Spin Art

It's been years since I "liked" making a painting in any way I could explain to someone. I don't consider this tragic, I consider it rather a good sign. I like feeling like my work is work. But today I made some paintings I enjoyed. I made spin art.

Eventually, no matter where I'm teaching, I seem to come across a crit that includes a statement like, "I like it, I had fun making it" as a defense of the work in question. As if liking anything ever mattered in any professional sense. When are people going to realize that art is not there to make artists happy? I take is as a manifestation of entertainment culture that young artists tend to gauge the success or failure of their work by the pleasure its making gave them. Entertainment culture or maybe vestigial therapy culture – after all, the pleasure principle also works nicely with the idea that one should be 'releasing' things through one's art.

Spin art was great fun not for its expressive products (how expressive an they be?) so much as for the formal opportunities I'd never noticed before. I realized that the spinning paper is like a potter's wheel, and that a line pulled straight out from center would result in a spiral on the surface. I realized that even with kindergarten tempera paint, simple color chords could be made. I remembered that keeping the ground available was a good way to keep some energy in the picture.

Of course I'm familiar with Damien Hirst's spin art paintings, and I'm not about to give up my pain-in-the ass methods for a frolic at the fair. I'm not even going to claim special status for the works I'm talking about - I wouldn't even think of them as sketches in any real sense. They’re more like color swatches or something – sort of like pure research rather than applied research. But they are fun, for whatever that’s worth.