What Art Is, Introduction
The primary artistic gesture is to designate something as art, to point to that which is important. This essential statement, ‘this is art, this is meaningful,’ is indistinguishable from, ‘art is this, this is what art is.’ I see my work as framing a specific definition of art, which, I believe, functions to imply an entire configuration of values. By positioning itself, the work invites viewers to reevaluate their own value system in relation to it.
My work defines itself against the vacuous values of consumer society. Rather than addressing the specifics of particular products or markets, allusions in my work are most clearly understood as references to underlying value systems. I think of each piece as a case study, a unique visual contemplation of contrasting values.
The vocabulary of the work is drawn from recognizable artistic modes as well as commercial imagery such as food and fashion. I see the present and history of art, culture and commerce as an open catalogue of possibilities. My work results from a process of intuitively combining these different images until something resonant emerges.
What Art Is, Part 7: Conflict Resolution
Meaning is under continual attack. King, corporation, stupidity, and superficiality conspire to replace life with entertainment, understanding with information, and identity with apathy. Art is about meaning. Ultimately meaning is restored by cultivating profound connections to other people, to nature, and to eternity.
City Love (mixed media on panel, 2005) consists of two small square panels, hung close together on a wall, faced with rough concrete. The close physical proximity and visual similarity of the two panels links them as a pair. They are not identical, but their differences seem insignificant. They have been raised from horizontal --the orientation in which concrete must be applied-- and elevated together on the wall, where they lose their resemblance to pavers, where they cannot be put to use or walked on.
What Art Is, Part 6: Art and the Market
Art is free. Unlike businesses, artists do not respond to demand, they make things whether people want them or not. Art is an unavoidably awkward combatant in the arena of buying and selling because it is already paid for, the artist having donated labor and materials. So-called buyers are actually endorsing ideas and enabling artists, rather than simply acquiring objects.
Flesh and Blood in Herringbone (acrylic on canvas, 2005) is a geometric abstraction based on a common woven pattern, in warm, bodily colors. The painting is about warmth and coldness in visual, interpersonal and economic terms.
What Art Is, Part 5: Art and Fashion
Fashion as a commodity can be considered anti-art. Far removed from merely meeting the human need for clothing, fashion’s purpose is to gratify personal vanity and promote social distinction. Fashion is the materialization of ideals such as appearance, self-absorption, and conspicuous consumption. Fashion reinforces one’s ideas about self and the world, pandering to the craving for acceptance and power. Where art celebrates the connectedness of individuals, fashion homogenizes the crowd into fleshless corporations of sellers and uniformed hordes of buyers.
Abstract Painting with Houndstooth (oil on canvas, 2005) is a fundamentally abstract painting, a mode associated with the spiritual, or the purportedly spiritual. The houndstooth pattern quotes a currently fashionable weave. A generalized gestural brushstroke interrupts the matrix, invoking the rhetoric of the spiritual upon the anti-ideals of commerce and the fashionable.
What Art Is, Part 4: The Fashioning of Art
The word fashion can refer both to forces within art, and to some of the most subtle imitations of art. A fashion is a style or trend, normally in clothing. Fashion changes. The parade of changing styles in art history might be compared to a succession of fashions. Fashion also means fashionable: stylish, attractive, tasteful, or conforming to a trend. Participation in the cutting-edge of fashion means having the newest, most obnoxious clothing available, making the continual replacement of the products of fashion intrinsic to their function. Fashion must be new, which is the same thing as being instantly out-dated.
Geometric Abstraction with Tweed (oil on canvas, 2005) is a double-dichromatic square, divided in two. The left side roughly approximates this currently fashionable fabric, and the right offers a reinterpretation of the familiar pattern. The painting promotes an idea for tweed, and frames an investigation of the artist as fashion designer.
What Art Is, Part 3: Fact and Fiction
Fiction painting operates by illusion. It tells stories, expresses moods, and creates imaginary spaces. Fiction painting addresses the question, ‘What does it look like?’ Fact painting constructs meaning through the way it is put together. With fact painting the question is, ‘Why would somebody do that?’ Perhaps all painting has elements of both fact and fiction, but I think of my work as fact painting.
Raw canvas, visible ground, and exposed nail heads in my work draw attention to the process of making oil paintings, foregrounding its deliberateness. I want the work to be openly purposeful, made to be looked at. I intend my painting process to be completely transparent. I want viewers to see how the paint was applied, to know what they are looking at.
Faux Formica (oil on canvas, 2005) is a small square painting simulating wood grain. As a mimetic artwork, this painting invites judgment against its external referent, either wood or plastic laminate as hinted by the title. But the title is unclear, and may be understood to refer to either the painting as an imitation of laminate, to laminate as an imitation of wood, or to wood as an imitation of laminate. The work addresses the nature of illusion, and the complexity of searching for something original in a context of fiction and illusion.
What Art Is, Part 2: Art and Politics
Art is not only about something, it is about something meaningful. An artwork’s meaningfulness begins with its importance to the artist, whose urgency, passion, and sincerity --without arbitrariness, narcissism or sentimentality-- leaves a perceptible imprint.
The experience of art is an interaction between the viewer and the artist. Whether the artwork functions as the artist’s surrogate, wake, or messenger, the viewer’s experience is ultimately interpersonal. Art, in its varied forms, constitutes the vital intersection of the social and the personal, the political and the profound.
Sex and the City (concrete, wood, and oil, 2005) is a small block of concrete slathered in pink paint, its rough wooden form serving as a frame. Concrete is used to refer to the ideals that inspire its use: efficiency, usefulness, and compromise. Pink oil paint is the counterpoint, asserting the fleshy, ethereal, and poetic in the space of the cold, solid, and lifeless.
What Art Is, Part 1: Art and Imitation
Art takes a stand, it challenges you, slaps you in the face. Artists assert personal visions, labeling their decisions with their own names. Art is a celebration, not of the individual, but of individual responsibility. Artists affirm the possible, the poetic, and the profound. Imitation sweet talks you, it flatters your taste. Imitation decorates, it is the advocate of the status quo, making attractive what already is. Imitation is comforting, it reassures you by reflecting the world as you know it. Imitation offers no possibilities, there are no implications to its seduction. Its appeal is shallow. Imitation flattens, its positivity is two-dimensional, depthless.
Art is a corrective for imitation, teaching the eyes to distinguish between the two. Frosted Geometric Abstraction (oil on canvas, 2004) is a small painting conceived as a chromatic and textural simulation of a sugar cookie. This small painting seeks to identify itself in opposition to imitation, particularly to works that masquerade as genuine artistic statements, but are only exercises in the allure of empty calories.