Art and the Artist

There is an age old question regarding the artist and the outcomes of that artist, namely can you despise the maker while still admiring what they made? Are there limits to that concept if the answer is yes? If the answer is no, is all art bound by its creator’s personality, and if so, what happens when the deeds of the human being have long since been forgotten but the art lives on? These questions seem to emerge more and more in an age when we are quick to judge people based on a perfidious text message or an off-handed comment that then goes viral. The diminishing privacy associated both knowingly and unknowingly around our social lives has only poured gasoline on the fire of moral boundaries. Although few traditional artists become celebrities, there work sometimes does. Few people knew who Chris Ofili was until Rudolph Giuliani decided to take issue with The Holy Virgin Mary. Aside from politicians feigning righteous indignation at artists to curry political favor, most so-called ‘blue-chip’ artists remain completely unknown by populist standards. What is known of these artists, if anything, is the product of their creativity, the art itself.

When art has an impact on a broad range of viewers it takes on a mystical association. Great art can be transcendent in it’s representations, providing the viewer with emotional responses that are otherwise the dominion of church, cosmology, philosophy or moments of extreme trauma or ecstasy.  Natural human curiosity gets the better of us and we want to delve into how such a work was created and who was responsible for moving us so. Why else would a film like Gerhard Richter Painting even be possible? Although the film grossed a tiny amount in comparison to major film releases, (a meager $242,000 in the U.S.) none the less audiences sat transfixed as a german painter was filmed squeegeeing paint on and off canvases. The studio of Francis Bacon was dismantled, walls and all, after his death in 1992 and shipped to a museum in Dublin as if it were an ancient archeological relic. In the midst of this fascination about how an artists does what he/she does, lies the inevitable cult of personality. It isn’t enough to simply witness the act of art making, there is a desire to know the person behind it. What mind could create a great work of art? What is their behavior, their loves, their desires, their politics that inevitably fuel their production? Therein lies the rub.

Over the past three decades I’ve had the opportunity to meet, interact and sometimes even indulge in robust libation with a wide range of artists from MacArthur Prize winners and internationally renowned blue chip artists to complete unknowns. Given those experiences I can say unequivocally, that there is no secret sauce to making great art. Personalities range across the gamut of human beings from inglorious to generous. I have met artists of great stature that would blend into any local hometown diner unnoticed and those that carry such idiosyncrasies it is hard to imagine how they availed themselves to the world at all. On balance I would say that most artists are perplexed as much by what they do as those that view their art. They see their art making as a strange drive within themselves that they can no more shuck off than the shape of their head. Most artists create because they have an interior urge to do so. They are driven to share, in whatever strange way, their experiences both exterior and interior, of this world through the medium of their choice. It is precisely this ubiquitous urge that can create a dissonance between the art that is made and the artist who makes it. No artist in recent memory has met with more of this turgid dissonance than Carl Andre.

An enormous retrospective of Andre’s work just closed at the temple of all things Minimalism, Dia Beacon and it drew considerable attention and derision due to the personal life of the artist being represented. The reason for this is well reported and decades old, and carries the heaviest of moral weight with it; the death of another human being.     On the evening of September 8, 1985 in Greenwich Village, New York, Ana Mendieta died by plummeting from the 34th floor of the tower in which Andre resided. The circumstances which led to her death are vague at best, particularly given the fact the only witness (or perpetrator) was Andre himself and both he and Mendieta were heavily intoxicated on champagne. Ana Mendieta was a rising star in the art world, albeit one who struggled against the shadow of Andre’s stature, her gender in a male dominated industry, and her Cuban heritage. It is precisely because of Mendieta’s heritage, gender, and politics that has attracted even greater attention to the incident, mixing with the few known facts to create a whirlpool of speculation, and passionate force. This can be heard in the Abstract Expressionist painter Howardena Pindell’s comment to a journalist just after Andre’s acquittal; “Oh, sure, I see it as totally symbolic: your life isn’t worth shit.” Thirty years on, Mendieta’s death remains a scab in the art world that reminds us of the inequality, and white upper class domination that dictates who is remember and who is forgotten. Many are wondering why, in light of the vagaries and loss of Mendieta, should Andre get such recognition now? Certainly, Dia Beacon feels as though Andre’s work is what matters and deserves, despite any whirlpool of discontent and anger about him as a person, deserved a retrospective.

Since the beginning of Carl Andre’s trial the confusion and sometimes contradictions in Andre’s portrayal of the circumstances combined with the fierce feminist community that Mendieta was a part of, has created a toxic mix of emotion. When the Dia Beacon retrospective opened, animal blood and guts were thrust upon the Manhattan location of Dia in an effort to draw attention to the still raw emotional wounds that remain with those who feel Mendieta was killed rather than fell. Although Andre was acquitted of the murder in a rare non-jury trial (he waved his right to a jury and asked that the judge be the sole decider of the outcome) many feel verdict was unjust.

When I read the plain style account Naked By The Window written by Robert Katz that wove together Andre and Mendieta’s past, as well as the known evidence and resulting trial, I felt confusion and discontent. It seemed entirely possible and plausible given Andre’s size, his level of intoxication and the volatility of his relationship with Mendieta that he could, in a moment of passion, have thrown her from his apartment window. The window sat above a hip-height (for Mendieta) radiator and it was well documented that Mendieta was terrified of heights. Making it even more difficult was Andre’s sometimes seeming bizarre behavior, sullen demeanor and his uniform of denim overalls. He went silent about the circumstances of the evening and he closed himself off from Mendieta’s family, some say in order to avoid moral judgement at a time of guilt. It took three grand juries to indict Andre to trial and the entire proceedings dragged on for three years creating an operatic arc within the tiny Soho art community that was the New York art world then. Artists like Frank Stella, a life-long friend of Andre’s still finds himself the point of criticism for immediately putting up bail for Andre when arrested. Rich white men, protecting other rich white men, the saying goes. This opera has persisted and aside from the verdict, and unresolved (and likely forever unresolved) circumstances of Mendieta’s death, it is exacerbated by the the type of work that Andre creates—Minimalism.

It has been reported that at the time of Andre’s trial, the art bar Puffy’s passed a pitcher with “CARL ANDRE DEFENSE FUND” written on it and someone put a brick in it. Minimalism remains to this day one of the more unpopular art movements, despite its universal philosophical themes. Since its inception in the 1960’s it has been derided as both overly simplistic (a tired and common argument used against art) and as a cold embrace of latent modernist principals. The fact that Andre became powerful within the art world by aligning standard construction bricks on a floor in classic geometric patterns adds to the fury against the man and his work. Like many artists of that period he is both a heavy drinker and averse to discussing the art work itself. The few times Andre has spoken about his work or art making it only adds confusion or contempt toward his personality such as, “I mean, art for art’s sake is ridiculous. Art is for the sake of one’s needs.” Position this quiet, middle-aged, wealthy, white male who was dominating the art world against the fiery, Cuban Mendieta whose work was powerfully grounded in themes of feminism, identity and mysticism and you have the perfect storm of binary fracture—women versus men, color versus white, body-centered art versus material Minimalism, outsider versus the establishment. This dynamism has muddied the waters related to Andre’s retrospective no matter what side you fall on, guilty or not guilty in terms of Carl Andre the human being. On the second to last day of the retrospective at Dia Beacon, several women artists staged an event called “CRYING; A PROTEST” where they walked amongst Andre’s works and began crying for the loss of Mendieta and her absence from the exhibition. My friend Faheem Haider, also wrote about the lack of acknowledgement of Mendieta in the retrospective and suggested that the man, Carl Andre was hiding behind the work in order to avoid responsibility. If one is responsible to universal principals, Faheem suggests, then he might feel it unnecessary to address things on a day to day scale.

The death of another human being by mysterious circumstances, especially one of such promise and creative power is incredibly difficult to anneal. The fact that Mendieta and Andre were such opposites also attracted to each other only makes the mystery and tragedy of her death more ripe and volatile. There remains the question, outside of the tragedy, of whether or not Carl Andre’s work should be given the attention inherent in a retrospective? Can the work be viewed for it’s aesthetic value outside of the conditions of Andre’s personal life? If a retrospective is warranted, despite the tragedy, is it necessary to include mention or representation of Mendieta’s work? I think it’s important to keep in mind at such contentious crossroads as these, that one of the functions of art, if it has a function at all, is to present ideas that scratch at the underlying components of our humanity. There is no right or wrong approach to that practice and much of art is oblique, raising more questions than answers. In my mind it is hard to argue against the body of work that Andre has produced in his lifetime and the contribution it has made to art as a conversation about humanity. You may hate it’s overt simplicity, its ground in the Tao Te Ching or what you perceive to be a love of modernism’s power, but the impact it has had and influence on art and everyday life is hard to deny. Minimalisms influence, for better or worse can be felt all the way down the line to the design pornography of Apple. Is it a horror that Mendieta was taken from us, no matter the circumstances so young—of course. Her voice in the art world today is much needed in a dynamic hell bent toward commodity and consumerism. The loss of her future contributions to art is a loss for all of humanity. 

L. Carl Andre, "Grecrux" (1985) - R. Ana Mendieta, "Silueta Series, Iowa" (1977)

There is a long line of art production that has been made by terrible people or born out of societies terrible in their actions. Should we condemn Mayan art or Egyptian art because of the behavior of those cultures? Should all of the armor be removed from museums throughout the world because it was created for the purposes of war, no matter how beautiful? Should On the Waterfront be permanently banned because its author, Budd Schulberg sold out others in Hollywood to the House Un-American Activities Committee, often destroying their careers? Does it make On the Waterfront any less of a powerful story? I believe it is possible to separate the local human dimensions of an artist’s life from the work of the artist. Many artists cannot explain how it is they do what they do or even how their better works came into being. Impulse, instinct, drugs, passion and every other thing that is uniquely human creates a conflagration of ideas and actions that becomes a work of art. Artists often refer to it as the happy accident. When the outcome of that is something that can move us either in anger, disgust or in ecstasy and joy, the artist has done their job, even if that artist themselves is lousy at living.

One way that Dia Beacon could have dealt with the emotionally charged atmosphere surrounding Carl Andre better, would have been to dedicate space and energy to a dual retrospective of Mendieta’s work. The fact that her work was an offshoot related to Minimalism could have been creatively curated in a way that both recognized the tragedy of her death as well as the likely underlying reason she came to fall in love with Andre, and visa versa, to begin with. An institutions job is ultimately to give a platform to the artists who have had a memorable impact on the human story. A combined retrospective of the two artists would have not only been deserved on both parts (who knows where Mendieta would have taken her land-body art practice) but would have given a meaningful frame to why art is important to begin with.

Departure

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

Hots on for Nowhere

The moon and the stars out of order As the tide tends to ebb and sway The sun in my soul's sinking lower While the hope in my hands turns to clay I don't ask that my feet fall on clover I don't roam at opportunity's door Why don't you ask my advice, take it slower Then your story'd be your finest reward*

The intent of this blog has always been to give some context to contemporary art and cinema so that those who are unfamiliar with the devices and methods used by artists might scratch at the surface of a deeper truth. Today I am thinking of Warhol’s early mastery and its parallel to the state of our nation because a personal loss mirrors this larger idea and because as stated earlier, art can be a bridge between the intimate and the universal. It is not the loss itself, as much as the circumstances that led to it that bring me such frustration, anger and ultimately, understanding. To witness the dynamics of our broken American psyche at play on a very personal scale is truly difficult. 

Watching someone squander their life because they cannot comprehend the preciousness of it, is almost more painful than having them die. Their perpetual delusion of materialism was thought to make them happier. Their inextricable connection to immortality through their pursuit of such delusions ultimately cost them their life. What could doctors and medicine offer that a new purse or a shiny set of nails couldn’t? How could eating properly and exercising possibly measure up to a visit to the hair salon and a brand new iPhone? Why should one worry about protecting your children in settling your affairs after death if one is never going to die? These were the delusions of my mother who died recently. She carried them all through her life as long as I can remember. However, the finality of death has caught up to her despite her magical thinking and I’m hoping it might serve as a lesson for others in their living. 

We are a culture possessed by dreams of immortality and armageddon. We live at the outer limits of sustainability, persisting a dream of ever more, (and more still) all the while knowing in our heart of hearts that eventually the clock will run out on our unending consumptive cravings. Americans hold death firmly in the abstract, which is odd given our abhorrent reactions toward abstraction in general. It’s a shame really that Andy Warhol is not still alive as he might have been the one to invent For the Love of God, instead of Damian Hirst. It seems out of place for a Brit to have invented it, or shall I say, stolen the idea at least. A diamond encrusted human skull seems much more befitting of the cultural delusion persisted in America and American art. Warhol’s success after the Campbell’s soup cans was solidified with his recognition of our American duality in one of his few inspired moments, Silver Car Crash. The large silkscreened canvases of hideous car crashes didn’t just echo the appropriated newspaper spaces of Jasper Johns but elevated them to a confluence of Johns work and Pollocks. The 70 some paintings Warhol created in 1963 to 1964 often referred to as his Death and Destruction Series leveraged imagery using photographs of gruesome car crashes, electric chairs, and suicides. This was Warhol’s apex and he would never make work this good again.

It is not enough to make the viewer aware of death, horror and tragedy, an artist needs to couch that realization in the cultural zeitgeist. What makes Warhol’s Car Crash paintings so good is not what you see, but what you don’t see. The two paneled paintings are nearly 9 feet tall and 13.5 feet wide—monumental scale. In the Car Crash paintings, Warhol depicts what Sartre referred to as the For-itself itself, that hoped for synthesis of being and nothingness. The idea that through art and the allegiance of beauty and death, one could find a cohesive consciousness, a bond if you will, between one’s imagined being and the reality of living. Warhol’s diptychs present themselves in art historical reference as a new kind of religious iconography depicting the union between acknowledging the inevitability of death and the obliqueness of oblivion united in the marriage of aesthetic truth. Here Warhol was informing us of a pathway America was on that showed how we might hold the contradiction of our own consumptive powers in balance with a greater truth, an almost holy other. No doubt his catholic upbringing paired with his own blasphemous lifestyle, must have contributed to his awareness of living contradictions, at least subconsciously. The coldness and mechanization of the silkscreen as a riff on mechanical reproduction was blended with bright colors or silver paint demonstrating our tendency toward celebrity and advertising, something Warhol knew a great deal about. This was the American dream of having it all. America was inventive, powerful, and vulgar in its tastes and yet we could produce great genius, art and land men on the moon (although not at the time of these paintings). 

Unfortunately, Warhol’s fantasy which was America’s fantasy was just that, false. Sustaining the duality has cost us dearly as we are slowly seeing our status on the world stage diminished and our economic model collapsing, whether we want to admit it or not. The fictive model of eternal ever greater consumption as aesthetic ideal has congealed into a self-replicating ironic loop of ever more crass, unimaginative pathos. America is an impotent giant torn between 21st century possibilities and 6th century conservatism. Our consumptive power has become a virus that now eats the young of America, consuming their potential and our hope for any form of real future democracy by fixing their gaze upon corporate brands rather than citizenship. It turns out the right-hand panels of Warhol’s work, the one’s mirroring the void turned out to be the more powerful. We lost our sense of balance because we lost our ability to hold those two ideas—death and being—as an ideal. Our denial of death as a concept through worship of celebrity iconography, and blind consumption have left us ontologically impotent. 

I am not a believer in the afterlife. I do not believe in reincarnation or heaven or whatever you want to call it. I believe we are all born of stardust and end as stardust. Matter is perpetual as far as we know it and infinite in its own right. Believing in this infinity has given me clarity and purpose about my own life. It humbles me and it has allowed me to understand things on both a macroscopic and microscopic level. I am susceptible to desire and consumption as much as the next person from time to time, but I do not fear death. I love whatever sense of consciousness I hold in this moment as I write these words but I know in many respects it is a kind of illusion that given enough weight can fool us into believing in our own immortality. Warhol’s Crash paintings must live as a diptych because the panel that represents the void is the true reminder of death, not the hideous filmstrip silkscreen of the car crash itself. Tragedy, happiness, sadness and all of the emotions must be held in check by the understanding that we all die. Seeing death, especially our own death and holding that image clearly, without fear, gives us a presence to make wiser choices about living. Consumption becomes less important when you realize you have only so many days on this earth in your current conscious form. 

Warhol’s Silver Car Crash (Double Disaster) will always hold a lasting impression on me, not merely because of its brilliant portrayal of American duality held in check, but because it was painted in the year of my birth. It is an iconic gesture that I can hold as both a universal symbol and a personal one. It reminds me that no amount of money or things can replace my health or ability to share my creativity with the world. Paintings are an aesthetic mirror held up to our culture that shows a way toward balance. I may now be an orphan at 50, but the lesson I choose to take from this loss is to hold steadfast in my acceptance of death and to live and love as much as I can until I make my way back to stardust. 

R.I.P. Diana Dowd Greene, 1941 - 2014

* Hots on for Nowhere, Page/Plant, 1975 - off the album Presence by Led Zeppelin.

The Bleakness That Bonds Us

I am a child of Watergate. When I was in grade school in the 1970’s it was an all consuming subject, even among eleven and twelve year olds. My small town high school library made sure there was a special reserve section that dealt with the issues surrounding the continuing unfolding of the scandal and eventual disgraceful resignation of a president of the United States. As a adolescent the idea that a president would not only lie but manipulate the infrastructure of the U.S. government to win re-election was nearly impossible to swallow. My parents were products of the post WW II boom. They went to college to gain teaching degrees which our government paid for in order to promote a more robust democracy in the wake of the atrocities of fascism. It was a time of relative idealism despite the assignation of John F. Kennedy just three months after my birth and later Martin Luther King and his brother Bobby. It was a time of hope despite the insipid bombing of Cambodia, the knifing of a young man at Altamont during a Rolling Stones concert and the hideous plague rained down from the Manson family in L.A. The remnants of 1950’s America was still holding charge in small town America. I was taught even then, at that early age about civics, citizenry and the idea of a functional government. My father voted for Nixon, twice and my mother voted first for Humphrey than McGovern, but I was taught to respect differences because the vote is what enabled reconciliation. Republican government with democratic underpinnings was the greatest form of government known on Earth, and despite it’s faults, it was to be respected.

Then came Watergate. It was as if I learned that one of my uncles was a child molester or heroin dealer. I had no personal opinion about the president, but the mere fact that the leader of the free world could lie under oath and deceive on such a large scale was nearly impossible to comprehend. Today, that would be the bane of naivety and I would be laughed at out loud by nearly every school child with any remote sense of current affairs. We all sit and watch The Cobert Report or John Stewart’s comedy news and we take it in stride that our government is filled with idiots, charlatans and deceivers, but in the spring of 1974 the unfolding idea of that our president could be involved in orchestrating something as petty and foul as a break in of the Democratic National Headquarters seemed as reasonable as suggesting that aliens were living at Area 51 in Nevada. It was an odd time because the aftermath of the 60’s still came to bear and much of television was divided between the ostrich in the sand and confronting very directly, somewhat cynically and very much sarcastically the fact that all was not well with our society. All In The Family, Mary Tyler Moore, M*A*S*H, and Soul Train ran at the same time as The Waltons, Little House on the Prairie and American Bandstand. Children, even precocious 11 year olds weren’t capable of sorting out the cultural dissonance taking place at the time. Watergate, changed all that. It made real in a televised cultural way that our society was deeply corrupt at its core. There was no more room for a beautiful landscape of democracy that would self-correct. You knew, even then, there was no coming back from what was uncovered with Nixon’s dirty dealings. Sure, governments and centralized power are always prone to corruption, but what uncovered the deceit of Nixon was the fourth estate. Today there is no more fourth estate. Woodward and Bernstein would have been laid off by now.

I’m making this distinction between the fracture of a belief that I encountered in my youth back in 1973-75 and now because I think the monumental difference between the two eras is quite simply, back then there was a belief to begin with. It seems today that adolescents aren’t silly enough to believe our government works or that politicians are held accountable or even that what they see on television is reality, but rather that it is all a shifting landscape of available cynical gestures ready for the proverbial YouTube mashup. Authenticity is nearly dead and gone and what remains is mocked openly for it’s naive sensibilities and lack of adherence to the only remaining god, money. It should come as no surprise than, that our most culturally mainstream art form, television has created two powerful dramas that ooze of disdain and contempt for all things moral, righteous or truthful and that deny the concept of authenticity as a strategy, shouting its finality from their bully pulpit.

True Detective and the second season of House of Cards act as agreements in an argument with no contradictions. These dramas about police work in the heart of Louisiana and the machinations of our central government in Washington, DC, accept bleakness as religious doctrine. Both shows a denuded moral landscape so tangible it is like smelling a peach at the apex of its ripeness on a hot summer day. The fine art world, if we can any longer call it that, has remitted a similar ripe oblivion but exhibits it in a way largely inaccessible by the average American, let alone any real admirer of art. Matthew Barney’s latest plethora of shit (literally) filmic opera promises a more esoteric rendering of the aforementioned television dramas. But few will ever see Barney’s high fashion elitist rendition of scatalogical infinity, but many will see House of Cards and True Detective. The new dramas hint back to the fears of the 1970’s (nuclear war, the beginning of the AIDs plague, sexism, and government corruption from the top down) but instead offer a new outpost in post-postmodern explication that insists we should all make peace with the fact that all is lost, rather than remain firmly connected to any remnant of hope. At least, dare I say, there were rafts one could reach out for in the river of shit of the 1970’s. What make these new dramas even harder to digest is the fact that they are so profoundly well acted and written. There is no wink or nod to McLuhan’s Bonanza Land, as in David Milch’s magnificent Deadwood. House of Cards 2 and True Detective forego the Shakespearean rhetoric and ode to westerns in favor a unannounced punch in the nose. Thank you sir, may I have another.

Maybe what bothers me most about all this acceptance of corruption, hate, violence, darkness and sexual malaise is the complacency around it. More than affecting a new kind of awareness, a call to arms that we should all recognize something is terribly amiss about our culture ala Network (1976), we are left alone in the dark to contemplate time being a “flat circle”. True Detective in particular acts as a model for the two extremes that represent themselves in modern America. On the one had we have the greatest increase in religious extremism and fundamentalism in our history, and on the other, the unraveling of time/space with the discovery of the Higgs Boson. I should be celebrating M-theory being used as an expository monologue in American mainstream television, but instead it just makes me sad. To hear Matthew McConaughey recite multiverse theory and superimposition betrays it the wonder it deserves despite his lilting Texas accent. Pizzolatto’s message is clear, we’re all rodents on an endless treadmill doomed to repeat ourselves. Similarly, Francis Underwood, played by the extraordinary Kevin Spacey (who reminds me there is still hope for acting after the death of PSH) has a similar take on time/space, except that his is beholding to only one ideal—power. For the Underwoods as DC power couple, even rape can be turned into a power grab ratings gambit. Even Camille Paglia blushes at Claire Underwoods coldness and calculation.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JUfN8wL5zKY&w=560&h=315]I worry that we are less and less impacted, touched, and influenced by art and that it simply serves as yet another device to placate our boredom and hold hands as we walk the flat circle of time. Indeed, Barney’s River of Fundament, loosely based on Norman Mailer’s Ancient Evenings, is a nod to the perpetual flat circle of time. In some ways the current cultural dynamic is ancient in its parsimonious positioning of romanticism against cold pragmatism, but there is something deeper at play. We are regurgitating centuries of culture on top of itself to the point of blurring any recognition of origin or meaning. We are forcing end game thinking and you can see it in all the apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic art being made. This recursiveness will doom us to a self fulfilling prophecy if we can’t see something other, in effect, evolve. Where is the art that will evolve us? Where is the hope?

Ontology of the Sublime

“The question that now arises is how if we are living in a time without legend or mythos that can be called sublime, if we refuse to admit any exaltation in pure relations, if we refuse to live in the abstract, how can we be creating a sublime art?”  —Barnett Newman

I’ve been considering the sublime a lot lately. This concept of observation that invokes awe. I recently completed Ross King’s book Michelangelo and the Pope’s Ceiling, an excellent, and detailed account of the painting of the Sistine Chapel that took the artists from 1508 to 1512 to complete. During the celebration of All Saints Day, that October 31^st, 1512 when the ceiling was finally unveiled in its entirety, did the cardinals, attendants, dignitaries and indeed Pope Julius II himself, look up at Michelangelo Buonarroti’s ceiling and find it sublime as many of us do today? I ask this question because it appears, that for all practical purposes, as Barnett Newman said in the 1960’s, that we have lost our ability to create the sublime.

Sublime is something altogether different. Sublime, I believe requires abstraction, as Newman said. By this I mean using our imaginations in combination with our knowledge and experience to construct manifestations of what we observe beyond the simplicity of what are eyes are telling us (or any of the other senses for that matter.) Newman’s presumption, that we have lacked since the sixties this ability to abstract, might be argued in much of what is found in galleries and museums today. It would appear an ability to abstract is preventing us from producing, and in turn observing much that could be considered the sublime in art. However, I find myself surprisingly in disagreement with Newman’s comment, despite seeming overwhelming evidence to the contrary. I believe our capacity for abstraction has never been greater in human history and we are simply living in a natural in-between art state. A state that is percolating old ideas and mashing them against our current circumstances until we re-imagine the profound, the sublime, in a new way.

Here we are where one out of every seven people globally owns a smartphone and two-thirds of the planet has at least a mobile phone. Google’s search engine processes 24 petabytes (24m gigabytes) of data a day. We have sequenced the entire human genome. We have sent a probe beyond our universe and landed multiple crafts on Mars now roaming its surface, sending back data. We can look up any snippet of information in less than a quarter of second. We have looked back into time/space with telescopes to the edge of the Big Bang and visited the deepest ocean trench in the world. On the surface it appears this enormous amount of data is overwhelming us, rendering us not in awe but in a state of complacency. Much of the art being sold commercially and displayed in museums is recycling ironic gestures like a turgid whirlpool of endless self-referencing banality. The art world remains largely and firmly planted in traditions that no longer comment on our current reality let alone re-imagine a future one. “Art is either plagiarism or revolution” as Gauguin said, and today we are seeing a great deal of plagiarism, but I believe that is not cause for alarm. I think we are experiencing another fallow time in the history of art, similar to the Middle Ages in Europe, but on a much more compressed scale.

The Renaissance was a time of concentrated wealth whose expression was quantified in expanding culture based on classical ideas found in ancient Greece and the Roman empire. Although a time of corruption, war, plague and pestilence it was also a time of growing science and technology. Religion, not technology formed the center of the growth in the European Renaissance and indeed supplied the wealth that provided for much of the greatness that lasts today in terms of artistic production. Julius II commissioned extraordinary artists (considered great craftsmen at the time) such as Michelangelo and Raphael. There were vast numbers of ignorant people living in relative squalor and then there were the elite who had access not just to better living standards, food and sanitation but knowledge. Michelangelo was well schooled in Latin, the Greek classics, and was carefully tutored in advanced methods of sculpture, fresco, painting and architecture as well as mathematics beginning at 15. He had access to the finest Florentine crafted pigments, some so rare their ingredients came as far away as Iran and cost their weight in gold. Michelangelo might not have had cell phones and the internet, but he had that periods equivalent. His assistants in the making of the ceiling were the finest in Europe, all masters in their craft and knowledge in their own right. So, then as now, a great separation existed between the have and the have nots, between technology and ignorance. It is precisely out this sort of mixture that great art is born.

We are emerging from a brief middle ages of culture, where the clock was briefly turned back out of ignorance fear and mostly out of greed. But from the ashes of that fading, impotent ideology, will emerge a new generation of artists who were born into the dynamics of our technologically centric world. This new generation of artists will circumvent old ideas directly by leveraging the technology that is second nature to them. Ideas on communication, human interaction, perception and even the very nature of reality will be upended and greatness will be born. The ironic loop is one of diminishing returns and we have yet to experience the full measure of art in the 21^st century and with it new forms of sublime. As Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe said in his book, Beauty and the Contemporary Sublime; 

Technology is produced by capitalism in order to consolidate and extend capitalism’s interest, which include the latter’s constant transformation, because capitalism’s persistence depends on its being the source, so that the product is also the producer as thinking is thought’s producer and product. I have suggested that the sublime becomes identified with the idea and image of technology, appears within it and adopts its appearance, at the point where the origin of technology is found in earlier technological functions rather than anything ever done or thought by a human—which is to say, where the technological is seen to have become the origin of, that which makes possible, a kind of thought and a kind of body which wasn’t there before.

When Pope Julius II gazed upon the chapel ceiling during the final reveal by Michelangelo, he was excited and thrilled and he asked for more gold. The Pope did not encounter the sublime that day anymore than he did when he gazed upon the three frescos of Raphael’s in his private chambers. His ego and the context of power would not permit it. Michelangelo may have been the greatest living artist of the time, but he was still a craftsman, and artisan who drafted stories for the masses. The sublime experience was intended for those who came to the chapel for mass, not for those in power. Then, like today, art served in parallel to technological advancement as a gateway to the sublime. The third law of Arthur C. Clarke’s applies then and now, to both art and technology; “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” This is precisely why we haven’t yet seen the next generation of great art. Artists need to construct a kind of magic, that will reveal the underpinnings of a deeper knowledge and we will once again experience the sublime. The magic in Michelangelo was in his interpretation of often obscure bible passages and characters using an extremely difficult technique to master combined with some of the finest foreshortening and drafting techniques ever rendered by hand. Imagine painting something into wet plaster (intonaco) with a badger hair brush using pigments that have been hand-ground by monks in Florence on a curved surface 60 feet above the ground and representing perfect perspective in a contorted figure that is twice life size. The intonaco dries within one day, so you can’t paint the figure all at once but must break it into Giornate’s (the famous figure of Adam on the ceiling took just four.) That would indeed seem like magic.