wyncko

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Vanalden Cave

...in Tarzana, CA.
Go south on Vanalden until it hits a dead end. Follow the trail and in about 1/2 mile, you'll reach the Vanalden Cave.

Vanalden Cave

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"L'esclave mourant"

Yves Klein, "L'esclave mourant" (the dying slave)...after Michelangelo
Terence Koh, "Cokehead"

The Culture of Narcissism

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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