Winter
- Stephen Hornsby-Smith
- Sep 29
- 3 min read

Here's some rhetoric? 'The 20th century almost killed us all, but at least we dismantled the Painting medium and its infrastructure '. Today we are still not including many courses of basic drawing classes in our Art Colleges and their curricula are actually almost punitive towards it! Let's try another. 'Art is our solar system, painting our planets and endless subject matter throughout all human experience has always offered Painters as our human and artistic gravitational pull ' So, that's pretentious bullshit! But the medium of Painting is our political weathervane, whether we like it or not! It is often even a shield whilst Painters have seen many governments come and go in the 20th century alone, it has seen many radicals turn to extremism and hate criminality - wouldn't it be an idea to learn from that experience? Painters were at the forefront against Hitler and Stalin, Mussolini and Franco etc, who all tried to destroy Modernist Painters who they thought were degenerate or bourgeois etc. But they haven't done as good a job in silencing modernist Painters as the hapless ATT have done since the 1980s!
TATT didn't do it out of malice but malaise, and they accepted various contradictory elements of the structuralist arguments with little resistance! TATT may have been subtle and incredibly intellectual, but they had a blind spot. Instead of just seeing Postmodernism as a distilled opportunity to dissolve the Soviet system and Marxist Dialectical Materialism, it missed the fact that both advocating Painting and advocating its absence (vague issues of short term Form') meant that it didn't see the potential of Painting being a deterrent , political symbol of political resistance of an experiential nature against all forms of Totalitarianism ,yesterday, tomorrow and today!! , Selfies are photos of our tech today but Painting remains the go between of our human brains and how we physically visually manifest them, because it is a visual 'face' against censorship and finally a permanent episodic cycle and revivalist manifestation of the imperfect visible hand of humanity confronting predatory AI. The fact that this low tech human visual imperfection will and has reinforced all human activity not reliant on tech, makes Painting ever more pertinent especially as our AI tech evolves and advances beyond us, has to be a significant path for all Painters to lead those who are both tech junkies and tech naive; it is a hands-on-hearts, hands with brushes and hands off our medium! It is a demand that those of us who started our art process in the 1980s and continue today say: 'About bloody time!! '
Acquiring the dubious rights to expose the conformist nature of Soviet Painting nevertheless allowed us to see today's shift and substitution of the Marxist paradigm for popularistic nationalistic today, whilst its connection is a 20th century anti-Western new alliance based upon having had a 'Revolution' and a centralised dogmatic state!!?? It seems as though 2 systems of both Capitalism and a revolutionary past, have allowed Iran, China and Russia to claim to be at the vanguard of new Conceptual Art from once closed societies today!!??? Welcome to the international market of contemporary Art! How do we know it is not self-critical? If it is critical, it is limited and permissible only if it is sanctioned by the state where profit can also be an advert for how tolerant or globalistic a country is! It's propaganda value! i Its priority is to make money and import foreign currency, buy political credibility, and feed into their dictatorial societies but very competitive economies in order to reinforce this new adaptation to China's 2 systems! No doubt that in many ways these new Art beacons of Conceptual Art are leading these very global markets??!! But if these new Oligarchs of Art are part of the relegation of contemporary Painting, then TATT is to blame as much as anyone!!
Esotericism and 'Form ambush' actually expressed a pecking order in the 1980s, and created an elitist snobbery that still hasn't been dispelled.! That is their grubby hands on the Painting medium! But those hands need some reverse engineering to put a brush in it. Perhaps at least a social medium free of Columbus like fear that we are Painting 'towards the end of the 'perspective, abstract or figurative etc? We are not going to fall off the edge of the world even if you have tried to create one! It's not just 180 degrees it's 360 degrees, the world has evolved since the 1980s, but you haven't! I would love to paint on or with rock from all planets in our solar system, but our idiosyncrasies that make us individually unique makes for an ever-expanding palette and subject matter...our own universe is expanding within an ever-expanding multiverse! An image within an image???!!! Our 'future history' will clearly be a visual and imaginative one, hands on!
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