Keith Tyson at Pace Gallery

This weekend I visited, for the second time, Keith Tyson's impressive sculptural installation the "Large Field Array" at the Pace Gallery in NYC This is one of the best exhibitions by a young artist I have ever seen.

The exhibition closes October 20th. Readers who live in or near NYC should make a effort to take in this show before it closes, go with a friend.

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The Large Field Array is a complex work of art. I have a number of thoughts about it but less time to write than I would hope for, so I’ll just keep adding to this post as time permits.
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"What is this? I have to wait in line?" fleeting and somewhat distracted thoughts flickering as I approached Pace Gallery on an unseasonably warm, late September day. The brief wait, limiting the number of viewers at any one time, increased my anticipation. My turn, through the heavy curtain into a great room visually buzzing with hundreds of individual objects. [10/17]


I have a small flash of anxiety as I move into the space, unconsciously thankful the elements are organized in grid, rendering a familiar order for my passage. I continue in, as I scan the room I am overwhelmed by a wave of sensation, this cannot be possible, it’s too much to comprehend, I am dizzy, afraid I will break something.

Maybe it’s because I’m a painter, I feel a comfort with the wall. Whatever, on my first visit I notice I drift to my left, towards the wall, rather than directly entering the room. As I look around myself I realize I am visually fixing on certain elements, I have an affinity for them, it is a form of recognition. The grid of little white cubes at the front, I have an internal association with this image, it is part of my world. It occurs to me that each viewer will have their own world, some random yet specific order, they bring elements of the Array into the focus of their consciousness, on that particular day. Tomorrow it will be different. [10/17]





Installation views © Keith Tyson and Pace Wildenstein Gallery









Images: © Keith Tyson

More to follow…

The State of the Art Market

There has been a considerable amount of speculation over the fate of the current art market. Given the unrest in the financial markets at the current time, I suspect the question actually being asked is whether or not the art market is about to crash.

Certainly there have been signs of excess which one might expect to be followed by a contraction in the marketplace, but this alone is not enough to precipitate a major decline in prices. Desires for a puritan art market purge because art is "not the way it is supposed to be," reflect a lack of knowledge on how markets work and what the consequences of such a purge might imply.

In my opinion, the fate of the US art market is completely tied to the fate of the US economy. Attempts to rationalize art valuations based upon notions of aesthetic quality, taste, or scarcity, are relative within the current economic environment, and therefore less important to a discussion concerning the state of the overall art market.



It’s the economy stupid...

The US economy is currently undergoing a period of severe stress. The recent decline in housing prices has been leading the economy into a potential recession, and problems within the subprime lending markets threatened to spread worldwide with disastrous consequences.

In mid-August the credit problems began to visibly unravel, the US stock markets took a 12% hit which threatened to turn into a full fledged panic. The central bankers (FED and ECB)were forced to intervene in order to maintain stability. On September 18th, the Bernanke FED cut interest rates by 1/2 percent, this was an indication of the FED’s concern over the severity of problem and a signal that the FED was going to aggressively intervene.

If I am correct in my interpretation of Bernanke’s decision to cut interest rates I would expect to see the following:

1. The FED will continue to cut interest rates by another point between now and March 2007, most likely over the next three months.

2. The Dow Jones Average will continue to rally, finishing the year near 15,000, and continue to rise throughout 2008.

3. Although we will see a slowing in the US economy, a deep US recession will be adverted.

In short, I believe the US stock markets made a major low in September and as a result, will continue to outperform all other investments, including art, for the next few years. This would be a change in focus and could shift some speculative capital out of the art market into the equity markets.

I do not think the art market will crash.

Generally, markets do not crash because prices appear to be ‘too high’ and almost never when everyone is anticipating a crash. Excluding extraordinary outside events, markets tend to crash after an existing period of declining prices, at some point the participants panic in fear that the decline will continue unabated, and the markets crash in capitulation.

Given the unfolding of events which have taken place in the financial markets over the past three months, I would expect the fall auction results to be tempered by a bit more caution, this may have a dampening affect on prices.

On the street, in the galleries, it is a bit harder to say what the affects of the recent financial crunch will have. Since I expect a strong stock market for at least the next year, the galleries may continue to benefit, albeit in a less frenetic manner.

Finally, if I am wrong and the FED does not lower interest rates as I suggested above, then all bets are off, the US economy will likely enter a recession and the art market will decline in a manner similar to 1990.

Thoughts on Painting IV - JPEGs, Details and Density

Hans, an artist and blogger from Tbilisi, Georgia, posed the question in the comments section of the previous post which I found interesting. Hans asks, "But is a painting on screen still a painting, a translated painting ?"

I would respond: No, it’s a digital reproduction of a painting, but that’s the obvious answer. As painters we have always had to rely, much of the time, on reproductions of paintings, the originals are hidden away in private collections or in museums somewhere where we are not. So we make do.

Part of the problem with reproductions has to do with their size compared to the size of the painting. The image of the Fra Angelico painting "Saint Francis Receives the Stigmata" in the previous post is 800 pixels wide. So, this painting is actually relativly small, only 33 cm (13") wide so there are 800/33=24 pixels per cm (62 px/in.) so the finest detail that can be resolved is 0.04mm (less than an 0.02 in) which is quite a lot.

However, if we have a 200 cm (79 inch) wide painting and still only a 800 pixel reproduction we have only 4 pixels per cm (0.635 px in.) which means each pixel represents a 2.5mm (about 5/8 in) square area of the painting’s surfac. The resolution goes way down because the information in a pixel is only the average color and tonal value captured for its resolvable area. This means that while we may still be able to see blurry evidence of a small drip of paint, the resolution of the details and at the edges between different elements of the painting lose their distinctness and clairity.

Never the less, there are a number of things we can discern from a reproduction. In a reproduction we can identify the ‘image’ or subject of the painting. We can see the overall composition and the other formal characteristics where we do not need the fine details. For example in one of my earlier posts, I made an analysis of the composition in Fra Angelico’s painting Paradise and for this the jpeg works just fine. From the standpoint of a viewer who might be just interested in seeing what is happening in the artworld a reproduction might also suffice quite nicely.


Pablo Picasso, "Still Life with Compotier and Glass", 1914-15
Oil on Canvas, 25 x 31.5" (63.5 x 80 cm)
Columbus Museum of Art
However as a painter, I find myself interested in the details more often than not, I want to see the painting as it exists as a physical object. This point was made evident to me recently. I had been looking at a lot of jpeg reproductions of Picasso’s paintings. What I was interested in was not cubism per se, but how inventive Picasso was and how his ideas progressed from work to work over time. Today, rather than looking through an art book, I have a hand selected collection of Picasso jpegs on my computer. This is not something that was easy to do only 6-7 years ago before the internet.

At about the same time, the Whitney Museum here in NYC had an exhibition "Picasso and American art" which had several Picasso’s juxtaposed with "Max Weber, Stuart Davis, Arshile Gorky, John Graham, Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, David Smith, Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, and Jasper Johns." The exhibition received mixed reviews but I found it very interesting to see how these different artists tried to deal with Picasso’s influence or legacy.

Touching on the question Hans raised for a moment, since Warhol and Lichtenstein’s paintings are based upon commercial technologies, they come across fairly well in reproduction but the other paintings less so for the reasons I stated above. So when I went to the museum, I was able to reconnect with the physicality of these paintings again. Although I ‘knew’ all the Picasso’s and many of the other paintings from reproductions, I wasn’t quite expecting the positive response I had seeing them grouped together.

At the time I made my visit to the museum, I was in the middle of working on a painting which had reached the state of defining itself as a general image but still had a ways to go to completion. I often find this ‘middle stage’ the most difficult part in the process of making a painting, the painting more or less looks all right but I know I have to be willing to push it over the edge, to either resolve it or just create another set of problems. So this was on my mind when I went to the museum and when I thought about it a bit, I realized that what I was responding to was the physical presence of the paintings, not just their ‘look’. As I noted, a reproduction can provide a lot of information about how a painting ‘looks’ but in most cases it cannot give one the experience of how a painting feels, the actual experience of its scale and physicality.

My earlier remark, "A painting is just a painting." is not unique, other painters have said the same thing. It does say something about the very nature of painting itself, that painters use their media with the intent of making a painting. It is a visual history of all the tiny decisions, many totally subconscious, that coalesce into what we call a painting. A painting is, in most cases, made by hand and this process involves a complex series of iterative decisions, it may utilize a process of painting in and then painting out until the final result is achieved. Even if one cannot ‘see’ what us under the final layer, the ‘hidden’ work informs the final result, what the painter saw - in the painting - that led to the final solution.


Pablo Picasso, "Three Musicians", 1921
Oil on Canvas, 80 x 74" (203 x 188 cm)
Philadelphia Museum of Art
Click image for a larger but differently appearing and cropped version.
For example, in Picasso’s Three Musicians, the area at the lower left with the diamond patterned leg, in the underpainting, there is a continuation of the red rectangle which makes up part of the right leg. It’s painted over by the pattern, but not totally painted out, leaving evidence of an earlier state. Additionally, the diamond pattern in the right leg is cropped, and the red in the pattern is very close in color to this tilted rectangle.

Does any of this matter? I think it does. Although subtle, this small detail adds another small piece of information which reveals the process and intent of the painter. This information builds up as a painting is resolved, it can add a sublayer of complexity to a painting. It is visible information which may not be fully appreciated in a quick look but which, never the less, is there. I believe it is perceived by the viewer, even if only in a subconscious way, and therefore enriches our visual experience of the painting.

Another aspect of my reaction to the paintings at the Whitney, was a heightened awareness of the density of the paint. In most of the paintings, both in the broader flat areas and in the details like Picasso’s pointillism and patterning, I found that I was personally responding to the physicality of the paint. Whether it is a densely painted section or just an area with the barest wash of color, one has the feeling the paint is applied with an intentionality, including the embracement of the ‘accidents’ of process. My observations are less of an issue biased towards approaches which utilize denser paint than an attempt to describe one the elusive qualities in a painting which can transmit to the viewer the sense of conviction the artist has in the process of creation. It is our ability to recognize and respond these qualities, which can generate within us a sense of empathy with the artist, through the painting.

It is about something more than just finding the painting ‘beautiful’, it may have something to do with our astonishment, our surprise that the painting exists at all, that its maker has managed to emotionally, conceptually and visually touch out to us from another time and place.

It was a good question with a number of currently relevant implications.

Thoughts on painting III

I made an comment in my previous post suggesting that an aspect of the aesthetic experience might be genetic trait which might have passed down through the ages in a Darwinian fashion. Over the last few months I began reading in the fields of neurobiology and cognitive science to examine whether or not my observation might have some merit. At this point, I still don’t really know the answer but this BBC lecture by the neuroscientist Vilayanur Ramachandran, makes some interesting observations which examine the neurological aspects of our aesthetic response.

At the end of the last century, both neuroscience and cognitive science made incredible, possibly revolutionary, advances into our understanding of the mind, of how the brain might work, of how we perceive, understand and interact with our environment. The human brain is the most complex biological object on this planet, and although current science has made discoveries on an order of magnitude greater than what was known in the past, it has just begun to scratch the surface of what may be, in the end, something that is not totally quantifiable. Never the less, what I have discovered so far is both exciting and revealing.

One of my reasons for reconsidering the aesthetic experience was that I believe that the relative deprecation of the visual in post-structuralist (postmodernist) critical theory was an unfortunate and incorrect decision.

Over the ensuing year I shall try to present an alternative course of critical thought. I shall primarily confine my discussions to painting, since I have been a painter for several years and over the course of my practice I have devoted a considerable amount of thought to what it is I do. In addition, I spent an eight year period at the turn of the century working for a digital imaging software company, there was a paucity of time to paint and no time at all to keep up with what was going on in the ‘art world’. I believe this cultural sabbatical allowed me time to meditate upon painting and what we call art without embedding myself in a pre-established critical viewpoint. At the end of this period, I felt it would be interesting to investigate the topic from a fresh point of view, one based upon my prior experience but also like one I might have naively assumed as a young artist.

The purpose of this commentary is to foster a different course of intellectual inquiry, one which is relatively general in its scope, one which is inclusive rather than exclusive. In some ways it is an exercise of thinking out loud with all its vulnerabilities. The reader should be forewarned that much of what I intend to say will be an intellectual speculation, prone to meandering, and subject to change as I continue my research.

Fra Angelico, 1440, "Saint Francis Receives the Stigmata"
Tempera on wood panel. 11 x 13 in., 27.5 x 33 cm. The Vatican Picture Gallery.

To begin, I want to briefly make some personal observations on what I consider are some of paintings attributes.

Painting is a way of visually presenting information as a form of communication. For the moment, I would like to counsel the reader to accept a broad definition for my use of the two words, ‘information’ and ‘communication’. As we progress, I will take the time to examine their meaning in more specific ways which I believe they pertain to painting.

Painting is about thinking.
Painting is about feeling.
Painting is about seeing.

Painting is dependant on the visual for its power of communication, this makes the visual component a primary point of interface. A painting which fails visually becomes problematic even though it may embody ‘interesting ideas’ or an attempt to ‘express emotions’. Never the less, the thinking and feeling aspects of a painting, when expressed successfully visually, can create a richer and more complex and empathetic experience for the viewer.

Painting makes things stand still. We live in a cultural environment overflowing with images, moving images, and images seen as we are moving. Painting stops the movement to afford the observer a moment for contemplation or meditation. This may seem obvious, but in a visually hyperactive world, paintings long unbroken history affords it a special place among the symbolic objects of our culture.

A painting is just a painting.

Thoughts on painting II

The Aesthetic Experience

Painting is a visual art, it communicates through sight. Although it may use symbolic elements (images, or other symbolic tokens) as part of its construct, paintings communicative power occurs when it evokes an ‘aesthetic experience’ as a result of the sum total of these constructs in both their visual and conceptual (symbolic) forms. Some will argue that the visual is primary, that form and content are coincident, but in thinking about the aesthetic experience I disagree. I believe that the ‘retinal’ and the ‘conceptual’ coexist in a fashion similar to a quantum state, where both exist simultaneously and it makes little sense to elevate one over the other.

In thinking about how one experiences a painting, I began by analyzing what actually happens as a sequence of events over time. I wanted to make a subtle distinction between what I will describe as the ‘subconscious’ or primordial event and the intuitive event. Some may want to think that this distinction is either not there or unnecessary, I don’t. The process in the order I think it occurs.

The primordial event.
I’m suggesting this is a near instantaneous subconscious form of perception which may be in part genetic, as a form of ‘filtering’ in the brain. There is considerable evidence that visual perception is the result of a processing activity which occurs within the brain. The information, as signals from the retina, is processed into an ‘image’ by the brain. However this happens, the brain does perform certain filtering processes, some of which must have had survival benefits for the species in the past. Some of the filtering operations are designed to enhance our awareness of the environment and some seem to exist to trigger other psychological responses which have had a survival benefit. These processing events are not limited to the human species.

The intuitive event.
If you so desire you can say, my primordial event is something that is ‘intuitive’ It really doesn’t matter because, regardless if you make the distinction or not, what I described as the primordial event happens first. It is the minimum basis for intuition.

‘Intuition’ must occur in the brain. Intuition is described as ‘direct knowledge’ which occurs without ‘conceptualizing’ (the cognitive). An event which occurs ‘without conceptualizing’, that is, without active cognitive thought, must use whatever information is already present in the brain. Since there is no way to get information into the brain other than experience, this would have to include both the primordial and memory directly acquired through ones life experience.

The cognitive event.
This is the active process of thinking, reasoning, remembering, imagining, or learning about what we are seeing. It’s the stuff we talk and think about.

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Since intuition has no way of occurring without some form of previously acquired knowledge (awareness) in the brain it must be evoked based upon the (prior) knowledge of the viewer. There is no reason why ‘intuition’ need be rational, in fact with little prior experience or because of psychological or neural disorders, it may well not be.

If ones ‘intuition’ can be improved over time, for example by looking at a lot of excellent paintings, then this suggests that the ‘intuitive response’ is indirectly affected by prior memories which were in part the result of cognitive thought and reasoning. If not, then it can only be a result of the primordial response, which I do not think is the case.

While intuition may be ‘the direct knowing’ of something, this does not in fact suggest what one intuits is correct. People have the wrong intuition about things all the time. Again, this would suggest that ‘good intuition’ is partly a result of good training or conditioning of the mind. The longer we work with something, the more intuitive it may become.

In the cognitive process, one may subject a painting to rational (or irrational for that matter) analysis and try to understand ‘why one had such a strong intuitive response’ I would suggest that these cognitive activities add up as (abstracted) memories which provide part of the basis for later ‘intuitive responses’ by reinforcing particular aspects of ones visual responses by repetitive focus.

If my assumptions are correct we can conclude that the ‘intuitive’ experience will be affected by the knowledge of the viewer, what we might call their ‘taste.’ This will have a direct affect on the ‘aesthetic experience,’ their emotional or gut response to a painting. As a result both the visual and cognitive components of a painting combine to produce the aesthetic response. Beauty is more than skin deep.

Thoughts on painting - I

All assumptions about the stylistic evolution in painting for the last 100 years are suspect. The idea that there is somehow "progress" in stylistic evolution is false. What one might see as the evolution of painting in the twentieth century, the popular path, Picasso to Pop, is only part of the story. It was built on the idea of the "modern", the constant roiling change of styles leading into the future. It was about the radical social changes brought forth by the industrial revolution. (From my remark in the comments section of the previous post.)

Painting and the Industrial Revolution: "The effects [of the industrial revolution] spread throughout Western Europe and North America during the 19th century, eventually affecting most of the world. The impact of this change on society was enormous and is often compared to the Neolithic revolution, when mankind developed agriculture and gave up its nomadic lifestyle." [Wiki] The Industrial Revolution ushered in the modern age and the shift away from an agricultural to an urban lifestyle. Coincident with this radical social change was the invention of photography which provided an alternative to painting for documentary representation.

No longer confined to strict representation, painting in the Modern era (roughly 1840 on) began to explore other modes of expression, which for lack of a better word I am referring to as "styles". I cannot think of another period in the past where there has been such a rapid and radical evolution of pictorial styles. The modern quest for the "new" resulted in the proliferation and rapid turnover in pictorial styles.

If I can digress for a moment here, I concede that "personal style", the way a painter makes a painting, the trace of the hand, can be unique within certain categorical parameters. This is an important aspect of the work which conveys personal identity. It is not what I am referring to as "style" for this discussion. When I say "style" I mean "cubism" and the like.

Painters who desired to make "advanced work" saw the quest for the "new", the invention of a "different" pictorial style, as the path to follow. So here we are, 160 or so years later and I want to suggest that this course of inquiry cannot logically continue. Because the course of this inquiry is closed, it is a loop. Once someone makes a "stripe painting" it becomes a definition and the stripe paintings which follow are variants and therefore technically not "new".

While I have no doubts that there will continue to be "new styles" I am questioning whether this can continue to occur at the same pace as we proceed further into the new century. Is this quest for "newness", nothing more than just playing "dress up" with painting, reducing it to nothing more than an ever-changing decorative fashion?

Is to be the course for painting for the next 100 years? I don't think so.

A Call to Arms.

This commentary started off as an answer to a question Ed Winkleman asked in The Lost Lifestyle "What I'm most interested in here is whether a lifestyle has been lost and if so does that matter and if so why?"

I got to thinking about the implications of what he was referring to, in essence the hypothetical loss of the "café society" and what that might mean. If we were sitting at the French Bistro across the street, given a couple of bottles of Bordeaux this is what might have ensued .

The speed of modern life, or maybe it's just the pressure, puts a crimp into the old café-bar society intellectual discussion. The French are very good at this, they will argue a philosophical point just to argue, Americans are more practical, show me the beef, buy or sell, what's the diff? In any case, it is not something which is currently commonplace but that does not mean it cannot exist.

In thinking about it, I believe that what's needed by the culture, is manufactured by the culture to fulfill the need.

Right now, the artworld is obsessed with money and glamour, it want's to be Alleywood, with a small glam audience that fits neatly on the pages of Artforum's blog and the NYC social diary. So, if this is what interests you, you're set, you get what you want.

On the other hand, I have the faint suspicion that something deeper lurks in the dark shadows, or maybe it's something darker lurking in the deep shadows, of this culture.

Why is anyone even reading this? Is there a terrible disconnect between what we believe, what we want for our lives, and the world as we know it? "They" want us to think about the money, about petty desires, maybe we won't notice what is happening.

I am not talking about political action, I could be but I'm not, I'm just thinking that society needs the artist to think a bit more about life and a bit less about success or money.

To realize that this society is sick, it argues it's course with a soundbite.

It argues it's course with a soundbite, and this glib course affects the life or death of someone you do not know. Should that matter?

Does it matter at all what discourse is put forth by the intellectual communities of society, including the artists? What if I suggested that the logical conclusion of postmodern philosophy is George Bush? Oh my God, how can I say that? Easy, just keep bending the truth, reinterpreting the facts as one sees fit, until everyone gives in, which is what has happened.

Where in society must resistance to this madness start? Why among the intellectuals, including the artists, of course.

It is not necessary to arrive at a solution, nor even assert a political action. The problem is apathy, the acceptance of something which you know is wrong in spite of yourself. It is not the responsibility of the artist to change society, in truth this is a course for the politicians.

It is the responsibility of the artists to reveal society as it is, or is not, to speak the unsaid, to think the unthinkable, to reassert the common dialog so that society can steer its own course. If the artist is obsessed with fame and fortune, society will be obsessed with fame and fortune. Gee maybe we are self corrupting, sounds pornographic, shouldn't it be fun?

Life is not simple, societies problems will not succumb to simple solutions, and just because you think something is right does not mean it is. Western free societies, the gift of the Greeks perchance, are based upon debate and consensus.

If society reduces debate to a soundbite we might as well eliminate the body politic and just flip a coin. Debate requires awareness, and awareness requires information, thought and action. How the artist fits into this puzzle is interesting, the artists is not a politician, it is not his or her responsibility to fill the queue with the body politic. It is the artists responsibility to illuminate the nature of debate itself, to affect by action, the process of debate not necessarily its outcome.

The current American problem is that we are told to be afraid of debate, we are afraid of the truth, whatever it might be, we reduce it to a binary option, a soundbite of thought, yay or nay by whatever means necessary. It is the responsibility of the artist to resurrect the debate, to ask the question, take a position, be political, intellectual, hedonistic, shit just be real, we need the truth.

To seek the truth, any truth, is better than repeating a lie.

What I am suggesting here is that the artist functions in society in a way which is psychic and subtle. In a way, the artist gives license to the culture, if we poke ironic fun at societal issues, a wink, wink, nod, nod, masturbation of acceptance, we in essence, deprecate their importance by avoidance.

If art has any meaning at all, any societal function, it is this, art is capable of seeding thought, refocusing perception, changing attitudes, in essence art can provide a subtle model for perceptual change as evidence that such perceptual change is possible. As evidence that such perceptual change is possible, not some political ideology or some philosophical theory, these come and go with the wind, but the idea that humankind must be adaptive in its thought process is a necessarily evolutionary concept which is at the core of the art making process.

It is 2006, six years into the new century, six years into the new millennium and we are debating evolution and the morality of stem cell research. What is wrong with this fucking picture? Oh yea, the body politic is dead against attempts by Islamic conservatives seeking a return to philosophy from middle ages. Oh god, Salem witch hunts would make a great reality TV show, sex, sin and torture for morality. Let's hear it for morality, my morality, my voting morality, my vote, my my. Oh, you say, fuck morality. I say what is the difference? Life is not black and white, as they say "it's in living color", the question is up for debate.

It is 2006, six years into the new century, six years into the new millennium and I think artists have wimped out, "Show me the check, I want mine while the getting is good, I'll be your whore, will you be my pimp?"

It is 2006, six years into the new century, six years into the new millennium and the world is on the verge of blowing itself up. As artists what can we do to affect a psychic change into societies perception of the future?

If you do not have an opinion about this, then you are part of the problem.