Jered Sprecher, Thought From Afar, 2011, oil, 20″ x 16″
Painter’s Bread blog has been doing a lot of artist interviews lately, as exciting for the images and studio shots as for the artist’s words. Check out recent talks with Jered Sprecher and Michael Dopp.
I’m not sure what to think of his work. So much of what I see in abstraction these days seems arbitrary –compositions, paint-handling, color, etc.
Agreed but I think Sprecher shows the poignancy of that situation, the desire to signify rather than to just be referential, and the difficulty of doing so when there’s so much water under the bridge. Which makes him sound melancholic, but I don’t think that’s the case, not entirely. He lacks the smart-assery I see a lot of. I find in his paintings a yearning -toward structure, as if it could be believed in, but a fundamental unmoored-ness.
I like vc going to an emotional content right out. It’s not exactly what you expect from a certain crop of young abstract painters, who do, I agree as well, seem to cultivate a lah-lah-lah attitude toward existential crisis, leaving audience in doubt as to whether said crisis is real or imaginary. All very smart-assy.
Not sure that I agree Sprecher’s work is exactly arbitrary. In terms of paint handling, yes maybe, but there’s a pretty consistent insistence on a kind of visually slow-moving, awkward balance (as in the Intro to Design meaning) that happens over and over and over in the work. Seems to be a bit of theme and almost got to be intentional and meaningful.
the sing-along we can’t tell apart from music… or much of anything for that matter. not sure i’m inclined toward that sentiment as it might apply to either of these two painters, here, exactly. but, it is a thought that’s been kicking around my head too, for a long while. Chris and VC both make good points.
I agree his work lacks the irony and cynicism. The first time I saw a Josh Smith it was at a restorer’s studio. I was picking up a painting of mine and he showed me a Smith painting / collage, which was already deteriorating after two years. The restorer protested to Smith’s then-dealer that one should not be using those materials, to which the dealer’s response was who cares.
(An interesting link between Smith and Sprecher is the latter now teaches where the former went, UTK.)
I suppose what I don’t find compelling about the arbitrariness or so-called attempts to wrestle with the end of painting is every artist is in the same boat and many carve out a compelling aesthetic quite happily. All the abstract painters at Feature Inc do it. Carrie Moyer at Canada gallery does it. Even Thomas Nozkowski, for all his relentless invention, does it very well. Amy Sillman and so on.
Not that it would be the first or last time I’ve read an artist’s work in a way that was completely wrong, but with Sprecher the provisional qualities of the work do seem like a happily carved-out aesthetic. In much the same way that we’ve truly reached a point where young artists come out who are sincerely ironic, just because it’s the language they know, or hipster classicists like Nicholas Uribe, I think Sprecher and painters like Wendy White and Kelty Ferris have an aesthetic of provisionalism that’s got little to do with Yves-Alain Bois or anything. Sprecher specifically seems to make work that’s much about language, I see borrowings from tighter, more traditional folks like Garth Weiser or Lee Bontecou.
I’m not really disagreeing with anyone about major points, and assume this is all ground you’ve thought over before, maybe I’m just feeling more kindly toward the painters here.
PS Rob, thanks for bringing up Moyer, I’m putting up a link to the Brooklyn which I’d looked over til your mention got me to looking up the work!
Chris, I see what you are saying and it seems true.
In terms of criticism, much of my educational background included professors who made critiques a full contact sport. I do tend to push towards negative criticism, but it is mostly to generate discussion by rallying defenders who can provide more context and insight into the work. It’s a very efficient way to learn about an artist. The cost is appearing to be a jerk.
Hey, I know where you’re coming from, I worked under (and loved every minute of working under) a Chinese-American prof famous for insights like “Looks good enough for trash can, not for my class room.” and the ever popular “Wrong! Do over.” I tend to swing critical right off the bat myself.
That’s why I love this forum, I feel like I’m often defending work I’m truthfully only lukewarm about, or critiquing work I like, just to get a work out and to get outside my own viewing habits. Thanks for doing the same.
An exchange with my favorite professor:
Prof: “Wait, you like Richard Lytle’s work?”
Me: “Yeah.”
Prof: “You fail.”
Me. “I’m not in any of your classes, Dan.”
Prof: “You still fail.”
I haven’t posted in a while, but I’m going to throw my two cents in becasue I really enjoy Sprecher’s work and believe that I share a similar aesthetic/philosophical view when it comes to the function of an abstract image.
In comments that I have read, Sprecher mentions the idea of hunting and gatehring images which implies some sort of drive to process images as both information and stimulation while operating on varying intellectual and emotional levels.
I see Sprecher’s images (as well as a great deal of contemporary abstraction) as operating in a cognitive or psychological space. Many of these provisional and casualist tendencies in paintings seem to be address some underlying philosophical tone regarding the nature of created objects and the human impulse to engage and understand that which is unresolved or tentative.
I don’t really want to bring up the issue of authority, but in my mind the true authority of abstraction, — what separates good from bad and so on is its ability to tempt both meaning and meaninglessness.
This ability of abstraction to span this liminal space of meaning is what makes it endlessly fascinating and compelling… at least in my mind.
Incidentally, Sprecher is one of the best at operating in this space of “cognitive estrangement” (Darko Suvin’s great SF term) . Sprecher’s images and great abstraction in genral always seems to tempt meaning while inertly disregarding it.
Just a thought: a couple of things you’re saying about Sprecher et al. are intriguing. I’m thinking of ” …implies some sort of drive to process images as both information and stimulation while operating on varying intellectual and emotional levels.” and “…seem to be address[ing] some underlying philosophical tone regarding the nature of created objects and the human impulse to engage and understand that which is unresolved or tentative”.
They’re great thoughts, both.
The other thing is, looking at them, both thoughts could be applied to Giacometti or Cezanne (and a few other Impressionists for that matter). And this is not that I’m critiquing Sprecher or anyone as un-original or un-innovative. It’s more like, expressing a state a wonder at the ability of painting, or varied visual expressions of different sorts, to keep an idea fresh and in currency.
Giacometti and Cezanne are both great connections and I would add Bacon to the mix as well, becasue I think that the idea of thought and impulse are incredibly important to each of these artist’s process. They are trying to do more than make a painting/sculpture, they are seeing and being in the moment and changing the methodology of picture/object making.
The result is both subjective and objective at the same time, it is pure and total truth. I love Giacometti and Cezanne for their relentless – ” brutality of fact” as Bacon would say.
Whether representation or abstraction, I think I respond to this raw and direct form of creation, it is as my good friend Baab would say ” sensing thinking.”