In the Head

Templar Grid Flower of Life Man

Trudy Benson

I really dig this abstract artist named Trudy Benson.  Her work stands out from the myriad of abstract redundancy that pervades painting these days.  Although I am not entirely sure of her technique, it seems like she uses computer based imagery as her starting point.  They look like simple doodles in Microsoft Paint, then transposed onto canvas.  What I love is the seamless relationship between the two realms, creating a dialogue between both analog and digital world views.  Also, the colors, lines and formations she comes up with so whimsically are fresh and fun to look at.  I see a pedigree of Jonathan Lasker in this work, whose work I also like to look at.  I would call this kind of art "Abstract Intentionism".  They are the type of abstractionists who are deliberate in their conceptualizations almost down to the most minute detail, which perhaps represents some kind of conceptual inversion. 

I am not sure of the title of this piece, but I really love it.  Anyway, I had to put her up here in the ole bloggy.

Liminality

I often think that this whole creative process if just one large liminal rite of passage.  That is, every time we approach ourselves and the creative process, we are at the threshold of what was and what will be.  I think most artists can relate to the idea that often the end result is far different from the original concept, with exceptions of course.  Also, there are unknowns in regard to both the past and the future in terms of understanding.  Things have a tendency to change and depending on endogenous and exogenous factors, the variables are perhaps limitless.

There is always a sense of mystery for me with art.  When I paint, I feel like I am engaged in a religious act of some sort, minus the institutional and political connotations of that word.  "Spiritual" might be more politically correct, but in the sense that "relegare" means to "bind fast", that is just it.  Every time we engage in a creative act, we bind ourselves fast to the infinite potential in all things as we connect to them both macrocosmically and microcosmically.

So, liminality underlies creativity because like the trickster, we never really know what it is.  Even after all the exegeses that go on, there is never a definite understanding of a work of art.  Even more so today, with so many styles, derivatives, shapes, forms, concepts in the art world, we might say we swim in a creative sea of liminality, sailing through the threshold of what was and what will be.

Factory Farm

Keep it Conspiratorial

I often find myself becoming too intellectual about art.  There is a tendency to do so due to ever increasing needs in the marketplace to stand out.  I find it all interesting, but after a while, I come back to my own esoteric, mystical, psychopomp view of the creative process.

No matter how we try to use science to decipher the creative process, we end up trying to remove the proverbial needle in the haystack.  At its core, the creative process in whatever form is a mysterious reality that lies beyond the total ability of human consciousness to understand it.  If that were not so, there would be no conscious evolution of sorts.  I think that is the one thing that keeps people going, that they have this Darwinian view of all things and in doing so, believe they are making progress.

However, this is all becoming rote and hackneyed.  I find most contemporary art, even mine at times, to be very trite.  It just feels stupid and inane.  Not to mention, if you go to galleries and exhibitions in New York, the pile of $hiT that presents itself as the so called avant garde.

Well, I can complain if I want and there are many souls who would claim that I have sour grapes, but whatever, I might be dead in the near future, so I don't give a F%@k.

Painting is Virtual

I recently read an interesting essay regarding painting and its referencing (indexicality) to its author as its supposed link to authenticity.  Based in pragmatics, the idea comes from Charles Sanders Pierce, the great logician who is famous for his trichotomy: icon, index and symbol.  This also has connections to structuralist ideas of Signifier and Signified, something that has been dealt with in different ways by the post-structuralists who came after.  

However, the idea that painting is a simple reference to the painter and that somehow is what legitimizes its presence is difficult for me to understand.  The reason has to do with the philosophical concepts of multiplicity and virtuality.  Henri Bergson expressed the effects of multiplicity and suggested intuition as a means for understanding creative works.  As I have stated before, the multiple, discursive universe of the contemporary visual art field, marks perhaps many things, but one thing is for sure, it marks its movement towards perhaps greater unknowns in its creative flow.  There is no conceptual ground on which to stand and beyond personalities and excessively rendered labels of identification, it appears meaningless.  In fact, the only thing I can see is a baroque nature to all of this and that perhaps this is its aesthetic substantiation.

Therefore, this brings up the question regarding arts legitimacy.  The problem lies in the fact that if there is no progressive logic to something, then its history is undetermined.  However, I personally do not see this as a problem per se, but recognize its superficial dilemma.  In fact, that might be a liberating actualization of the end production of years of institutional hegemony and conceptual schizophrenia.  

Multiplicity and virtuality, which were examined so well by Gilles Deleuze, are aspects of anything and its relation to what made it.  The problem with painting is that there is no direct reference in reality to its author and this is certainly true even in the personal effects left on its surface as a result of mark making or whatever in its production.  The reason is that once a painting is completed, whatever has been left is a virtual representation in an objective form.  The traces left also cannot necessarily be directly determined to belong to an individual, etc.  A good example would be Tibetan Sand Painting, where the identity of an individual is actually avoided with intention.  So many things are affecting the artist upon creation, that there is no consistent evidence to the contrary.  Hence, in my opinion, this is the reason for the repetitive, complacent style making of so many artists today.  The idea seems to be get a style and become recognized for it, because lets face it, it is about marketing and selling (standing out from the morass of ideas, personalities and images).  

A painting is not much different than looking at an image on a computer.  Its actuality does depend on an objective interaction, but its reality is there regardless...as it lives in a virtual realm.  Increasingly, the flow of information is becoming self-referential and the author is becoming anonymous in time and space.  All of this is a result of the virtuality of our existence in cyberspace and this is having a direct impact on the nature of painting and its relationship to culture at large.  Perhaps there is a feedback loop between the techonology and its effects on the nature of visual art in general?  These are complex issues and questions.

Conversations with Dan Asher

Lately I've been thinking about an old friend Dan Asher.  He was someone a lot of art world people knew, but did not like to admit it.  I met him at the Russian Baths in the East Village and he became a sort of avuncular figure to me.  Quickly I picked up on the fact that people like Jerry Saltz avoided him as he passed on Chelsea streets.  Dan's admitted frustrations with the art world were rooted in the fact that he witnessed things like the avaricious nature of a major gallerist's vampiric consumption of Basquiat (a story about selling his jazz records without telling him) and still harbored emotions about it, since Jean Michel was his friend.   This was countered by the fact that any artist in NYC faces, the need for money.  This all too often makes selling out to individuals that one would not normally deal with.  Watching Dan do his daily dance of selling his work to people on the margins of the art world and/or borrow money from friends to pay a phone bill was somewhat amusing, but equally distressing.

I think what impressed me about Dan, outside of his high level of intelligence, honesty and intense nature that felt like a pressure cooker waiting at any moment to blow, was the passion he clearly had for his work.  Integrity was something deeply important to him.

Before I  had to leave NYC myself, Dan gave me a bunch of small original photos.  I wanted to return them, but he wouldn't answer those attempts.  I think he must have wanted me to have them.  I am proud of those pictures and even though my art collection is much smaller than I would like, having those makes up for that ten fold.

I was disappointed to find out when I did that he had passed.  I had been living outside the country and there was no way to go to the city.  Either way...RIP to a real artist who actually gave a FCUK beyond some bull$hit complacency of towing the line all the way to the corporate art market.

Starving Artist

Joshua Abelow, Self Portrait, 2007

A year or two ago I came across this painter in my internet travels.  I am not physically present in the art world these days, so I limit my access to what I can dig up in the virtual.

Out of the majority of the art I have seen that is contemporary, this guy stuck out at me.  In general, he does the tongue in cheek thing like saying, "Ha, Ha, I have turned art over on its head and it will sell"!  Sort of like an internet troll, who purposefully throws out erroneous information to start a reaction.  I would compare him to Brian Belott, whom I know from past days at CANADA exhibitions.  

I would say that like in this image, Joshua Abelow is turning Picasso over, particularly late, "bad" Picasso.  In general, the "bad" in painting has become a sort of timestamp for the culture.  Perhaps because we have become so inundated with images, we react in such a way as to take what was normally ignored as bad taste and re-contextualize it?  You be the judge.

New Day Man

UFO for Bar at Custom Tire

Mural "SEA DREAM" painted today

Retrofitted

NDEWQ

High and Mighty

Artist= 1 Part Crazy, 2 parts Heart Sea

People want to entertain the insanely genius, eccentric, bizarre creative inspiration that artists live at least in fantasy.  Sherlock Holmes, Van Gogh tours or some bad rendering of Leonardo DaVinci on cable television for example, satisfy the banal attempt at living vicariously through the insanity of lone creative genius.  However, they do not want this on their doorstep or in their daughter's bed.  God forbid they actually have to deal with it in reality.  No, they just flip quickly to the "American Babylonian Idol" and get their dose of sublime mediocrity.  You see, all is a game.  The system, the money, the fame and on and on and on, and only an artist is willing to flip the card over to reveal the true chaos of it all.  That is why artists are 1 Part Crazy and 2 Parts Heart Sea.

Easter Monday 2008

Things got out of control for me at one point in my life and I had some kind of nervous breakdown.  Life's pressures will cave in and suck you in like a sinkhole.  Art has always been my anchor through life.  No matter where I go or what I do, I always have art to keep me inspired and moving forward through life's multiple circumstances.  This piece is special to me, because it was done at a time when I was going through some rough stuff.  Now I have this and other pieces to look back on with a reflective mind.

MasterDMT $ Earsnot 1997-98

I met Earsnot in 1997 when I was a student at SVA.  He stood out then as the smartest kid graffiti writer on the scene.  I knew he was headed for something great.  He came up to my studio and we did a couple quick jams on paper.  I still have this one.  He did the funny green man on the right.  He was clearly a genius and did not need any instruction about what to do and how to be culturally effective.  I'm glad to see he is so successful today.  He worked for it.

Agata Olek

Agata Olek is a very interesting artist based in NYC.  She does crochet and covers the world with it.  It seems to me to be a cross between graffiti ideas, Mike Kelley and Christo.  What is nice about it is that it takes so many conceptual ingredients and spins them out in a fresh way.  It doesn't seem to be overly concerned with galleries, like graffiti, but at the same time, it belongs within the framework of formal discussion.

The messages that are on many of the works are like memes that are reminiscent of Barbara Kruger.