on a personal note on representation

Ziggy Primavera

Two years or more ago, a friend asked me to paint a portrait of her dog; I acquiesced and did it. Ever since, I have painted a few more pet portraits for others.

Liz and Burt

I am not trained as a portrait painter.  Fuck, when you go to art school, as I did, you actually get trained to do fuck all.*  What, too many “fucks”?  I am “The Raving” after all...  Anyway, when you go to art school, you don’t necessarily learn to make anything; and if you are lucky, you learn to think about the nature of representation and cultural production, and you learn to talk about it.  You learn to read things like this by Carlyn Christov-Bakargiev who was appointed Artistic Director of this year’s thirteenth edition of documenta, dOCUMENTA (13):

I think that right now there is an urgent need for what I call a wordly alliance among so-called cognitive laborers of every sort, artists and scientists and fiction writers and so on.  It is very urgent to speak together and to work together and to be in a state of the propositional together. And here is the interesting part, to me, as far as choosing to go to art school in this day and age goes: The notion of “the artist” is a very limited notion historically.  The ancient Greeks did not even have a word for “art” as we understand it today.  They had the word techné, which did not mean “art” as we understand it today but instead something like “craftsmanship” or “craft”.  So whether or not art will even continue to be defined as a discrete field for much longer is an open question.  (Artforum, May 2012. p. 750)

Did I say “lucky”?  Well, maybe you’d be luckier actually learning techné.  But I digress… 

...So I started doing these pets.  And doing them always gives me heartburn because I know the owners want the paintings to resemble their pets.  My “art self” gets into making these, and all I want to do is break all the rules and just “play”.  Like I said, I get the heartburn and procrastinate doing them until I eventually succumb to getting down to the business of translating snapshots of animals into paintings of loved ones.  In order to get into it, I start manipulating things so that the context in which I place the pet starts functioning more abstractly and more like “paintings of my own”.  

this is no longer a working numbuh

In other words, I start having fun; but eventually there comes a point when I have to reign myself in and curb my impulses in order to start getting a facsimile of the animal in question down in paint. 

This is where the heartburn and procrastination really takes hold.  It entails a real internal fight: my wanting to paint more freely while having to reproduce what I see in the photograph used as reference.  In this struggle, there often comes a point when I find myself losing to the act of copying.  I start getting frustrated because the photograph keeps winning; and nothing I do in paint seems to be able to compete with the seduction of a photographic image.  This is the main pitfall of working from photographs in a world where photographic reproductions are ubiquitous and, to my eyes, have become our main mode of communication.

It is always at this maximum point of frustration that my unconscious kicks in and frees me from the bonds of the photographic.  It’s when my being remembers that painting is not photography, and that its rules of representation are very different.  Even though I need to make the animal resemble, in paint, the animal in the photograph, I am free to do it differently than the way the camera does it.  In fact, not only am I free, I am required to do it differently.  This totally mundane realization that I keep forgetting and shouldn’t, given that I’ve taught hundreds of students to be aware of it, is always such a rush.  It is most certainly not an original insight, or a profound one; but it is one that happens over and over again when I am in front of a “canvas”, and it is what keeps me going.

Wiley Spot

...off to paint cats...

* upon reading this a couple of weeks later, I realize I must have been in one of my bad moods, because I did learn a lot in art school; I learned to make prints and books and some other stuff.  I also learned to see, really see, and I met people for whom I still have great love and respect.  What you don't learn about in art school is markets and how to make a living in them when you get out; but then that's not what art is about...


cats:

Stimulus

I recently drove to Georgia after having spent too long before going back there to visit with loved ones.  The minute I crossed the border between SC and GA on the interstate, I noticed something odd: the road markers.  They had multiplied and seemed to be on steroids.

As long as I can remember, after coming to this country and noticing them, road markers have been small inconspicuous signs on the side of the road marking each mile of interstate and state roads from one boarder to another, be it state to state or county to county.  In the past, they were helpful to drivers who wanted to gauge where they were in relation to their destination. And now, they’re still helpful to people like me who have not yet been convinced that they need to be tied to a “smart” phone or a GPS system that can track me on a computer/satellite network at all times, and in turn allow me to know where I am physically at all times. I don't mind being a little lost...

These new markers on Interstate 85 are skinnier and placed lower than speed limit signs, but are as tall, or maybe taller.  They are big, and to my eye, cluttered green signs.  Unlike mile markers of old which straightforwardly tell you the mile you are on, these have the Interstate symbol with interstate number printed on them under the word “Highway” or maybe “South”, I don’t remember and can't make out on my crappy pictures (scroll to end); I just know that the “coat of arms” symbol makes them look very official.  Below the official looking interstate symbol, these signs then have the word “mile”, with the mile number printed under that.  Also, most surprising of all, they don’t just mark miles, they also mark half miles in this new, big, and conspicuous way.  

Disturbingly, to those of us interested in good design and annoyed by bad design, the “.5” on the half mile markers does not fit on the same line with the main mile number, and is placed underneath it in a bigger font.  Something like this:

Truthfully, I found these new signs horribly distracting as they zipped by on an average of every 28 seconds or faster depending on what speed I was driving.  I also wondered why the state had spent so much money on these things, about 400 new signs since there is about 200 miles of interstate 85 in the state of Georgia, in an age when most people do have GPS and “smart” phones that tell them exactly where they are.  Those of us who are still electronically somewhat untethered were doing just fine with the old small inconspicuous signs once every mile and paper maps.

It seems as if that quick and dirty, first and maybe only, spate of Obama stimulus money went to Georgia to be spent on new interstate signs for an old interstate in serious need of real infrastructure repair.  Contemporary politics moves too quickly to allow for slow and thoughtful disbursement of funds on big long-term projects with real effects.  These days, everything is window dressing.  I wonder what Obama got in exchange for his stimulating of Georgia signs since the place still voted for Newt Gingrich in the primaries and probably would elect him president if “it” could.  Let's remember that Newt was promising to build a colony on the moon; a very loooonnng-teeeerm project indeed.

Here are some crappy phone pictures, obviously not taken with an Iphone, of our tax dollars at work:

mile 163

28 seconds later

mile 163.5