YOU ARE HAPPY AND SEXY

I startled Jay in the laundry room trying to plug in the vacuum so I could clean out the car. They asked, “are you still writing”? I took a deep breath and exhaled, “yeaaaaah”, staring at two ground squirrels named anxiety and bitterness, poking their heads out of the ground of my soul. There might be a zine in the future, they says, maybe, quizàs. Whatever it is, I’m in. And this is it. You’re reading it right now. It’s about nothing, like Seinfeld. It’s about laundry rooms, vacuums, painting, pain, and “ting”. Because that’s what painting is - half pain, half “ting”. I tried to paint men but they’re just not as interesting as women are to me. Sorry. I tried painting wrestlers but people thought they were boxers and liked them too much. Nobody knows what they’re looking at when they look at my paintings so they just decide it’s nothing. When they think they know, they’re wrong. Nobody wants to believe they’re looking at pro wrestling. Most people think if they catch a glimpse of pro wrestling they’ll become one of those people. Because only Trumpy philistines watch pro wrestling, doesn’t he know it’s all fake? Spoiler alert: Painting is fake, too. All your favorite streaming shows you put on the background while you do other fake shit? Fake, fake, fake. Every billionaire’s self-made story? Fake. As. Fuck. Guess what smarty-pants? Every pro wrestling fan knows it scripted, choreographed and pre-determined. Just like your dumb fucking life, since day one. At least Kenny Omega is aware. El Hijo del Vikingo understands this. The audience for painting in Los Angeles? Not so much.

This is not about me (is “unselfaware” a word? Does acknowledging that make me seem more self-aware? Do I care?). My writing is like scripture - it reveals more about you than it does me. I’m writing this during the last meeting of an advanced life drawing class I teach at Casual State Fullerton. I’ve been adjuncting for 18 years. The app I’m writing this in puts a red line under the word “adjuncting” because it’s not a real word, because it’s not a real job. I graduated from here with an MFA 16 years ago. It took them that long to hire me back. The options were be a gallery artist or go into teaching. Now, if you want a full time professor job, you have to be a gallery artist. The message is clear: if you’re not a commercial artist, you’re dead. I started running into people that couldn’t wrap their brain around “art for art’s sake” in ‘09. People who don’t understand the reason for anything existing if it’s not to make money. People who ask the security guards at museums if the paintings are for sale. “Why don’t you try to be a gallery artist?” “Why don’t you sycophantically kiss the ass of boorish cokehead exclusionists who will sell your whole show at a discount to a Russian oligarch’s daughter-wife or a Mexican narco who will store it all in a freeport until the art advisor tells them it’s time to flip?” One time I had a studio visit with a gallerist who kept talking about themselves and their program and how they have 5 other studio visits today and I kept wondering if they were ever going to turn their head and actually look at my paintings hanging on the wall.

My earliest memory is hearing the song “Angela” by Bob James; it is the theme song to the show “Taxi”, which premiered in 1977. I was born in ‘78. I remember sitting on the ground, pulling my father’s records out and looking at them. Bob James albums. Paul McCartney albums.  On Mondays and Wednesdays, I get up at 5, leave the house at 6, and arrive at around 7 to the community college that lets me teach one section of one 2D Design class that starts at 8 and ends at 11:20. It’s a 90 minute round trip. Near the end of the semester like this, the students are just working on their projects while I sit at the desk and think about how fucked the world is. The world these young students will go forth into knowing how to mix secondary colors and find implied lines in compositions. They walk into class and get right to work. When you’re young you don’t question the point. You are the point. The moment is the point. Everything is new. Everything is novel. Every message you get from the world is “YOU ARE HAPPY AND SEXY”. You’re in the abyss and darkness is filling up the space like you’re in a car underwater? YOU ARE HAPPY AND SEXY. When you’re done for the day, and you try to relax, and you’re sitting there, and now you feel absolutely terrified, absolutely scared to death about nothing, about everything, YOU ARE HAPPY AND SEXY. You’re smart enough to know there are no more ways to make an honest living, true knowledge like that you can’t un-know YOU ARE HAPPY AND SEXY. I’m middle-aged so I get a different message: YOU ARE SAD AND UGLY. AND OLD.

Here and There

Two summers ago, the last real summer, we went up to the Bay Area. One particular painting at SFMOMA, Zapatistas, by Alfredo Ramos Martinez, follows me to the Whitney in New York in early March of 2020, right before the world shit its pants. In between, during the 2019 holidays in San Antonio, I recognize a piece at Ruby City by Cornelia Parker from a similar one on the cover of In the Wake: On Blackness and Being by Christina Sharpe. I pick up reading In the Wake again in the summer of 2020, too late. At SFMOMA my mother stands next to a nice Clyfford Still painting for a photo, horizontal with jagged black forms haloing a flickering flame of red and orange. She and Michelle stand between two Ellsworth Kellys for a photo; two triangles together, two people together, two squares together. In New York Michelle takes a photo of me next to a painting by Lyubov Popova, Painterly Architectonic, from 1917. That painting is in a documentary I show to my students. Photos like this prove that artworks are real, that they are experiences in the world, more than just "images" or "content". Popova's forms are sharp when you just look, but when you see them, you see the precarious entropy shattering the surface, trying in vain to redraw her design. The second photo I took at SFMOMA on that trip was of a painting by Imi Knoebel that is also geometric pink and red with neutral colors like Painterly Architectonic. In researching Popova, I discover they made sneakers with imagery from her paintings on them. This disgusts me. I buy a pair in my size (men’s 9).

At the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford I take a photo of my mother taking a photo of Rodin’s Thinker. A month later at the museum at Pomona College, I take photos of photos on photos, Todd Gray’s infinite regression rabbit holes, worlds within worlds, framings and re-framings on scales human to cosmic. For the first time ever, I lay eyes upon a painting by Kaye Donachie at the Independent Art Fair in Tribeca. It appears to be a sad clown painting. For the first time ever in the states, I see work by Swiss painter Miriam Cahn here, startling vertical portraits of naked humanoids daring to be looked in the eye. Back in San Antonio, a work by Cruz Ortiz at Ruby City titled El Jesse Amado reminds about one time in college, for critique in a painting class, Cruz arrived early and installed a hanging installation in the studio with theatrical lighting and chairs around it in a circle. When we had all sat down and the critique began, Cruz, in costume, handed out photocopied pictures of actor Eric Estrada. Good times. 

The only photo I take from "Painting After All" by Gerhard Richter at the Met Breuer is of a painting depicting a blurry skull in the corner. The show opened the week we arrived; it closed a week later. After the Bay Area trip, in my studio I photograph a plastic skull on a broken plastic column. At the Whitney, Michelle poses in front of the full-size facsimile of Man, Controller of the Universe, the mural by Diego Rivera. The photo I take is an homage to one I took of her in front of the real mural at the Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City, years ago. That mural is a recreation by Rivera of one destroyed by Nelson Rockefeller, Man at the Crossroads, at Rockefeller Center in New York, more years ago. In the movie Cradle Will Rock, Reuben Blades plays Rivera and John Cusack plays Rockefeller. In the movie Frida, Alfred Molina plays Rivera and Edward Norton plays Rockefeller. 

Before New York, in Culver City, Kristy Luck’s paintings hover between this world and another at Philip Martin Gallery. It is the last gallery exhibition I see in person in Los Angeles for over a year. Ree Morton at the ICA is the last museum show in LA I see. Right before Christmas 2019, at LACMA, the part of it they didn't tear down, we see a slow motion big bang in Black City by Julie Mehretu, an ominous storm of lines and bends and feathery marks, the eye of the hurricane is the eye of the viewer. If you’re close enough to see the chaos, you’re part of the chaos. Frothing seas of people on every floor of MoMa in March 2020, Michelle is a pink blur holding a coat in front of One: Number 31 by Jackson Pollock, the last image from the old timeline. Black City and One: Number 31 – across time and space and lunch, in my head, the two paintings finally meet. 

A stinging, crystalline glow surrounds the lost futures of the old world, what the stories were all leading up to, the next steps before the grand staircase collapsed. There were signs all around, in January 2020 I present two paintings in an exhibition called “Death Cult” curated by Max Presneill at the Torrance Art Museum. A large painting in the show is of a toothless skull by Cindy Wright titled LOL. So endeth the decade after the crash and before the plague, a no man’s land of scrambling meaning in forbearance, in deferment, automatically debiting income-reduced payments directly from your account. In the twilight moment after New York but before the big chill, the actor Max Von Sydow dies. I post an image of him from The Seventh Seal with a subtitle from one of Death’s lines, translated from the Swedish: Shall we finish our game?

Postcapitalist Painting

"In America..." Published in Krokodil magazine, Soviet Union, 1953 (text translated from Russian)

Some 64,000 years ago, woken beings not too different from us scrawled upon cave walls with red ochre hand-mined from the earth. What connects that kind of activity to the contemporary art exhibited at today’s galleries, art fairs, and museums? There is a disconnect between the felt nobility and inherent good employed to describe learning about and fostering an appreciation for art on one hand, and the decidedly classist, sexist, and racist bias the ‘art world’ routinely demonstrates on the other. The current global economic system of hyper-capitalist, cancerous profiteering rewards such divisive strategies; these strategies arguably underlie the very structures of the current economic paradigm. If systems of health care and education that don’t rely on a profit incentive can be imagined, then a world of art that doesn’t can be too. Such imaginings, practically speaking, are to remain in the realm of thought experiment only. There is no indication that the tide of capital the high end of the art world is awash in will be rolling back any time soon. Even on the non-profit end, much of their funds are still frequently provided by global corporate capital: the lead funder of PST: LA/LA was Bank of America.

Despite this, here in Los Angeles and beyond, thriving communities of working artists exist with the support of artist-run initiatives and alternative exhibition spaces that operate outside the interest and influence of oligarchic wealth. In Los Angeles, the artists of this community produce relevant, grassroots contemporary art activity, and a great deal of that activity is painting. Such a great deal in fact, that some definitive currents and strategies have emerged among the painters of this community. By no means are the basic notions here restricted to the single medium of painting defined at its narrowest at the exclusion of other mediums, or artists who do not identify primarily as painters – ‘painting’ as it were, like all other medium designations, is approached here as one of several overlapping sets of issues and considerations more than as neatly defined classes of products. What the work of these artists has in common is a direct and human-scaled approach. Most of these works range in size from modest to minimally heroic, since they are not industrially fabricated by the alienated labor of technicians in warehouses but hand produced in the studios and studio spaces of artists who are more than likely maintaining a living that has little or nothing to do with sales of their art work. Many of these artists, not being products of brand name MFA programs, remain generally unknown to the commercial gallery world and its audience. Others have broken through to the larger art world stage embodying these notions intact. The exhibitions where you can find many of these artists’ work are frequently organized by artists from within the community itself engaging in extra-studio practice from within the community itself, and the information about where and when typically stays among the social media networks established by them. Exhibitions are often of an ephemeral nature with limited public opportunities to experience them. The audience for them is typically other artists. Some of the overlapping aesthetic and conceptual groupings that have emerged among the painters of these communities as I see them range from edge-to-edge intuitive abstract strategies (Daniela Campins, Rema Ghuloum, Stacy Wendt, John Mills, Max Presneill), to more materially-based pattern and grid riffs (Britton Tolliver, Mandy Lyn Ford, Nano Rubio, Ana Rodriguez, Jenny Hager) all the way to deconstructed investigations of figure-based elements and other represenations (Kristy Luck, Christina Quarles, Maja Ruznic, Ranee Henderson, Joshua Hagler, Josh Peters), to engagements with landscape notions (Christine Frerichs, Esmeralda Montes, Stephen Parise, Carl Baratta, Hung Viet Nguyen, Virginia Katz) as well as engagements with identity, relationships, and media representations (Loren Britton, Michelle Carla Handel, Kyla Hansen, April Bey, Casey Kauffmann).

The unapologetic embrace of painting by working artists of modest means has a larger corollary within our current cultural paradigm. The insatiable hunger for new, novel forms of art coupled with the dismissing or throwing out of older forms thought to be obsolete echoes the wasteful capitalist notion of planned obsolescence. A reassertion and reacknowledgment of painting’s development can be seen as part of a critique of this notion. Also, a connection can be made with regard to perceived notions of commodification of particular mediums. On the surface, a case is made that more conceptual, dematerialized practices challenge the market’s ability to commodify them, leaving painting, sculpture and other materially based forms as tainted with an inherent marketability. However, a deeper analysis uncovers a contrasting take. Indeed, it was a breakdown in financial markets for “dematerialized” and “conceptual” commodities – mortgages, stocks, bonds, debt, securities, derivatives, insurance policies, etc. – that nearly led to complete economic collapse in the previous decade. Indeed, some of the seminal figures of more conceptual bents are canonized market darlings with the “paperwork” relating to the art works becoming a fetishized commodity itself. Against this, the material character of painting and related mediums now stands as a document of the creative, un-alienated labor of working artists, as opposed to both the “administrative” aesthetic of many conceptual and project based practices and the anonymously fabricated designer works of artists like Hirst, Koons, Murakami, etc. This is not to say that there isn’t a hot market for painting, merely that its marketability is no less “inherent” than that of dematerialized forms, whose non-art analogs exist almost as pure commodities, financial products that are essentially shared fictions of government enforced ownership.

It would be a stretch to say the painters mentioned above share a common aesthetic concern. However, grouped together as such, commonalities bubble to the surface when compared to the more recognized artists and trends du jour. Each of the above-mentioned painter's works has a more idiosyncratic, individual characteristic when compared to the repetitive processes of zombie formalism, the last identifiable success aesthetic of the decade. No one wants their work to seem like it was mass-produced to be flipped on the market. No one is making the same painting over and over. This individual characteristic is analogous to and works in conjunction with the notion of indexicality, as defined by German art writer Isabelle Graw. The works directly refer to, and are therefore indexical of the actual artists themselves, and they evoke the artist’s presence when experienced by the viewer. This individualized indexicality can be said to be the result of the reaction to zombie formalism, retro-packaged by writer Chris Wiley as ‘Debt Aesthetics’. Debt Aesthetics refers to the paintings taking on the visual characteristics of currency itself and being traded as such in the wake of the crash of traditional, (barely) regulated sources of credit and markets. This being the case, the overall eclectic reaction to Debt Aesthetics/Zombie Formalism can be summed up as an attempt at a post-capitalist practice, in the case of painting, postcapitalist painting. It is not painting as an attempt to create value that can be used to pay off debt. It is not painting as a commodity that lies somewhere between Monopoly money and BitCoin. It is painting as art. So it speaks to the original question art poses – what is art – and it poses the question not in opposition to capitalism per se, but beyond it, over it, bigger and more universal as an idea than capitalism, speaking to a future that has moved on from it, in light of its increasingly inevitable unsustainability. In no way does the 'postcapitalist' designation imply anything about the above painters' own personal political beliefs. Their work, in my view, is what painting might look like in a world that doesn't revolve around financial profit. It is an initial attempt, a furtive beginning, at envisioning a future, as the great art of the past often attempted to do, if only in hindsight.

Thoughts Left on the Page

installation view, Daniela Campins: In the Middle of This Frase, Eastside International (ESXLA), Sept 15th - Oct 20th, 2017

Part one of a series, working title: "Postcapitalist Painting"

Introduction

To the outside world, it seems that Los Angeles’s cup runneth over with new art museums and high-end galleries. Some of these new, moneyed cathedrals of fetishized capital exist to present high-end contemporary art collections that include million dollar acquisitions by the likes of Jeff Koons, Damien Hirst, Richard Serra and Basquiat (Broad, Marciano). Others are sprung from real estate development riches (Main Museum), or are new incarnations of older, established institutions (ICA-LA). Without digging too much deeper, one could be forgiven for thinking that the art world begins and ends among these spaces and the new mega gallery outposts that are springing up along side them, affirming the legitimacy of the art within, in part, by their market performance (Hauser and Wirth, Spruth Magers, Maccarone, Matthew Marks, etc). The art exhibited at these places wins the public relations battle, and this side of the scene has its front to the world at large. But beyond the spectacle of this there is a community of established, working, contemporary artists at the ground-level in Los Angeles producing important work, despite little engagement with the moneyed side of the art world-industrial complex. A great deal of what they produce is painting. Such a great deal in fact, that some definitive currents and strategies have emerged among the painters of this community. What they all have in common is a direct and human-scaled approach – most of these works range in size from modest to minimally heroic; and a strong indexical sense of the presence of the artist themselves – as this work is not industrially fabricated in quantity by the alienated labor of technicians in warehouses but hand produced in the studios and studio spaces of artists who are more than likely maintaining a living alongside their practice that has little to do with the market demands du jour. Some of the overlapping aesthetic and conceptual groupings that have emerged among the work of these artists range from edge-to-edge intuitive abstract strategies, to more materially-based pattern and grid riffs all the way to deconstructed, figurative investigations and more.

The Spectre (excerpt)

A spectre is haunting the art world – the spectre of all who have been failed by the rapidly irrelevant notion of “contemporary art”. All the powers of the old art world-industrial complex have entered into an unholy alliance to exorcise this spectre—galleries and collectors, curators and critics, museums and patrons: 

• Contemporary art enters broad public consciousness almost only as a function of late/ advanced/neoliberal capitalism. 

• Too many students of art are indentured by crippling debt, unable to join the economy or advance in society. 

• Many of the schools that teach art are overpriced administrative cartels that exploit faculty labor at the expense of students who are regarded as little more than customers. 

• The continued dwindling of governmental support, respect, or faith in the arts creates even fewer opportunities for contemporary artists. 

• The metropolitan centers for contemporary art are almost uninhabitable without the wealth and resources available to the upper class. 

• Small, mid-size and emerging venues and marketplaces for contemporary art are getting squeezed out of the scene, acutely reflecting the larger wealth and income inequality across the globe. 

• The political response from contemporary art has been stymied by its own systemic complicity in the larger issues; many who are privileged enough to participate in art benefit from the status quo. 

• There is a fundamental disconnect between the moneyed world of contemporary art and the less institutionalized scene of most working contemporary artists today.

On one end there are art stars, post-internet online celebrity artists, many commercial galleries, many corporate sponsored and private museums, the larger, well-funded art nonprofits, most collectors of contemporary art, art fairs, art auctions, online art sales platforms, much of the art world print media, the brandname art schools and programs, many professional curators, art advisors/consultants/buyers, writers, academics, and critics, and art book publishers. 

And on the other end there are artist-run initiatives, un-institutionalized or less institutionalized alternative spaces, small-budget, specific, and civic-run art non-profits and museums, working artists (artists with day jobs a.k.a. regular jobs), many state university art programs, community college and university exhibition spaces and museums, artist-curators and exhibition producers, online and social media based art writing and blogging, artist-run or alternative art study programs and independent art presses and publishers. 

The latter is all too familiar with, and has aspired to be part of, the former. The former appears barely aware or cognizant of the latter. The edges of the division are not precise, but the world of art of the 21st century is increasingly seeming like two worlds, the distinctions more felt as much as they are deduced by the participants. The motivations of both worlds are probably the same at heart (the wealthy were already wealthy when they got into art), but one side has its face to the world as the entire, official world of art and the other is easily viewed as trying to “sneak in”, hoping to not be mistaken for the help, as those of us on that side frequently actually are—preparing and shipping art work for exhibition, assisting artists successful enough to hire assistants, adjunct teaching art to communities the art world’s doors are not generally made known to at community colleges and public universities. These are often gigs that new MFA’s from the brand name schools aren’t typically caught doing, perhaps because they have been taught that they won’t have to—teaching first-generation college students about drawing and painting is not a representative ambition of such students of these professionalized programs. In such an era as this, the notion of an artist whose only self-imposed obligation to the world is the production of their own personal art practice can easily smack of self-indulgent entitlement at best, and oblivious abuse of developed-world privilege at worst.

Read the rest in the latest issue of Rabble, available for $5 from Insert Blanc Press