My friend Greg messaged me from Kenya, sharing some interesting perspective on the media, product placement and social mobilization. His point circled back to my general approach, positioning, and use of headlines.
Unfailingly, viewers of my collage paintings ask: “What is the underlying meaning?”
Our dialog opened pandora’s box: ‘what is the relationship between artist, viewer and critic?’ With my group show, Painting Resurrected, but twelve days away, I decided to share my thoughts with you… after the jump.
My Painting + Your Experience = ?
Collage is utilitarian, providing context and depth (as pictured above in My America), yet, can be considered subversive and laden with meaning. This is fun for yours truly, because no matter how much anyone tries to grill an artist about a picture – 65% of a painting’s (and artist’s) legacy will come from the viewer.
Marcel Duchamp said; “The creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications and thus adds his contribution to the creative act.”
Sometimes my choices are intentional, others, they simply represent a contemporary time capsule of a day or event. It is a combination of randomness and the physical act of painting I savor, and my process is largely internal. But is it? Why then would I bother to show my work? To sell and survive, of course, but what about you? What about the viewer?
Does Viewer Interaction Make Art?
Some people simply create to create. Regardless of the vehicle: slathering wheat paste on doors, in hopes it will be unhinged for all to see; extracting scrolls from a vagina; mapping out boxes for others to build – the viewers role in art is undeniable. If Shepard Fairey tags a tree in the middle of the woods, and the Department of Buildings can’t kill it, and Saltz cannot review it – does it exist as a work of art?
Partially yes, partially no.
A third-party take on any creative result can lead to a god complex. It’s akin to a movie… someone writes a script, but then there is a Director (who breathes life to the film), Actors (playing the scenes), a cinematographer (capturing the visual details to the minutia), Producers (whose money made it happen) and the other 5,000 names you see blazing through “credits” as you kick an empty popcorn bag down the aisle. Who is the true author of creation?
A team makes a movie, an artist makes a painting – the results of each are reviewed by third parties.
A Hypothetical Thought in the Mind of a Critic
“Sure, tis’ a great piece, but if I didn’t write about it so whimsically in the New York Times, Steve Cohen wouldn’t have dropped $12 Million for it. Yes… Yes… In fact, no one even knew what it meant until I captured its essence so poetically. You might say, I am partially, neigh, largely responsible for creating this work in the minds of the viewer. Thus, I truly, with my pen, have become a co-creator.”
An Artist is an Artist
Exposure, critical review and viewer interaction aside, Art is internal. Being an artist is a statement, a way of life. The decision to take, and stay, on this path is solely up to the artist.
Jasper Johns, whose “Critic’s Eyes” – a direct statement about seeing and speaking – is the lead image for this entry, said in an interview with Emma Brockes of the Guardian: “In a sense,” he says, “you don’t ‘start out’. There are points when you alter your course, but most of what one learns, if that’s the word, occurs gradually. Sometime during the mid-50s I said, ‘I am an artist.’ Before that, for many years, I had said, ‘I’m going to be an artist.’ Then I went through a change of mind and a change of heart. What made ‘going to be an artist’ into ‘being an artist’, was, in part, a spiritual change.”
If Mark Rothko listened to critics as he toiled on figurative work (above) en-route to his color field paintings, he may have decided to end things even before he created a $72,840,000 dollar color swatch.
What does it all mean? What is this nonsense? Surely, if nobody came to, or reviewed Painting Resurrected – I would still be an artist. This is the life I have chosen. All considered, if nobody makes it out, May 22nd would be a dull evening, indeed. And I will be signing up to experience the Bone, Thugs and Harmony chorus first hand – “It’s the first of the month, wake up, wake up, wake up, it’s the first of the month, get up, get up, get up.”
I like ‘My America’ a lot. It’s heavy on reds and blues I see. And Mexico’s blue…