Just got back from a meeting of our new millenium visual artists group. That's not the official name, but until we have one, I'll keep playing with possibilities in this space and elsewhere.

It's grown now from just being me and Cauleen to 4 of us, with 2 or 3 others sort of at the periphery.

Among other things, we talked about how to be a black artist in the 21st century in a way that neither ignores race nor over-determines it. In other words, how do you normalize blackness?

Bea, one of the group members, told us a story about knowing a fine art photographer who was looking for a hand model for some of his work about threads and sewing. Bea volunteered to be the hand. He wouldn't go for it though because, he said, a black hand would politicize the picture in a way he didn't want to deal with. And of course he is completely correct.

Part of the answer lies in repetition and in creating multiple simultaneous contexts; create enough work with enough complex and varied concerns such that blackness doesn't disappear, but it becomes neutral. It puts the freakish outsider into the normative center. And we all realize that that's something more effectively done as a group.

What we are doing is pretty rare, I think. Artists get together all the time to share some common aesthetic goal, or to manage some practical issue, but joining together under the framework of a coherent artistic-political philosophy actually doesn't happen that often.

I recently came back from another surprise trip, this time to Nashville for Father's Day.

While there, I saw that my sister who's going into her sophomore year of college had filled out one of those academic/career interest surveys. You know the ones where you rate how important or interesting certain activities are to you and the test tells you whether you should be sorting screws or splitting atoms.

It occurred to me looking at this survey how we create myths of ourselves, stories we tell ourselves about ourselves in order to make sense of life. My sister had rated herself as uninterested in applied mathematics. Maybe that's true, or maybe that's just what is supposed to be true of a writer of fiction such as she is.

I remember periodically filling out surveys like that. By the 7th grade the answers are preprogrammed by a lifetime of expectations and habits, or at least they were for me. By then I had accrued a certain image of myself--the artistic liberal artist, the writer-poet speaking a language of platonic pure forms. Looking back, I'm sure that I tweaked my answers--the 1's and the 5's--to get the score I was supposed to, so that the test would tell me back the story that I had told to it. And so life becomes this feedback loop where we manipulate our surroundings to tell us what we already know about ourselves, and we get the satisfaction of believing that the verdict comes from an external, impartial source.

I keep thinking about my recent email exchange with Roy Stanfield. I'm still not convinced that intellectually "subversive" art is any more valid than any number of other forms. And I think that word "subversive" only maintains its power if you fail to define it clearly; the more specificity you attach to it, the more mundane it becomes and the more it fades into the surrounding flux of art and life that already exists.

But he has a point. As artists it's still critical that we look not only at what we want to say, but at what we want our art to do, how it functions as a created object in the world.

The problem with painting is not that it relies too heavily on aesthetic pleasure or that its ultimate measure is its desirability. The problem, if there is one, is that its very scarcity is directly at odds with democratic principles. And this is equally true of sculpture and even installation. While it may be accessible to anyone, say, at a gallery, it is not a mass product. Democracy is by definition always oriented to the masses, whereas art is produced, distributed and consumed by a tiny sliver of the population. Its bandwidth is simply too narrow.

If you care about democracy, then your choices of artistic media are obvious: cable-access video, Net art, graffiti, comic books and zines, public sculpture, murals and public performance. Mass products all, or at least products with wider distribution channels. I'm becoming more interested in these and slightly less interested in the one-off painting as artistic expression. I'm making new myths for myself about how I make art. This is the slow, uneven transition that this blog has been chronicling for a year and a half now.

That said, I happen to believe this bit of heresy: that democracy isn't everything. As human beings, we continually return to this idea that there is an infinite mystery out there, that there are some things we cannot know or access directly. We rely on artists (among others) to give us a glimpse of that. That necessarily speaks for a kind of spiritual aura about art, a belief that, unlike a can of beans or a window sash, that object speaks a transcendent language. It is in fact holy.

That's why the unique painting or sculpture maintains its hated aura. It can't escape. It is the equivalent of a theoretical physicist's pure research, not meant to affect the world in any way, but rather to interrogate it, analyze it and serve as a window to the deep mystery of existence.

The new post-day-job schedule has started to settle in now, and so far it's ideal. There really does seem to be more time for everything, including a back-to-basics drawing routine I've worked into the rotation. My hand got weak 2 years ago, and never really has gotten back up to full strength. Fortunately, I've got time to spare.

I realize the freshness date has somewhat passed, but here's Roy Stanfield's response to my post:

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I think you are correct that I did not define subversion, and I think this misstep let your words wander a path that I did not intend. I never said the word revolution, and I did say, “we can’t beat our insane version of capitalism with artwork.” I agree with this: “telling the story of society back to itself in revelatory ways,” and I think my post asks no more than that of anyone making artwork.

I see work that panders to any public that it can get, and in so doing it loses my interest. I’m asking for work that thinks in any way other than "who wouldn’t want me / how can I be most desirable."

Thinking work is the most subversive artwork around. No one really wants you to think; they just think they do. Thinking work would be my definition of subversive artwork. There are many examples of this - some painting, some not.

While I’m at it, I better quickly define thinking work as something that takes on thoughts outside of its own medium. In other words, thinking work always takes on ideas from the outside world. It takes on the inside world when that applies to the outside world.

I chose painting in this post because of its limits (ex. frame, portability, extreme collectability, etc.). No, I’m not trying to condemn painting with this blog post. I’m giving the personal reason why I won’t let myself do it, and I ask you to consider that.

Artwork cannot change the world, but ideas can and do. Political ideas - and all ideas are political – that resonate in artwork are one front in a battle that has many different arts to muster. When ideas converge in the arts they always leak to mainstream culture.

Embedding political content in artwork means nothing more than embedding ideas. Artwork with an idea is not what is labeled Political Art – although this art is political.

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Yes, I was aware of stretching your words even as I wrote my response. Partly I was cutting off the conversation at the pass, so to speak, because the argument you did make almost always elides into the next argument after about 6 seconds of discussion. That is to say, first someone calls for something vague like "subversion," and then next thing you know people start issuing statements trying to convince artists that the fate of the world is in their hands--and then bad art ensues.

So, yes, it helps I think to be as specific as possible.

That said, I appreciate the deep engagement with the why's of choosing your medium. It's something that I haven't done, which I suspect is true of a lot of artists. After all, I gravitated to painting first because, as you said, it's the most obviously "arty" of all the arts.

I also agree that thinking work takes on ideas from the outside world, or at least that so doing is one very good way to make thinking work. To that, however, I ask 2 questions: 1) Is that enough? This definition sets the bar quite a bit lower than your original post would have implied since really, be honest, lots of painters take on ideas from the outside world. Not all of them do it well, but many try.

And 2) why should we privilege thinking over any other human activity? Some would say that in this cold, over-thinking culture of ours, getting someone to tremble before beauty or be struck silent in the face of the sublime may in fact be a heck of a lot more subversive.

Back when I was a graphic designer in the mid-90s, we all went a little crazy for a minute. For a brief period, graphic designers, who were otherwise smart and thoughtful people, saw themselves as the gatekeepers not only of all visual culture, but of culture in general, and by extension the guardians of politics, history, and the whole social structure.

I'm not exaggerating. Not by much anyway. Mandates of social consciousness rained down at conferences, on the Net, and in the trade magazines that had theretofore concerned themselves exclusively with effective billing practices and tips to jumpstart your creativity. Suddenly, we designers were discussing how we could usher in the revolution (yes, people used that word), how the right kind of graphic design could transform society. Even the font catalogs were getting in on the act. It was not hard to find a new manifesto every week, decrying all visual production that had come before it and setting out the new course of action and aesthetics that all designers would have to follow or be damned as the capitalist tools they were. Meanwhile, befuddled frontliners designing dog food labels and government shipping forms struggled to figure out how exactly their day-to-day activities were supposed to catalyze the revolution.

The graphic design industry eventually took it down a notch and reached a new sort of equilibrium--a nice balance in which designers could practice with both a heightened social consciousness and a little humility before the real complexity of the world and the bigness of change.

When I read Roy Stanfield's recent posting at January Blog, however, there was a whiff of this same anxiety projected onto the fine art world. This world complicates matters of course, since we carry the baggage precisely of not being graphic designers; that is we have both a more sublime mandate and simultaneously much less power to have a direct and measurable effect on society. (right, Dana Schutz, subversive enough?)

Go ahead and read Roy's post against painting at January Blog. It's brief and smartly written like everything he writes. But here's the problem as I see it, Roy: you speak of subversion, the need to be politically subversive, without describing what that means or what that would look like. The quality of being subversive is neither fixed, nor monolithic, nor undifferentiated in degree. In a society as complex, fluid and permeable as ours, my subversion may not only be different from yours, it may actually be mutually incompatible. Which is not a problem, but when you say no one's being "subversive," well I want proof of that.

You do say that painters need to "complicate the cycle of exploitation." In that case, I can barely think of a painter who doesn't do that in one way or another. But is it going to lead to mass revolution in the street? No. But why should it? Our society actually already has extremely robust mechanisms by which it can progress in an evolutionary manner, as unromantic as that is.

All of this discussion reminds me of Carolyn Porter's review of Arthouse's last New American Talent show. "Where's the revolution?" she wanted to know, dismayed by what seemed like a tame crop of works that leaned toward granting retinal pleasure or some other sensual indulgence.

I don't know where the revolution is, but I do think it's too much to ask of painters and sculptors to create revolution on their own. That's not what we're here for. Revolutionary times create the conditions for socially revolutionary art, not the other way around.

These are very ambiguous times, with no overriding social mandates or compelling progressive moral narratives. If we're honest artists, I believe we'll reflect and distill that truth. We'll figure out ways to tell the story of that ambiguity (as well as everything else going on in contemporary culture, which may only be tangentially political). That's what artists are doing now, which is what they always have done: telling the story of society back to itself in revelatory ways. If you want to force-feed something more dramatic, I guess you can do that, but without the social conditions that make that art object fundamentally true, it's likely to fall silent, a deaf-mute outside of the boundaries of the thing itself.

current music: Citizen Cope, The Clarence Greenberg Recordings

Shooting wrapped on the film today. There had been some talk of picking up one last scene sometime later in the summer or in the fall, but that idea died an explosive death, and the decision was made to cut the scene entirely.

Of course, that was the scene--the BMX bike opera--that was going to showcase the height of my creative achievements, but alas! there is to be no such scene. Also, I'm not sure how the movie is really going to congeal without that scene, since the whole film is basically about the repetition of certain symbols and motifs over and over in a pretty intricate way. But then again, that's not my problem. That's what editing is for.

I'm resisting the urge now to launch a whole new career in production design. I was just offered a gig on another indy film. Must...resist...distractions... It does play to my strengths though; the curious mix between creative work and anal organizing work. Brings back memories of my brother and I setting up the "movie studio" in the garage when we were kids. Organizing the workshop (the back lot, the special effects department, the costume warehouse) was always as important as the filmmaking itself.

Anyway, I'm glad I did this project. For someone who was never really much into film, this one has lit my fire for the filmmaking process.

current music: Mystikal, Tarantula