a couple notes about form

I’ve written elsewhere that the internet is a terrible place to look at artwork. One of the things I always try to do is to create a thing or an image that will stand in a room with all of the presence of an actual person. An image that will make people gasp and remember, that will cause sensations in the body beyond those receive from passively gazing. I believe the experience of painting and sculpture can and should be the experience of the spectators entire body.

For these reasons, I know more than a few artists who are reluctant to slap documentary photos up on the internet. I participate in all number of internet critique groups where people offer some glib responses to one or two fotos, none of the responses interesting, most of the work, just “the best” of an unknown and unexperienced body, that lies enticingly in some home studio. The better work, or the work through which one could draw conclusions, is unphotographed, preseumably stepped on or discarded.

That said, what good is a blog about art ? There is a limit to how much one can actually consume in written words, continually fed to us from an illuminated screen. I have tried to draw comparisons with some of the more compelling political blogs that I really can glance at and pick up a tremendous amount of information in a few minutes. As to art though ? I have lately been enjoying Industrial Feces. Great name, huh? 7teen has a very succinct and developed taste for what looks good on a blog.

I want a blog with a voice, like Gusky’s at ArtBlog Comments, and a position. I am more than happy to burst overinflated balloons, but New York has been wearing the drapery of its burst art bubble proudly for better than 10 years, another blog analyzing the fragments of anti-communitarian art pedantically mocking the pedantic is not really called for. A blog that documents the project of carrying the European tradition of art-making the rest of the way over that speed-bump that was “modernism” is called for. And I say European, simply because we haven’t got any other and frankly the people who are all so against traditions all seem more cliched than the traditions themselves ever were.

I remember very well a lecture we got once in school, on the fifth or sixth straight day of us all assembling bored into a circle and sitting looking at our watches. “We’re getting a lot of complaints that we’re talking too much. A lot of you seem to be saying, ‘god we, want to be doing something else,’ as if talking is the problem. The only thing we’ve ever done with you has been talking. We’ve moved mountains for some of you simply by talking. We didn’t pick up your brushes and paint for you, it was only ever talking.”

Hopefully this post will make more sense as the next few weeks pass.