Transference

Barry Schwabsky is an art critic who wrote a book that I really like, “Vitamin P.” Tonight he gave a lecture on what it means to be a painter. For him, at this point in art history, painting was the extension of a “project,” or the set of ideas that lead to the painting (or other medium).

He could (and did) explain this better than I but to simplify, a painting that is just an object is not particularly interesting. This is why many find “naive” art or “derivative” art or “decorative” art uninteresting - i.e., the act of painting is not what makes a painting art, at least not today. The act of painting in and of itself is nothing more than manual labor. And so, if that doesn’t, then what does? Schwabsky said that one answer is that it is not the painting but the idea behind the painting, but then he immediately refuted it by saying, if it’s the idea that is the “art” than who cares about the painting. He then cited German artist Michael Krebber as an example. Krebber’s works can barely be considered paintings but it has been determined that it is Krebber’s “project” that leads to the paintings that makes them art. Schwabsky implied that he is not a fan of Krebber, but he did believe that what made a painter’s paintings “art” was the “project” behind them, even though the artist wasn’t always fully aware of the project or able to articulate it themselves. Later in a Q&A he also said he thought that the artist had to be aware of where the project fell into the larger spectrum of the art world, so an outsider artist might not have a “project,” nor would a contemporary artist who exists purely in a particular time (such as Peter Max).

What this does, in my opinion, is posit all the power on the side of the art world, the art historian and the critic. The artist may not be aware of what it is that makes their project coherent, but someone somewhere eventually will be able to make that determination. Similarly, if you don’t need be particularly self-aware to have a project, any committed artist can have a project. A retired, hobbyist plein air painter can have a project because he is committed to an idea (plein air painting, the desire to paint like Van Gogh) and also has enough self-awareness to understand where he fits into the art world (hobbyist). And if any committed painter has a project, then the only question remaining is a value judgement as to whether or not the project is worthwhile, which again, posits all the power into the hands of the art world, the art historian and the critic.

But painting can have, depending on the painter, something that happens in the act of doing it that isn’t a part of the ideas behind it, just like playing music or performing dance or theater or spoken word, something that happens in the moment. And whatever that thing is that happens in the moment, in a painting, it is literally solidified into a hardened mass on a canvas (or whatever). (Yes, performances can be “captured” but they generally do not inherently make an object at the end, whereas the purpose of painting is to make an object.) So I don’t think the “project” theory accounts for this, it’s certainly more than “manual labor.” Or maybe “manual labor” is more than what we presume.

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Tonight’s lecture by Dana Schutz was interesting. More along the lines I’d been expecting compared to Matthew Ritchie, in that she showed a slideshow of her work and talked about each one. I have mixed feelings about her work, in that I think she tries to do something really difficult (or at least I’d find it difficult) which is make representational paintings from her imagination and yet I don’t like the paintings themselves much. Tonight I saw a few that I really liked however. They had political subjects (but weren’t particularly political paintings), like the one above, “Party,” painting around the 2004 election. But the overall feeling that her work gives me is something reminscent of art from the 1930’s or so. She even mentioned Alice Neel as one of her favorite painters who is interestingly also one of mine. I also think of Picasso, George Grosz, many others.

Her talk was very entertaining, often funny. I can understand that Jerry Saltz comment now because she seems, without artifice or pretention, to think about things in a completely unique way. And so, as I said regarding David E. Stone’s work, things you’ve never though about before make you laugh and so Dana Schutz and her paintings make you laugh.

What was interesting was that she described her trajectory as a painter, from her time starting out in graduate school. In fact, she opened the lecture with a slide of a painting that looks nothing like her work which she explained was a painting she did when she first got to graduate school and it was really, in retrospect, a painting of what she thought graduate school paintings should look like. Later she showed her first “fully painted” painting, which she felt sort of worried about, that people would find it naive or old-fashioned. So as she talked, she gave the sense of the sort of inner dialogue that goes on in the mind of the artist as they consider what to paint, what not to paint, and how to paint what you decide to paint. And she talked about how the time always comes when you look back on something you did and you no longer find it interesting. And it’s interesting to see how she has pushed herself to paint things she imagines but for which there exists no guide or photo or whatever to copy.

Someone in the audience accused her of speaking in a facile way about her art which is, for many, disturbing and often gorey. She said she didn’t see them as gorey. And if you hear her explanation of them, they indeed cease to be gorey and disturbing. I noticed that at a couple points she referred to removing both sex and death from the subject matter of her paintings and I think that by doing so, if only in her own perception of the painting, it removes a lot of what looks disturbing at a casual glance.

One of the paintings I liked best was a more realistic painting (very Alice Neel come to think of it) of herself doing a Google image search. Which made me wonder how many of us are all sitting around Googling abstract concepts like “telepathy” (as she is doing in the painting) or in my case “transference.”

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I think I might have to start going to more artists’ talks. Last weekend, David E. Stone was great and now tonight Matthew Ritchie’s talk at Painting’s Edge was inspiring. He sort of gave this whole lecture about political, intellectual and scientific thought of the past century and how it related to both art in general and his art specifically.

It’s kind of amazing but even though I go to galleries and museums regularly, even though I subscribe (and mostly read) ArtForum, Art in America and other art magazines like Tema Celeste, even though I’m somewhat highly educated, even though I have the internet at my fingers and can look up anything I want in a flash, even though I have a really good memory, despite all this there are so many artists who are famous and yet with whom I am not familiar. Including Matthew Ritchie.

So I googled Matthew Ritchie when I was applying to Painting’s Edge to see who he is and found a website that was a sort of strange interactive game called The Hard Way - It was exciting because Tracy F. and I have been talking about games as art a lot recently. In tonight’s lecture, it became clear that the interactive game was one of his earliest works, from 1995. Then as he showed more and more of his work, I realized that I saw his work at the Whitney in 2005, a group show which also featured Julie Neretu and which was concurrent with a Robert Smithson retrospective. Julie Neretu’s paintings seem to imply an abstracted twister or hurricane, a whirlpool of air and particles. Matthew Ritchie’s paintings imply an abstracted explosion and also some sort of strange aftergrowth, like fern fronds or fractals.

As he spoke, I was struck by the many concurrent themes in his work and mine. We are possibly about the same age, yet he is much farther along the trajectory of “artist” (fame and success aside) than I am. After his lecture someone asked him a vague question about whether or not he’d ever had “transitional” periods in his artwork and he mysteriously answered, “Well, you’ll notice that I have no artwork prior to 1995.” Say he’s 40 (he has grey hair but no visible wrinkles) - that means he either made no art prior to age 30 or made art that he won’t admit he made. But I digress.

He talked about several interesting ideas. One was that the roots of modern judeo-christian religion and thought came from ancient Babylonia, which was a culture that was possessed by a belief that it would eventually be destroyed, either by something ordinary (failure of crops) or by something extraordinary (what Ritchie called “bad luck”). This belief of eventual destruction still permeates our culture and according to Ritchie, there is a self-destructive glee that the whole thing seems to feed off of. (I’ve been fascinated by destruction and disasters and have started to do some disaster paintings although I am not happy with them because they are too literal.) The Babylonians responded to these fears by attempting to predict the future, which resulted in the development of sidereal astronomy and the zodiac. This whole thing got me excited because I’ve been thinking a lot about the idea of cultural memory and how the discovery of the small race of people - Homo Floriensis - on that island had opened up the idea that a lot of the myths and ideas that are familiar to many cultures (the existence of “little people,” etc.) are based in reality from long ago. So perhaps the Babylonians possessed the remnants of the cultural memory of the great asteroid or flood, in fact, perhaps we all do.

He talked about order and disorder - that the “real” world consists of order (the podium he was leaning on - a “box”) and disorder (the dirt outside) and that in his artwork, he tried to stay somewhere in between because both total order and total disorder are ultimately uninteresting. He also talked about how some of the best artists he knew of were vigilant, patrolling their own ideas relentlessly and looking out for anything that was “new” or “odd” or “different” and then mining that. (That one caused the man next to me to mutter, “Great way to explain it!”) This was while trying to explain that every artist has a “filter” through which they perceive what is interesting and what is not interesting and that not knowing what your filter is doesn’t mean you don’t have one. It just means that it’s not a very good filter or that you haven’t developed it enough.

On the 10, driving down here, I was thinking about my series, “Into the Woods.” I just sent off a grant application and so I was re-reading and re-working my proposal for this series and it became clear to me that I need to figure out how to deliver the ideas behind the series. The “concept” exists but I don’t yet know how to make the paintings “conceptual.” It’s interesting to talk about all the ideas behind art. When I see art that I don’t like, I always say to myself “That is an artist who has no ideas.” You can just tell. I have ideas but it’s taking me years to reach the level of skill needed in order to execute them (I am not talking about draftsmanship or realistic rendering here although that too was once an issue). But if I am vigilant, perhaps I can get there.

Tomorrow’s lecture is Dana Schutz. Jerry Saltz described her has having an “extra fold in her frontal lobe” so I’m looking forward to that one.

By the way, there was a woman at the lecture who was at the Excene Cervenka show at Western Project two weeks ago - I’m gonna have to figure out who she is.

(Will add links & photos later this week.)

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Today I went to hear David E. Stone talk at Gallery Revisited about his art. He was there with his wife Cathy Stone and their daughter and he talked about how he came from Sacramento and even though he went to public school he was lucky enough to be taught by a bunch of working, contemporary (mostly Bay Area) artists. His work was interesting and funny. To some, “funny” might sound like it wasn’t so interesting but to me humor that is wild and smart and free but not idiotic is rare and that is what David E. Stone’s work is like. His art is conceptual and all the best conceptual art is funny even if only because things you never thought of before make you laugh (unless you’re an asshole).

David E. Stone - at least in this show - riffs on everything. There is no other word for it. He riffs on previous shows, his own gallery One Year in L.A., the pegboard door inside Gallery Revisited, his mentors, his family, anything. The smallest things are fodder and worthy of delving into or boring out of, as the case may be. Of particular interest was his comment that he likes his work to be understood on two or three levels, but always on a basic visual level (he didn’t actually say visual but you know what I mean..) without text or explanation.

So then I came home (how could there possibly be so much traffic on a Saturday afternoon?) and I checked out the current incarnation of One Year in L.A. - Another Year in L.A. - lots of stuff worth looking at there, it seems.

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Today I attended the book release party for One Hundred Siberian Postcards. It’s a beautiful book of prose by Rick Wirick.

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Went to a couple Culver City galleries last night: Kinkead Contemporary, which seems to have consistenlty interesting art in their 7 month run, and Western Project which had a solo show of collages by Excene Cervenka. Kinda funny to stumble on by accident since about a month ago several of my friends went to the Silverlake Film Festival and saw “X The Unheard Music” and John Doe was there to get the “Lifetime Achievement Award.” You can see some of the pictures taken by Cynthia and also by Eddy. There are also some great pictures from the Knitters’ show in December at Safari Sam’s taken by Tracy. I missed the movie and the talk afterwards but made it just in time for the horrendous after-party at The Echo. Rumor has it that John Doe showed up at the after-party just as some band was playing a horrible cover of “Los Angeles” and he turned around and walked right back out the door saying, “I can’t handle this.” Who could?

Here’s some of Excene’s art, including journals going back to the late 1970’s:

Bill Morgan, director of “X The Unheard Music”was there…

Here’s the funky crowd hangin’ round the bar in the back:

Ralph took all these photos because I was too chicken, he was obsessed with this girl’s hair:

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I recently attended a talk by artist David McDonald and he said, “The Hammer is definitely L.A.’s hippest museum.” There’s really no arguing it. The Skin+Bones show at MOCA was anything but hip. Eden’s Edge shared a similar aesthetic to the L.A. sculpture show at the Hammer last year. I enjoyed the show without liking much of the art, although there were two artists whose work I liked, Monica Majoli and her weird “Rubberman” watercolors and Mark Bradford’s giant collages. They have a monumental yet chaotic quality that I love. I am not that drawn to abstract art unless it hints at some sort of figuration and my favorite of his pieces looked kind of like a giant messay map of lower Manhattan. The Hammer didn’t post any of the images of his works on their web site so the image shown below is from the Saatchi web site.

Monica Majoli, Hanging Rubberman

Mark Bradford

Song Kun, an artist from Beijing, did a series of paintings called “It’s My Life,” one painting for each day of the year. They are beautiful but sometimes too pretty and sometimes too much like film storyboards for a Japanese animated movie and sometimes too much like Luc Tuymans. What’s interesting to me, as a painter, is that you can’t really enforce a style that’s not organic to you for 365 days. Well you can if you’re anal retentive and self-controlling, but to do a painting a day you kind just have to paint the way you paint. Song Kun clearly chose a limited palatte (part of why it looks like Tuymans) and a uniform size (part of what makes it look like film stills) and to stick with these limitations for a year, you’d have to love them.

Last but not lease, there was a giant neon sculpture by Jason Rhoades which included the words “crotch taco” in neon.

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Yesterday, I took a tour of the Frederick Weisman Foundation at his former home in Beverly Hills. It’s an impressive collection. Every room in the house has at least ten works of art by immediately recognizable artists: Picasso, Giacometti, Lichtenstein, deKooning, Rothko, Magritte, and on and on. The garden features giant bronze figures by Botero and many other sculptures and there is a large museum-like addition to the house which has all the large-scale works that wouldn’t fit in a house.

Unfortunately there are many rules, including no photographs. Purses must be left in your car for fear that they “might damage the art.” You must arrive 5 minutes early, but no earlier. If you get there earlier you must not park on the street or drive around the neighborhood, rather you must leave the neighborhood and drive around someone else’s neighborhood. And no children under 12. We got there at 10:28 and were reprimanded twice for being “late” (the tour started at 10:30) but once that was made clear, the docent was great and her talk was not boring and I am one of the first people to get bored on a tour.

It’s interesting to see art in a setting that isn’t a museum and apparently Frederick Weisman and his wife Billie allowed tours of their home even when they were living in it because he believed that ordinary people should be allowed to see the art. If you think about it, when it comes to living artists, museums only get involved in acquiring their work after they’ve gained a certain level of success so most works by an artist are sold into private collections.

Also, the tour offered a chance to see a snapshot of wealth in the 1980’s - the furniture is unchanged and most of the art is from the 1940-1990 - a lot of bright colors and geometric patterns and those disturbingly lifelike sculptures by Duane Hanson. I don’t think I could live with one of those in my living room. And creepier still, Weisman commissioned two sculptures by Hanson of his deceased parents.

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SexyEngineer is an ongoing collection of found photos posted by active duty American soldiers on singles websites. I have over 300 but here is a small sample.

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This past weekend, I got to see John Humble’s photographs of beautifully fucked-up Los Angeles at The Getty. I’d seen a couple of his works at Photo LA but it was nice to see more.

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