the rigid plastics

Some of us who feel that our plastic medium of choice may have fallen into obsolescence, juxtaposed against new media artists of all shades and the new pop world brought to us by dupont and krylon in the form of an aerosol, have reached an impasse in how we regard the contemporary art world. I've one colleague who would retreat to the old stony fortifications of the middle ages in hopes that antiquated ruins that have at least partially withstood the test of time can provide him with a fortification strong enough to wage battle against the shimmering ephemera and bubble gum shock philosophy that proliferates some of the world's most important art institutions today. And to some extent, I can agree with a classisist slant when approaching an empty canvas, or a pile of material to be manipulated to form, but what I can't buy into is any constitution that standardizes and defines what is and isn't art. And in this way, I abruptly leave the classics and come to join, not even with the modernists or anything that has preceeded but, definitively with the now. In that way, in a state not divorced or seperated from now-ness, we can engage the creative force and form, and refine it increasingly so that truly anything can become artform. When performed with intention, intelligence, and possibly, the intent to offer something, even mundane, to be experienced in a way that is all encompassing and whole, art continues to find it's frontier.
The question and the concern is that painting and sculpture may have trouble finding their footing in an image flushed, commercialized environment. The trend that some classisists vehemently reject is the tendency of painters and sculptors, in an effort to speak the language of the cultural now, of fashioning their work after ad images and psychological marketing schemes. Are fine artist's in competition with advertisements? Must we play our game by their rules? Or is it simply a product of postmodern life and lifestyle that we paint what impresses our aesthetic? Vermeer and DaVinci were in pursuit of what crystallized into a harmonious aesthetic. Today, the golden mean is a mechanical process, replicated billions of time world wide. As fine artists, how do we sing the highest falsetto above the clamor of image puking high technology?

Attn: Caroline and "the world"

Spaceship has landed. Sifting through remains of test subjects, analyzing civilian population, learning to use mallets and hammers and finding preferences. Conflicts. From this the labors of our days and the conversations of our nights emerge. From so many thousands of invisible frequencies and communications invading our bodies, we seek to know ourselves? May this be the christening of a sanctuary to sift the art from the madness, and to winnow away the chaff of excess, to find the life rich kernal of essential self, soul, what have you. Begin again.