David doesn’t have a web page that I know of, so here are four more images from the exhibition. The works, all 2008, are described as oil and collage on canvas or mixed media drawings, and are mostly large. I mean really, really big. Birds in Rain and Winter Wars are each 120 inches on the long side. Ping, pictured above, measures 78″ x 48″.
Birds in Rain
Rebound
Winter Wars
Rebound
i really like David’s last name. pretty catchy.
the paintings are jacob lawrence meets matthew ritchie and they go to the arcade together. or they go on a bike ride and get tangled in the spokes. or both.
I vote arcade. If you mean video arcade. If there were video games that looked like those, I might be tempted to start playing video games again.
i might be tempted to start playing them.
these are a shot of what the video game looks like in ‘brain space’. like, the synaptic snapshot of it.
this description sucks.
i think some sort of dramatization, complete with sound effects, might be in order.
wait, wait, wait…
these are: dance dance revolution.
lol…
i think al held and franz ackerman are on the machine next to them… it’s a DDR dance-off!
Josef Albers shows up and he’s all, “Whoa. WHOA!! Y’all need to calm. it. down.” Meanwhile Dan Flavin keeps messing with the TV menu’s picture adjustments.
Not to summon an unwanted specter from previous threads, but, well, what are these about?
World peace?
Uh…seriously, though. I don’t know exactly what they are about. But I do have one thought about context, maybe related to “about”:
I remember, as an undergrad in the late 90s, seeing Rauschenburg’s work and thinking it was totally played; tired proto-hippy BS; not nearly as subtle and thought-provoking as Johns or Larry Rivers, much less de Kooning or Balthus. But it seems like kids David’s age (I’m guessing around 22), seem to have a much more enthusiastic take on Rauschenberg. And it’s kind of exciting to see The Youth getting into something that makes no sense to me.
Boo
Ok, ok. No more about-ness.
about…..FACE
The Youth??
oh man. i feel about 300 years old when you put it that way.
what are ‘The Youth’ into that doesn’t make sense to you? i’m serious about this…and very interested.
do you guys ever run up against aesthetic differences with your students that feel more like differences in taste. as in: sometimes my impulse when this happens is to say ‘well, you just have bad taste.’ (as opposed to my perceived good taste, i guess) to spin on my heel and to call the argument finished.
i don’t actually do this of course. but, it is one of those things that comes up when i just can’t reconcile myself to the things that my students want to emulate. like, i have no possible explanation for my opposition other than to chalk it up to the fact that they have no appreciation for my sophisticated taste.
this is the same argument my mom used with me over my boycott of the lima bean as a child. she swore i would come to love it. i staged a sit-in at the dinner table and then threw them up when i was forced to eat them. pretty effective i must say.
i still hate the lima bean.
You’re talking about one of the major problems of the art education system. Taste becomes red tape, a hindrance for artistic development.
It’s possible for both the student and the teacher to be justified in their tastes, but that leaves them at an impasse. The problem is students of art don’t necessarily believe (in) their teachers. They get who they get, so instead of growing, they spend a lot of energy rejecting or staying exactly the same.
The working solution for this (the one that doesn’t involve replacing the entire midwestern art-education paradigm) is a teaching method that relies entirely on quantitative objectives and evaluations.
That situation you describe–teacher and student justified in their taste. Is that really an impasse? Or just a ground for negotiation? I think two of the selfish reasons I bother to teach are to keep from getting stale and to have my fears/self-preservation instinct challenged on a regular basis. I’m more disappointed when my students want to keep it bland. I want more little rebels in class.
and it depends on what you are teaching. color (good color) is a language (like math biology or spanish). so if you are trying to get them to look at color, see color, think in color, analyze color, express color, you are trying to get them to think in a language. if you take french, you speak french. you are there to learn a language. i think rebelliousness makes a lot of sense, but what are you rebelling against? does it make sense to rebel against something you haven’t digested??
Of course it makes sense.
You’re young. You push against; test the limits.
Of course you learn the language.
this is when i begin to think about ‘art education’ as a really strange task. just when and where do you make the distinction between what you will teach and what you will not teach? i never know.
i too really like it when my students push against the things that they are learning. i like it for the dynamic of the class and also because that whole taste thing i was describing earlier could really propogate a terrible type of arrogance if left unchecked.
but, what gets confusing is teaching skill sets. if these are important in the sense that they teach visual intelligence, then they might be equally suspect because they engrain certain patterns of sight and thought. which might in turn limit interpretation and inventiveness…which ultimately are traits that most really great artists have.
i dunno.
I agree with Chris that the student-teacher disagreement is grounds for negotiation. I think that’s what makes talking about Art so exciting. As a student I WANT to be persuaded to like (or at least appreciate) something that I am not interested in or don’t like, and as an instructor I always hope my students can change my mind about things too, or at least make a great case. I don’t think you need to have TOTALLY digested something to rebel against it, because in a best-case-scenario it can be a pretty effective way of learning about and understanding whatever you’re rebelling against. For some reason I keep wanting to apply the platitude, “Keep your friends close, keep your enemies closer.”
who ya gonna call???….
I’ve been slimed!!
I accidentally deleted a comment I posted earlier. I don’t feel like rewriting, but it had this quote from August 1914 that I think is appropos:
“Books no longer inspired a respectful delight in him—instead they made him terrified that he would never learn to argue back at an author, that he would always be carried away, dominated by the last book he happened to have read. He was only just beginning to disagree with books…”
I think there has to be a difference between teaching ‘art’ and teaching ‘painting’ or ‘drawing’ or ’sculpture’. teaching drawing and painting is so often thought of as being a ’skill set’, a term which I dislike. of course it is important to teach ’seeing’. Is that really a skill (semantics alert)? Seeing as a language can be limiting, but no more limiting than teaching a child to read and write. Hasn’t great art always worked through a tradition? or is that too old-fashioned an idea?
anyway, if one is teaching painting and drawing (NOT as art) then taste and negotation are less of an issue. if at all. call it foundations. I like to see it as eye-opening, rather than dictatorial.
is there a difference, more than a fine line, between rebelliing against the language and disregarding the language? (of course there is)
A famous perceptual painter talked about a student who didnt put blue on his palette, and the teacher could never understand why not? but then later had to admit that it was the stubborn rebellious types that don’t always listen that go on to do something with their art.
I can agree with all that.
I have a student in a painting class right now who is a very strong academic drawer, draftsman…has a very good eye for proportion, confidence, etc. and then wants to paint in that dry academic way, procedural, very thin paint, afraid of making errors. It HAS been a long negotation between him and I over his work.
I want him to SEE, to embrace the abstraction, to relate the figure to the space, come at from a different direction, see the surprise of color. build up, work against mistakes…
he admits that he doesnt want to lose control, to make a mistake.
its like a painting eye that wants to be like one of the early american painters (like the peale brothers). Among several other painters, I have even related (inspired by his interest in the Clash, the band) the graffiti artist Futura 2000, who painted graffiti in a very improvisational approach (rather than the block out, fill in like most graffiti (and most student painting)).
Its tricky: is he rebelling? or playing it safe? Am I trying to get him to rebel, or conform?
i agree with a lot of the analysis here, but i will say that at 19 or 20 i didn’t even really have a developed notion of taste. i mean, we could debate forever what taste is and what it’s all about. but i had a lot of opinions and ideas about what art was and what i was doing and what i could do that were just off the wall. i needed that negotiation with instructors that chris and sloane are talking about. i needed that pressure. i also needed to develop a skill set (!!) to understand what the languages were that i could use. learning how to see and how to think about seeing. learning how to apply traditions, techniques, ideas, etc, etc, etc. most of that doesn’t have much to do with taste. it has to do with willingness and earnestness. so many of the artists that people associate with radical change or rebelliousness or avant garde were VERY well trained in the nuts and bolts, and often classically trained. rebelliousness for rebelliousness sake doesn’t get people very far. challenging traditions and notions as you navigate them takes courage and a willingness to engage. that’s what i want out of students. openness and yearning. that’s what i want out of myself.
recently i had a group of students who were simply uninterested in the artists i wanted to show them. they wanted to talk about “dragonball Z” and manga and big eyes and flat space and monsters and blood and freedom and hip saccharine stuff. we can call that a taste choice, but we can also call it limited. i knew most of the references they were talking about, and instead of fighting them over the things they were interested in, i took them at their word and started to bring in GOOD artists in that genre (masamune shirow and yoshitaka amano are two of the best) and go through and explain the connections these artists have to traditions of technique and application. i also showed them i was willing to meet them where they were, engage with them, and find out what they really wanted out of the coursework. after a while they trusted me that i wasn’t just trying to conform them to some academic tradition with my suggestions of what to look at and the kind of assignments i made them do. it’s not a perfect negotiation, but it’s a worthy one. john baldassari calls interacting with students “flirting,” and i think he is right. each one is different, each one needs different things. and once they are armed with some of the traditions, techniques, ideas, and practical experience that we use in the arts in general, they become fundamentally cooperative in their own educational experience. at that point we just become helpers and guides – someone a little bit farther down the road who can give a few thoughts or suggestions to help, as well as challenge them and ask the hard questions so they can start to develop that critical eye themselves.
so yeah, it’s more than skill sets, but it’s also more than just having different tastes. we’re all in that river of history and experience together with them.
agnes martin said that
‘An artist is someone who can recognize failure.”
i like this because it seems endemic to the nature of making something that you might not be able to qualify the boundaries of failure until you’ve tapped into that territory. and failure can be measured in so many ways. we measure it in ourselves in relation to the implied expectations of others. we can also learn to recognize it in terms of something more subconscious…like a gut instinct type of knowledge or hunch.
also, this quote addresses the notion of fear. fear is a strange thing and can manifest in ways that seem outwardly contradictory. it can make a person meek and tentative or it can make a person outspoken and loud, but in a narrow-minded way.
i might even say that sometimes (though not always) fear is as much a cause of rebelliousness as it is a cause for someone to cling to notions of safety.
i wonder what the anti-fear is. that would seem to be the perfect thing.
Check with Eli Lilly, I’m sure they’ve got something worked up. Academia is the market for it.
I should’ve qualified the student-prof taste conundrum by placing outside of time…as in, if their tastes aren’t fluid. And for some folks, they aren’t, even relatively speaking.
I’m envious of your manga-fan-conversion experience, Ballou, because I’ve not been so successful with that crowd.
And Jen, I guess I’d rather have them push against what I’m teaching than just indifferently sort of slough it off.
John– it seems like somewhere, at some point, that kid is doing something where improvisation could take place. Maybe it just has to happen at an early stage, the prep drawing. The PRE prep drawing, even.
Chris–It’s interesting that the previous generation used drugs to expand/investigate their lives (essentially, for fun), and ours uses them just to fit in where we want to be…where we think we’re supposed to be.
i agree with much that is being, has been, said. but…
if one wants to see the process of learning to draw, paint, or see…as a skill set (?!)…fine. But I still don’t like it. maybe it is a skill, learning to see (as an artist, visual designer, etc.), maybe not. But understanding ‘learning to draw’ as a skill has had a lot of negative connotations. I think of Franz Kline (or was it Barnet Newman) who in justifying the direction they went, recalled the desire to ‘not merely apply a skill, like Augustus John’. I am paraphrasing. And whether John was merely doing so is beside the point. Just that drawing/painting/seeing was so often (and still is) seen as a mere skill. “oh, that’s very skilled”….
more importantly, ’skill’ implies a finite, Teachable process to me. Like learning the alphabet, learning to tell time, learning one’s times tables, learning how to shuck corn. One doesn’t know how to balance a checkbook, then one learns that skill. Then they can balance a checkbook. It is not that cut and dry in terms of painting/drawing/seeing. I think it makes more sense to see those things as being infinite. Even if it has to be from an academic perceptual point of view, for instance.
There are definitely skills involved with these processes (learning to see and paint, draw). How to measure, How to analyze color, How to clean a palette/brushes, etc. But the process of Learning to See is something that feels very different from a skill to me.
This all gets back into major problems with the art education system and the rebelliousness issue. Correlation between foundations courses and upper level art classes. The youth (!!) take two semesters of drawing and painting each, and feel (so often) that they have learned those processes/skills. Digested them. and then rebel.
all this within a 4 year program that begins usually when one is about 19 years old. The problem is that art as a language has not been addressed until that age and point in ones education. Most often, one doesnt take a formal drawing class, at least not of real worth (again, most often) until freshman year of college. ….we wouldn’t feel as though we had digested Reading in two years, even 4 years. …on the other hand, I have seen instructors in their 50s still studying the rib cage, for example.
So we have a group of students, college age, who might be chomping at the bit to express themselves but, in terms of the language of seeing, are back at the ’see spot run’ level.
How frustrating. Why learn to draw when I can just hit print?
And rebelliousness depends on where one is standing. Rebels, and then rebels within their own peer groups are two different things. I would be interested in hearing some more specific instances of ‘rebelling’ in the classroom, as it were, from folks here. There are classic stories of students shrugging off their academic (at least at the time) art education: Monet, K. Haring, Sklarski….But if one is teaching a class where students are drawing from a model, or still life, for instance: what is the example of rebellion there? whether it be fostered or not. …I am suddenly reminded of a student (a peer at the time) drawing a wolf,from imagination, into the conventional still life on the table (bottles, etc.) because the subject was so ‘boring’. I don’t think that is the rebelliousness that is meant here. So how does one rebel when they are creating…a value scale, for example? at least in a way that is beneficial and pertinent?
i can get on board with the notion that learning ‘to see’ is a bit more of an intangible thing than learning ‘how to make volume’, or ‘how to draw an ellipse’. but, i think learning ’skills’ can become the springboard to learning ‘how to see’ in a more comprehensive sense.
we all consider ourselves artists. so, for most of us, this mindset involves a way of leading our lives in which we view our world through a complex set of lenses that integrate living with –> seeing and seeing with –> art-making. we understand being an artist to be a way of conducting ourselves all of the time… it’s not a 9-5 job.
but, very few people (if anyone) are born with this type of awareness. we crossed a line one day where it became so. and a lot of people who go on to be great artists aren’t that talented when it comes to assimilating visual information from the source. and they need to rely on skill sets at first to help them understand how to look deeply into things. i really needed someone to teach me how to draw with transparent construction lines before i could understand the notion of addressing the underlying structure of the volumes i drew. this ’skill’ demystified the idea of seeing for me. and in demystifying it, it actually enabled me to see more deeply and to look more deeply in general. but thank goodness someone actually took the time to teach me it despite my relative ineptitude as a young art student.
and of course, acquiring skills will not determine whether or not someone will be an artist. neither will not having some skills. i really have no idea exactly how rules of perspective work (in a rigid sense). but, i can manipulate space in a way that suits my paintings. it’s like writing: i can write ok (write, not spell), but if you asked me to define what a prepositional phrase is, i can’t.
becoming an artist is up to the individual and i think it largely comes down to desire. if you have enough desire (and i mean real, real fire for it) to want to be expressive, then you are going to also have the ability to be self-reflective and self-critical. and this comes down to being able to look at what you are doing and figure out what you have to learn to be able to do it better and more effectively. and then you are willingly going to endlessly remix and redefine within your process.
desire is the one thing that you can’t teach. but, sometimes teaching skills makes people more curious. and more and more curiosity can lead to more and more passion for something. and then, that person can cross that line.
amen jen, this is exactly how i feel about it.
in general, in my experience among art folks, it seems like once we bring out the word “skill” everyone and their sister-in-law gets the screaming hebbie-jebbies. yes, it’s got some connotations, but it definitely means something different and specific in its application for the arts in todays world (re-see jen’s exposition above). great skills do not a great artist make, but for damn sure they are part of the basis for all great works, no matter the form (yes, even naive, even outsider, even native, even non-western forms).
the kind of skill that modernism and postmodernism were struggling with and fighting against was a prescriptive notion of qualification based on specific exercises, NOT necessarily the practical applications of said exercises.
a child learning her scales isn’t making art when she’s six years old and sitting at the piano, but she IS when she’s using those scales in a dynamic, passionate, knowing, (and skillful) 15 years later and playing tchaikovsky. skills aren’t the end, they are a phase transition between potential and application.
this is why i love teaching drawing and painting and art in general, because it’s such a truthful mode of knowledge. all epistemology HAS to be based first in the body, the experience of the body, body memory, body knowledge. when students use their mind, eye, arms, hands, and stance to execute notions about seeing they are creating and developing and using BODY KNOWLEDGE. muscle memory, like a gymnast, reflex, intuition, etc, etc, etc. the skill is never enough, but it is the gateway through and to something that needs the skill but is beyond the skill. that is what is happening when we disconnect conscious TRYING and start to flow intuitively. what is directing us? the fullness of the knowledge our body has about execution and the years of time and practice and experience that it has about the translation of seeing what’s before.
i’m so passionate about this because it’s really just about the most exciting part about being an artist for me… excuse my ramblings…
*
“…translation of seeing what’s before US.”
*
in reading the above, i’m interested in what you all think the difference is between “rebellion” and “discussion” and where “pushing back” comes into play, particularly with students.
you all have different tastes, as well, but how far is it “okay” for that to go? obviously everyone’s focus and preferences are going to be different. but to what degree is it acceptable to not only have different taste but to not appreciate the “greats” of painting at all? is that really where the idea of rebellion comes into play with the dissatisfaction of some of students’ tastes?
i remember my freshman year of undergrad: a teacher showed us some caravaggio paintings, and at some point, fairly offhandedly, said something like “it’s just GOOD.” i didn’t look at caravaggio again until my junior year; that was an unacceptable attitude, that some art could be unquestionably good. i spent the two years in between in the library, in comic book stores, in galleries and museum coming up with my own canon that was good because i could find the reason why it was good.
in my junior year, i finally figured out that professor was a hell of a lot smarter than i was. he really could have stated why caravaggio is good, he was just trying to impress upon us an attitude of awe and excitement about looking at art. i also figured out some of the reasons why caravaggio was good.
but i did spend the two years in between assembling my own canon of good artists: kathe kollwitz, dan clowes, mike kelley, godard, bruce naumann, r. crumb, ray pettibon, etc. etc. it was a pretty half-assed list. but in the long run, the point was: i was engaged, i was enthusiastic and pro-active.
i teach out of my enthusiasms, so it is a little disappointing when i can’t get a student turned on to bellini or vermeer. but what i hope i’m really teaching them is that enthusiasm. in young people that enthusiasm often manifests itself as questioning, disbelief and arguing. in the classroom those are all positive things.
real dissatisfaction is reserved for ennui, slacking, passivity, solipsism, etc. etc.
for the record: i called my little list of sophomore year heroes half assed, but the people I listed were the good half, the other half were the ass half.
i think there is a sort of learning curve to the development of taste as well. when i was a BFA, i would never reject anything any of my prof’s showed me (images of art), because i just assumed that they knew something i didn’t and that i should give everything equal consideration.
this of course eventually leads to a small schizophrenic crisis when you reach saturation point with imagery and have no way of truly reacting to any of it.
in grad school i really started examining things in terms of liking or disliking them. and it felt really great to be able to flat out say that i really disliked something. which is different than rejecting things as being inferior.
i guess when i reject something as being inferior to something else that is when i know i am in that dangerous zone of being arrogant and glib. it’s tough too, because most of the things i reject out of hand are things that are new as opposed to things that are old. and this goes back to the fact that with things that have been around for a long time, there is a precedent for appreciation that has already been set. generally people conform to precedents because we like the sense of inclusion it provides us with. it took me forever to admit to the fact that i really don’t like Tintoretto…eeek…because so many peolple are always yammering about how great he is. but, i have to really sit on my hands and bite holes in my tongue in an effort not to immediately poo poo the manga stuff as being totally janky in the context of a painting class. and there is no reason for this other than the fact that it undermines a lot of the stuff that my training values. so, who is to say what’s right? i am not sure there is an answer.
what i tell my students about the manga stuff is that it comes out of a context. and unless any of my (typically) white-bread-indiana-westernized students have some inner connection to eastern-anime culture, then they had better think long and hard about the implications of appropriating things that they might not have any real understanding of. same aurgument i could use about most anything stylistic.
the other thing about teaching in general is that we have to learn how to do it as well. and we get better at it year by year. and though Chris would like to have us think that we are somehow Other than ‘The Youth’ (friendly jab), we are all just babies at this. it is complicated and tough.
i think what we have going for us is our youth. we can relate to some extent. and this too will come to pass and pretty soon we will be in our late 60’s and doing the equivalent of blasting Nelly or Aerosmith’s Janie’s Got a Gun on a boom box (sorry Barry) in an attempt to make our student’s think we have some semblance of cool and know-how.
while we all collectively cringe let’s take the time to fess up: things will get better/ things will get worse. ain’t life grand?
yep. I agree with all of this. What Jen and Matt are saying here…that is my point. Yes, there are skills involved with learning to see (How to compare two values and see which is the lighter, which is the darker, for example…drawing that ellipse….).
But the Process of Learning To See…as a whole…is something greater, more involved, more open-ended than a skill. My question had to do with the labelling and identification of that process AS a SKILL. The implications of that label (”Skill”). It seems like everyone here is saying that. WHat if we said that there are skills involved in: Learning to See, To draw, to paint…but those processes as a whole are more than a mere skill. We never stop learning to write, to draw.
All that stuff about the Body Knowledge is great.
Question: How universal are these skills that help us to see? Those de-mystifying construction lines? Can EVERYONE see them? maybe. Can everyone see the blue in the shadows? How about the pink in the sky? If something is truly a SKILL, isn’t it by definition teachable, and then in a universal way?? Do you believe everyone can understand any visual expression if the proper skills are taught and applied? Of course, enthusiasm and desire are necessary, but…..Do you have students who TRY to embrace some visual expression, but, try as they might, just cannot SEE it? Is everything teachable? Do you have some students who just can’t get the tabletop to lay down (sit in space)? students who can’t see those colors in the white wall? (for the record, I have less and less each year…)
I am not sure what my answer would be. I believe everyone can learn the skill of counting money, for example (except in very special cases of course). But everyone seeing pink in the sky……..? I don’t know.
it’s a continuum. on one end is mental apprehension/assent and technical action. on the other end is true intuitive application that transcends the skill while still using it. we do this all the time. i might be able to learn how to ski, but i do not have the aptitude (or the knees) for olympic-caliber downhill skiiing. maybe i can draw a few cubes in perspective but struggle to make an interior feel dimensional and spacial. maybe i can be told 20000000 times how to make an ellipse but never seem to think it through in the drawing itself. so certain students “just cannot SEE” some thing, that doesn’t mean it’s not a worthy thing to worth through and doesn’t mean it’s not working on them in some permutation down the road. God knows i have eureka moments all the time, where things fall into what i sort of knew they were supposed to do, be, function as, etc, but suddenly GET how to make that BE when i need it….
continuum!
well, many are not universal. color for instance, is the classic example of the thing we all take for granted that may possibly be widely variable. 2 definite ways it is variable: color-blindness, & alsothere are cases of different cultures that divide the spectrum differently. the larger question is: how relevant are these seeing skills to making?
i don’t think anything’s relevant in a complete sense. even in the instance of those transparent construction lines i found so useful. i took that class with my friend dara and she found the same methods to be really useless and dry. she already had this really expressive method of making volume and form. very alice neelish. that class we took was basically an exercise in learning how to draw like giacometti. for me it was great because it was all sighting and measuring and i really needed it in order to make my drawings other than something anemic. for her it was something that took her naturally fluid hand away from her…and not in a way that enriched it.
two people, same class — very different experiences.
that is why curriculum is tricky: sometimes it prevents you from responding to individual needs. which, when i think of every influential professor i have ever had, is something they were all really good at doing.
Okay. This is a throw-down! I know that David F. is part of a ’scene’ of ‘the youth’ who are smart painters and artists, who have a lot of insight to share regarding this guy, his paintings and what they are about. But. You let these boring old I.U. types (I’m included in this) go on and on and on and on about…what? pedagogy? How boring is that? Why don’t you folks speak up? I think this is a case where we, the people involved in this discussion really need to get ourselves CHECKED. So…
Amen.
Sometimes you get it right. No one knows why, but we all know it’s certainly unexplainable. We start out as hacks, yet by hacking away we discover the magic that enables the enabled mind. Lack of skill or training often leads to a disregard for skill or training and intuition is freed from the constraint of expectations and suddenly, the artist finds himself (or herself) at a multiple and simultaneous intersection. I sometimes think the naive mind is the best catalyst for rapid expansive progress. Art is something that occurs in the midst of this collision, between knowing and doing, skill and exercise; between observation and imagination. Once witnessed (or experienced, if there is truly a difference), we can return to this point in time or at least build ourselves another route, maybe to another place in space. Skill as we may call it, or taste, or learning, or cognition may indeed be a series of fortunate misadventures.
Pity the person who has to help another through that process. Probably why the pedagogy discussion can get so overwhelming.
David, I’m getting a feeling you might call these “Art For Art’s Sake”. Is that right?
These are a collection of investigations pertaining to my own interests and the nature of my experiences; my own system of logic. There is too much reading done to just call them “art for art’s sake”, however, there is a large part of me that is compelled to just make things. I think the multiple and simultaneous visual response is something symptomatic of my generation, a kind of search engine painting. A large part of me just wants to take people away into the picture, but these go much further than that. I want to make the impossible situation possible. Impossible cities rising from deserts in snow, encircled by impossible warplanes; a perversion of western endeavors into places they don’t belong. These are images that form in the mind of someone who grows up watching wars in the desert on television and anti-aircraft fire through night vision cameras. So you can see I’m nihilistic and romantic, the unevenly adjusted man. So I must retreat to a base notion of time, a child’s construction of history.
do these moralize and at the same time abnegate morality?
what are the child’s considerations of beauty in relation to violence? or is childhood only that span of time before we become aware that this type of contradiction is morally problematic?
Technology and the voids we create between eachother through progress generate a global moral dilemma. We have created massive gaps in the world by embracing technology and it’s speed. The responsibility of the world powers is to balance and ease the tensions created by these gaps, something we have not done. I’m not sure that this task has ever been possible, the components of the machine do not allow for a neutral gear. These works isolate and balance something moving at an exponential pace, indeed an impossibility. Speed, as the futurists demonstrated, is at once violent and beautiful. An essential moral of contemporary life is to be aware of this speed and the dangers posed by it’s direction and at times, practice a resistance to this movement and regain or gain for the first time the meaning of the obsolete. Painting or the handworking of printed materials and machine produced visuals is a way of swimming against this, for I am, in the end a creature who lives through the eyes. It is at once a collaboration and subversion of the environmental patterns that account for much of my experience. It is a way for me to regain some sense of spirituality, through making, in a time and place where it’s easier to rely on the next innovation to replace the human necessity to believe in something. We are inextricably connected to this tide, like time, we are prisoners of it; like a bird in rain.
The child arrives at this intersection once they become aware of a larger social body outside their immediate context. This is an ancient problem, like the artist, it is timeless and enduring. The juncture between the beautiful and the violent, technology and spirituality, alientation and belonging, a sense of life and a sense of mortality. These works are neither fatalistic or optimistic; they are a sweeping survey of a brief moment in a time and place that is uncertain of itself.
wow, so much stuff here david, and just exactly the sorts of things i’ve been thinking about for the last couple of years. and you touch on something right at the end that’s really been on my mind since i heard jen and choberka and eva talk about their work earlier this month: is a positive art possible? david, you place yourself apart from fatalism, but it’s still a pretty bleak picture. in my own work i’m confronted with how negative the images often are. it seems axiomatic given the sorts of situations going on around the world today that are working on me – many of which are similar to or adjacent to the ones david mentions. but i know that i’m not broken down in woe and feeling helpless and hopeless all the time. i doubt that many of us here really feel totally devoid of hopefulness. i really do have a sense of it, even perhaps a kind of philosophical positivism about the world. so why does that not come out so much? i guess i’m asking david and everyone else: is a positive art possible in today’s world?
I had a conversation recently along those same lines–we asked each other, why can’t we make something celebratory? My friend and I had both recently been to the same exhibit, in which much of the art had this kind of forcing-you-to-see-depressing-things aesthetic. Art shouldn’t feel like punishment. There was hardly a dose of the bounce and color in David’s paintings, not surprisingly.
Positivity must be invented. If we just mirror the whole wide world, ounce for ounce, then it’s going to be bleak (and wet, too, all surfaces considered…). So, yeah, I do think a positive art is not only possible but desirable. It might be the hardest thing to make. A genuine, compelling, complex, complete AND positive work of art. Can it be an affirmation if it is also a question?
I know that for us Catholics (even the lapsed), an affirmation or a question can be the cause of a long trip down Guilt Lane, if that adds anything to your thought, Sam.
This discussion is really interesting because it’s one I’ve found myself in, too. I know that my most recent work, inspired by the fact that becoming a father has been the most joyful and also the most terrifying experience of my life, has been an attempt to give form to a slightly more domestic version of the duality David is embracing. But, before that, for several years, I’d been trying make paintings that were exactly, precisely “Nice”. (and consequently positive, affirmative, etc.)
I remember having a hard time coming up with good successful examples of positive paintings/painters. Does anybody out there have any examples?
(I know the joyful/terrifying thing is a cliche that all parents say but it’s really so true. How many of you without children actually spend hours and hours every day contemplating suffocation?)
I dunno, Keith Haring comes to mind for celebratory/positive art.
The trick there is that if it’s patently positive, it’s patently something. It’s “pat.” Its existence is defined, contained, limited. It’s directive. It’s propaganda. Then, poof, Ad Reinhardt appears on our collective shoulder and wags his finger.
But then again, who’s Ad Reinhardt to tell us to do anything? Nothingness is out!