Poorly Photographed Images of Works I am Currently Progressing in the Studio.

Working Title - "House of Games"

Individual 2022 Paintings:

500mm x 600mm

Oil, Dispersed Pigment & Acrylic Polymer on Cradled Board

 

 

 

 

Funny that, I'd always hoped my decision to become a practicing artist would afford me a modicum of freedom from having to "interact with the fucking community".

 

I"ve rarely ever applied for grants or public project funding of any kind ... unless, of course, someone, 'in-the-know', had kindly given me the 'high-sign'. I have always preferred to invest my energy - energy I'd otherwise expend grant/proposal writing - on studio pursuits. 

 

Earlier in my so-called career I did execute a couple of ambitious public projects (one in LA and one for the City of San Francisco) but in both cases I was fortunate to have willing & qualified intercessors who didn't seem to mind interfacing with all of the many punctilious doorkeepers, inevitably attached to such matters.

 

The % for the arts program in the USA (wherein new building construction which had received any sort of federal or state funding were required to establish a set-aside budget for the purchase or art) had, arguably, the single most destructive impact on the arts, I have seen in my lifetime.

 

Artists - ever accommodating when it comes to cold cash - soon twigged to the reality that 'site-specific', region specific, community specific, proposals were most appealing to deciding regional ("fucking community") committees. So, the loathsome term 'research' began to attach its self - like a linguistic leech - to project proposals wherein aspiring % for the artists began to look at local events, 'sites', putative communities (historical or otherwise) local sensibilities & mores to dress up their proposals & ass-powder deciders. 

 

Institutional spaces, artist's spaces, and granting bodies of every possible affiliation and ideology, soon, thereafter, joined the site-specific, community relevance/interaction dance. And artists - once again, as accommodating, as always, when it comes to money or exhibition 'exposure' - shaped their work and themselves to whatever Procrustean bed they were asked to lie down in. 

 

To my mind, these serial lie-downs had unfortunate, domesticating, impacts on both art and artists. Former wide-ranging & relatively fascinating wolves-of-the-steppes (who could, now and again, be lured near the campfire, with promises of meat) soon grew accustomed to sleeping with and being warmed by their domesticator's well appointed hearths. 

 

Packs of artists became homogenous breeds with predictable appearances and habits. In time, these domesticated artists became indistinguishable from loyal dogs and, worse yet, began to resemble their 'owners' in both sensibility & petite bourgeois predictability.

 

Art of the type I allude to here - and the sotto voce requirements for its funding and fabrication - became ever more standardized and international in distribution and influence. The single good thing about it, though, is its distinguishable 'smell' ... which allows for its scrupulous avoidance, if we are fortunate enough to be approaching it from downwind.

 

I have had a lifelong horror of suburban living. Stemming from an early childhood trapped in a brand spanking new California 'cracker-box' housing development ... an instant suburb built for US servicemen and their newly nucleated families.

 

Living in those early housing estates was like dwelling in an earthbound moon colony. The lanes devoid of adult street-life, and signs of life - if detectable at all - taking place in the 'rumpus rooms', back yards, or double garages. 

 

Many of our house-wife mothers, whose primary occupation was child rearing, clustered together in  dining rooms and breakfast nooks during the day. Convening lengthy gab fests - fueled by coffee and diet pills. Supermarket-impulse-aisle displyed tablets and capsules containing Benzedrine and Dexedrine Sulfate. 

 

The children ran in unsupervised packs - on bicycles and barefoot across dog-turd studded summer lawns. Boomers now idealize such childhoods and use their 'shining' example to needle and shame subsequent generations. As if boomer-era suburban street-sense taught my generation anything other than Horror Vacui .

 

For the past 17 years I have lived in a Christchurch Suburb, where I was reminded this morning that the raucous start-up of a weed-whacker is a mating call. Soon summoning the answering whine and combustive rattle of gas lawnmowers, mulch-chippers, leaf-blowers, hedge-trimmers and the inevitable little men wearing Glyphosate back-pack sprayer.

 

 

I’ve been pondering why, song - a temporal artefact of the human voice - is the most profoundly transcendent of art’s many instruments. Why a singing voice has incommensurable capacity to move us.

Consider that a song’s profound beauty arises from the living core of a worm’s anticipated feast. 

 

A sound lofting heavenward on human breath. Deathless testament of beauty and defiant rebuke of creation’s terrible license to serially flourish at our expense. 

 

 

 

 

When I was a skinny, callow, freshman in high school (before I'd cannily allied myself with Big male buddies) the 'hard girls' kindly had my back.

 

Those sisters of the street thought me cute (in a non-romantic little-bro way) and I became sort of mascot to a gang of beehived & heavily eye-shadowed girls who smoked, trash-talked, and occasionally cat-fought with better-bred, tartan skirted, Janes. 

 

Ronnie Spector personifies the memory of those girls for me. And although I never got more than an affectionate pash from that tribe of tough & capable girls ... having moved away from Hayward High to the more psychedelic precincts of Canyon High ... there's still an unconsummated part of me that responds to the knowing look and urban ululations of the peerless Ms. Spector.

 

Look

 

A picture is something that requires as much trickery, malice and vice as the perpetration of a crime, so create falsity and add a touch of nature  –  Edgar Degas

 

As an artist and an occasional writer I am, occasionally, asked to write about another artist’s work. I usually find myself responding reluctantly, willingly or enthusiastically. I won’t tell you in what situation or to which specific artist I will initially react this way but, when I take up the offer, it is always because I like the work, something it suggests or both. I’m never sure why I’m asked. Is it because whoever is asking likes the way I write or is it the expectation that, being an artist, I’ll at least know what I am writing about?  I’m hopeful it’s the former as while I do know something about art, it’s not that simple. 

 

The first difficulty is, as an artist, I usually have little idea of what I’m doing and no idea how others will respond to the finished work. I expect its much the same for most other artists. This difficulty is further hampered by a reader’s desire for meaning. A reader often assumes if someone has bothered to write about the work it must have specific meaning. This is a major difficulty, not only in most instances, but particularly in this one, as I know how much Roger Boyce dislikes meaning. I’m not adverse to meaning but I know what Roger means. The search for meaning clouds the looking. The desire for meaning can not only hamper viewing but also making. I would suggest, if an artist’s singular intention is for the work to be meaningful, it will never reach the studio door. As the artist will be so weighed down by their objective they will never complete anything.

 

For the critical viewer the over-arching desire to find meaning can obscure any, albeit unintentional, utilitarian meaning. It is a desire that often approaches apophenia. Apophenia is the tendency to mistakenly perceive connections and meaning between unrelated things. Admittedly, art often makes connections between unrelated things. Surrealism is an obvious example. In fact, the bringing together of the seemingly unrelated is the foundation of surrealism and it is an idea that still underpins the bulk of contemporary art practice. The apophenia I am thinking of is more akin to the mis-heard. The song lyric sung over and over in your head in such a way that it has acquired personal meaning. Then, at a later date, you see the lyrics printed and realise they are completely different from what you thought you heard.  While the meaning you have gained may remain, it was never in the original. If this happens when viewing or writing about art, what is misread, either through a cloud of ideological preconceptions or the willful desire for meaning, enters a world of Chinese whispers. Eventually the thing looked at and its imposed meaning bare no relationship to each other. You often see evidence of this in gallery wall labels where the desire to imbue meaning is paramount.

 

Do these paintings need words? Words can either facilitate or obstruct understanding. Do any paintings need words? What you see, is what you see. And what you see, is what you want to see. As William Burroughs said “You can't tell anybody anything he doesn't know already”. Is it necessary to read a script before seeing a movie, see sheet music before listening to a song or to look at illustrations to understand a novel.  Those distractions may be interesting in themselves but are they primary?

 

These days, with visual art, words seem to be a requirement. Yet, scholars inform us, that only a few centuries ago, paintings were used to tell stories to those who couldn’t read. Hence, the early development of the visual language of western art was largely within the confines of the church.  After all, seeing is believing. Now it’s as if, we can’t engage with an artwork without having to read something, either before or after viewing. Is it really that difficult? That complicated? Was it early last century, with the rise of abstraction, that words became pressingly necessary? But there has always been abstraction. It wasn’t new. You only have to look at aboriginal or Islamic art to see that. And, what is perhaps the most abstract art form of all, music, is widely considered to be so immediately understood it easily crosses cultural boundaries. So, it seems we believe what we hear. Why is it we no longer believe what we see?

 

How do we see visual art? It appears initial engagement is subliminal. A subtle, oscillating, mix of thought and emotion stimulated by visual cues. A recognition. An experience that may build slowly or occur before you know it. The work will either appeal or not. If it doesn’t appeal there is no obligation to take it any further. You don’t have to understand why you didn’t like it or found it unusable. If you have responded favourably to the work’s visual stimulus and are intellectually curious you may want to know more.  Even if it is just to know exactly what that shade of white is because it would be great on your bedroom walls. Like most everything else, natural or manufactured, an artwork can be dismantled. Its parts be can laid out, identified and their function analysed but by then the patient is probably dead. This kind of investigation is only suitable for artists.

 

With his paintings Roger Boyce wants the viewer to look. To believe what they see. He implies this by painting paintings of paintings. There is no smoke, it is just mirrors, and like a magician, who wishes to not only delight with his sleight of hand, he also wants to reveal how the trick was done. You will notice next to the painted paintings there are no wall labels. If it’s only meaning you seek, I would start here.

 

Robin Neate

 

 

 

 Fun While it Lasted

 

Rhapsodic language and sanctimony do seem to readily attach themselves to modernist abstraction. As do miraculous accounts attach to medieval reliquaries. 

 

Pure abstraction's long-standing aspiration to be untethered from the objective - to unyoke itself from pictorial servitude to humanist culture - did (for good or ill) fatefully position it to promote the possibility of here-and-now transcendence. Transcendence, reserved, of course, for the elect.

 

These idle thoughts summoned for me the memory of Ancien Régime Werner and Elaine Dannheisser making their way across Chelsea's broken cobbles. The two, tottering unsteadily from gallery to gallery ... as if in search of New Lourdes.

 

I can't say if those two lovely oldsters did ever experience, in their regular pilgrimages, a rebirth of wonder, or, the return of their animal, spiritual, or erotic vitality. But I did once witness the normally dour art dealer, Diane Browne, transfigure suddenly and magnificently arise (with a fluttering of hands) from the floor of her gallery, as the Dannheisers entered the sacristy. 

 

It was, indeed, fun while it lasted.

Photo:

 

Werner and Elaine Dannheisser

by Robert Mapplethorpe

 

 

 

 

 

Everything Disappears

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.  

ROOM / @ SUITE / SEPTEMBER 2018