Indra's Net


James Joyce's masterpiece "Ulysses" follows main character, Leopold Bloom, as he traverses the streets of Dublin during the course of a single day. This is no ordinary day, however. In Joyce's hands, the brief sliver of experience held within two dozen hours of time becomes a vast allegorical passage containing a rich and expansive cosmology. One of the central ideas of Ulysses is that there is no such thing as "ordinary"..that life as it is lived cannot escape the epic significance that our very existence implies. The realness of this transcendent proclamation is somewhat hard to feel when one is awfully bored and has perhaps been spending several listless hours parked in front of the television, but I assure you that even in the most prosaic moments of quotidian reality, the universe might still be found. Maybe that's why such bombastic rhetoric from High Art icons such as Barnett Newman often is so hard to take in today's jaded world. Imagine getting worked up about a single line of white in a red field...it's about as exciting as dirt. I'm not about to bow prostrate in search of Onement before this windbags' pretentious field of ambition and ego...even if they are quite fetching paintings.

Dennis Hollingsworth
So where does that leave abstract artists today ? What do their paintings mean bereft of all the hyperbolic rhetorical heat and flash? In the case of Dennis Hollingsworth, one of my favorite abstract painters in Los Angeles, the answer for me has been found in a recent work I was lucky enough to catch a glimps of hanging barely dry in his Chinatown studio. Dennis is a blogger, and so it's been interesting for me to see a more complete picture of this artist through his online journal. A weblog is afterall, a type of hypertextual network of ideas, people, places, events and images...a "cosmology". The most recent post is just one vector of a vast network that stretches into a deep field of information. So, one day..one post..has contained within it a type of deeper implied significance.

I'm reminded of Indra's Net, a cosmological image culled from Hindu mythology to describe reality as a type of infinite web from which hangs an endless quantity of translucent beads of dew. The surface of every jewel completely reflects every other, and the net as a whole. Likewise, each reflected jewel in itself reflects every other, that reflects every other, that reflects every other, without end, as mirrors to infinity. All of this is a way of saying that embedded within every single ordinary moment is the Universe.

The reason I like this piece by Dennis so much is because I can somehow see with great clarity the accumulation of the seemingly ordinary moments of life into something quite large and extra-ordinary. Dennis writes abouts his paintings in an exciting and action packed manner, often employing a type of poetic prose in which the creative act resembles a terpsichorean sport that plays out on a razors edge, chaos and disorder threatening constantly . The creator must fight his way through these trials and tribulations, somehow holding the piece together until falling exhausted at the end..the painting hopefully still holding. I enjoy and relate to this romantic notion of creativity, and in Dennis' hands it is contrasted from the more mundane aspects of life as a privileged and special act.

This piece is unusually large and was probably quite time consuming to produce....so the ritual has been stretched out over the course of perhaps a month, drawn out into days...ordinary days in ordinary weeks. With the accumulation of time, I start to plot an imaginary map over the surface of this canvas..perhaps a type of log of artistic intent running strangely parallel to the larger universe contained within the artists blog. It is not possible, afterall to separate an artistic practice from the world we live in as such. Between the ecstatic moments of creation..the artist drives home, walks the dog, makes dinner, and so forth. Creativity is part of a larger life..and all lives are ordinary in their own unique way. This might ultimately be the best way of concieving the Creative Act-as but one dimension of a holistic enterprise..perhaps just as ordinary and humble as taking out the trash....but nonetheless imbued with a Universal significance in which all acts are divine.

It's much easier to see G-d in a painting when the artist isn't talking so loudly about it.

JP Munro

JP Munro

About a year ago I had a studio visit with a New York art dealer who was in town and interested in looking at my work. At one point I was telling him about my life and I mentioned that I had been teaching Art History, among other things, for the past six years to make a living. "It must be a real drag being around all those old crusty paintings all day," is an approximation of his response.

It's a peculiar cultural condition, this historical amnesia that is joined with a relentless pursuit of the "next". Every season witnesses the birth of another "star", ushered in with the ritualistic grandeur and pomp that surrounds the coronation of one more prince, one more princess. It's hardly a rare event, but nonetheless each show is reported with a breathless urgency that suggests the arrival of a revolutionary genius, and we rush to bask in the lambent glow of these New Young Visionaries. I first heard about JP Munro, an artist who is more or less my age, and has graduated and entered the world in a sequence generally parallel to my own, in the type of article that is emblematic of this corrupt hype and empty promise. It was frustrating to me as a graduate of The Wrong Art School At The Wrong Time, to see the seamless connection that joined another art school with the world of commerce, and I mistrusted then, as now, the proclamations of greatness and importance that accompany this type of inside arrangement.

JP Munro

But JP is a great artist, and we are interested in many of the same things. It's not his fault that there is a large soulless machine looming above us all, and as I've watched his painting over the years I've come to be captivated and inspired by not only the peculiarity and depth of his vision, but his singular commitment to the world of history and ideas that I, as a teacher, am immersed in on a daily basis. I'm glad he has continued to work and has found success, because as a painter I've come to realize that very few among our ranks are willing to step outside the fashionable box of self-obsessed pessimism, and actually indulge in a genuine reverence for our media. This would entail painting in a very "uncool" enthusiastic way-in this case with both a certain measure of observational naturalism (passing through the eye rather than the camera) and the shockingly "conservative" application of a representational space suggestive of a return to the mimetic origins of Renaissance Pictorialism. That this type of painting would, actually also require some….gulp…talent, might be the reason that it has remained out of fashion for so long. I'm endlessly hearing about how we live an a "de-skilled" age and I have to say that this is a big huge bullshit excuse for lack of chops if there ever was one. It has nothing to do with all art implying the Conceptual, we live in an age where people don't bother to learn how to paint because they can get by without ever having to. This time might now be over.

JP Munro

Yesterday I noticed a few photos online of Terence Koh's recent opening at the Whitney and I realized immediately how the power of JP's work is specifically manifest. The Twentieth Century notion of Art History can best be seen as a mechanistic construction and buttressing of a grand dialectical model of rhetoric and it's subsequent unraveling. Dennis Hollingsworth has written eloquently on this problematic subject, and I would invoke Lyotard as one of the high priests of anti-matter, who's project has embodied this quest to negate the teleological certainties that Modernist Doctrine seeks to reify. In such a model, the narrative validity of historicity is undermined, and there are no real ways to satisfy an inquiry into meaning by looking towards time-based categories. All we are left with are two moments. The Now, and The Eternal.

Koh and Munro are both grasping for the Sublime in arresting and powerful ways, but each version of the Sublime can be thought of as passing through either of these two dimensional conduits. Koh's project clearly propositions it's audience with the seduction of a charismatic Super Star. The brilliant light is the light of persona, of fame, wealth, success..of Narcissism. The Sublime Now is an ecstatic reverie of the Ultra-Hipness of present-a cocaine white fog of being here, being now, being alive. Koh is the Christ like vehicle for the joyous ecstasy of inclusion and exclusion. Through Him, We are joined as One..We belong…We, are all that is. This is a moment of Sublime Now, and it is over as soon as the light switch is turned off.

JP Munro
When I look at the sun and close my eyes I can see the veiny tendrils that feed the cones and retinas in my eye with blood.The tangled conduits remind me of a painting that JP has hanging in his studio, a lush and verdant forest, overunn, and hopelessly dense. This is the forest of History..an impenetrable and infinitely complex jungle of connections and causal paths. Beneath the canopy, protected from the burning light of The Now, in this quiet and shady reprieve, the seeker finds oneness with the Eternal Sublime. Looking to the past is a way of looking at the future. Giambattista Vico has written, among many others, of the cyclical nature of history, and I think that acquiescence to this model is a way of realizing that the past, present, and future are all one movement. Tied together and ultimately indistinguishable.

JP Munro

JP often paints battle scenes, horrific and singular moments of bloodshed and pornographic death. I think about something that he said to me about the power and optimism of Revolutions and the eventual shit that they inevitably devolve into. Despite this realization, in the moment of climax, there is hope, belief, and a feeling that life has worth, even if it ironically must be sacrificed to be realized. The eternal and the now are then in fact not opposed, but each is constantly vibrating into the other state. They are in fact, here, the same thing.

I'm reminded of a passage from "The Crystal World" by JG Ballard that seems like the most fitting way to tie up these thoughts. To me it reads as a pretty accurate description of the universe that JP has created with his paintings. The Sublime that I must conceed is after all both Eternal and Now.

…..this illuminated forest in some way reflects an earlier period of our lives, perhaps an archaic memory we are born with of some ancestral paradise where the unity of time and space is the signature of every leaf and flower. It's obvious to everyone now that in the forest life and death have a different meaning from that in our ordinary lack-lustre world. Here we have always associated movement with life and the passage of time, but from my experience within the forest near Mont Royal I know that all motion leads inevitably to death, and that time is its servant.

Rendering



Richard Dadd worked for nine years on a single painting...and five years on another. I think this one will take a couple more months at least..but I'm not in a hurry. It's nice to be immersed in the act of rendering..of giving form. Becoming is more exciting than being. Things that are finished are dead in a way..

Goethe:
The Godhead is effective in the living and not in the dead, in the becoming and the changing, not in the become and the set-fast; and therefore, similarly, the reason is concerned only to strive towards the divine through the becoming and the living, and the understanding only to make use of the become and the set-fast.

Satoshi Sakamoto




In the Serious Artworld of International Fairs and Biennales...the word "Visionary" seems to have the pejorative stink of unsophistication. Many artists carrying this torch admitedly deal in a currency of formula and cliche (or maybe the word is "kitsch")..but I feel like it would be unfair to dispense wholesale artists who are inspired by the fantastic. Artists such as Satoshi Sakamoto seem unconcerened with the self-conscious ironies of paintings recent history..and more energized by the fertile fields of their own imagination. I would also list Alex Grey, Joe Coleman, and Paul Laffolley as a few of the luminaries in this field who's work might be able to appear comfortably in both Juxtapoz, Art in America....and maybe in a not so far fetched future...Artforum. Not that any of this matters to these artists, who seem enthralled enough with their own muses.

It's great to look at art that isn't too cool for you.

Thousand-Hand

one month..


..has passed since I've been able to get into the studio. January was wall to wall teaching action. I'm beggining to regret taking on so many classes this spring...

These next paintings are all about Eros and "The Gaze".... so will be chock full of beautiful women. Please note: work in progress is just that. For one of the faces I was trying to channel a memory of a girl from Singapore I dated in college. Marco and the others were glad I finally had some time to hang out.

Sandy Olkowski: "Escape from the Known"


Six months ago Sandy Olkowski threw the couch to the curb and jumped on a plane to Thailand. During the interim she has produced two remarkeable bodies of work that each represent this passage through time. Heraclitus once said "No man steps in the same river twice," which is at once a meditation on the linear nature of our perception of being, and an illustration that the "you" that exists now will not be the "you" that dies, nor was it the "you" that was born. The continuity is an illusion that somehow we cling to..or are rather conditioned to cling to. This is because people are always re-enforcing this false notion of being..one that we like to pin words to. My word is "Jacques de Beaufort". At least that's what my license and tax forms say. The long distance runner or desert island survivor will tell you that this word becomes less and less meaningful as it receeds from utterance. "Well, look in the mirror..that's who you are!", the pragmatist would say. But it is not the "you" that grows the hair on your head..or breathes during sleep that they refer to. It's something that remains invisible and hidden from sight. And I'm not sure if it really can be known with words.

"Escape from the Known" is the latest in a series of short stories that represent this journey through "self" and it's relationship to "other". The boundaries of our knowledge of self often lie at the precipice between existence and death, and this is a theme that seems to be a pre-occupation for Sandy. The violent collision of these opposing forces is manifest for her most vividly in the mutual immolation known as a "relationship", or here more poignantly, in the simple dissolution of the mechanism of cogency we take for granted: memory.

  • Escape from the Known
  • False Dichotomies...The "Value" of a Painting


    Rattling around the artblogs recently I've noticed a cloud of thought hovering over the notion of "value" in painting. "How do we determine value in art?"..a question asked (and answered) by Jed Perl, among others in direct response to the vast influx of hedge-fund money that seems to be turning the notion of artworld correctness and propriety upside down. To me it's a curious problem because it represents an alchemical conversion of abstract ideas and concepts into a numerical equivalent in currency. This is ostensibly a method of gauging the collective belief and confidence in any given set of "values" that may be winning out against other values at any particular moment in the popular imagination. The problem is not in the notion that certain ideas seem to be more popular than others within the context of a moment in time (a constantly changing and unreliable measurement), but the tendency for "value" judgements themselves to assume either/or categories, bifurcations that represent false dichotomies .

    Here are a few false dilemna's you may be familiar with hidden in rhetorical questions and statements:

    Are you with us, or with the forces of racism and oppression?
    Are you a Republican or are you a Democrat?
    America - love it or leave it.
    Nobody wins unless everybody wins.

    In art history, the contrived dualisms that best represent this type of Manichean logic have seemed most salient to me in the relationship between two artists such as Fragonard and Greuze. Fragonard came to be eponymous with the Rococo and the artificial tastes of the Aristocratic culture he catered to. On the other hand, inspired by the writing of Romantic thinker Jean-Jacques Rousseau and his insistence on "natural" virtues as an antidote to the corrupt "ancien regime" that hovered like a bloated corpse above French society of the 18th century, Greuze embraced the simplicity and sincerity of common villagers and the "realness" of their everyday lives. We are aware of course that Greuze is the "winning" side in this contest, with the French Revolution virtually annihilating through exile or beheading the patrons that supported Fragonard, who died penniless and forgotten in 1806.

    Looking at Greuze in 2007, it's hard for me to see "naturalness" and sincerity. Instead, I see a pantomime of these virtues that borders on histrionic. The work only communicates simplicity in the way that a caricature might. It is ham-handed, farcical, melodramatic, and calculated. It is only by placing the work in a false dichotomy besides it's conceptual enemy do these characteristics become even a little bit real.

    Dichotomies are common in Western thought, a condition that C.P Snow has described as the "culture of argument". In such a climate, dialogue is characterized by a warlike atmosphere in which the winning side has truth (like a trophy). In such a dialogue, the middle alternatives are virtually ignored. Obviously for art to have numerical value in currency it must pass through this odd mechanism of valuation. And maybe this is why the pugnacious disgust at what Jed Perl has described as "Laissez- Faire" aesthetics might be a little over blown. I'm not advocating a sort of glib nonchalance that represents a superficial and shallow commitment to the world of ideas…but I have to say that today's culture is clearly based on a model of cultural customization that seems to represent a step away from the epic righteousness of dialectical thought. Although it's clear that the impetus for this de-valuation of "value" has more to do with fashion, constantly shifting tastes, i.e. trendiness, and the "democracy of access" granted by new money, the net affect is a logical and positive step away from art as yet an other emblem of ideology (..."-ism").

    It's not insignificant to note that Greuze also died broke and penniless a year after Fragonard..a victim of his own extravagances and a deep inability to manage his own success. In my mind the notion of "victory" and "revolution" are absurd concepts that by necessity create pathological cults of belief. In this way winning and losing are real concepts, but ironically can never be consummated. Today's winner is tomorrow's loser, and the individual is caught in a never ending whirlpool of torment that to me seems the most tragic reality that an artist can know. People that talk about moving art into what's "next" usually do so because they believe their contribution represents the inevitable destiny of the conversation of art history, and see their own art embedded within this sequential narrative. This dissatisfaction can generally be thought of as a subjective affect that I feel is an inevitable byproduct of lamentably mistaking the social-economic matrix of the "artworld" for the broader concept of "art" as a concrete cultural manifestation of applied philosophies-which should ideally transcend notions of game theory and market value. Implicit in this new version of historicity is the diffraction of all Grand Narrative outwards into an multi-dimensional Field of possibility and connectivity. In this way there is no such things as "winning" and "losing", but rather all that exists are vectors of relateability that are separate and distinct from a bounded and linear time-based model that we have come to call "Art History". The emergence of recognizeability or "celebrity" among an enormous pool of abundantly talented artists is merely an epiphenomena of social conditions/networks in a media driven culture along a given axis of causality and should not be regarded as an inevitable destiny that has become manifest.


    "Herein, perhaps, lies the secret: to bring into existence and not to judge. If it is so disgusting to judge, it is not because everything is of equal value, but on the contrary because what has value can be made or distinguished only by defying judgment. What expert judgment, in art, could ever bear on the work to come?"
    -Deleuze

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