experiences to the nth degree, mostly so that we can re-create them, improve them, explain ourselves and the universe and share ideas with and relate to other people. Despite our best efforts to explain aesthetics (the mind and emotions in relation to the sense of beauty and value) we have not satisfactorily described exactly what is beautiful and positive and what is ugly and negative, or even if that dichotomy really exists. It is purely a psychological question about which the outside universe does not care.
I run into this question because I catch myself denying that I care about aesthetics at all, thanks to my overblown worship of the Abstract Expressionist philosophy that seems to deny formalism and aesthetics completely. Barnett Newman famously said, “Aesthetics is for the artist as ornithology is for the birds,” and I believed that he meant it, until recently. He and others in the movement, Rothko, Motherwell, Pollock, were, for a time, struggling to break away from a school of art which was pure formalism and aesthetics, pretty pictures, which was especially difficult when faced with formalist geometric abstraction (Mondrian, Malevich, etc.). Now I realize that Newman’s was a statement of rhetoric, of hyperbole. Of course his paintings are gorgeous, and he knew it at the time, but to acknowledge it at the time would have been to confuse his argument that his paintings were (seemingly) pure psychological experience, pure spiritualism, “sublime” as he called it.
Now when I make something which just happens to be aesthetically pleasing, I can’t help second-guessing myself. I ask “is this okay?” and “what was my real intention in making it this way?” and I have trouble with the answer because I try to paint very intuitively. Who knows what in the subconscious decides to make something “pretty” or not? The composer Aaron Copland said that, even when you are not aware of it, when you are creating something you are making decisions. As mysterious as the creative germ may be, you still have the power to decide to write (or paint) x instead of y or z, and you will do yourself a great deal of service to be aware of when you are making these decisions, to be “aware of your awareness.” I first read that phrase in high school, when I still planned to study music composition, and only after finishing art school did I understand it.
One way to look at the question of aesthetics is comparatively. For example, I have a clear, reliable aesthetic opinion of certain types of people, particularly women. Stay with me. I know it’s a little juvenile to say so, but it honestly is the most reliable case study I can give myself in aesthetics because I have never once changed my mind about it. Why am I attracted to women? This takes me on a course into biology with which I am not totally familiar. My only assumption is that an evolutionary biologist could surmise that some part of my brain evolved to react this way to ensure the continuation of the species, a leftover from a time when procreation was a lot dicier.
Is this how all of aesthetics works? We’re just wired for it? There is just generally a hard-wired sense of “pretty” and “ugly”?
My real problem is how I feel about making something aesthetically pleasing. What is the value of that? Why bother making something (intentionally) beautiful? Or why bother making something ugly for that matter? It seems pointless to simply exercise ones ability to paint something to which others will predictably react on that level. I guess I don’t really know what other people think of my paintings (or those of anyone else’s) and I never will; I’m not in their heads. The leap of faith required to share psychological experiences with another person with whom we only share phenomenology only takes us so far.
(More to come later in Part II)
writing an artist statement
Writing a proper artist statement for an academic program is proving to be even more difficult than making the art itself. Generally speaking, too many artists rarely think it’s their responsibility to learn how to express their ideas in writing, and rarer still to carefully consider their audience, intentions, all the sources of their ideas and methods, etc. To pack all of this into a one-page statement, make it sound intelligent but not pretentious, has become a massive undertaking in research and practice. I have dozens of handwritten and typed notes and sound bites lying around, but I still don’t have them organized, not that I’m even through making the raw material yet.
I made myself a short (unfinished) list of rules for the statement:
- describe intentions
- explain motivation(s)
- demonstrate awareness of precedent
- articulate a position in theory/philosophy
- articulate a political position
- try to NOT list influences by name, especially other artists
- do NOT treat as pedagogy
This list has been growing gradually and I expect it might continue
Statement 9-30-08
My project in painting, drawing and cut-paper work, for the last three years, has been a thorough searching of occasional epiphanies of form and scale. Once in a while I get a flash of some vague form or color, in a dream, a daydream or in another work of art or design, and I try several times to reproduce it and create variations of it. I want to fully explore the potential in these rare and deep mines of the subconscious, what Barnett Newman called the sublime “plasmic” image. He too, along with Robert Motherwell, Franz Kline, Jackson Pollock and other Abstract Expressionist painters in the late 40’s and 50’s, adopted the Surrealist technique of Psychic Automatism so reach ones mind into the sublime, scale-less world of the subconscious, bringing back forms that are at once from nowhere real and universally understood. Being able to see these ideas clearly enough in the mind’s eye to paint or draw them is much like a composer’s ability to frantically scribble down a sonic idea onto the notational plane of the manuscript. “Writing,” transcribing or notating these forms is the best way to describe the process, as it feels more like hearing than seeing. (Actually listening to certain types of music is a great help in my process of putting ideas to paper – Ligeti, Penderecki, and Gorecki work well.) The rest of the process, examining shapes, lines, colors, media, etc. comes from pure practice and experimentation and waiting for the “happy accident” to occur. It is a very slow, incremental process between major changes in my paintings. On the other end, before any new ideas come, I spend time looking, listening and reading, taking interest and researching subjects with similar or relevant ideas and forms: architecture, biology, land planning, linguistics, engineering, philosophy, and of course, other people’s art, music and design.
Allotropes are different structural forms of a single element, such as the allotropes of the carbon atom: diamond, nanotube and graphite. I find this to be an interesting way to describe much of what I’m trying to do, which is to take one formal idea and put it through the sea of other influences in my head and make new variations out of it. Recently I had an idea to make large, irregular, curved shapes and encircle them with rectilinear “walls,” like plant cells with overgrown nuclei, then to squeeze these blocks of lines and shapes together into a larger form inspired by urban design and architecture. As always I am careful to avoid scale-specific forms, such as faces or bodies, so that the abstract field of vision has no scale at all, and can be seen as a space of infinite scale, in which all the gestures and colors and endowed with profound communicative potential.
Color has probably been the most difficult formal element to handle. It’s hard to see clearly in the imagination, it behaves like a wild animal which education only serves to distract and ruin one’s instinct in dealing with it, and corrections are rarely possible once it’s committed to canvas.
Brushwork is next on the list. Drawing is such an immediate way of working. Ideas go directly from the head to the paper with no perceived intermediary, the hand moving instinctively like a dancer whose gestures are traced on the surface. Ink and graphite are so romantic to me, silvery-gray dust particles trapped in the protruding fibers of a compressed and flattened amalgam; rich, opaque, dark fluid, wetter than water, landing on a soft bed of white fibers, quickly seeping in to stay trapped forever, but not to spread where it doesn’t belong. Lines go where the mind tells them to, the same way you write words. Paint does not go where you tell it to without a lot of practice. Generally speaking, paint is a thick, viscous, sloppy thing which sits on the surface, refusing to seep into the world you’re trying to create. It is infinitely varied and complex and has such wildly different properties between vehicles, pigments and additives that no amount of guesswork or conjecture can make it work properly. There is no end to the techniques of painting, and when you do learn just enough to get by, your education stands in the way of your instinct, which must again be conquered before the brush moves like the pencil again.
