The Agony of Influence

“The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.”
-Ecclesiastes

That is no country for old men. The young
In one another's arms, birds in the trees--
Those dying generations -- at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect.
-W.B.Yeats



If you strip your work of ideology - like a good Formalist (who's ideology is embedded in the material like a wood nymph) - you will find yourself dealing in abstraction - units, quantity, qualities (but not quality per se - it's ideological) .

Abstraction is not ideological, then, except as a way of life or an instrument.

In the financial world, abstractions are bundled with abstractions, new ways of structuring money; mathematicians sculpting numbers.

But why? To play the game? To extract revenge? To escape mortality? Sheer beauty?

Man is not so easily drained of blood as to deal merely in abstraction.

But what of the young artist, or even old, who declares their work to be deserving of a decidedly theoretical place in history, with its abstract taxonomies, its pruning of untidy branches, its essential, but contingent truths?

Many artists know the dirty truth - that there is nothing new under the sun - that there is only quality - newer, older, bigger, more.

Artists who colonize the past, a culture, or their peers, must come to grips with the necessity of quotation - the ineluctable press of thousands of ideas piled high in an eternal harvest.

But surely there must be a direction, if not an embodiment of the second coming?

And I say unto you:

He who is under-capitalized reaps the bitterest fruit.

Crest Hardware Art Show

Publish Post

Art Beat

Bidonville New York.

I went to Bidonville Coffee AND Tea's inaugural art talk on Sunday.

Art talks have their detractors - sometimes I'm one of them. The other day I read there was to be an art talk entitled "Is Money Ruining the Art World" the admission price was a reasonable ten dollars. I Went to see No COuntry For Old Men instead. I'm sure someone somewhere blogged a summary for free.

I know sometimes the number of slides and even the delivery can be pure comedy. A shtick. Theater. I once saw art star and Columbia professor Rirkrit "noodles are art" Tirivanija get through 10 zen slides out of 1000 before being swamped with questions by well coiffed young collectors about his conceptual squat in Thailand. That guy knows how to throw a socially relevant party.

First up was Anna Ehrsam, who's macho chunky anatomically correct sculptures would withstand any shotgun whiskey critique. Is that a self indulgent rendering of a vagina? I might say, snarkily. Why yes, yes it is. Does it need to be anything else? And in that, it wraps up about a thousand years of pointlessly pseudo-objective art critique, including but not limited to the self reflexivity, specific objects and the dematerialization of art, sociology and cunning linguistics. What is art about?

The second artist, Chris Schade, had eighty slides. I almost spit out my wine or beer I forget which, when he said that.

Chris said he'd go fast but that was a lie. He went all the way back to student work. It's nice too see a

progression, but I'm used to watching photo-streams on the internet - an image a second at least or just DVD's on fast-forward. All we are is dust in the wind, I thought in a slow relaxing crossfade. Then I would remember I had a beer just like at home. Other people were drinking lemonade and tea and lattes. I could ask questions if I thought of something, which I didn't until later, like now.

One nice painting in particular stood out - an apocalyptic red and black sky hanging over a lion being attacked by a

horse - an inversion of George Stubbs - go ahead and google him. And Chris, who is originally from Austin Texas, said it was from when he was at Yale, in the late nineties. Yale is famous for its pointlessly brutal critiques, "Too self indulgent" was one verdict. No wonder many Yale artists end up as cabinet makers adjunct teachers and art handlers and bar tenders and coffee shop proprietors.

There are too many artists - is what my NYU dentist/teacher told me yesterday. I nodded, ung uhng. We all know life is the ultimate Ponzi scheme made up of a thousand other Ponzi schemes in the great fractal chain of self made Ponzi, don't we. And there can be only one or two at the top, because that's just the way things are, like bellbottoms or acid wash.

At the end Chris showed slides of "breakthrough" work - breakthroughs after many dead ends. I've seen a lot of careers made in all mediums made off of a singular "dead end." I'm sure you've done the same. Some people are just born with it.

Formally much of Chris's work has to do with muralists, the Texas

landscape (I believed it because I've seen it) color theory - you know, the environment that influences artists but not critics, who see more clearly than you or I.

Some of Anna's work acquired a patina of smoke and water from a fire above her studio. Anna casts museum quality life molds for a living. She showed some recent slides of life casts from real military men. None of them were green, and I didn't see any bazookas, just scowls and features characteristically altered by the weight of the mother mold. "I'm going to combine them into larger rhythmic wholes," she said. Like Ponzi fractals, I thought. Anna is making work her art and life and really I think that's what artists should be doing, if anything other than living. Because who wants to live in a prison planet?

The politics of presentation always enter the picture - good slides aren't always made up off purely documentary photos. And who now is requiring truth in reproduction?

If I was going to present work I'd do it with music and take advantage of the video projector more -

- because art is dead. And alive. and also both dead and alive. Or not not dead. Yeah, I got an excellent adventure right here in my own home, but its sometimes nice to get out and see how the other half lives.

Hope to see you at the next one. (fall)

Bidonville. 47 Willoughby Ave Brooklyn, NY 11205 Phone: (718) 855-4515