Running with the Bulls

Recently a good friend of mine went on vacation to Spain. While there he decided it would be a good idea to run with the Bulls in Pamplona. He then proudly posted pictures of himself on Facebook adorned in the special tourist costume that paid organizers supply. It's a silly red and white outfit with a handkerchief tied around the neck, a quirky yet cheaply made ensemble. The post garnered a lot of likes and comments about how awesome this act was or about how crazy he is. I could tell when he got back that he was proud of the strong positive response that he got. What he failed to realize is that people were responding to how unusual of the post was rather conveying true admiration. It breaks up the banal cat, children, or political memes that get posted.

I believe that most of the people that liked his post actual had a somewhat lesser view of him afterwards. The hidden disapproval was not analysed or really acknowledged by the post-likers, they just went on with their lives with this new vague feeling that there was some amount of hollowness and lack of self awareness in their bull runner friend. Then there are the friends that didn't like the post. Most of them didn't approve of, or respect, the runner's actions and were cognizant of this disapproval. You don't get dislikes on Facebook posts and culturally people most don't express disapproval in this format. Because of this the bull runner friend only sees the superficial likes and is unaware that he has overall damaged his brand.

Much of the romanticism and fame attributed to running with the bulls comes from Earnest Hemming who famously documented his participation. Hemingway was a deeply troubled man constantly battling depression by throwing himself into dangerous situations and by drinking himself into oblivion. He fought in the Spanish civil war just for the excitement. By risking his life he thought that he would be able to feel more alive. This may have worked, but the relief would have been only temporary. After battling depression for most of his life he finally killed himself. If this is the reason a modern bull runner is participating it is nothing to congratulate, it is a sign of deep sorrow and sign that bad things are on the horizon.

Fortunately my friend did not run with the bulls to feel alive. His reason is why the vast majority of people participate, to prove to others how interesting and adventurous they are. The goal is to be seen participating but to expose yourself to the smallest risk possible. This is where the paid organizers come in. They know the patterns and psychology of the bulls, where and how the tourists should stand. They don't want you to get hurt, it would be bad for business. The safest thing is to post the customers in a large corners off from the typical bull path yet still very close and at a point where the bulls are already fatigued. The people should form a wall, the bulls are not really malicious, more frustrated and anxious. The wont plow into a wall of people that are not impeding there escape. they will attack the fools that get out in the stream driven by agitation and frustration. So really for these people its all for show. You could run out into the street for a bit when it looks safe just to prove to yourself that you're leading a rich life but you probably won't. People that are true adrenaline junkies tend to do activities for themselves and worry little about it being documented for their friend's approval. Mountain bike a difficult trail, rock climb, swim in the ocean, and don't worry about it getting photographed.

Then of course there is the moral issue involved in the tormenting and frightening the bulls. You say to yourself that they are just running through the streets, no harm right? Even if you believe the bulls don't mind stumbling and sliding around as hordes of primates taunt them, you should at least consider the ultimate fate of these creatures in the ring and what event this charade is really promoting.

The Herd

About a year ago I saw a couple articles in the news about an artist that was making waves with their portraits of people with two sets of eyes and lips but ones nose. I wish I could remember the name of the artist ( let me know if you know). The effect plays with the human mind and how it processes faces. It is disorienting and a little unsettling. Art writers praised the artist with claims that it provoked thought of mans interpretation of himself and the fragility of our reality. The praise was over the top. The paintings were just really another type of countless optical illusions that confuses the mind, not a great new form of art that explores the human condition.

So the over the top praise was mildly annoying and insincere, there is a lot of that regarding art critique so I didn't dwell on it much. Then I started seeing knock-offs showing up in my art feeds in Tumblr and Twitter. At first they were direct translations of the original art executed with varying degrees of skill. The amateur artist would sometimes refer to how unusual their thinking was and implied the  perception that they were exploring new territories and periodically their social media followers would praise the novel style. Of course, in reality they were just copying an exiting art meme and hoping to gather attention by jumping on the trend. Their work actually sends the opposite impression they are seeking. It's a statement of their own lack of creativity.

After a couple months a new phase for this trend emerged. artists began altering the technique. Why not 3 sets of eyes and no lips? So then there was an even greater stream of variations. The new wave a practitioners no doubt thought they were exploring new territories and establishing their fringy creativity. Then someone started posting pet animals with three eyes, the extra eye between the normal two. The optical confusion effect was completely absent in this case. for some reason the human brain doesn't struggle with that configuration. Around that time the craze died abruptly and its been a few months since I've seen any multiple eyes art in my feed. Now I wait for the next fad.

The Dali Scam

Often times people that don't really like art will want to create the image for themselves of a cultured, mysterious, unorthodox thinker. What they usually turn to is Salvador Dali. Hang a few pictures Salvador looking cross eyed with his silly waxed mustache twisted in strange directions and people in your life will get the impression you are complex. It is also important to hang a couple of his famous paintings with melting watches or elephants with spindly legs. This will prove that you have the taste to show his most iconic works.

Dali was only able to foist his art on the world because of the unique time period when he was a young man. Art had been moving away from realism starting with the impressionists. A large part of this was spurred on by photography. Why paint a meticulous representation of the real world when photography will always be more accurate? The lack of color photography helped slow the transition away from realism, while oddly the non-realists used the newly available vivid paints to create striking compositions.

Dali was able to exploit this transitional time period. Many people at that time despised abstract art as deviant. But Dali was able to use realistic painting style to pull in people that wanted something different but couldn't handle abstraction. His strategy was to combine objects that were not normally not associated or warp the appearance of real world items. The problem is, by and large the items combined were purely nonsensical, like boats with butterflies as sails. On top of the arbitrary nature of the compositions the execution was usually somewhat amateurish are cartoonish. Paintings were typically quite drab and lacking any real vibrancy.

Dali peddled his fame as a product unto itself, constantly mugging for the cameras, crossing his eyes and meeting any celebrity as long as the encounter was photographed. Its interesting that a google image search on Salvador Dali yields very little of his actual artwork but instead the results are image after image of Dali hamming it up. He got to the point where he stopped paying restaurant tabs and instead would just doodle on the check as his form of payment. The last decades of his life he would sign blank canvases and other impoverished artist would paint their art resembling Dali's style but making sure his signature remained  untouched. Now most paintings from this period are looked at suspiciously by art dealers for likely being fake and are valued far less than earlier paintings. On top his lack of ethics regarding his art, when he was younger he aligned himself with Fascists in Spain who persecuted many of the talented abstract artist of the era.

I sometimes meet someone and they tell me they like Dali and they hesitate so the can appreciate how edgy I must think they are. Then when I visit their home the only Dali related object they have is one of those framed infernal photos of Dali twisting his mustache. They don't really like Dali they just like the impression Dali appreciation will make on others.

Sonia Delaunay

When I think of the artworks of Sonia Delaunay I can almost believe that I had been delivered to an alternate universe where household art and museum art actually co-exist, having equal relevance, rather than separated into exclusive camps. As a painter of the modern life Delaunay was mesmerized by the effects of incandescent lighting, especially the electric spheres or miniature suns that lit the trendy Parisian venues she often visited like the Bal Bullier dance hall, and Magic City. the electric lights became abstracted interior circles, dividing white light into its component colors, rather like a crude version of Chevreul’s color wheels, where complementary colors opposed one another.

Nothing is regular in her exploration; rather it is instinctive and even haphazard except for her use of simultaneous color contrasts which was meant to mimic the musicality of the spoken word and as a result we get simultaneity in pieces but never in the whole. She was however, acutely aware of limits to the simultaneous and she delighted in making paintings that were impossible to take in one sitting. This daydream painting of virtual music can never really control the content of a mind in turmoil, though it is surely influenced by it.

My Garage is where I Find Peace

Pat Passlof

Pat Passlof was born in Brunswick Georgia in 1928, she idolized and studied with Willem de Kooning at the infamous Black Mountain College. Later, she took his advice and relocated to New York City, beginning a painter’s life. In Manhattan, Passlof continued to get painting lessons from de Kooning and became familiar with the characters infesting the 10th Street artists’ community. With these connections Passlof met the painter Milton Resnick, who she later wed. Resnick then introduced the youthful Passlof to the painting theory of Hans Hofmann, whose ideas, gathered in The Search for the Real influenced an entire generation of painters. The New York art scene of the early 50’s was rife with conflict, power, and personality. And it seems the Passlof was for a time caught in the tsunami, producing lean and ambitious, although somewhat derivative art.

Ionian (1956)

In an example of this early youthful work, Ionian, the upper right corner diminishes into a blue expanse, but this perception is quickly degraded by some form of object, laid flat by a pattern, that appears to enter the space from afar but spins the traditional perspective by bringing any reading to a stop as it is gouged by a thick black line. This line causes a sudden sharp change in the interpretation of the space by pulling the yellow and red striped object into the inner space and hammering it flat. De Kooning often created similar obstructions when he used collage to disrupt any fluid spatial view. something akin to a tabletop rises from the bottom of the canvas into the center of the image plane. This gives the viewer something stable to hold onto before the left side dissolves into a field of spotted, wild brush strokes that seem combine with and float above the virtual table. The rough strokes dissolve on the right into one of the two honest uninterpreted portions within in the work. The thick, white smear, in the lower right combines with crumpled and stained edges whose grimy greens and yellows holding the paintings corner one second and seem to slide under its phantom neighbor the next. The second subjective element locks into the surfaces far corner at the bottom right of the top left quadrant. This white form is surrounded and given heft by thick dark outlines. The shape itself, the paint layers, and the black, white and gray color palette would feel comfortable in one of de Kooning’s black and white paintings from the late 40’s. All of these parts; inside and out, natural and imaginary, pattern and undiluted expanse, all come together to shake a simple interpretation of space or to combine that reading with plastic interests to blast the viewer from a state of peace.

Sutbury 2  (1957)

Some paintings push the observer harder and deeper into the pool of abstraction. Sutbury 2 (1957) is a beautiful plane crash of a painting. But even the dappled and dirty grays that border the work on both sides before shooting into the middle contain enough deft to separate form and distance to create enough surface and emptiness in what would otherwise be a train wreck. On areas the surface paint is scraped away so the underbelly becomes an object. While in others object and weight are pulled apart when an upper layer is painted over a surface so carefully that the foundation becomes a structure and an integral part of the artwork. Rapidly applied strokes add to the urgency of the piece, as does the artist’s signature quickly scribbled across the bottom. These final elements borrow heavily from de Kooning, while the color combinations can be found in the important abstractions of Alfred Leslie.

Portrait and a Dream

Portrait and a Dream  (1953) by Jackson Pollock

notable works by Jackson Pollock

"I don’t paint nature, I am nature" is only a few rungs up the art historical ladder from ‘It’s art because I say it is’ and only a few more rungs down from ‘Pollock Sucks!'. But what if we get away from of art-speak cliches? We are used to those over repetitive narratives of brave creativity leading to the isolating bubble of celebrity, crippling self doubt and full-blown self destruction. 

But there are far more delicate contradictions that forever bounce round this black echo chamber of art history and bounce off ever diminishing barriers. On one hand we have this notion of Pollock providing something akin to Greenberg’s vision of a truly modern painting that has finally abandoned all literary, unnecessary content inherited from European modernism. On the other, we have this notion of visual art as primarily a record of a thing in time, becoming the factual membrane and documentation of a performance and movement. But this gives us a method to extract more difficult and demanding aspect of Pollock’s art, lying under this chaos of myth.

And so it appears that Portrait and a Dream, 1953, is a final self-reflexive musing on the opposing yet rotten center of Pollock’s later art. The left hand tangle has been likened to a woman during child birth, a nocturnal orgasm, and a mother decapitating children. The fat, bruised and mangled face on the right takes a long look back at failures. Like us, it can only see the hypnotic dancing tumble of lines as they untangle, erupt, and bleed their way across the image. They simultaneously belie some kind of ecstatic sensation of a dark nightmare mixed with ecstasy, but then it all dissipates back into the canvas,  that unforgiving fabric of the canvas.