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10/25/2007: "Modern Dilema" by Walter King
Over the last week I've had several suggestions for blogs. One is to speak more about the larger world of art and larger issues in contemporary art. The other was to talk about my own work. I think I tend to avoid the first issue because it can become so contentious. I've avoided the second most often because I don't want to make a habit of using this forum as advertisement for my own work. The more I think about these two ideas the more I realize that they maybe go together. So I'm going to try to discuss some of my painting ideas in connection with some larger contemporary issues. In the classical world the Greeks found ways of expressing the world through a combination of esthetic mathematics like the Golden Mean and other ideas about beauty and proportion. They understood architecture through the lens of mathematical modal combinations, scale and proportion were sifted for the best proportional arrangements. Much of Greek figurative sculpture and painting had been long since buried or lost by the time of the Proto-Renaissance. A kind of depression or regression covered the art of the Western world during the so called Dark Ages. In part because Christianity found much of the former pagan art offensive. Around the 12th century Art began to focus on the human condition in a world that tried for better or worse to duplicate the objective world we can all agree upon. Ancient Greek sculpture began to be unearthed and many artists were deeply inspired by the naturalism, the balance and lightness of being it possessed. The discovery of those Greek sculptures came precisely at that moment when the Italian world view made man the pivot point and eventually the measure of all things. Mathematical perspective, the study of human cadavers to learn about anatomy, the study of the physics of color and light and the understanding of scale and proportion lead to a supremely rational human centered form of art. The real world had, in their minds, been reborn! The Renaissance! It seems like a pretty straight line from Giotto to Corbet. It's like a stream of water shot from a canon.
Eventually the camera and use of photographs to “capture reality” defined once and for all what art was really about - our common reality!
But sometime after Corbet something very strange began to happen. It is as if that stream petered out and like a fountain turned into a spray which the wind carries in as many directions as there are droplets of water. Ever since Monet turned the art world upside down by making the reflection of the world in between his water lilies things haven't been quite what they were. The long, more or less steady state of art that we had suffered for centuries came to a fairly immediate end. It is very confusing if one tries to follow every tack by every artist after the Impressionists. The zig zagging directions simply bedazzle the mind.
Monet was in fact painting what he saw through his esthetically French eyes. When Kandinsky saw the Monet Haystack paintings he didn't recognize the subject and saw only colors and shapes and textures. It dawned on him that on a two dimensional surface that's all you get - two dimensional reality. And so non-objective abstraction was born as a kind of baseline art reality. Cubism via Picasso and Braque, Matisses use of simplified often flattened figures and harmonic colors and the Expressionists from various parts of Europe, Dresden's de Brucke, the Blue Rider group, several painters from le Beaux Arts in Paris had already set the stage for an art of abstraction, an art about the reality of ones feelings as much as about the visible reality. But none of these were ready to empty their work of all suggestions and reminders of the world we lived in. But Kandinsky was ready to deal solely with the reality of the canvas and its laws.
All hell broke loose. The Futurists began to explore the possibility of motion. The Surrealists the possibilities of time and the unconscious mind, the supremacists and the minimalists the reduction of the two and three dimensional worlds to the least of their variables. Then Dada immerged Like Venus from a toilet. Duchamp did what Monet wasn't really trying to do. Monet didn't think he was doing anything all that different that what had been done for centuries. He was making something beautiful and esthetic. The Dadaists, especially Duchamp, were quite intent on turning everything upside down and shaking it all out onto the floor. They didn't so much question what art was as state firmly from the start that they knew what it was--it was a sham. Esthetics, the mathematics, the anatomy, the careful processes and techniques, the art market itself had been duped into believing the reality that art had pursued for so long was itself a lie. Nothing but a concept, a con job. So they took cheap shots at everything art related. Painting, sculpture, photography and film. Absurdity became a common word in a language that had always sought veracity.
(coming soon) deconstructing lizards.jpg
No one has been able, as far as I know, to locate the actual companies that made Duchamps famous toilet, bottle rack (no bottle now or then actually fits or so I've heard). If the toilet, or Bottle Rack was created by Duchamp, or even some craftsman hired by the artist would it change the value of what he said it meant? Would it roll back the changes in the art world it fostered if it was all a lie? Those ready mades had such an effect on young artists. I suspect Dada is by and large pure contrarianism - a critique with no positive suggestion. I find it very cynical. And Post-Modernism is born of this cynicism. The art of ironies. An art that cannibalizes it's traditions each generation in an attempt to disavow any knowledge or responsibility therein. An art that stands against the very culture of which it partakes. The original post-modernists were mostly French historians with a Marxist slant. They wanted to understand how France managed to bungle the Algerian insurgency so badly. But to do that they found they had to deconstruct the entire French/Algerian history to understand it. Hence the word deconstruct fell into the hands of young art students who, also disillusioned with the current state of affairs found it a convenient concept with which to explore alternate cultural ideas, taunt the status quo and avoid looking traditional - or at least it was a way to do something traditional and still be able to argue that they were contra that tradition.
American painting during the first half of the last century ran amuck in the squalor of Cubism's stylistic flattenings. The Abstract Expressionists for whom paint became the entire reality on the surface finally broke through and contributed a new approach to abstraction. The earthwork artists dealt in the reality of their site specific ideas. Various minimal artists whose rows of rocks, grids of tiles, stacks of bricks or minimal constructions of combinations of material in which the reality of the material becomes the anchor for the image.
I come into this latter period in the middle 60's during the Civil Rights Movement and the Viet Nam War. I began noticing the world of art when I was quite young. My mother had two art books. One was a large coffee table book with all the great ancient and classical artists right up to the French Academy. I was steeped in Da Vinci, Titian, Michelangelo, Raphael, Rubens, Rembrandt. The other book was a smaller book of contemporary art beginning with the Impressionists right through to Hans Hoffman, Pollock and De Kooning. At some point she showed me how to graph up a photograph or print. I was 10. I wanted to be an artist.
(coming soon) fabric.jpg
As I became more and more enamored with the idea that being an artist was what I was here to do I continued to look at contemporary artists. Warhol and the pop artists and the graphic artist's and illustrators of the 60's who spoke to my growing awareness of the culture I lived in. The hyper-realists of the 70's were on top when I went to art school.
In the mid 70's I remember reading that one photo-realist was quoted saying that he wasn't making a realistic picture but an abstraction. The photo he had copied (most likely projected onto the canvas and traced) was simply an excuse to play with the formal abstraction inherent to all art. I do agree that all art is inherently an abstraction. At that time abstraction, primarily Minimalism had a fundamentalist death grip on the arts. To do anything else would get you excommunicated from Art Forum. Everything else was passe. The artist was trying to BS his way past that strangle hold. Of course he was making a picture. But he didn't want it discussed in those terms. It was the first time I recognized a change as it took place in my own time. It wasn't long before picture making became acceptable again. Just like the Pop Artists who stole the Abstract Expressionists thunder the hyper-, super, and photo-realists soon took over the whole show. Art movements used to last 50 years to a century. By the late 60's you were lucky if they lasted 5-10 years. Photo-realism is still with us today in its various forms. Though it seems to have lost some of its impact with rare exceptions.
The neo-Expressionists burst onto the world art scene between my undergrad and grad school school years in the early 80's. Conceptual art had been brewing in the wings since the late 60's. Slowly it gained ascendancy. I’d always found myself drawn to painting even though according to the critics painting was dead by the time I was in grad school. But the conceptual artists of the day weren't really very interesting to me. Even today I'm mostly bored by their work and find their justifications most often a way to cover the lack of communicative skill or sense of presence - again with some exceptions. But the idea of Conceptualism intrigues me even if the art leaves me flat. I worked in school towards a kind of realism at first, mostly because I felt I had to have those skills. Then I morphed logically into an expressionist as I got my painterly feet under me and loosened up. Eventually I fell in love with color and studied Matisse for some time. I remember my painting professor saying once that cubism was the gate into the 20th century. So I toyed with cubism but also felt it was a bit over done and mis-apprehended. Like Matisse I avoided it to a large extent garnering the most important concepts about what could be done on a two dimensional surface with two dimensional shapes while trying at the same time not to be trapped by Cubism's stylistic cages.
I am, at heart, a mystic though not given to superstition. I don't buy into ideas like astrology or
reincarnation.
(coming soon) salvation.jpg
I make pictures. They are a careful blend of form and content. Content has become one of the hallmarks of the Post-Modern movement of the last part of the 20th and beginning of the 21st centuries. While I don't think of myself as a Post-Modernist I probably share, whether I like it or not, some of the same ideas and feelings about the post modern world in which we live. We transform our reality into forms that are in themselves too small to say much. But through metaphor we can hint at meanings well beyond the scope of simply smearing a little colored mud on woven plant fibers. It is a gestalt in that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. In that sense it becomes metaphysical. We can express or suggest far more than we can actually see and achieve. Jung talked of archetypes that transcend our own times projecting backwards and forwards in time and memory. I am always trying to tap into those larger archetypes, the pregnant metaphors that speak a language we all understand even if we can not speak it ourselves. By the way- I'm not a Jungian and am not taken by modern interpretations of Jung even though I like some of his thinking. Archetypes for instance are a kind of stencil or form that hold universal meaning and attraction.
I first experimented with stenciling out of High School in the back of my parents arts and crafts store. It was 1970. I came upon it again nearly 20 years later with the dot matrix paintings. The matrix became something more than the reality of the image. It suggested many possibilities, radiation, a spiritual presence, a certain mathematical order or just a textural device from a formal point of view. Eventually I went from spraying paint through pegboard or painting on pegboard to attaching toys and other elements in a grid like fashion first to the peg board then other supports to create veils and layers through which I painted other images. The matrix itself came from using grids to enlarge images, to frame compositions based on the Golden Mean and other devices one can dream up as a way of organizing the surface of a canvas.
I use a lot of repetition. I've even done multiple variations on an image each on its own support hung in multi panel arrangements like an alter piece with its predella (The step, or raised secondary part, of an altar; a superaltar; hence, in Italian painting, a band or frieze of several pictures running along the front of a superaltar, or forming a border or frame at the foot of an altarpiece. [1913 Webster] .)It is a kind of story board in sequence. Multiple part images can also be used in ways to extend and vary meaning. By placing two works together, each its own often unrelated subject, larger meanings can arise. At some point the toys were used as stencils themselves and eventually disappeared leaving only their shadow doppelgangers.
Finally I began to draw and cut my images from old manila file folders. This gave me the potential of dealing with any subject matter I wanted to attack. My working modus is to never use the stencil image in exactly the same way as I've used it before. I'm always trying to transform the meaning of the images I cut either by using the negative stencil one time and the positive drop the next. Or sometimes I'll let the stenicil fill with paint, turn it around and use it like a stamp or woodcut. And turning an image upside down or sideways it will change the original intent. I'll fold a stencil to turn a horse head or reverse the upper and lower torso on a figure so it becomes a different gesture. Sometimes I retire a stencil by pasting it collage fashion onto the painting surface in some interesting way. And not everything is stenciled. I still work charcoal, pastels, paint and other materials like wall paper, xerography or toys into the work. It opens up the possibilities dramatically.
I like an image that cuts both ways, is loaded with inuendo, or can be two views at one time. In short, I like an image that offers a lot of potential readings. Around 1995 I began using the reclining lovers image, an image I still draw upon from time to time. I made them into sky, ground and shadows, the sea. The day of the 9-11 attacks nearly 6 years later they became the world trade center towers. (see below) Other icons began to find their way into my menagerie of animals and human gesture. The lizard or salamander, deer (inspired by two trips through Pennsylvania to New York and back in one year. Those deer crossing signs - I couldn't get them out of my head. The deer became a poignant sign for the environment, the poet, mans creature-ness. The Missing Tree (below) gets at the idea that there is something going on, the leaves and flowers in color on one panel on the next panel blackened. The shadow of the deer is a man. There is a bit of free association involved but it is directed more than not.
I did a long series of small stencil drawings called Modern Dilemmas a few years ago in which I tried to bond the idea of beauty with absurdity, by imaging as many of the philosophical dilemmas we deal in everyday as I could. I often mine an idea or a concept for as long as possible just to see what I get to. The idea of repetition is inherent to nearly everything I do these days. Whether it is the repeated stencil image that overlays and becomes the atmosphere of a work, the use of wallpapers which are designed to repeat over and over or the use of multiple supports in some variation. One of the dilemmas we find ourselves tied to in this modern society is repetition.
Repetition can be either boring or rhythmically stimulating - it presses the repeated image into our minds, and at the same time we eventually see past it to what lies beyond or behind. The repetition becomes a screen through which we see darkly. It becomes a metaphor for any number of states - focus, depression, discovery, the veil of reality that keeps us from seeing those things we feel but cannot see, the curtain that keeps us from seeing into the next world. I don't claim to know what happens next but I sense it is there.
I can pile up meaning with these overlaid images. Unlike free form montage which depends on free floating connections I can set up a context or syntax with a kind of semantics that defines a little more specifically where to go. Face Dancer (below) touches on this idea. A portrait of a person with little figures tumbling on his face - that moment of flux when you don't quite know how to react and you search your emotions for the right expression.
Most recently I've begun playing with a new way to use the stenciling process. Instead of cutting a whole figure I cut the figure in parts - a torso with head - a leg - an arm - these I can then put together to animate the figure. (see 6 Steps to Defeat Your Neighbor below) The multiple image, storyboard or how too format gives me a bit more time to tell a story. On my site you can see these in use in the Snake Handlers series, The Snake Charmer, and they have a cameo in House on the Hill.
So I have this dichotomy that I deal with - this modern tension - these modern dilemmas. I don't think of myself as a Post-Modernist. I see too many contradictions in the philosophy. However I do comment on what I think is a Post-Modern society- a society in flux, in transit, caught between traditional ideas and modern necessity and the resulting confusion. I see the world in two ways. It is both beautifully mythic and absurdly confused. Yet I am driven to justify it all somehow-- every movement in art, every breaking news story, every image I see, every contradiction, to summarize it at least, to be a witness to both.
Artworks in order of appearance:
1. Slot. Oil on board
2. Nude on a couch. Pencil on BFK paper
3. Agoache/Adroit. Diptych. Acrylic on board
4. Deconstructing Lizards. Auto body primers and charcoal on BFK Paper
5. Fabric. Diptych. Oil on board.
6. Salvation. Oil, encaustic, mannequin parts, toy animals and nails on board.
7. Godzilla. Oil on board
8. Not Concrete and Steel. Auto body primers and charcoal on BFK paper
9. The Missing Tree. Diptych. Oil painted over Xerox copies pasted on board.
10. Face Dancer. Oil on canvas
11. 6 Steps to Defeat Your Neighbor. Auto body primers and pencil on paper
12. I saw Two Men Dancing. 12 drawings, auto body primers and charcoal on BFK papers
