American Artist believes in the myth of the artist. More specifically, the notion of the artist as a hyper-creative individual who thrives on making representations of imagined tangents to reality. Artist feels he is so invested in this lowbrow construction of what it means to be an artist that he himself has become consumed by the myth, a psychological dive into an escapist perception of art. For Artist, having the name American Artist—not just a job title but an identity—adequately reflects his relationship to this anachronistic ideology. American subscribes to a naive premodern notion that art = representational images. In a contemporary context this becomes an awkward performance of tropes that have been disavowed by modernism and devastated by eras such as conceptual art and the championship of theory that overcame painting in the 80s. But in doing so he reveals a desire that many contemporary artists share: to shed their theoretical frameworks in lieu of a more gluttonous self-indulgence of their creative imagination.
Posted on: Thu, 13 Nov 2014 04:54:07 +0000