Not being able to do it.

"Not being able to do it is part of being able to do it."

Leon kossof

The thing you fear the most, and his wife. Ideas

Taliesin ideas

Orpheus reversed ideas

Piggyback

Is it because it’s no longer any good?

'Hermann Broch was obsessed by this in the 1930s. He said: ‘Painting has become a totally esoteric matter relevant only to the world of museums; there is no longer a general interest in it or its problems; it is virtually a relic of the past.’

Broch, the great innovator of the novel, the defender of Picasso and Joyce, did not wish to attack modern painting for its modernity. He had merely (with a distinct sense of melancholy) defined its situation. His words were surprising at the time; they are no longer surprising. In the past few years I’ve conducted a little poll and innocently asked people I meet who is their favourite contemporary painter. I’ve noticed that no one has a favourite contemporary painter and that most people can’t even name one.

Such a situation would have been unthinkable thirty years ago at the time of Matisse and Picasso. Since then painting has lost the weight of its authority; it has become a marginal activity. Is it because it’s no longer any good? Or because we’ve lost the taste or the feeling for it? In every case it now seems that the art that forged the style of each era, accompanying Europe through the centuries, is abandoning us – or, we are abandoning it.'

Milan Kundera

Where are we going with this?

You shall know us by our noses!

I love Mira Schor's writing and I really enjoyed her recent essay, Reviewing the reviews of “Songs for Sabotage,” with some help from Leon Golub. Especially her honesty about inter-generational cattiness, or jealousy of the young.

But what really stuck with me was her mention of ‘Trite Tropes’ where she seems to be talking about a particular kind of painting. She describes it like this;

“In such paintings, figurative and narrative, many of which emerge from BFA and some MFA painting programs in the US, in direct contradistinction to what one feels is straining for individualism, for some reason everyone always seems to look alike, people even all having the same nose, from artist to artist.”

Later she describes seeing an image that has just such a nose.  This particular painting also has,

 “… a highly established faux naive outsider artist style of representation.”

 She describes how she and her colleagues always cull such art from slide juries. Interestingly, she indicates that this kind of art would have some value;

“… if markers of redeeming self-criticality and meta-stylistic content were present. “

On the one hand, I think I know what she means (Is it an Alex-Katz-style nose?). On the other, I’m quite attracted to this kind of painting. It may even be possible, I'm slightly ashamed to admit it,  that this is the kind of painting I do. I certainly don’t have any redeeming self-criticality or meta-stylistic content. Also, my mediocre drawing skills often result in a faux naïve outsider artist style of representation. But then I’m also not making any claims that my paintings have any value as such. Well, they have value to me, but not to anyone else, and certainly not in an Art Establishment context.

Product

“When Wallace Stevens said “Money is a kind of poetry,” he could have applied it to certain precincts of the art world, where it is a kind of criticism. Those who believe that the cream always rises to the top, and that success in the marketplace is a reliable measure of an artist’s ambition, tend to be white male critics.”

John Yau

All art history is a narrow, partisan, curated reading of a particular fraction of a particular cultural moment.

The biggest complaint of successful artists presently seems to be that there is too much ‘product’. It’s not just that there are more artists than ever before, but that they are, because of the internet, more visible than ever before.

It’s now impossible to talk about a zeitgeist, or to suggest that artists are predominantly interested in some particular formal issue such as abstraction, figuration, etc. This isn’t because we live in a post-modernist, post-historical time when lots of contradictory ideas, styles co-exist. It’s because it’s plain to see that there is a massive variety of different stuff happening at the same time. But, this has always been the case. It’s just harder to ignore with the internet. You can’t really make a case for a narrow art movement now. We can’t really say that there is a post-post-modernism because there was never really post-modernism or modernism. Not in the great, over-arching way that these movements are talked about. They were never the only game in town. They were never actually the Law. Or, we could say that there were lots of competing modernisms.

Oh my god, we'll all be dead soon!. Thoughts on turning 50.

Alan Hollinghurst recently said that, “…novels are really about young people; they are about how people find themselves and become themselves”

I don’t believe this, but there is some truth in it and it got me thinking that perhaps this is why so many people I know have disengaged with fiction and story as they’ve gotten older. If the narratives that are being focused on are those of young people, why would they (the oldsters) be interested?. Also, is it true that being older means being in a static, stationary position of having ‘found’ and ‘become’ yourself. Surely this isn’t true. And yet it does feel true to say that the narratives/images that might be meaningful for a young person would be different to those that would be significant for an old person.

Does Joseph Campbell’s or Dan Harmon’s Hero’s Journey still apply at 50? I remember the painter Ken Kiff saying that as he got older he became more interested in the images of the desert fathers, the hermits and saints who took themselves into isolation. They seemed to him like a reversed,mirror image of the young Hero leaving home at the start of his/her adventure. If this image is resonant for older people, does it mean that old age is, in a sense, a withdrawal from the world? A disengagement? If so, what stories and images cluster around this? I think it has to do with a kind of bereavement. A bereavement for one’s own death. If being young is about finding and becoming yourself, is being old about dissolving, becoming un-whole? No, that can’t be it.  When I was young, I thought about death a lot (I’ve always been a fun guy). It was something that was going to happen to me. As an old person, I think about death just as much, but differently. As something which is happening to me. The process is happening. Of course, this isn’t exactly true, but that’s how I feel. I think it’s to do with this sense of coming to terms with one’s own death. Like bereaving before someone has died. Do you remember when the the 75 year old broadcaster David Dimbleby got a tattoo? I remember seeing that and thinking, That’s a tattoo on a corpse. Ofcourse, Dimbleby is just as alive as myself, but it was an action that was a distinct missing-the-point. Like all those bucket lists that old codgers tick off ( I speak as an old codger myself). I’ve met plenty of old people who delight in saying that they’re going to grow old disgracefully and there always seems to be something slightly hysterical in their attitude. However I can see that they’re rejecting the image of the wise old person. That’s not fruitful. Stasis and stability is not fruitful. Crazy old codgers are better. But there should be something grave and somber about growing old, shouldn’t there? Look, I don’t want to be on a moral high horse, I think that distraction is a fine technique, and as good a way of dealing with death as any other. But the bucket list model of ageing is different to Yeats’ “Old men should be explorers.” The Desert Fathers were explorers.