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Drawing Knowing

Journal entry for 21 Jun 2010 | Link

#class Reflections

I was asked to deliver some afterthoughts regarding my participation in #class by Jennifer Dalton and William Powhida. This was months ago, but here they are anyway.

I arrived in the morning before my talk and found Dalton in a gallery a couple doors down from Winkleman, along with two dozen rambunctious kindergarteners. It turned out that Dalton had taken her son's class out on pint-sized tour of Chelsea. The kids were tasked with drawing the paintings of some neo-neo-expressionist whose name I don't recall. One of these works was an asymmetrical diptych in which the smaller canvas was stretched with a brown piece of felt with a fold in it and left unpainted. Dalton called her son over to show me his drawing of it. It was a perfect rendition: a tall rectangle with a line drawn across it, executed with a the hammered line quality you'd expect from a five-year-old. Dalton asked him what he thought of the painting. "I don't think that's really art," he said. "I think it's just a thing." Dalton started on an explanation about why it could be art but he scurried off. She turned to me. "It sounds like something you would say."

"Both of you could be right. The artist is allowed to qualify his production as art. But the viewer is allowed to disqualify it. Even him." It was no place for a discussion about the philosophy of art. Chaos had been unleashed in a room with thousands of dollars worth of art on the wall and the grown-ups were glancing around for signs of trouble. I added, "I guess if your children can't humiliate you in public, who can?" Dalton laughed.

Well played, little boy. Keep that skeptical mind and keep using your eyes.

Drawing Knowing

I've been doing a lot of drawing over the last couple of weeks, and none of it has gone easily. I did a series of shorter drawings in ink on watercolor paper with a model. One was worse than the next one, making the initial two the only ones worth saving.

Next came a trip to Dr. Sketchy's. The model was Johnny Blazes.

Then, in a Chinese brush painting class I produced my first full bamboo painting. I make no claims for this except that it's not idiotic for a beginner. The value range is good and the line variation is pronounced if uncontrolled.

Then I got another model in the studio.

Next came a couple of drawings on the T with the Kuretake pen.

Switching back and forth like this made me realize the fundamental difference between the brush and the pen or pencil. With the pencil, and to a lesser extent the pen, the method is to put down searching lines and then emphasize the lines that found something. With the brush, you have to have a fairly complete conception of the entire form, if not the entire composition, before you load the brush with ink. Searching with the brush doesn't work very well. You tend to end up with distortion and slop. (I should speak for myself here.) There's still room for improvisation, but it's an improvisation of mastery, whereas with the pencil you can bumble along for a while until you get your act together. With the brush you have to draw in part like the aforementioned five-year-old, hammering down a conception, but that conception has to correlate to reality in a way that a child could never mangage. I no longer wonder why there was never a great figurative tradition in traditional Chinese art, at least compared to the Renaissance in Europe—drawing the figure with a brush full of ink on light paper is much harder than drawing it with something erasable.

But I now wonder how valuable it is to start a Western-style drawing with a gesture after all. It may be enough to have that gesture conceived in advance, and strive to put down correct, knowing lines from the beginning. This would be hard to admit, because gesture was the one thing I understood about art instinctively from the beginning. But it's the modernist way to make better art at the expense of how you think everything is supposed to go.

I remain as unsure as ever which style I prefer.

Shake Your Moneymaker

András Szántó identifies a rhetorical deficit when it comes to recent efforts to argue for philanthropic and public support.

The real question is whether generosity will return once the crisis ends? Unfortunately, long-term shifts in the philanthropic and policymaking mindset, especially in the US, cast doubts on that prospect. The problem is deeper, more philosophical, than money, and it applies both to public and private financing systems. It has to do with a crisis of ideas: with weak and wobbly rationales for justifying giving, especially to the traditional high arts institutions that commanded the lion's share of support in the past.

Coming up with that new framework, in Szántó's instance, requires a hip-high wade through a swamp of shamed feelings: national inferiority to Europe and the Soviets, local inferiority to other cities, personal responsibility to the underprivileged, and bristling against the notion that art is an elitist exercise, which threatens to prove true at any time. I do not envy the people whose job it is to make these arguments to parties with money, all of whom have acquired their riches either by business success or access to public funds, the very poles of the axis that runs from achievement to entitlement. It's an interesting glimpse into an argument that goes on all the time in the arts and a reminder of how divorced from reality it all is, as people continue to assume that creating things that no one wants is a good idea for reasons extrinsic to art itself.

The Dustbin of Art History

In an article destined to be ignored by contemporary art's apologists and circulated among its critics, which is how I learned of it from a few readers, Ben Lewis describes four traits of the sputtering end of the modernist project: formulas, narcissism, sentiment, and cynicism. I recommend the whole thing despite some errors of taste. (Luc Tuymans? No.) It's a convincing piece otherwise.

There is a pattern typical of these end-phase periods, when an artistic movement ossifies. At such times there is exaggeration and multiplication instead of development. A once new armoury of artistic concepts, processes, techniques and themes becomes an archive of formulae, quotations or paraphrasings, ultimately assuming the mode of self-parody. ... I believe that this decline shares four aesthetic and ideological characteristics with the end-phases of previous grand styles: formulae for the creation of art; a narcissistic, self-reinforcing cult that elevates art and the artist over actual subjects and ideas; the return of sentiment; and the alibi of cynicism.

He proposes a housecleaning, but that's a negative suggestion in the logical sense. The work remains to form a positive one, which is the unfortunate side effect of these sorts of screeds. They need writing, but the question of "What then?" remains.

Dopey

Social determinists were given aid and comfort yesterday by a report by Vanessa Thorpe on How Pleasure Works: The New Science of Why We Like What We Like by Paul Bloom of Yale University (emphasis mine):

"Traditional art is about what is in the world; more modern works are about the very process of representation," [Bloom] writes. "An appreciation of much of modern art therefore requires specific expertise. Any dope can marvel at a Rembrandt, but only an elite few can make any sense of a work such as Sherrie Levine's Fountain (After Marcel Duchamp), and so only an elite few are going to enjoy it."

It also appears that any dope can teach at Yale. Maybe he means only that since any dope could, everyone ought to. The thesis, that objects give us pleasure beyond their objective qualities for social reasons, is at least arguable, and may be apt to the commercial arena:

He believes that the psychological patterns described in "signaling theory" apply to the purchase of modern art. In other words, a rich man or woman tries to distinguish themselves from the pack by spending money on the right thing. "Any schmoe can buy, and appreciate, a pretty painting, while spending millions of dollars on abstract art might display a combination of wealth and discernment," writes Bloom.

But what lessons do we learn when people make weak defenses against failed taste?

Using Jackson Pollock's splash paintings as an example, he wonders why "so many people are unimpressed" by them. The negative reaction is often due to the fact that there is no obvious display of skill. In the past Pollock fans have defended the artist's work by saying the paintings are technically tricky to make, while others argue that the creative process is irrelevant. Bloom points out that whether skill and effort are supposed to be important or not, contemporary art is still priced and sold according to its size. "This might reflect the intuition that it's harder to paint a large painting than a small one. More effort leads to greater pleasure," he writes.

None, really. Science will get to the bottom of all this. But not today.

Pride

Boston's Pride parade a couple of weekends ago coincided with a distressing item reported by Julia Michalska:

The National Museum in Warsaw aims to chip away at prejudices against sexual minorities in Poland with an exhibition about homoeroticism in art.

"Ars Homo Erotica" (11 June-5 September) has already met with criticism and threats of demonstrations. "The situation in Poland is sensitive as a result of the plane crash in Smolensk," said exhibition curator Pawel Leszkowicz, referring to the event in April in which President Lech Kaczynski was killed. "The patriotic atmosphere that has pervaded the country has increased the power of right-wing groups. Therefore, I am not certain what will happen when the exhibition opens." The show is due to open during this summer's election of a president to succeed Kaczynski, who was a former mayor of Warsaw. ...

There have been a number of voices speaking out against the show. At the end of 2009, Stanislaw Pieta, an MP for the conservative Law and Justice Party, declared that, just as paedophilic and zoophilic art does not exist, "neither does homosexual art". More recently, an "Open Letter in Defence of the Good Name of the National Museum in Warsaw" was published in right-wing publications. The signatories included artists, journalists, historians and politicians.

Oy:

During his term as mayor, Kaczynski banned Warsaw's gay pride parades in 2004 and 2005. This move was widely believed to have contributed to him winning the 2005 presidency.

Libertarian economist Peter Schiff called Poland a "ray of sanity" in a "morass of economic quackery" early this year:

Last summer, I was invited to speak at the Economic Forum in Krynica, a resort town in Southern Poland. I was amazed at the level of economic activity and civic spirit that was on display throughout the country. I also was fairly surprised that my economic views, which are routinely ridiculed at home, have much wider support among the Polish economic officials who presented at the conference.

This common sense understanding was showcased in an opinion piece published this week in the Financial Times by Polish Finance Minister Jacek Rostowski. Contrary to the public flogging of the free market currently underway in Washington, under the auspices of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, Rostowski explains how governments caused the Crash of 2008 by removing the necessary element of fear from the markets. He states that this was symptomatic of the "deep Keynesian project," in which governments over the last half century have looked to smooth the economic cycle through periodic floods of monetary expansion and government spending. I couldn't have said it better myself.

But the full flower of liberty hasn't bloomed yet, just it hasn't yet fully bloomed here. It's worth a moment of your time to appreciate what we have and how far we have to go.

George Bethea Continues to Kick It Hard

George Bethea has put up a new flickr set of his remarkable recent paintings. My current favorite is below.

Reader Mail

In the journal entry in which I coined "Interactionism," I said,

Modernists think of Picasso as the most important artist of the 20th Century. Postmodernists think the same of Duchamp. The new movement will anoint Christo. Its watchwords will be participation, collaboration, and interactivity.

A reader answered:

The new movement will anoint Christo... or Sol Lewitt.

Lewitt is an even better example because his work entails all of that collaboration and has a lot more conceptualist cachet than Christo. Also, it seems like you can't visit a museum on the east coast without running into his work, to which useless wall space around some starchitect-inflicted building feature has been devoted. MassMoCA has given him a retrospective which is slated to come down in the year 2033. (And it's impressive, however dry.) Last year the director of a university gallery sent an e-mail around to the school's faculty expressing her exasperation that more people were not visiting their Lewitt installation. "Our students are drawing a real Sol Lewitt," she pleaded. Alas, no one ever mistook fervent scribbling for a Raphael, whose production ceased after his death, thus giving the designation of "real" regarding his work some real value.

The turtle graphics post evoked fond reminiscences from one reader:

Oh, Franklin, you've stumbled into something I played with so many years ago, and it was so much fun. In the ancient days of PCs there were very few choices for programming graphics. I had played with turtle graphics on my cousin's Vic-20 and had done sprite animations on my Commodore 64, but of course the world of the IBM PC was serious and business-minded and therefore graphically suited to making, say, pie charts and line graphs and not much else. My first PC monitor was monochrome, amber, and capable of displaying a whopping 16 shades of off-yellow.

Borland came out with a few compilers along with their own Borland Graphics. At the time I was interested in language parsing and artificial intelligence— I'd started fooling around with text adventure games and got caught up in parsing commands—and so the Borland language I picked up was Prolog. I liked Prolog more than LISP. And also you couldn't do graphics in LISP on the PC—but you could with Prolog. Doing graphics in Prolog is kind of like writing a novel in oil paint but I played with it anyway.

One of the first things I did was try to program my own fractals. It was the late 1980s and fractals were all the rage. I based my math on a really brief explanation of fractals given by one of our teaching assistants—so brief it amounted to one sentence, basically—and what I ended up with, eventually, was extremely neat but, well, I never did find out if I was making actual fractals. (The question is whether the function you're mapping does in fact have a fractional dimension, like 2.5 instead of 3 or 2.)

The next thing I did was start mapping out epicycles: The progress of a point moving around the circumference of a circle, the center of which is moving around the circumference of another circle, and so on. This is like plotting out the path of the Moon around the Earth around the Sun. Only I could make the Moon larger than the Earth, and I could map out a satellite orbiting a satellite orbiting the Moon...

Oh, I had a great time. Advanced Spirograph!

On Louise Bourgeois:

The problem exemplified by Bourgeois is a more sober, austere and controlled version of that embodied by Kahlo, and consequently Borugeois' work appears relatively more high-toned and profound. Its lofty status was perfectly predictable, if not inevitable. Given the propensities that have held fashionable sway in the art world for some time, one can hardly imagine a hot-button issue more effectively pushed, not to mention the lady's remarkable persistence and longevity.

The problem, of course, is that no matter how sincere, earnest and serious an artist may be, the bottom line remains that his or her work must reach a sufficiently high level of purely visual success before it can be said to be good, let alone great, as visual art. Its success or value as something else is another matter, but I insist on that bottom line, and I will accept nothing else in lieu of what, to me, is sine qua non. The work of Bourgeois, apart from the transient interest of her quirkiness, is far too dependent on her psychodrama and related capital-I Issues. Unfortunately, I don't really care about an artist's psychodrama unless the resulting work satisfies me visually first, and hers simply does not.

Kahlo's work strikes me largely as kitsch. Bourgeois is considerably more sophisticated, or so it would seem, but ultimately my response to both artists is similar: Look, we all have personal problems, but if you want to turn yours into visual art, it had better be worth looking at as such—otherwise, try literature or theater, or failing that, go on Oprah.

On John Perrault:

He writes, "In regard to Uncle Clem, what we have against him now is that..." What we have against him. Is that the royal "we," or the "we" of the anointed elect? Either way, it's insufferable, especially given the deficiencies you so diligently and accurately pointed out in his piece. Really, sometimes, in a fit of temporary charity, one wishes these people were merely clueless or trying too hard to score, as opposed to obnoxious. But it's yet another nobody trying to rise above a definite somebody like Greenberg. Notice how lesser lights from the same era are mentioned far less, if at all, and never with the spiteful vindictiveness aroused by "Uncle Clem." In other words, if you can't beat 'em, bash 'em.

Another notes:

That Perrault is nothing more than walking pollution.

On Boris Vallejo:

His people all look like bodybuilders because they are all bodybuilders. He likes to use them for models, is one himself, and even married one. His son Dorian is a health nut of the utmost insanity. Dorian's in wildly good shape but refused to pose for us because he always wanted to be drawing. When we'd go to his place for figure drawing, he'd make dinner for us, which consisted of—I'm not kidding of exaggerating here—vegetables he'd hack up with a cleaver and boil with soybeans, brown rice, and maybe some miso. I didn't even know you could eat the skin on ginger, but he wouldn't peel it, just whack it up and throw it with everything else. Broccoli stems and leaves! (Turns out the stems are the best part.) And not a potato in sight. Or peas or corn. All those starchy things Americans consider vegetables didn't exist in his kitchen. Real vegetation only! Everything boiled in about four different pots and poured into bowls. I honestly think that was his dinner every night.

Vallejo's always been a bit workmanlike. He started off as a Frazetta imitator but found his own stride, which is okay as far as it goes. Over the past twenty years or so he's gone off the beam because of his second wife, Julie. Man, painters and photographers running off with their models. Anyway, Julie's a painter, too, but let's just say she's a better model than artist. Boris for some reason decided to push her art along with his. Dorian says he does a lot of her background and such for her and all his recent books have her work in them, too. This has been to the detriment of both their work, although she was never very good. Yoko, Linda McCartney, Julie Bell. Sad litany.

On the new format in general:

Your writing in this journal is really good, smart and pointed, and right, of course. It is a pleasure to read. There really is nothing else like it. It needs to get real attention. Someone has to say this stuff and it has to be read.

I appreciate that. Put the word out to anyone you think might be interested, by e-mail, Twitter, or word of mouth. I did nothing to promote Artblog.net. I plan to let the quality of the content do the promotion here as well. If you concur, spread the word.