Books Fine Art

I strive to rid my art of apparent consistency, continuity and personal attribution.  I can pick from my inventory to

create incongruities or the opposite to arrive at a dream like space where irreconcilable emotions can merge into a harmonious unity.

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What bullshit eh?  Now seriously.

The function is the meaning for an object of use.  If one used a hammer to smooth drywall compound one could be said not to know the meaning of a hammer.  Most objects have an indisputable physical use.  They are meaningful because we understand how they function…one may not be able to manipulate food into one’s mouth with chopsticks but one knows the function as an extension of one’s fingers.  However there is an ambiguity of use for artworks.  Since they are not like equipment we may assume an art object’s use is to communicate something.  The question is…is it meaning or something entirely different?

A statement should have meaning unless it vacuous, such as the italics above.  If you understand the statement you know what it means. Can we say the same of paintings and sculpture?  Is language, spoken or written, a purer expression of the mind than making things?  Here are some examples of the uses of the word “meaning”:

“I thought it all meant something.”

“He’s a bitter middle aged man whose work means nothing.”

“’What do you mean when you say you don’t love me?’  ‘I meant what I said.’  ‘But you can’t.’”

“What I said in the poem wasn’t literally true of you.  The meaning is poetic.”

“When I write ‘poetry’ I noticed that when the lines look right that my original meaning, the impetus to write the lines, is buried and a whole other thing appears.”

“Is there meaning in life?”

“One gives life meaning by living in a certain way.”

“When an object is a work of art the question of meaning only comes up as one enjoyment in its layers of ramifications.”

“Art is a continual reassessment of what the times mean.”

There may also be hidden motives within the manipulation of meaning:

“The ownership of meaning bestows power.”

“We undermine power by revealing hidden meaning as an illusion of pure information.”

“Symbols can signal through censorship of a text.”

“An authentic account bears pure information thus bestowing the possibility of meaning.”

If an artist’s idea for a work congeals into an intention then he will make a plan for the idea to be expressed in a material that will communicate the meaning of the idea to an audience. Meaning may imply a teleological purpose for this artist.  Here the meaning of the idea is the cause of the material manifestations…say of a religious icon. This artist might have an unaltered message from conception through execution. He knows what his work means before he begins, the symbols are fixed so there is less room for open-ended-ness.  Idea begets intention begets expression begets meaning…or is the sequence that clear cut?  More likely the artist will probably have a more muddled generation of a work’s conception, one that involves revisions, clarifications, catenations, with altered intentions, plans and resultant meanings.  This assumes that he has something to say, and by this I mean anything of significance other than his own peculiar inversive analytical proclivities. “Meaning” floats in the work of our local painters of allegories.  An artist, the writer respects, claimed that no one has meaning in his work but this is mistaken, instead, the work he refers to is chock full of meaning, hemmed in by meaning.  We may also notice that in artist pronouncements, press releases, studio visits, gallery talks, placards next to work in museums, etc., we see how the explanations of meaning would overlay a viewer’s take on what he sees on the wall.  We find ourselves in an art culture that is awash in signifiers without signifieds; the business of Warhol.

The writer’s ideal artist makes inquiries to flush out what is buried or hidden.  He has an idea and invests it in an object to understand what the idea means.  His work of art will not come with a meaning; it will create meaning where there was none.  There will also be an ambiguity of meaning; what the painting means to the writer may be different to what it means to you and may be both different from what the artist thinks.  Its meanings may even be contradictory.  He makes work that is empty of preconceived meaning so the question becomes not “what does it mean?” but “how does it mean?”  How does it fill up each person’s interpretation or expectation?  Unintended meaning is there if they find it.  In this, there is no difference between a Paris Hilton and a Susan Visser.  Everyone who is willing to engage the work is in on the deal.

The scenario of “Lebedev and His Painting”

I put up “Lebedev and His Painting” and did not give it its title so it is just a carved mask hung on the wall next to a wax painting.  We have a show and tell in the gallery and someone, say Tom Tooley, asks what is the meaning of these two items called “untitled” and I say that they are Lebedev and his painting and Tom Tooley says “you mean the clown who Prince Myshkin rents a house from in the first half of Dostoyevski’s ‘Idiot’?” “Yes,” says I “that’s the guy.”  And Tom Tooley says, “I didn’t know he had a painting.”

The “The Ascension of Dmitri Karamazov” is an expressionist carving of a character in the “Brothers Karamazov” by Fyodor Dostoevski.  Dmitri, the eldest of the three, was sentenced to prison after being convicted of patricide near the end of the novel and the artist has taken the character beyond this narrative to transpose his interpretation.  When the artist gave the carving the title “The Ascension of Dmitri Karamazov” rather than “Standing Figure with Hands Clasped” (equivalent to “Untitled”) it delivers a layer of interpretation to the bare carving.  The expressionist style offers some possible interpretations of the artist’s appropriation of Dostoevski’s character; such as an illustration of the religious artist’s emotions put into an iconic form, the explicit or inexplicit religious feelings the artist might experience or his mocking of such feelings.  The artist may have carried Dostoevski’s inventions into his own fiction, to the extent that to acquire the full scope of interpretation you would have to read Dostoevski.  The title “The Ascension of Dmitri Karamazov” also restricts interpretation to Dostoevski’s novel but only if one ties oneself to the artist’s choice of title.  Of course the viewer can reject the title the artist pinned to the object, a generic expressionist carving, rather naive and cartoonish and decide the carver is just bullshitting…bluffing.  But then again maybe he isn’t.  If we take this to be one of his proclivities for clownishness…can he ever be taken as authentic given the distance he assumes from his objects…but apparently they are all something he wants to see otherwise he would not put forth all that effort and if others want to see them too…that’s nice.

It’s nine thirty, I’m alone on a Thursday night in a sushi restaurant in the Williamsburg neighborhood in Brooklyn waiting for a Maki Roll Combo after a hard day delivering art.  After I finished my order of Pah Jun, sitting here with little mental activity, it occurred to me that this exact state might be a good one to ease into meditation.  I recalled one of the Buddha’s disciples, the name slipped away, who was considered one of not much intelligence but the Buddha assured his other disciples that he had just as much chance for enlightenment as any of the others.  Perhaps someone rather empty headed has a leg up in the enlightenment business.  But if he got an idea, got excited, jumped up and began writing it down as if it meant something it would blow his state of rest.

I got pocket kings at the Hold’em tournament at the Elks the previous weekend. Instead of making a probing bet large enough to make anything less than aces fold and small enough I could fold against a reraise, I made a bet too large to fold when my opponent reraised.  This was a failed hypothesis tested in a game.  Marcel Duchamp developed a fascination for end games in chess.  I always read it as a metaphor for the end of art.  Now I’m beginning to wonder if poker could be a metaphor for art today such as an “art” of deception, one of extreme irony.  An endgame in chess is followed to its logical permutations with all the available information in front of both opponents; a stand off in poker has similarities except that the relevant information is concealed, it is confined to reading an opponent’s intentions.  In most games one hides one’s intentions with attempts to deceive whereas in art one attempts to reveal what is concealed.  In some sense sincerity seems to be very important.

when a person is talking to me sometimes still listening I withdraw riveted to the visual that person becomes an object like an animal like a bird the eyes hold let nothing through and the speaking face becomes a wall utterly alien time stops even though the words rush by and sentences are understood and contextualized in the whole picture the speaker wishes to describe it is better on the phone I am not distracted by impenetrable eyes looking out at me like a bird taking in my reactions to the words spewing forth giving me a view of an active brain the private synapses private thoughts made public thrust in the air displayed whether I want them or not

But first we must ask a series of altogether different questions, meta-questions, that we will not attempt to answer and you may ask, why not…

Can a theory be made into a work of art or, if it succeeds in synthesizing its phenomena, is it a species of science that generalizes its way out of being a particular?

The difference between science and art is that science attempts to explain phenomena in the broadest way possible while art consists of particular instances that resist generalizations about them even though every attempt is made to do so. The peculiar thing about art is that when a generalizing theory becomes strong enough to gain a consensual following the species of art it addresses will find a way to circumvent or disprove the theory.  This might be stated in another way; that a faction of its practitioners will overthrow the dominant style.  But this assumes that a theory that gains ascendancy accounts for the majority of artists working in that area rather than a usurpation of the power of meaning by a clique of critics and their lackeys.  This is the cultural investment of meaning in a “progressive style” that takes over the economic ecology of the art industry, such as Pop overthrowing Abstract Expressionism.  The soldiers of style attempt to invade the beach of “culture”…up till now.  Presently something else is going on, it may very well be the end of art history, that is, the end of the march of signatures in mutually exclusive acts of aggression played out in the fields of New York.

Can one burrow out of eclecticism through a theory as an artwork?

Does this question even make sense?  A theory of art, as an artwork let alone as a Work of Art, will make statements about a phenomenon, such as the kind that a theory in sociology might make in an attempt to generalize about criminal gangs or the culture of artists in Brooklyn.  The artwork might be a written text enumerating the salient points that pertain to itself as an analytic document that emphasizes it own peculiarities that are distinct from other documents that seem, at first glance, similar.  The fact that this document may seem to be similar to many manifestos over the course of the last century gives it a pedigree within a tradition of documents that have shifted the discourses of culture.  The good thing is that it is Post-Post-Modern.

Can a particular consciousness theorize about itself as a work of art and go through life acting as if it were?

The individual, obviously an artist, takes out the garbage and calls it art.  But what kind of art?  Performance, living sculpture?  Whenever this artist sits on the toilet taking a shit all his nerves, muscle contractions and relaxations are focused to thinking his theory through to make this particular artwork.  All his waking moments are full of intentions, actions, and results that all end up as artworks.  His sleep is a vast cauldron of utopian vision.

Can a consciousness theorize about itself as a work of art and retain its attractive peculiarities as an individual?

If the artist were to sustain this intensity of minute-to-minute art producing activity, intending art to be created by his least gesture, he would become more and more isolated because no one could stand to be around such a pretentious asshole.  Or he would have reached a state of enlightenment.

thought himself dumb but has a cognitive disorder he failed to recognize until some years after quitting drinking moved to a trailer in a woods misses the obvious after he found order in a world of abstractions his wife left rereads the same set of novels enjoys calculus but can’t solve story problems of specific times distances quantities his world is a collage he continually adds and subtracts to the wall in his mental horizon linearity crumples when he attempts to explain himself he is a great artist

The character flaws in an artist…

When I lived in Chicago in the eighties I rented a loft with two other guys.  Bill was a teacher in the public schools, not an artist per se.  He used to come in the early evening, point to what I was working on and ask in the sincerest manner, “what does this mean to you?”  He really wanted to know.  I never knew what to answer.  It was baffling.  I knew he could see through the bullshit I enjoyed using in graduate school, when I was always so sure of my genius I that I believed whatever I made up about my forays into the id.  With Bill’s persistent inquiries it bothered me that when something occurred as an answer it was too shallow, too derivative or equivalent to different rationales.  Anything I came up with never seemed to reach the heart of what I was trying to do.  So I could never answer but he was the kind of person who could persist, without offending, asking “what does this mean to you?”  It was meant to bother but still a legitimate inquiry.  After a few years I came up with the idea that the object will tell me what it means after it is made but that was not the case either.  For me, for my work, it is either interesting to look at or not and that seemed inadequate until I realized what was going on…

The artist has nothing to say and what follows is how he will say it.

There seems to be artificiality, perhaps an air of inauthenticity, if one makes an art object without an intention to communicate with it.  This is an interesting concern that I’ve noticed in my own work for some years now.  I’ve come to the conclusion that I have absolutely nothing to say in my visual art, never did.  Having come to this revelation I realized that most people that make useless objects do not either, the only difference seems that I am aware of it.  (Which is not to imply that they are not, they may decide to ignore it.)  So, what is there to make art out of?  Exactly this idea.  The knowledge that I have absolutely no meaning to convey has become a game, I can make anything that will amuse me, it will have no effect that I can desire or predict.

I also find the idea of “not having any thing to say” a bit scary.  Claiming “no meaning” is a rather cynical view of my potential audience.  If I do not have a message packaged in the object then we might consider the object in some sense inauthentic…morally suspect.

One might go so far to say that with “nothing to say”, a pure negativity fills the vacuum, of the jokester, the clown, the devil, an insipid position…and if I want to find out how severe the condition is I can continue to make my objects, quite adequately if I may say so, push them into the world without a proper subtext of intentionality so that whatever is communicated does so inadvertently. This position might be tenable since there are clearly rational choices made while constructing the objects, above all rational, but what I am interested in examining is how the choices, prior to engaging in the machinery of construction, stake out the parameters for my intuition to play within. I am interested in a signified with no signifier or a signified with a plurality of signifiers.  I can ask myself what subconscious messages I am attempting to communicate other than showing off my “gift” for design and have no idea what they are till I live with the results.  Is there a kind of morality to good visual form?  I doubt it. There are no moral choices here, none of personal identity besides that of just a regular guy hiding behind the word “Artist”, no political or social concerns, no strange dreams or visions, etc.  There is no higher moral behind the meaning of good design.  Excellent design is the handmaiden of efficient propaganda…Nazis had beautifully designed uniforms.

On the other hand I doubt if a project of making a work without meaning purposely is possible because there are always precedents in the way.  Clearly anything one could make could be contextualized within a series of other objects.  Herein lays the dilemma of the artist that wishes to opt out of post modernism.  When one is no longer naive and attempts to make something outside the historical series of cubism, dada, surrealism, realism, regionalism, abstract expressionism, pop, minimalism, conceptualism, feminism, new image, pattern, neo-geo, neo-expressionism or the chaos now, if one attempts to avoid selecting from this smorgasbord of style in order to transcend the machinery of “culture” one is necessarily post-post-modern and moves beyond art history, beyond a forum to communicate.  One must chuck it all, be done with it, opt out, quit making useless bullshit nobody gives a rat’s ass about.  Or not….

The desire for passion one no longer possesses…

If one is an “artist”, with nothing that is hidden to reveal except the knowledge that he lacks any ideas except the awareness of the true state of his inner life that he finds necessary to conceal from his compatriots, he deceives.  But in order to deceive successfully he must create an illusion of revelations that completes the circle of deception.  He cannot announce that he is aware that he has nothing to say…it gives the game away.  This will break down its structure and he will have to make up the rules as he goes along. The game will become impossible for others to play.  This is fine for the individual but it does not allow others to participate.  In a sense that is what an artist does anyway but there must be enough over-lap that other artists can recognize in one another’s activities.  They rely on display, they paint on flat surfaces, scatter objects in the appropriate spaces and show off in critical essays lampooning one another for being either too far behind, too alike or too far outside the parameters of the game.  When the latter successfully occurs the parameters are expanded.  Even kitsch is allowed as long as it bears a tongue-in-cheek certification that is disguised with an air of seriousness but with the kind of seriousness that those in the know can see through.  Perhaps there can be a satiric aspect to this lack of meaning lampooning the pretence to meaning, intention, and so on.  Where does the impetus to express one’s self by clowning come from?

left Manhattan to a small rundown village upstate to retrieve a few paintings for a lawyer in Chicago the brother of a sad middle aged woman once quite beautiful but now worn with teenage sons and a divorce just making it as the daughter of a semi-famous artist I remembered reading about in Artforum in the mid seventies I mentioned it and she brightened grateful someone recognized her father who in his hot pursuit of fame forgot a little her and her brother not entirely just a bit not so much that she did not recognize his affliction with all those artistic demons the conflict she recognized between those and his affection for her or

back to a rundown apartment in south Brooklyn the widow old now a climb up creaky stairs to rooms crammed full of forgotten canvases no one cares about but the family or what is left of a family of two here again I remembered reading about the dead artist and told her of reading his film criticisms that were astounding I was intrigued to see what his paintings were like but they were a disappointment I remembered reading the introduction to his film criticism that he was also a painter I wondered at the time what his painting could be like but they where not much neither were the ones in the village upstate both artists had a few moments of glory then something went terribly wrong NY is full of these confusions better to be in Michigan or Indiana where every one who wants to be someone leaves and leaves us to be the artists

M Slaski      6 05 09