William Utermohlen and the con of contemporary, by Van Gough

 "Nothing is true, and everything is permitted"
William Burroughs

I've been thinking about William Utermohlen a lot lately, and contemporary art and my 'place' in it. I do that periodically, and Poor Williams story is none better than a yardstick to beat one's self with. William-for the uninitiated- was an artist who continued to catalog himself throughout his twelve year descent into the hellish grip of Alzheimer's.

All the works above are by William-first to last , a period between 1967 and 2000. Hard to believe isn't it?  You can see all the progressions (or regressions) in between. The last one looks like the scrawls of child, or even Modern Art. What does that say about Contemporary Art then? That it is a self conscious affectation at portraying an unraveled mind? That it is the self imposed attempt at naivety? That it is the deliberate nihilism of virtuosity? All those questions share something in common. They are all predisposed intentions-a luxury poor William didn't have. Instead, he could only watch the years of bravura technique he had developed trickle away to the abstract resonance of dying brain matter, to formless, hollow shapes barely comprising substance or meaning.
The uninitiated for Post Modernist sake, might want to wank on and argue that the later renderings display more of a kind of tortured tumultuous vitality than the first portrait. Not poor William though. He would know such posturing was a lie, Sadly,William can no longer argue at all.

I ask again then, what does that tell us about Contemporary art? About the people who paint it? About the people who buy it? About the curators who peddle it? You see, I believe there's a perpetual lie being told in "Modern art" and it goes deeper than the con of the contemporary, and the sin of the cynical dollar value. It is one that forgoes suffusion for suffering.  The telling for technique. What it doesn't do, and what it doesn't want you to do, is look deeper, to think beyond the designer paint spattered facade and your home furnishings.It doesn't want you to be propelled by the rich magic in allegory, to become attuned to the symbolism of rite, because the historical power encoded in classicism,the veiled aspiration of heightened reality has been designated to become a relic collecting dust and trustees in museums and stately mansions. It is the artifact of privilege, the heritage of elite lineage. 

Why did this happen? Could it be that there is something else going on beyond the hustle of the Emporer's new clothes?

If you will indulge me for a moment longer... there's a scene in Polanski's movie the 9th Gate (based on the novel The Club Dumas) , in which Johnny Depp comes into possession of a grimoire (said to be written by old Nick himself) which contains illustrations imbued with powerful totems,capable of manifesting Satan (the light bringer) on earth.
It's a poor movie, made by a Director in recess, jaded by his own dark dabbling's no less, but my point is this-there is power in Ancient symbols. In well constructed, beautifully rendered, analogous images. One need only seek out the work of Bosch, Raphael, Carravagio, Goya or Blake to see the alchemy of inherent hermetic symbols expressed.

Where is any of that in Modern Art? If Modern life is a construct of our times, then so is the culture that informs it. But who exactly informs it? Who evaluates its worth? Is it the collectors? The so called 1% with warehouses of Hirst's and Warhol's? Is it the media, bought and sold by corporate advertising? Who are the arbiters of taste? You or I? What cereal do you buy and where did you hear about it?

Do you see where I am going with this? As my old friend John Liddy used to intone through white knuckles;

"Whats the fucking point damn it!?"

You see, I believe the depiction of anything beyond surface has become a problem, or at least diminished to the fuck you moniker of low brow or a Billy Childish ism. The other side is that the value of Art is now designated by the sterotypical notion that there are idiot savants in the gutter, comprising wizened kids under the delusion that scrawling on a wall is anti-establishment, when the irony of course is that their heroes are as entrenched in establishment as it gets and laughing all the way to the Banksy.
For that matter, isn't it also the case that if graffiti is the provenance of the street, with that democratization comes the terrible equation that skill no longer has any cachet, art no longer any value? Whose laughing then?

  Bottom line, you are being lied to: Duchamp was a chump. Pollock was bollocks. Rothko was bought by Rothschild. Your pristine hotel boardroom, Ikea Scandinavian model, with it's matching curtains and "edgy" Rothko reproduction is a crass lie and you are lying to yourselves and your notion of high art intelligence if you buy into it, because minimalism is as minimalism does-an empty shell in a vacant lot, with nothing beyond the incoherent blurt echoing the self proclaimed white box. It asks you to be a reflection of the same blank drivel, to look for relevance in the nothing and be content in its hollow. It has no cachet, no reference, no aspiration. It is the masturbatory scrawl of diminished intelligence with grand pretension. It is keeping you 'down' and it is the death and dearth of the magic and alchemical rite of artistry.

An insult in fact to the life's work of artists like William Utermohlen.

Naked contemporary

Here's a quick nude study in oil I did today just for fun. I think that I could spend my days in painted contemplation of the human form, I suppose it's the transcendence of adulation, the depth of just merely relating or some such wank.

Talking of playing with yourself, Huff Post had an article today entitled Top Ten Artists to watch. Unsurprisingly, Bruce Helander almost creams his gussets with genuflection,over a selection that wouldn't look out of place in a Home Depot skip or Fukushima landfill.

David Ellis-'True Value'

Notably in the list, was the only figurative piece by artist Peter Buechler, although it's hard to actually label the piece figurative, since he has chosen to decapitate the study leaving an empty featureless, muddy gray background.
Which on reflection, is probably as near a testament to the whole sorry travesty of contemporary art as one can get. I dare say he wasn't thinking that when he painted it, just cynically playing to the gallery no doubt, but with dross like Will Ryman's 'Roses' endorsed as a yardstick by the White House National Endowment for Arts, what hope is there for the future of Art.

Banksy rolling

I finally got around to seeing 'Exit through the gift shop.' I've always felt like Banksy's work was a little too polished, a little too contrived as if it had been designed by some committee in a Canary Wharf agency boardroom.
Anyway, The film is supposedly a clever, clever, mockumentary that turns the tables, in that as opposed to being about Banksy, it is instead a biopic about the French filmmaker who follows our eponymous hero from guerrilla graffitist, to contemporary cult.

Except the documentary maker is nothing more than a hobbyist, and though I shalln't reveal the gag, (oh how I laughed) at the eleventh hour, the whole thing tries to cack-handedly make some high brow statement about the nature of contemporary art.

That Modern art is a con and any charlatan can make it-really? What a revelation.I had no idea.

It's a sort of Spinal Tap for artists if you like.

I didn't. I mean, even as parody, is there anything more depressing than seeing a rich collector ebulliently talk about adding a Banksy to their Picasso's and Klee's? Some would argue the point-that the joke is on the collector, that it's holding up some sort of distorted mirror, but I believe in fact that the joke is on the artist, because ultimately what you get isn't smart, just the equivalent of a dumbed-down Twitter sound byte, about the sorry state of it all.

I rather hope the ghastly street scene returns to where it belongs, defacing the gutters as opposed to any legacy future artists can hope to aspire to.

And Another Thing-The Empty heART of the abstract confidence trick

I grow irritated daily by the number of downtown gallery's I see, paying lip service along with wall space, to bad abstract drivel. Its a masquerade, the artists who paint it are cynical beyond reprieve-and know it's bilge, as do the galleries that peddle the load of old Pollocks to begin with. It's contrived, like a bad mime act, except the patrons buy into the whole Van Gogh travesty, because they'd rather believe the smears they are coughing up mulah for, to be the work of a misunderstood genius, than what they are, which is no more tumultuously cathartically conceived than if the artist had partaken a paint enema.

There are a few practitioners out there that escape my ire- god I could wax lyrical about old school abstractionists like De Kooning, Bacon or Kitaj for hours, and more closely, I count one abstract artist as my friend precisely because he understands the process of deconstruction, and what it takes to master it.

Unfortunately,a large percentage of abstractionist's are no better than con artists, layering paint with pretension when they should use apprehension, or better still-a flame thrower. The work is neither brave, illuminating or relevant-at best a joke that leaves you feeling dumb, because you think somehow you ought to be laughing with the laugh track, when in fact it was a crappy punchline, that was delivered badly.

As someone who works methodically for hours to approximate the visions in my minds eye, and express my inner soul like I truly was excreting paint, the mockery of a certain abstract art strikes me as no less of an insult than if these swindlers had pissed on the shoes of my children.

Notes from an Easel-part 66

These past few days I've been ensconced with commissions, but I felt the fact that I gave myself some studio time to begin a new piece warranted an update, so here are the beginnings of my next skull in the series.
Distracted from my mission, the yardstick of milestones has plagued me the last several days.Its the usual guff that reminds me of the leaps and bounds that former paragons had achieved at half my age. Picasso had completed his Blue and Rose periods, set the world of new isms alight with Les Demoiselles d'Avignon and was a few years short of Guernica by the time he was 40.
Having broken ground with albums such as Ziggy, Low and Scary Monsters, Bowie's career was already in creative freefall by forty.
And yet, I console myself that Henry Miller didn't write Tropic of Capricorn until he was almost fifty, and Goya (the greatest artist of all time imo) didn't do his best work with the Black Paintings, until he was completely deaf, and half mad in his eighties. I imagine its relative, propelled by impatience for some kind of recognition and an appetite for utterly undistracted emergence. Not that I hold myself in such esteem you understand, I shrivel in such shadows, except...blah, blah, blah-no answers here-move along.

In the midst of keeping a roof over ones head, I let my attention wander to a biopic on Rauschenberg today. He likened art to trickery,literally consigning much of contemporary art as a blag with that knowing grin of his. If only Vincent had known. I often see Vincent as the ultimate martyr-posthumously, art would only ever be the contrived suffering of Ron Ethey or the shabby little suicide of Rothko. Even Pollocks death seemed paint by numbers by comparison. Fuck you Vincent and your miserable stereotype. Fuck you Rauschenberg and your privelidged cynicism.