Art and the Artist

There is an age old question regarding the artist and the outcomes of that artist, namely can you despise the maker while still admiring what they made? Are there limits to that concept if the answer is yes? If the answer is no, is all art bound by its creator’s personality, and if so, what happens when the deeds of the human being have long since been forgotten but the art lives on? These questions seem to emerge more and more in an age when we are quick to judge people based on a perfidious text message or an off-handed comment that then goes viral. The diminishing privacy associated both knowingly and unknowingly around our social lives has only poured gasoline on the fire of moral boundaries. Although few traditional artists become celebrities, there work sometimes does. Few people knew who Chris Ofili was until Rudolph Giuliani decided to take issue with The Holy Virgin Mary. Aside from politicians feigning righteous indignation at artists to curry political favor, most so-called ‘blue-chip’ artists remain completely unknown by populist standards. What is known of these artists, if anything, is the product of their creativity, the art itself.

When art has an impact on a broad range of viewers it takes on a mystical association. Great art can be transcendent in it’s representations, providing the viewer with emotional responses that are otherwise the dominion of church, cosmology, philosophy or moments of extreme trauma or ecstasy.  Natural human curiosity gets the better of us and we want to delve into how such a work was created and who was responsible for moving us so. Why else would a film like Gerhard Richter Painting even be possible? Although the film grossed a tiny amount in comparison to major film releases, (a meager $242,000 in the U.S.) none the less audiences sat transfixed as a german painter was filmed squeegeeing paint on and off canvases. The studio of Francis Bacon was dismantled, walls and all, after his death in 1992 and shipped to a museum in Dublin as if it were an ancient archeological relic. In the midst of this fascination about how an artists does what he/she does, lies the inevitable cult of personality. It isn’t enough to simply witness the act of art making, there is a desire to know the person behind it. What mind could create a great work of art? What is their behavior, their loves, their desires, their politics that inevitably fuel their production? Therein lies the rub.

Over the past three decades I’ve had the opportunity to meet, interact and sometimes even indulge in robust libation with a wide range of artists from MacArthur Prize winners and internationally renowned blue chip artists to complete unknowns. Given those experiences I can say unequivocally, that there is no secret sauce to making great art. Personalities range across the gamut of human beings from inglorious to generous. I have met artists of great stature that would blend into any local hometown diner unnoticed and those that carry such idiosyncrasies it is hard to imagine how they availed themselves to the world at all. On balance I would say that most artists are perplexed as much by what they do as those that view their art. They see their art making as a strange drive within themselves that they can no more shuck off than the shape of their head. Most artists create because they have an interior urge to do so. They are driven to share, in whatever strange way, their experiences both exterior and interior, of this world through the medium of their choice. It is precisely this ubiquitous urge that can create a dissonance between the art that is made and the artist who makes it. No artist in recent memory has met with more of this turgid dissonance than Carl Andre.

An enormous retrospective of Andre’s work just closed at the temple of all things Minimalism, Dia Beacon and it drew considerable attention and derision due to the personal life of the artist being represented. The reason for this is well reported and decades old, and carries the heaviest of moral weight with it; the death of another human being.     On the evening of September 8, 1985 in Greenwich Village, New York, Ana Mendieta died by plummeting from the 34th floor of the tower in which Andre resided. The circumstances which led to her death are vague at best, particularly given the fact the only witness (or perpetrator) was Andre himself and both he and Mendieta were heavily intoxicated on champagne. Ana Mendieta was a rising star in the art world, albeit one who struggled against the shadow of Andre’s stature, her gender in a male dominated industry, and her Cuban heritage. It is precisely because of Mendieta’s heritage, gender, and politics that has attracted even greater attention to the incident, mixing with the few known facts to create a whirlpool of speculation, and passionate force. This can be heard in the Abstract Expressionist painter Howardena Pindell’s comment to a journalist just after Andre’s acquittal; “Oh, sure, I see it as totally symbolic: your life isn’t worth shit.” Thirty years on, Mendieta’s death remains a scab in the art world that reminds us of the inequality, and white upper class domination that dictates who is remember and who is forgotten. Many are wondering why, in light of the vagaries and loss of Mendieta, should Andre get such recognition now? Certainly, Dia Beacon feels as though Andre’s work is what matters and deserves, despite any whirlpool of discontent and anger about him as a person, deserved a retrospective.

Since the beginning of Carl Andre’s trial the confusion and sometimes contradictions in Andre’s portrayal of the circumstances combined with the fierce feminist community that Mendieta was a part of, has created a toxic mix of emotion. When the Dia Beacon retrospective opened, animal blood and guts were thrust upon the Manhattan location of Dia in an effort to draw attention to the still raw emotional wounds that remain with those who feel Mendieta was killed rather than fell. Although Andre was acquitted of the murder in a rare non-jury trial (he waved his right to a jury and asked that the judge be the sole decider of the outcome) many feel verdict was unjust.

When I read the plain style account Naked By The Window written by Robert Katz that wove together Andre and Mendieta’s past, as well as the known evidence and resulting trial, I felt confusion and discontent. It seemed entirely possible and plausible given Andre’s size, his level of intoxication and the volatility of his relationship with Mendieta that he could, in a moment of passion, have thrown her from his apartment window. The window sat above a hip-height (for Mendieta) radiator and it was well documented that Mendieta was terrified of heights. Making it even more difficult was Andre’s sometimes seeming bizarre behavior, sullen demeanor and his uniform of denim overalls. He went silent about the circumstances of the evening and he closed himself off from Mendieta’s family, some say in order to avoid moral judgement at a time of guilt. It took three grand juries to indict Andre to trial and the entire proceedings dragged on for three years creating an operatic arc within the tiny Soho art community that was the New York art world then. Artists like Frank Stella, a life-long friend of Andre’s still finds himself the point of criticism for immediately putting up bail for Andre when arrested. Rich white men, protecting other rich white men, the saying goes. This opera has persisted and aside from the verdict, and unresolved (and likely forever unresolved) circumstances of Mendieta’s death, it is exacerbated by the the type of work that Andre creates—Minimalism.

It has been reported that at the time of Andre’s trial, the art bar Puffy’s passed a pitcher with “CARL ANDRE DEFENSE FUND” written on it and someone put a brick in it. Minimalism remains to this day one of the more unpopular art movements, despite its universal philosophical themes. Since its inception in the 1960’s it has been derided as both overly simplistic (a tired and common argument used against art) and as a cold embrace of latent modernist principals. The fact that Andre became powerful within the art world by aligning standard construction bricks on a floor in classic geometric patterns adds to the fury against the man and his work. Like many artists of that period he is both a heavy drinker and averse to discussing the art work itself. The few times Andre has spoken about his work or art making it only adds confusion or contempt toward his personality such as, “I mean, art for art’s sake is ridiculous. Art is for the sake of one’s needs.” Position this quiet, middle-aged, wealthy, white male who was dominating the art world against the fiery, Cuban Mendieta whose work was powerfully grounded in themes of feminism, identity and mysticism and you have the perfect storm of binary fracture—women versus men, color versus white, body-centered art versus material Minimalism, outsider versus the establishment. This dynamism has muddied the waters related to Andre’s retrospective no matter what side you fall on, guilty or not guilty in terms of Carl Andre the human being. On the second to last day of the retrospective at Dia Beacon, several women artists staged an event called “CRYING; A PROTEST” where they walked amongst Andre’s works and began crying for the loss of Mendieta and her absence from the exhibition. My friend Faheem Haider, also wrote about the lack of acknowledgement of Mendieta in the retrospective and suggested that the man, Carl Andre was hiding behind the work in order to avoid responsibility. If one is responsible to universal principals, Faheem suggests, then he might feel it unnecessary to address things on a day to day scale.

The death of another human being by mysterious circumstances, especially one of such promise and creative power is incredibly difficult to anneal. The fact that Mendieta and Andre were such opposites also attracted to each other only makes the mystery and tragedy of her death more ripe and volatile. There remains the question, outside of the tragedy, of whether or not Carl Andre’s work should be given the attention inherent in a retrospective? Can the work be viewed for it’s aesthetic value outside of the conditions of Andre’s personal life? If a retrospective is warranted, despite the tragedy, is it necessary to include mention or representation of Mendieta’s work? I think it’s important to keep in mind at such contentious crossroads as these, that one of the functions of art, if it has a function at all, is to present ideas that scratch at the underlying components of our humanity. There is no right or wrong approach to that practice and much of art is oblique, raising more questions than answers. In my mind it is hard to argue against the body of work that Andre has produced in his lifetime and the contribution it has made to art as a conversation about humanity. You may hate it’s overt simplicity, its ground in the Tao Te Ching or what you perceive to be a love of modernism’s power, but the impact it has had and influence on art and everyday life is hard to deny. Minimalisms influence, for better or worse can be felt all the way down the line to the design pornography of Apple. Is it a horror that Mendieta was taken from us, no matter the circumstances so young—of course. Her voice in the art world today is much needed in a dynamic hell bent toward commodity and consumerism. The loss of her future contributions to art is a loss for all of humanity. 

L. Carl Andre, "Grecrux" (1985) - R. Ana Mendieta, "Silueta Series, Iowa" (1977)

There is a long line of art production that has been made by terrible people or born out of societies terrible in their actions. Should we condemn Mayan art or Egyptian art because of the behavior of those cultures? Should all of the armor be removed from museums throughout the world because it was created for the purposes of war, no matter how beautiful? Should On the Waterfront be permanently banned because its author, Budd Schulberg sold out others in Hollywood to the House Un-American Activities Committee, often destroying their careers? Does it make On the Waterfront any less of a powerful story? I believe it is possible to separate the local human dimensions of an artist’s life from the work of the artist. Many artists cannot explain how it is they do what they do or even how their better works came into being. Impulse, instinct, drugs, passion and every other thing that is uniquely human creates a conflagration of ideas and actions that becomes a work of art. Artists often refer to it as the happy accident. When the outcome of that is something that can move us either in anger, disgust or in ecstasy and joy, the artist has done their job, even if that artist themselves is lousy at living.

One way that Dia Beacon could have dealt with the emotionally charged atmosphere surrounding Carl Andre better, would have been to dedicate space and energy to a dual retrospective of Mendieta’s work. The fact that her work was an offshoot related to Minimalism could have been creatively curated in a way that both recognized the tragedy of her death as well as the likely underlying reason she came to fall in love with Andre, and visa versa, to begin with. An institutions job is ultimately to give a platform to the artists who have had a memorable impact on the human story. A combined retrospective of the two artists would have not only been deserved on both parts (who knows where Mendieta would have taken her land-body art practice) but would have given a meaningful frame to why art is important to begin with.

Verdant Horrors

Verdant Horrors

Richard Mosse at Portland Museum of Art

In the deepest folds of our collective Western imagination lives a place called the dark continent—Africa. This idyllic source of our human genesis is now a place filled with mystery, fear and self loathing in the hearts of Americans and Europeans alike. For over a century European re-discovery of Africa yielded repression, slavery and destruction. Now the African continent is reaping what colonization has sowed.

In the most central heart of Africa lies both its richest and most menacing place, the Democratic Republic of Congo. A country of 77 million equatorial people spread across a dense, verdant, resource rich land mass roughly the size of Western Europe, D.R. Congo has been unraveling since its independence from Belgium in 1960. In 1997 civil war broke out fueled by immeasurable corruption, an influx of Hutus from neighboring Rwanda and a struggle for natural resources. To date the war has killed an estimated 5.4 million people and displaced millions more. It is into this, the darkest of the dark continent, that the Irish-born photographer Richard Mosse entered in 2010, camera in-hand.

The Portland Art Museum (PAM) is hosting Richard Mosse’s exhibit The Enclave in Portland, Oregon. The Enclave is both documentary photography and film footage, is visually riveting in unexpected ways. Mosse stumbled upon infrared film, long forgotten and then sidelined for being photographic kitsch. It was developed by the U.S. military and Kodak in the 1940’s to distinguish military installations from dense green overgrowth in aerial photography. Infrared photography shifts green into shades of shocking magenta-violet. It renders the dense Congolese jungle in vibrant red-blue hues while leaving the human mark of trails, buildings,  trucks and human flesh unchanged. In the familiar landscape of the West this would be far less effective than how it functions in Africa.

The adroitly timed exhibition sits poised against elevated American racial tension. It tugs at Portlanders (and white Americans) shame, fear and confusion. It reveals the hidden truths of war when our daily experience is curtained off from our collective military actions abroad. The shocking pinks and reds create push black faces against an alien landscape that mimics the European-born, white colonialist fear of the ‘other’. The Enclave is a psychedelic explosion of color that simultaneously fractures our visual ground while heightening our empathy.

The exhibition at PAM is split in two rooms, one containing the large format photographs and the other the video installation. The photos are dimly lit elevating their enigmatic proposition. Mosse owes more to the work of Edward Burtynsky than traditional documentary war photographers James Nachtwey or Lynsey Addario. The photography is less interested in the action of conflict than its aftermath. The work is all about residuals, deeply rooted in landscape photography, subtly rendering the changes manifested out of the depravities of war. Ruin porn is all too often war photography’s de facto position and Mosse elegantly avoids those trappings. His power lies in his ability to break from the obviousness of wars destructive terror as well as the blood and guts of dead bodies. This Irishman, born in a country with a long history of civil conflict is much more interested in the mundane, the bucolic, and the penetrating tension of stillness that is largely what war is. Action may be an attention-getting vehicle that shocks us, but Mosse’s photography wants us to look more deeply into the soul of conflict by examining its quiet moments and subtle residue. 

Bursting sounds roar from a darkened opening at the opposing end of the photographic exhibition space. Entering an unnerving and disorienting pitch black opening, you’re confronted with a black room filled with six hanging projection screens being intermittently and sometimes simultaneously bombarded with infrared film footage that Mosse directed while in the D.R. Congo. A soundtrack ranging from peeping insects, wind through jungle grass, and water washing ashore to gun and artillery fire, and the singing/shouting voices of people is played like a symphony above the screens. The infrared film makes military camouflage look like Haute couture at Paris fashion week than than the clothing of machete-wielding Congolese militia. The pink-pony color shatters any normalcy that otherwise dulls our sense of war. The lack of actual on-screen violence creates a persistent, unnerving tension and at one point the screens go black as the echoing sounds of artillery fire rain from the ceiling speakers. Most disorienting are the filmic apparitions of bizarre military exercises and community parties. Film footage of the deceptively calm waters of lake Kivu (itself prone to limnic eruptions that spontaneously release volumes of CO₂ choking the life out of everything near its banks) is played on separate screens while other screens play footage of village music celebrations showing tribal leaders feed money into the pockets of prancing women. The underlying culture and landscape are presented as is and yet intuitively you realize all is not right.

The Enclave first opened at the Irish pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2013 and is promised to travel on to other exhibition spaces. In a time when conflict is the disposition of superpowers and terrorists as recently witnessed in France with the Charlie Hebdo slaughter, it is important to reveal the deep roots of human conflict. The Enclave implausibly reveals a distant war as a play on our collective humanity while still holding a powerful aesthetic seat. Despite Mosse’s use of infrared film, the exhibition never falls into gimmickry or kitsch. Seldom does documentary photography and film hold such potency while maintaining a delicate ambiguity.

The Enclave is on view at the Portland Art Museum through April 12, 2105

Free Bird

A review of the movie Birdman (2014) - spoiler alert. 

“If I leave here tomorrow   Would you still remember me?”

               ― Free Bird by Lynyrd Skynyrd

In a world encased in irony and cliché the hardest art to produce is that which wades right into that milieu and inverts it, onto itself. The movie Birdman against all odds, does just that. Alejandro González Iñárritu’s wonderful new movie behaves like a stone skipping across the pond of popular culture. With every scrape against the surface, it reveals a deeper, often sadder truth about our culture while simultaneously tearing at the fiber of the system that perpetuates it.

Iñárritu in Birdman has created a macroscopic view of our cultural landscape using the microscopic lens of an 800 seat theater on Broadway in New York and a play by the late poet, playwright and short story writer Raymond Carver. Carver’s play What We Talk About When We Talk About Love serves as the foundation for the move. The production is being staged by Riggan Thomson (Michael Keaton) an ex-movie superhero named Birdman, whose fame faded with the last of a blockbuster tripartite in the early 90’s. Funding, acting, and directing in Carver’s play is a somewhat last ditch effort by Riggan to regain attention through art rather than pop culture. Riggan’s shame about how he obtained his fame stands directly in contrast to his penetrating desire to be loved as something richer. Against this backdrop Riggan must contend with a cadre of actors replete with a mountain of their own emotional baggage, his daughter’s cold disdain, and his lawyers’ forceable pragmatism. It is a world anyone could empathize with wanting to fly away from and soar above the streets of New York.

What makes Birdman great is its tempo. The soundtrack is simply a drum kit pulsing out Riggan’s life in syncopation. The jazz drummer Antonio Sanchez created a soundtrack that paired with Iñárritu’s direction, creates an unnerving pulse that rises and falls, pounds and runs silent throughout the film, leaving you with an erratic heartbeat for the film. Iñárritu even puts an actual drummer (Nate Smith) playing the soundtrack visible in the film from time to time to reinforce Riggan’s growing delusion. It is a fantastic device not just for its pacing of the movie but because it suggests the beating heart of our own lives and gently nods at the protagonist of Carver’s play, Mel McGinnis who is a heart surgeon.

Beyond the use of an aged drum kit for a background, Iñárritu works against fiction and pop culture clichés that thrust the viewer into a bullfight arena of competing pettiness, comedy and tragedy. As a visual artist what I found most striking was Iñárritu’s wonderful use of visual metaphors. A scene in a liquor store mirror Ralph Ellison’s invisible man captured by the photographer Jeff Wall. A fogged filled stage littered with gauzy actors posing with tree filaments on their heads pokes fun at almost every stage production of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. A drunk on the street reveals a soliloquy from Macbeth. Even the actors themselves become visual symbols of their own roll in Riggan’s life. Sam (Emma Stone), Riggan’s daughter is bleached out with dark rimmed eye liner making her look like a creepy doll. Mike Shiner (Edward Norton), prances about like a mirror of Riggan’s former self, often barely dressed. In one scene, Shiner is literally the visual metaphor for The Emperor Wears No Clothes. All of these actors and stagings mainly take place in a Broadway theater’s claustrophobic back hallways and rooms, painted in nightclub garishness and faded putrid tones. Riggan’s dressing room resembles more of a prison cell than a lead actor’s sanctuary. Often during the film the chambered back end of the theater becomes the inner chambers of Riggan’s increasingly demented mind where only the stage provides open terrain and safety.

A poignant, keystone scene in the movie leaves Riggan accidentally locked out of the stage door right before the play’s apotheosis. Panicked and left in his tidy-whities (a reference to Breaking Bad?) Riggan awkwardly speed walks around the block, right through Times Square and a crowd of smartphone wielding fans who immediately tweet the experience to over a million followers. On the surface it speaks to the desperation of male middle-age, fading fame, and the cult of personality but what it most beautifully mirrors is Ellison’s Invisible Man;

“I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. Like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus sideshows, it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass. When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves or figments of their imagination, indeed, everything and anything except me.”

A man whose fame is derived from playing a fictional superhero can stroll through one of the busiest places on earth and yet not really be seen. In this case of Birdman fame replaces race.

There are too many moments in Birdman to recount without spoiling the uncomfortable pleasure of the experience. Few films so eloquently balance comedy with desperation all the while making serious commentary on society, but Birdman succeeds admirably in doing so. The film reminds us of our shared humanity, and our fragility in order to disrupt what seems like an ever increasing reliance on fantasy over reality. Icarus is mentioned in the film but like everything else in Iñárritu’s Birdman, it is not the metaphor it seems. In this case the parable is directed at the viewers not its central character. A society bound to the cult of personality, and superhero movies is indeed flying too close to the proverbial cultural sun and like the Egyptians, Inca’s and Romans before, is destined for destruction. As with Carver’s Mel McGinnis, Riggan’s shame is a grounding force that creates a beautiful destruction in order to reveal a larger truth, “and it ought to make us feel ashamed when we talk like we know what we're talking about when we talk about love.”*

*from Raymond Carver's "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love"

Burning Down Byrne

On October 7, 2014, David Byrne the modern day Renaissance man and ex-Talking Heads lead, posted a blog entry on his website “I DON’T CARE ABOUT CONTEMPORARY ART ANYMORE?” The commentary, a seeming impromptu riff on his reaction to the current state of contemporary art, has garnered a lot of attention. Byrne isn’t just a painter and musician, he’s currently partnered with one of the art stars of the 1980’s, Cindy Sherman. His position, therefore, provides him with unusual access from both the point of celebrity and art world insider, to the undercurrent of New York’s art market. So, when Byrne writes about the art world he is writing from a position of art and financial power as well as a practitioner.

A few days later the artist and former gallerist, Ric Kasini Kadour wrote on Hyperallergic a counterpoint screed which attacked Byrne directly; “I Don’t Care About David Byrne Anymore?” A sideline memetic reaction has been taking place on everyone’s favorite social media platform Facebook. Aside from Kadour’s somewhat vitriolic retort (“Boo hoo, fuck off.”), I think both Kadour and Byrne miss the mark in their commentary about the state of contemporary art and strangely find themselves closer in alignment than either might admit.

First of all, contemporary art is not class warfare as many would like to pretend it is. As the late Robert Hughes so eloquently put it, “In art there is no progress, only fluctuations of intensity.” Capitalism by nature is predicated on constant progress and consumption, whether perceived or real. Art doesn’t play by those rules, which is exactly what makes it desirable to the 1%. What the extremely wealthy can’t have, they must have. This doesn’t pollute the art world per se, but only becomes more recognizable, more obvious in times of, as Hughes puts it, fluctuating intensity. Right now contemporary art is experiencing a period of low intensity, as is music. There may be a lot of people out there making things but there is no current collective zeitgeist to grab hold of and that makes for a lot recirculation of the old, the average, and the bad. Artists have always and will always pander to rich collectors because money makes the world go round and despite protests to the contrary, being a starving artist sucks. In order for art market to operate as class warfare it would have to persistently deny future Basquiats or present day Sam Falls, but it doesn’t. It may be dictated by tastemakers who see dollar signs but it doesn’t discriminate based on class. For this very reason, it keeps a perpetual flow of young, fresh MFA graduates hungry for success and fully participating in the system that fuels the amusement of the 1%.

Secondly, Byrne and Kadour both use straw man arguments to make their points. It is so easy to pick on the richest artist in the world, Damien Hirst and his For the Love of God (2007) diamond skull. Hirst is an opportunist more than a real artist and the bulk of his production is either a direct or near direct rip-off of other more talented artist’s work. So what. He is one man in a very large pool of makers and one man does not the art market make. Hating on Jeff Koons or Damian Hirst does little to add to the conversation on contemporary art. In equal measure, Kadour’s naive references to what might be termed ‘working class artists’ of various ilk is no better a position against the great art market engine. Just because you make something doesn’t mean you’re adding anything to the collective cultural conversation, especially didactic, playful sculptures of robots. Great art as we all know, penetrates deeply into the collective subconscious and communicates some form of undefinable knowledge that changes how we inhabit the world and bridges race, class and culture. The fact that there is little great art being made now may be lamentable but blaming it on economic conditions, secret gallery cabals or David Byrne himself, seems silly at best.

I understand Byrne’s disappointment as much as I get Kadour’s anger at Byrne and the art world. How many artists were of equal or superior measure to Vermeer or Titian in their time but lacked middle class upbringings or support from the church? Nobody ever said the art market or life was fair. I don’t believe that money pollutes the water of art production, there are just too many examples of great artists who found their power outside of the art market or wealthy patronage to convince me otherwise. Likewise I’m tired of the old 1960’s argument that by virtue of your own wealth or lack there of, you can’t comment on certain cultural conditions because you are either in or out of the “club.” Byrne paid his dues and couldn’t have possibly predicted his rise to wealth by way of an incredibly strange art-rock group that emerged in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s. Saying he’s rich so therefore he can’t comment on the rich is absurd. If anything, there is potential for him to reveal things that others would not ever have access to. By the same token, Kadour’s middle-class status, or at least non-wealthy status, isn’t an automatic pulpit for criticism either. The answer to contemporary art’s dilemma is not a socialist equalizing one. History teaches us that art often blossoms during conditions of inequality more than its opposite and therefore cannot be constrained or defined by economics or politics alone. Kadour regurgitates a lazy and tired argument that implies that if only less rich people were involved the art market would be more fair, and by association, better. Nothing could be further from reality.

Byrne’s comparison of the Dutch tulip bubble or Tulpenwoede is an apt one that Kadour completely glosses over. As someone who has spent a lot of time in working class artists studios, smaller more provincial galleries (like the Portland, Oregon gallery Kadour mentions—I live in Portland) I can tell you I have yet to see a great hidden, seething mass of talent. Bryne is right that the art market is paralleling the current economic conditions. Art has always been a profitable investment, out earning the stock market with regularity. It’s experiencing a bubble and with bubbles come breaks and then something interesting usually happens.

The real danger we face in the art world is the institutionalization of art production. Every year there are over 1,200 applicants for the MFA program at Yale. Yet, the percentage of employment of arts-related graduates has steadily declined since the 1970’s. The number of students receiving a bachelors degree in fine art in the U.S. has gone up 25% in nine years. In 2010 there were 29,000 graduates in art related fields. That’s 300,000 degreed people calling themselves artists in a ten year span. With tuition having risen at such rapid rates over the past three decades it is no wonder we have such simmering anger amongst young artists. There are simply too many artists who carry too much college debt to ever be equalized by even the most economically balanced art market. Combine this with the fact that the overwhelming majority of Americans never set foot during their lifetime in a commercial art gallery, despite millions attending art museums and you begin to see the dilemma. Art production is equated with laziness and frivolity in America and paying for such things is considered the folly of the rich. Why would you ever spend $1,000 for a work of art when you can endlessly listen to the new Beyonce album for a mere $15.99?

Until we change the underlying dynamics of how artists learn to practice their craft, how they form a professional practice while holding down a full time job and how they can create collectively owned gallery spaces that establish themselves in the suburbs and lower income communities, using micro payments and shared economic models, nothing will change in the art market of America and likely little will happen to create the conditions for the next generation of great artists.

Departure

Erased de Kooning Drawing

Dan: I'm older, and I'm much less friendly to fuckin' change. Al Swearengen: Change ain't lookin' for friends. Change calls the tune we dance to.

—Deadwood

The efficacy of life is held within the grip of memory. Without memory we and indeed everyone we know or have known do not exist. We spend our lives fighting against loss which is primarily fighting against the loss of memory. We manifest things—art, to hold onto the world which we live in. It is within this contentious dance with death that we manifest life.

The tenuous dialogue between memory and existence has grown even more difficult in the digital age. Ideas constructed within the macro world of paint, stone and pencil become much more liminal in the world of bits and bytes. Not only do we struggle with the relationship to digital art in how it’s displayed—computer monitors, televisions—but its preservation and continuation. Since the 1970’s the platform for music has gone from vinyl to 8-track to cassettes to compact discs to purely digital storage and now, back again to vinyl. How is an artist to predict the format which will hold the memories and expressions of tomorrow? Who now owns a betamax machine or a cassette player? As difficult as it is to sell works of art on paper, vinyl or canvas, it becomes even harder to make a living from digital production. As we’ve witnessed with the near death of newspapers and the implosion of the record industry, digital media lacks the tactile semi-permanence of something hanging on your wall. A Bill Viola work requires a monitor whose own technology is shifting every year. Televisions have gone from cathode ray technology to LED in just a few decades. Imagine how we will view our digital creations in 20, 30 or 50 years from now.

What I’ve come to realize however, is that none of this matters. The act of creation must go beyond the desire to hold on and the need for remembering if it is to become universal. The work of Bill Viola isn’t dependent upon a television monitor, it’s dependent upon the themes of being human. One could imagine his work being acted out live or drawn as a graphic novel or written out as a poem. It is the works of art which transcend the grip of memory that ironically live on the longest in our collective recollections and cultural identity. Loss is a starting point not an ending. When we loose someone important to us we don’t also kill ourselves, despite the anguish and sorrow we feel. We inherently understand that living is the point even if we understand very little about how that actually comes to be or why it is we too will eventually die. The 1953 work Erased de Kooning Drawing by Robert Rauschenberg is a testament to the way art can transcend the confines of memory and become something else, something universal. It doesn’t matter if you’ve ever seen a de Kooning before or even if you know who de Kooning was and his importance in the art world. It is enough to understand that one artist erased the work of another. The act of destruction becomes an act of creation.

This year has seemingly become a meditation on death, loss, and memory in my life. Mortality took up a seat next to me in my favorite pub and asked me to buy her a drink. I didn’t invite her to sit next to me and frankly before a couple of years ago I didn’t even know her name let alone hang out with her, and yet here she is, now a permanent fixture on that bar stool. My resistance was, at first swift, because like everyone else, I saw death as a threat to life, a destroyer of memories. Her presence there, forced me to confront entropy in a way that I had always pretended to embrace and understand, but suddenly realized was a pretense. I had disguised fear in a cloak of creativity. Life it turns out is much more like Schrödinger's cat experiment than even I had cared to admit.

Memories are not a box of photographs or a fleeting glimpse in our minds of a time we lived in the past. They are biochemical constructs built from electrical impulses that are stimulated from interactions in the real world as a tool for navigating the challenges of being. Evolutionarily speaking, memories have aided homo sapiens by providing us the foundation to create analogies, make tools, and catalogue our world. Memory has extended our lifespans and allowed us to surpass all other creatures on earth in terms of our dominance as a species. And the way in which those biochemical impulses are leveraged is through creativity and that creativity works by first assailing the memories we have available to us and then seeing how they can be reconstructed in a new way. The collective memory of de Kooning is now the collective memory of Rauschenberg which is really the collective memory of humanity. The symbolic is the real because we are alive.

The exciting opportunities available in the digital realm are the ones that challenge our understanding of permanence not the ones which reinforce our desire for nostalgia, for remembering and memorial. The creative act is an act of destruction because entropy is a natural component of being alive and to embrace its reality is to embrace being. It is also an impossibility. Matter is a constant in the universe and although it desires a state of equilibrium it is a constant. Staring at the Erased de Kooning Drawing brings us closer to that knowledge of equilibrium and a little closer to understanding the nature of being.

“Everywhere one seeks to produce meaning, to make the world signify, to render it visible. We are not, however, in danger of lacking meaning; quite the contrary, we are gorged with meaning and it is killing us.” ― Jean Baudrillard