I could never live in an always-pleasant climate. I grow flaccidly empty three days into a sojourn in LA, even if I’ve been riding around in a rented red Mustang that got rear-ended in a
Kinko’s parking lot on the first day of my visit causing my blood pressure and insurance rates to sky rocket. I’ve spent a bit of time in Florida and Texas as well, two other well-known temperate climates where at least three of my brothers reside, the ornery sea-cuss Neal whom I have previously mentioned and two others, whom I am sure are supportive of their only sister, but shall remain nameless as if I were to name them I cannot be quite sure what professional reputations might be in jeopardy by such a close association with contemporary art (and who are but a minority in my allotment of brothers, I assure you). Florida is disappointing to me not only because everything seems utterly scrubby (on my first visit, despite the malfunctioning of my mind because of the heat and humidity I figured out it was the fact of frequent hurricanes that discourages tall growth) but because the air seemed malodorous even when one adjusted for the smoke from the almost constant piney forest fires. I guess it was the whiff of Disney in the air. Or maybe the dominance of Palmetto palms, which due to the miracle of modern advertising, inevitably make me think of enlarged prostates. So I should have no qualms about the seasonal changes of Chicago. Particularly autumn, always a bracing time. Yet why is it that this year things seem so bleak? Was it all the rain we got this summer? Was it that we had no Impressionist blockbuster at the Art Institute to offer us an additional dose of radiant light (“Toulouse-Lautrec and Montmartre” of July ought-five being our last hit of plein air and frankly T-L is a post-impressionist and does that really count)? Was it that the international art crowd is just exhausted from keeping up with all the art fairs and biennales and there was no energy around to feed off? (Pier Show; Artco; Basel; Istanbul—now say it quickly and rhythmically, please; it’s really rather pleasant!)
Inside in the gloom of an ever-darkening apartment, painting, I think of painting. What is the problem with painting. Is it because people don’t know how to look at painting, a frequent topic of conversation over the years with The Shark? Or it is even worse, that people don’t care to know how to look at a painting—that is in the past. They’d rather apply the lessons of what is called —please Lord, let me have a more cogent term than post-modernism—yes, I realize I am sputtering. Sputtering. Then I think, people who never experience autumn perhaps cannot understand the bittersweet melancholy that autumn can provoke, and the metaphor it can provide for the draining away of life and the inevitability of encroaching dark and cold.
But perhaps I should turn to horseshoes. I have long had two horseshoes. One I don’t honestly know from whence it came, but I use it to prop open my kitchen window so my imperious cat may come and go with the sash locks still secure, and one was retrieved from Yosemite when it was on fire (summer of 1988) by a kind friend and it, all twisted and scary, is a good luck charm par excellence that hangs on my garage.
I also have a more lively relationship to horseshoes, having been an actual horse-owner who lived on an actual farm and had to deal with an actual farrier. There really is nothing worse than seeing your horse with overgrown hoofs, and having to get the farrier out to do drastic hoof-trimming before hammering nails into the hoof to secure the shoe. Yes, nails. All in all it’s a very brutal endeavor. How would you feel having staples put through your fingernails in order to attach something or other to them. (And for those of you who are horse-fans, here’s a Barbaro update ). But a horseshoe taken or thrown off a horse’s hoof becomes an object of mystical belief. They work, according to those assuring Nils Bohr, even if you don’t believe in them. Perhaps the same can be said for paintings? They work even if you don’t believe in them? Even if you know absolutely nothing about how they are made? Yes, indeed, but that means a lover of painting must trust that there are people around who still do know how to make them. Sure, there are all those many paintings from the past that are being held and cared for in thousands of museums or are languishing in dusty attics in Wisconsin waiting to be the next Martin Johnson Heade or Vincent Van Gogh to be discovered by and auctioned off at Leslie Hindman’s. But what about the “new stuff,” the sometimes seemingly gazillions of paintings turned out by the vast hordes of art school graduates. As Kerry James Marshall so astutely points out in his recent Bad at Sports interview, a good number of those art school graduates shouldn’t be artists, period. Rhona Hoffman, in her recent BAS interview, unequivocally states that art which draws solely from the popular culture bores her and encourages young artists to look at art other than contemporary art. She suggests they go to the Art Institute, and “compare themselves.” Hear, hear. (But I must offer a word of caution: there’s a museum stuffed with famous paintings such as La Grand Jatte, The Millinery Shop, El Greco’s The Assumption of the Virgin, the Haystacks of Monet, Rubens’s The Holy Family with Saint Elizabeth and John the Baptist, Zurbarán’s The Crucifixion and AIC uses a smeary Gerhard Richter “photorealist” painting—a woman descending a staircase [see comments on Duchamp below] as one of their rotating featured paintings on the main page of their website. Apparently things are as bad as we thought…).
But what I would say is that these two statements fall on deaf ears simply because young artists do not have the eyes to see. The young artists bent on comparing themselves, even if they were to take such sage advice to heart, wouldn’t know what to look at, never mind what they were looking at. After being trained to use the intellect instead of the senses, think about art before feeling it, and consider the context over any object found within that context, they honestly might not know whether to look at the El Greco or the fire alarm in the corner. And we wonder why there is a plague of ADHD in our culture. I have long proposed that our society, whether we admit it or not, trains our children to be the citizens we want and need, despite the constant and clichéd complaints about the hopeless state of “young people these days.” In our case, we’ve trained our succeeding generations to be unable to sort the wheat from the chaff, as it suits both our consumerist and egalitarian leanings. In short, get out those credit cards and make sure you don’t offend anyone. Don’t play with your Barbie, where god forbid you might use your imagination, rather collect fifty of them and keep them in their original cases that they are “worth more” on eBay so you might be able to afford a bigger house or car when you are all grown up. But make sure your Barbie collection reflects cultural diversity.
I fear that the majority of “young artists” simply are incapable of understanding the language of the paintings they’d see at the Art Institute. They’d see Old Master paintings photographically, cinematically. Or they would interpret mythological imagery—if they were even able to discern that it was mythological imagery—through the mind’s-eye of Age of Mythology, the computer game they played when they were eleven years old. Or they’d marvel at what John Currin is quoting from this nude or that still life. It’s not their fault. We haven’t taught them the language, thinking
it was the right thing to do. Our generation had the traditional knowledge, yet believed we must break the hegemony of those traditions, throw off the dusty past and all that, and we not only didn’t make it available to succeeding generations, we taught them it was wrong of our ancestors to have ever labored under such chauvinist, sexist, elitist notions. I have long railed against Duchamp and the malicious destruction he sowed, my theory being he was a second-rate plastic artist. In fierce rivalry with his more generously talented siblings Jacques Villon, Raymond Duchamp-Villon, and Suzanne Duchamp-Crotti, to be the best artist he had to discredit the traditions in which they labored and the facility they demonstrated within those traditions: the ability to observe the external world, interpret it, render, model, and so on. Yes, I know, it is wearisome, these cries from the heart. Standing in front of the Houses of Parliament, in a state of retinal ecstasy, I generate no future income for myself or anyone else beyond the twenty bucks I’ve plunked down to “be in this context.” And because for me the experience cannot be duplicated by a reproduction, I don’t even buy the damn postcard. That’s why I keep horseshoes around the house. To remind me of the depth of traditions and the magic and pitfalls of belief. And to have good luck, of course.
More later,
Lynne