I made this painting when I was taking fine art classes as a foundation for the commercial art classes in my second year. My buddy Terry remained in the commercial art sequence and finished with an associate's degree, but the teachers in the Commercial Art department sent me back to Fine Art. They told me I was a fine artist, not a graphic artist. They told me I was one of "Bruce's Kids" and in a hip 1980s way, they said, "go throw paint at canvases." And, of course, I did.
My teachers at Tri-C grew up with Late Modernism, the "stage" of art "history" in which there are lots of visual and material possibilities. When there are a lot of possibilities, it is with design and composition that we can make and evaluate art. This is what we were taught—color, symmetry, variation, focal point, etc. I remember when Terry handed in a collage, Margaret got scissors and cut it all apart into pieces to show us how many possibilities we have, and she explained every possibility as a complex of dozens of design fundamentals. This is what we learned, and I can't have asked for a better foundation in art. When I look back at my experience at Tri-C, I am grateful that I went there first, before studying anywhere else.
A friend recently told me he thinks of his work as "continuing Modernism." When he said that, I thought, "this is gutsy," even though I'm doing the same thing, without saying as much. By the time I started art school, the art world was publishing a litany of obituaries. Painting died early on. And then, one-by-one, the usual suspects were gunned down until art as we knew it was dead. Then the inky-fingered voyeurs of death notices observed that all of art history was dead. Everything was dead. And, of course, Modernism was dead. The field was so littered with corpses it looked like a Spencer Tunick photograph. So even for me, the idea of "extending Modernism" conjures visions of laboratories, lightning bolts, and reanimation experiments.
With Modernity gone, Postmodernity tried to move in, but lately the word on the street is, simply, contemporary. This is a word I do not like any more than the word modern. Rising from the ashes of the old connotation of contemporary is the new one which is a name for a style and a movement instead of a time frame. The word has changed. The old meaning is dead like everything else. When we say contemporary, we're no longer talking about a living artist producing work today. When we say contemporary artist, we mean someone who makes art with a particular style. If an artist is deemed contemporary, it's for his attitude, not his corporeality.
Now we are talking about a philosophical orientation and a cultural or political lifestyle. A contemporary art piece is not a painting that a living artist made at some point in his or her career. Contemporary art signifies a particular attitude: one that is new, avante garde, hip, and trendy. And it really needs to have been made in the last twenty minutes, because today's audience hasn't an attention span longer than five minutes.
A week ago marked 10,000 days since I started art school. My original plan was to mark this event with an online interview. That didn't materialize, so I felt compelled to bring the idea here to my blog. Over the next few days, and probably all year and beyond, I'll continue with the theme, tackling more difficult aspects of this saga, making some sense of myself as a contemporary artist raised on modernism. It seems to be unavoidable that this bloodletting will pool into a number of subsequent posts.
