The Gutter Art Critic

A Movie About Robert Wilson

2012-01-07T17:58:00.000-08:00

I recently watched this awesome documentary about Robert Wilson. This is a must see for every artist young and old, contemporary or traditional, kitsch or avant-garde. Also if you are a fan of Philip Glass, and I most certainly am this movie is for you. It is a great look at the life and work of one of the premier avant-garde artists of our time and I can only hope that it will inspire others to make some great art. In these trying times, god only knows we need the inspiration.

Art City in Name Only

2011-10-16T10:33:00.000-07:00

To some this blog post might be a little too confrontational or controversial, especially if you are a resident of Asheville, like I am, and you hold on to some very unfounded ideas of what this city represents to artists, like I am, and you believe that that this city has carved itself a very nice and comfortable niche in the national artist community, which I wholeheartedly dispute. But since probably nobody pays attention or reads this blog anyway, I think that might as well justify my discontent with the situation present at this particular time, and that is the disconnect between the now almost mythological arts scene and the reality, which for the most of us is rather grim and not getting better.
Before I delve even deeper into this problem, let me qualify a few things in hopes that I might shed a light on what I am actually talking about in reference to “arts” and silence the possible criticism that may or may not be coming my way. By arts, I mean a subject and form of making and creating wholly separate from craft. Interestingly Ashevillians seem to disregard, or have forgotten that art and craft mean two totally different things. They are not mutually exclusive, but they are not the same either. And as has been the norm and trend, the melding of art and craft has recently continued and effectively pushed real art toward the fringes. The emergence, or rather reemergence of decorative arts and rapid multiplication of design galleries in Asheville continues this trend to this day, more or less putting a knife into the wounds already perpetrated on the Asheville artist community. For those that have lived here long enough the situation seems eerily similar to what happened to the so called alternative community, which used to have its stronghold downtown on Lexington Avenue. Since the closing of Vincent’s Ear the gentrification of downtown became complete and the alternatives moved west, setting up shop downtown West Asheville and its neighborhoods. In the years that followed, even that downtown seems to be undergoing rapid change, possibly as unsustainable as the true downtown.
The river “arts” district fared no better. Once huge and affordable artist studios and alternative spaces, housing young and active emerging artists, gave way to weekend warrior landscape painters, encaustic and feel-good abstract hacks. Art with no ideas, no point or reference or content, but with lots of pseudo-emotion and “soul” took a high seat, partly because it could pay the ever rising rent, and displaced the original progressive thinking and challenging art coming from the young downtown bohemians. Conservatism seems to have found its place even in this artist community and continues to be propagated through a consortium of downtown gallery spaces.
To add insult to injury, a few months ago, the city attempted to ease some of the discontent that it started to perceive coming from the increasingly disenfranchised artist community by putting on a side show which they called the Creative Sector Summit. The name sounded great, but the truth was something far more insidious and telling of the situation on the streets. A friend of mine, who attended the summit, retold the experience in no uncertain terms. When he pressured some of the panelists on the issue of affordable studio space in Asheville he was told something to the effect of: “well, you’re creative people, I’m sure you can figure something out,” effectively kicking the can down the road and avoiding the challenge of a meaningful answer. The pattern of non-interest by those “at the top” mirrors in many ways that of the top 1% of Americans toward the bottom 99%. They have no problem taking from us what little we had, and when we ask for it back the response is a jaw-breaking yawn or downright hostility.
Many of us would probably like to gloss over this fact, but the sad truth is that in order to find challenging art, we have to go outside Asheville to get it. This would therefore be in keeping with another fact and that is that serious art magazines, publications and blogs do not cover our area, not for a lack of talent or sheer number of artists, but simply because the art on display here is utterly boring and categorical. And that is something that those at the top should really start thinking about. What does Atlanta have that Asheville does not? Or for that matter Charlotte? And how to implement those infrastructures they seem to posses? I was even more surprised that a cities like Knoxville , Greensboro, and Raleigh are more friendly to the young emerging artist than our supposedly hip town and give them more outlets and opportunities in forms of space and access to contemporary art. Ironically I left Raleigh in 2003 thinking I would get those here.
The problems seem widespread and maybe they are too far along for us to be able to affect any meaningful change. But maybe, just maybe I may be misreading the writing on the wall. Unfortunately I believe I’m right in reading the signs that Asheville hasn’t lived up to its name as an art city in which artists live and die by their swords. Most of them run away from battle, some choose to live a life of permanent destitution, or fold their weapons and join the ranks of the working class indentured servants or any combination thereof.

On Academia

2011-08-11T19:34:00.000-07:00

Take art classes, lots of them. Take them at your university, take them from the guy that’s offering five dollar drawing sessions out of his studio, take them from your local art co-op. That is the only way we will bring sanity back into our lives today.
The reason that the arts are always first to get cut out of any budget of a high school, college or university is not because the arts do not matter, but because they are dangerous. Unless severely watered down by academicism or the market, the arts and artists have a tendency toward the philosophical fringe, the leftist, socialist, anarchist mentality. Tthey do not swear allegiance to any state or nation and do not abide by any establishment. They have a capability to foment reaction if cornered. So take art classes, a painting class, a drawing class, and not just for the technique, which in some respects is secondary to the mental, emotional, philosophical and spiritual growth that ultimately results. Taking art classes puts you within the framework of other like-minded human beings as opposed to the drones we get so used to seeing in the “real” world.
The critique that will ultimately result in opposition to the concept of supporting academia in such a way is absolutely forthcoming. Here the tired old Newtonian adage “for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction” applies. However, we must consider the fact that there is a lack of almost anything meaningful that could ever replace the institutionalized monster that academia is, and if there is, it will most likely be something even more horrendously evil and dishonest. Just think of the horror that befell the Weimar republic in the wake of the Bauhaus tradition. What the opposition to academia has going for it, is also its greatest downfall, its lack of a framework of interconnectedness.
I am by no means a proponent of academia, nor its absolute detractor. There is a place for academia in the world of art. It is the only institution we have that keeps track of art history, even if it is a Western skewed mainstream history. Reliance on individual competence to keep track of the serpentine insanity that art history actually is, based solely on the individual’s goodwill is akin to giving corporations the freedom to police themselves in hopes that they will not screw the little people, it just cannot be done. Art historians are not CEO’s, but they both need to be under some scrutiny so that they don’t go off on a wild crusade to tell others what they should think. For better or worse, academia through a myriad of bureaucracy and red tape has actually managed to do the impossible, and give us a window to the way art has and is being made up to our present time. It is just a convenient punching bag for failed art students and disillusioned academicians and as such it is serving a dual role in the art world, because those same critics give us the actual avant-garde that is a result of the push back against academia. And so the circle spins. The push against academia is almost always the raison d’etre of the avant-garde, whose reactionary nature must find a sympathetic enemy for its cause, otherwise it would stop being avant-garde. And yet ironically the avant-garde is without fail the product of academia, because most of the artists that are involved with it have to some degree been involved with academia.
So the silly notion that academia is inherently bad or evil, because it is a machine that makes daring art boring and institutional is only half true, because it is also responsible for the creation of the avant-garde. Institutionalization is not created by academia, even though it does support it to a certain point. Institutionalization is created by the will of the art market – the gallery system, the media, the press, marketing agencies, museums and willing artists. Academia is a system by which individuals either enter this market or are repelled by it.
The few artists that have had the fortune or misfortune of not being a part of academia, are still in some ways affected by it, even by the sole fact that they are entirely outside of it. These artists are called outsiders. Outsider art is always genuine but seldom great. For outsider art to reach the level of greatness it would have to borrow much from academic art and would therefore cease being outsider art. The fact however remains that even the most outside of the outsider artists must have seen some form of academic art at some point in their lives, be it the Mona Lisa on a coffee mug or a kitschy replica of a Madonna and child in their local church. This is therefore the real extent of the reach that academia plays in artists’ lives.

The institutionalization of almost everything

2011-08-11T06:20:00.000-07:00

From Abstract Expressionism to Pop, from minimalism to graffiti the wheels of institutionalization are grinding away on what’s left of our culture. Got something avant-garde? Let us help you sell it. Do you like Banksy? We’ll here a bunch of shit with his art on it, yes he’s on TV and there’s a movie out about him, never mind that he’s trying to avoid the insanity of the market like the plague. Spectacle sells and everybody knows it. On the other hand, Banksy has become a great manipulator of the market himself and learned to walk on the art market’s waters, using the art market against itself, making fun of it and by extension of himself and everybody else. Cynicism at its finest has found a savior in Banksy and the anti-christ in Damien Hirst. How would Banksy react to the fact that some marketing agency figured out that it could repackage regular hardware store spray paint, and sell it to the burgeoning graffiti art market at 200% mark up as an artist quality spray paint in hippified packaging? Wouldn’t you want to learn how to spray paint graffiti on a train car or on a wall at SCAD or RISD? We all know what Damien Hirst would do though. He’d make the cans solid gold with a polished diamond tip and fill it with the tears of humpback whales and sell it at Sotheby’s for $5 mil each. Then Jeff Koons would do us all a favor and produce a shiny giant replica of the spray can with a picture of the whale smiling. Thomas Kinkade would just produce another one of his artistic still births without much regard for his or anyone else’s soul or consideration for aesthetic and moral principles.
Bill Hicks said it best himself, referring to the forces that truly drive our politics and economy “if you’re in the marketing business….kill yourself! You have no rationalization for what you do, you are Satan’s little helpers, kill yourself. Suck a tail pipe, borrow a pistol from an NRA buddy and rid the world of your evil fucking presence, you are fucked and you are fucking us, kill yourself, kill yourself, kill yourself now. Now, back to the show…!”
The true power of marketing has to be the inane right wing clown show we get to see on FOX every waking minute prepackaged and prechewed just right for the idiotopia that the United States has become since papa Reagan was let loose upon this land. Who can explain the phenomenon that evil spawn like Bill O’reilly get to “write” books about themselves and call it Culture Warrior? I have searched in the shadowiest corners and crevices to find the answers and came up short.

Art on the Defensive

2011-04-28T15:04:00.000-07:00

I heard a pretty interesting comment today from my painting teacher at Western Carolina University. He said that there was something strange about how artists (and I’m talking about painters here) have to be able to defend their position for making art and what subject matter they choose. Yet no one is asking a writer to paint a painting in defense of his writing. I understand this is an illogical supposition, but one that is somewhat truthful. What it proposes is that art is not valid until it has gone through a focus group type review (a critique) and that artists should therefore become even better communicators than they are artists, because it takes quite a skillful wordsmith to write up a meaningful artist statement. The more one thinks about this, even more issues spring up. For example, no one is asking a baseball player to defend what he does, or the WWF wrestler to write a statement explaining his attempts at leaping at his opponent in skin tight spandex. There is an artificial construct put in place that seeks to demonstrate that art is valid by having the very people that create it make that claim. I find that rather amusing given the fact that I am a fan of soccer, and yet I still have problems defending its validity in the face of someone who does not enjoy it. “It’s just entertainment… or the players have great skills” might the line go. But so what? Does the skill of kicking a little ball around warrant a multi-million dollar salary? Does a single game of soccer warrant a possibility that some people might end up dead, injured or In jail afterward because we know what emotions sports can bring up? Hasn’t everyone watched a game of sports and wondered what the hell these people were doing and thought how ridiculous the whole spectacle was? Yet I don’t see a single case where a football player, or Paris Hilton, for that matter, has to write up an essay in defense of what they do. As a society we just accept the benefits of those positions, their qualities as entertainment give them credence to exist in their own right, so why not painting? Why do painters have to constantly defend their position to the public when so much of the public willingly accepts the validity of cheap entertainment?

History

2011-02-11T17:56:00.000-08:00

“History repeats itself” goes the old adage. For a long time we heard this saying paying not much attention to it, with the exception of a limited few. Maybe the time is now. Historian Neil Howe certainly thinks so. His breakthrough book “The Fourth Turning” outlines the idea that successive generations of people follow a certain seesaw pattern of high and low, from crisis to prosperity with a roughly 80 year span dividing the whole into 4 parts of 20 years, each corresponding to one generation. His analysis starts around the time of the founding of the United States and continues through the pattern of depression and war following prosperity and to another depression following yet another era of prosperity. Hence from crisis to crisis, the Revolutionary war gives way to the Civil War, which in turn goes through the Great Depression and World War 2, culminating in modern times with our current crisis.
Unfortunately there is nothing new about this idea and I think that even Mr. Howe knows this. Whole nations and cultures believe that time and history are fluid and cyclical. It goes without saying that everything we observe around us follows a pattern of birth and death all the way to the very beginning of the universe. It is only an illusion of the mind that we see ourselves as separate from cycles of nature and time as a straight uninterrupted line of progress from low to high (a very sad state of affairs in today’s academic science and history). Our minds have been much too conditioned by the now almost obsolete ideas of Darwinism. Evolution is a much more complex and fluid component of nature than the simple hierarchic system of those who eat and those who are eaten.
In the years 1833 - 1836 a series of paintings by Thomas Cole sought to portray this idea of natural cycles, but having to do with one of the loftiest of manmade constructs, civilization. Cole’s series “The Course of Empire” progresses from a “savage” state, meaning a scene primarily occupied by hunters and gatherers, through pastoral scenes of Arcadia and ends with scenes of high civilization creating its own destruction and the ultimate apocalypse which eventually ends with desolation once again run over by hunter gatherers. It is a simple and novel idea, one which doesn’t get much play these days. Our preoccupations with ourselves and the now, blind us to the greater picture. We seem to be ever closer to edge beyond which disaster awaits.

The Savage State

The Arcadian of Pastoral State

Consummation

Destruction

Desolation

True Art Revival

2011-02-07T19:16:00.000-08:00

2 Part look at the creation of dioramas

2010-12-13T12:15:00.000-08:00

Culture, Kanye West and the New America

2010-12-04T07:49:00.000-08:00

Every year we are witness to a lowering of standards of American culture by corporate media. Since the time of Elvis Presley, the bar for who gets to become the next cultural icon has been lowered in order to accommodate the shrinking intellect of the American public, the nadir of which was supposedly reached in the late 80’s. Not so, if the maniac corporatist con men have to say anything about it. Robert Hughes might have had it right in the 90’s when he said that “Reagan educated the public down to his level. He left his country a little stupider in 1988 than it had been in 1980.” and yet he did not foresee the levels to which the upcoming generations would stoop in the near future. A future in which hip hop is the only tool seemingly available and effective enough to educate our overly medicated and apathetic school children. It is only natural and logical that “artists” like Kanye West* should be looked up to as the heroes of an eviscerated and neutered cultural dystopia as well as spokespeople for the masses of the brave new world in which we find ourselves today.
The fact that recently every sort of media is raving that Kanye West just released his new record, and this includes the supposedly “non-corporate and public supported” National Public Radio, constitutes nothing more that an almost “jaw-dropping fucking yawn”, in the words of the late Bill Hicks, a true cultural warrior, who used this phrase to describe how he felt about the release of Madonna’s Sex book. To hear a critic on NPR’s Fresh Air turn giddy while reviewing the urban musings of Kanye West while comparing him to Elvis Presley, is as interesting and intellectually uplifting as watching a dog take a shit. And to compare West with the likes of Elvis is nothing more than an exercise in artificial personality inflation and markup of West’s apparent worth in the context of an already over inflated celebrity bubble.
What we seem to forget is that most of the media personalities and pop culture icons presented to us on Tv, Radio, the internet and iPhones are carefully manufactured in corporate offices where ideas of the new image for the new teenager of the New America are being produced on a weekly basis in focus group style meetings or on the stages of low level television caricatures like American Idol. As a result of this, American pop culture has become a transient form of entertainment in which content is judged by it’s intensity of emotion and glitz rather than by it’s merits and ability to withstand the test of time. And it is precisely because of this transitory nature of today’s culture, with all its trends and fallacies, that we get inflated celebrities like Kanye West who’s apparent personality precedes his actual talent as a musician.
But what of the people that Kanye West’s music supposedly speaks to, the inner city kids, the rebellious teenager, the middle to upper class privileged children or (fill in whatever group you want here)? Is it not ok to listen to his music and enjoy it as one would any other meaningful record? On this subject, the answer is yes. West’s music has a right to be heard just as much as Bob Dylan’s, Michael Gira’s or Cannibal Corpse’s. The distinction lies in the aftereffect when a lot of people tend to substitute their personalities with that of the most popular celebrity of the day. The countless TV “reality” shows are a monument to this tendency. And the saddest outcome is the production of the kind of people that claim they listen to Kanye West’s music to find a sense of identity that are not dissimilar to those that believe that George Costanza is a philosopher and that television sit-coms espouse moral values.
This leaves us with the greatest dilemma of the new century, which is the realization that what we have learned in the end is that we have learned nothing. The corporate wheels keep grinding while the American consumer keeps consuming and we are left with people like Kanye West apparently ready to lead the New America to its ultimate demise in a fiery pit of mediocrity.

*note - If you’re reading this article a few years or maybe just months down the road, just substitute the name Kanye West with whatever celebrity’s name you see on your screen or on the covers of “leading” pop culture magazines.

The Problem of American Painting Revisited

2010-11-16T07:49:00.000-08:00

"The problem of American painting, had been the problem of subject matter. Painting kept getting entangled in the contradictions of America itself. We made portraits of ourselves when we had no idea who we were. We tried to find God in landscapes we were destroying as fast as we could paint them. We painted Indians as fast as we could kill them. And during the greatest technological jump in history, we painted ourselves as a bunch of fiddling rustics.
By the time we became Social Realists, we knew that American themes were not going to lead to a great national art. Not only because the themes themselves were hopelessly duplicitous, but because the forms we used to embody them had become hopelessly obsolete. Against the consistent attack of Mondrian and Picasso, we had only an art of half truths, lacking all conviction. The best artists began to yield, rather than kick against the pricks.
And it is exactly at this moment when we finally abandon the hopeless constraint to create a national art, that we succeed for the first time, in doing just that; by resolving the problem, forced on painting by the history of French art, we create for the fist time a national art of genuine magnitude. And if one finally had to say what it was that made American art great, it was that American painters took a hold of the issue of abstract art, with the freedom they could get from no other subject matter, and finally made high art out of it."
- introduction to Painters Painting (1973)

From the introduction to one of the seminal documentaries about American painting we read that for decades, we painted ourselves "when we had no idea who we were." Today the problem of contemporary American painting is that as soon as we came to a single realization of ourselves and identified what American art truly is, we forgot it with equal speed. What is left, are remnants of constant revising and reediting of old concepts and the result is a rehashed version of what preceded the coalescence into a true national art which crystallized in Abstract Expressionism. Worse is that today, against the backdrop of corporate influence and the glorification of materialism, we are left with virtually no one that can communicate what it is that makes American art great, only with those that tell us that it once was.
After the battles they have waged with the public, with themselves and against all odds, the painters have taken a cease fire and retreated from the barrage of aesthetic pseudo-values and incessant commodification of painting, so valiantly pushed to the frontlines by collectors and art speculators. It is as if they, and not the artists, have the last word on what is and what isn't acceptable art and how art should be experienced by the public they claim to represent. It is as if they should be the ones at the forefront of the attention and claim the highest prestige because they are the ones that have the power to either make or break the artist. So the artist retreats even further.
Even though the statements above, were written in 1973, they seem to ring true even today. Not much has changed in those 4 decades since then. As a result of the public's willingness to accept any political and religious dogma, America is more entangled in its own contradictions than ever before and despite all the technological advancements, what we are left with is shiny barbarism. War and inequality still permeate the American society, our landscapes are still being destroyed in the name of profits and national interests. An in order to produce a national identity, politicians and academics have turned to eradicating and omitting certain unfavorable aspects of history from textbooks and our culture.
The answer to the problem doesn't lie with the top artists of today. They have become too complacent as a result of the attention and wealth lavished upon them and became all too willing to pull with the collectors and museum directors who supplied them. The answer lies within each and every one of us. We have to answer for ourselves whether to yield or to start kicking.

The State of Art in Asheville

2010-11-04T14:20:00.000-07:00

I want to focus on the lack of contemporary art galleries in Asheville. The fact of the matter is, there are just too many artists and not enough galleries in this town, especially galleries that show emerging and contemporary artists. With the closing of the Arts Council’s Front Gallery, the number is even less. To be an artist in Asheville is a strange paradox. On one hand we live in a beautiful area, deep in the mountains, with lots of place for inspiration, and lots of other artists to network with. On the other hand, it is sad to realize that the only places we can show are in coffee shops and hair salons. The small number of contemporary galleries don’t have enough space or time to show everyone, and the commercial galleries just don’t care to show anything that they think they won’t sell. It is a frustrating experience. Most commercial galleries in Asheville have resigned themselves to show art that is marketable; that means, highly polished, non-political, non-controversial, art without content, that says nothing beyond what one can see. Such art is therefore mostly designed to look pretty in the gallery, so that it can look pretty in someone’s condo later on. So as an artist, forget about trying to challenge the viewer with your work. As it turns out Asheville isn’t interested in what you have to say. Asheville’s just interested in the mighty tourist dollar. At least that’s what the gallery owners would have you believe.
As if this wasn’t enough, a lot of the artists that do get shown in local galleries, don’t live here. So not only do we have to compete with the hundreds of artists that are already here, but also with the ones that aren’t, and chances are they’re probably represented by other galleries elsewhere giving them an upper hand in having a lockdown on the market. So if you’re a young aspiring artist, forget about trying to make a living here, too. Asheville isn’t interested in helping to raise young artists and propagate their careers. Asheville’s just interested in your services as cashiers at our stores and clerks at the places that you show your art. It seems that the attitude toward young artists here is one of “move here, go to school here and get out”, because that is exactly what most of them are doing once they figure the message out.

Robert Hughes discusses the commodification of culture in 12 parts.

2010-11-03T16:31:00.000-07:00

Art and Social Darwinism

2010-10-28T16:09:00.000-07:00

Art today should strive to reject the aspects of Social Darwinism so inherent in our Western culture. As society gets further into crisis as a result of this deeply flawed worldview helped along recently by 30 years of Reaganomics, the time has come to reverse the effects of Social Darwinism which have resulted in deeper isolation and individualism, and replace it with the effects stemming from cooperation. This is and always was the only way by which human societies have developed. The idea of cooperation was deeply entrenched in the early civilization of ancient Egypt, which as a result remained virtually unchanged for thousands of years. Contrary to what we get taught in history classes all over the country from high school to college, ancient Egypt was for the majority of its existence relatively free of conflict and war. Its people exercised cooperation as a means for developing a high culture when most of the peoples on Earth were hunter-gatherers. It was not until much later when invading cultures introduced warfare and disseminated false ideologies of materialism and individualism among the Egyptian public that the slow deterioration of Egyptian culture began, as each successive governing body got more corrupt than the one preceding it, in an attempt to amass more wealth and power at the expense of its people. Ancient Egypt is a classic example of the way that Social Darwinism destroys civilization from within, by pitting its citizens against one another in an impossible fight for survival.
Artists therefore should strive toward cooperation rather than competition. The powers that drive societies toward crises stem largely from the Social Darwinist ideology of scarcity and fight for resources. In America today, this worldview, though rarely acknowledged as the main undercurrent of our society, finds major proponents in the worlds of business (especially those who favor free trade agreements), media (Hollywood and television, especially the falsely named “reality” television), politics, and yes even the art world.
This is then perhaps the most important ethical dilemma of artists today. It is the job of the artist to be at the forefront of ethical development. In times of crisis, art always served to set society on the right path. Artists should never become the tools of a society which seeks to enslave and marginalize them. The power of Social Darwinism and the ideology of "survival of the fittest" with wealth and fame as its reward had a disastrous effect on the most recent generations of artists who tend to operate under the notion that they too will become rich and famous overnight. The media goes a long way to propagate this false belief. Art created under such conditions is seldom good and rarely results in anything other than a temporary distraction. Therefore it is absolutely essential that artists today stop creating only art that fits within our society’s narrow worldview, and start to make art which by its nature shapes that worldview.

Notes and Thoughts

2010-10-25T08:58:00.000-07:00

All art is useless unless it operates out of a moral imperative. It seems as though that in the past few decades we have completely lost this essential quality of art and forgot what a true moral imperative really is. Instead artists have turned to creating art in response to current trends. Unfortunately, trends are by their nature short term and easily disposable, and as such, art created out of this imperative is itself disposable. As if this isn't bad enough, another set of artists continue to make art which is supposed to be shocking or "controversial", either by it's content or by the nature it gets created. Art created within this single mindset, to the exclusion of everything else, is at best art that should be overlooked, but is at worst a poison slowly killing our collective unconscious.

Anselm Kiefer "Operation Sea Lion"

2010-10-10T20:17:00.000-07:00

Nothing happens in a painting!