Don't make the same mistake of assuming that Painting has lost its erstwhile multi-tasking multi-functioning umbrella impact since the pre-industrial world and can be seen purely as a fading power today. Only part of the once monopoly (except for sculpture) of Art media has been shed, it's now stream-lined and bespoke, pointedly non-indulgent, free from the constraint and the prescriptive nonsense that failed Art by being of a bohemian self-satisfied mirror watching nature! We’d become complacent and wasteful! We'd blown it! We almost deserved to be punished! We'd let the public down, and we were replaced by Artist's who thought that letting self-destructive impulses rule was just part of the whole narcissistic self-hate that was part of a process of becoming a non-Painter Artist, and that tech or idea or Al Art was a higher calling!? We'd 'GROW OUT OF IT'???!! Patronise someone else!!?! 'IT'S JUST A PHASE" doesn't wash either, as if it is someone going through 'Art growing pains' as if we were some snotty nosed child!!??!!
So, just as leaving the post-Cold War in the 20th century with all its cultural collaborations firmly abandoned and its political agendas gone since 1989 too, so we have said goodbye to the fall of the 'Berlin Wall, as yesterday’s news as now an anachronism in order to recognise that we need to embrace Painting today for today, not tomorrow or yesterday. Indeed, we need to embrace the new era and let the pre-modernist and modernist centuries of 'exclusive aura of the heroic but wayward cult of the Artist' and 'his' status die!! How? By not seeing them as anti-social and 'marginal’ and welcoming the era of the Painter being both consumer and producer! This is the era without tabloid speculation or the Art Renaissance grapevine and the over sharing of today's social media. But it is also the end of dependency on the rich and famous, the dodgy big money commission patrons! This is not the time to undergo starvation or going broke, but to go for broke where money can't hinder or help you!
The ideology of Marx and Nietzsche also no longer constrains or restricts you and should be left in the 19' century where they belong! Marx himself said lose your chains, but he was responsible for putting people in Stalinist work camps or corporate end of the world scenarios that never materialised!! In fact Nietzsche was outdone and out spun by the absence of the eternal return, no sequel at all, no superman etc I could go on but I'll keep it short , because there will never be a 1930's terror to return by national brain-washing — we're free to use these icons of mass destruction as absolutist hate criminals but of the 20th century, to not be forgotten and never forgiven in the 21st century These are pillars of toxicity and terror where Painting did not thrive but was attacked as beacons of resistance to it now that era of demonization by 'hate the Painter' is residually, subliminally squirrelled-away even today! Anti-Painting is not new! But instead of Painting being cardinalized by TATT as the standing our ground against extremism, by the 1980's we were relegated by TATTI But this should teach us that we should not rely on support from TATT to see that 'our influencers' are Hitler and Stalin as our barriers and not Art 'form' of a faux anti Abstraction anti figurative nature.
Instead, of course, no Painter should have to defer to the plight of all Painters who are all asked the omnipresent question: Do you want to do good or want to do well? All 'vanity projects' didn't start with the Renaissance, but certainly thrived by it! How many narcissistic flattering portraits to adorn the rules of Painting are commissioned by Oligarchs of their day, only to find that the sitters were more than vain, they were deluded! Painters who had been popular had I suppose little choice to not turn down commissions, or they'd lose their reputations by aggrieved Popes or merchants etc!!?? So, in that context the big players of the Renaissance weren't those who gave in but those who outmanoeuvred their 'vanity projects' — Leonardo and Rembrandt were either very selective or refused to reproduce what money was to buy from them!! This is and was epoch breaking integrity!! These guys were unique because they didn't follow the herd as well as being aesthetically incomparable!! But this true spirit of individualist independence is just as prescient today for Painters as it w has been — they became inventors of Painters, inspirers that risked their process and their status for all! And we too face a stark choice — we're told 'Don't Paint! Create anything in any other medium, but don't Paint! So, we Paint! Why? Because we have a tradition (not by ideology) set by Leonardo and Rembrandt, for example, to defy what we are supposed to do!
Painters today are against the grain, not by preference but by instinct and by exclusion, but free of unwanted attention, where the universal medium today is Art by tech or concept innovation. So, Painters are free from anxiety and fear of keeping up with the Joneses by Art grapevine (a perennial issue) or social media of today. But in fact Painters are liberated today from expectations of subject matter limitation, constantly constrained by portraiture or landscape, the religious or the mythological, or drawn together by pre-feminist nudes of passive women or the idealisation of the male body, often painted by gay men (as one of the few outlets for forbidden homosexuality) or for their repressed gay patrons! Therefore, the likes of Michelangelo could sublimate his idealisation of the male nude under the cover of religious piety and what was the Renaissance but a remake of ancient Greece and Rome and a reference to an age where being a gay man was a common practice and not demonised?! Now who wants to rethink the Renaissance now then...and what is the 'male gaze' again?
However, it is because Painting is no longer enjoying quasi monopoly status that it led to an overreaction (by TATT in the 1980s) to Painting, that was itself unprecedented, requiring untried tactics to an unpredictable outcome that we can learn with greater authority about any medium. So, how have Painters responded? Becoming fiercer in defending their medium and more vocationally committed to it than ever!! Look out for the army of the practitioners of Painting who are largely bucking the trend by being self-taught. There is a new unofficial manifesto of Painters in the UK stating: 'We need all of the public to support Acrylic, Oil etc Painters that aren't accountable to TATT No wonder that Painters today feel that inadvertently TATT has set free Painters but no one else!!
Moreover, it was modernist Art and not technology that enabled the chain of events that would lead Ku this paradox!!?? Imagine that Painting is low tech and not threatened by obsolescence as tech Art is and is not time sensitive where History museums may store non-Painting Art as tied to the tech of that era, but Paintings Painted whenever may be displayed for ever! New, old, today, tomorrow, yesterday etc who needs chronological order when images aren't fixed to a certain decade or style? Painting doesn't have to subscribe to any moment or time limitation because we've been round the block of time already and we are only image based and not any longer fixed to a political or religious period! No? It must be infuriating for techies...but am I going to feel sorry for glorified IT specialist who keeps getting hacked-into by the latest model? Try creating and not inventing next time!!
Art tech rationalism still, however, remains the avant-garde, but it is over thought and over extended and subjected to deconstruction and decontextualization based upon its original appeal of technological 'state of the Art statement', that by its own very definition and justification cannot be permanent and is surpassed by the next generation tech. But isn't it ironic that when Painting is slow rolled or rejected, it has been educated by pre and post Renaissance, as well as 300 years of modernism that has so far been able to further modernist quantum jump in 3 different stages. Painters are more equipped and better refined and yet are pariahized, and paralyzed and ridiculed....is there a history of such poor judgement? Yup! Poor old Cezanne originally got a kicking from critics...So the medium of Painting has a history and a concurrent role to expose the limitations of TATT and provide a social function to make accountable and to lead innovation in spite of TATT resentment.
This time welcomes a new era of millions of Painters free from over-controlling centralisation, dictat and the overzealous intruder of TATT. The pendulum has swung in Painters favour, but his time Painters don't have to fill the void of an amalgamation of a public need for fame and fortune as well as having to replace and cover the void left by dependence on any need for video, film, DVD's, Computer games, fashion, photography, the internet, social media etc all rolled into one. Imagine the dependence of the Renaissance peasantry and urban poor relying on their take on public Paintings of Caravaggio etc. imagine that seeing these images were their only chance to visually inspire themselves whilst being subjected to illiteracy by post code??!! Tabloids were by word-of-mouth etc, an oral tradition of passing-on the greatness of Art in Paint, largely in churches etc and not exclusively on private estates.... Who actually knew more about such Art? Those with money who want to obsess about their own portrait, or those who got the beauty and the pain portrayed when a Painting is staged for the general public, happening and staged in their sort of part of the town? Was it Caravaggio who painted for the non-rich or did the non-rich inspire such Paintings for Caravaggio? So, who understood his contribution to the Renaissance more? The rich vain client or locals who didn't have to aspire to get Caravaggio?
Even Modernism of the 19' and 20' century versions can be attributed to an absence of high tech in Painting that TATT couldn't dare encourage. But the newer, the more expensive or more precious will always become superannuated by its own offspring! Art by tech will always departmentalise itself rather than admit its own fear of obsolescence I But Art by Tech is more akin to a chronological science project, which provoke mockery from those who prefer state of the' Art Art'! But when have Painters been so tech centric? The 19" century with new developments of Paints that are portable? Say goodbye to egg tempura and yet haven't we still used the same model of Paints since. So largely we have used the same sort of Paints for almost the same time as modernist Art began in the 19' century? Painting is hardly high tech then? If it cost more would TATT prefer it? So, let's not make Paints exclusively priced because they'd like us more and we'd be fitting in? Perhaps this space that has been left by TATT can never be replaced unless we were more a lucrative medium? But would even the expensive and financially successful Painters actually want to return to be readmitted to TATT?
But perhaps the contrivance and misappropriation aren't just anti-Painting agenda from TATT, which doesn't actually officially exist, or regularly meet or organise, it is more than just a happy accident that views are coincidental and coordinated. So why is it so different from the political establishment in the UK? Just different narratives and totally different demographics and ironically is more engaged in popular opinion than you think. There seems to be an awareness that Abstract Painting is not connecting to the public, like when there is blank incomprehension of it, where there is no access to understanding it and to most people it is more of a barrier than a working opening to understand and appreciate that type of Art. But these instincts are right, where Abstract Art is a personal experience but not a way to articulate a unified message. Furthermore, modernist Painting like Van Gogh, Picasso, Dali, and Monet etc are devalued by mass production of factories selling Painting short by over familiarity in poster form for £5 I No wonder parents may say 'my 7year old can paint like that!'. So why should people go to galleries? Because Painting is new for today! Yesterday is gone, and so have TATT's view on the Painting medium. So, why not paint, why not paint each other? However, TATT did not reject Painting on the back of a cigarette packet, it gave it some consideration! Whilst the Fine Art market goes through the roof, why not allow the medium of contemporary Painting plummet through the floor...must have taken you all of 2 minutes to come up with that bollocks!
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