In the mid 1980s I executed two monumental commissions in California. One in San Francisco's Mission District and one at the well-known and highly visible corner of Hollywood and Vine, in Los Angeles.
The Los Angeles work has recently vanished. And neither the art consultant who originally orchestarted the commission nor her art-lawyer can discover its whereabouts. Or why it diappeared. New(ish) state laws which protect the integrity of public works or ensure an artist's rights are not applicable to the work in question, due, paradoxically, to its vintage status.
I'm consoled in my loss by thoughts of all the many children who, over three decades, may have seen the work (out of car-passenger windows) from the adjacent freeway and surface roads.
Everything disappears. As, eventually, does every consequence of its going.
Regarding artists, Plato saw in them no invention, unless inspired and out of their senses. Inspiration, incidentallybestowed - in the Plato’s own time – by a divine troop of discipline-specific Muses; figurative personifications and exclusive franchisers of creative genius.
Lamentably, for visual artists, while Greek Muses readily enraptured poets, musicians, tragedians, dancers, and comedic actors, they, for whatever reason, spurned visual artists.
Plato stipulated insensibility as essential prerequisite of divine inspiration. I like to fancy the philosopher imagining such obligatory insentience along Apollonian lines. Envisioning, perchance, vital inspirational swoons unspooling in what one might think of as neoclassical style. Spontaneous divination, attending on cerebral abstention – serially eventuating within a colonnadedrotunda, awash with even, Arcadian, light.
A space, symmetrically picketed by genre specific effigies and furnished with tastefully appointed fainting lounges. The sum of its aesthetic and psychological portions designed to encourage accommodative inward-turning and mortal downscaling of oversized sacred energies. Discarnate consummation, germinating and birthing physical creation. Creation, of course, minus somatic exertion or emotional histrionics, of the kind I entertain a happy appetite for.
I speak to the sorts of squalid, orgiastic, convulsions often typified by more barbaric states of possession and creative birth. Ludicrously savage states of captivation, like the Dionysian-flavouredfrenzy-and-transport attached to popular notions of middle-period modern artists. As in the caricaturish artist-manqués (and their creative paroxysms) one chances upon in New Yorker cartoons and Mad Magazine parodies.
Is any caricature more perennially hardy - or as ubiquitous - than stereotypical depictions of bohemian picture-painters? We’ve all seen, and been drolly amused by, these laughable, easel-orbiting dervishes, lost in a private, careering pas de deux, with whatever ‘god-mad’ inspiration topped their contemporary-painting dance-card of the cultural-moment.Most of us are familiar with this apparitional, beret-and-smock-wearing artist. A parodic character, far removed from any sort of steady, Apollonian, inner-thrummings.
Conversely, what we have here, is a spirit-drunk puck, unthinkingly engaged in a no-holds-barred, and potentially self-destructive, tango with real and imagined elemental forces, dressed up as demigods. In ungainly and mortal struggle with an immortal tag-team of Maenadic suitors or, perhaps, adversaries. An artist, wholly lost to the world, to himself, to any possibility of impulse-buffering domesticity … in fact, publicly averse to all governing restraint. An artist - to paraphrase Maslow - who is - merely animal - an animal transcending.
So, what might this essay’s mythopoetic carry-on have to do with the purportedly allegorical paintings on show? These newest works continue on an elliptically sui generis path of preposterousness, provocation and impiety – contending with typically dead-earnest (and, to my mind, dead-end) aesthetic concerns and conceptual ‘issues’, currently obsessing the outward-turning, gray-matter-alphas of the art world.
My paintings perpetually cycle and recycle monotonic, introspective, matters of matter-of-factly misanthropic studio-life. Studio environs complete with its exaggerated, and shopworn studio emblems, such as: painting palettes, easels, brushes, smocks, berets, cruel shoes and paint smears. Outfitting my anatomically correct figures – in various states of studio dress and undress. Loosing the paintings’ players at each other, to indulge in socially incorrect intergender tussles.
Think of the pictures as mytho-poetic Punch and Judy shows, featuring relatively tiny artists beset by bigger-than-life, multi-chrome, Bacchae.
The paintings’ shallow perspectival settings and preposterous lighting-conceits backdrop the depicted figure’s stylized terpsichorean mayhem - think WWF, think contact-improv, think Jules Feiffer’s cartoon ‘dances to spring’, think the anachronistic stylizations of Nijinsky or Martha Graham. All, of course, contrived and stagey – but convincing, nonetheless, with a curiously plausible internal logic. The painting’s players; either unaware or unashamed of the broad melodramatic artifice they play out.
While the paintings feature, in most cases, spatially believable, planar-floors. And, at times, the sort of low-rent moiré-patterned wood grain walls found in trailer-homes and budget motels, such ur-quotidian detail serves, perversely, as shabby-chic foil to the painting’s even more tawdry optical (atmospherically metaphysical) contrivances. More often than not, consisting of spectral incursions by non-naturalistic light and color – democratically alluding to visionary states, lustrous natural phenomenon, or Las Vegas’ neon-borealis.
What does all of this add up to, you might ask. Well, nothing, that is, to do with any real, or explicit, fixed meaning. The paintings’ agenda is simply retinal and cerebral delight – of an unfixable (open ended narrative) category. While alluding to and borrowing (magpie like) from all sorts of affiliate association. The paintings, in their final testimony, substantiate and attest only to the hoary outlaw-biker credo – sworn to fun, loyal to none.
* my essay (unpublished) for the exhibition of the same name @ Suite Gallery, Wellington
I used to live in a loft in Manhattan's wholesale flower market. 28th Street between 6th & 7th.
Upstairs lived a young boy, with his father. That same lad claimed, decades later, to have heard the blues coming up, from my place, through the floorboards. Now he lives in New Orleans and earns his crust as an itenerant bluesman. Touring constantly around the USA. He asked me, not long ago, to paint him an LP album cover. Here 'tis - sans record title and his name ... which will come later at the printers. By the way, he gave up the cigarettes.
The idea that art (of all type) is a sort of antechamber one
habituates, or medication one swallows, in order to "improve" one's self
and/or one's society, is a bourgeoisie, Victorian-era, artifact.
The Victorian notion was that the, then-trebling, early-industrial
era's 'great unwashed' could be demographically reduced, or socially
improved, by supplementing the workers otherwise squalid existences with
calibrated doses of culture.
These ideas have persisted to our day and
are now greenhouse-propogated by relational aestheticians and
non-profit ( governmental and private) entities who dole out public
funds based on 'measurable' audience-outreach and measurable
audience-enrichment ... read "improvement".
I've no argument against, nor practical alternative to these hoary
ideas and practices - mine is a subjective observation. Nothing more.
FYI: Art Historian Amelia Jones is a seasoned pro when it comes to curating her own
(faux) radical credentials – and self-promotionally disseminating that
self-constructed myth via mainstream media and august podiums at airless
academic conferences.
Jones is particularly deft at
opportunistically placing herself (in word, if not deed) at the
hypothetical barricades of whatever cultural war(s) she sees being
fought – fought by actual, participating, stakeholders.
Jones is
the quintessential academic, careerist-sayer, posing as an activist
player. Her two main claims to ‘fame’ are coining the grammatically
jaw-breaking trope “Pollockian performative” … and her infamously
demonstrated willingness to accept a lucrative Chair at UCSC – where she
functioned as upholder of, and appartchik spokesperson for, the
party-line at Roski School of Art and Design, University of Southern
California – just as the entire 2016 post-graduate cohort of the school quit en masse, in protest over the organizationally inept
corporatization of the art school. Including, but not limited to,
broken, contractual, promises to its post-grads.
From the
elitist promontory of her academic sinecure Amelia Jones loftily
pronounces on “trans-identity” and righteously excoriates ‘privilege’ –
all-the-while nibbling Jimmy Iovine and Dr. Dre’s 70 million dollar
petit fours.
Jones has positioned herself in such a way as to
lump anyone who questions her radical legitimacy with those who oppose
the cultural “re-questioning” she herself has co-opted from its rightful
owners.
Means to an End. 2016.
Two full scale SCBA (self contained breathing apparatus)
Courtesy of the artist.
C A V E S is pleased to announce an exhibition of new work by New Zealand based artist
R O G E R B O Y C E
Means to an End
Opening celebration to take place on Friday the 29th of April from 6pm.
29th of April - 21st of May, 2016.
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“It is not worth the bother of killing
yourself, since you always kill yourself too late."
- E.M. Cioran, The Trouble with Being
Born
We respectfully acknowledge the traditional owners of the Kulin Nation.
C A V E S
Room 18, Level 6, 37 Swanston Street
Melbourne, Victoria 3000
Australia
Hours: Thursday, Friday 12-6pm. Saturday, 1-5pm or by appointment call 0413205929 or 0416051672
Here's my farewell Merle Haggard story and my favorite
Merle Haggard song.
When I was a young man I once took a job on a broke-down ranch-cum-fugitive-farm
(of sorts) a good distance on a dirt road outside Durango Colorado....somewhere, or other, in the national forest
vicinity of Alamosa. The place was run, or rather run down, by a half-assed
'rancher' (and I use the term rancher, loosely) more accurately an out-and-out grifter named
Bert.
Bert had a number of things going, in various states of the union, none of which were
going particularly well, at the time. Bert’s hobby-ranch and
cult-of-personality detention camp was staffed by a duke’s mixture of youngish
men and women - semi-skilled cowboy-and-cowgirl-wannabe drifters - and real,
down on their luck cowhands, pedophile cooks, dipsomaniac bottle-washers, self-diagnosed handy-men and women and
what have you – most of whom seemed to be primarily engaged with - to the
exclusion of much honest work and all else - a perpetual and mysteriously randy, game of musical bunks.
The stock was habitually hungry, and thus constantly breaking down fence
to get at grass - both Bert's and the surrounding neighbors. This, and other
ranch management dysfunction led to anger and conflict with the more-competent
owners of neighboring spreads and recrimination, incessant grumbling,
conniving, rumor mongering and dust-ups among Bert's mostly unqualified, debatably sociopathic,
ranch hands.
A great many conflicts stemmed from Bert's unwillingness, or financial reluctance ,
to buy-in feed, the ranch's collective incompetence at growing and laying by its own hay
and alfalfa stores, but more often than not overflowed from incompletely sublimated tension
around, and out of, tectonic shifts in romantic alliance, schism, and
rivalry.
I'd hie off, now and again, into wilder places nearby, to get far away from the ranch's daily interpersonal
chaos and collapsing infrastructure ... and to try for trout in the Alamosa, the Animas
& their tributaries. A time or two, on my desperate river wanderings, I'd find I had been
mysteriously tracked down one river trail or another, by a
canny, redheaded and determined young horse-girl. I'd get back to my camp at
nightfall to find her ride tied nearby and her waiting, in the altogether,
inside my tent. She got no argument from me, there on the river, although back at the ranch was another story.
Things finally came to an unhappy head, with Bert and I, late one evening. And
after a marathon, and dangerously heated, argument about: whether I was really
leaving, or not, whether he'd be paying me what was outstanding, or not, and if he'd willingly drive
me to the train station in Gallup,New Mexico - or risk a well earned beat-down I’d
been spoiling for.
Bert surprised me by capitulating and so we drove off the ranch, into the night, and on toward New Mexico,
in his late model, canary yellow, Coupe de Ville. It should be noted here that Bert
did not scrimp on personal comforts.
Driving, in an adrenally fatigued and grimly silent state,
through the remainder of the night, we arrived. And I was unceremoniously dropped, near dawn, on
the outskirts of the New Mexico Indian town of Gallup - where I'd be forced by a Southern Pacific timetable to
wait most of the day for the next train to California.
Being already
chronically sleep deprived - by continual ranch goings-on: jarred or kept awake,
nightly, by noisy parties, serial arguments, the occasional knuckle duster and/or
theatrically loud fucking sounds coming from adjacent, thin-walled, bunkhouse - I was all but asleep on my feet in a town I had no familiarity with or newfound affection for.
Gallup is, or was then, a dead, dry and dust-blown southwestern town with nothing
much to recommend it - save cheap Mexican restaurants, drinking dives, and
cheek-by-jowl pawn shops - pawn shops stuffed full of dead-Indian-pawn. Sad, tawdry cinder-block and stucco treasuries filled with silver and turquoise bolos, bracelets, necklaces,
belt-buckles, and earrings of various vintage and craftsmanship – all democratically
reduced to abandoned second-hand merchandise, to be pawed through by fat, white,
American tourists weighing the dubious pros and cons of quality, price and
baseline advisability of buying and taking home an authentic Native American memento of travels through the indigenous southwestern USA.
I imagined, with no little desperation, finding a lush park or municipal lawn on
which to collapse and sleep. But that was a waking dream. Gallup's few public parks were treeless, sun-blasted expanses of hard dirt,
dust, broken bottle glass and strategically pinched dogshit. Grass, had it once existed, was now a
distant memory. I wandered the streets in a sort of nauseous haze, looking for relief.
Relief appeared, as if a mirage, in the form of an old-school movie
palace. On a Deco Marquee: "Clint Eastwood’s Bronco Billy, featuring a cameo appearance by
Merle Haggard and the Strangers". I tripped into the almost empty theater’s shady,
air-conditioned interior, sat down in a plush seat, and stayed with Bronco Billy until Merle appeared - grinning and fronting his band, behind a cinematically stagedbarfight.
I fell asleep immediately thereafter, assured that if Merle could carry on
playing in the eye of a honky tonk storm that I might, just might, sleep undisturbed, all the way to California, in a
second class train coach and wake up fresh to the sunshine state. Where perhaps, with some luck, I might reclaim a little piece of the life I’d left behind.
The song Merle and the boys were playing in the
movie that day was Misery and Gin – my favorite Haggard tune then and to this day. RIP Mr.
Haggard. You gave as good as you got. And often better.
Ha ha ha huh? Art Basel Hong Kong Debate motion: "Art Today Has Sold Out
To The Market" ... note to breathless ABHK debaters - Bernard Berenson
once lucidly compared the Renaissance relationship twixt artist and
patron to that of a luxury goods tradesman (say, shoemaker, tailor to
the court) and a customer placing an order. The patron specified what he
or she wanted.
I imagine the Church and 17th century nouveau riche
tradesmen of the Netherlands also specified desire. What Modern,
and now contemporary, art patrons most specifically desire, is a ticket
to ride. A warrant to climb aboard and be associated with an artist's
intangible, but increasingly valued, prestige.
To gain admission to
realms of prestigious endeavor and experience they would otherwise be
socially/culturally excluded from - given the almost monomaniacal
pursuit of mercantile wealth is the real price of admission to Art Basel
Hong Kong and other luxury goods trade-fairs.
Thread contribution (with some editing for out-of-context-legibility) to Jim and Mary Barr's Over the net and on the Table FB Page:
Without at all questioning the quality and suitability of art and
artists, chosen for this year's Walters finalists, I would submit that
the largest elephant in the Walters room is the apparent exclusion of
painting and painters from consideration.
While there have been, in the past, exceptions to this perpetually evident omission ... those, for the most part token, painters included in the finalist-and-winners mix would be exceptions to the rule.
Given that painting is the statistically largest category of visual art
practice in any country, and given it thrives, innovates and (yes)
dominates multiple artworld sectors - despite its many published
obituaries - its exclusion by successive Walters juries is an
embarrassingly self-conscious and myopic exercise of ideological
discrimination.
The supposed conflict of ( makher / מאַכער )
interest you (Over the Net) highlight with your investigative
speculations is, in my experience, standard operating procedure in the
larger artworld... and here, on these professionally inbred islands, an
all but unavoidable fact.
'Insider-trading' is the mother's milk
of international, national, and regional artworld-curation and
adjudication. And an indispensable promotion-rung on the
arts-administration career-ladder.
I would guess that what I've
written here will be seen (if at all) as either partisan, sour/grapes,
and/or reactionary waffle. What else is new?
Friday, January 1, 2016
New Years Eve
When I was still drinking I didn't, as a rule,
go out on New Years Eve. My friends and I, who were all 'career
drinkers', referred to New Years Eve as amateur night. We didn't
,of course, cease our chronic, chemically-assisted, drinking on New
Years Eve - we simply stocked-up and stayed home.
Shortly
after moving to New Zealand, while still married, with a young child
(Enzo, probably 2 years old at the time), we undertook a motor-home Tiki
tour of the north island. We ended up, on New Years Eve day, at Glink's
Gully, an ocean-side campsite near Dargaville. In the daytime it was
delightfully sunny, the seemingly endless beach a natural marvel, and
our campsite neighbors friendly and reasonably sane.
That evening
an entire campsite of average looking, mostly middle-aged,
middle-class, white-folk got simply blotto and ran amok. While their
children scurried about the night, unsupervised. Amok, there's simply
no other way to put it. Add, to the veneer-delaminating George
Romero-like scenario, a musically monstrous, ear-bleedingly-loud, Jimmy
Barnes-on-bad-acid-style band ... churning out one banal cover-song
after another - some time before midnight - (with our two year old
wailing in pure terror, at the sonic assault) factor in the sound of a
military-sized copter landing very close by where we trying to,
hopelessly, get the kid to sleep.
Apocalypse Then.
Mid morning
of the next day (or early-afternoon, rather) those who'd managed to
come-to were slumped on chairs and chilly bins .... staring dumbly at
the destroyed turf between their jandals. Slowly the night's full story
(and the reason for the copter landing) emerged in pained, embarrassing,
croaks from our crushingly hungover camp-mates.
It seems one
young girl had been all but cut in half, another seriously broken, by a
drunken, speeding, dirt biker - ripping heedlessly down the beach in
pitch-darkness. Two mid-teen girlfriends, lying on their backs, gazing
up at the wealth of stars in a moonless sky - both of them leaving, one
near death, in the medi-vac copter we'd heard landing and taking off.
I found myself comforting the dead girl's inconsolable grandfather
(known as 'the Mayor of Glink's Gully) as his own family&friends
cohort were yet too traumatized or wolly-headed to provide an ear. He'd
had a beer or two, the night before, took off his hearing aids and gone
to bed - waking in the morning to the night's tragedy.
All of
the campgrounds we stayed at during our travels that summer were to a
lesser degree (of course) similarly Janus-faced. In the daytime folks
fished, swam, played volleyball and ate together in some semblance of
normality - but at night, any night, most bets were off. Nothing arose to
challenge the level of middle-class-white horror we had on New Years
night ... but various degrees of ungoverned, ethanol-induced chaos ruled
kiwi campgrounds, come sundown, on any given night.
This is not a reproach, or cautionary tale - it's nothing more than a first person account.
Although I wasn't drinking then, and abstain to this day, I continue my
habit of staying home on New years Eve.
Humanity is barely sufferable
when both they, and I, aren't in the bag. So, as I write, it's roughly 11:13PM and
here I sit, waiting for the signaling fireworks outside to resound.
A spirtitualist-table-rapper's means of communication with the 'other side' or a Richard Artschwager table - sometimes, sometimes, a cigar is not just a cigar.
"A commodity appears at first sight an extremely obvious, trivial thing. But its analysis brings out that it is a very strange thing , abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties .... It is absolutely clear that, by his activity, man changes the forms of the materials of nature in such a way as to make them useful to him. The form of the wood, for instance, is altered if a table is made out of it. Nevertheless the table continues to be wood, an ordinary, sensuous thing. But as soon as it emerges as a commodity, it changes into a thing which transcends sensuousness. It not only stands with its feet on the ground, but, in relation to other commodities, it stands on its head, and evolves out of its wooden brain grotesque ideas, far more wonderful than if it were to begin dancing of its own free will." - Karl Marx
In the Studio today: Art Tatum - here he's playing Sweet Emalina, My Gal (sounds like the A take version).
Tatum is, inarguably, the greatest jazz pianist of all time...and one of the greatest pianist, in any genre, of all time. when asked who the greatest pianist in the world was, Vladimir Horowitz replied, without hesitation, ‘Art Tatum’. Also Horowitz said ,in an interview, that ‘If Art Tatum took up classical music seriously, I’d quit my job the next day’. Pianist Fats Waller once announced Tatum by saying "God is in the house". It takes some listening for the ear to get accustomed to Tatum's perfection ... to aurally accommodate his uncanny precision and speed. Tatum's playing has, at times, been erroneously described as 'mechanical' - akin to a player-piano roll. Tatum plays with such speed and aplomb that his two handed pieces have sometimes been mistaken for four-handed performances. The longer one listens to Tatum the more the heroic poetry and rich veins of sweetness begin to pronounce themselves. But long studio sessions listening to nothing but this genius can, admittedly, be wearing. Bill Evan's - with his occasional flaws and heart-on-sleeve humanity is easier to live with over long periods in the studio.
Expat American living and working in New Zealand.
I have a long-established painting practice and
occasionally write criticism for Art in America, Sculpture, Art New Zealand and ARTNET - among others.
Where I come from the only people who read visual art criticism and review are the artist ,his dealer and the artist's mother.
