Autumn

Autumn is the season to forage, otherwise old replicas and forgeries that may require expert technique seem out of place and lacking in imagination. Autumn is like the Art Markets today, as pre 1945 Modernist Paintings are purchased by new money to stash in vaults that never see the light of day! They are entombed and fossilised in order to de-inspire new directions of Painting, where the first and second 19th and 20th centuries of Modern Art are stifled and lost to the vault barely hiding a coordinated TATT attack to justify relegating the whole oeuvre of the Painting medium! Very Cold War, no? Too oppositional, too difficult, 'too repetitive' or just an opportunity to make money out of the market (and purchase a newly found pre-Renaissance work of 'dubious status’) by your 'impartial Art cultural overview' to ostensibly popularise Art? Surely you admit you have an advisory function to all the great Auction houses in which you are required to make 'an independent cultural judgment' that may 'influence purchase'? Or has Autumn for you arrived prematurely?

Life, society, global reset have all moved on, except TATT who are maybe right for ‘low Art landfill themselves'? Well, we are 'post-postmodernism today I'm told...........and the role of contemporary Painting? Still stuck on minimalism and maximalism? Or is it deconstruction and the reinvention of structuralism today? What minefield have you forged for all Artists? Is it CGI or AI, supercomputers, or it's puppet of social media? Is the internet still free?.... new gimmicks on new technologies is it? Perhaps cybercrime is the latest tech to permeate our lives? Or who can replicate and reproduce quickest? What happened to 'no words or adverts' visual Paintings of new subject matter and the human imperfection of mortality, and capacity and curiosity that is more important than visual perfection and the new Airbrushed high tech that controls outcome? Art, especially Painting, is transformative because it is the cultural rubric of risk and improvisation!!!? This cultural Painting life has an essential ingredient that no tech can compete with, it is self-evidently and beautifully flawed!!

Today's 3rd stage of Modernist Painting that continues its path through the Art Universe may actually be in total transition! It isn't the medium of Painting but the medium of Modernism via visual 2D representation that is our era; it is connected to the network of the Past, present and future of all potential episodes of Modernist Painting. How can we predict and also connect with it? But reverse engineering also includes retracing our steps from the minefield of variants of the 1980's structuralist ambivalence just as it requires building a speculative future in the past tense too! Welcome to the future present and the future beyond our control but reaching out for all possible trajectories to future proof as well as 'future restore' by 'future-looking' in the mirror! Imagine a constructed number of future directions in a 'multiplicity of Universes' in terms of Physics as well as Visual Art via Paint potential too? Do you fancy one day using rocks from Mars, Jupiter or Saturn etc to make Paint on a 2D surface here on Earth or vice versa? Location, location, location it maybe, but new realities of perception, new colours new consistencies of those colours, new molecular outcomes etc Wouldn't it be astonishing to conflict with such advances in technologies that may one day allow for human flight, planet hopping etc by new planetary ancient practices and ex terrestrial Painting medium as planting a human foot on a new Art planet?!!! Welcome to a ‘New Modernist Painting of the future utterly routed in its BCE 40 000 handprints on cave walls on Earth! How we may feel a coexistence with the future and the 3 stages so far of Modernist painting including today's version. Welcome to TATT to either continue to devalue the contemporary Painting medium or admit that Art de -evolves or evolves by centralised dictat even if it is tacit or in academic circles alone! But Conceptual Art from the 1990s to today surely has been drifting and encircling itself and has not moved on?

Collisions or collusions, forager or forger, snobbery and micromanagement versus a victimless departure and autonomous improvisation? Well, let's just retrace our steps from the minefield of form and perspective and thinking outside and through and inside and upside down etc of the 4, 5, 6 D etc. (We have no information on our human potential) 'Cube inside or outside etc a box! Let's get out of the minefield and retrace how we got there to avoid determinism, stasis and Art paralysis! As we move back, we acquire all the knowledge of how we may have got there. Reverse engineering allows for references, decisions, omissions, rejections, trajectories that we made or missed, so any wrong move gives us one less to deduct from to find the right path! This isn’t esoteric but a intuitive intelligence that forms our path back to our revising and taking on the next test of human curiosity. This is not 'Live, die, repeat! ' It offers new subject matter in which new tech and increased sensorial human visual potential may actually stimulate and transcend hitherto human limitations by activating new neurons in the brain or in the unique human eye etc. Ironic isn't it, that tech could encourage new ways of seeing so we can continue ancient practices of Paint??!!

When withdrawing from a philosophical and psychological cultural minefield, you are able to compound the amalgamation of what you have come up against and select ex-components by reset and some untangling from residual shackles within a totally new context. This infinite variety starts from different takes on the same subject matter. The new markers are that we don't have to either paint what we are attracted to or by what we are repulsed by. Paint Tracey Emin and Churchill in the same portrait, paint the Sahara in the Alps etc in the same landscape! Collide not collude! Resist not appease! Break down your perspectives and boundaries, culture clash is 'the contemporary!’ “You are never too old and yet 'always too young'??!! " Can back-off! Bring on the 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 D's (even if we don't quite understand them!), Do your own human imperfection by foraging and by not descending into the shadows and the airbrush of AI forgery! Don't be assimilated and swallowed up, accumulate back on your journey to evacuate from the 'no man's land, decay and rotting cultural corpses of post modernism of the 1980s! Faced with being overpowered by being absorbed (by assimilation) 'assimilate back', retake what is yours, reject a cultural 'hostile takeover' and counter the hostile takeover by your own hostile takeover. In your face and on your back lawn attack back because the only way to deal with invasion is to counter invade; and let's face it TATT has been a judgmental bully towards our own medium!

Art like the economy has cycles, but isn't Conceptual Art sometimes shockingly predictable? I mean all those mind games?? Try painting mind games without any written text! Like any burst of energy Painting is the very meaning of 'Trial and error and risk' even within the same Painting process in the same Painting. How many mediums of Art can claim to use a minor brushstroke (or alteration) can completely destroy or make a work of Art at the same time? We are conflict and ambivalence, paradox and anomalies! There is no escalation like in the making of a Painting, and at such slow, long-drawn-out weeks and months, decades etc. The re-birth of Painting today, however, may actually come from an ironic source.... If TATT in the 1980s hadn’t relegated contemporary Painting from public and private spaces by saying we were 'burnt -out, ' we wouldn't have re-birthed into an army of practitioners that we have in the UK today!

But did Painting become a political weathervane, or has it always been? Does it warn us of the global dictatorship and totalitarian nature of Climate Change? Does it tell us that vast heat changes will have to be met by universal air-conditioning or fully equipped heaters that can only be funded by replacing Oil and coal (whilst knowing that we have them in the bag) but new anti-carbon footprint solar panels, and other devices to cool us down and protect the polar ice caps as well as sustaining wildlife? No! Well only tangentially ...even if it is the subject matter of landscape Paintings!!!? Well, that will divide the room! But isn't that the point? we are not meant to like all Paintings, we are meant to make our own minds up, stimulated by free visual image making 'speech'! Find the narrative! But, can't we compare Paintings from all era's painted during multiple governments, institutions, fashions, demographic changes etc that surely shed light on political ideologies, histories of military conflicts, social up or downgrades, and therefore do inform us how and why decisions were made and their backstory that feeds into the Paintings, rather than are politically propagandizing or dogmatically imposing! !

Now in post 1917 USSR, clearly it seems that by the birth of 'agitprop' was actually doing that same very propagandising thing, but if we take a wider historical perspective we can see that by 1920-22 those very free thinkers were being state controlled and coerced into conforming at gunpoint, and that their very radical free thinking that had innovated the ground-breaking agit prop, was being twisted into victimising its creators, and Artists fled the very totalitarianism that they had tried to sweep away in the first place! Now isn't Agitprop' propaganda and therefore ideological, but firstly, in a wider historical context it was unprecedented, and a bold innovation of the avant-garde more than even a political idiom, and secondly, it tells us more than just political propaganda and ideological mass poster image making and especially about the Artist exodus from Soviet Communism, the huge disappointment and agonising over the failure of Marxism to meet the promise of the state to 'wither away' when it did the opposite, when put to the test of realpolitik in the USSR! Thirdly, it tells us about the role of the Painter and Artist, where Paint was mechanised in poster form advertising a propagandised series of lies! There are not many 'Constructivist' images that depart from just state controlled propaganda, but do we not recognise more than just looking at an image of a poster extolling pro Communism in the Soviet Union? Absolutely! In fact, didn't Painting outlast the Marxist dialectic (broken by the end of the Cold War) and may offer explanations about how Nationalism and the new narrative of 20th century 'Revolutions' coalesce that join China 1949, North Korea, October 1917 in Russia and in 1979, the Iranian theocratic Revolution as post Marxist oppositionalism to the West?