So I recently talked to my friend Brian in New York--he told me about his goals for next year. They were all very profound and packed with self-actualization. I couldn't remember anything on my list as it was not in front of me at the time and I didn't want to risk moving the phone, which would certainly have resulted in the broken cord falling out altogether.

So I went and looked later. I realized that they are somewhat mundane this year and that was intentional. They are:

1. Keep doing/developing the drawing and painting
2. Build the INFLUX house into a real, living entity
3. Do something (more) interesting with my Web site
4. Move to the East Coast and get settled there (if conditions are right)
5. Do more writing on art/technology/Afrofuturist themes.

This strikes me as a very doable list, not at all daunting.

What's not written here is the fullness, the kind of woo-hah robustness that I'm bringing to all this now. I'm not doing anything different than I have in the past. I'm just doing it all bigger.

current music: Will and Grace theme song in the next room

I've just read Donald Kuspit's Dialectic of Decadence, very short and fast read about the modernist dialectic between "advanced" art as personified by minimalist Donald Judd and "decadent" art as practiced by figurative artists like Georg Baselitz. His basic point is that both of these forms rely on each other to repress each one's sense of inadequacy. The only way out is a return to the passion of the past.


Judd's "Hommage a Picasso"

Although I agree with how Kuspit characterizes the dilemma, his solution is reactionary and out-of-step with what's actually happening in culture. Also, even though this is a fairly recent essay (2000), it completely ignores new media art, as though art were limited to a choice between painting and sculpture. Those two problems might be related. I'd like to bring some of these ideas up to date.

current music: Beulah, The Coast is Never Clear

At my good friend Kazki's house right now, showing him how easy it is to update a blog. Look for his soon!

I went into work, the day job, this morning, even though the office was officially closed. There were about 10 or 15 people there anyway, but it was still quiet enough to get some actual work done. My boss, the lawyer-turned-backseat art critic, was there. At first I stayed in my own office to get a few things done, then went down to his end of the building to complain loudly about a recent acquisition that was totally misrepresented to us, causing my department much grief. I dropped a few F-bombs. He said he'd pass the F-bombs on to his contact at the other company.

Then we got to talking about Fred Wilson again, about installation art and tangentially about photography. He had earlier said that he has a hard time buying photography as "real art." Well, the conversation was very different this time. I started out by saying that part of the problem is that there actually is so much bad photography and bad installation art out there that's passed off as the real deal that what else are people to think but that the problem is the genre, rather than a particular instance of it? (I'm not sure that's exactly true, but it makes a point.)

He agreed with this. He then went on to say that when it comes to photography he realizes that the "I could do that" attitude only goes so far. Specifically he said that if he were to try art photography he would probably only fool himself, that a trained eye would probably be able to spot the differences. But his own stuff would be good enough for him to hang on his wall. I said he'd get no argument from me about that. And frankly, why shouldn't someone be perfectly fulfilled with their own imagemaking abilities? I say go to it.

It was a nice ending. I felt vindicated. I'm sure every artist, designer, and photographer has had this conversation with a layperson. Usually, it doesn't end this way. Usually, it ends in a stale mate, with the nonartist more convinced than ever that if they don't get it, there must not be anything to get. Not so this time. I feel a little bad for calling him an idiot behind his back.

current music: Chris Whitley, Hotel Vast Horizon

So I'm perusing the articles at Artnet and I found this description of the work of artist Jacques Flechemuller who has a show right now in Brooklyn:

His imagery is characterized by an obvious fondness for the absurdity lurking just beneath the surface of advertising imagery and popular culture, filtered through a skeptical, post-pop sensibility.

Hmm, is it me, or does that describe about 75% of what's in New York galleries these days? The messages and the context simply make no sense. It's easy for people who are richer than God to feel hip and subversive by looking down their noses at Taco Bell and breakfast cereal and the like. And there are plenty of artists more than willing to help them. The worst is when those people realize they're being pretentious and undemocratic, so then they weirdly pretend to like these things in a genuine way--and then it's just plain creepy.

current music: The Mars Volta, De-loused in the Comatorium

Well, the painting is barely dry, but I've scanned it because I can't wait to get it up on the Web. It's called "Brooks."



I'm no longer convinced that it's the best image in the series as I said before, but I still think that overall, it's a success.

current music: the silence of the morning

My next painting will be based on this jpeg image floating around the net somewhere. It'll be interesting to see how the hat reads.



Her take it or leave it attitude reminds me of Queen Latifah.

current music: Phoebe Snow, Looks Like Snow

At great risk to the health of my scanner, I've scanned the painting I'm currently working on in its transitional stage (still wet).



This one is taking on a more sculputural solidity than previous paintings.

It is odd that I'm spending so much time on this one. Usually these are a one-sitting affair; 2 at the most. I'm just taking my time on this one. The small scale is starting to get to me more and more though. I've said what I can for now at this scale. After this series, I'll definitely be making a move, and maybe I'll come back to the small scale when I rediscover something new to say with it.

Not much doing at the INFLUX House tonight (henceforth to be known as IH). I have decided to finish up the paintings I'm working on now before moving on to developing these more esoteric physics ideas. That's what happens when you go from "dry" to "wet," from "scarce" to "abundant." You overflow with ideas. The painting I'm working on now is a painting version of this drawing from a couple of years ago:



Turbokitty wrote an excellent post at 2 Blowhards, documenting her move as an artist from ironic detachment to something more genuine. Obviously I've been interested in those ideas lately.

A girl I met a few weeks ago kinda sorta maybe asked me out. It was one of those weird noncommital invitations that could really mean anything. Basically she wrote me an email about some unrelated stuff and then at the end it said, "See you soon?" with a question mark. So it's more pointed than "See ya whenever," but it's not as pointed as "Do you want to hang out this weekend?" It's sort of in the middle. That's just the kind of thing I would do.

I'm not even sure I'm interested. My complicated sexual history of course complicates everything. My therapist says I need to figure out my relationship to women. No kidding.

This concept has been a major source of inspiration for me lately. Sure, the conceit of the "blackbody" (get it?) is a little obvious, but once you get into the meat of the physics, there are a million ways to spin this artistically.

These seem particularly beautiful and mysterious to me, and so rich in potential imagery:

Here is a sneak peek at some of the new painting going on at the INFLUX House. I'm in the middle of this series of 10 to 12 portraits and hope to be finished shortly.



And a detail:


You'll soon be seeing a significant number of women for the first time. I'd always had trouble with female subjects--something about the inherent repressed eroticism of Webcam shots was difficult for me to deal with. But I'm exploring these new subjects and enjoying the results.

Here is the latest one in progress--this is how they typically look right at the beginning:



All of these paintings are done on my usual small scale. With this new techinique however, I'm realizing that that scale isn't going to work much longer. Especially seeing them here, makes them look like sketches for larger works.

And that's what they need to be. A few of my teachers and cohorts have told me that they enjoy the small, intimate scale. And a lot of them mention that Chuck Close has already done the gargantuan thing. I can't let that deter me though; I'm after something totally different and these pieces are crying out for the heavier "bam" impact of working large. After all, I'm the only one who knows exactly what I'm imagining in my head.

Went to a party given by Harold Chaput of AMODA. The whole AMODA crew was there and someone asked how the Artist's Partnership Program was going. I told him that I attempted to resign from that 3 months ago. Even though Harold refused to accept my resignation, I in fact have nothing to do with APP as far as I know.

I'm glad I showed up--the old me would have been too embarrassed over the crash and burn spectacle of the APP to have shown my face. But the new me says who cares? Life goes on.

It also occurs to me tonight that it has been a very long time since I've been at a party and just hung out all night. A long time since I've relaxed and felt no "gotta get up early tomorrow" pressure. I don't know if that's bad or indifferent.

d berman gallery, pointlessly and pretentiously spelled with all lower case letters, just opened a Sydney Yeager show tonight. While I'm not on the anti-Sydney bandwagon that some are on, I did think this show was about a zillion times weaker than her concurrent show at The Jones Center. This show felt very one-note repeated over and over, while the other show is more a conversation with the artist.



I ran into the wonderful and delightful Salvador Sosa whom it is always a pleasure to see, and I'm not just saying that because he's one of my collectors. He's one of those rare types: smart and well-heeled, but totally without pretensions. He genuinely loves art, loves surrounding himself with it, without once looking over his shoulder to make sure someone's watching to see how cool he is. I promised once again to do his portrait, which I've literally been promising for 2 years.

I've gotten interested in the art of Kerry James Marshall and also Raymond Saunders. I'm thinking I'll do some digital art/portraits based on their work.

Let me remix something I said the other day, for greater precision and clarity:

It's inaccurate to say that cold, empty conceptual art is somehow emblematic of a middle-class white American psyche that doesn't know what to make of itself here in the first few years of the 21st century. Such artists are in fact the exception among all artists, not the rule. There are more sincere Lisa Yuskavages out there than cynical, irony-ridden Jeff Koonses.

Still, the art of the cynical minority parades its "nyah-nyah" aesthetic for an audience of artworld powerful who are all too eager to smile and nod and pretend that this work is somehow "important." The slew of garbage mobiles, inane videos, willfully bad drawing, the endless fart jokes, the recurrent middle-finger gestures, literal and figurative, are all nothing more than an aggressive "fuck you" to anyone that still considers social transformation and personal trascendence valuable goals. Those pursuits require some passion and some vulnerability. Theirs is art that says, "I needn't worry my pretty little art school head about pointing to any transformation, social or personal. The world is already my oyster and there's nothing else to do but play art games."

Such a posture seems easier to strike for these young, white, mostly male turks, comfortable in the knowledge that all they need do is point and laugh at the rest of the world, while they stay safely walled up in their intellectual towers. Meanwhile, the rest of us are busy at work, exploring worlds of genuine anger, beauty, hope, desperation and joy.

Terry Teachout has posted a brief discussion of the growing importance of blogs. Here's an excerpt:

To be sure, most blogs are the verbal equivalent of JenniCam, but the silly ones neither get nor deserve much attention. Instead, the blog has evolved with astonishing speed into something far removed from mere faddishness. It is now a full-fledged journalistic medium, the first truly new one since the dawn of network TV. JenniCam was a curiosity, but blogs--or something like them--are here to stay.

I can also get excited about the potential that blogs represent, for information dissemination, for the incubation of ideas. What I can't get excited about is the implicit anxiety over hierarchy in this post.

Right along with the history of the Web--a history of radical democracy, of chaos and flattenend hierarchy--there has been an accompanying history of anxiety in getting the new media to look more like the old media, complete with recognized authority, centralization and clear delineations of whose more important than whom.

When one says, "the silly ones neither get nor deserve much attention," that's more than just a statement of facts. It's a vision of the world that seeks to reify hierarchy, importance, authority. A problematic notion at best in cyberspace. The revolution that is the Internet, the radical bliss that is the blogosphere lies precisely in the fact that Suzy Jones in Knoxville, Tennessee can tell the world about her art, her underwear, her messy apartment or whatever else in a radically unfiltered way. So what if only 6 people read the blog? That blog is only meant for those 6 people, but it's 6 people (a total community of 7) who have now been bound through the exchange of ideas (recipes, images, whatever) without waiting for a magazine editor or station manager somewhere to tell them what to be interested in. That's not to say that all ideas are equally useful or true, but it is to say that the marketplace of ideas is more wildly open than ever before for any of us to decide for ourselves.

Instead of comparing the Web to television (a common mistake since they both have screens), we would do better to compare the Web to telephone systems. They are both built on a network of one-to-one communication points that cumulatively have revolutionized information exchange. Yes, there are some people that get more calls than others because they have information that a larger number of people find useful, but that's not the point. The point is that anyone can pick up a phone and contact any number of millions of other people anywhere completely at their own discretion.

Likewise with blogs. Their importance is not in their similarity to old style media, i.e., the ability to convey information on a one-to-many model. We already had that, and we don't need another realm in which a few "authorities" control all the information. The importance of blogs is in the democratic potential of sharing ideas across spatial boundaries whether 1 person receives them or a million.

The sketchbooks of Peat Duggins are among the most inspiring art I've seen in a while. In order to bulk up my own artmaking muscles, I've returned to doing some basic exercises out of Nicolaides. It feels like going back to kindergarten, but it feels good.

What I like most about Peat's stuff is that it is so sure, so confident. It doesn't hesitate on the page. I've never really had that, and it's something I want. Directness, immediacy.

I'm going to get in trouble for this.

I finally visited the site of artist Roy Stanfield. He's fairly celebrated in Austin because he is doing highly intellectual, conceptual stuff unlike anyone else really in this city. What people used to call "edgy." And he's young. 25, I think. The problem is that no one seems to have noticed that his work is totally devoid of actual content. It's reminiscent of so much east-coast based, nonvisual visual art that's all about cumbersome explanations and the manifest suspicion of anything enthusiastic or sincere. I look at his art and realize that that emporer has no clothes.

I've met Roy a few times and I genuinely like him. He's a cool and down-to-earth person who--my guess is--is approaching his work with only pure intentions. I just wish his art could address some actual thing in the world instead of just gazing at its own navel. If one's art is self-consciously alien, manifestly difficult, then it has all the more responsibility to give its audience an "in" with compelling and relevant content. Otherwise, it's just art that attempts to bully its audience into not questionning too much. And a lot of people are willing to go along with it.

Check the art of Mendi and Kieth Obadike for a contrast. Their work is also very alien, difficult to access. But it has actual content that is related to the rest of the world.

Let's take it to the next level: There are a lot of ways in which the Stanfield axis of art is exactly appropriate for this historical moment. It's the art of a middle class white America that has largely run out of things to say and can only strike oppositional poses in lieu of real speech, since it has largely (not to say totally) failed to invent compelling narratives for how to exist in the 21st century. It's scratching and clawing to maintain its cultural hegemony, but in the end it has nothing new to say.

That's why Richard Prince is so damn boring. That's why the best stuff is coming from the margins, not just the socioeconomic margins, but the margins of the fine art, gallery-based world, e.g., film, cartooning, music. The white artists who have made it out of this impasse, it seems to me, are the ones who aren't trying so hard: the Jenny Savilles (not American, I know), the Stephen Shores and Glenn Browns. Artists who approach the world with some measure of humility, sincerity and some grace.

I've switched from the "private" to the "public" option for this blog. That won't mean much in itself, since pretty much only strangers will come here through those means. But I will soon be linking this from my own art site. That will be a bigger deal since there are several people I work with and some other people who go to my site every once in a while for different reasons. And if they ever come to this blog, I'll be outed in all my weirdness. Which is kind of a big deal because I'm in middle management and have a pretty conservative reputation (I think). Oh well... It's really about time that changed. Fuggit.

2004: The world is abundant! Seize the Power...

Donald Kuspit, in talking about the early stages of Philip Guston's work, talked about how he was an inhibitionistic artist, a "dry" artist working from a position of scarcity. I recognize myself in that. I'm making a choice not to be that way anymore. I'm deciding to work from abundance, to be a "wet" artist.

The Mighty Low-Res was born today.

After spending an hour and a half getting my printer to work, I refreshed my memory of some Afrofuturistic terminology. Seems that Mr. Bollweevil has added some new material since I last checked.

An opening at Artamici has reminded me how much I want to get back to life drawing. Plus I saw the lovely Jennifer there, who I want to nail like crazy.

Donald Kuspit has done a pretty interesting look at Philip Guston.



Right in the middle of the Guston article, Kuspit makes this sweeping but true statement:

"From Colonial Realism to Social Realism American art has tried to be straightforward and clear-eyed -- good citizen art, leveling everything in sight to make an obvious point. Banality is good in America, because it mutes our differences, thus keeping us from cutting each other's throats (sometimes). Even Eakins and Homer are rooted in banality, the so-called common culture, muting their sharp perceptions to "reach" people, while Ryder, attempting to move beyond banality, banalized the beyond. He had a romantic inkling of the sublime, but he brought it down to earth, where it collapsed into a theatrical balloon. American art is bound by the reality principle, and Guston's Abstract Expressionist venture into pleasure principle art, with its explicit sensuousness -- the next best thing to explicit sex -- was necessarily short-lived, so long as he wanted to remain an American-type artist."

Though the reality principle doesn't have so much of a chokehold anymore on American art. It is ultimately where we're all coming from, and what we have to relate to in some way.

As if it weren't already obvious enough, this article proves that Damien Hirst is a total fraud.

The Fresh Up Club is currently showing a group of new paintings by Eric Gibbons. Do not miss this if you are in Austin. Psychedelic and tragic landscapes of a space that is as much emotional as physical. Sugarcoated cyanide pills. Beautiful.



For my money, Eric Gibbons together with Andy Coolquitt, Stella Alessi and Greg Piwonka are four of the best and most interesting image makers in Austin.

I managed to piss away an entire evening stressing out about money and time. Money and time, time and money. Not enough of either, but especially not enough time.

I started resenting my job pretty much the day it was offered to me. Now over two years later, I'm going crazy every minute I'm there, not doing art. Then I come home and I stress out for 3 hours about how little time I have to accomplish anything--after which, I'm really too tired and stressed out to do anything. What a life!

I already know the answer: one thing at a time. The reason I get myself all worked into a tizzy usually is because I think I have to do everything all at the same time and I don't know where to start. I gotta stop doing that.

San Francisco is slated to open a new museum of the African Diaspora. It's about time, but if you believe the way this article tells it, then once again we as a people have basically been reduced to food, dancing and slavery. Something American people love to do with "exotic" peoples.