Paintings and Conversations

My painting got chosen for the 4th Beijing Biennale 2010.  I decided to go, since I was to be a speaker at the Symposium that took place a day after reception.

I will write abouit the trip later.  For now, here is the speech that Quentin Hardy helped me with ( and did most of it)

Alterrealism and the Present Challenge of Art

With great honor I join the other artists here for the Beijing Biennale. The organizers of the show have set for us high goals. They, and all of us here, hope to depict something of the sense of environmental crisis, efforts social progress, and shared spiritual unity, as caused by the modern world. We cannot hope to solve these problems, or even depict their magnitude in a world more closely connected than ever before, yet we do well simply by striving for a better understanding of them.

The idea of a Biennale was first floated, excuse the pun, in Venice in 1895. As such, it was created at a time when people stepped from their early industrial revolution and into the modern age of Einstein, and the twilight of the Imperial World. The idea of International Art, and a global brotherhood of artists, was a celebration of a newly connected globe, and an assertion of national greatness among the relatively small number of participants.

What does a biennale mean today, in the age of instant global connectivity, and many nations strive with other transnational forces? What is the role of the art, and the artist, in this time of crisis – which, as our Chinese friends know, can also mean “opportunity” or simply “change.” The changes we see around us are too numerous and dizzying to list, but let us spend a moment on the crisis, and the opportunity for renewal.

The old modern world and the modern artist troubled each other. Art concerns itself with an invisible world whose past, present and future are memory, imagination, and desire. The media of paint and stone are means to inhabit that world and be re-energized by it. So too are videotape, or performance spaces segregated for an art experience. The ultimate aims of aesthetic transport and information about being human remain invisible. Even when the artist responds to historic events, he seeks to escape time.

Our modern world is dominated by the physical and the time-rationed. The undeniable triumph of methods of scientific enquiry and their final physical expression in industrial power have reshaped the globe beyond the imaging of any human not from the relatively recent past.  We have even bioengineered ourselves.

Ignoring that power is more than vain sentimentality; it is a lunatic impossibility. People who travel and trade largely in the invisible world, artists and their kin, struggle for appropriate roles and voices against this unprecedented and inexorable process of global modernization, the tyranny of the visible.

Even an artist’s success became problematic. Do well, and art became a highly valued and traded commodity. Artists are raised to the status of seers to enhance the marketing of their gift, with few people improved in the process.  That is flattering, but it made distant the invisible world that we timelessly want ourselves and others to see and explore.

Art in the world created at the same time as the Venice Biennale eventually became as a kind of super journalism, and the artist a mere commenter on the world. Andy Warhol noted that advertising and fame are powerful influences. Jeff Koons saw Michael Jackson and his chimp as simultaneously iconic and tacky. Damien Hurst showed that we react to a stuffed shark mostly as a living object, even when it is encased and consists largely of formaldehyde.

Similar points could be made about the vertical categorizations of fine art photography and performance art, to name two responses to technology and commoditization. Likewise the categorizations like feminist art, queer art, and outsider art – worthy in identifying the downtrodden, perhaps, but too often marketing categories too. With their success, they are tamed into statements, even indictments of the world, to be thoughtfully consumed before moving on to the next piece of art.

In hope of better ways to resolve the problems of art’s invisibility and the relentlessly physical world, I have dedicated my craft to a new sensibility, which I call Alterrealism. Alterrealism takes as a given the reality that, in an age dominated by software and instantaneous connection with an infinite amount of people, facts, stories, and computational tasks, we may become direct conveyors of the invisible world.

Software is, after all, an invisible product, nothing more than a series of statements about how to organize something. Our economy, for better or worse, rests on computed risks that have relevance only to other risks, and transactions that fly about us in wireless connections. Our relationships and our realities are virtual, and many of our allegancies, like the allegiances among the artists here today, have no corrallary in physical geography.

What is alterrealism’s response to this changed world? It is to embrace, as more real than any particular product, the invisible realities within us. I respond to the felt and the intuited as more real than their physical manifestations. I delight in the reality that our days begin in dreams, they do not end there. I attempt to convey the ever-becoming of intuition as a more real guiding force – not as a mystic descent, but as a recognition of its primacy.

The work of mine that the organizers of the Beijing Biennale have chosen, Exextinct No. 1, uses objects of the mechanical world as subordinate actors in a narrative of generation and precise physicality within its timeless ritual. As such, even the deepest identities of gender, threat, and renewal are alive because of an imaginary continuum that authors the particular physical manifestation.

To the extent this is an environmental statement, it is one of the triumph of unseen patterns that care nothing for time, for they are above it. As a work regarding the themes of shared unity and social progress, the primacy of the invisible, and the threat and promise of the rituals with which we evoke it, is evident.

In much of my work the casual consumer will see aspects of the pained and the broken. It is not broken to me, for they are rich in life, rich in emotion, and vessels of memory and action. Emotions of necessity are complex, and need to be seen as the invisible forces that bring us life. The complexity is still one thing, only understood by struggle and meditative acceptance. Its vocabulary reveals itself from within.

Make no mistake: I believe that our final destiny is of our own making. It is the invisible within us that makes us creatures of light, who by seeing that can achieve a new balance. It is the invisible patterns within us and among us that we now rediscover, learning once again how to love ourselves in perpetual, invisible change.

Thank you.