sci-fi
Yeah, so what's with all the sci-fi ? When I was growing up my mother was (still is) a librarian, and as a method of daycare, I would spend long solitary hours wandering the stacks and poking my nose into the battered collection of each library she worked at. I think something about science-fiction is very male and pre/adolescent..and it's also usually the province of nerds and outcasts. So it's coded heavily with a language of signs and symbols that a very specific audience is fluent with. There is, of course, a repressed type of voyeuristic sexuality that often forms the strange backdrop to a procession of variously imagined Dystopian nightmares. Science fiction is the most existential and mythopoeic of all of the pulp-genres. The idealism of youth is expressed as a precocious deconstruction of the present-as projected into either an idealized and hopeful future, or nightmarish and hellish descent into the Abyss. As a vital movement, it all ended sometime in the early nineties when reality and fiction merged completely and perfectly. Unfortunately the drab and horrific commonplace of the real future did not end up to be so brilliantly cinematic and vivid as the genre's greatest illustrators had proposed on the covers of magazines like Analog or Urania. But it could still be said to be bewildering and surreal in it's own way. Nevertheless, these paintings represent a seminal moment in cultural history. In a stunning fashion, they express a remarkable intersection between the inner and outer worlds of the individual. Looking back to this time of my life, I remember feelings of anxiety and hope, not only for my own future, and my own passage through life to come..but also for the civilization that surrounded me...which I also perceived as being young and in flux. In a way, not much has changed...
Why Write ?
I began writing this blog by accident...stumbling across Blogger one night in the empty hours between midnight and morning. As the month has passed, I've come to realize that this could actually be a good thing to continue. I remember reading recently in ArtForum's "Scene and Herd" a bit about how nobody ever talks about art in Los Angeles. I think the reason for this is both obvious and unfortunate. I believe that artists should write..we shouldn't be fearful of our beliefs and convictions...we shouldn't hedge our bets by hiding in mute safety. That being said, it is not my intention to judge, critique or complain. This is a project that allows me to organize my own thoughts and clarify the avenues of connectivity that inform my process. I'm not interested in writing a history or enforcing some sort of Procrustean worldview of my own design. Nor is this blog an attempt to demonstrate my own status within a picture gallery of the social scene. I'm not interested in creating "alliances" based on the specious notion that there is some sort of Manichean ideological struggle now brewing in the art world. On the contrary, embedded in this project is an abnegation of the shallow spectacle of narrative. There are only subjective values and interests..it is up to the individual to navigate their own inquiry and mount their own interpretive struggles. I'm motivated by the desire to explore these interests and create meaning by connecting them to the tiny plot of land that my own artistic identity now occupies.
"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
Vintage Sci-Fi painting is better than 95% of the crap out there.
That's just my stupid opinion though...everyone has their own tastes and interests. And that's ultimately what this all has been boiled down to, a sprawling landscape of highly specialized knowledge with no visible dialectical landmarks sweeping us away into a thrilling and unfurling grand narrative. Nope. Not anymore. People that try to make vast summarizing arguments for the purpose of weaving their own projects into a place of eminent relevance are hopelessly misguided and should probably stop. Art should act as its own argument...theory is not a life raft for a bland and mediocre practice. Furthermore, it becomes increasingly apparent that everything is somehow equally relevant...just as the measure of relevance becomes more and more the property of the individual. At the end of the day I think it turns out to be a lot better and more democratic...and really takes a lot of the ego and self-important posturing out of the act of being an artist. Hooray for the 21st century!
Mario Correa
A class of mine from LA Valley college took a trip to Chinatown this past weekend to pop in on some old friends. Our first stop was Mario's studio, where we were greeted by this show-stopping image. Mario has been working on a really interesting series of portraits of figures from strange, esoteric subcultures..like drag racers, hang-gliders...and people who hold odd records in the Guiness Book of World Records. Each portrait is accompanied by an abstract background meant to recall early 20th century abstraction, and to create a linkage between the odd communities that abstraction grew out of while examining the nature of "community" in general. Besides being beautiful works..they do get one thinking about the strange sub-culture that we call "the art-world". The art openings later in the evening kept my mind wandering in this direction..although in the dizzying and chaotic spectacle..there were few answers.But I did feel at the end of the night that despite the arena of competing ambitions and the shared desire to rise from the faceless swarm into glorious notoriety that perhaps we were all authors of this scene..and that ironically, the artist who was being celebrated in each show was not a lone figure on an elevated stage,but perhaps more like a "host" who had merely invited us into his little corner of the world.
Mario 2
Mario gave a great talk to my class, and was quite charming and articulate despite being obviously fatigued from the characteristicly Bohemian long evening before. I think some of the ladies in our group were quite taken with this handsome young artist, and I also know of others who have admired his charms from afar. What's more is that Mario seems completely humble and unaware of his effect on the fairer sex..and is quite down to earth..and yes, sorry girls..he is spoken for.
Bart Exposito
Bart ExpositoAfter Mario's studio, my class hopped over to Bart Exposito's..
I liked this image because it reminded me of a shot of a Barnett Newman painting that also had a spectator observing from close range. Except here the spectator is mirrored by the figurative element rather than dwarfed by a sublime field of color. I was reading some writing in the Saatchi catalog about Bart's work enforcing ",the impersonal and anonymous as a comforting numbness." I disagree..I don't think there's anything impersonal or numb here..it has nothing to do with "lifestyle arbitration" but more to do with a thrilling objectness. The painting is experienced initially as 2 dimensional plane, but it forces it's way past that limitation and becomes fully realized as a material object...one in which color and form are personality traits contributing to the charismatic aura that it projects. These are beautiful and serene objects..and despite the obvious and easy reference to the 60's..I feel they are timeless and cannot be held within such a narrow interpretive field. They are contemporary exemplums of a long and esteemed tradition that stretches not only into a rich and fertile past, but into a hopeful and robust future where, yes, perhaps painting does "Triumph" after all.
