Inspiration, distraction

Posted in Aimless Musings, Visual Art on August 7th, 2009 by Titus

My friend artist Peter Fagundo described to me this morning a studio visit he had recently with an artist he works with, at the restaurant where he waits tables to pay bills. He said that his initial reaction to the work was to dislike it, though with some time and conversation with the artist he got a place of appreciating where she was coming from, if still not exactly liking the work.

That’s how it goes. And that works well when teaching; it’s the crucial skill, actually. When I used to write criticism, I refused to meet with the artists because I knew that I would lose, not objectivity, but the integrity of that somewhat “pure” immediate gestalt, and subsequent very personal analysis. I didn’t, and don’t, want to appreciate everything that comes round the pike. As an artist, I want to know what it is I’m supposed to be doing, and actually feel great satisfaction when I see something I clearly don’t care about. As I remember Krishanmurti once saying when asked about some silent yogi or levitating lama, “good for them. That’s just something I don’t have to worry about doing myself.” I love that idea. Rather than giving way to envy or agitation, just to think, oh good, I don’t have to make or do that thing.

Pete said that he feels like his aesthetic knife is getting really “honed”; not to kill, but to pare away the unnecessary. I know what he means. I, too, feel like I’m getting ever clearer about what I want to see, and what I don’t. I can appreciate the latter, but feel an increasing devotion to serving the former. Agnes Martin often spoke about human beings having a certain feeling or idea of perfection in their minds, and how artists often attempt to express this idea through their work, of their own sense of perfection in the mind. I take the meaning of this extremely broadly, as I think she was able to do, though her own work had a clear, very personal expression of it.

For whatever reason, I think I’m one of those people who find it especially difficult to know clearly what it is I need to make with much distraction around. Graduate school was really difficult in that respect. It really didn’t help me at all; in fact, it was quite damaging I think. I guess this is why I’m drawn to Agnes Martin, and Zen hermits, Taoist recluses, and desert monks. They shunned the hubbub in order to be able to truly listen within themselves.

Martin called it listening to inspiration. She said that inspiration is sort of always close, but that rational, discursive thought gets in the way; that artists often have that inspiration but that they don’t humble themselves before it (“humility is the most beautiful word,” she said), that they think it has to service their egos, and between the inspiration and the execution, a thousand thoughts enter and debase it. This is exactly how I feel when look at so much work today. I’m using the term “thinking” here not to mean a certain thoughtfulness; but rather, that I think art is by nature a much more intuitive, pre-rational, immediate, visceral kind of experience – even when as quietly reflective as the Ryman’s and Martin’s and early Marden’s I’m enjoying lately.

I’m reflecting on this “inspiration” standard in my own work a lot lately. In the galleries, I see too much thinking often times, and too much superficial influence from unquestioned trends and conventions. My old Korean Zen teacher used to say over and over “too much-e tinking tinking tinking! Only go straight, don’t-know!”

Which reminds me now of the thing I meant to say at the beginning, which is to relate this series of questions. They were how Pete boiled down his critique of that artist he visited. He rattled it off: “I asked her: Why are you doing this? This way? For whom? What do you mean by it? How do you want people to react to it?” I said she probably felt really tired in the day following. Like, those are the questions, aren’t they? And how many artists are really committed to asking them from their toes to their head tops? I’d say, only a percentage, and not a large one.

Peter Fagundo

Posted in Uncategorized on July 16th, 2009 by Titus

I should mention, in the off chance some random soul has stumbled here to this site, that my very good pal and mad genius painter Pete Fagundo, (affectionately known by many as “Dooood”) is having a show this weekend. I’m giving a talk, I’m told. I’m so going to just wing it…

here’s the info.

117(1)Artist/Gallerist/SAIC painting faculty Dan Devening wrote this insightful press release:

For the past 10 years, Peter Fagundo has rigorously integrated his home life and studio practice to create a single, self-supporting entity. The most recent result of that ongoing project is Essential Transmutation Frequency, a one-day, site-specific installation of new work in a special setting.

On Sunday, July 19th from 12 – 5 pm, Peter opens his home studio to present paintings, works on paper and photographs in the context within which they were conceived and produced. He is working from a platform that–for the first time–acknowledges the tradition and history of painting; this new work arrives directly and unfiltered. By defining a “frequency” that allows the material and form to arrive without ambiguity or deflection, these pieces are rarified through careful tuning of the simplest elements. The work in Essential Transmutation Frequency confronts his medium and his life head-on.

Please join us for the exhibition; a brief introduction by Titus O’Brien begins at 1:30 pm

1210 Sherman Avenue, Rear    I Evanston     I 847.800.2667     I pfagundo@comcast.net

New painting

Posted in Visual Art on July 16th, 2009 by Titus

Titus painting? Yes, strange but true. I can’t make anymore sculpture right now as I’m sick of finding storage for them.

Was actually building a maquette for a new sculpture when I got fed up with the fussiness and started making some quick collages. I liked them surprisingly well, and saw them as bigger paintings. Made the first one as a test, think it interesting enough, and will hopefully complete the next bigger one (5 x 6 feet +) before the new semester starts at SAIC/Columbia.

Its untitled for now; acrylic, charcoal, and graphite on linen. Here are some crappy, flash-hot snaps of it, followed by one of the next collage slated for translation to paint:

Essay for Lizzy Wetzel’s “The Medicine Show” catalog

Posted in Visual Art on June 10th, 2009 by Titus

To be published soon. Here’s a link to Women & their Work, the gallery. And to the show website.

———————

In the beginning, void. Total absence. Out of this nothing came One. No why or how. Bang. There it is. Logos. One thought. A word.

Out of One came Two. From Two came Three, and from the Three, Infinite Cosmos. More galaxies in our universe than stars in our galaxy, more universes beyond this one than galaxies in it.

What was the phrase that shaped itself from this nothing (no creator needed, separate from the creation)? The one Word that begat the symphonic infinite holographic encyclopedia of being, all of it reducible to that first utterance; which is still just now, and always?

Why, “Love,” of course.

Well, apologies to you hard-nosed art worlders, but we can’t talk about the artwork of Lizzy Wetzel and not confront the obvious. You can’t not use the word “psychedelic.” You can’t not get a little cosmic for minute. You have to use the “L-word.” After all, she does.

In the ritual that initiated her exhibition at WOTW, individuals were selected from the crowd by a male “gatekeeper” dressed in nothing more than a hawk-wing codpiece, ornately embellished plastic Halloween wolf mask, and white body paint. They were ushered by two more masked, dark-costumed functionaries into a black-light illumined bamboo dome. There Wetzel, in hooded white druid’s dress, her stated intention to “massage” each person with amplified drum beats and chanting, whispered a healing mantra: “I love you.” Each participant was given an initiatory mark as they exited, an orange stripe painted down their forehead and nose.

Love chants, glitter hot glue, fluorescent shiny puff paint, black lights, animal parts: this work is nothing less than a challenge to every last vestige of high-art respectability, and really, the new academy.

By the 1990’s, after the thorough decades-long “deconstruction” of any authoritative aesthetic or material criteria, art-world clout had finally come to more or less be measured by a perceived level of analytical critique; a predominance of a sort of masculine, reductivist, passive-aggressive, hyper-intellectual gameswo/manship and tactical maneuvering, symptomized by a lack of any sort of emotional/physical expansiveness, in favor of endless small tight turns in the brain. Feeling was allowed, as long as it was moderated by a wink/nudge irony, political agitation, or was observably negative (ennui, angst, self-loathing, disgust preferred, thank you.) Sincerity was really only to be believed if what was expressed was unpleasant.

The last few years have seen an overwhelming push-back against this sort of discrimination, toward glee, joy, casualness, collaboration, hilarity, friendship, care, entheogens, make-up, and generally having a good time in the art experience.

Wetzel is a member of a creative generation emerging naturally in this moment, reacting spontaneously with their cultural products and intrusions – I would argue she happens to do it better that most. The world clearly needs a new approach. Things are a mess. We are out of balance. We need some healing. A Medicine Show, even.

Art as medicine; of course. What else should it be?

What needs healing? God, what doesn’t?

At root, we greatly suffer the loss of functional myth and meaning structures. Disconnection from Earth (physical and metaphysical,) each other. War, within the self, and by extension, everything else.

We are sick, unto the possible death of our species. To the death of many others, that is already certain.

We don’t have the luxury to be purely negative anymore, to wallow in the impulse to critique and intellectually unravel the mechanisms of our immanent demise. We need healing. We need vision.

Art can act as medicine. Illness, of all sorts, is about separation; even just from the notion of health itself. We lose felt connection to the trunk of the sources of being, and find ourselves driven out into strangled branches and twigs. Lost in the weeds.

Indigenous people everywhere lived and developed slow, sustainable cultures over dozens of millennia, building myth-ritual-social structures in harmony with human and natural patterns, staying connected to the roots, not losing site of the obvious. They ate, grateful, sustained by the gifts of the flowering world, and in turn they were eaten, by the earth, by its gods.

Very few of us still live consciously connected in this way today, and we exist embedded in conditions that make it seemingly almost impossible to do, like soul-caught bugs in media amber.

Indigenous societies had certain technicians whose function it was to specialize in this sort of harmonizing: of the human with human, and of the human with the seen and unseen realms beyond the boundaries of flesh and conscious psyche. We now generally use the Turko-Mongolian term “shaman” to label these doctors of the sacred.

If religions, as most now generally understand them, arose with the development of settled agricultural civilizations 5000 years ago, these free-agent visionary technicians, men and women, have been acting in much the same manner for closer to perhaps 100,000 years. This is not a heritage that we simply shrug off, or technologically “evolve” beyond. We are actually much less “advanced” than we think, functioning with essentially the same physio/psychological equipment as our great-to-the-1000th grandmother.

Many “civilized” human societies are deeply alienated from their original holistic human cultural systems. The “why” of it is (perhaps) a long discussion. But clear is that in the development of what has come to be considered contemporary art praxis, numbers of its significant recent practitioners have embraced the shamanic function quite consciously, engaged in what some consider an archaic revival, a revolution on par with the European Renaissance. Joseph Beuys would of course be foremost among these artists.

He is one of Wetzel’s art lineage ancestors. But like a reactionary shamanic art granddaughter, she’s painted his tools fluorescent pink and covered them with glitter and butterfly wings. Instead of aesthetically reclaiming the dark rusted iron and fat/felt of a resurrected Luftwaffe martyr, she re-posits her summer day-camp kids’ Hobby Lobby materials, and her DJ friend’s post-rave-culture club gear.

Wetzel is from the Southwestern US. She feels it too. She likes the desert; cacti and bones. Her material language emerges out of the dusty red soil and Hill Country caliche, and while she’s temporarily taken her alchemical laboratory to NYC, she doesn’t leave the region for long at a time. Certainly never in spirit.

The curtained, black-lit, sacred shrouded dome zone in the exhibition is balanced by a desert evocation outside it, symbolized by bright lights and a triangular installation of San Pedro cacti. The San Pedro is a source of many traditional medicines used for thousands of years in Americas north and south, famously including psychoactive mescaline alkaloids. Shamans know that plants have communicating spirits, and power beyond their mere chemical components — no different than you or I. She’s adorned these cacti with gold glitter and artificial painted blooms, and planted in hand-built clay chalices.

Circles symbolically relate to water, and triangles to fire. Balancing oppositions, male and female. On the walls are enshrined the ritual masks and garb worn at the opening. I pointed out to the artist that she’d intuitively arranged them as cross-adorned (4) pentagrams (5) inside triangles of light (3). There is sacred geometry at work. Each whole number by nature has associated energies and archetypal references. I’ll leave interpretation at that. Find in them what you will. I hope viewers will be drawn to spend time with the installation, and feel their way toward the messages Wetzel embeds and embodies in it, having happily struggled to midwife it into the world, in laughter, in tears. It was hard work, physical and spiritual.

The final element is a trinity of horse-hides stretched on the walls, with mirrored rainbow star-bursts tied across their surfaces. As I spent time gazing at them they began to resemble gateways opening into deep space, like images shot from the Hubble space telescope of black holes and nebulae. I like that rather than try to pretend to depict something cosmic using high-tech or illusionary means, a horse hide, a few strands of plastic craft cord, some octagonal feng shui mirrors , some goopy paints, and the context do the trick, perhaps more evocatively.

The whole thing is actually surprisingly discreet. Too often lately this kind of approach can feel like a big adolescent neon dump pile; trying too hard with the more-is-more, lamely forcing the glam tacky anti-art factor. Wetzel takes some lessons from the desert, from the indigenous, and maybe Don Judd and Dan Flavin. There’s a surprising kind of sophistication, tastefulness believe it or not, that you can’t really pretend. I call it ‘visual intelligence.’

The important thing is to know that it’s possible to generate these kinds of crazy/sane visions, intrusions, happenings, detournement, these kind of ancient/futuristic lineages and communities today. Wetzel’s effort is a challenge to you to create a medicine show in your own world.

And by the way: she loves you.

June 10, 2009

Titus O’Brien is an artist and writer currently based in Chicago.

MS14

Some pics of recent things

Posted in Uncategorized on May 12th, 2009 by Titus

Expanding space, opening space, activating space; “painting” without paint, but melting plastic; intuiting the right-feeling gesture, arc, relationship, body scale; playing with gravity, tension, innate properties, etc…going against “taste” but grappling toward rightness, a certain Quality, perhaps…

bather-dtl-2

amazona-detail2

grem-21

sextet-sm1

Ulysses

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