So, I've been hanging out in San Francisco for a few days, well my brain has, it's a good late night haunt partly due to the international timezone, which sounds more glamorous than it is, it's just online junk, so don't get excited, but it's all good.
FecalFace.com – don't ask me why – has some sound people, links, art, advice and so on, but best of all it's heavily laced with a healthy does of cynicism, not the sneering kind, just the stuff the doctor ordered, it keeps the blood pressure down, and the expectation for life to get better all of a sudden.
There's always a torrent of articles on all the latest in hmm… well I suppose it's cutting-edge art – but then again I don't make that distinction – it's either great or it sucks as far as I'm concerned. The only bad (in a bad way) art I've seen there was posted as a joke, what's more there's not a hint of 'craft' about the place. I've been bullied by a lot of crafty types in the last few weeks, mainly middle-aged women who like to make jewellery in their spare time. I'm sorry ladies, you are not artists, you are craftswomen, it has to be said, someone has to make the distinction. i'd like to lump a lot more in with them, but I suppose I can't over generalise, well I can but in the context of art history I'd need to place a foot firmly in my mouth. There are landscapes, and paintings of animals, and kids, and god knows what other junk that passes as art, fine art (is that term even relevant any more?), but most of what I come across online doesn't challenge any preconceptions I or most artists have about the problems with realist painting, sculpture, printmaking and so on.
There are two camps for art, those who aim to please, and those who aim their proverbial weapon of colour and line, shape and form, slap bang in between the eyes of the turgid establishment. Something's got to give, we can't all want antiques, watercolours of sunsets and still lives of horses, some of us want to do something different, some of us want to use art as a political and sociological device, a tool, a crowbar, a hammer, a bomb.
So Fecal Face, what's most interesting about the site is that it's near enough providing a real-time account in the progression of, dare I say it, an art movement. Shock, horror, there's no such thing I hear you cry? Ahem, well maybe not, but if you were the fictional character that resides in my subconscious around this time of night/morning, you'd be clenching your fists with rage, I guarantee it. We live in a time of post-modernism, nothing is new, everything is but an appropriation of something else. That's true, nothing is original, except for the combinations, the maladjusted and disjunctive juxtaposition of one old idea with another. An experiment in hypothesis by a toddler in a laboratory coat. The avant-garde, if they ever were, burned down their modernist totems years ago, they made sure as they danced around the flames that nothing was left but the trampled and blackened remains of a less nihilistic age. The strangest thing is there is no end, there is no 'post', we are here, this is the ever after.
Scrabbling about in the dirt has its advantages, you're not pestered by those who make their living forcing their highly subjective view of art historical timelines on every rich banker and investment group that sidles by, then again if you want to eat, that's most likely a distinct disadvantage too.
Some of the artists FF feature are well known to me, and perhaps to all of you, I've mentioned Faile recently, there are also interviews with urban graffiti artist D-Face, and perhaps the absolute originator of modern street art / graffito – Blek Le Rat. However here's a few other's worth a mention…
Eric Joyner – He likes robots – a lot – oh and doughnuts but I don't share that particular fascination. I've read the interview but he doesn't give too much away, perhaps it's an emotional response to the cold technological age we find ourselves in, perhaps not. He shows a distinct nostalgia for old school sci-fi, something my art tutors at Brighton would've most definitely frowned upon.
Still, I get it, it's a mechanical comfort blanket, a world of nuts and bolts that most guys can get their teeth into. You can't hug a blue-tooth signal, you can't fight a microwave beam, but you can always feel the weight of cold metal. i know this is supposed to be the Information Age, or is it something else by now? Whatever it is it's rather confusing, and for all the facts and data available at our fingertips, I doubt that many of us feel much the wiser.
What's more, we have nothing to pin our hopes on, we can't conquer nature, it will more likely conquer us, if we win, we lose. The only technology we need is technology that reduces our need for technology. Still, robots, I'd have liked a mechanical friend as a child, something all-powerful to smite my enemies and take the rap when the fuzz arrived at the door.
Fall Outing by Eric Joyner
FF have recently written a feature on the Tournesol Awards who've just had their 5th Anniversary. Yet again it's San Francisco-centric, but I have to take art where I can get. God Bless Globalisation (that's mine – I've just decided I need that for a title for a piece I haven't thought of yet). The prize is $10k and a heap of praise for the best up and coming artist in the SF Bay area, Paul Wackers won. I prefer the work o previous winner Ana Teresa Fernandez.
Ana is a Mexican born painter and performance artist, she has a Masters of Fine Art from the San Francisco Art Institute, and she is one of the few realists out there I can appreciate. Her work 'encompasses different boundaries and stereotypes: physical, emotional, and psychological.' I'd personally call it domestic surrealism. I again am reading a very different message than the ream of professional critics out there, which means I'm either very right or very wrong, take a look and decide for yourself.
Untitled 1 (Performance Documentation) by Ana Teresa Fernandez
2007, Oil on canvas; 64 x 72"
To finish off the post I'll include a couple of mad collages from Tom Long, I've always had a soft spot for this particular technique, or should that be medium, forgive me it's 5:07am and BBC2 are playing light jazz on Ceefax, it's about as near to a testcard as you'll get these days, it's driving me insane (again). I'll be off now…
Art and its artistic sensibility are really fading in the world of modernization. I am agreeing with your words against such a modernization which has nothing to do with the originality of art. In the name of modern art they are just ruining our inherited culture of art. They don’t have any right to do so