| Marsyas and Mars |
[Apr. 28th, 2012|08:43 pm] |
A procession of sorts.
Flaying of Marsyas by Titian .. his last painting, in Moravia in Kromeriz .. I found the poster in the old chem lab in the building where I have the studio
Čerwuis was a South American indian from Paraguay brought over to Prague in 1908 by the explorer A Fryč. It's an intriguing story and I just learned its been made into a comic by a Czech comic book artist.
Mars belongs to Allah
 |
|
|
| online interview |
[Apr. 16th, 2012|07:14 pm] |
Two Little Indians, oil on canvas, 100 x 119 cm, 2012
I was asked to do an online interview with an arts blog out of San Francisco called Hyperreal.
Check it out!
I'm flattered that they like the work and it was nice to have the opportunity to get my message out there a little more. And as always you can find pictures of my recent paintings on my tumblr. |
|
|
| conservative values EU style |
[Apr. 11th, 2012|11:23 pm] |
One third of Czechs don’t want gays, foreigners and people of different skin colour as neighbours
Around one third of Czechs do not want gays, foreigners and people of different skin colour as neighbours, suggests a new poll by the STEM agency released on Wednesday. The results also show that some 86 percent of Czechs would not like to live next door to drug addicts while 78 percent of those polled would not want alcoholics as their neighbours. Also, around 12 percent of Czechs do not want to live next to rich people.
source: http://www.radio.cz
backwards crap is global |
|
|
| Art World Artists vs Artists |
[Mar. 31st, 2012|08:42 pm] |
There was a great group show in Prague earlier this month organised by the International Bongo-Bongo Brigade which was masterminded by Andrew Gilbert, a Scottish artist living in Berlin, and Humberto Poblete-Bustamante, a Chilean living in Paris. So nice to see something from outside CZ here, to get a feeling for other ideas and approaches, currents in Paris, London and Berlin, etc. It's pretty rare, unfortunately, as culture in Europe is divided still along national borders, and Prague is not as international as it should be. We're stuck in the 90s here apparently, some 20 years behind.
So the show has had me thinking on art and the art world a good amount this past month. Artists want to make a career, surely, and this often means finding some relationship with a curator or gallery owner, some place within the art world business apparatus. How much one sells out can surely define their art .. the question quickly arises: Do we make art for the art world, as a product, or do we make art for the sake of making art? For the lucky few the answer is both, but the reality is that the art world is dominated by superficial creatures attracted like moths to the flame of glamour and the high life that seems to emanate from the sterile white cubes of the modern gallery. Art has to be shown somewhere, and the divisions within the art world are many, layers of bottom feeders in the murky depths where Sunday painters rub shoulders with old painters stuck in art school styles from the 60s, up to secondary spaces where new art school students are trying to show off their fashion photoshop hybrid works, up to the layer of the big fish, they look big from below anyway, reputations ensuring sales as they ride the wave of aura around their work, and the occasional whale floats by, invariably bald with strange coloured specs, these established art world beings who play collectors off of each other, driving up prices. I mean everyone certainly has to have a Neo Rauch, for example, he's still hot, if not white hot anymore, and the money is flowing faster than the champagne. And good for him, why not? He isn't bald, but that's fine, he has a nice head of hair. Because without the pyramid, without this kind of aura of speculation, I suppose, there wouldn't be any money flowing at all. So one has to play the game. Or one feels one has to.
Jiři Dokoupil is the template for the Czech art scene of the last 20 years. One of these bald beings educated in Cologne, he has a name and he profits from it. I like his candle paintings (he makes smudges with the flame), some of them, and a few other things, but one can see how he is thinking very strategically how to make a good trick, how to position himself, to keep the money flowing. And from a materialistic perspective, well of course, I mean that's what it's all about, right? The works are very much about finding a new look for a canvas, and then making a series, quickly. It's like a factory. And a number of Czech artists have followed his lead, looking for new ways to make a mark, just to have a slightly new look to their work, just enough to have something to sell, to put on the wall. Some of them are quite talented, don't get me wrong, they have a good touch and some interesting ideas, but it is work made with money in mind, and the burning desire to find a gallery in Germany, have a show in LA, get a stipend to Brooklyn, etc. And who can blame them .. they want the hell out of here. Ha ha.
And then there are artists, simply working day after day away from the glare of money and the desire for it, working like workmen building some fantastic edifice that they can hopefully complete before they die. Working for the sheer joy of discovery through the work. One hesitates to call them "true" artists, because they are not better than the art world artists, just different, like the difference between the town and the city, perhaps, or between dreamers and pragmatic entrepreneurs. And as I said, a few artists can combine both impulses. Bongo-Bongo turned me on to Eugène Leroy (d. 2000) who lived and worked most of his life in a country house outside of Lille in Northern France. He started painting in the 1930s and from the late 1950s on he developed a unique Expressionist approach that he stayed with for the rest of his life. He began to gain more recognition in the 80s when he was already in his 70s. There's a good article on him here. The paint is encrusted and reworked obsessively, the paintings themselves become radiant objects exuding the energy of their creation. It's figurative painting on the edge of abstraction. He used the model as a presence, the scenes in the video are pretty cool. His approach harks back to Cezanne, the artist in the country studio... It's romantic and it's also marketable (what isn't?), but that doesn't take away from the artist's solitary search for truth through expression. Is it truer than Dokoupil's savvy manipulation of the market? I suppose I'll let you be the judge of that. The Czech equivalent of Eugène Leroy is Bohuslav Reynek with his patient poetic style developed in seclusion at his farmhouse outside Havlickuv Brod. Forced into seclusion as it were by the communists. And let it not be forgotten that before the revolution most Czech artists were forced to work in seclusion. That's another reason they want a taste of the market place today.
And as a postscript let me suggest that if you like your artists crazy and suffering like Van Gogh, then you'll enjoy this classic film version of Joyce Cary's The Horse's Mouth from 1958 starring Alec Guinness. The book is amazing in its use of dialect, and the film captures some of that ambiance. John Bratby did the paintings, and they are impressively rough hewn and focused on feet predominately. Bratby was the biggest thing going in England before Pop came along, all the rage in the late 1950s. Have a look at his work here and browse through the impressive database of English painting. Lots of forgotten painters in there. Here are a few names to get you started, but really the list goes on and on. So much art, and most of it pretty good. And that's just in the UK. |
|
|
| Afghanistan massacre and My Lai |
[Mar. 21st, 2012|11:18 am] |
|
Watch My Lai on PBS. See more from American Experience.
I just left a comment over on ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif?v=92.1) bardcat's journal that was more like a blog post so I'll just paste it here too. I think the massacre in Afghanistan, a story which is already being quickly hushed up and forgotten, and the death of the black teenager in Florida, gunned down by some self-proclaimed "neighborhood watchman", that these stories are connected. That they reveal the "heart of darkness" at the root of US culture, a culture of violence and racism, and a complicit media machine which, instead of working for the powers of good in society, instead of helping to make our society healthier, is instead wrapped up in a technofascistic dream of power and spectacle and is itself a reflection of the same culture of violence, an act of violence against our collective psyche. Power rests in the hands of those who maintain the status-quo, and the status-quo is maintained by making people afraid to speak truth to power. As long as we are sheep, we will be fleeced.
And so in reply to bardcat, and connecting the dots between My Lai and the murders in Afghanistan, I wrote:
I agree that war is hellish and the soldiers are under great strain, even when it's just in some boring outpost. And I also know that many of them are poorly educated and not able to cope with the cultural issues that are thrust on them. This is an issue the Pentagon should have solved long ago, considering their huge bloated budget.
Regardless, the recent attack on innocent civilians in Afghanistan is unconscionable and morally repugnant. No excuses can be made for such vile misuse of power. And I can't help but think of My Lai and the way it was prosecuted. My memory of that event is certainly only minor as I was a small child at the time, but I think the national mood demanded some sense of justice. And there was a show trial. But a quick look on wikipedia gives me the answer what kind of justice was served in the massacre of My Lai, and I quote:
"While 26 US soldiers were initially charged with criminal offenses for their actions at Mỹ Lai, only Second Lieutenant William Calley, a platoon leader in Charlie Company, was convicted. Found guilty of killing 22 villagers, he was originally given a life sentence, but only served three and a half years under house arrest."
And nowadays, the mood of the nation? We have become desensitized, we are immune to feelings of empathy for distant "enemy" combatants, or even people in other countries, or states, or let's just say people "not like us". The minds of the citizens are clouded by the fog of information/disinformation and the constant stream of infotainment means that any news story, any issue, quickly drops "below the fold" ie out of sight and off the table. What is the result? Corruption is rampant and ethical values are disintegrating. America sold it's soul to Ford and Smith and Wesson, and so we shall live and die by the car and by the gun. Vietnam was fought for rubber and oil, and Afghanistan is all about pipes and pipedreams and the oil under Persia which we covet. How much more death must we trade for our lifestyle and our land of the free? |
|
|
| my first lost decade .. the 90s |
[Mar. 19th, 2012|10:20 pm] |
I got my MFA in 1992 from U. of Mississippi with the thesis show "Models" which focused on race, class and violence. The work looks pretty bad for the most part to me now. The work was not so popular with my family. My stepmother said it "made her stomach churn". I suppose I was trying to offend, not so hard to do in Mississippi.
Then I went to Prague in the summer of '92 for a year and a half where I taught English and moved like 5 times and wandered around like an idiot and started learning Czech. I had a studio with an old painter named Janicek who spoke choppy English and painted naive landscapes.
I started freaking out that I would be in Prague forever so at the age of 28 I rushed back to Oxford, MS where I hung out for another year washing dishes and smoking dope, and on hindsight I see, ruining my relationship with my Dad.
After a year of that I moved down to New Orleans where I worked in a video rental place and lived in a shotgun shack uptown and painted a good bit. 96/97 were good years for me. I was floating in that tranquil New Orleans haze. It's not called the Big Easy for nothing. I then moved up to New York City and lasted there for about four years. I didn't get much art made, instead I wandered through people and scenes looking for love in that crazy crowded mess of a city.
 |
|
|
| post-apocalypse |
[Mar. 6th, 2012|05:22 pm] |
I finished Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell last week and was truly impressed. This guy is a writing machine, and this book was perfectly crafted to sell for a film (coming soon to a theatre near you) and make him a lot of money. Way to go, David! Just as the promo image for the film above shows, post-apocalyptic imaginings are all about the past confronting the future, and in Cloud Atlas the cycle of the eternal return is evoked, reflected in the reincarnation thread through the book together with the way the final story set in the future in Hawaii reflects the initial story set in the South Pacific. "After the Fall" is this resonate idea today as we feel ourselves on the edge of a precipice as the post-WWII dream of a post-colonial capitalist utopia has faded into a return to a kind of neo-feudalism. It also reflects the Bible and the Garden of Eden. I thought of Joni Mitchell's song about returning to the Garden, a kind of before-the-fall image, and the post-apocalypse is an imagining of another fall, the end of our enlightenment values as they fall away into a society of human animals. Homo homini lupus est. This is the fear we face, that progress is an illusion and we pass our lives in a sort of flailing uncertainty. The existentialists face this squarely I suppose, but I'm not sure if flailing is enough for me .. though perhaps that's all there is.
Another parallel is with A Canticle for Leibowitz, a novel I read when I was quite young and which I only half remember but in which the only fragment of the past is a shopping list which the monks see as some holy text. "Get bagels".
In the local paper there was an interview with the writer Ivan Klima who said something to the effect the culture is being replaced by entertainment. We can see how the entertainment industry, ever since the late 70s, has been driven more and more by the need for huge spectacles and huge bestsellers. Cloud Atlas is an example of a vaguely deep post-modern novel that reaches for the current zeitgeist and succeeds to the extent that film options were sold and it looks set to be a massive hit. This feeds the entertainment machine. As I wrote about punk in my last entry, true culture is local ... as a foreigner and an exile in a sense, I relish international cyber-culture, but I feel like it's a lonely place, this cyber-realm, this world of failed globalism caught in post-apocalyptic dreaming. Real culture happens between people in meatspace, right? And yet we want to dream collectively, and so here we have Cloud Atlas to be the dream for us, at least for a short while. |
|
|
| punks (not all dead) |
[Feb. 27th, 2012|09:30 pm] |
I came across this group of videos from the early 80s on youtube of local punk/new wave bands in Lexington, KY where I grew up. These bands were all the rage around 1980 when I was 15, so I was too young to run around and go to the shows, so its fun to see them now, and kind of amazing really. The Thrusters were a kind of glam/punk band with lots of theatrical queer aesthetic involved. Check out the lovely ladies on percussion. Punk was a radical rewiring of the hippie love and peace vibe, a kind of nihilistic, anarchic bubbling up of youth rebellion. When I first heard about the Sex Pistols I was turned off by the blood and the ripped shirts. It was too radical for my little teen brain to absorb. But then I discovered Elvis Costello and the first videos started playing on cable and I started spending my allowance/meager savings on imported vinyl records.
Punk hit in the summer of 1977 and by the time I started getting into these records, the poppier side of it anyway, by 1981, the whole movement had been appropriated, to use the parlance of the time, absorbed into the mainstream. Malcolm McClaren and Vivienne Westwood were savvy promoters/proto-culture hackers who were at the epicenter of the movement and rode the wave into fashion stardom. The whole mess aesthetic, pirate primitive look that Westwood designed is still quite appealing. But if we consider the reaction to say Adam Ant compared with Johnny Depp's Jack Sparrow of today, one can see how masculinity has become hardened today, even more fearful of difference and gender-blurring. When I was in high school I got called faggot almost every day but I think the repression is probably even worse today. Much of this fear is due to AIDS I suppose which came up in the same time period (early/mid-80s) and changed everything. So let's say that AIDS killed the dynamism of punk, because the sexual revolution within the anarchy and freedom punk allowed was cut short by fear of experimentation and sharing partners, etc. People were shoved back towards monogamy.
But it's not just about sex, I mean Madonna grabbed that ring didn't she? Ultimately punk is about defining the current moment and defining one's self on one's own terms, which is easier said than done. "I will not be treated as property." This still resonates, yet buried beneath the behemoth of capital. Jello Biafra coined the slogan, "Don't hate the media, become the media". But is it still possible to grab a microphone and start a revolution? Punk was fantastic and disturbing (boot boys) in equal measure, but it used up the power of rebellion as much as it stoked the fire. And it is said that Nirvana was the last desperate gasp of the power of rock, squeezing out the last of the tube. Each revolution has also empowered the state in its repression. The internet allows for instant communication, but any message, any gesture is lost in the cacophony of voices, in the static noise of other competing information and disinformation. So information is a weapon used against us as well. The internet pacifies. This is another message from the early 80s, those pre-AIDS days of slow time and slow communication: that local action has the most resonance because it's experienced live. Punk I suppose can only arise today in a rejection of the spectacle. Yet it requires originality, and this becomes increasingly hard to find. And it requires belief, which is getting harder to muster, when everyone's too jaded and dumbed-down in this post-political repressive time of the Janus-headed god of austerity and connectivity. |
|
|
| navigation |
| [ |
viewing |
| |
most recent entries |
] |
| [ |
go |
| |
earlier |
] |
| |
|
|
