Peter Schjeldahl
Art Vent Letting the Fresh Air In
October 13, 2012
Andy Warhol, Dollar Sign, 1982
©The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh. Founding Collection, Contribution The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc
©The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh. Founding Collection, Contribution The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc
Jerry Saltzon Facebook, yesterday:
We now have this enormous top-heavy operational apparatus… a hundred art fairs and international biennials, galleries growing larger as artists work in smaller spaces, skyrocketing prices during a worldwide economic contraction. The art world’s reflexes are shot; its systems so predetermined that they’re driving us; we’re no longer driving them. The system is less susceptible to paradox, discovery, ambiguity, and all the exquisite deviations and orphic oddness that brought us to art in the first place.
….The system may be too big NOT to fail. It is telling us what we already know: A crystal is cracked. It is time for mutinies, forging new topographies and plotting other courses."
Artists are famous for pioneering new territory, making places like SoHo, TriBeCa, Williamsburg, etc. so attractive that they’re driven out by the moneyed interests. However now it’s bigger than that; while we were sleeping, they co-opted the entire art world and made it one big hedge fund.
In Chicago last week, a collector friend asked me what’s going on in art, what’s good, what’s happening, and I couldn’t begin to answer him. What’s good? From whose point of view? Mine? Gagosian’s? Sotheby’s? And does it matter? The machine that is the art world is going to run regardless of whether I, Saltz, or anyone who really thinks about art, finds it important. As in current politics, the truth is meaningless and history never happened. So what if another artist did the same thing better yesterday or ten years ago, or is doing it better now in some loft in Cleveland. Like everything else, when things become corporatized, the emphasis changes; it’s no longer about building a better mousetrap, but how many mousetraps can we sell?
Back in the day, the value of contemporary art was determined by an intangible, but nonetheless fairly reliable, aesthetic consensus of artists, writers, inspired dealers, curators, and collectors crazy enough to spend money on the art they loved—with no prospect of a return, as the secondary market was reserved for dead artists. Now value is determined by how long you can keep the ball (or “spot” in the case of Damien Hirst) in the air. Other than generators of product, artists aren’t part of the game. Nor are critics, whose insistence on analyzing and qualifying is beginning to appear superfluous at best, and at worst, downright annoying.
How great is the divide? Example: Richard Prince’s work sells for millions, yet not one artist of my acquaintance cared enough to see his 2007 Guggenheim retrospective (I did, but only because my press pass got me in for free), and Peter Schjeldahl wrote of him: “An adept of juvenile sarcasm, like Prince, is well advised not to invite comparisons with grownups.”
Often compared to the tulip craze that took over Holland in the 1600s, one wonders if the speculative art bubble will burst once investors find it's filled with hot air, when the tide turns from Hirst, Prince and Koons to….? (Whatever happened to those Chinese artists who were so hot a few years ago?) Even the seemingly grounded market in Warhols could be upset when the Andy Warhol Foundation (whose Creative Capital grant is supporting this blog) disperses its collection.
What could unravel even sooner is the art school pyramid. For a couple of decades, students have been willing to take on loans of $20,000 to $30,000 a year to get a degree that would supposedly net them a tenure track teaching position worth upwards of $50,000 a year. Now, however, that 75% of those jobs are being filled by adjuncts making an average of $2700 per course, with many, like Walmart employees, having to rely on food stamps, it seems unlikely that academia will maintain its appeal for long.
Meanwhile, what’s an artist to do? Saltz says it: mutiny, forge other topographies, plot other courses…in other words, make history once again. Think the Salon des Refuses, the Bauhaus, Black Mountain College, New York’s Downtown Scenein the 80s….This is not the first time artists have had to take things into their own hands—and they will.
***
An addendum, following the comments of friends on Facebook, some of whom found merit in Prince and Koons, although I'm glad to say no one defended Hirst. That, however, is not the point. While I have no interest in Prince, I do like some Koons, and I adore Richter, who is a daily inspiration and, for me, completely deserving of his fame. However, outside of seminal historic pieces, to assess ANY work of art, even Richter’s, at millions of dollars, or even a million, is to indulge in pure speculation. No longer engaged in questions of artistic merit, every institution, from museums to art magazines, is swept up in this wild game of chance being played out by people with too much money. There were probably some pretty gorgeous tulips during the tulip craze, which is no doubt what set the whole thing off, but what happened ultimately had nothing to do with tulips. Comments (16)
September 20, 2011
Those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it -- earlier post), a monumental, voluminous construction made of transparent PVC that hung from ceiling to floor and took the shape of an elliptical labyrinth—which Ribé first made 42 years ago when the MoMA artist, a Brazilian named Carlito Carvalhosa, was eight years old.
But wait…the MoMA piece has a “sound” aspect: “a system of microphones hangs from various heights and records the day’s ambient noise, which is played back the following day through several speakers” something that might seem interesting when described in wall text or a press release, but in real life makes zero impact. The first time I experienced anything like that was at Chicago’s N.A.M.E. Gallery circa 1973 when a local artist recorded the sound occurring in one part of the gallery and played it back in another. I didn’t know about Bruce Nauman at the time, but I’m guessing he was beginning to work with sound then too—when Carvalhosa would have been twelve.
The global art world is flooded with hothouse conceptual art much like this, which Jerry Saltz recently coined the “International School of Silly Art.” Born in institutions, and exhibited in institutions, mechanical and denatured, it has the look but not the guts of its predecessors. Neither building on a tradition nor reacting to one, it exists in a vacuum—a rehashing of history without being part of it.
On the other hand, as I’ve pointed out before, the music of the same generation is alive and well and living in this century. Young musicians have absorbed the music of the 60s, 70s, and 80s, synthesized it and made it their own. Also to make music you can’t just say you’re a musician but must learn an actual skill, and I fervently believe that the honing of a skill—a practice (a word Peter Schjeldahl hates when applied to visual art, but I like because it implies necessary repetition)—slows down the creative process and allows the time and space for idiosyncrasy to emerge.
This is why Marina Abramović’s The Artist is Present was completely effective, where the recreations of the older pieces that accompanied it were not. Everything Abramović did the past, all her experience—her “practice”—added up to a personal presence that filled the room, something a stand-in who lacked the artist’s peculiar self-training could never approximate, especially when the thrill and risk of doing it for the first time was gone. (It’s curious that Abramović, whose work involves self-awareness, didn’t get this distinction).
But, hmm, maybe the über-liberals of the art world are just following a societal trend that includes the Republicans, who rewrite history every day without batting an eye. If we can do something lame and make everyone believe it’s new, important and exciting, why work harder?
I’m not arguing for new or old, but the development of ideas and forms—any idea, any form—that takes art beyond the mundane, is something I think about the next day and am eager to revisit. Saltz again, in a 2008 interview, challenged artists to make something that seems “to put off more energy than might have gone into making it. A good Pollock,” he continued, “is like the burning bush: It burns but doesn’t burn out. You don’t use it up.”
Up until October 8th at Meulensteen in Chelsea (formerly Max Protetch) are the small acrylic paintings on metal of Ann Pibal who, while just five years Carvalhosa’s senior, has clearly thoroughly studied and digested the history of a nearly century-old form—geometric abstraction—to create work that's fresh and of its time—which is just what we want: art that doesn’t replicate history, but makes it.
Satisfaction is rare, but it does happen.
Ann Pibal, MNGO, 2010, acrylic on aluminum, 12 1/2 x 17 3/4", courtesy of the artist and Meulensteen, NY.
Ann Pibal, SPTR, 2010, acrylic on aluminum, 11 1/4 x 15 3/4", courtesy of the artist and Meulensteen, NY.
December 18, 2009
Peter Schjeldahl, "
Gerhard Richter, Abstract Painting (894-1), 2005 11 3/4 x 17 3/8
Gerhard Richter, Abstract Painting (894-1), 2005 11 3/4 x 17 3/8 If, after the Orozco show, you want to indulge your senses in a retrograde manner, hop on over to the same place we first saw those Dannon lids, the Marian Goodman Gallery, and wallow in Gerhard Richter’s gorgeous scraped abstractions, up through January 9th.
June 22, 2008
Installation view, "Who's Afraid of Jasper Johns," at Tony Shafrazi Gallery.I’m catching up on my reading, plowing through the magazines that accumulate on my kitchen counter (I swear they reproduce overnight—I come down in the morning to find ten magazines where there was only one the night before). Not to be missed is Peter Schjeldahl’s summing up of Jeff Koons in The New Yorker (June 9 & 16) on the occasion of Koons’s retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, which begins, “There’s something nightmarish about Jeff Koons” and ends with “We might wish for a better artist to manifest our time, but that would amount to wanting a better time” yet acknowledges the “material mastery, conceptual perfect pitch, and idealistic beauty of the objects on display in Chicago.” Yup, sometimes Koons fakes it and other times he makes it. Schjeldahl doesn’t make sense of the Koons phenomenon, as if anyone could, but for the first time I found myself reading about Koons while nodding my head in agreement.
Then there’s Jerry Saltz’s review in New York (June 25) of the Gavin Brown/Urs Fischer conceived “group show” entitled “Who’s Afraid of Jasper Johns” at Tony Shafrazi Gallery (through July 12th), a mishmash of authenticity, appropriation and reproduction that Roberta Smith called “demonically aerobic to brain and eye” and Saltz wrote is “like some mad replicating vision machine, or a walk-in Louise Lawler” that was intended to “set art free from the context of the white box.” I’m as weary of the “white box” as anyone, but I don’t find the tag sale aesthetic of “Who’s Afraid,” where every image seems to cancel out every other image, a viable replacement. Howard Halle, in Time Out, called it a “deeply cynical meditation on the deeply cynical nature of the contemporary art world.” To me it felt toxic, was toxic—given the out-gassing fumes from Ron Pruitt’s plastic bag “waterfall” and Rudolf Stingel’s new but visitor-smudged white wall-to-wall carpeting—an environment to be exited as soon as possible.
The back-story is much more interesting. I mean if you were to write a novel about a guy who sprays paint on Picasso’s Guernica at MoMA and then goes on to fame and fortune as purveyor of graffiti-based art, it would be just too cheesy. It’s a story that I've always felt revealed the rotten core of the art world. But to bring it up-to-date, here’s Shafrazi, 34 years later, at the after-party for ”Who’s Afraid,” being presented with a birthday cake that’s a giant replica of the Guernica.
Saltz writes: Brown climbed atop a table and, amid much yelling, toasted Shafrazi. He then thrust a cake decorator filled with red icing into Shafrazi’s hands. As the crowd screamed, Brown implored, “Write, Tony, Write!” Shafrazi started moving the device over the cake. Slowly he wrote the words I AM SORRY. Time stood still. It was like an angel of redemption had entered the room to take away Shafrazi’s guilt. The room went silent. I was shocked. The Shafrazi began writing again. He wrote one more word: NOT! It was like the Sopranos finale. Just as you thought everything was going to change, everything became more of what it already was.
And that sums up the exhibition: something that purports to be new and different but is really just more of the same old.
Then there’s Jerry Saltz’s review in New York (June 25) of the Gavin Brown/Urs Fischer conceived “group show” entitled “Who’s Afraid of Jasper Johns” at Tony Shafrazi Gallery (through July 12th), a mishmash of authenticity, appropriation and reproduction that Roberta Smith called “demonically aerobic to brain and eye” and Saltz wrote is “like some mad replicating vision machine, or a walk-in Louise Lawler” that was intended to “set art free from the context of the white box.” I’m as weary of the “white box” as anyone, but I don’t find the tag sale aesthetic of “Who’s Afraid,” where every image seems to cancel out every other image, a viable replacement. Howard Halle, in Time Out, called it a “deeply cynical meditation on the deeply cynical nature of the contemporary art world.” To me it felt toxic, was toxic—given the out-gassing fumes from Ron Pruitt’s plastic bag “waterfall” and Rudolf Stingel’s new but visitor-smudged white wall-to-wall carpeting—an environment to be exited as soon as possible.
The back-story is much more interesting. I mean if you were to write a novel about a guy who sprays paint on Picasso’s Guernica at MoMA and then goes on to fame and fortune as purveyor of graffiti-based art, it would be just too cheesy. It’s a story that I've always felt revealed the rotten core of the art world. But to bring it up-to-date, here’s Shafrazi, 34 years later, at the after-party for ”Who’s Afraid,” being presented with a birthday cake that’s a giant replica of the Guernica.
Saltz writes: Brown climbed atop a table and, amid much yelling, toasted Shafrazi. He then thrust a cake decorator filled with red icing into Shafrazi’s hands. As the crowd screamed, Brown implored, “Write, Tony, Write!” Shafrazi started moving the device over the cake. Slowly he wrote the words I AM SORRY. Time stood still. It was like an angel of redemption had entered the room to take away Shafrazi’s guilt. The room went silent. I was shocked. The Shafrazi began writing again. He wrote one more word: NOT! It was like the Sopranos finale. Just as you thought everything was going to change, everything became more of what it already was.
And that sums up the exhibition: something that purports to be new and different but is really just more of the same old.
March 24, 2008
“Mr. Michelangelo” in a comment below, requested that I analyze the reviews of the Whitney Biennial, and I'm never one to avoid a challenge. First, howver, I want to say that these are adept essays by critics I admire—my quibble is with the format. We live in a strange world of “balanced journalism,” an insidious concept to begin with because it’s utterly impossible and negates the value of considered opinion. Further, because journalists are called upon to give voice to “the other side”—every positive statement must have its naysayer—fringe groups or opinions that might otherwise go unnoticed are given undeserved respectability. Used as we are to this format in the news media, it’s crept into art criticism as well, so that the critic’s real opinion becomes lost in a sea of alternating positive and negative statements.
I first became conscious of this phenomenon two years ago when I read Jerry Saltz’s review in the Voice of the 2006 Biennial, where he starts off with “ ‘Day for Night’ is the liveliest, brainiest, most self-conscious Whitney Biennial I have ever seen,” while the next paragraph begins, “’Day for Night’ is filled with work I’m not interested in…..” –then switches gears with, “Nevertheless, the show is a compelling attempt to examine conceptual practices and political agency, consider art that is not about beauty,” etc. He talks some more about what he doesn’t like (“The show is not without problems…” “This brings us to an irksome feature of this show and many like it…”) before flipping back to, “A number of artists stand out….” so that by the time we finish we’ve completely forgotten that he’s writing about work he’s “not interested in.”
This is the dilemma of full-time critics—they have to write about a lot of stuff, so they either have to like a lot of stuff or write about a lot of stuff they don’t like and in doing so they don’t want to come off as too dismissive, lest they get a reputation like Hilton Kramer’s.
This year, in “When Cool Turns Cold,” a thoughtful analysis of what he aptly calls “the Art School Biennial,” Saltz makes it almost to the end before falling into the trap saying, “On the upside, [the curators] Momin and Huldisch should be congratulated for mounting a thoughtful show that, while academic, is neither dogmatic…nor sprawling…nor sexist…” and concludes with an upswing, reaching for a “striking moment” or two when, earlier on, he already said it all: “There’s little that’s overtly sexual, shocking, angry, colorful, traditionally beautiful or decorative, almost no madness or chaos. The show doesn’t alchemically add up to more than the sum of its parts.”
Peter Schjeldahl starts off by calling this year’s Biennial “the most poetic I can remember” but gives an example of that only at the end, a work that “enchanted” him, while the in-between is filled with descriptions of things that didn’t, his detailed attention giving them more weight than they deserve. I must say he nails the Rachel Harrison experience, however, when he calls her, “the leading light of new sculpture…[who knows] precisely what she means—and you would too if you were just the littlest bit smarter than you are.”
Holland Cotter (who took no joy in the Armory building itself, calling it a “moldering pile”) does the flip-flip thus: “The 2008 edition is…an unglamorous, even prosaic affair, the installation plain and unfocused” with works that have “uncharismatic surfaces, complicated backstories,” followed by, “There are certainly dynamic elements” followed by, “But again, the overall tenor of the show is low-key…” and then “Hard-liner believers in art as visual pleasure will have, poor things, a bitter slog. But if the show is heedless of traditional beauty, it is also firm in its faith in artists as thinkers and makers rather than production-line workers meeting market demands.”
However, I would posit that if Biennial artists were truly “thinkers and makers” their output would be more engaging. Also I want to point out to the world at large that we, as artists, seek “visual pleasure” not because we’re playing to the market but because we are, ahem, visual artists and therefore, not coincidentally, concerned with things visual.
The Biennial, if not beloved—in fact often called “the show you love to hate”—but which at least used to generate excitement, has been slowly losing gas to the point that it’s become so inconsequential that maybe next time these guys can forgo writing about it altogether and put their talents toward covering events that, pro or con, stir their souls.
I first became conscious of this phenomenon two years ago when I read Jerry Saltz’s review in the Voice of the 2006 Biennial, where he starts off with “ ‘Day for Night’ is the liveliest, brainiest, most self-conscious Whitney Biennial I have ever seen,” while the next paragraph begins, “’Day for Night’ is filled with work I’m not interested in…..” –then switches gears with, “Nevertheless, the show is a compelling attempt to examine conceptual practices and political agency, consider art that is not about beauty,” etc. He talks some more about what he doesn’t like (“The show is not without problems…” “This brings us to an irksome feature of this show and many like it…”) before flipping back to, “A number of artists stand out….” so that by the time we finish we’ve completely forgotten that he’s writing about work he’s “not interested in.”
This is the dilemma of full-time critics—they have to write about a lot of stuff, so they either have to like a lot of stuff or write about a lot of stuff they don’t like and in doing so they don’t want to come off as too dismissive, lest they get a reputation like Hilton Kramer’s.
This year, in “When Cool Turns Cold,” a thoughtful analysis of what he aptly calls “the Art School Biennial,” Saltz makes it almost to the end before falling into the trap saying, “On the upside, [the curators] Momin and Huldisch should be congratulated for mounting a thoughtful show that, while academic, is neither dogmatic…nor sprawling…nor sexist…” and concludes with an upswing, reaching for a “striking moment” or two when, earlier on, he already said it all: “There’s little that’s overtly sexual, shocking, angry, colorful, traditionally beautiful or decorative, almost no madness or chaos. The show doesn’t alchemically add up to more than the sum of its parts.”
Peter Schjeldahl starts off by calling this year’s Biennial “the most poetic I can remember” but gives an example of that only at the end, a work that “enchanted” him, while the in-between is filled with descriptions of things that didn’t, his detailed attention giving them more weight than they deserve. I must say he nails the Rachel Harrison experience, however, when he calls her, “the leading light of new sculpture…[who knows] precisely what she means—and you would too if you were just the littlest bit smarter than you are.”
Holland Cotter (who took no joy in the Armory building itself, calling it a “moldering pile”) does the flip-flip thus: “The 2008 edition is…an unglamorous, even prosaic affair, the installation plain and unfocused” with works that have “uncharismatic surfaces, complicated backstories,” followed by, “There are certainly dynamic elements” followed by, “But again, the overall tenor of the show is low-key…” and then “Hard-liner believers in art as visual pleasure will have, poor things, a bitter slog. But if the show is heedless of traditional beauty, it is also firm in its faith in artists as thinkers and makers rather than production-line workers meeting market demands.”
However, I would posit that if Biennial artists were truly “thinkers and makers” their output would be more engaging. Also I want to point out to the world at large that we, as artists, seek “visual pleasure” not because we’re playing to the market but because we are, ahem, visual artists and therefore, not coincidentally, concerned with things visual.
The Biennial, if not beloved—in fact often called “the show you love to hate”—but which at least used to generate excitement, has been slowly losing gas to the point that it’s become so inconsequential that maybe next time these guys can forgo writing about it altogether and put their talents toward covering events that, pro or con, stir their souls.
January 28, 2008
This week in The New Yorker (January 28, 2008) Calvin Tomkins writes about John Currin and his pornographic paintings, a new group to be exhibited in London at the Sadie Coles gallery in March. It made me think of Currin’s show around this time last year at Gagosian uptown, which I went to see only at the last minute. While many people I respect, including Peter Schjeldahl, have long thought that Currin is an important artist, I never got it. When once, in conversation, Schjeldahl mentioned how much he admired Currin’s technical ability, I began wonder have we, in the art world, such low expectations that ability comes as a surprise? In the field of illustration it’s a given—you can’t get in the door without it—and to compound the problem for me, Currin’s style has always seemed uncomfortably close to that of illustrator C.F. Payne who, having worked for TIME and Rolling Stone, is now doing the back covers of Reader’s Digest and threatening to turn into the Norman Rockwell of our time.
I believe execution is only one component of painting, and important only to the degree that it supports the content. God knows, painters with great technical ability have been using it in the service of poor image choices since the beginning of painting. Ideally, in painting or any form of art, execution and concept should merge so completely that we’re no longer aware of either; we’re not thinking, “How did he do that?” or “What a cool idea!” but are one with an experience that goes beyond words, beyond thinking.
Therefore Currin’s technique didn’t interest me because his content didn’t interest me; I found it cynical, mannered, and soul-less in the extreme. And when I read that this most recent show was “long on pornography,” getting on the Lex to see it began to seem even more like an effort not worth undertaking. Am I anti-porn? Not necessarily, although it’s not an active part of my life, and whatever prurient interest it may once have held has been dulled by the sheer amount of it in galleries. That, plus the waves of porn-derived art that seem to hit, every few years, the schools in which I occasionally teach, have left me pretty porn-ed out. I feel about porn the way I do about Christmas music, which is that over-exposure has rendered me incapable of mustering any response whatsoever.
So the Currin exhibition had three strikes against it—besides being Currin, it was uptown and pornographic—until I read a short panegyric by Schjeldahl in The New Yorker, accompanied by a tiny reproduction of a straight-forward portrait of the artist’s young son, one of two such paintings in the exhibition, which Schjeldahl described simply as “ravishing.” It was enough to get me on the subway.
And it was worth it. The two small paintings, interspersed inexplicably among graphically sexual ones (since I don’t believe in psychoanalyzing artists or attempting to guess their intentions, I’m not going to comment on this bizarre aspect of the exhibition), were painted with all the attention and tenderness of Chardin, and indescribably beautiful. Taking up the challenge in the artists’ adage that the hardest subjects to paint are sunsets and babies, Currin’s skill enabled him to avoid the obvious trap of sentimentality; far from sappy, these paintings are lovingly observed and alive with all of the aching delight of parenthood. They were enough to make me swallow my words and admit to myself (and now, finally, to Schjeldahl) that Currin is, or rather can be, a wonderful painter.
I believe execution is only one component of painting, and important only to the degree that it supports the content. God knows, painters with great technical ability have been using it in the service of poor image choices since the beginning of painting. Ideally, in painting or any form of art, execution and concept should merge so completely that we’re no longer aware of either; we’re not thinking, “How did he do that?” or “What a cool idea!” but are one with an experience that goes beyond words, beyond thinking.
Therefore Currin’s technique didn’t interest me because his content didn’t interest me; I found it cynical, mannered, and soul-less in the extreme. And when I read that this most recent show was “long on pornography,” getting on the Lex to see it began to seem even more like an effort not worth undertaking. Am I anti-porn? Not necessarily, although it’s not an active part of my life, and whatever prurient interest it may once have held has been dulled by the sheer amount of it in galleries. That, plus the waves of porn-derived art that seem to hit, every few years, the schools in which I occasionally teach, have left me pretty porn-ed out. I feel about porn the way I do about Christmas music, which is that over-exposure has rendered me incapable of mustering any response whatsoever.
So the Currin exhibition had three strikes against it—besides being Currin, it was uptown and pornographic—until I read a short panegyric by Schjeldahl in The New Yorker, accompanied by a tiny reproduction of a straight-forward portrait of the artist’s young son, one of two such paintings in the exhibition, which Schjeldahl described simply as “ravishing.” It was enough to get me on the subway.
And it was worth it. The two small paintings, interspersed inexplicably among graphically sexual ones (since I don’t believe in psychoanalyzing artists or attempting to guess their intentions, I’m not going to comment on this bizarre aspect of the exhibition), were painted with all the attention and tenderness of Chardin, and indescribably beautiful. Taking up the challenge in the artists’ adage that the hardest subjects to paint are sunsets and babies, Currin’s skill enabled him to avoid the obvious trap of sentimentality; far from sappy, these paintings are lovingly observed and alive with all of the aching delight of parenthood. They were enough to make me swallow my words and admit to myself (and now, finally, to Schjeldahl) that Currin is, or rather can be, a wonderful painter.
Time changes things in weird ways, so now the truly radical act is to paint something close to your heart—in this case, your infant son. I’m reminded of a conversation between Gerhard Richter and Rob Storr, the curator of Richter’s 2002 exhibition at MoMA, as it was recorded in Art in America:
RS: There is another body of work which is perhaps more surprising than the landscapes in certain ways—the paintings you made in 1995 of your wife and young child. These are very unexpected paintings.
GR: Maybe because there are so many of them.
RS: Both the number and the subject.
GR: The subject? Because there are children in the painting?
RS: Yes
GR: I can’t quite understand why this should be so extraordinary.
RS: It’s unexpected because it seems very private.
GR: Very private, yes. The only difference is that I have become more shameless. I am not as ashamed anymore, and I am not afraid anymore. My fears have abated somewhat. I don’t feel as if I have to behave properly. Somehow I finally understood that I am allowed to do what I want.
I’m not suggesting that everyone go out and start painting their kids—that would be awful. But I am saying that forms of art other than those recognized by the academicized avant garde may still be relevant, and that there are more possibilities for content than that derived from the media, a trend that has gone on at least twenty-five years too long. It just happens that I’m reading Alex Ross’s The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century, and came across a quote from composer Morton Feldman who said something like, “What looks radical may be conservative and what seems conservative may be radical” (I’ve lost the exact reference and will correct it when I find it). And this paragraph (p.354):
RS: There is another body of work which is perhaps more surprising than the landscapes in certain ways—the paintings you made in 1995 of your wife and young child. These are very unexpected paintings.
GR: Maybe because there are so many of them.
RS: Both the number and the subject.
GR: The subject? Because there are children in the painting?
RS: Yes
GR: I can’t quite understand why this should be so extraordinary.
RS: It’s unexpected because it seems very private.
GR: Very private, yes. The only difference is that I have become more shameless. I am not as ashamed anymore, and I am not afraid anymore. My fears have abated somewhat. I don’t feel as if I have to behave properly. Somehow I finally understood that I am allowed to do what I want.
I’m not suggesting that everyone go out and start painting their kids—that would be awful. But I am saying that forms of art other than those recognized by the academicized avant garde may still be relevant, and that there are more possibilities for content than that derived from the media, a trend that has gone on at least twenty-five years too long. It just happens that I’m reading Alex Ross’s The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century, and came across a quote from composer Morton Feldman who said something like, “What looks radical may be conservative and what seems conservative may be radical” (I’ve lost the exact reference and will correct it when I find it). And this paragraph (p.354):
“Everything begins in mystique and ends in politics,” wrote the French poet Charles Peguy in 1910. Morton Feldman, the maverick modernist who loved Sibelius, applied this epigram to twentieth century music, describing how grandiose ideas are made ordinary with the passage of time and become fodder for a power struggle among ideologues and pedants. “Unfortunately for most people who pursue art, ideas become their opium,” Feldman said, “There’s no security to be one’s self.”