Painter Painting

Ideas evolving

Four films on Remix Culture by Kirby Ferguson...

This is reposted from Open Culture. I'm thinking about it because of an essay by Tracy Thompson in Salon on the way the causes of the Civil War still inspire revision and debate. For more on this, see the collection Remixing the Civil War: Meditations at the Sesquicentennial.

Article of the day: Cut-up Technique

You may know a lot of stuff, but you never know when you need it...or that's what I've been thinking as I wrestle with texts for new paintings using the cut-up technique pioneered by Tristan Tzara and William S. Burroughs. I don't know that what I'm after is quite the same...I want something else - I want (I expect) the randomly combined bits of language to give me something I cannot find on my own...here's what they look like...

From the studio - Kandinsky Paints

I first came across this through Open Culture. Had to share it here, as I love to see people work in the studio...

Send in the clowns

Here's one for the medium-is-the-message file: I was clicking through the trailers on iTunes the other day and noticed one called Silver Circle. Being that I'll watch anything computer-animated, I took a look.

Wow. It's like a right-wing, financial survivalist's Matrix.

Trailers are meant to give you enough of a film to get you interested - to help you see if you're in the audience for the picture. So when in the first seconds you see a character attacked by an army of faceless drones behind shields that read 'Federal Reserve', you know that you're watching something whose target market is waiting for the U.N. black helicopters to touch down.

Go on and you get an especially hoary piece of conspiracy theorizing. It seems that these characters live in a world where currency is supported by governments, rather than quaint things like precious metals (which haven't supported economies since the Bretton Woods Agreements...). "Rebels" have begun minting their own currency which they claim has "value"  and that draws the ire of the Federal Reserve (remember when movies were about mysterious foreign threats? James Bond, anyone? Please?)

Zoe, our spunky, lo-res heroine, is a freedom fighter. Her ultimate foe may be Victor Brant, Chair of the Federal Reserve, but her proximal adversary is Jay, who's investigating an arson and is drawn into a  romantic entanglement (with explosions, the website promises!). They live in 2019, which, with hyper-inflation, sounds a lot like Weimar Germany, and the dollar has lost its position as a lynchpin currency. It's notable that its not predatory banks or industries that are capitalizing on this crisis - it's the our own government.

Yawn. Ron Paul made this up in 2009. Or rather, he gets a ton of credit for what has been talked about in a mess of fringy groups for decades. But when the fringe starts releasing its own animate feature films, you know it's time to start getting active.

We've seen movies as vehicles of allegory and protest before. What's amusing is when the medium of cinema gets put to use clumsily. Really? Silver Circle is lower quality than the animatics you see in bonus features for a major studio release. It is painful to watch a two minute trailer, almost as painful as watching SIMs act. It's implied on a page about the studio that director Pasha Roberts picks lo-tech 'South Park-syle' animations because they give the work counter-culture cred. Don't believe it. This thing looks like one of the (once) popular animated news re-enactments.

But why are they doing this? (Who are they? I'm not there yet - hang on) Let's read a from a post on the Silver Circle Underground Blog:

Science fiction movies often introduce ideas that are later produced by science. After all, science fiction writers spend a lot of time dreaming up technological gadgets for their heroes and villains to use. In the Terminator movie series, cyborg assassins were equipped with built-in technology that allowed them to see in infrared. In addition, their eyes could access software that provided a heads-up display full of useful information about objects and individuals in their field of vision.

To me, this looks like a classic case of if-you-can't-beat-'em, join'em. For years, citizens on the right have decried the liberal bias of the entertainment/media complex. But with the success of FoxNews, it appears that a wholesale effort is afoot to craft an alternate universe. The story quoted above goes on to describe how the government is 'compiling untold volumes of unconstitutional data' on citizens. Don't bother asking about evidence, there is none. In the real world, there are plenty of allegations - supported by data - of corporations collecting consumers' private data and selling it or turning it over to the government, but that's not exactly the same thing, really. It seems that every sin that could be committed in the Silver Circle universe must be committed by the government, and one assumes that power is the motive. Corporations, motivated by the much more fungible concept of profit, seem to be nowhere to be seen...

Hmmm...wonder why that is?

No really. We were just treated to a whole year of politics based on the idea that a lie told loudly and often becomes truth. Now see a new kind of lie - one predicated on omission, one that claims that everything wrong with the country today comes from the doings of its government. With citizen ire directed toward the government - an institution that carries out the will of its people - no one has time to care about the greed and indifference of corporate entities whose greatest concern appears to be that there is too much money out there - too much for them to control it all.

Lately my work has led me from a once-sunny and mildly postmodern/ironic attitude toward codes to a much more sinister place lately. We are hearing all sorts of weird newsspeak like 'liberty filmmaking' and 'truth language'.  I have become interested in the various cyphers and verbal secret handshakes or hate groups and anti-government organizations, most of whom operate under the delusion that they are the ones with real freedom and a frightening responsibility to save the rest of us.

We could ignore this. That may be the best strategy. But I am afraid that the people who think that it's a good idea to oppose our government through violence and fear-mongering propaganda rather than through the political process will keep up their rhetoric and some people may start believing them. Critical thinking skills are not something we can count on in the electorate these days, and Silver Circle looks like the latest attempt to take advantage of that situation. We are living through the consequences of unchecked access to guns and ammunition no, something we should have had the political will (if not the moral responsibility) to oppose. I have enough trouble letting a bad movie ruin my day, let alone my country.

Some times it IS the worker, not the work...

Charles Kraft's Hitler Idaho

Most interesting read of the week? Jen Graves unnerving essay on ceramic artist Charles Kraft who - it turns out - is not ironically interested in Nazi imagery, but is actually a frightening person.

To me, the best part is reading as Graves sorts our her own feelings toward the work, for which she previously professed admiration.

Ongoing stories...

An interesting reading of the Bush-is-a-painter story from Lee Rosenbaum at Culture Grrrl...

When Presidents Paint

Images from Gawker.com

With the discovery that George W. Bush has been secretly at work on paintings, the art world experienced something on the order of a tear in the space-time continuum. 

Citizens of that utopia called 'the art world' have had to deal with the severe cognitive dissonance that results from liking the work and loathing the source.

Bush, after all, is remembered as the man who cut taxes and relaxed regulations on the wealthiest American citizens and industries. After 9/11, Bush squandered the good will of the world and led America into two wars whose primary purpose appears to have been to provide unending work for defense contractors. His administration perfected Orwellian newspeak with educational reform programs that had such benevolent names as 'No Child Left Behind' that rewarded 'achievement' while fundamentally skewing the goals of education. In the last election, we watched as chagrined candidates from his his party pretended his administration hadn't existed.

But W's paintings have been popping up on Facebook and all over the Internet (1,590,000 Google hits for "George W. Bush paintings" and counting). People seem to like them for their naivete. People are reminded of art they love, from history or from the present. One of the funniest lines of reasoning (one Jerry Saltz touches on) is the symbolism of the bathtub in Bush's pictures and its connection to other artists. Art, after all, is about art, right? So it only makes sense that if George W. Bush is making paintings, they should be connected to other paintings.This is the sort of pop culture soul-searching Slate was made for.

Some people have been quick to point out that Hitler was a painter, too. On the other hand, Jimmy Carter was a poet. Being Hitler didn't make Hitler's paintings 'good' or 'bad' any more than being Jimmy Carter redeemed the ex-president's verse. The confusion of the person for the product - the most profound muddle faced by artists in the 21st century - is at the core of this problem. People who hate Bush struggle to figure out how they can like his paintings...or even rationalize their existence.

But it's startlingly easy to resolve this conflict - one needs only to remember that not all paintings are art. Before crowd-curating, Marcel Duchamp described how things made by people are ratified by discussion in a 1957 statement, The Creative Act (you can listen to Duchamp here...). W's paintings need to be seen for what they are - the products of a hobby enjoyed by retired individual who emailed them to his sister. He didn't put them on display in a gallery or museum. They weren't discovered - they were hacked into. The assumption that they are art appears to rest on the medium in which they have been made - paint. As an industry, the art world is pretty good at separating things made with paint into categories of 'works of art' and 'museum-quality oil paintings' that wish they were art. Here is yet another opportunity to practice such discernment.

What' really tragic about this is all the wasted time. I am as guilty as everyone else of giving Bush's pictures more attention than they deserve by adding to the melee. While thousands of artists produce work that we could be talking about - attempting to contribute to a millennia-long conversation about cultural value by producing objects and images and setting them into a context of other objects and images - we are spending time rooting through the private emails of someone who much of the world regards as a war criminal.

Let's make sure the former president is remembered for the right things.

Media Seen

 

 

I was rather taken with this piece by Ben Rubin called And that's the Way it Is....hope you like it. More info here.

Last suppers

The subject of a death row inmate's last meal has been dealt with by a number of artists. Julie Green's Delft blue ceramic take on the idea, spotlighted in this week's New York Times, caught my eye...

The last meal served to John Wayne Gacy, as imaged in an essay in the Mail Online

I think part of what interests me about this work its potential to revitalize the idea of the still life in some way...it still contains the moralizing overtones of traditional Dutch still life painting, but with a decidedly modern, documentary spin...more on that later (perhaps).

It's not okay to use the word 'cultureverse'...

...but I still really was interested in a story on today's Morning Edition from Neda Ulaby called In a Fragmented Cultureverse, Can Pop References Still Pop?

If you have a chance, give it a listen - some of the interesting ideas that came up include

• The 20% rule
• The degree to which increasing tribalization of cultural reference makes as all like immigrants
• A comedian saying "I assume everyone has seen Fargo"

More soon - I hope...but enjoy for now...

The beauty of code

Picked this up from Artsjournal.com today...loving it the expression of boredom with the cliches of 'new media'...

Stop whatever you are doing...

...and go to Soundcloud to listen to the Portland Cello Project performing Beck's Song Reader.

What are you doing still here - go! NOW!

If you require some kind of hype, read the LA Times Pop & Hiss on this monumental achievement...

You can almost smell the stale beer...

Make sure you stop at the New York Times for The Party is Not Over...it's pretty awesome.

Seeing the light, then losing sight of it

Greatly enjoyed Jim Shepard's essay on Flannery O'Connor on the Atlantic website...Shepard names something that has always bugged me about the idea of epiphanies in literature - that they don't last. He writes:

Writers talk a lot about epiphanies—what O'Connor, in her Catholic tradition, called "grace"—in short stories. But I think we're tyrannized by a misunderstanding of Joyce's notion of the epiphany. That stories should toodle on their little track toward a moment where the characters understand something they didn't understand before—and, at that moment, they're transformed into better people.

[...]

This kind of conversion notion is based on a very comforting idea—that if only we had sufficient information, we wouldn't act badly. And that's one of the great things about what The Misfit tells the Grandmother in the line I like so much. He's not saying that a near-death experience would have turned her into a good woman. He's saying it would take somebody threatening to shoot her every minute of her life.

In other words, these conversion experiences don't stick—or they don't stick for very long. Human beings have to be re-educated over and over and over again as we swim upstream against our own irrationalities.

I have to admit I've had more earth-shattering epiphanies than I can actually recall...too many moments in which everything seems to make sense, only to get swallowed in the fog of living again a few hours or - if I'm lucky - days later. I've tried to write them down, draw them when they are of that nature, but even then, I too often end up looking back at my notes and wondering what on earth I was seeing in that state of enlightenment.

Images of creativity

Today, I'm thinking about people making things...

Mother Nature forging a baby. Note the unfinished infants at the bottom left...

I've always been really interested in the image of God as an architect...

Studio wall

Having trouble getting images on my webpage's sketchbook, so I wanted to share this here....still sorting out the studio to some extent, but getting work done a little at a time...these are transcriptions of passages from the readings I assigned my students this fall, or things I found while I was researching the Intro to Visual Studies class.

Yet more graphic violence...

Some time ago, I notices that hazard signs had become more specific about the consequences of misuse or ignoring warnings...I wonder if this is response to some kind of lull brought on by less explicit signs. Here are a few examples of rather specific hazard signs...

More graphic violence

from the Retronaut...do they have a category for gruesome deaths?