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Spring 2008
John Anderson
Cristina Baptista
Cynthia Brackett-Vincent
Michael Brownstein
Nuala Ní Chonchúir
Antonia Clark
Alison Eastley
Brent Fisk
David Fraser
Krikor der Hohannesian
Brad Johnson
Amy MacLennan
Lisa Markowitz
Dale McLain
Damon McLaughlin
Micki Myers
Roger Pfingston
Heather Schimel
Rachel Stewart
Lafayette Wattles
Matt Alberhasky
Margaret Fieland
Robert Johnson
Richard Rippon
Willie Smith
Jennifer VanBuren
Jai Britton
Patrick Carrington
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Alex Nodopaka
On Debunking Modern Art and the Pursuit of Culture: an Imaginary Rant
I do not blame Jasper Johns or Richard Diebenkorn, Jackson Pollock or Cy Twombly or Robert Motherwell or xxx xxxx to mention only the most notorious of that certain era immediately following the end of WWWII for painting what they did in New York. Like many artists from the late 1940’s on, I pulled those who outperformed self-appointed art critics and malformed art runts curetting gurus and the clientele who promoted and blindly bought random abstractions in nature passing for art.
Of course, the minimalist may have taken the prize; I mean what could surpass a dot on an empty canvas or a gessoed canvas, if at all, with nothing but white blobs with a single razor cut in it. I mean these were no balls of fire Mona Lisas or Garden of Earthly Delights to which they didn’t come close. Then came the wraparound and wrap up artists. Then there were those who made towering symbols out of toothbrushes and toothpicks not to mention the enlarged beyond life-size of offset printed cartoons and comics. I mean corporations funded vast amounts of plastic cling-on wrap that paraded their contributions to the arts which were actually translated into advertising their brand name product. Then there were a few bricklayers that took up acres of space and brought in tons of dirt inside museums. Last but not least let’s not forget the assholes that shot themselves as part of their performances and who did it without the promise of any virgins except for a shot in the dark, pardon my pun, at some post mortem publicity.
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In cahoots with the big name gallery sharks they chummed the seas for the parroting fry that followed, not the least a gullible public who in the long run became irrelevant to the art scene since they claimed their children could paint better and their schooling never taught them to read between the lines or form their own opinions. On this subject I stand to be corrected but until then let me expose my point of view. As a matter of fact, not unlike the present so-called sub prime borrowers that finally had an unwitting revenge on the well to do white-collar gangsters… the artists went bankrupt but let me not digress.
The world has been and will always be full of macrocosmically compacted black holes and an infinite telescopic expansion of the already existing. Everything is yet to be discovered since everything is ever changing and forever moving farther than our reach will ever grasp.
Hardly anyone of the aforementioned artists has created any truly original art that has not been done several decades earlier since the 1920’s in one form or another before them by such luminaries as Paul Klee, Vassily Kandinski, Rene Magritte or Marcel Duchamp or Max Ernst and why not Hieronymus Bosch circa1500. To boot, the art done before was meant to be a lark as most of their originator declaimed. However, these mostly academically untrained artists latched onto the apparent facility of abstracts. Starting late during the preceding 19th century, technology spilled to the masses. The 1950’s were times of technological advances and mass production revolution and mastery of new compounds in nearly every field, be they sociological with the advances of psychology, to scientific electro-mechanical gizmos. Yet not one of their work compares to the masters they mimicked. Basically I consider them copycats who convinced themselves they invented the wheel and who promoted thanks to the Peter Principle by the overwhelming marketing savvy capable of selling rocks to its very rich but culturally ignorant clients.
In early times the purpose of art was practical. It was to inform and record. Images transcended words since there was none yet created to describe what one saw or envisioned. The art today has no purpose except to add interest to bland walls or are accompanied by more words than is contained in the meaning of the image. With the above in mind I wrote, please bear with me, a written bouillabaisse describing their so-called chef d’oeuvres.
In a particular artwork, white kidney-bean gaps in a field of pink, they read as subterranean nests incubating ellipses of color. A small green and a larger sky-blue form while a darker pink shape at the top suggest a pair of women’s soiled underwear. The brown traces are quite subtle as if the washing cycle was set on delicate and did not bleach out the traces. I don’t dare put my nose to them just in case like that other schmuck who put dead cows and sharks in thank god clear plastic sealed aquariums.
I would not describe any ones of the aforementioned artists as creative giants of the second half of the 20th century or even among the most original of all modern artists though some have come closer to the truth when they proclaimed they were really not avant-garde at all but simply a continuation of a beginning.
The works confirm that Abstract Expressionism was a national, not a New York painting style. But they also suggest that school of painting tilted the improvisatory style toward later developments, creating a variant of Abstract Expressionism that sidestepped the style’s solemnity and its wholeness in favor of something fractured and accessible.
The painting process is transparent, which is nothing new, it is in most Abstract Expressionist work. You can usually see all the way to the raw canvas of a Pollock drip painting. But that school added a more complicated awareness to the process, punctuating ragged blocks of layered color with lines and quasi signs, introducing irreverence and, at times, sexual innuendo. A typical description of an artwork follows. The painting features a lower right quadrant of bright, brushy egg-yolk yellow over white and red to which a bubble-like outline adds a bulbous head. Upper left, a series of cursive lines and loops imply an outburst of language, culminating with a red letter at the top edge that is really a pronged patch of color that escaped an incursion of white. And beyond all this an empty speech balloon bobs at the painting’s edge, too small to contain the verbiage.
In addition to painterly gifts, that school had an eye for progressive art and a knack for synthesis in works that emphasized the painting process in areas of layered color punctuated by darting lines, usually black. These works have a humor with even feistiness absent from most other work. What is especially startling is that they assimilate an odd style broached earlier primarily in black-and-white and sepia shadowy hues.
All these works were respectively seen by the aforementioned artists intent on marrying line and brushwork in their own art. Most would go on making grander, more complex figurative and abstract paintings. But too many of these later works are tamped down by their studious reserve and exquisite touch; they balance on the cusp of vitality without really getting their feet wet. In many ways his painting was never freer, less predictable or more full of the future than in New Mexico.
Now, what is really frustrating, even after showing off my knowledge of art history is that all these words are wasted in a culture that has no culture and where social humanities rank next to the root of the grass and where the pursuit of the dollar exceeds of any number of so-called dead enemy. That, to say the least, would be the final hypocrisy. Of course I do not wish to take away the advantages of a constricted education, which is of the specialist. I mean when visiting an oculist doctor with dust in your eye you do not want that doctor to stick their finger in your other hole telling you that you also have dangling hemorrhoids. The problem faced by any civilization is of parallel technological advances and the humanities where both must move forward nose to nose so that’s its people can keep intellectually abreast. Unfortunately that’s where we in America lack the most. We are the contemporary Romans and we know what happens to those for not keeping up with social advances. The distance between the few artists and even the fewer technical luminaries, the greater and greater numbers lagging in both.
In a small Abstract Expressionist painting of a subterranean nest incubating ellipses of women's underpants I suspect the creative giants of color fields suggest a pair of well-endowed women with their meaningful half dripped a la Pollock are small and quasi introduce irreverence. I suggest a field of something more a complicated awareness towards the top suggests a tradition of white kidney-bean gaps confirming it is not avant-garde at all but a rather transparent irreverence among the most Abstract Expressionism improvisatory style. They suggest a subterranean nest of incubating ellipses of color that was nothing new to the self-promoted creative giants of the style's solemnity and quasi signs, punctuating ragged blocks of all modern art.
Another painting features a bubble-like outline with a bulbous head. In the upper left, brushy egg-yolk yellow over white emphasizes the painting process. But too many of the layered colors punctuated by darting, usually black lines emphasize the painting's edge. While the upper left, culminating with humor and an exquisite touch, assimilates a bulbous head with a knack for synthesizing. In addition they balance on marrying lines and a patch of vitality without any bright paint, culminating in a series of cursive lines where even feistiness is absent.
In conclusion, the exquisite touch of humor balances such or such painting featuring a series of cursive lines emphasizing the top edge, which is really a knack for art balancing in an large blue sky complicated by a most startlingly emphasized verbiage. I mean what the f#$k does that verbiage above really mean?
"I asked for a 20-year cut facial lift"
Alex Nodopaka |
See more of Alex's visual art in his Photobucket and on this issue's poetry and fiction pages. |
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