Titus O.

Since Malevich painted his infamous white square in 1918, declaring that he had in effect finished the history of painting itself, painting’s demise has been almost continuously heralded, year in and year out; much like Nietzsche’s God. Yet somehow today there are more churches and painters than either Jesus or Giotto could ever have imagined. Incredible as it is often imperceptible from proximity, we really are witnessing a new, information age, and the technologies at our disposal are beyond comprehension, unbound and eclipsing one another as rapidly as each of our heart’s individual beats. There is already nostalgia being cultivated, by some young hipsters, for obsolete cell phones from just a couple of years ago (maybe when we get nostalgic for the moment just preceding this one, we’ll be on the verge of some truly paradigmatic shift.) Despite this climate of unfathomable change, pushing around colored pigment suspended in gooey mediums with some animal hairs glued to a stick remains oddly tenacious, ubiquitous, and yes, marketable. For many, it is indeed an exercise in nostalgia. For the more devoted, serious, or clever, ways of reinventing it are seemingly inexhaustible. This is not to say that much contemporary painting isn’t as tired and limp as an over-cooked noodle. But there are innumerable artists finding ways to powerfully reinvigorate what is demonstrably a primordial activity.

Painting is the single most history-laden art form, and therefore one of the most difficult to come at freshly as maker, audience, or critic. But paint is by its very plastic nature sensual, and approachable. I often think of Dave Hickey’s quote that no matter how cerebral or rarified art gets, “it ain’t rocket science.” Anyone can have an opinion about a picture; so they should, and more of them. No matter how intellectual the artist, if s/he chooses to wrestle with paint for a living, there has to be at root some fundamental love of, and fascination with, applying luscious goopy colored stuff onto surfaces, constructing image/objects. Painters are a particular breed, perhaps born and not made; some folks (most painters) might say they’re just peculiarly afflicted. To be one, it isn’t enough to head down to the Hobby Lobby, pick you up a Frederick’s 18” x 24” canvas with the staples on the sides, some cheap acrylics and student grade brushes, dabble out a cabbage and tea pot and call it high art. Now if you were to do all that, ritually burn the painting, video the whole thing, and project the result in a darkened gallery, then we might be talking (maybe just not about painting anymore.) The difference isn’t just the level of ludicrous pretension (though that is hardly a negligible impetus for much contemporary art.) The important point now is a certain level of self-awareness, spin, and a questioning of processes as they occur. Why are we painting on canvas? Why a nude, or a landscape? Why are we using oil paint, or acrylic? Can we use something else? And whatever it is, can it be used compellingly? Is it pushing the envelope? Does it freakin’ look cool? And what sort of headaches is it going to cause the restorers in 2106? (Technology is always an issue: just ask the owners of a Pollock or a Kiefer, much less a Rembrandt or DaVinci.)

The most important quality though, for any artist, is simply rigor. I use this word a lot, because it seems to best sum up some analyzable but fundamentally unspeakable gestalt about an artist’s methodology and product. Does the work have legs, bones, a solid foundation? Does it reflect the thorough activities of a shapely mind, and of a powerful, impassioned line of inquiry?* Anne Allen, the curator of Texas Paint II: Out of Abstraction, spoke to me about generally thinking for this show in terms of the artists being “hot” or “cool.” This has nothing to do with their market status, despite the prevalence of that sort of gauge these days. Rather, it’s refers to an approach, an attitude about the craft, a certain predominance in the sensibility. The Chinese long ago neatly elucidated the fundamentally dual nature of terrestrial existence: that generally vaguely understood (and usually mispronounced) yin/yang thing. Not surprisingly, there are any number of ways art making can be sifted and separated into disciplines, styles, or just predilections. We all tend to lean a bit toward one relativistic pole or another. Hopefully, in time we outgrow the need to stake our claim to just one territory, and grow more balanced as we “age and sage.”

None of the artists displayed here are wholly hot or cool, either; which would be impossible in any case. As I said, there is a primary sensuality about the stuff of paint itself. So we could talk about the Dionysian (hot) appreciation for the life of the meat-body we occupy for our time here on Earth. It has its many romantic(in the original sense of the term) devotees, and most of us could agree that at this point we’re lucky to be able to drop most of those sticky ideas about sin we’ve picked up over the centuries (easier said than done.) On the other hand, there are the left-brained acolytes of Apollo (the cool,) who stoically and idealistically desire the “purer” life of the mind and the abstractly rectilinear. Well, those are the antipodes, and we can immediately, if loosely, categorize most of the art in this exhibition as belonging to one of those camps. Thankfully nothing here (or in life) fits neatly in either, without a great deal of slippage. The very nature of our own subjective experience defies easy categorization. We can only apprehend anything at all through the access of our myriad sensual apparatus. Nor can that sense data be interpreted without the clinical electricity of the brain. Eyes, ears, nose, tongue, skin, all attuned to different ranges of energetic vibration, each encountering the world and charging synapses with impulses, each in turn interpreted by the brain, which then floods the body with more messages as cascades of neuropeptides, hormones, etc. It’s an infinite circuit of hot becoming cool fueling hot turning cool. Yin and yang indeed.

The best thing about a curatorial premise is that it simply provides another means to think about and contextualize the works themselves, which if they’re good defy easy categorization. Even dividing the show into “representational” and “abstract” installments is at this point historically arbitrary – thank goodness. What if Clem Greenberg had gained his fond wish to be the Aesthetic Ab Ex-Nihilo Emperor of the Universe? We’d all be stuck only having one aesthetic, living in an action-painted artistic Stalingrad. You can’t help but get frustrated with philistines who say that they only like “abstract art,” or its obverse. It’s hard to imagine now, but fifty years ago drunken artists and critics were beating each other up in bars over whether one could paint or even talk about putting recognizable images in paintings. Of course the best of them (like de Kooning or Guston) never finally chose a side. They just painted, without boundaries. Many of the best living artists find their métier in the dance between these supposed opposites. After nearly one hundred years of pure abstraction, as well as conceptual expansion and the inclusion of every possible material, technique, and approach — anything today is fair game.

It’s not quite a total free-for-all. Well, actually, it is really; but don’t panic. As another phrase from the East goes, “Chaos is good news.” With seeming chaos come bursts of freedom from hierarchical determinism and societal stultification. However, along with this freedom, we as viewers are given an enormous responsibility when confronting art today. There is no dominant interpretive hegemony, so it is up to us to think a bit more, feel a little more deeply, and follow up on the threads of interest and curiosity that trail out from the works of art that shock, compel, move, interest, or annoy us. Artists are a generous lot, out there in lonely studios meditatively and passionately banging out these rectangles and discs of color and texture and form and hope, attempting to bridge the gap from their neural networks to yours, helping us all to get some new patterns firing in the synesthetic webs behind our sensory radar.

*Allen Ginsburg quoting Lucien Carr: “When mind becomes shapely, art becomes shapely.”

As an art student almost 20 years ago, I read the artist Robert Irwin talking about developing “lines of inquiry.” I’ve thought about that phrase nearly every day since, and never found a better way to talk about what it is artists really do. It’s like when John Cage would say that if you have a good question, the results can’t help but be interesting.