It was the first time that I’d been so captivated I had to buy the painting! I was a sophomore in college. The painting was called “Sailboats.” It was an interpretation (i.e. a copy…or, shall we say, “appropriation”?) by a senior art major of a work by Lyonel Feiniger.

Lyonel Feiniger, Sailboats (1929)

Retrospectively, I can’t be sure which came first: did I see this painting in the Senior Art Majors Show before I chose Feiniger for my term paper in Art Appreciation? Or had I chosen Feiniger to research before I made the connection with this painting in the Senior Show? Whatever the order, there was a meeting, a convergence of the eye/the mind/the heart. For a kid from a small town whose only exposure to painting was working for a General Contractor, that meeting was less a signal of the growing maturity and sophistication of a 19 year old than it was awaking to another dimension in life. Honestly…it felt like what I imagine painters must have experienced when they discovered (or, more accurately, invented) what we now take for granted in a painting: the 3^rd dimension. Oh, sure, it was “there” all along…but where was it in visual renderings, before it began to show up on paper or canvas? (I wonder…can an artist paint something s/he doesn’t see?)

Lyonel Feiniger, Spiller Day on the Sea

I can’t say any longer what it was about Feiniger that so captured my attention back in the day. It clearly wasn’t a prior exposure to art; nor was it a body of knowledge telling me what I was seeing. The best I know how to say: it was a meeting, a face off with my nascent perceptive, aesthetic and critical skills. And why was it Feiniger I was facing? Well… maybe a “second tier” artist was about as far as I could reach…who knows? But in that moment I felt like a curtain was lifted or some protective film was peeled away to reveal an inside that was now out there, right before my eyes. You don’t forget moments like that…even, and maybe especially, when they go unarticulated. They are felt deeply and personally and profoundly even after they are gone.

So… as I was reading a review of the current show at The Whitney Museum, Lyonel Feiniger: At the Edge of the World, I began to hear echoes…echoes about how Feiniger’s “glassy perfectionism” was void of “the spiritual,” or that in his quest for “harmonic balance” and “cosmic structure” he gives us an art of excessively sharp-edged, intersecting planes with titles like “Broken Glass” that can stand as an emblem of the tenor of his characteristic work. And what is most characteristic about the creator of these pictures at the Whitney? …That he is a master of technique, but one whose feeling for an art of order and balance is not emotionally engaging however much it may have gripped him profoundly. In other words, his mastery of the technical skills of artistry has succeeded in

Lyonel Feiniger, Mill in Spring

delivering to us only works that are cool and un-engaging? Competent but not compelling? Distinguished but detached? Yeah, that seems to be it. They may express something that was profound for him, “but, frankly, it leaves us cold.” (Ouch!)

At this point as I’m reading, it’s like some old nostalgic urge wants to enlist me in Feiniger’s defense. But then a comment pops into mind from one of my own blogs… I wrote: There’s nothing wrong with the elegance of technical brilliance. It can be stunning in its execution. But if that’s all it is—stunningly executed—it’s just empty…of life. With Feiniger, as with Mondrian, technical mastery is not all there is. Sharp, defining forms illumined by planes of colored light open an inner eye to forces, mysteries, shaping and directing each life in a profoundly impersonal, universally spiritual way. (Were Feiniger Chinese, we might accuse him of trying to portray the Tao!) Warm and fuzzy or firey and furious is fine, occasionally even necessary. But the passion of the private and personal need not disqualify being engaged by the poignant and piquant presence behind the curtain of appearances. That a feeling for harmonic order and balance fails to be emotionally engaging may say more about our numbness to feeling than it does about anything true.

What’s troubling about my own comment is that I link it to the comments about Feiniger, how he’s just not connecting however profoundly he poured feeling into his art. (“Nice try…I’m just not moved, Mr. Feiniger.”) And then, I cannot help but wonder whether these observations aptly characterize my own work as well? I mean, maybe what first captured my imagination so many years ago was actually a recognition…seeing not an unfeeling, detached, stranger but a friend I had yet to meet…someone whose lines and planes of light I could recognize as familiar?

When I employ hard line, color planes, asymmetrical (harmonic) balance and esoteric forms…pouring feeling into them (just as

Lyonel Feiniger, Yachts

Feiniger did)…there is no guarantee that they will engage anyone else. And, in fact, hard lines, sharp edges, precision, pure color free of the brush’s mark on the picture plane…these all are associated with impersonal, technical distance. I use them like film.

It remains a fact, a stubbornly infuriating truth, that no matter how cleverly articulate you are, how passionately or eloquently you affirm its presence: feeling cannot be engendered from second-hand experiences. The form feeling takes in any work of art is not and cannot be engaged declaratively any more than one can laugh genuinely on demand. It may be there in the process of creation; it may find its way into the form creation takes. But if there is no look of recognition, there is no feeling. When nothing puts the heart in motion, the head hasn’t got a chance. Experience begins with recognizing what’s going on. It takes a measure of cultivated sensitivity to respond—not with apprehension or indifference, but interest—to something we neither recognize as familiar nor understand. And it takes courage…the courage to care about anything other than ourselves, to realize that sometimes a stranger can be the friend we did not know we had. What an amazing experience when that happens!

Lyonel Feiniger, Marine Blue

“So, Lyonel…a big shout out to you for that experience way back when! It’s made all the difference in the world.”

Lawrence Bowden

Lyonel Feiniger (1871 -1956) is getting some recognition. You’ve probably never heard of him because for most critics and art historians he’s considered something of a “second tier” artist. The typical take on Feiniger often goes like this: more substance than Jacques Villon…but less scintillating or forceful than Dufy or John Marin.

Jesuits III

Feiniger was one of the first to be appointed as a “master” at the Bauhaus and yet, while we hear much about Klee, Kandinsky, and Albers, his work is rarely seen and even more rarely admired. Nonetheless, three major exhibitions of his painting, drawings, and photography are underway in Germany, the United States, and Canada through next summer. (Does this mean that you can’t have an orchestra without the second violins? Oh, never mind….)

When I was in college, “Art Appreciation” was required for graduation. I wasn’t eager about enrolling in anything “required,” but, fortuitously, I loved this class. It was part art history, part aesthetics, and all passion for the language of art—vivaciously and seriously impressed upon us by our professor, who, by the way, was one of the few on the faculty without a Ph.D. (Many classes with many Ph.D.s since has convinced me that there is no substitute or equivalency for passion when it comes to knowing one’s subject enough to convince anyone else it’s worth caring about.)

When we got to the Bauhaus and Modernism it was as though I had found a place that felt familiar while, at the same time, didn’t quite feel like home. I had been introduced to something beyond or outside of my own personal history, something that was clearly novel, foreign even, and yet there it was expressing what I could feel and recognize without really understanding why. When it came that time for the obligatory “term paper” in Art Appreciation, the more astute of my classmates chose an artist or subject for their papers about whom there were actually entire books written. Being a naive contrarian, I chose Lyonel Feiniger…only to discover in my research that I was lucky if I found a paragraph or two about him within a book.

What I learned by choosing one of the “second violins” was that I couldn’t rely on someone else’s thinking to tell me what I was supposed to see or how I was supposed to feel about Lyonel Feiniger. If I wanted a paper long enough to avoid disaster I’d have to discover and write those things for myself. I was forced into a lot of looking hoping to find something to say other than, “Oh, I like that,” or, “That’s a piece of crap….” Mrs. Hamilton (the professor) had little tolerance for opinion in lieu of substance. That much I knew. What I didn’t know was anything else—how to speak about what I was actually feeling and seeing in Feiniger’s painting. I did poorly.

Only later, a good bit later, did I realize that my problem was not that I was just an inarticulate intellectual light-weight. Staring into Feiniger, I naively had placed myself face to face before the mirror of Art itself. The aim of art is in-sight, understanding the essential life of feeling. Having never been taught to see, having no appreciation for art as a language, and having few textual materials to fall back on…I barely knew what to think, much less how. I’d chosen Feiniger because his art struck some kind of chord. But while the heart must have had its reasons for that choice, my head was dumb about them. What initially was an appealing, even familiar feeling

The Green Bridge

was turning into something that registered more like oafish stupidity. Face to face and I couldn’t understand.

If we look at a work of art and it fails to register, when we don’t know what to think or we have no feeling for it…is it that what we see simply isn’t to our taste? Is it that the artwork itself has no feeling in it; it’s just bad art? Or is it that we fail to recognize the feeling being expressed? Maybe that feeling we miss is like an anonymous face in the crowd—human by definition but not yet a person because we just don’t know them.

If all thinking begins with seeing, when we don’t know what to think about a work of art, it’s likely we’re not seeing it. There may be something in our visual field, but it is not yet an experience when we don’t know what to think. What’s there in the absence of experience, what registers in the visual field when we don’t know what to think, is an opinion. Opinions are very democratic; everyone has one…no experience or thought required. To be other than opinionated is to be educated.

Knowing what to think about a painting (or, better, how to think about art) does not—as I have said before—reduce it to so many words. Putting any work of art to words is merely an act of recognition, seeing a person you know in a crowd of faces. Just as a rest, a deliberate silence placed on a musical line, helps create the melodic line…finding the words to help us think about what can only be felt rather than said enlarges our capacity both to experience and know what’s going on.

Art is the form feeling takes when it is most elegant. For example, music is the form sound takes when it is felt; dance is the form movement takes when it is felt; poetry or literature is the form words take when felt; and one might even say that architecture is the form we give light and space when they are felt. Sometimes these forms are subtle and refined; sometimes they are blunt and brutal. But art is always felt thought. Not knowing what or how to think about art is a symptom of not knowing how to recognize or think about feeling. At best feeling may simply be confused; worse, it may become dangerous.

Art educates feeling. To neglect artistic education is to neglect to educate our feeling. To most people (especially politicians and

Sunset

ideologues) the idea of educating feeling, developing its scope and quality, seems absurd. And yet without that education feeling becomes an emotional stupefacient and runs easily into mob-headedness over which thought and reason have little, if any, control.  More than fifty years ago the philosopher Susanne Langer summed it this way:

Art education is the education of feeling, and a society that neglects it gives itself up to formless emotion. Bad art is the corruption of feeling. This [corruption, the failure to educate our feeling] is a large factor in the irrationalism which dictators and demagogues exploit.

(In Part II of this blog post I’ll come back to feeling and the question of its absence in Feiniger’s artwork and mine.)

Lawrence Bowden

“You know, I’ve spent my whole life going to school, taking classes, doing shows, trying to follow the rules and get it right…and look! WTF?!”

Magic

The exasperation I heard this artist expressing at the opening of the Willie Shouse Retrospective currently on view in Riverviews’ Craddock-Terry Gallery was not so much professional jealousy as it was genuine, quizzical astonishment. Here was a respected, talented, widely collected and established Lynchburg artist who has invested years of time, money, and energy cultivating skills that are generally required for such recognition. And now here s/he was: in the middle of the Craddock-Terry Gallery surrounded by an audible buzz of enthusiasm for another Lynchburg painter who, in his lifetime, was hardly recognized as an artist—and yet, in barely a decade’s activity, with no formal training or refined materials, Willie had created a body of work that was flying off the walls and into the cash box! WTF indeed?

Untitled

Willie’s craft is crude, or maybe “rough-hewn” would sound more polite. He painted on whatever he could find for nothing or next-to-nothing…motorcycle crates, construction refuse, bed sheets or whatever available fabric could be drawn across a scrap wood frame to hold it. We’re not talking sophisticated stretcher bars here! There is no uniformity to the size, shape, or weight of the completed paintings. (In fact, I’m told, one of the pieces about the size and shape of a small kitchen table weighs over 100 pounds!) The materials that contain them are unrefined, purely functional forms…places to paint.  Onto these surfaces he’d apply house paint, latex, acrylics, dyes or (if he needed burnt umber) tobacco juice.

Willie had an eye for color, perhaps the most striking feature of his images, and probably composition. I say “probably” because in the pieces that work there is an internal cohesion that is something more than merely aesthetic. In his best work one sees a story and not just the suggestion of one. By contrast, in other of his compositions all we get are random fragments, broken chunks of a dream declared over by affixing his signature to them, probably because that’s about all he could do. Just the same, these are paintings with a purpose. Like so much of self-taught art, they serve a function for their creator that has little or nothing to do with money as their driving force. Rather their purpose is highly personal, insistent, and as intimate as the pages of a diary. And yet even though the details of the purpose they express remain enigmatic, one has no problem accessing the rich feeling and emotion they contain. The felt work is energetic and immediate. And this may be part of what makes them, as a body of work, both compelling and disturbing. Color not with standing, there is darkness and there are demons here that live side by side with  holy spirits, comic capers, gentleness and Love. They’re playing together—kind of like real life.

Memory Bank

Minstrel

What intrigues me about this show is that it has an almost charismatic attraction. It generates enthusiasm in both the more sophisticated—aficionados of folk as it were—and those less self-consciously attentive to trends. What accounts for that? The discovery (or the invention) by the Art Establishment of “folk art” is a 20^th century phenomenon that dates to the 1930s. But interest in this area of the human arts has literally exploded in just the last decade or two. Ginger Young, who owns and operates a gallery in Chapel Hill devoted entirely to self-taught artists, reports that in 1990 fewer than 10 museums included contemporary folk art in their collections; today there are more than 50…. The annual Outsider Art Fair in New York has marked its tenth anniversary, and Atlanta’s Folk Fest routinely attracts 10,000 collectors, dealers, and artists every August. Clearly, this art has an audience. And just as clearly, having been given the imprimatur of the Art Establishment with its cadre of sophisticated curators, collectors, and dealers there’s money to be made. Now it’s easy to find a plethora of manufacturers who mimic a folk or naïve look in order to capitalize on the interest. (Just do a quick “folk art” or “outsider art” search on ebay and you’ll see what I mean.) But such a cynical view cannot account for its appeal any more than it can account for this work being made in the first place.

I rather imagine we are drawn to these arts by something that has more recently disappeared from so much in the sophisticated fine arts. I’d call it “presence.” In the sixties we called it “soul.” Presence is hard to define because it’s a quality we recognize only when it’s there—in the same sense we recognize that a “person” is more than a human life form. There is reciprocity when there is presence, a relationship awakens that makes a connection of one with another. In place of presence conventional and contemporary art has become more interested in impressing us with technique or technical brilliance. There’s nothing wrong with the elegance of technical brilliance. It can be stunning in its execution. But if that’s all it is, it’s just empty…of life. The marvel of art is that it brings form to life, it does not take the life out of it. When one’s skill and technical mastery wring from its presence any evidence of human touch or any intimacy an artist may have had with their work…this is not purity, it is sterility.

Fly & Jump

Among self-taught artists there is no dissociation of art from life. This, I think, is what lends an authenticity or genuineness about it, something we seem to yearn for these days. It’s almost as though the absence of those conventional artistic skills signal something real, immediate, and sincere. It’s like there is a raw charm reflected from work that has been created without fear of reproach, with a kind of strength drawn from the courage to bare one’s soul without regard for rules and conventions. Good self-taught art is nothing if it is not honest and heartfelt. Ginger Young put it this way:

This “raw charm” you mention is precisely what makes self-taught art so arresting and compelling. The years of rigorous training undertaken by legions of fine artists may in fact drain their works of power and immediacy. Obviously, everyone is different; but I cannot imagine that Howard Finster would have kept the same sharp perspective on the world — and the hereafter! — had he earned an advanced degree at the Corcoran or the School of Visual Arts.

Can Willie’s work hold its own with the likes of Nellie Mae Rowe, Mose Tolliver, or Purvis Young? You’ll have to decide…that’s part of the appeal. Regardless, Lynchburg is fortunate to have had Willie Shouse. And we are fortunate to have Riverviews Artspace recognize the contribution he made to the life of the arts in our community. How sad he couldn’t have enjoyed that recognition while he was with us.

Lawrence Bowden

My paintings may never be in a museum, but Michael Wong’s work will.

Michael is a young artist from the Twin Cities (Minneapolis/St. Paul). In March of 2010 we were fortunate enough to have an exhibition of his work in the Craddock-Terry Gallery. One of the great things about having a studio at Riverviews Artspace is the opportunity it often affords me not only to meet but also to talk with artists who bring their work to Lynchburg.

website: www.michaelwongartist.com

Michael Wong is among the most interesting and unique people I have met. It didn’t take very long in conversation to learn that he takes his art very seriously and is very serious about where he’d like his art to take him—and it’s not to the bank (although, he admits, that would be nice too)! It’s to the museum. When I asked him, “Where do you see your work hanging? Or who do you see buying your things?” He didn’t hesitate. His answer was so nearly spontaneous and resolute that it was more like a statement of fact than an aspiration. “In a museum,” he said, “that’s my goal…to have my work in a museum, you know, to have it preserved and archived. That’s what I want to do.” Now, I don’t know how many artists set out with the museum in mind. Michael may not be unique in that respect, but by the same token his work strikes me as though, indeed, a museum is it’s proper home.

For one thing, the sheer physical size of his major pieces nearly precludes finding a domestic residence! And then there is what I’d have to call their “cultural size”… and by that I mean both the sweep of his vision across the mythos of cultures West and East and the aesthetic wells from which he draws, West to East and back again. Using basically a pencil, paper and years of time, he creates with the most basic of colors (tones of gold, grey, black and red) vast iconic or surreal landscapes. He does so with such meticulous detail and precision that they become new worlds at once strange and yet discernable. They invite and demand something of us more than a sale. It seems pretty clear that what’s going on in this art is not primarily about the money Michael could be making with his craft. It may seem an odd thing to say, but his images are as variously humorous, disturbing, confounding, provoking, and always as interesting as culture itself.  So it’s almost as though a cultural archive is the only place equipped philosophically and functionally to hold them.

What animates Michael’s art is like the narrative of a Gordian knot. By “narrative” I mean a story that locates who he is with who we are in the stories that compose the patterns of our culture. It is a narrative born of his experience as an American-Chinese artist. “American-Chinese artist” is a description, not an identity…a description that too easily can culturally isolate what it describes. Why? Because identity is rooted not in biology, but in experience. Whatever descriptive uses we make of the bi-cultural tag, as a label it describes a box. That box can confine and contain a complex of meanings and experiences that a label will never convey. In fact it may even actively inhibit exploration or integration of those experiences into the flow of cultural life. As a dualism, being “American-Chinese” can have the cultural implication that one is actually “neither/nor” or, equally confounding, it can imply that one is “both/and.” My reading (and, admittedly, I don’t really know) is that Michael’s art responds to that enigma in a way that rejects naïve cultural/bi-cultural categories. The alternative to being pushed onto one side or the other of the dualism is to transform being two into being something new. As the United States grows increasingly multi-racial and multi-cultural, where and how we locate our identity as individual people with interwoven histories will become an increasingly imperative challenge if we are to survive as a People. Michael’s work is important because he shows us one way to do that, a way to embrace differing strands of our history while simultaneously weaving them into a cord that transforms our experience rather than fraying it with difference. Michael sets his task this way:

As a American artist of Chinese descent, I identify myself as the other outsider, one who is neither grounded in western or eastern identity, and employ my feelings of cultural isolation to create new representations of identity and history.

“New representations of identity and history…” This, to my way of thinking, is why Michael’s goal is most likely to be realized: because this is what museums preserve. They are repositories of history and identity, archives from which we may discover elements of material and aesthetic culture that form the narrative, tell the story of who we are and what distinguishes us as a People.

Michael’s art does not simply record, catalog, or collect elements of our cultural story, or even recover and integrate its missing persons or pieces in the way an historian would. Rather, he constructs new representations, visual complements that clearly connect to but enlarge the possibilities of the dominant cultural narrative. He does this in an intriguing way….

I imagine him over hearing a conversation among iconic figures and events, persons and historical moments of near mythic proportion in the West and the East. Imagine, for example, folks like Erasmus, Mao, Edgar Allen Poe,Odd Job and the Buddha making up the story of who we are and how we live?! (They have, you know.) What I see in Michael’s art then is an outcome of that conversation. An invention in form and comment that is created with the tools of being an other outsider plied to cultural stuff that has given form and created the history that identify the West and the East. He draws those cultural materials into something new, something that re-imagines visually and aesthetically the social, political, and cultural topography.

Michael’s work is as huge physically as it is imaginatively. Like the iconic persons and events he engages with his art, the art itself is larger than life. A single work or two will consume an entire gallery wall or extend from ceiling to floor like a giant scroll that even by exhausting its space has yet to unroll the whole story. On one wall, in a drawing it took literally years to complete, is a landscape that resembles a mural one might find in a Chinese temple or manor house…and yet not exactly. It’s something else. Looking carefully, you discover a vaguely identifiable event—like that of Chinese laborers building the railroads in the 19^th century American west. The event is historically familiar…and yet we see it incorporated into an environment that is altogether new and quite unfamiliar. It wakes us up not only to what we have assumed into our cultural awareness, but to what has been excluded from it. More importantly, we’re invited to see something new, something that has been transformed or born out of that event that cannot be reduced simply to either “American” or “Chinese.” Transformation means not that we come to see the same old familiar things differently, it means that we actually see different things.

What he does large has a delightfully playful corollary small. Lying on a table you find a stack of cards. On each is a single figure or image of iconic status meticulously drawn almost as though it were a cartoon graphic. And throughout the deck like wild cards, the skull and cross bones calls us to attention, to beware of what we make of what we see. Here then is a collection of images that could be shuffled into a hand or posted on the wall and ordered as variously and uniquely as the individual player and his imagination chooses. His mind will order up meaning indifferent to the time and place from which the images come. The order we create forms a narrative, like the panel of a graphic novel, a personal story formed into the meaning we make of our cultural inheritance. An experience less like cultural determinism than reading the Tarot!

By grounding his work in neither West nor East, but at the same time employing in unanticipated ways the iconic events and figures that have shaped those cultural traditions, he offers us a new reservoir from which to draw the imaginative possibilities of who we are and who we yet can become.

Lawrence Bowden

I wrote an “artist’s statement” recently for an exhibit in which my work was featured. As part of my “statement” I pointed out that, not being a famous artist, my paintings would not be found in museums…and, because my

Fame & Fortune as an Artform

paintings are not market-oriented, that they are just as unlikely to be found in a commercial gallery. I went on to conclude that even without such accoutrements, neither fame nor fortune need be all there was to painting. Even without being in a museum or commercial gallery, I added, now and then my paintings find their way into juried shows.

That, as an artist’s statement, was about as unembellished, straightforward, matter-of-fact  accurate as I could get. Or so I thought….

Another painter friend of mine, after reading my statement, accused me of being desultory and dyspeptic, whining about not selling my work and complaining that no one was smart enough to understand what I do. Well…I was flummoxed. This assessment so totally confounded me that I began to wonder:  Was that the take away, “dyspeptic”? A belch of bitter rambling? If it is simply accurate and honest to say that “being a famous artist” is not a status I enjoy (and mercifully not one I must endure), is it dyspeptic to say so? Maybe…in a culture that thrives like an air fern on the most hollow aspects of fame and celebrity—from actually being famous to being known for being famous to merely knowing about or hanging around with the famous. Since I’ve only recently begun to paint, to imagine myself clawing into The Art World of the cultured elite so that one day my work might find its home at the MoMA is quite a humorous notion! I’ll pass on pretending to museum status! And galleries, too, for that matter….

Why would I say that my paintings would never be found in a commercial gallery? Is it only a sour puss that can’t find some commercial interest to represent his work?! Fortunately, being retired means I don’t have to make my art

Andy Taking a Picture

earn my living. A commercial gallery is by and large a market driven business. Unless you run a one of those galleries in The Art World that fills the pages of ARTFORUM and virtually drives taste, you want your stock to be artwork that will pay the bills. You want work you can move not to a few very wealthy clients or art patrons, but work that will appeal to a broader spectrum of the art consuming public. And that generally means work that is not too unconventional, esoteric, or disturbing…three descriptors I’ve heard that (aptly) characterize my paintings! It’s not that I intend to be arcane or non-popular…I just don’t paint with the market in mind. In fact, I don’t even have an audience in mind—and that is a serious liability for anyone wanting to live by their sales. The upshot is, I am not a commercial artist. So…I paint dirigibles (at the moment) the way others paint pears, portraits, or country cottages. Do I want to sell my work? It’s always gratifying when someone likes what you’re doing. But, for me, making sales has little to do with making art. Therefore a commercial gallery is not a venue I’m inclined to seek. Is it dyspeptic to say so?

No revelations here. This all seems pretty matter of fact. So where’s the dyspepsia? From  the iconoclasm I guess…I don’t know what else is so acidic! Acknowledging that neither the museum nor the commercial gallery (fame and fortune?) inspires my work, that glomming recognition or tallying sales are not motivators-in-chief…acknowledging what are facts for me may de-stabilize two of the cultural shibboleths we have about “art.” I mean, everybody wants these things, right? How can you be an artist or care about your work if behind, within, or around it isn’t the desire to be in a museum or a commercial gallery? It’s about being recognized and affirmed by all those sales isn’t it? So if it sounds like you’re eschewing those things it must be because you don’t have them and you’re just jealous, that’s why you’re dyspeptic, disillusioned, or disparaging of yourself. To question the prevailing cultural drivers of fame and fortune opens the larger question about the value of painting itself and the motivation for doing it. (Pass the Pepcid please!) These are questions that have been lurking in and around this blog since its inception and they are questions that go to the heart of what we’re doing as artists, and why.

In my last blog I mentioned some observations by Adrian Piper on the practice of art. Freedom and integrity figure prominently in her understanding. Integrity, she says, means that you are not tempted to lie to yourself about what you are doing, or why. One of the lies that artists (and not only artists) frequently tell themselves is that their work is better and deserving of more recognition and higher value than it is. Or that what they are doing “you wouldn’t understand.” Such lies may keep one self-impressed, but they do so at the cost of real freedom. Freedom,

Adrian Piper, "Color Wheel Series 29"

suggests Piper, springs into your awareness from that part of yourself that lies beyond the limitations of your individual ego. It doesn’t have much to do, she says, with self-assertion…and even less to do with personal identity or self-indulgence. To the contrary, freedom is inherently connected to the pleasure of self-transcendence, and so the pleasure of acknowledging your own limitations. Taking the art world more seriously than we regard our integrity and freedom erodes our spirit or whatever it is that justifies our hopes, inspires faith in our talents, and invests the work we do with goodness if not greatness.

Like most others who paint or make art, I take pleasure in showing my work, enjoy it when someone appreciates what I’ve done, and am delighted to make a sale. Hypothetically, would I decline MoMA or being represented by a lucrative commercial gallery in New York or Los Angeles were there the opportunity? Of course not. But that misses the point altogether. If I relied largely upon being recognized or making sales I’d soon stop making art with integrity…which means, I’d soon stop making art. If my work never finds a home in a museum or a commercial gallery, if it never achieves popularity and remains arcane and cryptic to most, does that diminish the value of doing it?

Lawrence Bowden

Let’s face it…most of us ask very little of our painting. If we make a sale now and then, get juried into a show every so often, pick up an occasional award or accolade, that’s enough. Some of us don’t even care all that much about those things, we’re just pleased if we can turn out something we can be satisfied with ourselves. Why ask for anything more? No need, I guess. If we have the means to dine at a four or five star restaurant, order the best the menu has to offer, there’s nothing really to prevent us from picking at our food as we choose…. But what if painting were something more? …something other than juries and galleries and ribbons and income and all that stuff from which we too easily are tempted to construct a pallid social identity?

Robert Henri "New York in Snow"

Robert Henri, who along with John Sloan, William Glackens, and others became identified with the Ash Can School of early 20^th century American art, wrote a remarkable book on the study, appreciation, and practice of art. He called it The Art Spirit. At one point he is asked by an aspiring painter as to whether he thought the work this young artist was doing would pass muster “with the juries.”  Henri responded, I cannot interest myself in whether they will pass juries or not. More paintings have been spoiled during the process of their making, through such considerations, than the judgments of juries are worth. And why no interest in juries? Because for Henri, the object of painting a picture—however unreasonable it may sound—is not to make a picture. The “picture,” for Henri, was a by-product, a trace he called it, of a more fundamental and essential aspect of painting:

The object [i.e. the richer or deeper purpose], which is back of every true work of art, is the attainment of a state of being, a state of high functioning, a more than ordinary moment of existence.

In other words, for Robert Henri painting is not the replication of the ordinary—making a picture—but a means to actually change the way we function, an opportunity to experience the ordinary differently, to enter (in his words) a state of high functioning. That’s how true works of art are realized, how they come into being. “Juries” evidently have little to do with it. If we are to believe Henri, juries are for picture-makers rather than artists.

Now this may strike us a little bit “heady,” lofty, or just obtuse…because unless you’re willing to wade through the whole of Henri’s writings, it’s not obvious what this state is he’s talking about. (Cognitive psychologists might call it “flow” or “being in the zone.” Sort of…) Regardless of what you call it, Henri says that that when painting takes us there our mind is clear of all distraction or preconception and we’re discovering—finding new techniques, seeing things we’d normally overlook or undervalue, rendering our subject as we’d never have imagined. The outcome, the by-product, may be crude or refined; it may look like the work of a child or the way of a master, but it will contain and convey more than a painted picture.

The object of painting once engaged changes our experience. And changes in the way we experience will change the ways we live. That’s the point: If a certain kind of activity, such as painting, becomes the habitual mode of expression it may follow…that the value of a work of art is in the living it inspires. It was Henri’s conviction that the reason so many artists lived to such a great age and “have been so young” at a great age is that they have lived living, whereas most people live dying.

Art, then, is not so much about the by-products we make to sell or show as it is about the practice of living. Our work tells us about our practice.

The provocative contemporary conceptual artist Adrian (Margaret Smith) Piper wrote this about being an artist:  a cornerstone

Adrian Piper "Self Portrait as Nice White Lady" 1995

of your life should be that you seek opportunities to practice, without which your day is not complete…. If you don’t practice, you viscerally feel the gradual process of shutting down, becoming numb, mechanical, unreflective, sad; of atrophying that part of yourself that gives you reason to live. Once you stop feeling that process, you’re lost, and that part of yourself will sink out of reach. By making art the practice of living, she concludes, deeper principles, convictions, and insights will permeate us, our awareness and our experience at all levels. Life will become lived living, a choice to greet joyfully, to celebrate, and honor.

Adrian Piper can afford the five star menu…and I’ll bet she doesn’t pick at her meal.

Lawrence Bowden

Do you think that Freud was right—that artists, basically, are neurotic? Is making art somehow a compensation for some deep-seated psychological maladjustment? Or are artists generally just weird?

My wife and I recently visited a classy rather upscale interior design store—not that we were actually shopping there, understand, but because we were curious. Inside we were soon absorbed by a particular grouping of big, bold, artworks that took command of everything from their place on the walls. I mean, you were not NOT going to see these paintings! As we were looking the floor manager strolled over to engage us and tell us about the painter. In the course of conversation she told us that she had been aware of this painter’s work for some time but had not met the artist until: “One day this very ordinary, tastefully dressed, man came into the store carrying two of his paintings. I assumed that it was the delivery person because he looked so normal. And he was so pleasant and easy to talk to! I had no idea…it wasn’t a delivery person at all. It was the artist…and he wasn’t weird or anything!”

The floor manager’s incredulity–he wasn’t weird or anything–betrays the rap of the weird unconventional artists and art generally get. And just as generally, artists do little to discourage it! (Maybe because they’re weird.) Justly or unjustly earned, “artists” in popular culture are perceived to be enough “different” that it’s become a cliché to say of anyone who looks or behaves out of the norm, “S/he must be an artist” –-a snide way to excuse or explain unorthodox or bizarre behavior or appearance? It’s become such a cultural cliché—that artists are different—that younger, aspiring, artists or artist wannabes have adopted weird as a role, as though it were one of the qualifications of being an artist.

As a teen my son was a pretty conventional high school kid—he loved his Mom, played baseball, and ate apple pie. And he dressed like his friends. When he went off to art school looking pretty much like an ordinary guy, one of the first things he reported was that “everyone here is trying so hard to look different that they all look alike!” I guess you could surmise that he made his statement (at least as far as ‘the look’ goes) by not needing to make one of appearance.

I think this notion about artists being different, or feeling like to be an artist you have to be different to fill the role, is a kind of vestigial remnant from that lost era of the aura. (About “aura,” take a look at my previous blogs) With an aura about “art” comes the notion that artists somehow “see” what others miss and “say” what others need to hear. That’s probably part of it, part of the reason role players think they need to be different and the rest of us sometimes project difference onto the artist. And yet, let’s face it, part of it too is that many artists—the famous ones we know about anyway—really are, or were, just a bit odd. Van Gogh? Warhol? Pollock? Lady Gaga? Banksy? Cobain and all those artists who just happened to pick age 27 as the time to die?  That’s part of it too.

But what intrigues me culturally about the mystique surrounding an artist is that I think that mystique captures something we need to recognize: that there is indeed something important, even essential, about “difference.” There is comfort in the status quo, but not security. Even though conformity, brand identity, and mass-mindedness are big business, and even though we harbor all kinds of parochial suspicions about people or things that don’t fit the familiar or bourgeois…yet (except for ideologues) we seem to tolerate, excuse, or ignore the weird or unorthodox when it comes to art or the project of being an artist. Sometimes we even turn them into icons.

Is it any wonder, then, the attraction that being an “artist” holds for some? The mystique of being artsy weird can appear to be immensely liberating. Where else do we carve out a cultural niche for non-conformity, the freedom to think independently, create imaginatively, and, yes, behave obliquely? It seems like an interesting role to audition for…were being an artist a part one could choose to play. But the serious artists I know and the ones I read about don’t seem cast in life quite this way. In fact most don’t talk about their art as offering them much of a choice at all!  It’s simply something they must do; they cannot not do their art and be at peace with themselves. It’s neither a hobby nor a profession properly speaking. It’s a vocation that comes with an imperative, an insistence or urgency that the artist him or herself understands only in the restive drive that keeps them making art. You never hear about the panic, the desperation, the incredible isolation and barrenness that threatens when a work is released—when it seems as though the last stroke has been brushed, the last note sung, the last word written…. Will you paint, sing, write again? There’s nothing romantic about that kind of existential question.

So really, it’s not about the clothes or the quirkiness or the free spirit we think we see. Being weird or different is not what defines the artist or the vocation s/he serves. Artists may be weird or different or unconventional, but don’t count on it always. What afflicts the artist (and not artists only) is creativity—but, Mr. Freud, does that make them neurotic?!

Lawrence Bowden

And whenever the evil spirit from God

came upon Saul, David would take up his harp

and play; it eased Saul; he felt better, and the evil spirit left him.

(I Samuel 16: 23)

Cy Twombly, "Shield of Achilles"

In my last blog I noted the apprehension Walter Benjamin had back in the 1930s: that with rise of mechanical reproduction art was in danger of losing the aura it once enjoyed. It was that aura Benjamin described that gave art a unique influence in shaping the values and character of our culture as well as its role in cultivating sophistication and insights deemed requisite to personal growth and development. His apprehensions may have been prescient. Only a few days ago I came across this comment in my reading:

Artmaking seems to be work whose value is conceded, but not rewarded. Becoming an artist means…relying almost entirely on yourself in a world that’s more or less indifferent to all that you do. Art may be recognized as a noble profession, but it rarely gets mistaken for a useful occupation.

In fact, the article suggests, “art plays little role in defining and reinforcing the overall values of society.”

It makes you wonder why art should matter?  Well, one answer is: Because religion and ideology are killing us!

I’m not thinking here about just the super-crazies that call for the death of cartoonists or novelists who are unflattering to Islam; nor am I thinking about wimpy gallery directors who pull art from the Smithsonian because influential Catholics were offended; nor am I thinking about the gaggle of evangelical talking heads and politicians who regularly want to censor, de-fund, or eliminate anything that might be construed as immoral, improper, or offensive to what’s Right. That kind of thing, sadly, has a history nearly as long as the history of art itself. What that sad history suggests, obviously, is that art often seems to be a threat to religion and other ideologies. The threat does not come from a competing set of doctrines or dogmas, but from the power of art to do—differently—what religion too often claims belongs to itself alone: transform and alter the ways we see and experience the world. Art, like religion, can be a life changer.

The Hebrew Bible offers one of the earliest glimpses of the power of art. Saul was a troubled man and when the King was troubled you didn’t want to be around him, it could be deadly. But, as the book of Samuel tells it, a lowly shepherd by the name of David had a gift, the gift of music, and when David played his harp, it not only soothed the angry beast—it positively removed the evil. Evidently it was David’s art rather than his dogma that did the trick and transformed a kind of squirrelly and dangerous king into a decent human being for a time!

Homer tells us in The Iliad that after Achilles lost his beloved friend in battle he was bereft of armor. Mother to the rescue, Thetis enlists the master craftsman, Hephaestus, to make a new shield for her son. Because an artist crafted it, Achilles’ shield was not  the utility model designed for just getting by. The Shield of Achilles was emblazoned with life itself. Hephaestus had fashioned into the metal the daily affairs of human living, in the city and in the country, with all its toils and sorrows, conflicts and peace, its labors, loves, rewards and losses. In other words Hephaestus’ art awarded Achilles with a macrocosmic view of the world in the microcosm of his shield. But what distinguished it was not how accurately it depicted human life, but how powerfully the artist had used his material—to make us see rich and precious truth through a medium, a material, entirely other than the truth itself! For example Homer writes:

The Shield of Achilles

On that shield Hephaestus set a soft and fallow field,  
fertile spacious farmland, which had been ploughed three times.
 Many labourers were wheeling ploughs across it, 
moving back and forth.  As they reached the field’s edge,  
they turned, and a man came up to offer them 
a cup of wine as sweet as honey.  Then they’d turn back 
down the furrow, eager to move through that deep soil 
and reach the field’s edge once again.  The land behind them 
was black, looking as though it had just been ploughed, 
though it was made of gold—an amazing piece of work!

“…The land behind them was black, looking as though it had just been ploughed, though it was made of gold.” It is not the gold we see but black earth. The artist has literally changed how we see, transforming the emblems of money and might into the freshly turned earth lying fallow before our eyes, rich with truth more precious than gold and goodness more powerful than might.

This capacity of art to transform the way we see and experience, to show us truth and to exorcise the evils within, interestingly, asks only that we look, listen, and engage the work long enough to discover for ourselves what we cannot be told. It’s not about doctrine, dogma, identity politics, or precious claims that hide beyond doubt or scrutiny behind the veil of authority. It’s about authenticity, intellectual and emotional freedom, and realite—telling it like it is. Doctrine, dogma, and institutionally managed structures of belief are anathema to art…and that’s why art “offends” so often throughout history. Georges Braque said that art is meant to disturb. The disturbance art is meant to cause is not a fatwa or a bill to kill the National Endowment! Art’s disturbance is divine de-centering, throwing off-balance the tried, the true, and all that has gone unimagined. It offers us the capacity to see things differently, imagine alternative ways to think and practice. Most importantly, art demands no litmus test to prove your humanity. Instead, at its best, art offers a stunning display of the range of freedom, the richness of diversity, and the pure creativity of the human mind. What’s dangerous is to get imagination without vision, goals without values, and individuality without character–that’s art too.

(FYI: to take a look at the way art disturbs in the United States, I’d recommend reading Michael Kammen’s book, Visual Shock: A History of Art Controversies in American Culture. One of the issues Kammen explores deftly and implicitly in his barrage of brouhahas over ‘art’ is the point of it all. That is, the point at which art matters.)

Lawrence Bowden

A Zen koan:

I have something: When you look at it, it’s there. When you look for it, it’s not.

What is it?

One of our local colleges recently adopted a slogan: Be An Original. You see it posted in windows, on raised banners, and draped from buildings as you drive by the campus. I have been told that the slogan is not original with the college. That is to say, it did not originate at the college, but was purchased from an outside consulting firm—evidently to create something like a “brand.” There is an irony here, a somewhat pernicious one. This same college wishing to brand the importance of being original also decided to sell some of its own uniqueness, auctioning from its museum a number of original paintings by prominent American artists. This, it said, was a move to bolster a sagging endowment. In making the decision, one trustee is alleged to have said that no real harm would incur from liquidating original art because a reproduction would be just as good.

The irony in this is stark when you pair the slogan with the apparent indifference toward originality in art. Purchasing a brand identity rather than being original yourself coupled with treating art as simply financial treasure appears to confuse value with cash. Taking someone else’s idea and using it as though it were your own does not make that idea yours even if you paid for it. It is not original with you. It is plastic flooring made to look like wood. Buying a nice poster of Guernica does not make it Picasso’s masterpiece even if it looks just like it. Even if it were a full-sized reproduction it still would not be the Guernica. A reproduction is not equivalent with the original—that seems obvious. But the real difference is not in the price you pay for an image…it is in their respective value. Value is not so much a pecuniary standard as it is a measure of personal worth. The price of a poster or a fine reproduction has everything to do with things like how many are available, how well crafted the copy is, what the market demand is, etc. These have little, almost nothing, to do with value—an attribute of originality that cannot be copied however cleverly it may be mimicked. We’re in trouble when we can no longer discriminate between price and value, or worse, when we claim to know the difference but choose to ignore it. Oscar Wilde, in Lord Darlington, described the cynic as “someone who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.”

A Price for Everything by Guy Wulf

In an era of mass production, digital technology, high definition imaging, and brand identity marketing it becomes increasingly challenging to know how to think about the virtues, the value, or, for that matter, the meaning of anything original. One is hard pressed these days to believe that anything original actually characterizes, much less defines, how most of us think, live, and consume. Our heads and our behaviors are filled with the mass produced, the reproduced, the facsimile and the photocopy. We hardly know how to think without talking points, opinion pages, and spin doctors telling us. You can only imagine why many artists are similarly hard pressed to sell anybody anything that lacks the look of art we’ve seen in books, on posters, mugs, note cards, and calendars! Paradoxically, while artists want to believe that a painting gets reproduced because it is good, non-artists assume that a painting is good because it is reproduced! Is it any wonder then how increasingly common it is for artists to hear “Wow, I really like this…Do you have a print for sale?” (I know, gotta watch the budget.) But it makes you wonder, has the ubiquity of the reproductive arts undercut our capacity to value the original…or has it perhaps enhanced it? With the fake the phony the superficial and mass-produced everywhere, maybe the original in all its one-of-a-kindness is valued even more? Maybe…but then maybe that’s just a head trip if we’ve never experienced anything original. If we’ve been exposed only to reproduction and imaging, copying and re-appropriating how can we ever know what we’re missing, what we can’t see, feel, or imagine that’s there in the presence of the original? Chocolate flavored candy is not the same thing as real chocolate…but what’s the difference if you’ve never had real chocolate?

In 1936, the eminent cultural critic, Walter Benjamin, published a seminal essay entitled, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” In that essay he expressed some concern that the newer media of film and photography had fundamentally altered the concept of art itself. How? By the essential role of reproduction in the medium. Film, for example, actually depends upon its reproducibility. It is an art in which no original properly exists. Audiences depend entirely upon seeing a mass-produced print. The 1930s was an era in which reproductive technology was burgeoning. As one advertisement proclaimed:   artwork that once only museums and the rich could afford can now be yours to live with at home. For Benjamin, the “aura” that original works possessed by virtue of their unique existence and presumed cultural value inspired a sense of awe in those who experienced them. What he wondered was whether mass reproduction would supplant the original with a mass-existence that could erode the critical discernment and reflection that once was afforded by the originality of the artist’s vision? In other words, he wondered if the aura of the original were withering?

The withering of the “aura” that concerned Benjamin is something we see in the erosion of our capacity to discriminate “price” from “value” when it comes to original art. Too often too many determine how good a painting is by what they’d have to pay to own it and so they opt for prints or reproductions. There may be some value in having a snap shot of a loved when they are gone, but the value of that image is not in the resemblance it portrays, but in the experience we’ve had of a loved one’s presence. A reproduction does not afford us the presence of an original we’ve never experienced—it is a snapshot of someone we’ve never met.

Lawrence Bowden