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Tuesday, May 5, 2015

sunshine of the open mind -- casting shadows

I remember art school just out of the service -- a readjustment I guess I never made. Students in from rural high schools who had dreamt of becoming artists spent their first year bewildered, wondering why their dreams were turning out so strange. A group of them, four or five, actually came to me only because I was a vet and slightly older and asked me what was going on, and I could only say it certainly was educational -- the military having left me guarded and ironic. In the end most of these same students sanely moved on to other fields of study. I was more detached but no less chagrinned, as the graduate students, surly and dismissive, seemed to be running everything.

What they didn’t like was anybody trying to draw anything, paint anything, or make anything recognizable to anyone in favor of stuff that was just stuff, the more unrecognizable the better. Remember a bfa show in which the artist had taken ladies undergarments, soaked them in dye that didn’t take and ran them through a wringer, I’m guessing, leaving purple and blue caked in all the wrinkles, and then hung them on a line laundry style. People would stand and look and offer, “sure looks like a lot of work,” not knowing really what else to say. No one was willing to say out loud it was a total waste of time since that would have blown the whole game, turning the art building back into a warehouse, but that’s what every rational person was thinking.

That’s how they all start out, these cul-de-sacs of thought, and whether they’re religious, political, or cultural, the technique is the same. Seemingly harmless little transgressions of conscience are allowed to take over the garden, suffocating all the beneficial stuff that used to grow there. If it’s art, it’s called ‘open-mindedness,’ which means all academic/contemporary art resides in a sanctified zone where critical thought is suspended. We cheer. Mother church insisted parishioners ignore abuses by clergy all around, for the sake of the revolution patriots aren’t supposed to notice the labor camps and firing squads, and in exchange for the security of a fine career art bureaucrats embrace the notion of the ‘open mind’ -- anything goes.

Problem is it isn’t true. Met an artist once who told me the only way her representational paintings could be reviewed by the class was upside down. Academics spent a couple of generations heaping harsh disdain on any art that attempted common accessibility, and any student who dared try it anyway. Fellow academics who might occasionally attempt to appeal to the public, or just felt the need to create their own most natural art, went straight to the woodshed. That is true.

Somehow it’s the art that isn’t covered by the ‘open mind’ mantra that seems most interesting to me, since whoever makes it hasn’t been just trying to get along. It’s tricky. The genre markets are as closed-minded as the academics at an opposite extreme, wanting everything predictable and standardized, and sometimes it doesn’t seem there’s much real estate between. That’s the tricky part, that’s the independent part, and that’s where there’s a cutting edge that actually slices anything. 

A culture’s self-expression comes through in the art people support by wanting to possess it themselves, art’s most authentic and legitimate jury, and they’re open minded to a degree. Artists just have to come half way, and those nice folks will bring up their speed to meet them. I’ll say that another way -- nothing breeds sophistication quicker than spending personal out of pocket money. Once that first purchase is made, for best results might need to sacrifice a bit, suddenly an automatic process takes over, and every similar piece of art seen thereafter gets mentally compared. It just happens on its own. Given a decent array of styles and levels of accomplishment, people considering parting with part of their paycheck grow up quick. For any artist who would feel sullied by working toward such an exchange, who would rather keep their civil service position and ‘open mindedness,’ I mean no harm nor find fault.... 

The ground shakes, and winds blow. Lord aren’t we tired of moronic comic book movies, and wouldn’t it just make us all feel better, help us see farther and to think more clearly, to have some locally-sourced user-friendly art up on the wall around here?


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