But, let's not forget that DeKooning and Bacon were influenced by Picasso, and Picasso was influenced by Manet and Cezanne. To me, there is nothing odd in this. Still, I'm constantly encountering other artists who can't conceive of gaining anything from an artist so different from themselves. A visiting artist once looked at some images I had on my wall and voiced his astonishment that I had a postcard of a Chardin painting next to an image of art by a more modern or contemporary artist, I don't remember who. I recall being confused and annoyed that this should concern him at all. He seemed to be criticizing me. Picasso collected postcards of all kinds of art that he admired. All great art, he felt, can stand together. Or, as Merton phrased it:
Tradition, which is always old, is at the same time ever new because it is always reviving - born again in each new generation, to be lived and applied in a new and particular way. —Thomas Merton
Of course, we do have our place, and our time, as artists. But even with this, I am having trouble. I'm working on an MFA in painting online at a San Francisco art school. I've spent over four years trying to make my own way in a provincial West Coast school that would love to see me, a New York artist, carry on the Bay Area Figurative tradition. At forty-five, I'm probably not going to be influenced by the scene over there. In the formative first years of art school in Cleveland, I was surrounded by art that was clearly impacted by New York, not San Francisco. The light over there is different. We have clouds. We have rust.
But, even if I was from the San Francisco area (the reality that the school is now recruiting students from around the world seems, somehow, to escape them) why should I copy other artists? It appears to me that some of my teachers regard art in conventional terms. There are several styles that are established, and my teachers would like to see us students conform. But it's only fear that makes us conform. Fearful artists gravitate toward convention because it has currency. In some ways, it has been shown to work. They call it tradition. Or College Art Association guidelines. But really, they're going after the quick fix. They may work hard at it, but it's not the same way I work.
Convention is accepted passively, as a matter of routine. Therefore, convention easily becomes an evasion of reality. It offers us only pretended ways of solving the problems of living - a system of gestures and formalities. —Thomas Merton
A strong artist challenges the easy solution. This infuriates lazy artists because they take it as a criticism of their ideological comfort zone. And, well, it is. Like Picasso said, it's the masters who create; disciples copy. A master feeds his mind like a child. One curator called Picasso a cannibal, absorbing as much as he could from other artists, and then following his own vision. This is the difference between a learner and a student, a child and an adult. My first two years as an undergraduate, I was a learner, not a student. I was a child, not an adult. I was, in fact, a bad student. I still am. That's not to say that I didn't spend a lot of time my first two years in art school copying other artists. I did, and I will address that in another post. But I was exploring very freely, taking in everything, and I was allowed and encouraged to begin developing my own vision.
The problem with me and education is that I like learning and I like teaching. I don't think education permits learning and teaching. I think education prefers indoctrination. Let's not confuse indoctrination with enculturation. Most people, it seems, think schooling involves telling others what to know, transferring what they think to the pupil's brain, based entirely on the teacher's own set of facts. For the lazy artist, the world of art is a world of facts. For them, when a kind of art exists in the art world, it is a fact. It can be categorized, classified, and quantified. Then it can be taught. But if I do something original, there is no comparison, it doesn't exist, and it can't be allowed in school because it's not a fact.
But convention, which is a mere repetition of familiar routines, follows the line of least resistance. One goes through an act, without trying to understand the meaning of it all, merely because everyone else does the same. —Thomas Merton
At Tri-C, I was taught that there is a way to evaluate something completely new and original. We learned something about the fundamentals and principles of art. These were truisms, not conventions. But, the postmodernist threw away the truisms, leaving only convention. And the realists mistook conventions for tradition. So now, the art world is plagued by convention, both conservative and liberal. Both camps have lost touch, largely, with the nature of art. Though no one can completely ignore the fundamentals of art, we have lost touch in practice. We are like drunkards who have moments of sobriety. And the rest of the time, we are lost.
Something's different about the art world that was waiting for us in Generation X. The art waiting for us was not much at all like the art that we were taught in the foundations classes at Tri-C. The art world for our generation is nothing like the world of those New York School Modernist Sculptures that inspired me to reassemble bicycles into a memorable sculpture. The art world that was waiting for us is a void that has continued, for three decades, to defy the kind of creativity and inspiration I had at Tri-C. I'll have more to say about this void, about tradition, and about modern and contemporary art in coming posts.
