A site sharing my painting, photography, cultural criticism and commentary.
The art form of cinematography is no stranger to an exploration of landscape as a central theme. It is used as a device in film to echo our own mythological claims and serve as that boundary between sentience and the sublime.
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Erased de Kooning Drawing
Dan: I'm older, and I'm much less friendly to fuckin' change. Al Swearengen: Change ain't lookin' for friends. Change calls the tune we dance to.
—Deadwood
The efficacy of life is held within the grip of memory. Without memory we and indeed everyone we know or have known do not exist. We spend our lives fighting against loss which is primarily fighting against the loss of memory. We manifest things—art, to hold onto the world which we live in. It is within this contentious dance with death that we manifest life.
The tenuous dialogue between memory and existence has grown even more difficult in the digital age. Ideas constructed within the macro world of paint, stone and pencil become much more liminal in the world of bits and bytes. Not only do we struggle with the relationship to digital art in how it’s displayed—computer monitors, televisions—but its preservation and continuation. Since the 1970’s the platform for music has gone from vinyl to 8-track to cassettes to compact discs to purely digital storage and now, back again to vinyl. How is an artist to predict the format which will hold the memories and expressions of tomorrow? Who now owns a betamax machine or a cassette player? As difficult as it is to sell works of art on paper, vinyl or canvas, it becomes even harder to make a living from digital production. As we’ve witnessed with the near death of newspapers and the implosion of the record industry, digital media lacks the tactile semi-permanence of something hanging on your wall. A Bill Viola work requires a monitor whose own technology is shifting every year. Televisions have gone from cathode ray technology to LED in just a few decades. Imagine how we will view our digital creations in 20, 30 or 50 years from now.
What I’ve come to realize however, is that none of this matters. The act of creation must go beyond the desire to hold on and the need for remembering if it is to become universal. The work of Bill Viola isn’t dependent upon a television monitor, it’s dependent upon the themes of being human. One could imagine his work being acted out live or drawn as a graphic novel or written out as a poem. It is the works of art which transcend the grip of memory that ironically live on the longest in our collective recollections and cultural identity. Loss is a starting point not an ending. When we loose someone important to us we don’t also kill ourselves, despite the anguish and sorrow we feel. We inherently understand that living is the point even if we understand very little about how that actually comes to be or why it is we too will eventually die. The 1953 work Erased de Kooning Drawing by Robert Rauschenberg is a testament to the way art can transcend the confines of memory and become something else, something universal. It doesn’t matter if you’ve ever seen a de Kooning before or even if you know who de Kooning was and his importance in the art world. It is enough to understand that one artist erased the work of another. The act of destruction becomes an act of creation.
This year has seemingly become a meditation on death, loss, and memory in my life. Mortality took up a seat next to me in my favorite pub and asked me to buy her a drink. I didn’t invite her to sit next to me and frankly before a couple of years ago I didn’t even know her name let alone hang out with her, and yet here she is, now a permanent fixture on that bar stool. My resistance was, at first swift, because like everyone else, I saw death as a threat to life, a destroyer of memories. Her presence there, forced me to confront entropy in a way that I had always pretended to embrace and understand, but suddenly realized was a pretense. I had disguised fear in a cloak of creativity. Life it turns out is much more like Schrödinger's cat experiment than even I had cared to admit.
Memories are not a box of photographs or a fleeting glimpse in our minds of a time we lived in the past. They are biochemical constructs built from electrical impulses that are stimulated from interactions in the real world as a tool for navigating the challenges of being. Evolutionarily speaking, memories have aided homo sapiens by providing us the foundation to create analogies, make tools, and catalogue our world. Memory has extended our lifespans and allowed us to surpass all other creatures on earth in terms of our dominance as a species. And the way in which those biochemical impulses are leveraged is through creativity and that creativity works by first assailing the memories we have available to us and then seeing how they can be reconstructed in a new way. The collective memory of de Kooning is now the collective memory of Rauschenberg which is really the collective memory of humanity. The symbolic is the real because we are alive.
The exciting opportunities available in the digital realm are the ones that challenge our understanding of permanence not the ones which reinforce our desire for nostalgia, for remembering and memorial. The creative act is an act of destruction because entropy is a natural component of being alive and to embrace its reality is to embrace being. It is also an impossibility. Matter is a constant in the universe and although it desires a state of equilibrium it is a constant. Staring at the Erased de Kooning Drawing brings us closer to that knowledge of equilibrium and a little closer to understanding the nature of being.
“Everywhere one seeks to produce meaning, to make the world signify, to render it visible. We are not, however, in danger of lacking meaning; quite the contrary, we are gorged with meaning and it is killing us.” ― Jean Baudrillard
Arshile Gorky, the progenitor of Abstract Expressionism began making work pushing in that direction in 1930. In 1942, the New School artists saw a painting at Betty Parsons by Max Ernst made from dripping paint from a can tied to a string. Shortly thereafter Pollock began experimenting with drip painting until he was ‘discovered’ in 1947. The greater American public has been aware of abstract expressionism since Life magazine published its now famous exposé on Jackson Pollock in 1949, 64 years ago. So why the cognitive dissonance or at the very least, misunderstanding and mild approbation to Abstract Expressionism?
Our modern world is fraught with ambiguity and a lack of knowledge-authority. Where painting was once looked upon as the source of some of that knowledge-authority, offering a gateway to our subconscious at the genesis of apocalyptic behavior, it now holds virtually no authority. As J. M. Bernstein says, “So the disenfranchisement of art entails the disenchantment of nature, which disenchantments jointly entail the disenchantment of society.”[i] A recent American Psychological Association survey[ii] discovered that Millennials are the most stressed out generation yet due in large part to their hyper-connectivity with smart phones, tablets and computers. To Bernstein’s point, our contemporary world is accessed almost exclusively through the simulacrum and it’s stressing the hell out of us. If we are to believe Bacon’s approach to painting as sensation then how is that possible by looking at Pollock on your iPhone? At its core, viewers feel disassociated from abstraction because it resembles a pixelation of their simulated daily experience. On the other hand, the arcadia of 19th century painting and sculpture, feels much more secure in its avoidance of anything digital at all. Its simulation provides a gesture toward nature and forgotten landscapes, not the advance of psychotherapy and the digital age. Despite the failings of Denis Dutton and Ellen Dissanayake’s attempts to quantify art-making as anthropological grounded[iii], the foundations of our residual memories do seem to be made from the collective recollection of our early ancestors arcadian experiences on the great plains of the African subcontinent. Why else would Picasso be more palatable than Pollock to a global audience if not for his theft of the tribal?
Getting back to the question of how one should look at art, I have come to realize its the same as asking how do you taste food. Both are couched in a combination of epigenetics, life experiences and historical knowledge. This is the kind of thinking behind Schama’s book Landscape and Memory. Speaking on the nature of Anselm Keifer’s work in the context of German history, specifically Naziism Schama astutely comments, “For it has attached to countless artists and anthropologists who have parted company with Enlightenment skepticism about the cultural force of myth and magic and who have seen in their complicated symbolic elaboration something more than a hoax perpetrated on the naive by the unscrupulous.” There is a seduction in how we own our observations whether scholar, scientists or barista. All art is selling a seductive observation. How we look at another’s observance is highly dependent on our own seductions, experiences, genetics and memory.
Abstract Expressionism is very self referential, meaning it focuses inwardly on both a psychology of observation as well as art history itself. Pollock was equally enamored with dismantling and reconstructing the conventions of painting technique, approach and practice that came before him as he was in unravelling his on manic depression through the sensation of painting. It is asking a great deal of people in today’s existence of simulacrum and simulation to extend their own observations simultaneously inward and free of irony, as well as metaphorically toward the experience of paints plasticity in service to sensation. It’s not impossible but it is indeed an esoteric exercise that will likely only be coveted by a select few.
Retraction and reactionary behavior is a logical outcome to rapid and disruptive change. Our current obsessions with the magical realms whether religious doctrine or the Twilight movies is just such a reactionary expression. The 70’s dreams of nuclear holocaust have transformed into zombies and vampires. Our addition to tool-making in the age of accelerated progress is causing our minds to fracture and is freezing creative thinking. In just my lifetime we have gone to a firm believe in Einstein’s relativity to the notions of multiverses and anthropic string theory. This severe compression of technological sophistication and philosophical expansion combined with our hyper-connectivity (try answering a trivia question without reaching for your smart phone) will inevitably force us through to another kind of existence, whatever that may be. In the meantime, we are forced to contend with our own dissonance and longing for utopian forms as a weak justification that whatever we do technologically it will lead, contrary to all past indicators, to a richer kind of existence. The new art will have to address Leonard Susskind’s assertion that reality may forever be beyond reach of our understanding. I’m looking forward to people asking me how to look at that art.
[i] Bernstein, J. M. Against Voluptuous Bodies: Late Modernism and the Meaning of Painting. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 2006. Print. p. 241
[iii] I am not disputing an obvious anthropological underpinning to art-making but rather the philosophical or anthropological scientific framework that Dutton and Dissanayake use to make their particular and related arguments related to how art is made.