Ideas from 2013
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| City Roots: London, mixed media on maple ply, 2013 |
I
Structure: Information theory
To my mind, the moment and the memory are the mysterious quanta at the forefront of human understanding that need to be analyzed, cogitated, measured, and theorized in much the same way as Max Plank's quantic energies of a century ago. (as explained by Mr. Richard Fyneman)
Meaning and Artwork:
Labor is important in my notion of artwork because of my interest in meaning (semiotics). In architecture, also, codes and meaning, responsibility for "every mark made on the page", is an a priori supposition.
In woodworking: if every move you make is a pain in the ass, you make sure it's the right move first.
Also in painting.
But, there is the notion that all thought is only precursor or corollary to intuition. So my paintings are trying to hold both analysis and intuition, calculation and feeling, and are often about that struggle. Art is the place where message and metaphor flow into each other, content and form embrace fully, and the ability to generate, experience and sustain meaning can develop, for both viewer and artist. In this way I feel that my trade is essential to the social organism.
A forest for the tree:
Contemporary life, at least to my experience, is categorized by it's inundation of the individual with big, big pictures. Satellite views. Meta data. The cinema, our myth machine, made even more expa(e)nsive and creepy with the advent of digital imaging technology.
I limit my exposure, consciously, to "main-stream" media. By this I mean primarily radio, cinema and television broadcasting. For this activity (due to this capacity), the internet appears to have been a tremendous boon to the individual struggling to maintain their personal freedom of consciousness. It (The internet) is a filter by which one may sort and focus the massive streams of information (media) available to the modern consumer, who by creating a collection of signs that refer to an individually curated /created aesthetic taste or style creates what amounts to the soul of a contemporary human being of any class, (since their actions are not tied to a definite subordinate production value) but are instead always fed back into the meta machine as "personality commodity" (reality show). We proceed to cannibalism, the closed system…the second law of thermodynamics looses and the perpetual motion machine conserves perfectly all available resources...
We are but a collection of moments. Memoirs. We were never here but were here always, in pristine digital splendor. At least that's what the contemporary person who spends a lot of time on the internet might think. It's sort of a party line. This is understandable.
Roots:
Hal refers to American Culture in his childhood ( he is a baby boomer) as monolithic. On the internet and in my life in particular, it feels as if I am looking at the cracks in the foundation of that monolith, and the root truths growing through it.
Mon, 8 36/13
UN debating intervention actions due to evidence of chemical warfare/terrorism in Syria.
*[This continues the ideas of Focoult, Baudrillard and Beuys that in contemporary society, worker/consumer credits (capital) are tied to the world of floating signifiers (consumer goods) thereby];
II
The last few years I have been making artwork thinking about the relationship between photography and painting, working with digital photographs and drawings to create figurative compositions in which humans or man-made things are transforming into trees and plants, or trees and plants are transformed into abstract shapes and passages of paint. This motif synthesized three things:
1my interest in juxtaposing organic forms and the urban built environment during my residency in Oakland's famed Jingletowns arts district in 2010-11,
2larger investigations in my catalogue raisonne into the conceptual possibilities of multiple media expressing the relationships between labor, material, process, production, technology, presentation, and persona(identity) etc
3the artwork as metaphysical simulacra of the relationships between different modes of human consciousness, and of the process whereby the mind organizes and constructs reality from experience. The relationship of the part and the whole.
(Romance)
The compositions are then transferred/translated into analogue mediums of painting and drawing.
III
One of the things that informs my style is the idea of:
Noumenon
Kant-"das Ding an sich"
With Photoshop™, this becomes the artistic activity par excellence – the editing out of extraneous information, the negative space, and replacing it with narrative movements, symbols, gestures, numinous swirling information, to represent the spirits.
[To represent the spirits of the mind.]
Or, the reconstitution or the form itself, the arm itself, the yen itself. The hand. And on into movement.
(The law of gravity becomes clear as soon as two line intersect: the center must hold.)
Aldous Huxley in "The Doors of Perception" remarks on the spectacular effect of drapery on the psychedelic mind, and invokes the canonical tradition of western art as initiates into a cult of form.
Calasso, too, invokes this lineage when he speaks of the Attic vases as a centuries long obsession with form, with appearance.
/the thing that exists once, and only for a short while.
IV
Thus the mystics know: you don't even have to look, to see.
The scientists: you have to look to see.
But often, we are looking for what we cannot see, and do not know that we do not know we do not see.
And so forth.
Often, it really helps to look, to see.
El Mirador. El Mirado. Etc.
V
The only thing worth painting is porn.
VI
All issues are facets of a single issue: the issue of power.
VII
An Organic Theory of Class:
In The Leopard, Giuseppe Lampedussa's Prince of Salina marries his heir to the heiress (of emergent burgeosie chieftain/mafiosi) Don Calogero in order to preserve his family's wealth and power.
Achilles hates Odysseus. And Agamemnon.
Power hates Cunning. And Politics. Together, they are the united front of Western Civilization.
Economics: the study of how (and where) people (organisms) get what they want.
Ecosystem: the study of relationships between organisms and their environment.
oikos: In Greek, "house, dwelling place, habitation"
House Music: black latin gay disco music from AIDS. Hope.
Music. The formal organization of space.
Painting, art, is primarily a political activity because: who gets to say so what we see?
The antidote to art is Truth.
Who gets to eat is a complicated question, indeed.
IX
"The roots of the thing must be strong, and deep, if it's canopy is going to be seen for very long…"
X
After watching the (excellent) film adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's novel "The Road" last night, I realize that basically all the art I have ever made has been about the Apocalypse. Not the Apocalypse of St John, but rather the environmental and nuclear and genocidal apocalypse that is currently happening, right now. It is the background to my entire life, and in my work especially, the relationship betweeen background and foreground, subject and object, content and form are symbiotic, amorphous and continually in flux. I've been working on describing my work, and if I had to pin down a theme, well, how could anybody working right now make art about anything else?
It seems to be important, as an artist, to document these goings on, and their effects on subjectivity, consciousness. If any intelligence might be around to look at stuff later, it would be good for them, poignant and stuff, for them to see artwork about what is happening, what the artists who saw what was happening thought at the time, what did they have to say for they self.
It's the only thing I can think to do. Stay busy. Protect the fire.
Humans control fire 125,000 years ago, language develops about 50,000 years ago. Agricultural Revolution 10,000 BC, Writing advents 3000 BC.
"Ever since the Renaissance, painting has been the grandest intellectual adventure in the visual arts, a titanic effort to encompass the glorious instability and variability of experience within the stability of a sharply delimited two dimensional space."
–Jed Pearl, "The RectangularCanvas Is Dead", Sept, 2013, in The New Republic
Greg Hawthorne, Big Sur artist
Theory of god, because of quantum mechanics, leads to endless regression of computer simulations, to finally be grasped by a mind which is defined as "states of integrated information"
MIND
Schizophrenia diagnostics through measurement of the eye's saccade, "a rapid movement of the eye between fixation point", from the rench saquer, spanish sacar
We are each of us creating the universe in our own minds.
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| Invent Monster, oil paint on panel, 2016 |
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