small painting - a response ...

4/30/08
6:58 AM

i was concerned by last friday’s ny times article on ‘small paintings’ by respected arts writer, roberta smith - good writing, astute observations, and ‘b.s.’ will usually do that for me ...

the theme of the article/review didn’t really say much except draw attention to a trend of making small work as if it were heralding something new, and though i’m not really familiar with the artists’ cited, i can’t help think that it’s little more than coincidence, an inadvertent reaction to diminishing opportunities and creative discourse, or a desperate strategy to survive in a global culture preoccupied with banality ...

this isn’t an argument for ‘big is better’ because some some of my top ten favorites out of the thousands of paintings i love are small [van eyck’s ‘st. francis’, gorky’s inks, picasso’s ‘barbizons’, and jasper johns’ inks from the ‘70s], and some of the most exciting shows i’ve seen featured small work in the cubicle galleries of the east village, the barnes foundation, market street in venice-ca, and the malibu getty ...

no, this is really about the artists’ motive, the media’s sensationalizing or conciliatory response to a tragedy, and the despicable results of years of playing in the key of ‘w’ ...

keeping with that analogy, there’s a distinct difference between a symphony, a chamber orchestra, and a string quartet - the music is written differently with the expectation of eliciting different responses ... though they share similar musical characteristics, their intentions differ ...

is the artists’ proclivity to small work spawned by a legitimate pursuit of trying to reconcile the precepts of what contemporary painting has evolved into, or are the painterly ‘issues’ and philosophical debate so devoid of articulation that the ‘smallness’ is more representative of the level of discourse, or is it simply an ‘easier’ venue to market in a flat screen, limited resolution culture ...either way, the artist has a responsibility to art and a ‘league of giants’ that have preceded them - and ‘easy’ isn’t part of the by-laws ...

or could it be, given the turbulence of our political/social/economic restructuring over the past eight years, that repression/suppression of the individual is being reflected by retentive fetishes, or the cost of materials, studio space, commuting, and shipping have escalated to a level of unsustainability since the day gigs, galleries, and buyers are fewer and paying less, or is it a futures’ scheme to appeal to the wealthy’s secondary domicile or the economically stricken’s fixed income or downsizing, or is it the result of diminishing expectations from educational institutions that cared less about the quality of learning than the procreation of their own establishments, or is it the gallery/media/museum machine that fosters its’ own brand of nepotism for survival that have reduced the ‘idealism of art’ to amusement park attractions ...

don’t know, but it seems worthy of questions ... and answers ...

and that ‘smallness’ doesn’t only have to do with the size of art - lets look at what and how much is being written in the few publications that claim support for the arts - what used to take weeks to pour over in reviews and essays now takes only days - and that doesn’t reflect my capacity to understand anything any better - there’s just less substance, fewer writers of merit, and only a handful of credible publications ...

and i know we’ve been conditioned to live in a time where confrontation is best saved for fox news, hollywood hype, wrestlemania, and personal angst - where tolerance and acceptance of the unacceptable has evolved to the limits of political/social ‘correctness’, but being ‘wrong’ just isn’t alright anymore ... ‘small’ doesn’t resonate the depth of human suffering , global political injustice, entropic expansion, depletion of resources, and disregard for life and spirit - whispers in a crowd have little impact, and i guess that’s what drove me to respond to roberta’s article ...

it’s not so much that its being done - its the condoning, or even encouraging the issue in media that saddens me in light of all that could be said about art and its possibilities ...