Thanks Squeak

I recently read Richard Whittaker's interview with Squeak Carnwath, a California based painter who shows at John Berggruen Gallery in Squeak Carnwath

San Francisco. My personal connection was the first interest for me in looking at her because I installed her 2003 show at Berggruen and spent time with her work. Some of her surfaces are pasty and fissured, like unpainted neglected walls from forgotten alleyways and often have writings or scrawlings along with simple drawings of different symbols that have, I assume, a secret meaning for her, but a presence that somehow seemed to mean something to me as well. Others of her works were painted in stacks of hunter green and burgundy blocks, buttressed with colors of sand, somewhat like quilting and something like bricks, often including the same phrases, comments and lamentations within the composition. The works I saw were probably somewhere around 6' X 7'.

Reading her interview brought many salient issues to light about what it means to remain an artist well after one has completed the academic section of an art career. I thought the most lucid detail about the
David Wojnarowicz

interview was that though she addressed the realist concerns about making work and how the work inevitably relates to a market, she quickly departed from what seemed to be petty issues and moved into the realm of content and relationship to her work. She talked of how her work was both prayer and meditative act, and alluded to the potential function of activism present in the making of artwork. She also made some comments about the trend of rigid representation and hyper-representation of both objects and concepts on the contemporary scene, and how this sort of art making paralleled the literal manifestation of terrorism in the sense that it is an overstatement. There is the element of shock, both in art and in terrorism, historically, and artists want to employ this mechanism to the inth as the privilege of making work. Thankfully,

Carnwath takes the dialogue out of the coarse and blunt and envelopes her plaintive poetry (in text) in an ocean of contemplation and worship, dying and becoming. This worship, this aspiration of
TL Lange

engendering life into the artifacts we as artist offer up gives the artifact a quality that extends far, far beyond the content of the daily newspaper. For Carnwath, the nourishing nature of artmaking and looking are what propels her forward well after she's left the ivory tower. Her lasting power certainly isn't hurt by the fact that she's represented by several important west coast galleries and regularly sells works in the tens of thousands of dollars.

work in progress

This is the first in a series of 84 X 96" paintings that I'm beginning now. This piece is changing appearances on an hourly basis as I search my own decisions, question them, listen, and pace myself around what shines. This abstraction could hold or it could move into a figurative narrative. I never know which paintings will be effective as pure invention and which will need to be grounded in imagery from our recorded history until I have spoken patiently with the surface for some time. We (the painting and I) often need to have arguments so that we can respect our innate boundaries and so

that I can know where I am stuck or resisting and as Chogyam Trungpa once said, "lean into the sharp points" of the life quandary. What a fortunate and maniacal act this art making is. Thee compulsion is fascinating, mesmerizing, dumbfounding. Can we achieve the gift of truth that we strive to give? Possibly, if we don't mask and let ourselves be stripped of contrivance and even artifice in our sincerity of making.

rauch1p

rauch1p
Originally uploaded by lost luddite.

Painting in an ivory tower

This kind of topic is an invevitability. If only it could be full of praise, hope and beauty, but my experience here is facilitating my progression away from what seems to be 'successful work'. Now I have visiting artists coming and showering me with their ideas, thought processes, values and the rest and it seems to cause both confusion in terms of the goals of my work and a doubting of my aesthetic sense, which I think is really showing in the work I'm doing now.
There was a time when the intent of my work was more clear. It went something like this: Art is a pure and noble and spiritual form of expression, an act that the planet and the people in it need and appreciate. I can enter into this dialogue in a manner that takes art making to an even finer distinction by speaking to the people in the world of the song in their heart. People have feelings, nerve endings that extend out beyond themselves and their personal concerns and connect to the preciousness and fragility of all things that are living. We can sense these living things, their joys and their sorrows and there is a way to create a window in which to become aware of our nerve endings that connect us to a universal heart of compassion and empathy. And that in creating, which is a purely generative act, one can break ground towards some of Hegel's lofty metaphysical theories involving the evolution of consciousness via the creation of energy.
Maybe this can be exacerbated in an academic setting if those who are hired in a mentoring capacity are up to the job of inspiring greatness of being amongst participants. They ought to know of personages on the contemporary and historical scenes who can awaken something of a transcendental perspective. I look for a wholistic view from my mentors, one which shows insight. If we are on a precious and fleeting journey on an earthly plane, then why hold back the full resplendent flowering of greatness? All sentient beings have the capacity for exceeding their own expectations. What should be avoided are the closets and cocoons of complacency and self establishment that enables people to stop challenging themselves and that leaves them in a place where nothing phenomenologically exciting is happening.

IMG_0347

IMG_0347
Originally uploaded by lost luddite.

This piece is from a series of 10
monoprints, completed, maybe on Thursday night. They are simple to make and they are pretty. This kind of ab ex approach is important in my work as a way to release the mind from logical and linear concerns. I like these small pieces as a preliminary effect.

IMG_0342

IMG_0342
Originally uploaded by lost luddite.

Here is an example of figurative and narrative work.

Sensation

It's early and I've been reading a book review of Who's Muse: Art Museums and the Public Trust. There are lots of noble motives attributed, fairly I think, to the institution of the art museum, namely that their purpose is to show the art, first and foremost and to foster a peaceful and consolatory environment, both in the work that is shown and in the design and arrangement of the museum itself. The contributors to the book are conservative and traditional and have a view that is akin to the sublime stewardship of the land supposedly achieved by spartan ethics and hierarchical refinement.
The writer here is opposed to the sensational for a lot of clear reasons, and makes a decisive parallel between new trends in the art museum world and the low brow, commercial diminance of images and sensation that goes on outside of the walls, but now, increasingly inside museums. It's an interesting point to make, but a fine line to draw. How, when there are always new directions cropping up in the fine arts, can museum administrators see clearly whether a work of art is low brow or not, and if it is low brow, on what grounds should it be clear that it doesn't belong in a gallery? Who can make a decision like this and avoid the pitfalls of censorship? These are the concerns that these noble but conservative views bring up.
The most lucid illustration I found in the review was the hope and intention that museums should have this peaceful and conciliatory atmosphere that is ultimately established by the work itself. It's nice to think about art work in this way, and to regard it as nourishment rather than basic gratification or entertainment. And behind this is the lasting conviction that there is something spiritual, sacred or holy in art work and that it is posesses a force of healing and sustanence for society. The review is encouraging to artists that there is still hope to remain distinguished and seperate from commercial art and the onslaught of commodity driven looking on the part of the public.

When I think about which artist's work upon seeing it has changed my preconceptions about it, I have to answer that, other than the old masters, new work has impacted me usually in passing and great works of artists now unknown to me have touched me. Ultimately there are handfuls of those whose work grew in stature and importance after actually seeing it for real. Maybe Jenny Seville would be an example. Stepping back, an artist whose work really impressed me is Goya, but that really comes from knowing the context of his life and history, what kind of establishment he was working in, etc. In pure painting, I spent a lot of time in Prado in Madrid and Valezquez, Murillo, Raphael, Brueghel, and Botticelli in particular impressed me, looking far better in person or being even more dynamic than I had imagined.
When it comes to modern art, many of my experiences in viewing the actual work has been somewhat disenchanting. Guston is an exception that comes to mind, but often something about the quality of the painting whether it be how the artist handles surface, deterioration and imperfection in preparing the canvas, or simply the flawed human presence in the work that's not so apparent in an image in a book, is uncomfortably demystified in a gallery, which might only be a result of finding that the wizard of oz is actually a small man. What has impacted me in a more powerful way is being familiar with an artist's work, and then, in the process of looking, learning the context of the work, the relevance of the work to the artist, and then, bang, the work opens wide for me and takes on a very magical quality. This happened most dramatically for me with Mondrian. He is an exacting and technically proficient, eloquent painter, but to know how he came to paint his squares and what they meant for him, his adherence to theosophy and his search for a universal language is to truly begin looking at his work. At least it was for me. But I'm not so sure that his philosophical theories were contained in his paintings as much as they were illustrated by them.

what's in the art?

There are a multitude of examples out there of original artworks that have been appropiated by people, other artists/thieves who couldn't come up with an original concept on their own. I'm not talking about perfectly normal cross pollination between artworks, artists, and ideas that goes on everywhere and lends a sense of collective gestalt to different groups of image makers. The people I'm talking about, one could imagine, are out to make a buck or to otherwise capiltalize on an image that has worked for someone else, or maybe, more innocently they actually conceived of the same type of image independently. There could be some cause for concern about this piracy if what we were doing was simply making images, commodities, cutsie wootsie items to peddle on the web or elsewhere, but I hope as artists we are seeking more than that. And in this regard, the focus changes from what is made to the making of the thing, and what that thing contains. In other words, I believe that the work, unless it is a digital or specifically made for the web, cannot be summed up by its representation on a computer and so then it can't be completely stolen. In a great work of art, there is the unique psychological, sensorial, physiological experience of the piece that is more alive and present than even the paint itself. This is a view of art as related to some universal, spiritual, collective unconscious of which we may be a participant, and which we are humbled and lit on fire in the midst of, cooled by mists and and settled into a cradle of self-ness. Speaking with Judy Glantzman today, some sleeping zombie within, stripped of the sacred, was draped again in a robe of meaning. This idea that the unspeakable, the unknowable can somehow be reached for, maybe never possessed, but reached for melts away all concern about petty criminals and whether someone is stealing an image of your work. It's the difference between stealing a photo and stealing a soul.

The view from the stix

As a painter, my primary function, in an ideal world at least, is to paint. I'm building my images from the phenomonalogical world around me and from the world within. So to some extent, the output of my work is informed and infected so to speak with my surroundings. So when I think of artists in NYC and what they have that I don't, the only truthful answer is that they have NYC itself, the self proclaimed center of the art world. People working in this city have the privilege of seeing the new work that has made the grade and is flooding in from all over the world, and then they have the work that is being created there, some of it crap, and most of it, reifications of other art images flying by in an incessant swarm of imagistic ephemera. But the element that makes NYC art consistently relevant and exciting is, of course, the energy of the city, the grandeur, the monumentality of what's done there, and for this reason, NYC's status of world class art market, and international catch-all of people and ideas, I relate to New York.
I used to take trips there every six months or so, and I would spend a few days trudging through Chelsea and then up to the galleries around central park. I've been to Soho when I was working as a preparator and managed to find one good politically oriented exhibition there. At nights with friends I visited the exciting places in the city, new areas of Brooklyn mainly, some trendy and some gritty. But mostly, I walked in New York City, and soaked up the life and the energy of the place, getting lost (Brooklyn mostly, I can't get lost in Manhattan) and discovering whole worlds and communities I didn't know existed in America. There are a great diversity of ethnic neighborhoods in Queens that feel authentic to the cultures they are comprised of, like the Indian neighborhood whose Dhosa King restaurant and Hanuman temple treated me to a divine disorientation of standing on a Bombay street. Or the time I got off the train at the wrong stop in Brooklyn and ended up in the Bedford Styverson neighborhood. There were fifty gallon drums burning on the sidewalks and street vendors all over the ground, selling pungent incense and African fetishes. I definitely felt like a stranger, but I asked people and they told me how to walk back to wherever it was I was staying.
My experience of the art seemed to read more like an expose on the New York art society than a recognition of the greatest art being done in the world. A lot of my looking had to do with galleries that looked right for me, that I felt comfortable in, and work that I related to. Where could I have my big debut in NYC!? And it was exciting to talk with people and get a sense of the very normal human beings behind some of the work.
9/11 changed New York alot and i realize the impact the more I think about the city. I went up in October, 2001 and I haven't been back since. I went off to the West Coast, in search of a sanctuary left coast, fleeing from a floating tyranny across the country and around the world. But San Francisco's art infrastructure can't hold a candle to the relatively welcoming home that New York provides for artists and their creations.