I am not talking about Realist art per se, although a
realist painter will be included in my discussion, but an attitude toward life
that is realistic. I first touched on this in my critique of the Boston Art Scene and the Marathon bombings. I had just finished up a show in Boston that winter
with Paul Pollaro. I had not shown in Boston since 2007, so it was a re-acquaintance
with the Boston art world. The then current Boston art scene seemed to me to be
more interested in providing well-crafted objects and weak sentimentality than
with trying to understand the depths of the world we live in. Just the ripples
on the surface not the powerful forces that shape that surface. The political elite’s reaction to the Bombings
later that Spring seemed to say that they had rather support a veneer of
meaning, propped up by platitudes, than deal clearly with the nature of
the world that produced such horror. In the case of the Marathon deaths, the
political class brought out the big guns to channel Boston’s enthusiasm for
sports so as to heal an emotionally rattled city overcome by this tragedy. It all
reeked of Babbitry.
I recall in high school working late one night on an essay
on "Moby Dick". I could not figure out the mystery of it all and the solution of
a mystery seemed to be essential to the book and to writing a successful essay.
Who is Ahab, what drives him? How do we function is a world shaped by mad
leaders? It seemed ridiculous to hand in a paper that left the big questions
unanswered. I am sure that most of my
classmates could have cared less. I remember going to bed at midnight, the night
before the paper was due, somewhat disheartened with my unresolved essay, only
to wake up a few hours later with an insight into the problem. It lay in the “Try
Works” chapter. Recently, because I couldn’t remember what the chapter was
about , I googled the title of the chapter. I was not surprised it was a meditation on the
need for perseverance and faith as one passes through the dark night of evil
and sorrow, captured by the patterns of fire and smoke spewing from the rendered
flesh of a freshly killed whale. “There is wisdom that is woe; but there is a
woe that is madness.” says Ishmael. How do we navigate that distinction? It
made me think of Clint Eastwood in “The Outlaw Josey Wales” who hovers between
the two woes; one a wisdom born of sorrow; the other a kind of madness, akin to
Ahab’s?
All I have reread at this point is that chapter but I am
astonished how much there is to unpack in each sentence. The end of the short chapter
describes Ishmael’s realization that he has been steering the Peqoud ass-backwards
and is close to capsizing the whole boat for me is a searing image of an upside
down topsy-turvy world full of mistakes that are combined to weave the fabric
of reality itself.
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| "Victim "2014 Deyab |
There are a handful artists, and I will include myself , who are emotionally robust enough to look at the shape of things and
depict them accurately. I think the key to their way of thinking and feeling is
an ability to see things in context: a kind of intuition of the whole or a
knack at seeing what “is” in the context of the unseen. Larry Deyab at first
glance can appear to be a so hip and contemporary with his preferred use of spray
paint, photographic journalistic source material and a Richard Prince sense of
the edit and erasure. But his art embraces a totally un-contemporary sense of
horror more akin to Goya than Prince as he responds to the ongoing chaos of the
Middle East. His preferred media of spray paint provides an identification with
the lives of the victims who have been reduced to poverty and terror and if
asked to paint their condition could not go the a fine art store to buy
brushes. It conveys a sense of urgency and identifies with the victims with the
brush of urban anger,spray paint. His subject matter heretofore dealt the
Arab-Israeli conflict, now stands aghast before the unwillingness of the
Western powers to engage in the Syrian conflict that is moving rapidly toward
genocidal proportions: Images of blind fate, the hammer of doom. Victim and
victimizer. The emotions go beyond the photo journalistic source of the images
but seem more akin to some generational and macabre dance of evil.
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| "Sargasso Sea," Mugar 1997 |
Excess is at the heart of these conflicts. Over the top annihilation
of the opposition, a fury that knows no boundaries. Confronting and engaging
this aspect of life and death is not something easily achieved with Realism,
nor with Abstraction for that matter. I attempted to engage these issues in my work
from the late Nineties, shown at Crieger-Dane in Boston and has remained an
issue that seems to escape the critics. Or maybe they see it but it is that
very notion of excess that puts them off. Somewhere in my career I lost any
desire to make art as a vehicle of self-expression. The Neo-Expressionism of
the 80’s seemed to be the last gasp of that self-centered version that came out
of Germany in the 20’s and 30’s.I wanted a language that would embody the state
of things of things as they are. Things as they are swimming in a sea of forces
bigger than themselves. But also as inevitably forced into conflict with each
other. The titles of the work gave them away: “Mackerel Crowded sea “,”Sargasso
Sea”, “Footprints”. The first title is taken from Yeats’s “Sailing to Byzantium”,
a poem that establishes a sharp contrast between the modern reality of man as
swarm and a more god based hierarchy that lends a ground of eternity to our individual
existence. “Sargasso Sea” created in my mind a sort of organic island without
substance that houses enumerable species….”Footprints” imagines a larger force
squashing lesser forces. The latter title and painting is no permission for this
sort of oppression but a rather sang-froid description of academic politics. I
have always felt that the sadism that we love to imagine is so far from our day-to-day
lives virulently in the perverse little politics of the world we work in.
Mike Ananian’s realism evokes implicitly a kind of male
stoicism that reminds me of Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman”: the life of
someone who has to get up for work each morning to fulfill his sales quota, whether
there is pleasant background music or not. I also think of Mamet’s “Glengarry
Glen Ross”, where real estate brokers driven by the Darwinian will to prevail, are
capable of undercutting their colleagues, selling questionable properties and
committing crime. There is no room for humor or grace, only the hope that their life of struggle has some heroic meaning. The characters in
Ananian’s portraits seem to carry their faces like Roman portrait busts without
any halo of divinity.
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| "Helmet" by Billy Lee |
They are strangely reminiscent of his UNC-G colleague Billy Lee’s sculptures of heroic hoplite heads. Guardian’s and sentinels that are eye-less. They don’t observe anymore; they have been reduced to pure
will. They are holding their ground full of a contained phallic fury.
Maybe my work and the work of Deyab, Lee and Ananian is lacking
in irony, the staple of contemporary art. We are not
fetishistic in the creation of our art objects, just forcing our images to remind the
viewer of the hardness of survival. No bromides, no fatuous statements about
commodification. This work is not fun. No matter how hard we try to create fantasies about the human condition and leaders and gurus to fulfill them we
can’t escape the grim reality of conflict.
