Painting After Art is Dead

Thanks to my friendship with Jenny Eggleston I was asked to be included in In The Pink at the Halle Cultural Arts Center where the pieces on the left below are installed from now until April 1 (no fooling). I posted on Instagram yesterday how the juxtaposition of a painting with some of the cubes made me reminisce on some of the earlier strategies that I used with both physical and implied cubes (middle pic). The easel implies still-life and the cube assemblage is definitely a collection of objects like those many of us who went to Art school probably drew and painted.

The picture on the left feels a little goofy- for me, the painting becomes a cubist portrait of… cubes. I’m including a Roy Lichtenstein for reference to the idea of being cartoonish*. The full context for my sincere if unnecessarily self-conscious emotions about any use of the word Cubism in relation to my work is the regularity with which non-Art-world types use this word incorrectly to describe it. It’s a dumb thing for me to be bothered by, especially when it is always in the context of expressing interest in the objects that result from my practice.

What I reflected on after I walked away from the exhibition install was how the work shown in the middle image above had helped me see that contradiction was showing up in my work, in this case the contradiction of the subject (cube) being present literally and representationally, and highlighting this duality through juxtaposition.

I’ve realized that goofiness in the context of a practice that takes itself pretty seriously is a useful contradiction; said differently, if I was truly goofy none of these words would have been necessary. If one digs IE googles a little deeper you quickly see that “goofy” while meaning everything from harmlessly eccentric to silly, doesn’t ever imply not being serious. *BTW, cartoonish is another interesting word choice if I do say so, meaning “not like real life, because of being too simple or exaggerated” which sounds right in the strike zone.

And… I’m not the first artist to work through this stuff. Chuck Jones, whose aesthetic is so deep in my subconscious, was clearly influenced by Modernism, including Cubism (hot take- Le Courbusier is the best Cubist painter) and Nicholas Krushenik cleverly and deftly took the equation in the opposite direction. BTW “yes” the spatial “snap” the one gets from cellular animation is hugely influential on how my mind’s eye thinks about putting images together, even if the paintings I make aren’t even really representations of a specific thing or space (then again, are the subjects of cartoons ever real?).