Brownnoser by Chuck Dillon. Click image to view source.

Tate I, photo by Flickr user Martino’s Doodles. Click image to visit the Flickr page.

It’s easy to label me as an artist: I paint. I paint pictures. I paint pictures of people. Easy, right? I don’t happen to be particularly turned on by conceptual art, or art that’s deliberately obfuscated, or art objects overshadowed by the artist’s mission to “break boundaries” and “challenge preconceptions.”

Before you click away, conceptual artists, please hear me: I love you. And also you guys, who like to paint pictures of kitties and geraniums: I love you, too. Art is art, and it takes all kinds. There, I’ve said my thing.

Art can be difficult for us to swallow. As Dan Fox writes in this editorial for Frieze Magazine, difficult art has become the norm in the art world.

Boundaries are ‘broken down’ and ‘preconceptions challenged’ so often as to make subversion and radicality seem like a mandatory daily chore rather than a blow to the status quo. They perpetuate old-fashioned notions, such as that of the artist visionary liberating the masses from mental enslavement by bourgeois values. Overuse has made these words sound strangely toothless, for what’s at stake in the art is often less important (but not necessarily without value) than the language suggests.

Of course, what constitutes “the art world” is an ever-shifting tapestry of popular opinion, preconceptions, and nebulous reputations. (Perhaps some boundary-breaking is warranted here.) It seems one is either in it or not. It’s hard to say when exactly an artist becomes part of the art world, we usually rest upon the consensus that they have arrived. This vague notion of the art world as an establishment points out our links to the tired cliche of the artist as revolutionary. At what point does the liberator become the institution?

This is just one of the many questions I asked myself while reading Fox’s article (via Kristin Anderson). I didn’t come up with many answers. I’ll continue to think about how deeply the following resonates with me:

You have to understand the pieties: the weight of an artist’s monograph or how many times their name crops up on e-flux announcements; someone’s preference for reading October rather than frieze; the internationalism of the contemporary art world – some romantic residue of the idea that, if you travel regularly by plane, you must be high-powered because your business reaches far outside your locality; artist names exchanged as collateral by those jockeying for position in the marketplace of curating or criticism. These are the little curlicues that adorn the edifice of the professional arts establishment.

How can you tell if it’s New Media Art? Here are some tips.

(New Media Art in the Aughts is what web art was in the 90s, installation art was in the 80s, and performance art was in the 70s. That is, largely oblique and inaccessible unless done very well.)

This handy list was put together by the Near Future Laboratory, a “think/make design & research practice focusing on digital interaction designs based on “weak signals” from the fringes of digital culture, where the near-future already exists.”

Still from Ryan, an animated film by Chris Landreth.

Not only does Landreth use his medium for purposeful and poetic storytelling, but he portrays strikingly accurate visual representations of love and addiction. Watch the film online at the YouTube Screening Room.

Read more about the film here.
Read more about Ryan Larkin here.

Link to the All Faiths Beautiful Flickr set.

From a Washington Post review of the All Faiths Beautiful show:

Outsider artists are presumed to create out of some pure inner vision and not in response to any trends in the art world. Their creations tend to be idiosyncratic and sometimes inscrutable, and have a long-night-of-hallucination feel. …The creations seem driven by an instinct that lies somewhere between compulsion and belief. They express less a coherent faith than a desperate attempt to be seen and understood, even if the outreach ultimately fails. …The show is at its best when it showcases the more peculiar “faiths,” and then challenges you to connect.

One of the more challenging parts of All Faiths Beautiful is the portion of the show devoted to atheism. As to whether atheism can be considered a faith, that’s up for grabs. But one individual who has expressed a particularly poetic atheistic worldview is the late great Mr. George Carlin. In a 2004 interview with Terry Gross, Carlin explained that while he was not a religious man, he did find spiritual sustenance in the notion that everything in this universe is made up of atoms that were created in the heart of a star. If we are all made of the same material, he reasoned, then we are all one, and if that’s true, then what is there to be afraid of? I’ve included a video of Carlin explaining his views on religion below. (Caution: salty language and challenging notions.) Because all faiths ARE BEAUTIFUL in this here blog post.

Related: Sarah’s del.icio.us sites tagged religion.

2 Dogs by David Choe

LA underground artist David Choe delivered this item to my inbox late last night:

Dirty Hands: The Art & Crimes of David Choe

Documentary Competition
(USA, 2008, 92 mins)
World Premiere
Directed By: Harry Kim

Los Angeles artist David Choe’s kaleidoscopic work can be playful, confrontational and sexually frank. His personal life is no less complicated, as revealed by close friend Harry Kim, who documented Choe’s life and crimes from 2000 to 2007. From the manic highs of commercial success and dinosaur hunting in the Congo to the self-destructive lows of Japanese jail sentences and bouts of self-doubt and depression, what begins as a gleeful portrait of a bad-boy artist slowly becomes a poignant celebration of one man’s journey, both artistically and spiritually, toward his own uncertain salvation.

Saturday, June 21st 9:45pm (world premiere!!!)
Majestic Crest Theatre $12.00

Sunday, June 22nd 4:00pm
Mann Festival Theatre $12.00

Thursday, June 26th 4:30pm
Mann Festival Theatre $12.00
June 26th 4:30pm

http://www.lafilmfest.com

For ticketing information please phone 1-866-345-6337 or email boxoffice@filmindependent.org

Here is the trailer for the documentary Dirty Hands: The Art and Life of David Choe.

When you go to David’s website, you’ll see a popup window titled “News and Weather.” Do yourself a favor and stick around to browse it. In this news section David shares a little insight about the documentary filmmaking process:

The guy living at my loft, sleeping under my trampoline, is filmmaker harry kim, he made a short ten minute movie about me two years ago ,and has been following it up with a full length feature, so he’s been following me with that fucking camera the whole time, only thing is he has no funding and his parents don’t like the fact that their son is spending his whole life making a movie about a guy that destroys the earths surface , my place is big , so he’s here with me now, I introduce him to everyone as my documentater but he’s always drunk, asleep , or dancing with girls ,so I spend more time documentating him these day . I keep telling him he hasn’t earned the right to sleep in yet.

Related: Here is my previous post about David Choe.

Venus and Pope’s Workout by Masami Teraoka.

Masami Teraoka has long been one of my favorite painters. His watercolors from the 1980s about the AIDS crisis are an evocative mix of beauty and terror, sensual forms startled into abrupt mortality. (Dear Lord Baby Jesus, if I work really really hard, can I be this good a painter someday?) His new series, The Cloisters’ Confession, draws upon the traditions of early Renaissance painting from Europe, particularly the altarpiece form. (I’m seeing both northern and southern elements here, even a play on Botticelli’s Birth of Venus.) There are even some oil-on-canvas miniatures — quite a departure from his earlier large-scale watercolors. Is it too cliched to characterize this as East Meets West? Possibly. At any rate, let’s not pigeonhole.

In recent years Teraoka has been painting flesh with a curiously post-mortem pallor. The corpse-like appearance of these figures, treated with rolling Florentine sensuality, plus a generous dose of taboo sexuality, sends us straight to Bosch and back again.

Teraoka points out a similarity between European early renaissance and ukiyo-e painting: the tendency to flatten physical space into a series of stacked planes. The paintings in Cloisters’ Confession recall Flemish horror vacui. The resulting scenes are not what you would call realistic — in other words, not what you would see with your own eyes out in meatspace. Instead it’s a melding of learned visual information (what the eye sees, further processed by memory) and graphic language used for narrative purposes. This concoction elevates the image’s importance beyond the need to represent a scene realistically. Taraoka is using pictures to tell us something.

Geisha in Bath, from the AIDS Series, by Masami Teraoka

(A side note — I see in several of the altarpiece paintings that Teraoka has placed Venus figures and geisha side-by-side. A few years ago I enetertained the notion of combining the features of a Botticelli beauty with the feminine ideals presented by Kitagawa Utamaro. I wondered what would happen when two disparate paradigms of feminine beauty were put together. Teraoka’s works remind me that I should dig out those images and post them.)

Right Some Good is where Kirsten Anderson (of Roq La Rue gallery in Seattle) has been blogging about some of her favorite contemporary and historical artists. In the post about Teraoka’s show, she mentions an essay in the works about the return of the grotesque in contemporary art. I’m looking forward to that.

Cover for A General Theory of Love, designed by John Gall

Have a look at this charming video interview with book designer John Gall. He talks about his idiosyncratic design aesthetic and willingness to make bold moves.

Gall mentions the dichotomy of quiet time balanced by bursts of creative energy. I find I spend a lot of my creative time just looking, considering, trying out ideas. After a certain point I reach a watershed and the image just pours out.

Gall is also right that deadlines are powerful motivators. Here’s another interview with John Gall at Step Inside Design.

Great design awes me. I’ve never considered myself an Idea Man, but I believe that is what a designer does. They hold up a clever mirror to culture. When I see a piece of good design, a well-made form that complements the content it’s wrapped around, I think “Of course! Why didn’t I look at it that way before?”

It’s a little easier to grasp China’s global economic impact by examining it one niche at a time. Take Dafen, for example. Dafen is a suburn of Shenzhen in China’s Guangdong province where the bulk of the world’s paintings are made. Here is an image to help bring that idea home:

Dafen raises all kinds of questions in my Western mind:

• Is this a sweatshop? Does that make the purchase of these paintings unethical?
• Are they feeding a public hungry for the same old, same old thing?
• Why do people want reproductions that they know are reproductions? (Oh, yeah, because they can’t have the original.)
• Does Chinese culture have any appreciation for original works of art? (Some answers to this question can be found in Philip Tinari’s article on Dafen for Art Forum, October 2007.)
• Are the paintings forgeries, reproductions, imitations, products, or art objects?
• What exactly does or does not qualify as an art object?
• Is art a commodity? Should art be bought and sold? How often, for how much, to whom? How expensive does an object have to be before it’s considered art?
• Are the Dafen painters artists? (These ones certainly are.) Do they have talent as well as skill? Does it matter for what they’re doing?
• If I learn a bit of the language, do they have any job openings? Might they subsidize a few oil painting lessons?

Dafen’s customers are shopping for paintings instead of prints, and reproductions (of public domain works) rather than forgeries. A quick Google search for “Dafen oil painting” yields a variety of digital storefronts through which one can browse works sorted by artist name, subject, style, or size. No one is trying to fool anyone here. I don’t seem to be upset about an art industry that shuns originality. In fact I enjoy anything that contradicts the twentieth century artist-as-lonely-genius mythos.

The Dafen example calls the nature of originality into question. It’s a common conception in the Western world that artists create original objects, and the objects speak are an expression of the artist’s individuality. We generally think if the artist isn’t creating something from the heart, it isn’t really art. But I don’t consider myself an originator. I have never been good at creating images out of thin air. (After several years in art school I learned that the out-of-thin-air idea is a myth. Using models and references will make your art, whether abstract or realistic, better every time.) I absorb information from all around me, process it, filter it, and send it back out in the form of drawings and paintings. It’s been a long time since I was interested in trying to come up with the “next big idea.” I can tell you this: if American art education was more concerned with technique, skill, and discipline rather than expressing individuality, we might be a little cozier with the Dafen model. Like it or not, their paintings are very well-made. Whether or not you want to call it art is up to you.

Follow these links for more about Dafen Village:
Dafen at Wikipedia
Chicago Tribune article about Dafen, February 13, 2007
Self-portraits by Dafen artists
Life of Guangzhou, with an introductory essay on Dafen
Kevin Kelly’s take on Dafen
Dafen Village Online

Bill Viola, Still from the Quintet series.

The classic short film Powers of Ten encourages us to step out of our immediate physical and temporal frame of reference. Any activity that breaks us away from our half-second-unit information-heavy attentions nowadays is a healthy one. Looking at an image, for example, is a great way to allow yourself a long moment.

In recent days there’s been some fooforaw regarding Flickr’s decision to allow users to post short videos. Much discussion has ensued on the concept of the “long photograph.”

Photographer and blogger Clayton James Cubitt has gathered a great handful of links relating to long photography. My favorites are this comment on a clip from Koyaanisquatsi and Cubitt’s own Zero Feedback pieces.

Bill Viola is another artist whose work demands that we slow down. If you are lucky enough to be in an art museum that has a Viola in their collection, do yourself a favor and stand in front of it for at least two minutes. What at first appears to be a still image will be revealed as a super-slow-motion moving picture — a long moment. (Here is Bill Viola at Wikipedia.)

Also out this week is a trailer for the documentary Glass: A Portrait of Philip in Twelve Parts. While watching the abovementioned clip from Koyaanisquatsi, I heard a snippet of the score and thought, “Gosh, that sounds like Philip Glass.” Sure enough, it is. You’d have thunk I went to college.

Finally, if you’re looking to step way way way out of your current temporal perception, look into the Long Now Foundation. Among other projects, they’re building a 10,000-year clock.