RUDIMENTS, pt. 1,173
(of gutturals and grunts, pt. 1)
The thing about Art that
makes it so difficult is the
manner of response. For the
artist, it's nothing like that at
all. The difficulty of course
is always for the viewer. Mot
especially for the un-initiated
viewer, or the unschooled,
perhaps, who still tends to
view everything as if he
or she was looking through
a window and expecting the
usual set-up of the ordered
objects of everyday life, all
arrayed in the, again, usual
pictorial form. They wish to
see duplicated that which they
live and inhabit. I guess that's
fine enough, but try a camera
(or a phone, these days?).
-
Life isn't like that at all, and
every bit of me went into the
translating of MY views and
images into MY own art reality.
I guess - at some level - when
you come right down to it artists
only paint for other artists. The
rabble be damned; they don't
understand anything anyway
and continually go about
proclaiming the hows and the
whats of what their own 'kid'
could do. As if it was easy; as
if their kid was some of daft
genius who could puke the
sweat out of an idea and actually
make something other than a
smiley-face sun or a scribble
enhanced by a cartoon character
and a fence made of right-angled
lines. The world is deeper than
all that, and long ago the modern
era had done away with all this
'art as through a window' stuff.
Those were interesting thought
complacent pictures, done with
skill and trained dexterity by
people of a pre-psychological
and - as far as Art is concerned
- a more thoughtless age. If you
think people are dumb now, you
probably should have seen then.
-
I used to get completely bored
with that tired, old Davidian
classicism style - the art schools
taught it. John Canaday's 'Mainstreams
of Modern Art' surveyed that idea
co9mpletely and had become a
1960's go-to Bible for the sourcing
of Art School ideology; and it was
all fine as it went - a student of
Art needed, certainly, that basic
grounding in the spiritual hymnal
of the subject. But we'd already
outgrown that, per the Surrealists
and Dada artists that had progressed
through and come out of, WWI. The
world was different and changed.
From electric toasters to Freud
and Jung, everything had been
turned on its head as Art had become
no longer a 'window' to peer through
at other pretty pictures, gnomic
expressions on fine ladies, or huge
battle scene by Gericault new. The
image was 'new' - it was on screen,
and it was moving. Broadway Boogie
Woogie indeed. Mondrian, for one,
had already chopped the block.
-
So, what was my street alchemy?
What was I exactly doing there, my
gamboling from street to street and
alley to alley, I hoped, had to add
up to something. Or, I was a fool?
Was my quest the simple and normal
one of most any rootless 18 year old
running amok on his own : girls,
burrows, witnessing, observing? I
tried to steer clear of all distractions,
and mostly did. A certain level of
street-crime was all around me, and
there were a hundred ways of it:
wharves, docksides, people walking
along, things left in cars unattended,
petty burglaries...and more. The
particular time of these matter were
rampant with untested newcomers,
patterns of drug sale and drug use
which - in many ways - offered
means of turning cash. One needed
to be careful, at every turn, and I
steered to the Art end of things. My
'new' way of seeing was a work-in-
progress and I was determined to
stay with it.
-
Another thing I noticed was that
none of this could be taught anyway.
For those who so willingly went to
schools and thought it could be, they
may as well have been studying to
be accountants and nurses. Always
searching out a key and a solution,
some pattern to the weave. It had
nothing to do with Art anyway; it
was merely 'training,' for something
and for which no one actually cared.
Careerism of that nature (now they
all become 'curators,' a new catchword
in their infernal jargon - supermarket
produce aisles will say 'Vegetable
displays curated by Karen.'
Bravo, Karen.
-
As an example of structured thinking,
consider early art, which was once
structured around a grid system. The
later Surrealists, who delighted in
shocking, had done nothing to alter
'painting' itself. It was, primarily, the
same old stuff merely with different
and more 'radical' images. To shock.
The 'structure' of painting itself was
still waiting to be changed, and it was
'space' that had to be changed; psychic
energy without the fall into the more
usual quagmire of the Surrealist
imagery of academic perceptions
and normal spatiality. What broke it
all open, I's guessed, was the idea
of psychology : archetypes that
transcended, somehow, Symbolism
alone. All was replaced, by the
1920's, by the new, imperative, grids
of the subconscious - it was all
becoming a new game, entire.
-
Like starting a new language, the
steps were tentative - of gutturals
and grunts. Sounds, perhaps, not
always yet connected to concepts,
or at least not yet fully baked. BUT,
what had begun happening, around
tavern-tables and mighty bars where
artists hung out - in their spare
times exchanging ideas and notes
about each other's work - was the
replacement of those old, pictorial
grids of seeing. 'Picture-window' art
was done! The grids had been newly
replaced by the grids of total
consciousness. A new world had
dawned.
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