I am still incredibly proud of the work that I produced when writers were still referring to me as a “gay minimalist,” … a label which, to me, has nothing to do with being an artist and a whole lot to do with being gay. I was making images which were conceptual, but with a better end-product. The work concerned notions of the validity of the photographic artifact, and how “accidental image making” yielded the individual control over the process to the ghost of chance. Yet, no matter what I invested in the work emotionally and intellectually, the work kept being received as punchy eye candy, and consequentially, sold very well… and other artists I respected made fun of it, which hurt. But something else was happening to the art world at the same time… there was a new kind of minimalism emerging; a minimalism that dispensed with any sort of connection with any manner of intellectual activity… bright, clean and absolutely vapid. I felt less and less connected to an aesthetic that seemed more concerned with paint chips and blending in with sleek, modern interiors. So, I turned my back on the bullshit and just started making art… and other artists started liking it… a lot, and I felt good about it… and it sold. It was anachronistic, and somewhat awkward, and totally lacking in irony, and it baffled some folk because it seemed profoundly unhip to their eyes… and I felt the reconnection to what initially channeled my whole being into a creator, not a consumer. The art world seems to be an antithesis to this; the artist as consumer who is influenced by consumers, and not the artist as creator inspiring contemplation, and in that sense, artists seem to mirror what we have bred our students to think. I mentor daily a group of profoundly talented individuals who have instilled in them from birth an abject, all-controlling fear of being wrong. They go with the flow, in large part because of how we have reduced education to a one-size-fits-all approach to thinking, which is profoundly disturbing. Many artists are also now afraid to be wrong, and it makes for some fairly awful art.
Posted on: Mon, 19 Jan 2015 03:26:30 +0000
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