Persistence |
Walter Gabrielson Painter |
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Chapter 9 |
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Ramblings |
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| From the explicit to the implicit. As you make paintings your mind is busy churning out rehearsals on everything under the sun. The hyperactive monkey mind has to get off on something so it gets busy with scenarios, paranoia, fantasy and other stories as you paint away. I have plenty of these but no place to put them, now that the narrative is salted away (save for some adventures I include in my appendix) I will relate a few and call it a day. People Watching As Art Material If you observe two people talking to each other who are engrossed enough to permit you to get in close and look at them from a 45 degree angle, you see something very strange; you see the artifice of the act they are projecting to each other! With your own conversations it isn't as evident because you are mesmerized by the headlights of their act. From the side you can watch it unravel. Or, during a phone call (nobody will call me after this), you don't have to listen to the words of the caller to discern how they are feeling, functioning, covering up or anything. It is all revealed in how they sound, the tone of their voice. As I came from watching people to making art from people I became aware of another entire dimension to humans, the hands. For pictures making purposes, hands were better than faces. A face is so powerful that when you put it into a picture it becomes the entire focus of the image and it is difficult to take your eyes off it. Hands provide a better way to send messages because they are more subtle and you regain greater control of the narrative. I have left the faces off for years and nobody seemed to mind. Only recently have I begun to do faces, and they are just faces with large expressions and that is the story. The beauty of people watching as art material is that you never run out of material and the subject is infinitely more engrossing the more you do it. As you watch others, you watch yourself. But you have to be careful when drawing people pictures in a shopping mall, they will kick you out. Don't do anything in life to interfere with shopping. I like the small human event and the largeness of its implication. Like snails, we leave trails and I like to give them meaning. The dilemma is primarily one of editing, there is simply so much cubic material out there. It is coming at you in life, it is coming at you in media, it never ceases. Once I was giving an art talk to a group and someone asked me where I got the material for my paintings, I thought for a moment and then said, "Everybody stop doing what they are doing right now and look at everybody else and you will see a half-dozen paintings right in front of you." It was true, we had a frozen tableau and I left my damn camera home. The Paint And The Power It is amazing what power there can be in something as messy as paint. Like any medium you must totally come to grips with it, immerse yourself in it, eat it, drink it, taste it, have it come out of your ears. After a certain point, there are no teachers to help. You must go on into the unknown and take the paint into you. I can't give a useful description of how I use it now because it is way past those gorgeous little procedurals that American Artist runs. I studied and learned paint through all my artist predecessors and I use the history of illustration and painting to make my images. I think the concept will go on for many years for it is relatively inexpensive, versatile as a medium, and you still can become empowered by using it. It isn't used well today; there is a crudeness to most painting which is distressing to see and it may come from the lack of good teachers, I don't know. What is really important is to see any medium as the means of accomplishing what you want when making art. You should not limit yourself to a medium because it has worked in the past. If I were starting out today and had all the choices of mediums come before me I can't say that I would choose paint to work in. It could well be something to do with animation and computers. Assuming I had the same desire to work within the narrative I think I would opt for a technology that allowed me another dimension, another step forward to tell stories. I like the versatility of morphing or the computers ability to change an image from one thing to another in smooth steps. Having a technology available to expand your vision is every artist's dream, as long as the means doesn't corrupt you too much. You could make a regular movie about people, something as simple like "The Player", "8-1/2", "A Fish called Wanda", "The Big Chill", no car crashes or cyber-outer space, just regular movies from a regular story line and visually create it from an emotional point of view so that the look of it would also be the story. It would alter or distort color, shapes, people, sets, and create new sets as it went along. A little bit like "Tron" but better. Not as peculiar or nightmarish as a Francis Bacon come to life but just as if you were looking inside someone's head as the story line unfolded. I know we see events in real time photographically but we process and give meaning to them in vastly more, dreamlike, surreal ways. That is the movie I would like to see, an experience of life, that is more meaningful than a photographed play. It's as if special effects were the normal effects, the context and manner the entire story is perceived and given to you. The visualness of the story would be conceived right along with the narrative of the story. Some day somebody is going to make a movie like that. Eventually, electronic painting, electronic image making shall be inexpensive enough for artists to access in all its glory. It is happening already, the next generation will be truly startling. Today's libraries will be tomorrow's electronic libraries offering images, narratives, three dimensional works and all the rest. Two of the biggest artist problems may be solved by technology, affordability to make work, and increased accessibility to an audience. In the future, an artist will createimages and stories at home or in the studio and these will be stored and priced at a central facility, and usersof the material will pay a fee to electronically bring them to their homes on large screens to be enjoyed or stopped, analyzed, "hung" on the wall as part of the decoration or enlightenment, whatever. Already recorded sound is almost lifelike, one day images will also be that powerful in our own homes. But that is the future. Presently I feel better about continuing my journey with paint to see how far I can push it and make it work for me in the days I have left. Ten Ways To Save Yourself A Thousand Bucks Of Therapy When it comes to self-improvement we are all suckers. I knew an artist named George Green who one day dropped by Peter Plagens' class in Texas on the way home from grocery shopping. A student asked what he was doing with the groceries in an art class. George and Peter, both masters of the put-on, immediately concocted a story of how George was teaching a special class next semester in "Nutrition for Artists", the premise being that artists don't eat well and wouldn't it be nice if they were to take a one-unit class in preparing nutritious, tasty, simple dishes in the poverty of their lofts? Upshot was that after it went on for a while, a whole bunch of students wanted to know how they could sign up for it. Probably a terrible lead in for some advice I have to keep your equilibrium as a creative person, but since I have personally dealt with over fifty artists in one form or another about their issues in this territory I might as well pass them on. Artists should think long and hard about: * The cancer of anger. Enough said. * Learn from your work. It is the profit of the time you spend in the studio and you deny it if you steal from others. * Plateauing out. It happens to everybody. The more you work the more you exhaust the mind. You have to take time off and allow space for the bubbling mind to kick * The old "have your way or get what you want" dilemma. Most of us want to have our way and that destroys ever getting what we want. Having it both ways is impossible. Getting what you want is much better. * Don't wait for the phone to ring. It never does. You wait and wait and it never rings or it doesn't ring right. Art is an activist business and you kill yourself waiting for something to happen. * No fixed way of being. There is no one way or best way to make a picture and there is no one way or best way to have a career. You have to adjust yourself to the possibilities that come and there will be few enough of them. * Never believe in expectations. The killers of artists. * Don't accept the judgements or comments of others as being more than expressions of themselves. Given that art is projective, people who make comments about your art are always talking about themselves. * Stay in touch with and never lose that which gives you optimism and joy. When you lose that, you know you are in trouble and you might as well seek professional help because it is almost impossible to do it by yourself. * Grow up, accept responsibility for your actions (or non-actions) and for god's sake, stop being a kid and CLEAN UP YOUR ROOM! Humanist Art Compared And Contrasted There is an official outfit called the Humanists. They have letterheads, meetings, put out newsletters and everything. Once I was invited to a debate on whether someone had or hadn't the right to commit suicide. Having been in that spot I can recall my general thinking at the time and one thing I didn't consider was calling up a group of intellectuals to debate or even ask their permission (Excuse me, do you have an opening for midnight or would mornings be better?), or go to a seminar about it and kick around my right to do it, any of that. It was more like, am I desperate enough and finished with life to go through with it and to hell with the talkers and dilettantes. Which leads me to the dilemma we artists face, half of us would kill for a good bit of propaganda to describe what we do to the outside or some nice words to make us feel good and the other half would never give a damn or would hate the idea in the first place. When you are in the emulsifier of action, the talkers and ditherers just get in the way. Artist philosophy always comes off terrific on the page, it is the soothing syrup of righteousness that easily lashes up with raw greed to give everyone what they want. The real trouble is that talk, language, philosophy, words, unified field theories are just temporary handholds on the trip to hell. They make you feel good for a while, but then you have to get back and think for yourself. At any one time the art world enthusiastically, blindly, lovingly embraces new "concepts" for the result is pragmatic: money is made, works get done to service the dragon, people got on board, and for a brief moment in time, like the time between drink no. 4 and drink no. 5, everything is absolutely heaven, the planets are in alignment and we all feel happy and delusional. So now we know that contemporary artists work within a floating straitjacket of language that attempts to define artists, translate them into concepts and describe them by comparison and the application of labels. Remember the old college essay question, compare and contrast? That is what is going on. Artists are zilch unless they can be compared and contrasted. It is always curious to me that artists, who are held up to be individualists, are invariably described as being in groups. I don't think there is a process whereby artists can be perceived individually. Eccentric works but that's a group too! But on the other hand, if you want people to understand you and you can't put a painting under each and every nose, I guess words will have to suffice in the short run, just as long as they're not taken too seriously. So, I reluctantly admit to a temporary, uneasy alliance with language. What a laborious intro. Nothing is easy in this damn business. Now I will carefully put my toes on the slippery slope. Good luck. In my career I have been called a lot of things, "Mr Body Language" I like a lot. "Transpersonal", ahh, too shrinky. "Social Relevant" is nice. But, I guess I can live best with "Humanist." It seems to describe me fairly well. Some years back Barry Schwartz (Praeger, 1974) wrote a book The New Humanism about this kind of art and I heard that he actually did commit suicide. Good thing I didn't go to any of the meetings. My view of the territory is that it is a spectrum of images, on one end there are the private, inner moments and then it moves on to more interactive events with other humans and on to the stories of humans within various contexts in an external environment and on to humans being extremely active. When you make works of art about humans you realize this is a circle that must be completed by another human to observe the work, it doesn't work too well as decoration. Humanist art doesn't sit there with science or retinal pleasure or philosophy, it has to be lit up and become interactive with another being. Humanist art must be felt, it is about and deals with emotion, its character is more about human experience than art experience. That is why I have worked without a lot of formalist moves on my images through the years; I feel it obscures and detracts from the human connection. I think indifference to this art is the enemy, art musak doesn't do the job. One definition of psychosis or craziness is not being able to be in touch with your feelings. I believe the specific purpose of humanist art is to reacquaint humans with their own humanness. Our current world actively works at deadening our emotions, this art attempts to reawaken them. We need the texture and profundity to our existence continually pointed out to us any way we can in the smallness and largeness of our living acts, our gestures, our living of life. The best thing we artists do is to create images that people already crave. If we are lucky and work hard we come up with the images before people even know they need them. Jung says that symbols are the universal language, the primitive expressions of the unconscious. Art is a field ripe with layers and layers of meaning. Art attempts to make the invisible visible and to generate universal symbols that humans understand and use. In that sense all artists are tryouts, be they humanist, formalist, conceptual or whatever. There is never any one way to do it; there are just different opinions about what is the right way at the time or what is the best way for any one artist to go at it. I am now sixteen years at this act and I don't yet see an end to it. The territory with its richness appears infinite, which is good. Every picture, every image is a new surprise for me and I am fortunate to be there to witness its birthing. Conclusions, Contusions And Confusions Nobody will know how tough and profound this artist life is unless they do it, that is my conclusion. The confusion is: who cares, except me? I feel sometimes that I am delusional within a delusional system. It is all so vague, but at times it is all so clear. You are driving along in the fog and suddenly you burst out into a sunny, clear day, and then you are in the fog again and it gets darker and you hit the car in front of you. Or you get home and the water heater just went out and there is a flood but at least you are safe as the water comes up around your ears. Or maybe you come home and there is milk and cookies ready. I once posed the following question for a graduate class: Assume you are an artist and for various reasons you have to go out and have a show or be visible with your work somehow and there are only three choices available to you: (a) a furniture store will put your works on the wall, sell half of them, but hardly anybody will see your work and you will feel cheap and dreadful; (b) a top of the line gallery likes your work but won't show them in the foreseeable future but will put your work in bins back in storage and drag them out at times and you will be able to go to all the openings at this place and at least learn from it but have no sales for a while; or (c) a middle of the line gallery will actually give you a show but you will only sell one work, but in order to do it you will have to have sex with the dealer (male or female, your choice). Maybe that's why my colleagues would get upset with me, bring in the real world. Actually I haven't heard of the last part of option (c) happening all that much but I thought a hard price tag would be good for the problem. Of course, in a flash I would have picked (b); yet 90% of all the students to whom I posed the question picked (a). Which only goes to show, at any one time you only know so much and people think only the best things will ever happen to them. What actually happens is a strange amalgam. I don't know what anyone can learn from my story because all our stories are so strange and unpredictable. About my story the young might say, "Yeah, but that isn't going to happen to me because I'm going to make it big because I feel I am, and my enthusiasm will substitute for my ignorance." My age group might say, "Fascinating, but why are you torturing yourself like this?" Somebody older and wiser might come up with, "Told you so." You really feel old when you have no more excuses. Adventure is perceived as risk that works out. I personally knew six people killed flying hang gliders. They were all very happy until the end. Was it worth it? One fool can ask more questions than a thousand wise men can answer. I believe that with risk you get more than you bargain for and not in the form you anticipated. Having gone through serious illness gives me a perspective on the people around me, many are just like I used to be, cheerfully going on with all the habits and mental aberrations guaranteed to get them into serious trouble. Nobody will be spared something. It all catches up with you, something catches up with everybody. I am now at the point where I, my assumptions having collided enough with my realities, no longer have many illusions. But I don't feel badly about it. I'm inclined to let the externals whiz on by and hang out within my internals where the action is. The only place I try and stay relatively nondelusional is within this abomination we call "career." It is my support system so I have to treat it seriously. I define my career as moderate. I am no longer at the beginning willing to sign up for any little old idea so I won't be left behind when the cut is made, and I have never hit the very top, the heady place where you command princes and pirates to fantasies and fairy tales and you run off with fabulous loot. In the moderate career are the pluggers or the dreamers or the also-rans or the unluckies or the eccentrics. Not a bad group actually. At this level we get the job done and we are adjusted and we are finally honest with ourselves. We don't have much time to waste on posturing, or on strategizing or on most of the other insanity that goes on in this game. We do the art of the possible within the constraints of our support system and our imagination. It is truly beautiful to see the good ones within this peer group as they go onwards. Their work gets better, their inquiry penetrates further. In art school today students are sold the idea that the top end is the only place to shoot for and is all there is, and that if you don't make it there, you are a loser. What lies. What insufferable arrogance and ignorance from these "teachers." Actually 95% of all people that step up the ladder of the arts are going to drop off at any one level, from undergraduate to graduate, to post graduate, to contender, to professional, to star. Does it mean that all these 95% people aren't worth anything? That they aren't artists? Of course not. More than anything else I have discovered that is more important for artists to survive and stay with their dreams. One day they will make a contribution, one day they will see what the struggle has been worth and seldom will this occur within the external accolades of celebrity status. There is a beautiful Buddhist walking meditation called Kinhin. You practice walking as slow as possible. A s y o u s l o w y o u r a c t i o n s d o w n m o r e a n d m o r e y o u b e g i n t o p a y a t t e n t i o n t o a l l t h e m o s t t i n y i n c r e m e n t a l , i n s i g n i f i c a n t e v e n t s t h a t h a p p e n t o y o u. The moderate career is like that for me. I have learned to enjoy the smallest events in my quiet, tiny existence. I open up the studio early in the morning in my small industrial area before the other people around me arrive, or if one of them is already there, we make note of it. Why is someone coming early? A sale is a wondrous event, the negotiations, the deal, the delivery and sometimes the hanging of one of my works in someone else's personal surroundings becomes epochal. They are startled how this new intrusion alters their space, their privacy, and I hear about it for years. Driving down to Los Angeles through the orange groves of Santa Paul and Fillmore is an adventure. Years ago I used to fly along this valley looking down at it as I floated through the orange blossom perfume. Experiencing the changes and the rapid pace of LA is a shock, always some new abomination. I come back up the coast at dusk with the stereo on high or a ball game on the radio, returning home after dark truly exhausted but feeling that I have accomplished a great journey. We get in trouble with this world of art because we expect more of it than it can ever deliver. Our dependency upon it constrains our indepen-dence. I am in about maximum control of my work but I am never in control of the career because it is fraught with far too many variables and luck. It is much like riding a tiger you ride that you can never get off but it never gets dull. The best thing I have learned about career is not to let it define me, that is the secret. I know artists who allow their reviews, the amount of shows they have, the ups and downs of other artists careers, the changing catechism of art, etc. to define them. Ultimately it may be the biggest cliché in the world but the way you define yourself winds up being how you feel about yourself. Once I heard the story about the happy young woman getting a copy of Vogue magazine - she pages through it and looks at the gorgeous clothes, the anorexic models, the beautiful guys and the perfumes and accessories she becomes more and more dissatisfied with her lot, she is too fat, too poor, to out of it, too bland, too nothing. Everything else in life appears better, and she is a very unhappy person. We do it all to ourselves. And Finally, Thought I had ended this book once. Typewriter is starting to go, better end it fast. There is a fascinating formula with flight: to double the speed of an airplane one must quadruple the horsepower. It takes that much additional energy to makeit go faster, even getting off the ground is an amazing feat. The phenomenon of flight only happened in this century after humans had attempted it for centuries. Before the Wright brothers just about all the inventors of airplanes were killed because nobody but them had faith enough to go up in the air with their contraptions. Until they worked, they all crashed and each crash took the level of flight technology with it. Rather elegantly they all faced the total possibility of achievement or death and they had to totally commit to it to find out which way it would go. It is such an adequate comparison to the act of the artist. We fly or crash on the strength or weakness of our brains and our commitment. We are in the same beautiful crucible of risk as we contemplate our images and our commitment to them. Each time, you seem to have to do it brand new. The models that worked before are tired out by the time they get to you. Those who follow them just put off the time of their own little adagio. Your own particular combination of ability and handicap is as unique a combination as any unknown lashup of airfoil, lift, drag, and power in an airplane. You realize totally that you are out there all by yourself, vulnerable and confronting - everything. The act of making art has induced you to a form of flight and there you are, what is going to happen? I can see the autobiographical form definitely has its limitations; even though you are the closest to experience, you edit. You want to transmit the essence of your experience but not that which makes you look bad. You have to hide some things; everyone has at least one big secret that is better to let lie there, even me. But you have been closer to the action than most will ever be and you want to say about the beast, "Can't you see? Can't you see?" This is what it is like. We aren't foppery, incompetent dudes. We aren't eccentrics like Gully Jimson in "Horse's Mouth." We sometimes look like the character that Nick Nolte plays in "Life Lessons" (within the trilogy "New York Stories") but without all the sexual obsession. Stock brokers have sexual obsessions too, but they don't make such wonderful means of caricature as artists. We just have better sets and dress codes to imply dissolution and incompetence. I have kept away from the titillating because I have seen it doesn't mean much. It's a diversion. You think it is important at one time but it really isn't. A friend of mine went through one of these years of unending sexual gymnastics and passion that defies explanation. The net result was that he didn't get any work done at all and he felt he was in the clutches of a violent mental illness. Many great stories are privacies of friendship. I am not going to tell them. My attempt has been to lay out what the creative artist life is now, specifically my own and generally what my peers go through. I hope I have done it. We are a fundamental part of our culture with our art, our contributions, but our voice is seldom heard. We don't make the rolodexes. Being ignored is not only unfun, our contribution is also lost. So be it. We live in an age of celebrity worship and the spear carriers don't get much stage time. We are held mute and so we live with it. I never thought my life would be like this. I felt that somewhere I would attain a reciprocity, a resonance with the people for my efforts. It happened for a brief few years but closed down. Perhaps it will happen again, I can't tell. The mechanism of that happening is impossible for me to manipulate. All I can do is create the work and take it as far into the world as I can and then it is up to somebody else. There has to arise a utility for our images, they have to mean something to someone else, they have to need them. The need is probably there even before we make the images. No matter how good the work is, if there is no need for it, no one will support it. I see my life is part innovation, part reaction to events, part moving blindly in a darkened room. I made some horrendous mistakes but so what. If I didn't do anything at all, I would be conceptually perfect, paint perfect paintings, be an ideal person. Ain't me. I wish I could turn the clock back and make the images at the beginning that I am doing now. But that is fantasy, for it was going through the whole procedure that my best work was revealed to me. Surprise No. 1 in setting this down has been that it all seems somewhat remote, as if it happened to someone else. What a character this guy is! I have that experience with paintings all the time. I work at them and bring them up out of the mindmurk into existence, finish them off, and then they are over for me. It becomes my past. Oh, I did that! Interesting. I guess along the way you evolve your time orientation and that becomes integral to your perception of life itself. I don't live in the future. It appears, well, short, indeterminate, nothing much I can do anything with. Fast track people used to flay themselves with questions like, "Well Brad, ten years from now what position and how much money do you see yourself having?" Keeping out of leveraged buyout jail might be nice. What I am focused on right now is: why did I get up at 6 a.m. to type this out instead of going to work and cleaning out my storage space? So, talking about my past has been gratifying, self-indulgent and revealing, but almost the story of a stranger. Surprise No. 2 is that none of our choices is ever frivolous. When you're young you can go off and make bad choices. The comedian David Steinberg used to have a wonderful bit where he played a psychiatrist and a client entered his office which was filled with many chairs and couches. Steinberg said, "Come on in and sit down. By the way, everything counts!" Client didn't know where to sit. All your choices add up to a wonderful stew you never knew you could concoct going into it. You become a character making another character by your choices and you learn to live with this guy or hate him. I have worked too hard at becoming me to remotely envy anybody else now. I don't want to be anybody else. Is this Surprise No. 3? Is this character the best I can do? Maybe some more shaping, trimming or maybe it is just about right. Step back and take a look. It's like the end of a painting, you know when you are at the end phase because of doing major things with it you are fussing with details, like looking into a mirror with a new set of clothes and seeing if they work, pulling here, tugging there, sucking in the belly. If I write much more I will be diddling toomuch. This book feels just about right for now, it is the best I can do with the capacity I have. It is time to quit. I am now nine months from when I started this work. This is definitely longer than a painting. I said at the beginning I would see where it would take me and now the evidence is before me, my entire damn life. What do I think about it? What should I think about it? I have felt self-awareness is my strong suit, but to come to a judgement about the story I have now laid out is almost asking too much. Is life better a question than an answer? If I came to came to conclusions now, I would be very tempted to self-justify everything, wrap the enigma in a pretty package. I think I know myself but I don't know what I mean to others. What do I represent to them? Should I care? How many people have I hurt along the way? What are accomplishments worth? I would never have conceived of all the penalties and new premises I have encountered along the way. I think, in the cruelest judgement that I can generate, that I have tried to keep my life close to the way I have approached art. I think that has been fairly consistent. Mea culpa. O.K. God, do I get in? Maybe. How about going back and trying out lawyering for a lifetime? That should test your soul. On the other hand, you never took up golf; that's a plus. Perhaps a more relevant question than whether I was a good boy or not is, getting past all the misery I have put up with in this profession, has being an artist given me a more profound outlook, position or experience with life? Reluctantly, reluctantly I would say....yes. Within the toughness of the artist life is the spirit and enlightenment that lifts you to a slightly higher plane everyday you can stay with it. Not that you couldn't achieve it in other ways. But, observing thirty years of my peers going through life in and out of art and watching people in dead-end jobs or frivolous work that may make them tons of money but grind them down at the same time or in work that is killing and corrosive to their being, I have to say that, if you can put up with it, the artist life will deliver. It isn't an escape for the quiet or inept who want life to go away while they paint, it isn't necessarily benign and beautiful because it is about "art." I used to think that teaching had an elegance of collegiality and scholarship, but I learned it is more like a snake pit of thwarted ambition and powerlessness instead. Because artists live a life about art, it doesn't mean that their lives are artful. Much of it is simply a grind. But when you are around art you have a glimpse of what the sublime can be. You see someone you would never imagine finding the depth to make a huge breakthrough and come up with images of immense power. You see the totality of someone who has just been plugging away at it. You see a Pat Hogan simply draw energy and life itself from art that he lives way beyond his life expectancy. You can be around enough positive, regenerative events it balances out the negatives. You certainly don't have to come home from the steel mill at night and stare at the TV with a beer, knowing that today was bad enough and tomorrow you will have to do the same, damn, repetitive, ugly thing and all you have to look forward to is the same and the same and the same. One night at CSUN I had an older student with a problem with his drawing; for the past thirty years he was a commercial artist and did paste-up of catalogues and he was back in school for inspiration and relief from the dullness of his life and work. He was stuck in the drawing, so I took his pencil and just whacked off a flowing, free, curvilinear line to illustrate what he needed to do to give the drawing life. He stared at it in awe. "You know," he said, "I would do just about anything to make a line like that." There it is. Art can give you life. I won't be the one to judge myself on how I have done, others have, others will. I go for the days. Today might be enlightening, it might be business, it might be death. I don't know. As I go along, friends drop away, more body parts act up, the support system falters and I reach further back to keep the encounter bright and fresh and interesting. I become reborn each day by living within it and the next day, well, who knows? Art is my contribution and my experience with life. It just can't get much more intricate or more intense or more textural than that. I have heard that the man who considers himself enlightened, isn't. The old honesty clause. I am in the toughest job, the best job and the job I have created for myself. The unknown is inside me, just waiting to be pulled out as long as I persist. Continuing Glossary of Contemporary Art Terms Artist: 1. One who produces works in any of the arts that are primarily subject to aesthetic criteria. 2. A maker of images. 3. A purveyor of dreams. 4. One who gets into something he knows nothing about in order to find out something. 5. A manipulator of artistic materials. 6. Someone who is called an artist. - E N D - We are frauds. Suspicion confirmed: artists are frauds. I know saying this from the moderate getting-any-place position sounds like sour grapes, the kind of thing anybody with three beers at the end of the day says about the job. But it is there. I think the artist job requires the assumption of at least the following two major lies (probably a lot of minor ones too): (1) that you are the original source and innovator of an image and must be awarded endless power, money and respect for your vast contribution to life and culture, and (2) "high" art is higher, better and purer than other art forms andany opinions about it are unassailable fact. Of course, this is all a fraud. But, we all go along with it too. Art is amorphous, delicate, undefined and projective so it appears to foster delusions like this. Perhaps it is better to have the illusions than not, I don't know. There is always comfort in a big lie. Take the first assumption, please: all artists, or at least the ones we hold near and dear to us are purveyors of originality. What every artist really, really knows is that you actually cobble up an image from a lot of sources, add the secret sauce of your own perversion or distortion, mix well and serve. Every artist takes from someone else, it's only a matter of degree. Art history, scientific theory, industrial process, novels, movies, anthropology, psychology, recent art moves, and out-and-out stealing are just a few of our sources. What we do is discover, assimilate, and arrange and rearrange, and then call it our own. But nobody does it all by himself. Nobody. Originality is an add-on to the content of culture and science already out there, a new brew of very old stuff. The concept of "new" is highly perverted. Most of the time new just means new to you because you haven't heard of it yet in some other context. There isn't much reasonable doubt about all this. The fraud comes in that artists are not supposed to admit to it! That's the rule. Admit you are strongly influenced and you go to the foot of the class. When you start out, there is a general interchange and interplay between other artists of images, sources and ideas, you kick this material around and play with it, much as children play with toys without being terribly possessive about it until the great day when the outside world intrudes, and then that which has heretofore been fun and play becomes venerated ----- PRODUCT! It is very amusing to watch students joyfully manipulating ideas and mediums around until one day it becomes -- MY WORK! "Well, what my work is about is.....", or, "You must come over and look at MY WORK sometime." It would appear that possessing something called MY WORK is the fatal slide down the chute. It becomes your identity, your support system, your reason for being, your way to break into the art world, your contribution, and your thing to lose in a divorce settlement. Of course, the lie becomes necessary to front a career in art, so we all go along with it. I don't think having some of this is terribly bad, for after all, you DO spend a hell of a lot of time and misery working at your work, your image and all that and you DO add some imponderable something to the stew that hopefully makes it better. It boils down to just exactly how you yourself deal with this big fraud. With a very big career, an artist just can't afford the slightest upturn of the mouth, or the whole game is in the toilet. In that league, everything is big time, serious, for real, greatest work ever produced, worthy of every coffee table book and really dull article written about it, and there seldom is any crack in the flawless assumption that this work is totally and absolutely original and therefore, terrific and therefore worthy of any and all money, rewards and credibility you can throw at it. At the lesser levels you can afford more candor, the stakes are less. The greatest lesson my friend José from UCLA taught me was that basically everyone is somewhat in the fraud business. Everyone. Uncovering the lies and the perversions of the coverups was his fun in life. The only redemption is to publically acknowledge your assumptions and lies, to make yourself honest again by letting go of the fundamental fraud and just having fun by scamming the small stuff. I think he was right. You can't stay straight creatively unless you admit to your complicity with the fraud, and then you are free to go on from there. The second big lie has to do with the assumption that "high" art is better than anything else and there are priests you can trust to show you the way in case you get lost. I only bring it up to describe the great hoax of the Sixties and Seventies, wherein one kind of art had an absolute lock on what contemporary art was supposed to be or was. Just about everybody in the system bought into the lie and supported it because, let's face it, they were all being paid off in one way or another (money, career, fame, you name it). We were all co-opted by this phenomenon, and I don't excuse myself. I bought the big lie for the first three years out of grad school too. And it wasn't that the art was all that bad or corrupt in and of itself, a lot of interesting images were created within its context. The big lie was that there was only ONE kind of art that was good, pure, enlightened, and the answer to everything, and that was called abstract painting. Everything else was deemed horseshit. The game went on for twenty-five years or so before either enough people got bored with it or all the available slots for moving abstract art through the system were full that new people coming into the system had no recourse but to give up or invent their own game, or abstract painting finally used up all its visual gambits too many times that even the most serious aficionado couldn't look at another work without laughing or truly put upon. A gain, the art wasn't the lie, it was the context and handling of it, the handlers and priests who purported to give us truth were really cranking out public relations so they could get ahead. Therefore, it is a realistic assumption that one should never, ever, believe anything you read in art magazines, articles, reviews, statements, and all the rest. What we learned from that adventure was simply that those in charge of noble concepts are just as fraudulent as all of us, so why believe there is really any higher art to start with? You give people the power to define hierarchical values and they will sell you down the river every time in pursuit of their own agendas. Always better to just like one art or another on your own terms. But the scam goes on, a new form of elitist avant guardism is cooking away, a form of philosopher-led gullible newcomers are passing the gas of absolute truth and purity today, and guess what, everything else everyone is doing that doesn't tow the party line is --- horeseshit! It must be that there is some form of cosmic truth warp in art, if you go after big things you have to become incredibly small-minded and elitist to do it. I always wonder what people would do for art if their situation changed, if you were on a desert island or some place that was vastly alone and non referential, what kind of art would you make? Would you do what you are doing now? What kind of work would you really do if there were limitless time, enough support but nobody looking over your shoulder, writing things about you or having the prospect of a show. What would you do? How many lies could you support then? The energy it takes to keep up the fraudulent assumptions would be transferred into a greater power of yourself perhaps. Or maybe you wouldn't do anything if there was no external reason to do it. My final thought is about the phenomenon in art of transferring, assuming opinions to the vaunted heights of "fact." This activity is a cherished weapon in the absolutist's arsenal of lies and should be noted with a large asterisk. In art, there are very few facts. Practically nothing is a fact except there you are with your hat in your hand looking like a bozo. Just about all art is a series of opinions, and you have to remember this all the time or else you go under and become crazy like everybody else. There are such things as personal opinions (heretical), group opinions (much sought after) and expert opinions (World-class assumptions) but they are still opinions. Somewhere in all this, opinions are granted factual license and away they go to lie, cheat and steal all by themselves. Artists hate opinions until they are positive opinions about themselves and then they forget their reservations and get on board without a whimper. In art I think it is better to forget entirely about facts and just go with one opinion or another. If you hear facts, you are hearing lies, and that is invariably big-time fraud. Enough said, buyer beware, and,....you can't cheat an honest man. © Walter Gabrielson 1993 All Rights Reserved ------------------------------------------------------------------------ http://www.waltergabrielson.com |
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