Joshua Abelow, 04/2008
I.
The odds stacked against young artists are an oppressive force in
America. I equate making a living as an artist to jumping off a ship
in the middle of the ocean and expecting to be saved by a beautiful
mermaid. This idea has been instilled in me since I was young and now
that I am 31, it still rings true. Sometimes making art sucks me dry
and gives me little in return, except the momentary pleasure of
keeping busy. A lot of what I have made over the years is garbage.
So what keeps the pipe dream real? Why am I intent on making art if
the chances of success are stacked so high against me? What is the
role of the artist these days?
Bruce Nauman's 1967 light sculpture, "The True Artist Helps The World
By Revealing Mystic Truths," is a response to similar questions he
must have been asking himself as a young artist. Bruce Nauman
explains:
"The most difficult thing about the whole piece for me was the
statement. It was a kind of test-like when you say something out loud
to see if you believe it. Once written down, I could see that the
statement, 'The true artist helps the world by revealing mystic
truths,' was on the one hand a totally silly idea and yet, on the
other hand, I believed it. It's true and it's not true at the same
time. It depends on how you interpret it and how seriously you take
yourself. For me it's still a very strong thought."1
Nauman's statement is a strong thought for me as well. Of course,
there isn't a universal answer or truth to artistic practice, which is
why Nauman's light sculpture remains so funny.
II.
I grew up in a small town in a middle-class family and had little
exposure to museum-quality art (although my grandmother, Paula Brunner
Abelow, studied painting at Cooper Union in New York and is an
excellent painter). My parents encouraged my talent for drawing and
painting from an early age. Choosing to be an artist was never
something I considered because, for lack of a better way of putting
it, art chose me. In my public high school I was recognized to be,
"Most Artistic," and also had the "Most Distinctive Laugh." My talent
for painting and drawing outweighed any other gifts I had, so it was
perfectly natural for me to go on to art school. Upon turning 18, I
moved to Providence, Rhode Island to attend RISD, which was a
mind-expanding experience. A couple of months after my 1998
graduation, I moved to New York, and began working for the well-known
painter, Ross Bleckner. One of the reasons I was attracted to
Bleckner's work is because it addresses personal and political issues.
Ross is a master craftsman of painting and I knew I would learn a lot
working for him (which I did). I worked for Ross during the day and
maintained my own studio practice at night and on weekends.
I made hundreds of paintings during my first couple of years in New
York. Some were successful, but many were not. Two tiny 8" x 8"
canvases, each depicting a noose, are my most important images from
this time. I made these little paintings in 1999. Both are titled,
"Go Kill Yourself." I like these two little paintings for a variety of
reasons:
1) They engage in one of the two "universal truths", death (the other
"universal truth" being sex).
2) They can be read as serious or as a joke.
3) The image is a readymade, which brings to mind Dada.
4) The image is repeated, which brings to mind Pop.
5) The title is as significant as the image, which brings to mind
Conceptual Art.
Another reason these two paintings are important to me is because I
abandoned my search for meaning in the process of making, and instead,
found my meaning in the concept and simply executed the idea. These
paintings are not about finding truth, but rather, they are about
questioning truth by employing dark humor. This approach has become
the foundation for my art ideology.
The idea that one can create one's own rules as an artist makes me
think of Mike Kelley. Kelly has no single medium or aesthetic
strategy, and this, of course, becomes his strategy. I feel a kind of
kinship with Mike Kelley after having lived here in Michigan for the
past two years (I highly recommend visiting the bookstore, Bookbeat,
which is owned by Kelly's close friend and artistic collaborator Cary
Loren). Kelley sees his upbringing in a working-class family in
Detroit, Michigan in the 1960's as influencing his worldview:
"I didn't feel connected in any way to my family, to my country, or to
reality for that matter: the world seemed to me a media façade, and
all history a fiction - a pack of lies. I was experiencing, I think,
what has come to be known as the postmodern condition, a form of
alienation quite different from postwar existentialism because it
lacks any historical sense - there is no notion of a truth that has
been lost. It is characterized by the feeling that there is a general
evenness of meaning. To borrow a phrase from Richard Hell, I was part
of the 'blank generation.'"2
Growing up during the 80's and early 90's in suburban Maryland, I
experienced my own feelings of isolation and meaninglessness.
Listening to hip-hop, skateboarding, drinking, and smoking lots of
weed were some of my favorite pastimes. I was also very serious about
painting and drawing, but somehow I knew I would focus more on art
after high school. In retrospect, it's appropriate that my first
significant painted image in New York would be a noose! I needed to
kill myself and embrace a newfound optimism for the future.
III.
Peter Halley is an unexpected example of an artist who deals with
self-portraiture. Despite the appearance of Halley's paintings as
hard-edged formal abstraction, many of his earliest images convey
thoughts and feelings of alienation and isolation. These themes
continue throughout his career. Halley says the square shape in his
work, "was meant to be an autobiographical element, almost a
self-portrait. . .a self-portrait, not of my life, but my mind set."3
I like this idea that one can represent one's mindset rather than
one's appearance, and I can see how it may be at the root of all
abstraction.
Geometric abstraction, in particular, has interested me since I first
began to think about art. Cubism and early modernism highly
influenced my grandmother's paintings and these images crept into my
subconscious at an early age. I remember admiring the simplicity of
the compositions and the harmonies the colors created in their simple
shapes. During my RISD years, I became interested in artists such as
Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Piet Mondrian, Mark Rothko, and Pablo
Picasso for their use of simple geometric forms to convey complex
moods, thoughts, and feelings. I find comfort in geometric forms like
circles, squares, and triangles because they are easily recognizable
to children, adults, and people from diverse cultural and educational
backgrounds (there is a strong relationship between children's art and
geometric abstraction). I use familiar shapes (and familiar language)
in my work as an entry point to guide the viewer into something less
familiar, where meaning is multifaceted, political, and personal.
One of the reasons why Halley's work continues to interest me is
because he attempts to assign specific meaning to abstract shapes and
colors. Halley believes there is "as much social relevance in
geometric shapes as in words or photographic images."4 Furthermore,
Halley states:
"What we do in the visual arts is really only important insofar as it
engages issues that are real in society as a whole. . .I've
deliberately tried to make work that emphasizes the identity of the
individual within the social matrix."5
For me, the most interesting art (from any time period) holds a mirror
to whatever society it is created in - for better or for worse, we get
the idols we deserve. With my "Masturbator" and "Narcissism"
paintings my intent is to humorously criticize myself for being a
totally self-absorbed, selfish artist. At the same time, my criticism
extends outward to the social matrix of our country.
Peter Halley addresses the role of the artist in relation to society
in his essay, "Beat, Minimalism, New Wave, and Robert Smithson." I
find Halley's thoughts regarding Smithson surprisingly relevant:
"Smithson insisted that artists must be conscious of the motivations
that guide their work, of their role in society, and of the role their
work plays ('And you know a lot of people just don't like to hear this
sort of thing. They prefer the artist to be dumb and unconscious and
basically crazy').
"He insisted that artists must try to describe what they believe to be
the nature of reality and not be seduced into creating escapist 'dream
worlds' (either pleasant or haunted). He claimed that artists who are
'dumb enough to think they're on a cloud or something' actually serve
to reinforce reactionary political values by reiterating social and
political illusions in the dream worlds they create (He said that art
was the opiate of the middle class)."
"Lastly, he argued that the only way for the artist to become
conscious and to figure out what is real is to engage in dialogue.
His work contained dialogues between art and environment, artist and
art world, art world and society. He railed against the 'Kantian
myth' that the art object is a 'thing in itself.' Instead he urged an
understanding that the work of artists is dialectical: 'Things are not
things in themselves. They are related to other things.'"6
IV.
In conclusion, I will focus on three of my most recent painting projects.
"Mystic Truths" was made during my summer months spent in Pontiac,
Michigan between my first and second years as a Cranbrook student. It
is a large installation composed of seventy-two, 16" x 12", oil on
linen, individual paintings. Every other painting reads, "HANG ME,
HANG ME, HANG ME, HANG ME," and "HAR DER FAS TER." At the time, I was
going through a break-up, largely due to the fact that I had chosen to
leave New York. On a personal level, "Mystic Truths" was my response
to this failing relationship. On a philosophical level, it is a
response to questions I was asking myself about the purpose of making
or buying art. On the one hand, these paintings act alongside a
long-standing and highly revered tradition of color study in painting.
On the other hand, the text undermines this tradition by reducing the
meaning of the paintings to their most base function, to be hung. The
title was chosen in response to Nauman's light sculpture, "The True
Artist Helps The World By Revealing Mystic Truths." I am currently
interested in how language can be used to say one thing, but mean
another, and how color, text, surface, and repetition can be used to
create multiple layers of meaning.
"Dumb & Easy" is an on-going project, loosely inspired by Paul
McCarthy's 1995 video piece, "Painter." I have completed ninety-five
of two hundred paintings for this site-specific installation (although
I don't, as of yet, have a site). Each painting is 18" x 18", oil on
linen. Every other painting reads "DUMB & EASY," and has a
simplified, almost abstract, self-portrait with a big loopy beard.
The quantity of paintings and the complexity of the color arrangements
are intended to overwhelm the viewer and contradict the text. The
portraits heavily reference sex as does the phrase, "Dumb & Easy."
The portraits are sarcastically self-celebratory and the text is
intended to reference my feelings of self-doubt (art as masturbation)
about the importance of my painting practice. My stance is
self-critical, but at the same time, my hope is that viewers find the
work funny and also find multiple ways to enter into the piece. In a
1999 interview between artists Dike Blair and Richard Prince, Prince
states, "I'm very attracted to the type of subject matter with a flip
side, seemingly pleasant things that are simultaneously disturbing."7
"Dumb & Easy," in particular, is analogous to this mode of thought.
"Call Me" is my most recent painting project (also in progress). It
is composed of 16" x 12" paintings that zigzag around the walls
creating a gradation of color from yellows to oranges to browns to
grays to greens to blues and so on. The text repeats, "ABE LOW ABE
LOW, YES = NO, 917 847 7964, NO = YES, ABE LOW ABE LOW." On the most
basic level this piece is a self-portrait. My last name and my New
York cell phone number are repeated to the point of absurdity. I use
myself as a signifier to metaphorically address issues of personal
identity in an age where cell phone numbers and email addresses define
us within our culture. By obsessively repeating the text, the
original meanings of the words dissolve into a desperate, nonsensical
rant. "YES = NO, NO = YES," references personal ads and/or notes that
school children pass to one another, asking for approval or rejection
(example: please circle one: YES, NO, MAYBE).
Notes:
1. Neil David Benezra, Bruce Nauman: Exhibition Catalogue and
Catalogue Raisonne (Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 1994), 62.
2. Mike Kelley, Foul Perfection (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2003), 102.
3. Peter Halley: Paintings 1989 - 1992 presented at the Des Moines Art
Center, October 3, 1992 - January 10, 1993 (Des Moines Art Center,
1992), 17.
4. Arturo Schwartz, Peter Halley: Utopia's Diagrams, (Milan: Tema
Celeste, 1998), 30.
5. Ibid.
6. Peter Halley, "Beat, Minimalism, New Wave, and Robert Smithson,"
Arts Magazine 56, No. 9 (May 1981)
7. Interview of Richard Prince in Dike Blair, Again: Selected
Interviews and Essays (Chicao: WhiteWalls, 2007), 111.