'Nostalgie IV', Oil, ashes and charcoal on burned panel.
I do not subscribe to this idea that one medium is inferior
to another, that because of personal preference or belief in the superiority of
a medium one can privilege one over the other.
Typically this kind of privileging has to do with one’s belief in
commodification or authenticity or even identity (gender roles or otherwise).
Within each medium is a notion of the pure and authentic vs the commodified and
naturalized, the radical vs the reactionary, the medium of action vs the
reactive medium (if you like Nietzche for example). I also don’t subscribe to the notion of
radical art as coming only from the ‘less privileged’ or the ‘marginalized’
mediums. This, in a complete 360 degree
turn manages only to privilege those forms of art vs the others, not in any
sort of radical shift, but rather in a totally normalized way. Privileging certain forms of art turns those
forms into the ‘Other.’ Given the amount
of time, space, media attention that these ‘other’ mediums receive in the
institutional system and outside of it, this argument is completely out of its
own element. What am I talking about
specifically? Since the late 1960s the
‘marginal’ mediums have historically been performance, video, installation,
conceptual, and ephemeral art.
Institutions typically refer to the university, the museum, the
gallery. Interestingly however, because
of the institutionalization of theory via its embedding within the university
in the 1970s, these marginal mediums became the preferred mediums of the
institutions themselves. This did not
happen overnight, but to be certain, video art is today no less inferior than
painting, and sculpture is not less superior than performance. The institutionalization of all these media
made certain that the edge that each once had have been thoroughly blunted and
the radical was turned into the merely consequential. What seems like an innocuous enough notion of
levelling of the playing field appears in actuality as a push for the
privileging of a different form of art. But why? If identity politics is to be believed the
reason for this privileging of the ‘other’ media is not because of what they
are but because of what they represent.
Painting and sculpture represent the old world, the conservative,
hierarchical, patriarchal system of oppression while performance and video
represent progress and inclusivity. The
strangest operation is at work here however.
While ephemeral arts seem to operate in the realm of equality and
universality while contending that painting and sculpture might in some way be
elitist because of their ties to money, such as corporate funds, private
collections, and so on (and this is in fact true, but this is not why they are
elitist), they themselves focus on particularity in the forms of identity as
opposed to the universalist ideals of their earlier incarnations, becoming
elitist in their own right.
Personally I believe that identity theory is anything but a usable
theory for going forward. Identity
politics with its focus on the body, gender, orientation, race, only deflects
the issues without solving any of them.
It is a dead end in the institutionalized knowledge and commercial
structure of the art world. While I
understand the urgency and vehemence of the proponents and I am absolutely
behind the struggle for equality for all races and genders, I believe that this
is a fight that cannot be fought and won in the realm of art, at least not
until major ruptures and cracks appear in the institutional system. We must remember that systems are created to
absorb and nullify dissent. What are we
accomplishing by creating an institution out of identity politics? Only an arena in which individuals must
prostrate themselves within a guilt ridden spectacle of a type of struggle
session that leaves everyone equally guilty and equally culpable.
So this is why I paint.
It is not a political or social belief, but rather a belief in the
medium itself as a vehicle for a deeper truth, and this goes for all other
mediums. Each medium has within it the
potential for a deeper meaning and a type of truth that is masked by the false
consciousness that we give it when we make it into an institution. The new paintings are a result of years of
trial and error, thinking and experience and lots of reading. By going through many mediums I’ve arrived a
point in which I was able to get rid of a lot of excessive ‘stuff’ like color
and the need to say everything all at once in every piece. The work is narrowed and shows bit by bit the
whole picture. While these paintings are
mostly of smoke clouds from local wildfires, painted from photographs I took
myself, they refer to much more than that, memory, nostalgia, the terrible and
the beautiful sides of nature and so on.
The truth is somewhere in there, but very difficult to dig out.
