Edward Ruscha said something to the effect, “A bad work of art will make you say ‘wow’ when you first see it, and later make you say ‘huh?’. But a good work of art will make you say ‘huh?’ when you first see it and later make you say ‘wow’”. (1) The problem as I see it, is many people seem to be enigmatically seduced by the ‘wow’, and overlook the ‘huh?’-that is, if they give it enough thought to arrive at a ‘huh?’. If only I understood the virtue of the ‘wow’, perhaps I would understand why the spectrum of what is considered “art” varies so greatly. I am, therefore, interested in what creates and constitutes an appealing aesthetic and why different populations and classes of people differ in their opinion about this. Is it a matter of taste, class, social construction, or possibly the veiled ideologies grounded in the historical context of such work? My research has led me to believe it is a combination of all these facets that create a seductive work that also situates for itself a place in the historical lineage of art. It was, therefore, my objective to construct a series of works that challenge taste and its assignment to class construction while fusing this with the concealed historical ideology of certain aesthetics. The fusion of these concepts ultimately led to a recognized alienation and marginalization, in the work and in making the work. From this alienated position, collectives form, similar to families, and collaboration becomes a key component to the concept, simultaneously attacking the idea of autonomy.
(1. Fellow artists and friend, Jason Sudak, told me this once and it stuck with me-I can’t help but agree with that statement. The work I find most compelling is not work that will hit you over the head with its message or physical appeal, but rather, work that allows you the opportunity to understand it. Though this quote by Ed Ruscha can be found all over, I did manage to find it on a bog- the blog is in the Cited sources under the author Nicole Berry.)
The Artists Komar and Melamid did a series called the People’s Choice where they polled 11 countries on what constituted the most wanted and unwanted things in a painting. (2) Though the final assemblage of paintings differed greatly in appearance from country to country, one thing nearly all of them had in common was a resounding like of, and desire for, the representation of natural aesthetics- landscapic depictions of the natural world. What is of particular interest to me is the use of the poll to determine the general public’s desire for the natural aesthetic. This was, in fact, the broad public’s opinion on art- not artists, or the critical art world. This natural aesthetic is therefore a pervasively used, iconic-image generator, especially for the general public- or middle class. It is my intention to understand why- why the ‘wow’. Why is this natural aesthetic so desired? Through the research I have come across, I concluded that the historical ideologies at play in works using this ‘natural aesthetic’ are what tie them so closely to the traditional, middle class- and as a way of addressing my desired alienation from this found connection I have created a series of works that breed the ideologies of the former, with ideological theories that stand in direct opposition to the historical ideologies at work in the landscape painting- in order to break apart and re-contextualize what is at play.
(2. You can find the work from this series on the DIA Center for the Art’s page about Komar and Melamid’s Most Wanted series. (http://awp.diaart.org/km/)
In order to address what was at work, I needed to understand what I was looking at. So I didactically broke apart the landscape painting itself, and I used Kinkade’s work as a sounding board for this. (3) In an article on the artist Marc Handelman, by Karen Rosenberg, in an issue of Artforum, Handelman breaks apart the ideologies of the landscape painting. (4) What I gathered from what he said was there are three spaces at work within these paintings. The first is the foreground- it represents something industrial, a present day remnant, like a boat, or a house, or even people: evidence of civilization. The second is the middle ground- it represents the past, or a wild frontier: land to be claimed, conquered, or controlled. The last part is the background- it represents something sublime with its ever-expanding mountain range or the vastness of the sky: it is an endlessness or a future.
(3. Figure:)
(4. The article was an art review of Handelman’s work, titled, “Marc Handelman at Lombard-Freid Fine Arts”.)
From there I wanted to address the personal relationships people had to these works, so I looked to my own personal relationships. By confronting people’s relationships to these works- these things that hang in our houses, above our couches, and decorate our bare walls- I was not only addressing their relationship to these works, but also wrestling with my relationship to their relationship to these things. I did a series of photographs of people, my family namely, in their houses, with their landscape paintings. (5) I used my family because I know them, love and appreciate them all the same, but they are also still very much apart of the middle class or general public. By using family I was also using work I was familiar with- these paintings, drawings and photographs hang in houses I was raised in and visited often. I too had a personal relationship to the work as much as I had a relationship to the people that owned them.
)5. See Figures 2-5 for examples of this work.)
My next objective was to create a film that started to break apart the ideologies working in the landscape painting. (See figure 6 for still image from first film). I wanted the film to take on a “formlessness” (6) - a formlessness that leads to the blurring of the distinction between film (what I want to make) and painting (the landscape paintings), painting and photograph (the final assemblage of ideas I created). In an article titled Bachelors by Rosalind Krauss, in an issue of October Magazine, she talked about the ideologies at work when prominent media are fused together. “As a blurring of the distinction between photograph and painting, or photograph and film, they constituted a perverse feminization if you will of the masculinist values of ‘straightness’ itself: clarity, decisiveness, and visual mastery- all of them a source for the photograph’s authority.”
( 6. The idea of “formlessness” come from writings by Bataille, but in this paper, is elaborated on in an article by Rosalind Krauss. )
Figure 6:
Historically, these landscape paintings served the westward expansion movement of the 19th century, as was their time of definitive prominence. It used the idea of conquering the land to portray a sense of mastery over the land, or over the “natural sublime” (7), rather. It was a yearning to conquer nature, as it was such a powerful, unpredictable, and often destructive force during the westward move. Elaborating on Krauss’s idea, land or “nature” has always been prescribed as inherently female- always the pro-noun “she” in descriptive terms. So bringing the historical purpose of the landscape paintings back in, conquering land becomes a very aggressive, masculinized view of conquering traditionally white, heterosexual male adversaries: women, children, babies, birth, female regenerative forces- things that ultimately relinquish control and independence . (8) So penetrating the idea of formlessness, if the landscape painting (a stylized view of nature) served to produce a sense of mastery, I wanted to use those same types of images (stylized views of nature) to re-establish the relationship of master to mastered, and the singularity of those roles by addressing the function of the collective.
(7. The natural sublime is idea that nature has the awe-ing power to destroy civilization at any time without reason or warning.
8. The cultivation of this concept came from a conversation with another student (Jason
Sudak) who was writing a paper on Picasso- he obliged me in my desire to use this idea/phrase in my work and thesis. )
Expanding on the idea of the formless, and the blurring of boundaries, I wanted to confront the ideologies at work in the landscape paintings with something that (in an ideological sense) is directly oppositional to that. As Krauss writes in Bachelors, on Bataille’s idea of the “formless”, “This formlessness, or blurring of boundaries, involves a transgression of boundaries- there is a cancellation of the distinction of high and low, between animal and human.” In this case, it also becomes a cancellation of the distinction between purpose and absurdity, between mastery and mastered, between civilization and its opposite: primitivism (before civilization). And ultimately, there is no longer a distinction made between “art” and stylistically, contemporary, cultural trends. In the 19th century the landscape painting served this trend, today it is the youth culture of the decadent, uncontrollable, uncivilizable, primal being. I embarked on a series of photographs that perversely collided these two ideas, drawing on the ideologies of both. (9.) In these photos, there is the presence of civilization or humanity- it is the people themselves- but when this ‘humanity’ is not conquering, is not civilizing the land (or ‘Mother Nature’), “gender bodies begin to slip” (Krauss uses this phrase in Bachelors). When the feminized land is not being mastered, but instead is the dominant setting for a little cult of primal, youthful, characters to exist, it then dominates and takes on the masculinized role.
(9. Figures 7-14:)
This little cult of characters however, incorporates ideas from, (as Michelle Thomas says in the article Primitivism), “The 19th century movement of Romanticism, with their nostalgic quest for a return to an earlier state of grace free from the adulteration [of western civilized life]”. Nowadays, however, primitivism is, “The artistic [both visual and literary] representation and celebration of tribal people”, people who were not touched by colonization. (White page 1) They are, “Homogenous societies located beyond the frontiers of the civilized world,” (White, page 2)
I wanted to create an other-worldliness from something so anti-western ideology that it is counter-intuitive to the landscapes and therefore renders them absurd. These pictures are a play on that absurdity: these character’s absurdness- and their alienation from whatever culture these beings are from and the land they are now residing in. The character’s relationship to the landscape is a visualization of the conflicting ideologies of the landscape painting and the idea of primitivism in art.
Ultimately, Primitivism was, “An attempt at a break with bourgeois society by exploring its opposite-its uncivilized its rawness, its liberated mind- free from western ideals-free from defining western traditions” (10) , even and especially in artistic practice. Artists like Picasso and Gauguin used this in their art. Quoting an article on primitivism by Michelle Thomas, she said, “In his wish to emulate ‘the primitive’, Gauguin attempted to adopt a more instinctive state of mind which later became associated with madness, neurosis, and the naive outlook of the child.” And that is really what these characters are about. An absurdness, a nostalgia, and a naiveness about returning to a place outside of civilization (but because they are youthful cultural trends-they are the epitome of civilization)- the same naiveness in the ideology of the landscape painting. They are just milling about in these photographs, posing themselves in the land, but not really a part of it. By not engaging in the land, they are not mastering it, but rather flipping that relationship and being mastered by it, in their naiveness. You see them trying to fit in, “look we found this giant animal skull, this feels right. This is right. We look right, don’t we?” However, they clearly are not from this place -one of them has tennis shoes on, the other has sweatpants on under his wrap, one girl is dragging around an old doll on a shoestring and the other has a bronze deer sculpture tucked under her arm like she just swiped it from someone’s mantle somewhere. The actual composition of the photos is mostly meant to mirror, and speak to, the breakdown of the three spaces functioning within landscape paintings themselves. All the while, they represent the clashing of these two opposing ideologies, which culminates in the aesthetisization of the absurd and ultimately of the aesthetisization of the middle class alienation.
( 10. This is from an abstract of the article Modernist Primitivism: seeking the lost primitive other in works of Georges Bataille, Michel Leiris, and Rene Char, written by Nevine Demian.)
However, the key component to all my work, is addressing that it is not done alone. Though the concept of Primitivism was meant to break apart traditional hegemonic ideologies, it should also be noted that it was a westernized self-invention of the concept of otherness. This would be problematic, if the success of the envisionment was not dependent on the creation of the ‘family’ in that otherness. The characters in the pictures were marginalized and alienated because of their invented otherness, and so they formed a collective- a family in which to thrive. This is a representation for the artist. This is the source from where the third and final film I created for this thesis drew its content. The artist commonly works from a marginalized position, but finds other artists to work with in order to breed ideas, sympathies, and ultimately collaborative work. I address this familial building relationship in the photos, and again reiterate it in two more films produced that expand on these same ideas of alienation and marginalization and the collective and family that rises from that. (11) The collective not only challenges the ideas of the autonomous ‘genius-artist’, but also recognizes the collective as fostering an artistic wellspring. In finality, this concept is brought to full actualization through the final exhibition of work. In recognizing the collective, I am curating four other artists (two of whom are not in the Art and Design Program) into my allotted exhibition space- all of the work exploring the ideas of alienation, marginalization, and the formation of families or collectives, while conceptualing concreting it in show. (12) The final exhibition for my thesis show will be the installation of my photos and films, along with the work of the other four artists, and the final touches that make the space home to this collection. (13)
(11. Figure 15 and 16: Stills from final films "Better than the Ramones" and "Borderland")
(12. Figure 17: Stills from Jason Sudak's film "Creep City", being curated into the show)
(Figure 18: Autumn Wetli's Postcards from Paradise Collages)
(Figure 19: Emma Repp's Print Series)
(Figure 20: Jeremy Daly's Pamphlets)
(13. Figure 21: the 'final touches, will be drawings, print-paintings, and various other objects that were incorporated in the films and photographs- like the deer skull- most of which will be placed on the floor leaning up against the wall below the work- with the exception of the skull which will be above the photos)
Cited Sources
1. Huysmans, Joris-Karl. Against the Grain. New York: Albert and Charles Boni, 1930. Print.
2. Rosenberg, Karen. “Marc Handelman at Lombard-Freid Fine Arts.” Artforum. December 2004, page 198. Print.
3. Berry, Nicole. “Panel on Criticism”. Accessible Art. Web.mac.com. November 28 2008. Web. 3 Jan 2010
4. Demian, Nevine Nabil. “Modernist Primitivism: seeking the lost primitive other in works of Geroges Bataille, Michel Leiris, and Rene Char”. Drc.ohiolink.edu, Digital Resource Commons OhioLINK (2003): abstract. Web. 24 November 2009 < http://drc.ohiolink.edu/handle/2374.OX/4523>.
5. Govan, Michael. “Komar and Melamid: The Most Wanted Paintings on the web”. Diaart.org. Web. 1 Jan 2010
6. Krauss, Rosalind E. “Bachelors.” Worldcat.org, October Magazine MIT Press (1999): 1-5. Proquest. Web. 6 December 2009.
7. Thomas, Michelle. “Primitivism: Nouveau Larousse illustre, Red Stone Dancer, Les Demoiselles d’ Avignon, style negre, The Couple.” Arts.Jrank.org. 2009. Web. 6 December 2009
8. White, Jonathan David. “‘It’s a So-Called Civilized World’: American Pop Primitivism and The Cramps.” AmericanPopularCulture.com, Americana The journal of American popular Culture 1900 to Present (2002): 1-10. Web. 25 November 2009.
***If you would like to know more about the week to week process, and other work involved in this thesis project, please visit:
http://annaschaap.blogspot.com/
