 |
| 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 |
* 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:
hm, about that making a living business, or what i mean is how to avoid the business of making a living. i still have the email of when you had just finished these, they do hold their own and are great to look at, i particularly like the one on the yellow back ground. i trust you are well lovely lady :)
ReplyDelete