If I may continue from my previous comment on prior post, these do expand out from their own art fiction/identity. Which is pretty amazing considering how stylistically entrenched they seem.
I was actually about to ask about that in the previous thread–the ‘artist making art’ conceit/tradition. Would you mind expanding it?
Is it related to the topic a few posts ago, the inward-turned pursuit vs something in a more open dialogue?
These are subtle-inventive. They’re kind of like new-figurative meets bay area, set to Chicago apartment-gallery scale. They’re not gonna bang you on the head with themselves, though.
I’m talking about shifts in motivation. We all carry some degree of desire to make good art, and we choose different directions for achieving this (be it inward-turned pursuit or more open dialogue, etc). We’re fueled by genuine interest of course, but the choice to make art directs our enthusiasm a certain way. We become artists making art.
This is limiting. We can expand out from this identity-orientation, but it’s difficult because it’s not always apparent when we’re in it. But sometimes, when one is engaged in the work, the necessary framework that makes it art becomes less important. The artist’s decisions are no longer about how it exists as a work of art, that’s secondary.
This is a very clear distinction for me, even though I’ve not explained it well here.
Carla, I think I see what you’re saying. Eventually, you’re not just making something, you’re thinking about the other related aspects, the context–the medium, the action, the place, the price, the source, the histories of all those things, the politics of all those things, the surfaces of all those things…
I don’t know if it’d be worthwhile to try to make not-art, since it’s basically a conceit–you’d know deep down you’re still in dialog with capital-A Art. But if you put it another way–to avoid deference/differance, to avoid appealing/pandering to some art authority, that seems to ring out rightly. Barry Gealt just mentioned something along these lines here.
I’d say an artist is initially thinking more of all the related aspects, and that eventually one can lose that and just be making something. An artist gains independence through engagement.
I’d agree it’s about avoiding deference, both to art authority (external and/or one’s internal tyrants) and to the fact that you’re making art. You can’t reject that you’re making art, but you can let this function as a framework rather than the featured impulse.
I went to the Campbell Gallery site ready to be irritated, based on the posted image, which was too easy to peg a la Spencer,as Ballou mentions above, or in reference to Steve Canaday or other figurative painters showing up on the West Coast of late.
That said, most of the images on the site were exciting, dense. Something more visionary and surprising than this image suggested. The “Corner” painting in a sense “looks back” at you, not in terms of a direct gaze, but a presence and life in the human image that feels autonomous and unique.
The thing with Chapman, is that there is a transcendence to these. I just can’t shake the picture I have in my mind of the artist who might have made these paintings. Some ultra-earnest undergraduate at Smith College in the 1940’s working on these in secret at home. A hard-drinking, circle of Modigliani, womanizing Polish refugee living in Big Sur,CA bitter and wondering why fame and fortune have passed him by, and will he be remembered after he’s gone?
Does anyone else see this?
And agree that it actually does convey some sense of pathos to these works? Something actually sympathetic. Something that I feel sympathetic to. Even though I have no doubt that the actual Jesse Chapman is some New Not-So Sincerity type, ready to quote Borges’ “…a better procedure is to pretend that those books already exist and to offer a summary, a commentary.”
Brian Calvin and Nathan Boyer I think get to the same thing. Canady (who I wasn’t aware of) or Tim Lokiec probably don’t succeed; both are pretty annoying.
To continue the comparison between Chapman and Schwarm: I do just feel like Schwarm is actually the more engaged and sincere. But the works just don’t have that transcendent moment that Pollidori and to a lesser extent Chapman here do. I’m with Carla on that 100% (though my reading of the Schwarm photos may differ slightly). I don’t know how to make that transcendent moment a criteria. I feel it’s true, I just don’t have a way to describe how it does or doesn’t happen.
Chris, I agree with your skeptical tone as to the “New Not-So Sinceres”, but I have to stand up for Borges! He may be an iconoclast and subversive in terms of form, but his writing is as passionate at it gets, in its own bizarre way. There’s blood pulsing in that work.
no disrespect was meant to actually rub off Borges.
actually, i wasn’t even trying to be that disrespectful to Chapman–just trying to play up the contrast between he and Larry Schwarm.
I see “badness” in the clunky figures, the dumb mountains, the scrubbed paint. Certainly all the names that have been brought up in relation to this work traffic in some of these type elements.
“Badness” can be good or bad; it can come off as incredibly cloying smug shallowness as in canaday, or heartbreaking directness as in Guston. At its best, it has to do with channeling your inner simpleton to say what needs to be said with as little guile as possible. At its worst it seems like a hipster put-on.
This work is interesting but I do feel like I’ve seen too much like it in Calvin, Schutz, on and on. It’s not that they’re “bad”, but that they’re “bad” in a way that seems kind of pat and familiar from those other artists.
Chris- I wouldn’t have thought of a Modigliani-following polish womanizing Smith College professor in relation to this work. That’s not a stereotype that I’ve some across but maybe I haven’t been paying attention.
Very dangerous to presume bad faith, here a “put-on”, based on style in art…I don’t think John M is doing that here, and I would agree that there are recognizable tropes related to Schutz and others in Chapman’s work.
The concern I have is about a decision to discount work out of hand on this basis. Artists work, in my experience, to arrive at the forms that embody their ideas. To dismiss work based on a pictorial vernacular that, while in vogue at the moment, can be linked back to many non-hipsters, including Guston, Spencer, Beckmann and other Neue Sachlichkeit painters, is the mirror-image of the equally pernicious tendency to discount the work of observational or “realist”artists as outmoded or too earnest.
Some of these Chapmans have poetry in them, some don’t.
What I sense in these is a self-conscious riffing on the idea of painting people, painting at all. While there’s nothing necessarily wrong with that, and while I can see the poetry in some of the images, alot of what comes across to me is a deadpan flatness that seems thin, overly familiar, an unnecessary limit on the work’s expressive potential.
Artists do work to arrive at forms that embody their ideas. They’re also sometimes overly influenced by trends, and work towards overly detemined conclusions rather than making their own discoveries.
While I like aspects of the paintings, I sense some of that going on with this work, and it gets in the way a bit.
i think in a lot of ways artists make what it occurs to them to make - in a sense i have to give people some benefit of the doubt because of this. regardless of what influences them to do what they seem to want to do, i can still make a sort of good-will effort to read the work. god knows a lot of so-called bad art eventually made it into the academy and beyond. one needs only to read ruskin’s descriptions of whistler’s paintings…
but i do often feel a certain kind of tension about some works, works that don’t “feel” to me to be considered in some way, or works that seem too self-consciously gimmick-driven or faux-naive, or one-note. yes, i’ll admit i feel this way from time to time. but i have to indict myself on this point immediately since all of these feelings i have are really pretty subjective based on many factors and influences - few of which really touch on some special objective arena of qualification. so again i have to fall back on the considered looking and giving the benefit of the doubt. on some level i have to believe that people are making what they make not because they are assholes, but because they really feel strongly about what they are doing. them feeling strongly about it doesn’t necessarily make it good, but it does - in a way - necessitate my considerate willingness to attempt to read the work.
sometimes i’m just at a kind of loss about certain works. i was talking with chris today about amy sillman. i’ve been haunted by the reproductions i’ve seen of her paintings. they seem so derivative to me on one hand but also really kind of full of a sense of effort and direction. i’ve felt this way about nozkowski and lasker, too. i could write them off because of my mystification, or i could continue to think about them. with both sillman and nozkowski i’m coming around - lasker is still trying to convince me. i think something similar is happening for me with schutz and calvin and, to stay on point, chapman here. i’m less convinced about brian calvin and chapman, but honestly it’s mostly because i don’t really like the images so much. schutz is frustrating because i respond to some images but not so much to others… i’m babbling.
i guess what i’m saying is that i’ll admit to feeling like some works i see are bad, but that my feeling that way doesn’t really disqualify those works for me. i simply tuck them away and come back to them. i think it comes down to whether or not i’m willing to be offended by work i think is “bad” at a certain moment in time. i just can’t make myself think that way anymore. i’m not going to be personally offended that painting - or any art for that matter - simply exists.
…plus i feel like i need to make some penance for in the dim and distant past thinking that guston and stanley spencer were “bad” painters. for shame!
It may be my problem, but when this one particular strain of figure painting seems to get a disproportionate amount of critical/market support (sorry, the m word), in my world view, it becomes a little more suspect. If I saw any of these artists’ work in isolation, or if they were students, I’d probably see the work differently.
When the stuff is foisted on us to the exclusion of so much else, I tend to wonder why and its flaws become amplified; its thinness, its reductiveness, its cuteness. I may not be reacting to any one painting as much as to a phenomenon in which these qualities seem to be excessively celebrated, striven for.
And really when you look at a lot of these paintings (schutz, calvin, chapman), they’re horrifying; I see some kind of final absurdity and emptiness in them; it oughta really fuck people up to look at these things; instead this work just sort of casually becomes the hot, now thing. I find it disconcerting.
When I see stuff like Kilimnik, Schutz, Calvin and now Chapman (the list can go on and on) I can’t help thinking that this issue was torn wide open 100 years ago and today seems like trendy nothingness. Painting still has a lot more to offer.
I actually see no sign whatever of this “exclusion” of other modes.
If anything, one could make a case that the “market”, which I suspect is the real villain in this discussion, is in fact too promiscuous in its appetites, all too willing to embrace anything and everything for its own ends. It’s hard to take this case for exclusion seriously in an artworld that has room to embrace Eliasson and Freud, Schutz and Koons, Murakami and Carsten Nicolai, Kara Walker and Tim Hawkinson.
And EVERYTHING was torn open hundreds of years ago…are realists working today to make up for the horrid deficiencies so apparent in the work of Hals, David, and Caravaggio?
to bump the conversation back up to the top of the thread, it was already said very early on that art-making in general trips us into an overripe dialogue with history/and with currency. we all become part of this whether we like it or not.
it makes no sense to cast aspersions at the impetus or the form of paintings for which the only scale of value that we’re engaging is one of relativity in light of a genre of ‘others’ who we deem to be the cohorts of ’said individual’. i guess what we’re doing is critiquing a timeline?
right now i just feel a little bit badly for chapman. not because i necessarily like the work, but because the assaults on him are so much based on so many things that make going to the studio everyday and making work that is not paralyzed by these exact concerns sometimes seem nearly impossible.
boo hoo. i so badly want to be original. so don’t we all? and odds are, it ain’t going to happen. maybe the new strategy should be going to the studio and making work that is as ‘played’ as possible. it would allay a lot of anxiety about being too closely alligned with pop/hot-painting culture…in other modes of the art profession, it seems to work for jeff koons, right?
what seems to be flummoxing us is this want for forward momentum. without this propulsion we start to get scared…is something good? is something bad? shit, has it been done before? are we going up the hill/ are we sliding down it? this is quintessentially modernist thinking (even as we rail for originality and freshness) crap…we’re all dated.
as a measure of self-assurance, i’ll tell you what i want. i want to go into a cave and work for about 10 years and then come out and see what i’ve got going on relative to the big picture.
these paintings seem to have a lot to do with something like early Arshile Gorky. so yeah, it was turned over 100 years ago. it’ll probably be turned over in another hundred…painting is really really old. and it seems to keep going and going.
incidentally: in the New York Times today I lifted this quote from an article on Gorky:
In 1932 Arshile Gorky outlined his influences for the art dealer Julian Levy: ”I was with Cézanne and now naturally I am with Picasso.” Mr. Levy replied that he would exhibit the Armenian-born New York painter ”when you are with Gorky.”
No it’s not fair to judge work simply for resembling other work or to assume this represents “cashing in”, imitating, whatever. I don’t know what generated the work, in all likelihood it was just someone doing what he felt he had to do, which is the only way I’ve figured out to keep things happening in the studio. Screw originality, screw anyone elses’ proscription for what art should be.
On the other hand I see nothing wrong with simply noting that there seems to be a surprisingly large and growing profusion of work in a particular mode (it may be this profusion that I’m talking about, more so than “exclusion” of other work).
I find myself a bit perplexed by the wide proliferation of work that I find somewhat narrow in its inquiry. Chapman became a springboard for expression of that perplexity. I could be wrong, just setting down my impressions for the edification of all.
If I may continue from my previous comment on prior post, these do expand out from their own art fiction/identity. Which is pretty amazing considering how stylistically entrenched they seem.
I was actually about to ask about that in the previous thread–the ‘artist making art’ conceit/tradition. Would you mind expanding it?
Is it related to the topic a few posts ago, the inward-turned pursuit vs something in a more open dialogue?
These are subtle-inventive. They’re kind of like new-figurative meets bay area, set to Chicago apartment-gallery scale. They’re not gonna bang you on the head with themselves, though.
brian calvin meets stanley spencer
I’m talking about shifts in motivation. We all carry some degree of desire to make good art, and we choose different directions for achieving this (be it inward-turned pursuit or more open dialogue, etc). We’re fueled by genuine interest of course, but the choice to make art directs our enthusiasm a certain way. We become artists making art.
This is limiting. We can expand out from this identity-orientation, but it’s difficult because it’s not always apparent when we’re in it. But sometimes, when one is engaged in the work, the necessary framework that makes it art becomes less important. The artist’s decisions are no longer about how it exists as a work of art, that’s secondary.
This is a very clear distinction for me, even though I’ve not explained it well here.
Good call, Ballou.
Carla, I think I see what you’re saying. Eventually, you’re not just making something, you’re thinking about the other related aspects, the context–the medium, the action, the place, the price, the source, the histories of all those things, the politics of all those things, the surfaces of all those things…
I don’t know if it’d be worthwhile to try to make not-art, since it’s basically a conceit–you’d know deep down you’re still in dialog with capital-A Art. But if you put it another way–to avoid deference/differance, to avoid appealing/pandering to some art authority, that seems to ring out rightly. Barry Gealt just mentioned something along these lines here.
I’d say an artist is initially thinking more of all the related aspects, and that eventually one can lose that and just be making something. An artist gains independence through engagement.
I’d agree it’s about avoiding deference, both to art authority (external and/or one’s internal tyrants) and to the fact that you’re making art. You can’t reject that you’re making art, but you can let this function as a framework rather than the featured impulse.
I went to the Campbell Gallery site ready to be irritated, based on the posted image, which was too easy to peg a la Spencer,as Ballou mentions above, or in reference to Steve Canaday or other figurative painters showing up on the West Coast of late.
That said, most of the images on the site were exciting, dense. Something more visionary and surprising than this image suggested. The “Corner” painting in a sense “looks back” at you, not in terms of a direct gaze, but a presence and life in the human image that feels autonomous and unique.
The thing with Chapman, is that there is a transcendence to these. I just can’t shake the picture I have in my mind of the artist who might have made these paintings. Some ultra-earnest undergraduate at Smith College in the 1940’s working on these in secret at home. A hard-drinking, circle of Modigliani, womanizing Polish refugee living in Big Sur,CA bitter and wondering why fame and fortune have passed him by, and will he be remembered after he’s gone?
Does anyone else see this?
And agree that it actually does convey some sense of pathos to these works? Something actually sympathetic. Something that I feel sympathetic to. Even though I have no doubt that the actual Jesse Chapman is some New Not-So Sincerity type, ready to quote Borges’ “…a better procedure is to pretend that those books already exist and to offer a summary, a commentary.”
Brian Calvin and Nathan Boyer I think get to the same thing. Canady (who I wasn’t aware of) or Tim Lokiec probably don’t succeed; both are pretty annoying.
To continue the comparison between Chapman and Schwarm: I do just feel like Schwarm is actually the more engaged and sincere. But the works just don’t have that transcendent moment that Pollidori and to a lesser extent Chapman here do. I’m with Carla on that 100% (though my reading of the Schwarm photos may differ slightly). I don’t know how to make that transcendent moment a criteria. I feel it’s true, I just don’t have a way to describe how it does or doesn’t happen.
If SAIC and MFA Yale don’t leave you pretty self-aware, I wonder what would…
Chris, I agree with your skeptical tone as to the “New Not-So Sinceres”, but I have to stand up for Borges! He may be an iconoclast and subversive in terms of form, but his writing is as passionate at it gets, in its own bizarre way. There’s blood pulsing in that work.
no disrespect was meant to actually rub off Borges.
actually, i wasn’t even trying to be that disrespectful to Chapman–just trying to play up the contrast between he and Larry Schwarm.
Bad or feeble painting is in vogue right now. I’m a little worn out by it.
Bad, feeble….care to define your terms, and how they apply here?
presumptuous to define someone elses’ terms, but…
I see “badness” in the clunky figures, the dumb mountains, the scrubbed paint. Certainly all the names that have been brought up in relation to this work traffic in some of these type elements.
“Badness” can be good or bad; it can come off as incredibly cloying smug shallowness as in canaday, or heartbreaking directness as in Guston. At its best, it has to do with channeling your inner simpleton to say what needs to be said with as little guile as possible. At its worst it seems like a hipster put-on.
This work is interesting but I do feel like I’ve seen too much like it in Calvin, Schutz, on and on. It’s not that they’re “bad”, but that they’re “bad” in a way that seems kind of pat and familiar from those other artists.
Chris- I wouldn’t have thought of a Modigliani-following polish womanizing Smith College professor in relation to this work. That’s not a stereotype that I’ve some across but maybe I haven’t been paying attention.
john m - - well said…I like the phrase “hipster put-on”.
I would also throw in the word “deskilling”.
John, the names were changed to protect the innocent.
Very dangerous to presume bad faith, here a “put-on”, based on style in art…I don’t think John M is doing that here, and I would agree that there are recognizable tropes related to Schutz and others in Chapman’s work.
The concern I have is about a decision to discount work out of hand on this basis. Artists work, in my experience, to arrive at the forms that embody their ideas. To dismiss work based on a pictorial vernacular that, while in vogue at the moment, can be linked back to many non-hipsters, including Guston, Spencer, Beckmann and other Neue Sachlichkeit painters, is the mirror-image of the equally pernicious tendency to discount the work of observational or “realist”artists as outmoded or too earnest.
Some of these Chapmans have poetry in them, some don’t.
well said, matt.
What I sense in these is a self-conscious riffing on the idea of painting people, painting at all. While there’s nothing necessarily wrong with that, and while I can see the poetry in some of the images, alot of what comes across to me is a deadpan flatness that seems thin, overly familiar, an unnecessary limit on the work’s expressive potential.
Artists do work to arrive at forms that embody their ideas. They’re also sometimes overly influenced by trends, and work towards overly detemined conclusions rather than making their own discoveries.
While I like aspects of the paintings, I sense some of that going on with this work, and it gets in the way a bit.
i think in a lot of ways artists make what it occurs to them to make - in a sense i have to give people some benefit of the doubt because of this. regardless of what influences them to do what they seem to want to do, i can still make a sort of good-will effort to read the work. god knows a lot of so-called bad art eventually made it into the academy and beyond. one needs only to read ruskin’s descriptions of whistler’s paintings…
but i do often feel a certain kind of tension about some works, works that don’t “feel” to me to be considered in some way, or works that seem too self-consciously gimmick-driven or faux-naive, or one-note. yes, i’ll admit i feel this way from time to time. but i have to indict myself on this point immediately since all of these feelings i have are really pretty subjective based on many factors and influences - few of which really touch on some special objective arena of qualification. so again i have to fall back on the considered looking and giving the benefit of the doubt. on some level i have to believe that people are making what they make not because they are assholes, but because they really feel strongly about what they are doing. them feeling strongly about it doesn’t necessarily make it good, but it does - in a way - necessitate my considerate willingness to attempt to read the work.
sometimes i’m just at a kind of loss about certain works. i was talking with chris today about amy sillman. i’ve been haunted by the reproductions i’ve seen of her paintings. they seem so derivative to me on one hand but also really kind of full of a sense of effort and direction. i’ve felt this way about nozkowski and lasker, too. i could write them off because of my mystification, or i could continue to think about them. with both sillman and nozkowski i’m coming around - lasker is still trying to convince me. i think something similar is happening for me with schutz and calvin and, to stay on point, chapman here. i’m less convinced about brian calvin and chapman, but honestly it’s mostly because i don’t really like the images so much. schutz is frustrating because i respond to some images but not so much to others… i’m babbling.
i guess what i’m saying is that i’ll admit to feeling like some works i see are bad, but that my feeling that way doesn’t really disqualify those works for me. i simply tuck them away and come back to them. i think it comes down to whether or not i’m willing to be offended by work i think is “bad” at a certain moment in time. i just can’t make myself think that way anymore. i’m not going to be personally offended that painting - or any art for that matter - simply exists.
…plus i feel like i need to make some penance for in the dim and distant past thinking that guston and stanley spencer were “bad” painters. for shame!
It may be my problem, but when this one particular strain of figure painting seems to get a disproportionate amount of critical/market support (sorry, the m word), in my world view, it becomes a little more suspect. If I saw any of these artists’ work in isolation, or if they were students, I’d probably see the work differently.
When the stuff is foisted on us to the exclusion of so much else, I tend to wonder why and its flaws become amplified; its thinness, its reductiveness, its cuteness. I may not be reacting to any one painting as much as to a phenomenon in which these qualities seem to be excessively celebrated, striven for.
And really when you look at a lot of these paintings (schutz, calvin, chapman), they’re horrifying; I see some kind of final absurdity and emptiness in them; it oughta really fuck people up to look at these things; instead this work just sort of casually becomes the hot, now thing. I find it disconcerting.
Yes.
When I see stuff like Kilimnik, Schutz, Calvin and now Chapman (the list can go on and on) I can’t help thinking that this issue was torn wide open 100 years ago and today seems like trendy nothingness. Painting still has a lot more to offer.
I actually see no sign whatever of this “exclusion” of other modes.
If anything, one could make a case that the “market”, which I suspect is the real villain in this discussion, is in fact too promiscuous in its appetites, all too willing to embrace anything and everything for its own ends. It’s hard to take this case for exclusion seriously in an artworld that has room to embrace Eliasson and Freud, Schutz and Koons, Murakami and Carsten Nicolai, Kara Walker and Tim Hawkinson.
And EVERYTHING was torn open hundreds of years ago…are realists working today to make up for the horrid deficiencies so apparent in the work of Hals, David, and Caravaggio?
horrid deficiencies!!??
You’re not big on irony, are you?
to bump the conversation back up to the top of the thread, it was already said very early on that art-making in general trips us into an overripe dialogue with history/and with currency. we all become part of this whether we like it or not.
it makes no sense to cast aspersions at the impetus or the form of paintings for which the only scale of value that we’re engaging is one of relativity in light of a genre of ‘others’ who we deem to be the cohorts of ’said individual’. i guess what we’re doing is critiquing a timeline?
right now i just feel a little bit badly for chapman. not because i necessarily like the work, but because the assaults on him are so much based on so many things that make going to the studio everyday and making work that is not paralyzed by these exact concerns sometimes seem nearly impossible.
boo hoo. i so badly want to be original. so don’t we all? and odds are, it ain’t going to happen. maybe the new strategy should be going to the studio and making work that is as ‘played’ as possible. it would allay a lot of anxiety about being too closely alligned with pop/hot-painting culture…in other modes of the art profession, it seems to work for jeff koons, right?
what seems to be flummoxing us is this want for forward momentum. without this propulsion we start to get scared…is something good? is something bad? shit, has it been done before? are we going up the hill/ are we sliding down it? this is quintessentially modernist thinking (even as we rail for originality and freshness) crap…we’re all dated.
as a measure of self-assurance, i’ll tell you what i want. i want to go into a cave and work for about 10 years and then come out and see what i’ve got going on relative to the big picture.
these paintings seem to have a lot to do with something like early Arshile Gorky. so yeah, it was turned over 100 years ago. it’ll probably be turned over in another hundred…painting is really really old. and it seems to keep going and going.
incidentally: in the New York Times today I lifted this quote from an article on Gorky:
In 1932 Arshile Gorky outlined his influences for the art dealer Julian Levy: ”I was with Cézanne and now naturally I am with Picasso.” Mr. Levy replied that he would exhibit the Armenian-born New York painter ”when you are with Gorky.”
No it’s not fair to judge work simply for resembling other work or to assume this represents “cashing in”, imitating, whatever. I don’t know what generated the work, in all likelihood it was just someone doing what he felt he had to do, which is the only way I’ve figured out to keep things happening in the studio. Screw originality, screw anyone elses’ proscription for what art should be.
On the other hand I see nothing wrong with simply noting that there seems to be a surprisingly large and growing profusion of work in a particular mode (it may be this profusion that I’m talking about, more so than “exclusion” of other work).
I find myself a bit perplexed by the wide proliferation of work that I find somewhat narrow in its inquiry. Chapman became a springboard for expression of that perplexity. I could be wrong, just setting down my impressions for the edification of all.
there is always a tendency toward groupings of work/thoughts/patterns, that emerge with a sense of timing and simultanaeity (trends).
convergence theory
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convergence
Also see Gombrich on “mental set” in Art and Illusion.