Contemporary issues

We are creeping up to the anniversary of the 1913 Armory Show that launched Modernism in America, as I mentioned in the previous post. My teachers inherited this Modern art and they shared the fundamentals of Modernism with us. The fundamentals of Modernism are really the same fundamentals that underlie all art through history—it's just that, with Modernism, these principles don't stay underneath, they rise to the surface. For example, while Leonardo's Virgin of the Rocks is triangular in composition, a modern painting may simply be a triangle.

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.

Young Francophile

On September 23, 1985, I began art school at Cuyahoga Community College. It's now, by my reckoning, ten thousand days later. When I'm thinking about this numerically even anniversary, another commemoration in tens comes to mind: the one hundredth anniversary of the armory show in New York City, which falls a few days from today.

The armory show brought modern art to America's popular consciousness in 1913. Among the artists in the show were the notorious Europeans reminding us, too, of the influence of another continent. But soon, New York became the center of the art universe and an American flavor of modern art was born. Soon, the European-influenced art of America grew into its own. We rode that wave of enthusiasm for quite some time. In 1985, Modern Art was still taught in the classrooms I painted in. And, we still paid a lot of attention to Europe. The one art film we saw over and over in classes was a film about Karel Appel.

But the decades since I started school have been dominated, it seems to me, by a rise in popular American culture and a rising nationalism in general. My loves are probably, now, split between American arts and arts overseas. For a long time, however, having been starved in public school of any encounters with foreign creativity other than British literature, I devoured anything I could get from overseas, and from throughout time, too. When I was a kid, my friends and I were reading Doestoevsky and Proust. I wonder if kids who were reading comic books have fared better as contemporary creators. On the screen, we were watching Bergman and Fellini. If we wanted bad movies or horror flicks, we went for the worst, not the most popular. But, I think some of our current successful filmmakers are more likely the kids fed the popular Hollywood diet, nourishing their body of work on kitsch and blood. As for music, we were listening to Stockhausen and Schoenberg, not Kiss. And for art, we turned to the modern art of Europe and a New York school that was influenced, at least through their teachers, by those Europeans that the American populace first discovered in 1913: Picasso, Matisse, and Cézanne.

An art critic I sometimes follow wrote a review of a Matisse show a couple weeks ago in a popular magazine. Filled with ecstatic descriptions of his experiences viewing the work, this article was completely different from his apology for Postmodernism in the following week's issue. Writing about art since the early 90s, he used considerably less poetry and emotion to say that art had shifted to a new beauty revolving around ideas. I liked reading his excitement about Matisse. I think Matisse is still relevant. As for the new ideas, well, I think that if most of the American university scholars who misunderstand Derrida would read some Diderot, maybe, somehow, they'd see that the new ideas are nothing new to the French.

Student studies

Not long ago, I showed images of all my old work to some of my graduate advisers, with the hope that they could understand where I'm coming from as I work on my thesis. If they could see my entire body of work, maybe they'd understand that there are themes and stylistic consistencies that run through it. Maybe they'd understand what the thesis is about. But I was stunned when they liked the work I did in high school and the first year of college the best, showing far less interest in the more original work I've been developing over the 27 years since.

Certainly, the early work has a freshness. It may be less over-thought and less overwrought. But looking back at this early work, I realize that it is all very familiar. Those first couple years, I looked at the work of famous artists and I produced similar work. While it's never easy to make good art, it's a lot easier to copy what someone else invents than to invent something yourself.

Let's take, for example, this bicycle sculpture that I made within the first couple weeks of my first quarter. You have to love this. But in some ways, by the time I was assembling it, it was doomed to read as cliché. In fact, I recently stumbled across what could be the prototype in a Sanford & Son episode, pictured below.

I enjoyed making my bicycle sculpture, and I'm sure part of the game was demonstrating that I was up to the task of making expressive art. I think I demonstrate a remarkable control over the materials I was working with. But I don't believe I ever seriously thought of it as anything other than an exercise. As soon as I was finished making it I was ready to move on and get into something more personally meaningful.

The first series that felt like my own was a series of photographs made using flashlights. I'll write more about this series in another post. I began the series in high school as part of a senior project and I continued working on it my first year at Tri-C in Bruce's Life Drawing course.

The class met on Tuesday and Thursday mornings, and each Thursday, from eleven to noon, we had Creative Hour. During this last hour of the class, I worked on the series that would be featured at the Annual Student Art Show at the end of the year. This series began my lifelong interest in melding realistic proportions of the figure with a rustic, sign- or symbol-like simplification. Even still, the point of departure was a popular trick that I learned from a Photography magazine. My early work tended to be tinged with a "neato" factor in the process. These little gimmicks matured into a lifelong interest in alternative methods. Like other early works, this series began with me proving I could mimic existing art, but I refined it in my own inventive ways.

This wire sculpture is another example of derivative experimentation. It's derived quite obviously (to me) from Matisse and Picasso. It was my original idea to use the metal bands that normally bind cubes of bricks. But the figure is reminiscent of the great modern masters and reminds me of a sculpture we had in our hip, modern church. It is another example of my interest in reducing the figure to a symbolic, linear shape. But I did not have a clear stylistic direction when I made it, and the other two or three sculptures in the series are not figurative at all.

My interest in sculpture can be seen in this early ceramic piece that I made in high school. This, also, attracted the attention of my graduate advisers. But what we have here is a rebellious coil pot. My high school art classes were not particularly creative. When directed to make a coil pot in art class, I liberated the coils from the mundane spiral and gave them some poetic freedom. There is a little of me in this but, again, no direction. I like it, but it's transitional.

This plaster piece was made by simply shoving a vacuum cleaner hose into a mop bucket and filling the bucket with plaster. I spray painted it and was done. It is simple, elegant, sophisticated, remarkably mature, but it hasn't a whole lot to do with the themes that really interest me. I like it, but I had to keep moving.

This piece derives from several sources. The first was Bruce's own interest in minimalism and shaped canvases. The second is Josef Alber's experiments with colors. And the third is the use of color to evoke depth, which we were studying in class. I also wanted to find out if I could push the depth a little by raising the red rectangle just slightly above the blue. You can't tell, but it may enhance the illusion. I don't know. Bruce told me to be bold, not subtle. This was one of my first experiences in which an instructor challenged my method. Again, this piece was about mimicking other artists and an exercise in applying the principles I was learning. It was also one of my first attempts to see how the artist's intent and the audience response might relate. But the piece has little to do with my style. Looking back, I think it accomplishes what I wanted it to do, but it's obviously very dated looking.

This painting is another that caught the attention of my graduate advisers. Why? Because it's big? Because it looks like a Lee Krasner painting? This painting was a joke that my brother-in-law and I played with a huge, abandoned canvas that had been in the storage room for ages. We dumped every kind of leftover medium we could find on it. We made a mess on the floor, jimmied the lock to the janitor's closet, got a mob and bucket to clean up, spilled the mop bucket all over the hall floor, made Mike laugh and got a light lecture from Bruce when we hung it on the wall wet and the President of the College leaned up against it. It took forever to dry. Again, not my direction. Not my work. We said, let's see if we can make an Abstract Expressionist painting, we did it, and we moved on. Experiment completed. Obviously we used our talent and skill. And it's not bad, at all. But it obviously lacks the control of color, in particular, that one finds in a more serious piece. It really was just us having fun, and maybe showing off.

I played a lot, early on. But I was always interested in bringing something new to the world—something all my own. So, while I proved my capabilities and my understanding of art history, I was always driven to develop my own style. This is what I've been trying to do for the last twenty-seven years. As I gain control over the resources and discipline I need to regularly produce finished work, and as I find ways to secure the time that I need to create, I expect that I will accomplish that goal. I will do my own thing, drawing on tradition and the influences of other artists, but making it my own.

All the preceding art works date from 1985 to 1987.

Ten thousand days

Today marks 10,000 days since I first started art school. I began studying art at Cuyahoga Community College's Eastern Campus on September 23, 1985. The Tri-C art department is in an old 1970s building that used to be called the Interim Building. Classes were held there while they built the Main Building which opened just before I enrolled. The Fine Art department, appropriately, remained in the earlier, temporary building. It was a comfortably ugly space that reminded me of the art room by the boiler in my high school basement. A utilitarian structure, the Interim Building fit the landscape of abandoned 1950s military bunkers that surrounded our campus. It became my home for two years.

I still remember the first day, sitting in the old gallery listening to Bruce lecture endlessly on what to expect as art students. Everything, down to how you sharpen a pencil, was new. A quiet but talkative, slow-moving, bearded man, he had an adage for every situation. If we tried to protest, he would open his eyes wide and say "ah!" and stop us, somehow compelling us to wait for him to say something, even though half the time he'd just leave his mouth open, as if we were meant to supply the words ourselves. He challenged everything we did, saying, "now do another, do it bigger, make it as big as the Statue of Liberty." I would never again make art without thinking deeply about what I was doing, every step of the way.

The other dominant personality in those days—and he's still there today—was our drawing, ceramics, and printmaking mentor. Mike is no less responsible for my discipline and aesthetic than Bruce. I'll forever picture him, toothpick in his mouth, wild hair, laughing so hard he'd splash his coffee on the floor. At the museums, Mike taught us to see art, dismissively waving away one painting in passing and stopping before another where, animating his whole tall body, he would exclaim with ecstatic praise, "this is art!" Whenever we'd get him to do the same in a critique of our own art work, we'd realize we were not simply creating assignments.

Mike, like other teachers there, is a working artist. Many of the students, too, were local artists developing their craft in what was really more of a workshop environment with us students the apprentices. Studying art at Tri-C East was a unique experience for a Freshman who'd been eighteen for only a month. I was surrounded by students of all ages, from teens like me to artists in their 70s and probably older. I was working with people from other countries and other ethnicities, and it was a huge relief.

The central room was an all-purpose hub. Sometimes we'd have drawing or design classes there. Sometimes we'd meet for lecture or watch the one favorite art film the library owned. Always, we had critiques there. But often it was simply the lunchroom and general hang-out spot, encircled by the other rooms: ceramics, printmaking, sculpture, the wood shop, life drawing, the gallery, and Bruce's office. Here, all the different personalities came together and taught me almost as much as my classes did.

Over in the Main Building, it sometimes felt a bit like high school. More people my age were over there. But in the Interim Building, it was a tangle of humanity ready to teach me things that I couldn't learn from kids my age. Relieved of the stresses of freshman-year-rebellion conformity, I was free to concentrate on creativity. I was at school seven days a week, from morning until night. The only reason I worked was to earn money to buy coffee, gasoline, and guitars.

Within the first couple weeks of school, we had a field trip to the Cleveland Museum of Art. I don't think I realized, until recently, what a gift this museum was. I can trace the core of my aesthetic to my experiences as a young art student seeing shows there. Our destination was an exhibit of New York School Modernist Sculpture.

I was going to ride with Terry. He and I had started together this same quarter. I remember him sitting over by the door of the gallery on the first day of classes and I made a note that he was probably the only male in the class close to my age. He was a muscular guy, and I wondered if he might be a football player, but it turned out he was a weight lifter. We were both taking the same sequence and we quickly paired up in creativity and adventure.

On this day, Terry and I jumped into his light blue Chevette, and, with Alice Cooper playing in the homemade speaker boxes in the back, we zoomed off ahead of the others to the museum. Since we beat the rest of the class, we walked through the show on our own. Everything was so strange and seemed so silly. We made fun of all the sculptures saying "that's not art!" Then we returned to the lobby just as our instructor, Margaret, arrived with the class.

As Margaret guided us through the exhibition, she showed us the work in ways I never saw art before. At each sculpture, when she finished opening our eyes, Terry and I would look at each other, dumbstruck. That night, as I pulled into the driveway at home, I hit the brakes and jumped out. My parents had decided that very day to take all the old bicycles from the garage and put them at the curb for the trash collection. It was a pile of wheels, and spokes, and pedals and it resonated instantly. Two days later, Terry and I had a large-scale bicycle sculpture assembled and spray-painted silver on the lawn outside the art rooms. When we arrived at our Fundamentals of Art class, the other students came in with their found-object sculptures in their arms and placed them on the tables. Margaret had to go outside to see what Terry and I had made.

We titled it Birth, as a joke, mostly because Wading Antelope didn't seem to fit. Margaret, of course, found ways that it evoked birth, and, in a real way, it was a birth for us.

The sculpture went on to be exhibited in the Main Building and the school newspaper wrote an article about us. Some twenty years later, I ran into Margaret at an opening reception for one of her shows, and I reminded her who I was. She remembered me and the art vividly and introduced me to the people around us as one of the guys who created this amazing sculpture composed of hundreds of bicycle parts.

Tradition

Some of my teachers tell me my work doesn't look enough like my influences. They can't conceive of the fact that I can be influenced by both Paul Klee and Alex Katz. Even stranger, my work looks nothing like these artists. This must seem like madness to my instructors. They feel like I should be riffing off an established artist from San Francisco. Some saint from their canon. And it should show.

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.

Art Walk Campaign

It's almost inevitable, it seems, that a visual artist gets called upon to do some graphic design. Over the years, I've worked in graphics and printing many times. In 2004, I created this advertising campaign for the Murray Hill Arts Association in Cleveland. It was a great year for attendance.

The theme I used throughout the advertisements and publicity materials was graphic images of people's legs all walking in the same direction. There are men and women and boys and girls of various ages—which you can tell from the clothing and the size of the figures. A number of the figures are carrying art that they purchased.

This was the 25th anniversary of the event, so the 25th was featured prominently. Below are stickers we used to seal the box lunches that we provided attendees.

After that year, I moved out of my Murray Hill studio. A few years later, I learned that they had continued to use this design in later art walks.

Why anyone can learn to draw

—Creativity—

I once led a drawing workshop for a group of executives at a large corporation. They recognized the value in learning to draw to help them learn to communicate better with each other in meetings. Drawing is something we can all learn, and it's not just for artists. There was a time when learning to draw was considered part of a modern, aristocratic education for every young person.

Drawing has something to do with talent, but anyone can develop the cognitive and physical skills that form the foundation of drawing technique. It is in vision and inspiration that some might stand out more than others. On the other hand, one can go far by simply learning to listen to the muse. So here are a half-dozen aspects of drawing that are available to anyone willing to learn.

Drawing Conventions. Certain ways of rendering a drawing are time-tested for their effectiveness in communicating visual form. These conventions can be learned by anyone. In my classes, for example, students learn how to draw shadows using a formula that most artists use.

Fundamentals of composition. There are constants in art, just as there are constants in music. We can identify a variety of visual characteristics that we can rely upon to produce consistent visual effects. Anyone can learn to create emotional harmony or tension using these fundamentals. These rules seem to be based in nature rather than in culture. For example, a horizontal line will usually seem to refer to landscape.

Seeing. A great deal of any art making has to do with seeing, just as making music has to do with hearing, and great writing has to do with reading. As you develop your drawing skills, you will learn to see the world differently, and see your drawings differently.

Drawing skills.  Over time, artists have learned the ways that tools and materials work. Anyone can learn to use a pencil. You can learn how to sharpen and hold a pencil, and how to draw with it. If you practice, you can easily master your technique.

Style. Simply by being yourself, your own unique style will come out. You will learn to recognize and value your style, and then develop it.

Imagination. This is where some people stand out more than others. Some of us are quite naturally called to engage our peers with unusual ways of experiencing. While some of us may be more imaginative than others, we can all develop our imaginations more. In addition, we can all learn to identify, appreciate, and create visual poetry.

So, there's no reason to fear drawing! If you understand that learning drawing is like learning any new skill set, you will understand why you have trouble at first, but you will know that you can watch yourself master it over time like any skill. Maybe we should think of every skill in life as an art form!

I once had a young student who told me, at the beginning of the first class, that he wanted to learn to draw a fist. I told him that I would teach him what he needed to know to draw anything he wanted. I soon forgot about the fist. On the last day of the six-week course, his mom came to pick him up. And he asked her to wait as he pulled out a fresh piece of paper. On it, he drew a perfect hand, closed into a fist. He had remembered what I told him and proved to himself that he had learned to draw it, simply by learning how to draw.