One of the protagonists, Abe Strapp, is the personification of evil. His actions make a hard scrabble existence in a barren outpost called Mockbeggar into a place of extreme misery. Clearly he is a psychopath and though inventive at getting what he wants, can’t control his violent, destructive proclivities.

The other protagonist, Abe’s sister, “the Widow Caines”, is his mortal enemy and their rivalry shapes the narrative. The Widow, unlike Abe, is well able to master herself. She is smart, hard-working, practical and thrifty. But the siblings are alike in their greed and lack of human feeling. They are both driven to own as much of Mockbeggar as they possibly can.

So while The Adversary is a depiction of dystopia, it is also a study of two types of commercial activity. Abe represents the ravaging imperialistic type that does not create but seizes what others have built. He has no sympathy for those who are suffering or in desperate need. The parallels between the Abe Strapp character and Donald Trump are inescapable.

Bullying, misogynistic, violent and mean, they are only smart enough to get what they want through force. So they surround themselves with gangster henchman to do their dirty work.

The Widow is the type that works hard to build wealth and standing, using her native cleverness, and grasping any opportunities that arise. She represents the type of commerce that accumulates wealth by outsmarting the competition and obsessive drive. If an analogy to the US is extended, the widow represents the Democratic party’s supports for an unregulated market. In both a poverty stricken Newfoundland outpost and the USA today, the dominant paradigm is that unhindered trade creates wealth that trickles down to lesser folk.

The fact is that in both scenarios wealth does not trickle down, and a substantial portion of the population struggles with poverty and hardship. So in the interests of maintaining the existing social order, Democrats in the US support social services and a limited distribution of wealth. In the early Newfoundland version, the Widow takes orphans and runaway slaves into her orbit to use for her own purposes, in exchange for providing them with sustenance.

The siblings are similar in that they both got a head start in commerce through inherited wealth, then increased their holdings through favourable market conditions and buying up weaker enterprises. Their allegiance is to accumulation and self-interest rather than any moral code or social values. They are dissimilar in their approach to commercial activity. Abe, like the imperialists, ignores the rule of law and accepted behaviour and acts with impunity because there is no one to stop him. The Widow, like the Democrats, prefers to work within the law because the laws serve her interests. But when imperialists have the upper hand and ignore the law, as is the case today and in Mockbeggar 300 years ago, free-enterprisers like the Widow are at a disadvantage.

Abe Strapp’s manager, The Beadle, is the archetypal middleman. He represents the middle powers and the middle class. While not having power himself, he does the bidding of the tyrant and ignores the morality or even legality of his actions. He is beholden to the despot and shares his misogyny and lack of empathy, so is not inclined to oppose him. Though he is the spiritual leader of the community, like the siblings, his allegiance is to Mammon, not God.

So The Adversary works on many levels. It is a disturbing image of a dystopia, and a study of the two sides of commerce – the irrational, destructive, violent side in brutal rivalry with the hard-working, logical, self-interested side.

The story is also a timely allegory of the present day in which these two sides are locked in battle. Trump personifies the lawless, violent imperialist side as the US attacks Venezuela, kidnapping its president and his wife, killing its defenders then stealing its oil. Trump is facilitating the most brutal genocide in recent memory, while attacking any Middle Eastern country that opposes their occupation.

By attacking Iran, he is willing to risk an uncontrollable escalation of war and world-wide disruption of trade and no one seems willing or able to stop him. Now that Canada and Greenland are also on the US menu, Canadians and Europeans are being forced to rethink their complicity in US imperialism.

Like the Beadle these middle countries and their middle classes have complied with US aggression because it served their interests. Their hope is that the world will return to the unregulated free trade regime of the Democrats by which at least their middle and upper classes benefited. They prefer to ignore the fact that, as in Mockbeggar, the poor never benefit from the wealth created by the acquisitive merchant class, but suffer the most during hard times.

So who is the adversary? Aubrey, the Widow’s head man, and one of the very few with integrity in the community, says, “The Fortress walls are useless… The adversary is already within”. This dire prediction comes after the Widow made sure her late husband’s Will disinherited a cousin who helped build the business ,so that she alone inherited. The adversary is not one type of commercial activity or the other, but avarice itself.

Mass atrocities are taking place in Sudan’s North Darfur state, warns Doctors Without Borders.

The book is consciously, egregiously grotesque and not a light or easy read. Passages like the scene of drunken louts in a contest that involves eating a live Sparrow are almost too revolting to bear. But these images reflect our willingness to witness horrific behaviour that we tacitly endorse though our silence. We are bombarded by images of a real-time genocide: children shot at close range by soldiers, the torture of prisoners, the destruction of homes and livelihoods and the herding of refugee into camps that are then bombed from the air. We resign ourselves to mass species extinction, wildfires, flooding and drastic climate variability because we have become deadened to suffering and cowed by propaganda. Toward the end of The Adversary, the berserk tyrant has a helpless youth beaten almost to death before the villagers finally rise up to stop him. Crummey’s work asks us when we will finally have the courage to rise up.

Image from the Washington Post’s “The Endless Call.” This page is part of a resource collection on Black Freedom Struggle history. This article is on the uprisings sweeping the nation in the wake of George Floyd’s murder.

The Adversary is well written and a compelling novel, though it is not without flaws. There are too many characters and it is sometimes difficult to keep track of them. But such a minor quibble is irrelevant given the challenging and highly relevant message Crummey has delivered. The Adversary is a must read.

The post The Adversary: A Must Read first appeared on Marion-Lea Jamieson, Artist.

Debt

The most important message in the excellent film, Surviving Progress was that debt is the driving force behind the world’s current economic, social & ecological crises. As apostate Wall Street bankers and IMF bureaucrats explained, debt is the force behind: destruction of the world’s most crucial ecosystems; poverty and social upheaval in developing countries; and the likely end of civilization as we know it.

In pre-capitalist societies, debt was owed to the state rather than private individuals. When the burden of debt for most of its citizens became unreasonable, in the interests of avoiding revolution, the rulers would forgive all debt, ride out the consequences & start afresh.  With capitalism, however, debt ownership has concentrated in the hands of 10% of the world’s private individuals, the financial oligarchy, and they do not have any interest in the health or even continuation of society as a whole.  As a class they would rather destroy the planet than  give up their self-interest.

Though the financial oligarchy has a great deal of power, those of us with surviving democracies do still have the means to fight back through the political process.  As Michael Moore says, “we’re a democracy – we can pass any laws we want!” Whether this is still true remains to be seen. Surviving Progress clearly advocates that we elect rulers willing to cancel debt in order to save civilization rather than the financial oligarchy.

The US Debt Crisis

This might be easier said than done. According to the US Treasury, the federal government currently has $36.22 trillion in federal debt and every day, the US spends $2.6 billion on interest. As of September 30, 2024, the US debt-to-GDP ratio was 123%. This means that the US debt was $35.46 trillion, which is higher than the GDP of $28.83 trillion for the fiscal year 2024. The main cause of this crisis is that revenue from taxes exceeds spending. If the US were to fairly tax some it’s billionaires, this problem would go away, but unfortunately the billionaires are in charge, and choose to cut spending instead. As the billionaires who hold the US government debt are also in charge of the country, they would not be willing to see any forgiveness of the debts they are owed. Fifty+ years of policies designed to enrich the few, at the expense of the country as a whole, have created this debt and the enormous inequalities in wealth & power that threaten the stability of the country and, by extension, the world.

Canada’s Government debt accounted for 69.4 % of the country’s GDP in March 2024, so it is not as dire as in the US. Many Canadians may believe that debts owed by our neighbours are not our concern, but because Canada is so closely tied to the US, it they catch a cold, we sneeze. Or more accurately, we catch our death. The current US president’s threats to annex Canada stem directly from the debt crisis in that country. That crisis has been exacerbated by de-industrialization and de-funding of the educational and other social systems so that the US has become less competitive internationally. Other countries like China have surged ahead economically and creatively, especially in technology, and the US is falling ever-further behind.

Instead of reforming an unworkable economic system of distribution, ruling elites in the US, both Democratic and Republican, have chosen to step up the extraction of wealth from other countries. In addition to the list of countries from which the US has traditionally appropriated their wealth, the US has added Mexico, Panama, Denmark, Europe and Canada. So US debt has become Canada’s problem.

Annexation

If the US were to “Annex” Canada, it is unlikely that we would we become a 51st state, as Trump has said, but instead would become a protectorate like Puerto Rico, without voting rights. As in Puerto Rico, the main source of revenue for the country would be from impoverished young Canadian women leaving their families to become US nannies and cleaners, while Canada’s natural resources would go south. Would Canadian ruling elites fight to prevent the annexation of Canada by the US? Canadian Author and Activist, Yves Engler suggests that Canadian armed forces are so heavily integrated militarily with the US, that they might instead participate in a possible invasion.

“The depth of the Canada-U.S. military alliance is such that if US Forces attacked this country it would be extremely difficult for the Canadian Forces to defend our soil. In fact, given the entanglements, the Canadian Forces would likely enable a US invasion.” Engler goes on to suggest that, “It’s time politicians start demanding Canada decisively break away from the US empire and the place to start is severing the military ties.”

In addition to withdrawing from NATO & NORAD, Engler suggests that Canada should sever its economic ties to the US, as it’s global aggression will not solve it’s economic problems and debt crisis. “The G7 has successfully asserted capitalist/NATO influence. But the imperial alliance is facing renewed pressure from the expansion of the BRICS. The Brazil-Russia-India-China-South Africa recently added Indonesia as a full member and numerous other associate members. As an expansionist Donald Trump becomes president of the USA, all those who support a truly independent Canada must work towards a multilateral world. We must expand our relationship with other countries and move away from our dangerous economic, diplomatic, social and military reliance on the United States. A good first step would be Canada withdrawing from the G7. “

Who Runs Things? Running Man

While heightened US aggression to Canada & others can be traced to its debt crisis, the US debt crisis itself can be traced to the incredible wealth that has been allowed to flow from the public to the private sphere – to individuals, corporations and oligarchies. With that wealth has come unlimited power so that the wealthy are able to manipulate the political system to ensure wealth continue to flow from the public to the private sector.

How is a mere artist to respond to the threat, not only to Canadian, but to global economic, social and political stability? This is, of course, not a new threat, as this situation has been brewing since corporations first began their rise to power and the possibility of true democracy began to fade in North America. As an artist, my response, 25 years ago, was a series called Running Man. This was an overtly political theme and it drew criticism from my peers, as the dominant paradigm is that contemporary art must not be didactic and present a point of view.

Running Man appeared as three drawings for Artmoney, an international art project presenting a global, alternative currency. Artmoney is currency-sized original art, contributed by artists around the world. My contribution was 3 bills showing the evolution of a running man into a corporate man – or the man who runs things.

The motto on each bill, “This is the way the world will end“, is an embarrassing misquote from the poem The Hollow Men by T. S. Eliot. The final stanza may be the most quoted of all of Eliot’s poetry: “This is the way the world ends/ This is the way the world ends/ This is the way the world ends/ Not with a bang but a whimper.”

This motto was also carved around the base of a piece called Special Cases in 1999.  As described in more detail in my blog On Corporate Power, that sculpture was about Running Man in his bureaucratic context – ensuring that economic  demands must always take precedence over social or ecological needs.

Running Man also took the form of a public art piece in Kelown BC, where he stands today.

Economics: The Dismal Science

There is one dominant economic philosophy that has led to the unmanageable debt and enormous inequalities that now threaten the stability of the US and Canada. This is the approach to economics characterized as The Chicago School. This philosophy of unfettered free markets and little government intervention, has been adopted by ruling elites and has led to waves of successive financial crisis and growing income inequality.  One alternative economist suggested that the Chicago School economists are, “the product of a Dark Age of macroeconomics in which hard-won knowledge has been forgotten.”

My father, the late Dr. Stuart Jamieson, was an economist who applied his hard-won knowledge to improving the lives of working people.  As a Keynesian and Labour Economist, he supported the rights of workers to organize and improve their negotiating position with the owners of the means of production.

Like many progressives, Stuart Jamieson’s faith in the union movement was shaken by events in the early 1980’s in British Columbia.  A draconian far-right government, bent on removing the social safety net, galvanized the many factions on the left into a unified force.  But on the eve of a threatened general strike, the unions struck a deal with the government that protected workers and left the poor, sick, disabled & disadvantaged to fight for themselves. Disillusioned with the union movement and the potential for Economics to solve real-world problems, Jamieson turned to direct action.  He joined the movement to save the old-growth forests in Clayquot Sound on Vancouver Island from timber harvesting and was arrested for blocking access to logging trucks.  In his late eighties, he was fitted with an electronic monitoring ankle bracelet and placed under house arrest at his home on Bowen Island.

This betrayal of a is an example of why many distrust the union movement and socialism. When push comes to shove, they tend to sell out in order to strike a deal that will protect their interests. This distrust of unions and socialism was based on the writings of Proto-Economist Karl Marx.

Marx, one of the most influential figures in human history, argued that accumulation of capital shapes the social system and that social change was about conflict between opposing interests driven by economic forces. He theorized that human history began with free, productive and creative work that was, over time, coerced and de-humanised, especially under capitalism. Marx criticised utopian socialists, arguing that small scale socialistic communities would be bound to marginalisation and poverty, and that only a large scale change in the economic system can bring about real change. In other words, the workers of the world should unite in order to create a force large enough to confront capitalism. But this large scale change seems farther off than ever as workers in the US support politicians whose interest are diametrically opposed to their own.

 Environmentalist David Suzuki tried to provide an alternative economic model in an article in the now defunct magazine, Common Ground.

Suzuki suggested putting a value on natural capital such as wetlands and forests, noting that “These economic benefits have even received the attention of the World Bank, which plans to assist countries in tracking natural capital assets and including them in development plans, in the same way we track other wealth using the GDP index“. However, given that this is the World Bank, they would likely be interested in tracking natural assets the better to turn them into wealth for transnational corporations.

The concept of turning natural resources into wealth was the inspiration for my sculptural piece below called Conversion, where green trees become gold to a backdrop of graffiti.

Suzuki’s idea of using capitalism to fix capitalism is the preferred path for those who want to tinker with the system to protect the environment, but leave the system itself intact. This has, unforunately, become the platform of the Greens in Canada.

Other ideas in that issue of Common Ground were more practical. The article by John Restakis, Beyond the Camps: Occupation and the Co-op Connection, provided a more practical approach to change that can be activated by ordinary people.  John Restakis was the author of Humanizing the Economy – Co-operatives in the Age of Capital. He advocated participation in the co-operative movement which has a long history in Canada.  As he said, “we have the experience of 170 years of co-operation to see that the tenets of democracy can be applied to economics just as in politics and that they work. It is this heritage of economic democracy that is invaluable to the movement that so ardently seeks an alternative to the status quo“.

As examples he pointed to the survival rate of co-ops which is double that of conventional businesses. He highlighted how credit unions, by responding to the actual needs of their members, didn’t engage in the fraudulent financial speculations that bankrupted the economy and had no need of massive public bailouts. He suggested that shifting our money from banks to credit unions is something concrete everyone can do. Co-ops reduce inequality on a global level because fair trade, based on the return of profits to small producers through their co-ops, isn’t based on the extraction of profit by exploiting the weak. And at a time of global economic recession, the experience of the recovered factory co-ops of Argentina, Uruguay and elsewhere shows how workers and the communities in which they live can take back control of shuttered factories and provide a living for workers and their families.

The left-wing Co-operative Commonwealth Federation, or CCF, was a Canadian political party that was the forerunner of the now centrist New Democratic Party, or NDP.  Founded in 1932 it was an aggregation of socialist, farm, co-operative and labour groups, with a number of goals, including: public ownership of key industries; universal pensions; universal health care; children’s allowances; unemployment insurance; and workers compensation. It also stated that “No CCF Government will rest content until it has eradicated capitalism and put into operation the full programme of socialized planning which will lead to the establishment in Canada of the Co-operative Commonwealth.” In 1939 and again in 1941, my grandmother, Laura Jamieson, was a CCF MLA elected in Vancouver Centre.

In 1944, the CCF formed the first socialist government in North America in Saskatchewan, but during the Cold War, it was accused of having communist leanings. The party addressed these accusations in 1956, by replacing its original goals with more moderate ones, and becoming the NDP.

This underscores that Canada has roots in the cooperative movement and that this philosophy can provide an alternative to the global, dog-eat-dog capitalist system. This alternative would entail local and regional self-reliance and shortening the supply lines for imported and exported goods. This would not only make areas of Canada less reliant on global trade, but would lower greenhouse gases produced from shipping products over long distances. If the regions of Canada were to shorten supply lines and become as self-reliant as possible, this would lesson impacts from extortionist trade policies of the current US administration. The art of economics could be made to work for, rather than against, Canadians.

It would not, however, protect us from invasion. If Canada survives this administration, the ruling elites would do well to learn from this period. That lesson is: if we side with the school yard bully while he steals all the other kids’ lunch money, it should come a no surprise when he comes to steal ours.

The post The Art of Economics first appeared on Marion-Lea Jamieson, Artist.

I worked with the Running Man image exclusively from about 1997-2002.  This series, using an image of a man running headlong into the future and oblivious to the past, explores the ideas and assumptions behind the corporate free-enterprise paradigm, consumerism  and the impacts of these ideas on society, economy  and  environment.  The Running Man image is also a vehicle to explore the inner workings of individuals who are pressured into participating in relationships of dominance and ruthless  competition. These people are always in a hurry, rushing toward their own and the planet’s demise.  They must avoid personal attachments that might jeopardize the struggle to get ahead, so personal relationships are neglected in favour of business acquaintances.

Running Man sometimes becomes aware of the emptiness of his inner life but the feeling soon passes as the strength of his ideological commitment to the accumulation of wealth reasserts itself. A wonderful French film in the Vancouver Film Festival called My Piece of the Pie depicts the character of Running Man. This film was especially powerful because it did not follow the usual Hollywood formula where the nasty, ruthless rich guy sees the light at the end of the movie and, through personal transformation, becomes more sensitive & caring.  This film illustrated the reality of the right-wing corporate mind-set: they just don’t get it.  No matter how clearly he is shown the evils and grief caused by a fundamentally unethical economic system,  Running Man is just is too entrenched in his position to change it.  From where Running Man sits, everything looks just fine and when he is exposed to criticism of his world, he can’t figure out what people are griping about.  To him, self-interest is the basis of a divine plan for the creation & distribution of wealth.  Those with the most self-interest create the most wealth and then this wealth will trickle down to the rest of us. If wealth doesn’t trickle down, but continues to float up, this is caused by a lack of gumption among the have-nots.  He believes free-enterprise capitalism is an economic system perfectly aligned with natural human impulses, and those not benefiting are just too lazy to take advantage of its opportunities. Like the pre-revolutionary French aristocrats, Running Man lives in a hermetically sealed world, protected against morality, reality and empathy.

The Personal is Political

The series began as a personal catharsis  for understanding men who flee attachment. But in the process, I became aware that I too was a running man, avoiding real life by chasing success and worldly concerns. As they say, artists always make self-portraits.The Running Man image first appeared in a series of oil paintings in 1997. Below is its first appearance as a painting/sculpture study of a potential clear sheet acrylic sculpture.

Though women can and do participate in institutions of dominance, Running Man remained gender-specific to reflect the predominantly male corporate culture.

Another very early Running Man study in oils,  was again, a study for a sculpture. There is a figure in a business suit cut out of clear sheet acrylic and superimposed on a scene, in this case, a selection of homey items.

I began to make the connection between the problems that men face in relationships with the larger competitive, alienating, consumer culture. As my understanding of the scope of this series progressed, I began to cut figures of the man in the suit out of plywood, put a clear acrylic briefcase in his hands and set him up in 3D configurations. This business-suited figure represented discorporate man, optimizing capital and cutting losses. The 3D series went on to examine the larger influences that were breaking down family, community and society and became a larger critique of global capitalism and its impacts on the economy, society,and the environment.

Another Running Man painting/sculpture study from this period introduced the idea that later became the wooden sculpture All That Glisters (shown below) and finally the large steel sculpture Running Man installed in Kelowna BC (shown above).

The first sculptural piece in the Running Man series was called Special Cases (shown below) and it was an image about the exploitation of natural resources. The clear acrylic briefcases contain water, trees and fish, which are the big three resources of my home province of British Columbia. The piece illustrates that resources are extracted here, then processed elsewhere so that the value of resources does not benefit local economies. I exhibited this piece in 1999 in a sculpture exhibition at the University of Northern BC.

At the time, I had no capability for shipping transporting or installing sculptures, so I roped the plywood figures and the large wooden base to the top of my Ford Escort wagon and headed toward Prince George. Just before Hope I could see plywood figures sliding off the back of the car in my rear-view mirror, so I pulled off the highway and struggled to tie down my load.  Somehow, I got to Prince George where I installed the piece, stayed for a couple of days with a kind friend, then headed home.

When I made Special Cases, I had a day job as a planner for the BC Agricultural Land Commission (ALC), and was sculpting on days off. The title of the piece, Special Cases was inspired by my work at the Commission and an earlier job with the BC Ministry of Environment .  Both bureaucracies were charged with the responsibility of protecting natural resources, but in both jobs, senior bureaucrats and politicians would find ways to avoid carrying out their legislated duties. 

A favourite method of weaseling out from under the requirement to protect agricultural, forests, water and other resources, is to class them as “Special Cases”.  So for instance, though the ALC was mandated to preserve & protect agricultural lands, a category of lands would be classed as Special Cases so that they can be developed in a business-as-usual approach. So new highways, roads, pipelines, pumping stations and prospecting for gravel, oil or minerals could be approved without an application.

This is Running Man in his bureaucratic context – ensuring that the dominant paradigm, which is that economic  demands must always take precedence over over social or ecological needs, prevails.  Briefly stated, the dominant paradigm assumes: 1) the universe revolves around the economic needs of one species (human beings) rather than the needs of the other 1.7 million species; and 2) human beings have a God-given right to consume an unlimited amount of other species and natural ecosystems. This paradigm forms the basis of individual, corporate and government decision making in BC and throughout the world.

The next piece in the series was called Colour Theory and it examined the social impacts of unrestrained capitalism on the lives of workers and others. In this piece, Running Man comes in two sizes: large and powerful, and small and powerless, and expresses relations of dominance. Poorer males accept the domination of wealthy, powerful elites only because the system allows them to dominate females and those further down the economic ladder. The more rigid and repressive the power structure in a society, the greater is the need to encourage subjugation of one group by another. Otherwise, that large pool of disaffected males whose lives are getting harder each year, would turn on the ruling class.

The larger version is the man in the business suit, with a clear acrylic briefcase and a hole where his heart and should should be.  His look is outdated because his character was formed in the 1940s and ‘50s when the current system began.  In a world of diminishing natural capital Running Man must become increasingly fanatical in order to ignore the fact that the system is unsustainable. 

In this piece, the briefcases contains smaller, less powerful naked running men, some of which are dismembered. They represent the social dislocation that occurs when workers are transients, chasing uncertain employment created by increasingly mobile capital.  These smaller figures also appear in a sub-series on the theme of graffiti, discussed in another blog. The title Colour Theory also comments on the ways in which elites set various ethnic groups against each other in order to deflect attention away from the fact that the economic system does not serve the majority’s interests.

The third sculpture in this series of wood & sheet acrylic works is called  All That Glisters (shown below). In this piece,  the briefcases contain bright but worthless baubles, illustrating the distorted values of a corporate culture in which economic wealth is valued over ecological and social health. This piece served as a model for the monumental sculpture of Running Man that was created in & for the City of Kelowna in 2002.

I created a mock-up of the sculpture as it would look onsite.  Here is one of the first images I sent to the City.

I used the above image of All That Glisters, placing it on a pedestal and photo-shopped it into the site. Originally, I had wanted to place the Running Men on a stack of coins & experimented with versions of a stack of coins as shown. The edge of each coin was to be ribbed like a real coin, but the cost of an 8′ pedestal of that diameter and the plasma cutting of the ribbing was prohibitive.

I soon realized that 3 parallel figures did not create a sufficiently stable form, so using cardboard models, I triangulated the figures as shown. I also reduced the pedestal to one coin balanced on a column with CNC routered images of naked running men.  The column referenced ancient columns that featured ancient Running Man successfully defeating his enemies.

Though I did as much work as possible myself, much of the fabrication was done at a fabrication facility called Monashee and other metal shops. Shown below are one of the figures freshly cut out of one 3/8″ sheet of mild steel 8′ x 24′ and being sand-blasted prior to painting..

After the symposium I wanted to experiment with concrete, especially casting in concrete. I cast 3 small running men using a rubber mold, (Smooth-On’s Brush-On 35) and a plaster mother mold to cast the three concrete guys for Off-Centre (below).  The concrete mix I use for casting was just cement & sand (1:3) and water mixed 1:4 with white glue (Polyvinyl acetate).  I got the steel flat stock machine rolled and hung a mossy rock from a steel chain.

Off-Centre depicts Running Man‘s world. The rock represents the earth and around it run the guys in suits. They see the earth as a small part of the economy, an “externality”. As it is external to the economy, it has unquantifiable economic value and therefore isn’t factored in as wealth. This is an inversion of the real world in which the economy is merely one activity by one species on the planet, which is entirely dependent on the earth’s ecosystems for its continuance.

Off-Centre was shown at Peace Arch Park which straddles the Canadian/US border. The rock originally hung from a single chain so that it dangled within the steel rim.  But viewers swung the rock on the chain until it flew up and broke one of the figures.  So a second chain was attached to prevent people from playing with the artwork.  Mindless abuse such as this has had a profound effect on contemporary outdoor art.  In order to withstand the rigours of public interaction, funding bodies favour stolid geometrical shapes designed to withstand oafs that climb on, swing from and have their pictures taken atop any and every artwork in the public realm. This is a far cry from earlier works that overcome the limitations of the material to create sweeping, swooping lines and delicate forms . Nothing can project from public art that will not be snapped off; no small part can be attached that will not be removed; and no paint, powder-coat or other effort to create a durable finish can survive being scuffed and scraped by shoes, pen-knives, stones, skateboards and anything else.

This phenomenon is discussed in more detail in another blog bu suffice it to say that most people have no respect for public art that is unlucky enough to be placed in their path.  Everyone assumes that if something is not a sidewalk, a park bench or a fire hydrant, it must be a climbing apparatus. We in the West need to educate people not to abuse sculpture the same way that people have been coerced into not blowing smoke in the faces of fellow diners or not letting their doggies poop on the sidewalk. In Paris or Rome, every museum and art gallery had groups of school kids sitting in front of works of art learning that these things are an important part of their culture.  As you tour the Tuileries Garden you do not see kids swinging off heroic outstretched arms or using urns as skateboard ramps.

Here in North America we accept that this is will happen and only permit idiot-proof works to be displayed. But even the sturdiest, most well-designed & fabricated work isn’t safe from the public.  An example is a great sculpture called Olas de Viento or “Wind Waves”  by Yvonne Domenge which sat overlooking the beach in Richmond’s Garry Point Park. When I last came across it there were several children climbing through the piece while their Mom attended to her cel phone.  The kids were throwing rocks at the inner surfaces, which is clearly a common activity as the paint finish was chipping off in many places.

Though it is outdoors and relatively unprotected, Seattle’s Olympic Sculpture Park discourages vandalism of its priceless sculpture collection by unambiguous and continuous signage “Do Not Touch the Sculptures”.  No namby-pamby “please do not climb on the sculptures for your own safety” here.  So no one so much as steps off the foot paths for a closer look.  Every sculpture everywhere should have such signage.

In addition to favouring bullet-proof public art, funding bodies are also reluctant to fund controversial art. Since Kelowna’s bold commissioning of Running Man for its downtown core, there have been no further Running Man commissions. Carved Bears, leaping fish, abstract forms and colourful banners abound and are not likely to generate outraged letters to the editor. And private commissions or purchases of anything in the Running Man series have been noticeably absent as well.  Those who can afford to buy artworks (the big collectors in my town are property developers) don’t want artworks that challenge the status quo.

The last piece in the Running Man series was a maquette for a steel & resin screen called The Many Moods of Running Man. This would entail plasma-cutting running man figures out of 3/8″ steel then filling in the cut-outs with coloured sheet acrylic. I can see it now at a scale of 1:3 or maybe 1:4, astride a grand plaza with a water feature murmuring in the background and the sun casting colourful reflections of Running Man! Below is the maquette in wood and Mylar.

The piece is suggestive of the way corporatism co-opts spontaneous creative cultural products for its own purposes.  So if, for instance,  grass-roots organizations are successful in promoting human rights, ecological awareness or if an art movement or school arises that captures the public imagination, corporations are quick to co-opt this energy to their own ends. Thus the life in every worthwhile cultural development from rap to the “Green” movement is neutralized as a vehicle for profit. 

This was the last piece in the series as I had to admit that buyers weren’t lining up to put a Running Man over the sofa. So for the next 5-6 years I worked on abstract sculptures, creating a two and three dimensional vocabulary of forms that were complete as discreet units and worked together as an overall theme. I also pushed the limits of my technical abilities to design and fabricate works in three dimensions.My thoughts on abstract art have been marshalled in another blog.

The Running Man series challenged the unspoken yet pervasive artistic convention that overtly political art is somehow diminished by its subject-matter. In many ways, I agree that art should operate on several fluidly interconnected levels, rather than be nailed in place. And no matter how strong a point of view an artist intends to project in a piece, viewers see it from their own perspective and interpret artworks in various ways. For instance, most people I spoke to about Running Man assumed it was an almost humorous depiction of how rushed and harried we all are, and didn’t connect it to any larger context. As I had put out a request for baubles, many citizens of Kelowna responded, creating a community connection to the piece.

But at a time in history like the present, when the political spectrum keeps moving farther & farther to the right, as an artist it is difficult to focus on creating new artworks. Yes, performances, galleries and books counter the violence and destruction that is taking place. But these can act as a counter-balance while at the same time trying to engender political awareness. This was the goal of Running Man.

The post Running Man first appeared on Marion-Lea Jamieson, Artist.

This Is Happiness describes the transition of a small community from a traditional way of living to one of modernity. The transition takes place in the Irish village of Faha on the western edge of Ireland, via the arrival of electricity in the 1950’s. Until that time, the villagers are described as living much as they had for the last thousand years, using horse drawn carts, oil lamps, and in touch with the rhythm of the seasons. Very few ventured outside the limits of the village if they could avoid it and most were suspicious of “foreigners”, such as those from the next village. The community was largely self-supportive, interdependent, close and for the most part, happy. The villagers entertained themselves with music, stories and interpersonal relationships and didn’t miss modern conveniences they’d never had.

This village is a classic example of what Max Weber, a founding figure in sociology, would have called Gemeinschaft or one with strong traditional bonds of family and local community. Villages like Faha offer support and a sense of belonging that is important to everyone’s identity, so that people in Gemeinschaft communities tend to be grounded and emotionally strong.

Modern or Gesellschaft-based relationships, according to Weber, are rooted in “rational agreement by mutual consent”, the best example of which is a commercial contract. In these societies, the individual is the important element rather than the community. But because of this fragmentation of community into autonomous individuals, people are less connected to each other and where they live, and therefore less happy.

This is Happiness doesn’t describe the world after the electrification of the village when it becomes part of modernity. But Williams provides hints of what is coming and what will be lost, especially the music and language that provide connection and joy to the villagers. With electricity will come the tyranny of clock time, as opposed to the unregulated, convoluted but free sense of time that it replaces. He describes this pre-electrified sense of time:

“To conquer both time and reality then, one of the unwritten tenants of the local poetics was that a story must never arrive at the point, or risk conclusion. And because in Faha, like in all country places, time was the only thing people could afford, all stories were long, all storytellers took their, and your, and anyone else’s, time, and all gave it up willingly, understanding that tales of anything as aberrant and contrary as human beings had to be long, not to say convoluted…”

Williams also describes the villager’s music, like storytelling, as insubordinate to clock time:

“One of the things about Irish music is how one tune can enter another. You can begin with one reel, and with no clear intention of where you will be going after that, but halfway through it will sort of call up the next so that one reel becomes another and another after that,, and unlike the clear edged definitions of songs, the music keeps linking, making this sound map Even as it travels it, so player and listener are taken away and time and space are defeated. You’re in an elsewhere. Something like that. Which, I suppose, is both my method and aim in telling this story too.”

It is rare and pleasurable for an author to so clearly link his writing style to his subject and theme, and Williams has succeeded in writing a novel that reflects the time, the music, the people and their stories. Williams’ novel takes us deep into the heart and soul of the community of Faha which is the source of the power of the music and storytelling in that place:

“It seems to me the quality that makes any book, music, painting worthwhile is life, just that. Books, music, painting are not life, can never be as full, rich, complex, surprising or beautiful, but the best of them can catch an echo of that, can turn you back to look out the window, go out the door aware that you’ve been enriched, that you have been in the company of something alive that has caused you to realize once again how astonishing life is, and you leave the book, gallery or concert hall with that illumination, which feels I’m going to say holy, by which I mean human raptness.”

This is as good a description as any I have read of what makes any book, music, or painting worthwhile.

This is Happiness is an unabashedly nostalgic look at a pre-modern Irish countryside that fostered local arts and language born of the people and the place where they lived. Though not described, there is an implicit contrast with modern cities and arts that are divorced from the souls of those who write or create. But Williams is not attempting to provide a balanced vision of that rustic Irish past. As many other novelist have written about small town rural life, it can be stultifying and even violent toward those who don’t fit into the village norms.

In his study, Suicide, Emile Durkheim said, “…the taste for individuation, and the love of progress…cannot exist without generating suicide.” In order to combat “corrosive individual egoism,” and “the moral poverty of our age”, he suggested that decentralized occupational or social groups could replace the strong sense of community and connection to each other that we have lost with modernity. Ideally, these would also tolerate differences and allow for individual beliefs outside the norm.

This is Happiness raises similar questions about progress. Are we any better off driving in cars rather than horse drawn carts? Are we any better informed with electronic devices rather than books? Are we any happier with the over abundance of consumables in our stores? Williams doesn’t temper his strongly held conviction that we are not, having given up the true sources of happiness, which are the stories and music that come from our souls and connection to the place where we live.

In earlier blogs I have delved into the issue of modernity and the seemingly unstoppable onslaught of progress that has devastated the planet and risks the continuing existence of life on earth. If we had stayed at the pre-modern, pre-electrical, pre-industrial stage, there would be a much smaller number of human beings consuming a much smaller proportion of the earth’s resources. Other species would have benefited if we had remained in a state of Gemeinschaft, living in damp stone huts at a subsistence level. While this state may not have been one of happiness for all human beings, it would have been a state of greater happiness for other species and the Earth as a whole.

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Time’s Arrow

The assumption that artists must produce work that reflects the time in which they live is a widely accepted and unquestioned truism. This is part of the paradigm that, as time is moving forward, we must all keep in step, or that art, like technology, must progress. Otherwise, we may become “behind the times”, believed an undesirable place to be. This means that artists whose work is considered daring, cutting edge and contributing to a progressive understanding of art, are constantly supplanted by the next wave.

An example of this was enacted in a play produced many years ago called Red, by John Logan, directed by Kim Collier and performed at the Vancouver Playhouse Theatre.  It was one of the last main stage plays the Vancouver Playhouse Theatre Company performed before it closed in 2012. What a delight it was to see such great acting, dialogue, direction, & sets. Classical, full-on theatre such as this is scarce these days in Vancouver and elsewhere, as there seems to be less and less funding for the arts. Available performance space is increasingly devoted to “multi-media performances” with video, photography, sound (as opposed to music) and as much new media as possible, perhaps to appear contemporary & relevant to the Tweet generation. Not that Red didn’t use video & stills, but they were used in such a way that they didn’t clutter up the play unnecessarily.

The play, taking place about 1968, foreshadows artist Mark Rothko‘s suicide in 1970.  The visual metaphor is that of the colour black, symbolizing death & destruction,  gradually engulfing the colour red, symbolizing life in all its beauty & horror. It was an apt penultimate play for an excellent theatre company about to be scrapped.

The play suggests that much of Rothko’s mental anguish was caused by his feeling of growing irrelevance as the art fashion of the day moved to Pop Art as defined by such artists as Roy Lichtenstein

Artists who follow their inner direction and volition with luck can find themselves on the crest of the latest fashion in art. Then, when the tide turns and brings the next wave of young artists, influenced by a new set of circumstances, the formerly fashionable artists are considered behind the times. As the critic Harold Rosenberg said, Rothko and his contemporaries tore down “…unlimited formal experimentation and parody and fragments of radical ideas” only to have their own ideas derided as egotistical and outdated by the next generation of artists.

The following is a quote that I wrote down without noting the source.” The rhetoric of isms and counter-isms has vexed the art world since the Second World War with new stylistic trends set up every few years to oppose whatever has become fashionable (postmodern succeeding modern, deconstruction succeeding that, and so on). The superficial theoretical pretensions of the various after-modern “schools” use cheap pronouncements cribbed from works of philosophy or literary theory.  Art enjoys an oedipal energy in which creation is always destruction, usually of one’s most intimate influences.”

This Oedipal energy is as integral to art as it is to the culture of consumption.  We are constantly reminded that we must have the newest, best, most fashionable and most cutting-edge of everything, from electronics, to hairdos, to art.  God forfend that we should have last-year’s, let alone last decade’s, version of anything.  More profoundly, this is a belief that we are moving ever-forward on a trajectory of constant improvement. In this view, we are ever-striving onward & upward toward social & individual perfectibility in which all wrong thinking & wrong acting will be eradicated.  So the clunky cars of the 50,s, the horrendous politics of the 40’s, the economic errors of the ’20’s, the stultifying social mores of the 1900’s, and all the ignorance and pestilence that went before is being left ever-further behind us.  And the more recent & contemporary the art movement, the more likely it is to be closer to the goal of full understanding and intelligence.  It’s a view solidly ensnared in the belief that time’s arrow moves in only one direction – forward into the future and we must be constantly changing with it. The type, quality or direction of change is not important, as long as we are not left behind the times.

Recent thinking is that time moves not only forward but also sideways (backwards is disputed). We are programmed (no doubt for our own sanity) to only perceive the forward motion of time, but it’s sideways mobility accounts for the frequently reported non-linear temporal events. This has implications for our attitude toward not only art but all human creative activities throughout time.

Transcending Time

An excellent website called Art History Unstuffed provides a meaty discussion of Abstract Expressionism.  In the section called How Abstract Expressionism Re-Defined Painting and Art: Abstract Expressionism and Meaning, the author, Dr. Jeanne S. M. Willette, states that, “The Abstract Expressionist artists translated “meaning” from subject matter to the broader and deeper intent of the word.  For these artists, “meaning” had to be profound and transcendent so that art could rise above the rather minor role it played during the Thirties as handmaiden to politics.”  She sums up her section of this discussion on Abstract Expressionism by saying:

“With Abstract Expression the primary moral act is the decision to paint, followed by the question of what to paint at the time of the end of painting.  In a world that has experienced an all engulfing war and a horrifying holocaust and a brilliant blast of annihilating light, painting becomes a moral activity, one of the last possible ethical gestures. Abstract Expressionism was an art of pure idea, considered to be sublime, even transcendent and thus reconnected with the early Romantic tradition of landscape painting in America.  Nineteenth century American painting had sought God in Nature, but in a universe that had be denaturalized and had been scourged of God, the only transcendence or saving grace was art itself, the last refuge of godliness.”

On the one hand, this assumption appears to be the epitome of hubris – the idea that we can attain spiritual transcendence and godliness by playing with colour & form.  And it suggests arrogance and egotism to assume that the arduous discipline necessary to find God, as taught by the world’s major religions over thousands of years, can be cheerfully circumvented by picking up a paintbrush and going at it.

On the other hand, as Barnett Newman said, “The artist expresses in a work of art an aesthetic idea which is innovate and eternal.” This idea captures the essence of abstraction as the artist seeks to remove all vestiges of identification with a particular place & time and creates a work that is universal. In this there is an element of spiritual transcendence and some abstract art could act as a bridge between the spiritual and the worldly. This appears to be the case for the Rothko Chapel, in Houston, Texas. As the magazine, Texas Monthly says: “To its devotees, the chapel is sublime: a darkened cosmos that facilitates powerful spiritual experiences. The space, which features fourteen dark paintings by Rothko, is famous for being dim and moody. It’s a sensory deprivation chamber that also functions as a theological deprivation chamber. Many customary signifiers of religion—statues, altars, stained glass—have been stripped away. It is, as Houston architectural historian Stephen Fox puts it, “a space that seems sacred for a post-religious world.””

But transcendence in abstract painting is not easy to achieve, and much of it is either a substitute for the ability to draw and create realism, or is a lifeless copy of a fashionable abstract painting style.

But to imagine that one artistic approach, such as Abstract Expressionism, can replace the search for spiritual enlightenment is suspect, since some of the most brilliant artists found more solace in drugs or the bottle than in their work. For Mark Rothko, a successful career of creating powerful paintings was not enough to defeat despair. To imagine that we can replace God, however understood, with Art is like assuming we can replace the signpost for the road, or more accurately, the road for the destination. Art is a genuine bridge between the spiritual and the worldly, but not the only one, or the one that works for all artists. Art, like yoga, prayer and other disciplines can lead toward spirituality, but surely the guidance of tried & true religious practices is needed. Art alone is too amorphous.

Conclusion

If there is a point to this discussion, rather than just being a ramble about the mysteries of Art, it is this: art is not, and should not be, time bound. There is no overarching need for artists to be limited to expressing the fashions or paradigms of the culture of the time in which they live. Artists can work with what Wllette called, “an art of pure idea“, or can build on the best work of past eras, confident that time is elastic and art can transcend time. There is more on the topic of art and the time in another blog.

The post Behind the Times first appeared on Marion-Lea Jamieson, Artist.

Not the Gift I Had Hoped For

As an artist, I had high expectations for this book, and that it would, if not keep me sane, at least help me understand and work within the commercial context of our lives. Hyde goes some way toward helping with the understanding part by looking at late capitalism from a unique perspective. And he describes the relation of artistic activities to our overwhelmingly commercial society in (for the most part) an interesting way. But he makes no attempt to help artists work within this system, because, as he puts it, “this is not a “how to” book. So I was disappointed because it is very easy to come up with a critique of capitalism, no matter how unique, but it is another thing to suggest alternatives, either at the individual or the governance level. I was also disappointed that the book did not translate all that well across disciplines.

Works for Writing Maybe Not Other Arts

Hyde claims many of his assumptions hold for writers, painters, singers, composers, actors, and film-makers, but he is writing from a writers perspective. For instance he talks about the suspension of disbelief, “by which we become receptive to work of the imagination”. But in painting, there is no real requirement to suspend disbelief as belief is more of a verbal/intellectual process that does not hamper or enhance a viewer’s perception of visual art. The writerly focus ovetakes the middle section of the book, which is an exhaustive analysis of the work of two poets, Walt Whitman and Ezra Pound, that was of limited interest to this reader, a painter.

The book was started in 1979 and first published in 1983, a time when it was still considered appropriate to use the masculine pronouns, “man”, “his” and “he” instead of non-gendered plural forms like “humans”, “people” or “they”, and Lewis uses masculine forms throughout. He does, however, include Chapter 6, A Female Property that has to do with women being given in the marriage ceremony as a gift. He points out how clearly this underscores that women are still considered as property to be used in bartering. His very practical suggestion is that, in addition to a father giving away his daughter to the groom, the groom’s mother should give away her son to the bride.

These may be niggling criticisms because the real point of Hyde’s book is to understand the market economy – how it evolved, its most salient characteristics and what it means to be an artist in such an economy. He develops his argument in the first part of the book where he differentiates between a gift economy where items are given without expectation of rent and a market economy where anything given to another is expected to come back with interest. In the last part of the book he explores how art fits into this.

He has some keen insights and, like most good writers, can put into words ideas that the rest of us have trouble expressing. For instance, he describes how a gift economy differs from a market economy: in a market economy, all gifts are destroyed. “If the increase of gifts is in the erotic bond, then the increase is lost when exchange is treated as a commodity transaction (when, in this case, it is drawn into the part of the mind that reckons value and quantity).(p196)

Artists with Dark Sides

Flannery O’Connor

Though in some ways The Gift does not translate well among artistic disciplines, Hyde includes great quotations that are universal, such as this one from Flannery O’Connor:“No art is sunk in the self, but rather, in art the self becomes self forgetful in order to meet the demands of the thing seen and the thing being made.” (p.195)

While this is an eloquent, uplifting statement, it illustrates that an artist can be gifted with imagination and skill but step outside the zone of self-forgetting and become as blind and bigoted as the most brutally ignorant. Recently found correspondence indicates that O’Connor had a “habit of racial bigotry…She was disturbed by the presence of an African-American student in her cousin’s class; in Manhattan, she sat between her two cousins on the subway lest she have to sit next to people of color. The sight of white students and black students at Columbia sitting side by side and using the same rest rooms repulsed her.”

Ezra Pound

This is the shadow side of many successful artists that is not adequately addressed in Hyde’s book. For instance in the chapter dedicated to analyzing the life and work of Ezra Pound, he does not address the question of how Pound can be a self-forgetting artist capable of making poetry that “meets the demands of the thing seen and the thing being made” and a rabid anti-semite. Instead he goes into a somewhat annoying digression about Hermes and the shadow side that doesn’t ring true.

Pablo Picasso

It is not only writers like O’Connor or Pound with a shadow side, such artists abound in every discipline and their presence is not clearly explained in The Gift. For instance, Pablo Picasso has been called the most influential artist of the 20th century but today, Picasso is more often talked about as a misogynist, sociopath and narcissist. Yes, it is difficult to be a sensitive, creative person in a culture of getting and spending, but Hyde does not explore how an artist can be gifted in one area but spiritually disabled in others. He believes artistic creativity “has the power to assemble the elements of our experience into coherent, lively wholes”, but this is clearly not the case for some artists who have stunted relationships with fellow human beings.

So we have to go along with Hyde’s compartmentalizing of the creative imagination so that the person making art is in a different zone than the person out in a culture distorted by the marketplace.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Esemplastic Power

He relates artistic creativity to the concept of the gift in that “the imagination has the power to assemble the elements of our experience into coherent, lively wholes: it has the gift.” Samuel Taylor Coleridge describes the imagination as “essentially vital” and takes as it’s hallmark it’s ability “to shape into one,” an ability he named “the esemplastic power.” An artist who wishes to exercise the esemplastic power of the imagination must submit himself to what Lewis calls a “”gifted state,” one in which he is able to discern the connections inherent in his materials and give the increase, bring the work to life….the artist who succeeds in this endeavour has realized his gift. He has made it real, made it a thing: it’s spirit is embodied in the work.”(p.195)

Hyde goes on to describe how “…the spirit of the artist’s gift may enter and act upon our being. Sometimes, then, if we are awake, if the artist really was gifted, the work will induce a moment of grace, a communion, a period during which we too know the hidden coherence of our being and feel the fullness of our lives…any such art is itself a gift, cordial to the soul.”(p.196)

And “we participate in the esemplastic power of a gift by way of a particular kind of unconsciousness, then: unanalytic, undialectical consciousness.” “The creative spirit moves in a body or ego larger than that of any single person. Works of art are drawn from, and their bestowal nourishes, those parts of our being that are not entirely personal, parts that derive from nature, from the group and the race, from history and tradition, and from the spiritual world.”

Joseph Conrad

Hyde quotes Joseph Conrad, “the artist appeals… to that in us which is a gift and not an acquisition and, therefore, more permanently enduring. He speaks to our capacity for delight and wonder, to the sense of mysteries surrounding our lives; to our sense of pity, and beauty, and pain; to the latent feeling of fellowship with all creation – to the subtle but invincible conviction of solidarity that knits together the loneliness of enumerable hearts, to the solidarity… which binds together all humanity – the dead to the living and the living to the unborn.”

Thanks Anyway

As I have said in earlier blogs, the greatest gift writers can give to other artists is to put into words truths about art that practitioners of other disciplines do not have the skills to do (this sentence is a case in point). So I forgive the gender-specific pronouns, the long diversion into analyzing poetry and the lack of a “how-to” because The Gift is one person’s offering to nature, the group, the human race, history, tradition and the spiritual world. Thanks so much, Lewis.

The post The Gift by Lewis Hyde: With Thanks first appeared on Marion-Lea Jamieson, Artist.

In the adjacent upland area of the French Creek Estuary we counted more Juncos and more Spotted Towhees than I’ve ever seen in one place, a couple of Hummingbirds, some Quail, many Sparrows, and a few birds that are rare at this time of year such as a Townsend’s Warbler. There were at least 14 majestic Great Blue Herons nesting in the trees and flying overhead to fish. On a cold day in March the trees and bushes were simply alive with birds and it was entrancing.

The joy of seeing these exquisite creatures up close in my binoculars is my reason for bird watching. These elegantly feathered animals so entirely at one with their surroundings, are a strong contrast to us humans in our environment. We constantly ward off our surroundings with walls, heating/air conditioning, machines, clothing and devices. But birds belong to a different, more attuned, more perfect way of life than us domesticated human beings. Is this innately what it is to be human or were we at one time more like birds and other wild beings? Their beauty, super-awareness and finely-focused attention on the present moment, every moment, is like a lesson in how to be in the world.

In Margaret Atwood’s forward to The Bedside Book of Birds: An Avian Miscellany, by her late husband Graeme Gibson, she describes what bird watching meant to him. ”…every new Bird was a revelation to him. He wasn’t much interested in making lists of the birds he had seen, though he did make such lists as an aid to memory. Instead it was the experience of the particular, singular bird that enthralled him: this one, just here, just now. A red tailed hawk! Look at that! Nothing could be more magnificent!“

But yesterday it was difficult to be enthralled in the present moment knowing that an area of marvellous bird habitat, adjacent to the protected area of French Creek, will be bulldozed for more human habitat. Sadly this is not a protected area but private land slated for development of 14 homes. This is the dilemma of bird-watching: the more you watch them the more you treasure birds, and the more pain you feel as their habitat is destroyed, lot by lot, forest by forest, ecosystem by ecosystem.

In several earlier blogs I have explored birds in both sculptures and paintings such as the painting below. Then Again was part of a series called Time Lines, that used schematic images inspired by European Neolithic art from 7000 – 3500 BC. The series examined the linear concept of time or the understanding that we are constantly moving forward into the future and out of the past. It explored the possibility that time is a more circular phenomenon that is relative or even illusory. The simplification of images in Neolithic culture produced an abstract, symbolic, conceptual art that subverts the idea that art is progressing, and that whatever is created today is superior to what went before.

Time LInes also continued the exploration of the relationship between humans and other species using figures with both animal and human characteristics in 2D and 3D. This investigation was ongoing for many years and always seems relevant. Creation is the largest and final piece in this series. The melded figures contrast with the belief, common in Western and modern cultures, that humans are separate from and independent of nature. The series referenced ancient animal/human mythological images suggesting that the split between mind and body, human and natural, is a fairly recent paradigm that replaced the previous understanding of a more interactive relationship with other species.

Some of the paintings, like Flight, shown below, were painted as though sculptural. Flight, features a melded human/bird figure, and visualizes a sculpture that I could make in steel at some time in the future. It was inspired by the elegantly constructed armour in European museums, and how wonderful it would be to use the same techniques to build a sculpture on the animal/human fusion theme.

This series included some sculptures such as the one in wood shown here

These works are in praise of birds – these gorgeous, jaunty, mysterious beings. May they persevere, survive the Anthropocene era and continue for eons to come as they have done for the past 150 million years.

The post Bird Watching: A Love Affair first appeared on Marion-Lea Jamieson, Artist.

How does the word relate to art? In her book, Summer, Ali Smith takes a stab at it: “Art is about the moment you’re met by and so changed by something you encounter that it takes you both into and beyond yourself and gives you back your senses. It’s a shock that brings us back to ourselves. Art is something to do with coming to terms with and understanding all the things we can’t say or explain or articulate with help from something which we know will help us feel and think then articulate those things even at times like this when feeling and thinking and saying anything about anything are under impossible pressure. What art does is, because we encounter it, we remember we exist too, and that one day we won’t.“

Then there is Aldous Huxley’s ambitious work, The Perennial Philosophy, (1945, Harper Perennial Modern Classics, edition 1990) that makes the connection between transcendence and the arts.

Huxley says the perennial philosophy has to do with”… the metaphysic that recognizes a divine reality substantial to the world of things and lives and minds: the psychology that finds in the soul something similar to, or even identical with, divine reality; the ethic that places man’s final end in the knowledge of the imminent and transcendent ground of all being -the thing is immemorial and universal.“(p.vii)

This is a meaty tome and not an easy read, but I ploughed through it wondering why a gifted writer like Huxley would be interested in such an esoteric topic. The answer becomes apparent about halfway through the book where he talks about simplicity.
“…real simplicity, so far from being foolish, is almost sublime. All good men like and admire it, are conscious of sin against it, observe it in others and know what it involves; and yet they could not precisely define it. I would say that simplicity is an uprightness of soul which prevents self-consciousness…. That soul which looks where it is going without losing time arguing over every step, or looking back perpetually, possesses true simplicity. Such simplicity is indeed a great treasure. How shall we attain to it? I would give all I possess for it; it is the costly pearl of holy scripture.”(p113)

Huxley and Pablo PIcasso agreed on the goal of simplicity and spontaneity:
“Only the most highly disciplined artist can recapture, on a higher level, the spontaneity of the child with its first paint box. Nothing is more difficult than to be simple.”(p116)

and
“…it is by long obedience and hard work that the artist comes to unforced spontaneity and consummate mastery. Knowing that he can never create anything on his own account, out of the top layers, so to speak, of his personal consciousness, he submits obediently to the workings of “inspiration”; and knowing that the medium in which he works has its own self nature, which must not be ignored or violently overridden, he makes himself its patient servant and, in this way, achieves perfect freedom of expression.”(p117)

Another example of an artist who acheived exquisite simplicity is the sculptor Alexander Calder, whose mobile is shown below.

However, Huxley goes on to clarify that perfect freedom of expression and even the creation of perfectly beautiful and inspiring artwork is not the highest goal. The ultimate goal is overcoming the sense of a separate self and instead, identifying with what is called “the ground” which is God or the Tao as it exists in an eternity outside time.

And he says the corollary of this explains the nature of good and evil:
“… good is the separate self’s conformity to, and finally annihilation in, the divine ground which gives it being; evil, the intensification of separateness, the refusal to know that the ground exists.”(p184)

The problem arises when Huxley gets onto the topic of “subhuman existences”. He states that “…every other species is a species of living fossils, capable only of degeneration and extinction, not a further evolutionary advance…of all this living matter only that which is organized as human beings has succeeded in finding a form capable, at any rate on the mental side, of further development. All the rest is now locked up in forms that can only remain what they are or, if they change, only change for the worst. it looks as though, in the cosmic intelligence test, all living matter, except the human, had succumbed, at one time or another during its biological career, to the temptation of assuming, not the ultimately best, but the immediately most profitable form. By an act of something analogous to free will every species, except the human, has chosen the quick returns of specialization, the present rapture of being perfect, but perfect on a low level of being. the result is that they all stand at the end of evolutionary blind alleys…. as species, they have chosen the immediate satisfaction of the self rather than the capacity for reunion with the divine ground.”

According to Huxley, for this wrong choice, nonhuman forms of life are punished negatively, by being debarred from realizing the supreme good, “…to which only the unspecialized and therefore far more highly conscious human form is capable.”(p183)

So despite the rigorous thought that has gone into other aspects of his book, this section reveals that Huxley is a man of his time who believes that “Man is the Measure of All Things”. Huxley’s version of the perennial philosophy thus negates the arguments against separateness that have gone before. Unfortunately, he has internalized the Christian view that, while the human goal is oneness with the divine ground, separateness of human beings from all other forms in nature is almost a prerequisite for this oneness. But if goodness is the annihilation of separateness, then evil must be the intensification of separateness whether from God, the Tao or the Earth.

Burdened by this illusion, humanity’s damage to the planet has come about through intensification of our separateness, which by the above definition, is an evil belief in ourselves as a superior species with a unique capacity for union with the divine ground, but not part of nature.

Since 1945, science is confirming that everything is connected. A closer more biocentric examination of forests shows they are a gigantic interconnected being with what could be called a mind connecting its various forms. If this observation of inter-connectedness were to be expanded, we can assume that the entire surface of the earth is one interconnected being, with one mind or what has been called Gaia. Awareness of this inter-connectedness could be called a recognition of the ground of being.

So though the goal of the perennial philosophy is to recognize the oneness of all things, the assumption that humans are a separate species with a higher calling than all other species means that this philosophy is deeply flawed. Rather than adhering to beliefs that elevate humans as aspiring divinities, we should contemplate our humble role as only one of 2.16 million species on the planet all interconnected in nature. Perhaps it is in a complete recognition and acceptance of this connectedness that our true divinity lies.

As noted above, Huxley is a man of his time and his flawed thinking is apparent from the perspective of this 21st Century blogger. He refers to humanity as “man”, uses the pronoun “his” consistently and sees no relation between the female principle and divinity. He also refers to “primitive” religions and “savages” as people who are less mentally and spiritually developed than people like himself or the thinkers he admires. However, in fairness, it is likely that mainstream ideas of the 21st Century will appear just as deluded to people of the 22nd Century.

But Huxley admitted that he had not overcome his sense of a personal separate self, was filled with pride in his many and admirable achievements, and clearly struggled to be the best person he could be in his life. While his views have been limited by assumptions common to his place and time, in other ways his book is a valuable contribution. It is a compendium of what he considers the best writings on philosophies that seek to overcome the separateness of individuals and nations as they struggle and strive in errors that bring destruction to themselves and the world.

Leaving aside Huxley’s blind spots, he has made some astute observations about the role of the artist. Huxley suggests that the best art, what might be called transcendent art, is created by artists who have overcome the separate self – a separate ego. Through discipline these artists create works that are not the product of their pride, desire for fame and recognition, or even pecuniary rewards. The most meaningful, worthwhile art is created to bridge the gap between the separate and the eternal self, or ground of all being. This is as good a definition of transcendent art as we are likely to find.

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It was 1974, I was pregnant and suffused with the peace & contentment that I suspect is The Great Creator’s way of ensuring women are willing to undergo birth.  I was in my fourth & final year at the Vancouver School of Art and joyfully producing a plethora of pregnant forms.  My work was as round, expansive and shiny as my belly. I was fascinated with eggy shapes and anything to do with eggs. Love and life was good.

Broken Yolk, 1974, Marion-Lea Jamieson, molded Sheet Acrylic, 36”h x 48” w x 30”d

I had just discovered how to take photos & had borrowed a camera from the Art School.  The Egg Boxes were photographed in a number of configurations and locations. Unfortunately, I had not yet learned to ensure that the lens was clean.

I also choreographed & performed a couple of dance pieces during this period.  The first was called Egg-Hanger, a dance piece for 6 dancers that I choreographed and was performed at the Simon Fraser University Theatre under the direction of Iris Garland. Though I don’t have a visual record of the piece being performed, I have images of the sculpture that I made for that dance:

The photo above was taken at the New Era Social Club, an artists’ studio on Powell Street.  Other artists working there at the time included Glen Lewis, Dave Rimmer, Taki Bluesinger & Chris Dahl.

 I choreographed & performed a solo dance piece when I was about 8 months pregnant in the dance space of the Western Front Artists’ Collective in Vancouver, as part of a performance directed by Linda Rubin.

Called Amnion the piece began with me inside a large clear polyester sac that I had made with a large zipper that allowed entry & exit. The dance, was done inside the sac and in front of a large blue heart, to the accompaniment of thumping music. The piece ended in a symbolic birth with my emergence from the sac clad in flesh coloured leotard & tights

During the pregnancy I continued to create images of the fecund female body with an interest in exploring the, to me, interesting paradox that the female body is celebrated for it’s sexuality while, in the West, its amazing reproductive capability is almost an embarrassment. My theory is that reproduction is an instinctual process that unequivocally links humans to their mammalian natures and belies the assumption of our species’ separateness & superiority.

While still at art school in 1974, I created a series of sculptures using vacuum-formed sheet acrylic in the shape of a heart using the Vancouver School of Art’s fabulous Thermoplastics studio. This studio was amazing as it had a giant oven capable of hanging a 6′ x 8′ sheet of acrylic that could be heated, then formed.  For this there was a giant vacuum-form press where the heated acrylic could be either sucked onto a mold through the vacuum function or the direction of the airflow could be reversed so that the hot acrylic could be blown through a cut-out. I used heart-shaped cut-out to create 3 big acrylic hearts, 4′ x 4′, with a circular fluorescent light fixture inside. The blue heart was used in the Western Front performance. Sadly, the entire Thermoplastics studio was not moved the the School’s new campus on Granville Island that eventually morphed into the Emily Carr University of Art & Design.

Below are some other photos of the big blown acrylic hearts. A big heart shape was cut out of 3/4″ plywood and clamped over a sheet of hot acrylic.  Then the air was forced through the cut out & the heart shape bubbled into life.

I also played around with vacuum-formed female torsos in the form of heart-shaped boxes. As a pregnant woman I was interested in the concept of vessels – of things within things. These vacuum-formed acrylic, heart-shaped torso boxes were filled with various items and photographed in a number of locations & juxtapositions.

 As part of the heart-shaped container series, there was a series of heart-shaped boxes. Like the torsos, these were photographed filled with various objects;

There was a heart shaped, drop leaf table that was part of a series of red-painted wooden sculptures. These included Egg-Hanger, shown above and a piece called Brass Stand at right. Though Brass Stand was not strictly speaking a part of the pregnancy-inspired “hearts & eggs” series, it is included as it was part of the red-paint that seemed to be an important aspect of my work at the time.

Brass Stand was part of a project grant received from the Vancouver School of Art that allowed the recipient to explore beyond the capabilities of the Art School. Recipients were encouraged to pay outside trades to create all or part of the artwork. I choose to explore the potential for spun brass, and created a wooden mold to be used to form the brass. I then approached a metalwork shop and asked them to recreate the wooden forms in brass. The guys in this metalwork shop couldn’t figure out what I was doing there and why I was asking them for such outlandish work. A couple of them figured I was there because I was looking to get laid, and became so unpleasant that I was afraid to go back and pick up the remaining work. I was shy & unsure of myself at that stage and like most women of that time, blamed myself for creating the unwanted attention.

My beautiful baby girl was born soon after I graduated from art school. The birth was difficult, and I came home to an empty, ground floor apartment with no money and no help. I collected welfare and wandered around a dank apartment with no furniture, carrying my baby, with both of us weeping for the first three months.  I hadn’t really foreseen that as a penniless female artist, I would not have the leisure or resources to create artworks once I was a mother.  The isolation was also a shock as artist friends came by, saw that I was no fun and didn’t return. They couldn’t understand why I had done this to myself. But I knew why. I fell in love with that baby and have never fallen out of love with her, or the next baby, who came along 6 years later.

The first three months were the hardest and the paintings I did, shown below, were the only works created during that time. They were exhibited in a gallery in Chinatown specially set up to show the work of artists on welfare (those were the days).

Six years later, I had a second baby, my son James, even though the marriage was shaky and we were no better off financially. I often say that having my two children was the smartest move I ever made.

Many years later, my second husband Colin, my children and grandchildren and his children & grandchildren are the greatest blessings of my life and I thank the Creator for having given me the wisdom to choose love and life over good sense.

The post Love and Life first appeared on Marion-Lea Jamieson, Artist.

Modernisms  & Postmodernisms

The art historian/critic James Elkins made an interesting statement in his 2005 book on modernisms  & postmodernisms, Master Narratives and their Discontents. The focus of the book is the role of painting in modernist & postmodernist theories and the core question of whether painting is irrelevant to contemporary visual arts.

If our understanding of contemporary visual arts is based on the assumption that there is a clear trajectory of progress in art-making where the avant guard reject the outdated, unconscious approach of the past and present and lead us forward into the future through new ways of presenting images, then the Postmodernist rejection of painting is justified.  Postmodernism and painting are mutually exclusive because painting is a creature of modernist theory, and modernist theories rest on belief in the ability of art, specifically painting, to transcend the human condition.

Postmodern theories suggest that modernism’s belief that art can transcend entanglement with the political, moral and social failings of the time in which it is created are at the core of paintings irrelevance. From this perspective, the whole history of modernist painting is its coming painfully to an understanding of its place in the disenchantment of the world. Criticism of modernism is essential based on the uselessness of the received rules of painting and the hopelessness of proceeding as if painting could be the place where the world is “re-enchanted” (pp. 52-55).

In response to modernism and painting’s association with hopeless efforts to re-enchant the world, contemporary art schools and postmodern critics reject painting in favour of other visual art media, such as video and other new media. And those who do continue to paint are careful to avoid using received rules. Elkins touches on the problems with this approach:

“It is certainly much easier to make an acceptable piece of video art than it is to make an acceptable painting, and…the reason for the relative ease of video art is that painting has a longer history: more strictures, more limitations, fewer possibilities, a much denser lexicon of critical terms. Therefore…the ease of video is a reason to keep considering painting, especially when it’s a place where things seem to keep going wrong, or where the artists are deliberately misbehaving themselves, piling kitch on camp on kitch without end”. (p. 164) He uses the example of Jeff Koons, whose “…place in the history of twentieth century art is assured in part because of his apparently deeply sincere endorsement of kitch ideas and kitch media“(p. 70) .

The Torment of the Artist

The disenchantment of the world is captured in a few evocative sentences by my author, Richard Powers. In his 2009 novel, Generosity, he describes the torment of the artist reluctant to contribute to the meaningless torrent of artistic works flooding the world at any given moment. In the face of ecological, social and economic megadisasters an artist can only tell,”...the odds against ever feeling at home in the world again. About huge movements of capital that render self-realization quaint at best. About the catastrophe of collective wisdom getting what we want, at last.”(Powers, Richard, Generosity 2009, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, p. 152) This is the quandry that postmodernism has met with scepticism, suspicion and anti-authoritarianism.

Powers outlines the decline of modernism through the disenchantment of a budding art historian who “…nurtured the belief that the deepest satisfaction lay in those cultural works that survive the test of Long Time. But a collision with postcolonialism….shook her faith in masterpieces.A course in Marxist interpretation of the Italian Renaissance left her furious. For a little while longer she soldiered on, fighting the good fight for artistic transcendence until she realized that all the commanding officers had already negotiated safe passage away from the rout.” (p. 61)

Elkins describes postmodernism not as the name of a period with a definable approach such as  postimpressionism but as “…a condition of resistance that can arise wherever modernist ideas are in place. Postmodernism works like a dormant illness in the body of modernism: when modernism falters and fails, postmodernism flourishes.” (p. 89)

Elkins’ & Power’s complementary works agree that the assumption that art can transcend the human condition is a core value of modernism that the postmodern critique rejects. So how can artists, especially painters, step out of the here and now and create works that are timeless, universal and make transcendence possible?

The Return of Myth

In his blog, [Re]construction: Metamodern ‘Transcendence’ and the Return of Myth, Brendan Dempsey, a graduate student at Yale University, courageously entered the fray. He suggested that “metamodern mythopoeia reasserts a form of ‘transcendence’ without forfeiting postmodern immanence as it reconstructs artificial paradigmatic models for the twenty-first century“. He includes the work of several young artist who he feels are involved in is artistic mythmaking that oscillates between the poles of discredited modernist myths and postmodern superficiality.

Dempsey used this work by Adam Miler as an example of a painting that, “reconstructs artificial paradigmatic models for the twenty-first century” and “oscillates between the poles of discredited modernist myths and postmodern superficiality“. In The Roses Never Bloomed So Red, Miller delivered an impassioned critique of late-capitalist decay by depicting a fauness vanquished by the violent spirit of development.

This is an early work by Miller and the egregiously curvaceous fauness dooms this painting to the level of soft-core porn, despite its censoriousness. Some of his later work, while still featuring voluptuous nudes being violated in erotic ways, is undeniable in its technical mastery and force. But Miller’s latest work, such as his Comedia Humana” project, is more strongly connected to myths so that, for the most part, the female nudes escape the problem of the male gaze. But overall, Miller has been lured into the same traps that have ensnared artists of earlier epochs.

Perhaps myths are not something that can be conjured up by modern men, steeped in a myth-denying culture. Myths are stories that live in our DNA and make sense to us because they are part of the fabric of ourselves as human beings. As Joseph Campbell would say in his book The Power Of Myth, “…true myths are our ties to the past that help us to understand the world and ourselves.The myths that have come down to us through thousands of years of oral and written history are precious strands of our true selves and attempting to discredit them is like trying to discredit the seasons“. Myth is clearly not a vehicle that will automatically “reassert a form of transcendence” but must be used with conscious awareness and humility to work.

Post-Clement Greenburg

It could perhaps be said that much of post-modernist theory has been developed in reaction against Clement Greenburg‘s definition of what makes or breaks good painting. Greenburg simply defined good painting as something that someone with good taste, such as himself, could see was a good painting.  His point of view is somewhat offensive to our post-modern sensibilities, but he was not aware of post-modernism’s greatest contribution to criticism in all genres – the disparaging of bias.

Scientific research on perception showed that the mere act of observation affects the thing observed. This has led to a general understanding that it is impossible to be objective – that the observer sees based on a set of values and assumptions that influence what is seen. This understanding has led to a cultural revolution in all areas including the arts. This cultural revolution meant that dead white men were no longer automatically considered the “greats” of literature, drama, music and the visual arts. It was no longer intellectually acceptable to assume that women and minorities were grossly under-represented among the “greats” because they were less capable of creating masterpieces. But once using the “greats” as a yardstick for excellence was gone, the very concept of excellence came under attack, all criteria for assessing the arts was dismissed and everybody is now an artist.

But the postmodernist critique, while entirely justified and rational, has been taken to extremes, until, as Elkins says, we have been subjected to exhibitions “piling kitch on camp on kitch without end”. So it is worthwhile to revisit Greenberg’s worldview to retrace our steps.

Greenberg never examined his assumption that, because he was a person with good taste, what he saw as a good painting was a good painting and he needed to provide no further evidence of this. But the reason his attitude is still appealing is because he is right in assuming that the point of art is to abandon oneself to the pleasure of viewing. It is not an intellectual activity that requires several wall-feet of text to understand. Art should be a visual, visceral, sensuous experience that bypasses the busy brain and transcends mundane day-to-day life.

Jackson Pollack was Greenberg’s most famous protégé and is a good example of a painter whose work as a visual experience is not narrative, not conceptual and certainly not banal. It is a pleasure to lose oneself in this artist’s ability to weave a surface of textures and patterns with all the complexity of nature but the intentionality of a human sensibility.

Other painters that Greenberg loved, such as Larry Poons, also confirmed his good taste.

Not all of the painters Greenberg admired are immediately recognizable as a visual, visceral, sensuous experience. Perhaps, as he said, you had to stand in front of them. But the point he was making is that a great painting can transcend entanglement with the political, moral and social failings of the time in which it is created.  Paintings is not and never can be irrelevant because we only have to look at a great painting like those above to know that they can create a place where the world is “re-enchanted” and can achieve transcendence.

The post Transcendence first appeared on Marion-Lea Jamieson, Artist.

So I look for ideas from writers that have tried to capture a sense of what is happening in and to the Western visual arts. This is a daunting challenge as it is impossible for anyone living in a period of time to stand outside of it and look objectively and from a future perspective to say that this or that phenomenon, philosophy or paradigm represents the times. Harold Rosenberg was just such as writer who tried to see where art was going in his time and what might be expected in the future.

Though written 50+ years ago, Rosenberg’s early 1970’s book on art criticism Harold Rosenberg was prescient. At first I was put off by his use of terms like “the artist is a man who…”, but I came to overlook his gender insensitivity. Rosenberg’s primary concern is that art, and he is primarily concerned with painting, is in danger of going over the edge that separates it from crafts, commercial design and the mass media. This concern no doubt grew out of the success of artists like Andy Warhol, a former commercial artist, who wholeheartedly embraced popular culture and commercial processes.

What’s interesting about Rosenberg’s views, is that, though he is deeply immersed in the art world, he is not aware of the term, or the fact, of post-modernism. He is writing at a time of huge changes in attitudes toward art and he is documenting this change as it is taking place.  Thus he is able to report on the transition between the philosophical endorsement of modernism that was widely accepted by the art establishment, and the shattering of this consensus through emerging artwork critiquing that philosophy.
In many ways, his writing was prescient as it can be said that art has since gone over the edge he described. But this jump was a conscious choice by the artists involved and made out of a sense of necessity. That felt necessity was to rebel against the commodification of art and the modernist illusion that the art object could meaningfully convey a response to a world that was capable of creating two devastating world wars and weapons of mass destruction. The jump was also motivated by photography that could record life much better that painting and had replaced it in many ways.,

Instead of making irrelevant art for money, artists such as Marcel Duchamp were making art as criticism through parody, irony or subversion. Artists like Troy Emery continue that tradition today. though one has to question whether using parody, irony and subversion has become an avenue to sure commercial success. Whereas Duchamp only made one Fountain, like Jeff Koons, Emery makes dozens of pieces, with slight variations. He has fully embraced the post-modern acceptance of commercialization as a defensible and even central aspect of an art practice.

Perhaps one of the reasons that painting has been considered an outdated art form is that it is difficult to crank out paintings at an industrial/commercial scale. While it is accepted that sculptors will farm out the actual casting or fabrication of their artworks to artisans, there is no similar tolerance for painters. Sophisticated collectors of paintings expect it to have been the work of the artist that signs it, not a painting factory. Of course there were the screen prints of artists like Warhol, and currently there are Gicleé prints of paintings, and paintings that have clearly been mass-produced. But these never have, and likely never will, achieve the recognition and respect given to mass-produced sculptures.

Rosenberg’s primary concern was that painting would become commercial design and mass media, but this has not happened. Instead, it became somewhat irrelevant to the art establishment and by extension, the art market and many artists. Rosenberg’s insensitivity to gender issues reflects his lack of attention to other important issue that created the post-modern revolution. Though he touches on the fact that taste in art, especially modernist painting, was set by an elite made up of white, middle & upper class males. They in turn found they most admired the work of white, middle-class male artists, so that women & visible minorities were excluded from exhibitions & sales.

There were many other artists who did not accept that there were insurmountable problems with making artworks such as painting. For instance, Rosenberg suggests that “…if Miro had a “problem” it was how to reach a state of creation unhindered by problems”. And as Rosenberg says, many artists saw the only other alternative to be making art for oneself.”For Barnett Newman, painting was “…a way of practising the sublime, not communicating it

Others such as Piet Mondrian, believed that it was possible to “…conceive of a grand vision such as the salvation of the human race.. that could be expressed in paint.” He believed his work was a “plastic vision” that would help to set up ” …a new type of society composed of balance relationships”.

Mondrian was aware that his work could not speak for itself without a “new phase in human development” so he wrote statements and manifestos explaining his ideas. The irony, for Rosenberg, was that in contemporary art, the meaning of artworks is not in themselves, but in the personality of the artist, “…his ideas, his role, his pathos.” He saw with clarity that what would become post-modernism would replace ideas in art altogether.

Modernist painters wrestled with the issue of content and the reaction against using recognizable images. Rosenberg refers to “pre-formlist abstraction” as that which has an unmistakable subject but “…projects a content that is implicit in but not restricted to the marks on the canvas”.

In this approach, a painting “…comes into being through unanticipated responses to what is taking place on the canvas”, as Rosenberg describes the work of Joan Mitchell. Whatever has gone on before provides the clue & the motivation for the next move.

The “meaning and emotional intensity of Mitchell’s pictures] are produced structurally, as it were, by a whole series of oppositions: dense versus transparent strokes; gridded structure versus more chaotic, ad hoc construction; weight on the bottom of the canvas versus weight at the top; light versus dark; choppy versus continuous strokes; harmonious and clashing juxtapositions of hue – all are potent signs of meaning and feeling.”(1)

Rosenberg describes these as pre-formalist modernist painters as differentiated from the formalists who conceived abstract art in terms of “…a grammar of dimensions, edges, and color relations”. Formalism also focused on eliminating metaphorical references, perhaps in reaction to what had become a cloying use of metaphors by some artists in earlier periods.

But the ultimate destination of this formalist direction were paintings that eliminated not only metaphor, but dimensions, edges, and colour relations as well, to become a flat plane of one colour. My question is, where’s the fun in that compared to Mitchells’ aim and method: to express delight at having been taken by surprise?

This is not an essay in that it does not attempt to wrap up an argument with a neat conclusion that summarizes previous rambles but is an ongoing exploration that can be continued in another post.

1) Nochlin, Linda (2002). “Joan Mitchell: A Rage to Paint”. In Livingston, Jane. The Paintings of Joan Mitchell. New York: Whitney Museum of American Art. p. 55. ISBN 0520235703.

The post This is not an Essay first appeared on Marion-Lea Jamieson, Artist.

1) West vs East
The novel is the second in a trilogy and is based on reminiscences of India circa 1969 by Alka Joshi’s mother. The author herself left India at the age of nine and has been entirely educated in the west, which may account for this novel’s oddly pedantic style . She writes as someone looking at India from the outside rather than as someone immersed in the culture. Her book focuses on the material details of Indian life such as interiors, clothing, jewelry, and food, rather than providing insights into how Indians think, feel and relate to each other on a personal level.

2) Excessive Detail
The Secret Keeper shares some similarities with Cutting for Stone, by Abraham Verghese, an expat Indian author who, in my view, also crammed far too much information into one novel. He too used relatives’ reminiscences of an earlier time as material and it appeared that he, like Joshi, couldn’t resist putting in every anecdote. However, because Verghese grew up in the rich Indian tradition, rather than in the West, he has a unique and poetic writing style. But his book was far too long.

The Secret Keeper is also too long and full of unnecessary information that slows down the pace and strains the attention span. There are constant digressions and the story bogs down at points of potential interest with detailed descriptions of clothing, jewelry, food, interiors and traditions extraneous to the plot. Joshi’s main goal is clearly not to write a literary novel, but to bring Indian culture in an accessible style to a western audience. But the culture would have been better served by fewer words and better writing.

Because this is the second in the series, Joshi also provides backstories about the characters from the first book, The Henna Artist, that break up the flow. These are not well integrated into the story and are repeated far more often than necessary, so that we hear about Radha’s birth of an illegitimate son, Lakshmi’s affair with a married man and the loss of Nimmi’s husband, over and over again. This novel needed the guidance of a more critical & rigorous editor from the beginning.

3) Cardboard Characters
Though there is extensive detail about everything else, none of the characters come alive and important emotional events are left out or unconvincing. For instance, Malik’s character is inconsistent in that he responds according to context, rather than interior motives we readers are made privy to. First he is in love with Nimmi, then he is lusting after Sheela, then he is devoted to Nimmi again but his motivations for these transitions are not revealed. Malik and Nimmi’s relationship is also sketchy in that there is an abrupt transition from meeting at the flower stall to becoming lovers with no real explanation as to how this came about. There is nothing persuasive in what we are told about both characters to account for their supposedly strong feelings and devotion to each other.

The personal relationships in the novel may be sketchy because the author is not interested in describing inner lives or considers them secondary to describing life in Rajasthan. In the back of her book, Joshi explains that including descriptions of jewelry, garments, food etc., is a way to “…enrich a plot and show character development”. In fact, all these descriptions of “things” took up so much of the book there was little room left for character development and an enriched plot.

4) Tough Act to Follow

The fact that I read The Secret Keeper immediately after a brilliantly-written novel by Michael Cunningham, Day, is largely responsible for my disenchantment. Day‘s characters are vehicles for explorations of the human condition. They are everyday people who transcend everyday life and isn’t that the task of art – to be transcendent? Day is primarily a work of art rather than a slice of life, a page turner, a historical drama or a commercial product.

Of course, not everyone wants to explore the human condition or transcend everyday life. Not everyone wants art and many (most?) readers are happy to pass the time with an undemanding book. In fact, even internet blogs such as this one are criticized for being too demanding. The Flesch reading ease rating for this blog is 47.8, which is considered difficult to read. According to site analysis, I should use shorter sentences and less difficult words. Does this mean that, in a world that demands simple sentences and easy words, it is futile to criticize novels that fall short of their potential? Should we put such a book aside rather than take a writer to task for not trying hard enough – for not struggling, failing, and struggling again to create something better?

Others would argue that literary character development is a remnant from the modernist era when readers expected and demanded 3D characters that come alive through the author’s insight and skill. Cunningham’s characters search for meaning in their lives, which is considered so last century to post-modernists. The Guardian’s review of Day has this to say: “…he returns, with undiminished faith, to the project that united modernists as different as his heroes Joyce and Woolf: the effort to articulate the vast inner lives of a few unexceptional people…”. For instance, Cunningham, a middle-aged gay man, is able to articulate the inner life of five year-old Violet and with a few deft strokes, make her so alive that the reader “knows” Violet. Again from the Guardian: “The liveliest and most memorable portrait is of the little girl, Violet, already a shrewd performer in every moment, dutifully pre-empting the responses of her devoted but exhausted audience….Now here is Violet, twirling in her dress, abundantly cared for. Cunningham allows her to be sad, nonetheless, to feel the weight of a difficult world on her shoulders, and occasionally to turn away from human feelings to animals and stars.” Cunningham clearly studies people and puts effort and skill into making his characters believable. In contrast, Joshi uses Nimmi’s children as stage props and we never get to know Rekha and Chulla. Her characters are tools for introducing descriptions of costumes, traditions, foods, interiors, etc.

5) Writing Style
This is only Joshi’s second novel and hopefully in future she will develop as a novelist, but at this point, there is no innovative use of language and storytelling. Though the plot of The Secret Keeper could have been compelling, the story was fragmented by digressions and backstory repetition. The author’s intention was that by inserting a wealth of information about Indian culture, she would bring it alive in “…all it’s chaotic phantasmagoric glory.” If the writing in the novel had captured this “phantasmagoric glory”, or was richly lyrical and imaginative, or the characters were drawn with more skill and inventiveness, or the sentences had more magic and less pedantry, this novel could have worked. But the writing has none of these and the book was overlong. The Secret Keeper did not bring to life a culture that is ancient, complex, & spiritually rich. Unfortunately for Joshi’s development as an artist, her present style of writing and narrative structure have been a great success, so her readers, publishers and promoters will want more of the same.

6) Issues
In the late 1960’s there were serious socio-political problems plaguing the Indian sub-continent including poverty, famine, wars with China and Pakistan, internal uprisings, political turmoil, and violence in cities. Social mobility and social cohesion were then, and continue to be, hampered by a rigid and punitive caste system and widespread religious intolerance. This has led to the success of communist parties and inevitable clashes with established elites.

Though we should not expect every novel to address it’s socio-political context, The Secret Keeper is written from the point of view of established elites and is uncritical of the system as a whole. There was, and continues to be, discrimination against Muslims and lower-caste groups in Hindu-majority India, but this is glossed over. In The Secret Keeper, it is through the compassion and intervention of those well-connected to aristocratic ruling elites that lower class groups, represented by Malik and Nimmi, are rescued from lives of hardship & poverty. Malik achieves upward mobility with the help of a Brahmin with aristocratic connections and the much abused tribeswoman, Nimmi, is also rescued through the personal intervention of elites. The novel does not challenge the structure of the social system but suggests that all is well if a few “bad apples” (such as gold smugglers) are incarcerated. It’s a naive point of view.

7) No Meritocracy
According to Wikipedia, Joshi’s first book in this trilogy was adopted and promoted by Reese’s Book Club, a celebrity book sales club run by Reese Witherspoon under her media company Hello Sunshine. Today 2.5 million people follow @reesesbookclub. In 2021, Witherspoon sold part of the company to Candle Media, for $900 million. This is big business. A celebrity endorsement has a huge impact on sales and the publishing industry and Reese’s Book Club has gained a reputation for boosting the sales of its Book Club Picks. As of 2019, no Book Club Picks had sold fewer than 10,000 copies and novels selected as Book Club Picks reportedly outsell other fiction books by 700%.

So it is not surprising that the second book in the trilogy, The Secret Keeper is highly rated on Goodreads and became New York Times bestseller. It would seem that reader’s ratings respond to media hype rather than the actual merits of novels as literature. For instance, Day, by Michael Cunningham, who is generally described as a brilliant mind, Pulitzer Prize winner and Creative Writing Prof at Yale, gets only 3.5 stars on Goodreads, while The Secret Keeper gets 4.09.

The question is whether readers who read and highly rate books promoted by celebs would actually prefer books with more literary merit? One reviewer of The Secret Keeper said,”I had happy tears reading it. Almost everyone had a happy ending and the author had tied up all the loose ends.” Another said, “The writing remains soft and simple which is wonderful…”. There is a huge market for novels that are simplistic, unambiguous and have a happy ending. If more complex, nuanced and challenging novels, such as Day, were marketed by celebrity media, would they sell as well? As the CEO of Hello Sunshine says, storytelling can shift the culture and change the world. But story selling can also shift the culture and change the world – perhaps not for the better. What impact is hyper-capitalism having on arts & culture as a whole? This is an interesting area for further study.

The post The Secret Keeper of Jaipur: A Best Seller first appeared on Marion-Lea Jamieson, Artist.

I try to give any novel the benefit of the doubt because I question my own capacity to be an informed evaluator of the written word. I’m just a visual artist who reads in my spare time. Though I did get 3/4 of the way toward a BA in English Literature a lifetime ago, I have forgotten how to apply analytical techniques. Prose either excites me or leaves me cold, so this blog is an attempt to understand what makes for good writing.

Art Appreciation

Not that experience or expertise in one art form is irrelevant when evaluating the success of another form. I’m a former dancer, so if I’m zoning out while watching dance, I scan to see whether the source of the problem is my own lack of attention or out there on the stage. If I’m struggling to stay awake, perhaps it’s because the rhythms or movements are repetitive and predictable, or the performers are not clear on what they are trying to say, or the idea is sophomoric and not worth saying. Dance that works is transcendent like no other art form, when dancers pierce the fourth wall in real time, in real space with real bodies. Technique is an important, as is charisma, presence, and talent, none of which can be faked on stage.

In an art gallery, my eyes skim over paintings that are like thousands of other paintings and not taking any chances, or are derivative and made to sell. Conversely, I find pieces annoying that repeat the same old ironic/angry/outraged, post-modern themes in an attempt to be relevant. Good painting, like good dancing, requires technical prowess (whatever the post-modernist, post-post-modernists, anti-artists, etc. might say), talent (which no amount of technical skill can supplant) and originality. So there are overlaps among the arts and a general understanding and appreciation of one form provides insights into others.

Sentimentality

In any discipline, one area fraught with danger is sentimentality. Images of nurturing mothers with children, happy carefree children, sad children or any children, really, are hazardous as they so easily tip into the maudlin. Images of old people can also be deadly if they rely on one-dimensional stereotypes: the kindly old man/woman/; the wise old man/woman; the old woman/man with a lifetime of regrets or one huge regret that must be resolved before her/his death, and so on.

Any character that is always kindly or always evil or always played on one note is not interesting and this is the sense I got from the first few chapters of The Keeper of Lost Things. The characters were not likely to reveal startling unexpected sides of themselves or take the trajectory of the story in a completely unanticipated direction. I must admit that the reviews on the back cover put me off: “it left me smiling”, “charming and gently moving”, and “heart warming”. I want insight, daring, and a unique and adventurous use of prose. I do not want heartfelt, heartbreak,heartwarming or the redemptive power of friendship. It is all just too cloying – too obviously designed to pluck the heartstrings with egregious sentimentality.

If the writing is unique, flamboyant and poetic I can forgive a writer for manipulating my emotions, but if it is also pedestrian, clunky and predictable, there can be no forgiveness. In the first few chapters of The Keeper, clichés abound, such as: “a safe pair of hands”, “weary to the bone”, “it had been their song”, “a lovely cup of tea”, “a prickle of anxiety”,”his presence always lifted her spirits”,”that whistle of the kettle pierced her reminiscence”. I could go on and on but I didn’t – I put down the book and returned it early to the library.

Sitting in Judgment

Still the doubts gnawed at me: What do I know? Who am I to judge? The Keeper was nominated for Goodreads’ Best Fiction 2017, and 41,766 readers gave it 5 stars. One reviewer described it as, “…a little lacy, dressy, decorous, cultivated, rosy, sweet, courteous, cordial, romantic, a little mysterious, quirky, touching, sad, humorous, warm, cozy, and loving”. Another “…an enchanting story about love, loss, friendship, and healing. A wonderful cast of endearing, quirky characters made this book a pleasure to read!” How can I say that the point of the novel is not to create heart-warming, heart-felt stories where everything is warm, cozy and loving?

Zadie Smith

So I turned to Zadie Smith, an award-winning writer, for some insight into what makes good writing. In an article in The Guardian, Smith argued that fiction should be “not a division of head and heart, but the useful employment of both”. A good novel doesn’t just tug at the heartstrings it engages the mind. But as one reader said about The Keeper, “…it is a heartwarming escape. Not every book has to be critically reviewed for style and all kinds of other attributes…”. I’m realizing that readers are divided into those who read to employ head and heart and those who want to escape into an easy, feel-good world. So if tens of thousands of readers are happy with escapist fiction, rather than plots that make you think and virtuostic writing, I will leave them to it and spend my precious reading time devouring the best literature I can find.

The best novels have dialogue that rings true. In her collection of essays, Feel Free, Smith talks about, …”that trick of breathing what–looks–like–life into a collection of written sentences….it really is a sort of magic. I like writing that makes you hear voices.” Where this magic is lacking, less dedicated authors rely on repeating what others have written time and time again, rather than experiencing and transcribing the voices real people.

Here’s Smith on author Paula Fox. “A fresh crop of writers sought a way of writing “around–the-house–and–in–the–yard” fiction…A new domestic realism: unsentimental yet vivid….”. While there is a plethora of “around–the-house” stories, they fail to seem real if told through a lens of sentiment. Fox explains her gift thus: “I can see”, and this does appear to be the crucial ingredient in good writing. Not a soft-focus lens on life but a 50-1350 mm zoom.

Smith quotes E. M. Forster: “she gave up trying to understand herself, and joined the vast armies of the benighted, who follow neither the heart nor the brain, and march to their destiny by catch words”. Smith contrasts this with the writing of Edward St. Aubyn, “…it’s a joy. Oh, the semi-colons, the discipline! Those commas so perfectly placed, so rhythmic, creating sentences loaded and blessed, almost o’erbrimmed, and yet sturdy, never in danger of collapse. It’s like fingering a beautiful swatch of brocade…”. While no one could accuse St. Aubyn of heartfelt, heartwarming prose, his writing is a gorgeous fabric of colourful threads even as he takes the reader on a torturous and frightening route through the human psyche.

Smith discriminates between the real world, “where we often want our judgments and moral decisions to be swift and singular and decisive”, and fiction that, “messes with our sense of what it is possible to do with our judgments. It usefully suspense our great and violent desire to be in the right on every question….” This accords with my empirical observation that good writing forces even the less introspective among us, such as myself, to question our assumptions and open our minds to new ways of thinking. It creates hairline cracks in our most dearly-held stereotypes and prejudices, in this way paving the way toward social change, or at least a more conscious readership. And surely this is the point of the arts, to act as a conduit for greater awareness, rather than as a soother.

The post The Keeper of Lost Things: A Heartwarming Escape first appeared on Marion-Lea Jamieson, Artist.

Above is a silver-painted wooden version of a frog piece that is part of the animal/human fusion theme. Below is a gold-painted version in steel.

The frog/human figures continue my fascination with melded animal/human figures, the myths that feature them and how they relate to changing human history.  In ancient religions these figures were  symbolic expressions of a deep spiritual understanding and represented a particular human function/attribute in its purest form.  This indicates that there was a recognition of and respect for the similarities between humans & other species and an understanding that all sentient creatures share more commonalities than differences.  This understanding was lost over time as humans became farther removed from the natural world and failed to appreciate our dependence on it.  This has led to the degradation of the planet through over-expansion of human habitat and the disappearance of the habitats of other species.

Another small sculpture using the frog/human image is a second version of Jumping Frogwoman in plaster.

The frog is often considered the “Tunnel Canary” in the human global experiment of mining the earth and converting its resources for our use.  Frogs are one of the most sensitive species to global warming and the thinning of the ozone layer.

Wikipedia states that frog populations have declined dramatically since the 1950s: more than one third of species are believed to be threatened with extinction and more than 120 species are suspected to be extinct since the 1980s. Habitat loss is a significant cause of frog population decline, as are pollutants, climate change, the introduction of non-indigenous predators/competitors, and emerging infectious diseases. Many environmental scientists believe that amphibians, including frogs, are excellent biological indicators of broader ecosystem health because of their intermediate position in food webs, permeable skins, and typically biphasic life (aquatic larvae and terrestrial adults).

Frogs feature prominently in folklore, fairy tales and popular culture. They tend to be portrayed as benign, ugly, clumsy, but with hidden talents.  “The Frog Prince” is a fairy tale of a frog who turns into a handsome prince once kissed. The Moche people of ancient Peru often depicted frogs in their art.

In Panama local legend promised luck to anyone who spotted a golden frog in the wild and some believed that when Panamanian Golden Frogs died, they would turn into a gold talisman, known as a huaca. Today, despite being extinct in the wild, Panamanian Golden Frogs remain an important cultural symbol.

I have love frogs since childhood when my sisters & I would collect them from creeks & ditches & bring them home to live in our backyard pond.  Unfortunately, our cats would catch them & kill them, thus we and a million other children and cats did our bit to reduce frog populations.

One of my earliest works that melded animals and humans was the drawing below. Called, Elegy, it comments on the extinction of frogs and is an elegy that mourns their sacrifice to human sins. In the process, it questions the Biblical assumption that God only sacrificed his human/divine son to human sin two thousand years ago, as other species, just as precious, are being sacrificed here and now.

Like the Three Graces in the bird blog, Elegy used a famous classical painting as a point of departure and modified it to change the message to include other species beside humans.  Later I used the drawing as a basis for a painting shown below.

The famous painting on which it is based is the following:

Though the drawn version of Elegy was done in 1985, then translated into oil paints 30 years later, I have been uncomfortable about showing it publicly in case some might find it offensive, which is the very opposite of my intention.  I have never subscribed to the theory that the role for art is to shock the comfortable into questioning their beliefs, and I have the greatest respect for the human search for spiritual understanding and faith. I do, however feel strongly that the mass species extinction of frogs is tragic and am using the pieta symbol as a way to communicate the scope of this tragedy. Because frogs are considered a lowly species, the use of a frog figure to depict Christ may appear blasphemous to some people.  But the use of animal figures to depict Him is not something I made up to annoy people.  When in France, I was surprised to find ancient sculptures & paintings with Christ depicted as a fusion of different animals: part lion to reflect courage; part lamb to show His gentleness; part bird to show his heavenly nature; etc. It is a reflection of our distance and antagonism to the natural world that this type of representation currently rarely appears, to my knowledge.

I used another painting from a life-drawing class that was less than successful to create another frog painting.  About 1997, I did a painting called Colourful Robe that exhibited the same problems as describes in the post On Birds and another post, Exploring My Inner Woman: paintings of women (indeed any arty depiction of women, such as sculpture and especially photography) ) have a built-in Kitch factor.

This is because women have been over-represented as subjects for art, and have been pimped for hundreds of years to communicate such cloying sentiments as “The Eternal Woman” or “Motherhood”, or “Beauty”. Now any artist that uses an image of an (especially) naked woman must deal with centuries of sentimental abuse of the female figure in art.  At one point, I thought that it was the static nature of painting, photography & sculpture that lent the female image its slightly pornographic quality, no matter how innocent the intention.  So I tried making drawings of the female body in motion, which was a slight improvement but still felt uncomfortable with it. 

So like the painting of the woman on the beach to which I attached the Stork’s head, I turned this figure into the Frog Queen and was much happier with it. As I said, I regard all of my paintings as works in progress and only stop working on them when they are taken away from me through sale. Below is the first iteration of this painting.

I loved the imperious expression on the models face and wanted to capture that in the frog figure.  All of these works question & challenge the lowly status of other species and the assumption that they are lesser beings in terms of beauty, grace, authority and divine esteem. The Frog Queen suggests that if frogs ruled the world, there would certainly be no water pollution, climate change, the introduction of non-indigenous predators/competitors, and emerging infectious diseases. The world might be a much more livable place for all of us.

Though I liked the colourful robe, again I wasn’t satisfied with the semi-naturalistic landscape setting and wanted to make the whole painting into a sculpture study.  I was interested in taking the rules that had been used with the figure and applying them to the surroundings in order to make the whole more logical or make it a world with its own logic, so to speak. In other words, I applied the restricted palette and planar surfaces to the entire canvas.  The idea was to create a painting that looked carved in stone – as though the scenario was sculpted out of a rock face. I re-named the painting Heket to return to the sacred connections with frogs, as depicted in Elegy shown above.

Wikepedia says that to the Egyptians, the frog was a symbol of life and fertility, since millions of them were born after the annual inundation of the Nile, which brought fertility to the otherwise barren lands. Consequently, in Egyptian mythology, there began to be a frog-goddess, who represented fertility, referred to as Heket (or Heqet). She  was usually depicted as a frog, or a woman with a frog’s head, or more rarely as a frog on the end of a phallus to explicitly indicate her association with fertility.

As a fertility goddess, associated explicitly with the last stages of the flooding of the Nile, and so with the germination of corn, she became associated with the final stages of childbirth. This association gained her the title She who hastens the birth. Some claim that—even though no ancient Egyptian term for “midwife” is known for certain—midwives often called themselves the Servants of Heqet, and that her priestesses were trained in midwifery. Women often wore amulets of her during childbirth, which depicted Heqet as a frog, sitting in a lotus.

When the Legend of Osiris and Isis developed, it was said that it was Heqet who breathed life into the new body of Horus at birth, as she was the goddess of the last moments of birth. As the birth of Horus became more intimately associated with the resurrection of Osiris, so Heqet’s role became one more closely associated with resurrection. Eventually, this association led to her amulets gaining the phrase I am the resurrection, and consequently the amulets were used by early Christians. The link between frogs, resurrection and Christianity gives greater substance to the truth of Elegy.

Nine years later, Heket went through a further transformation when the figure was re-imagined in a piece called Metamorphosis, part of series called Back to Nature. Here the figure is shown with a more painterly approach and the colourful robe and human female characteristics are back.

The most recent frog piece, As It Were was painted in 2019. The stylized frogs were inspired by images from the European Neolithic age and the piece was part of a series from 2019-2021 called “Time LInes”.

Frog images may well re-appear in my work as they are an evocative image, rich in associations. Watch this space for more on frogs!

The post On Frogs first appeared on Marion-Lea Jamieson, Artist.

In John Banville‘s novel, Ghosts, the protagonist comes to live on a sparsely populated island and reflects on the slow pace of life there:
“Time. Time on my hands. That is a strange phrase. From those first weeks on the island I recall especially the afternoons, slow, silent, oddly mysterious stretches of something that seemed more than clock time, a thicker textured stuff, a sort of Seadrift, tidal, surreptitious, Deeper than the world. …This is a different way of being alive. I thought sometimes at moments such as this that I might simply drift away and become a part of all that out there, drift and dissolve, be a shimmer of light slowly fading into nothing.”

So it is less productive  in terms of paid labour, but more productive of relaxed charm, friendliness, and ease.

My art practice has responded to Island Time by allowing for more detailed, labour-intensive work that might take all afternoon for an almost unnoticeable addition.  And it has led to the creation of artwork that owes some of its technique to a time before mass produced printing when artists carved images on wood, rolled ink on top and pressed the image onto paper. They became astonishingly skilled at depicting the world using cross-hatched lines to convey light, shade, form and texture. Later they used this technique to create line drawings of incredible detail etched into metal plates. Many artists keep this time-honoured and highly-skilled tradition alive and I have studied both the early and more modern practitioners to develop my own style.

For many years in the 1980’s and 1990’s I worked as an illustrator for editorial, advertising and book publishing using this style of drawing. I sometimes carved my drawings into linoleum to make lino-cut prints, but due to the short time-lines in publishing, I usually used scratchboard to create cross-hatched black & white drawings that translated well into print media and could be produced on time..

To sharpen my technique, I also made drawings of landscapes, portraits and still-lives that were not for commercial applications.

Then I got into sculpture and later, big, full-colour abstract oil paintings and away from 2D black& white images.

But having moved to this Island, removed from urban assumptions and pressures, I have once again taken up the challenge of creating detailed, labour-intensive line drawings with the cross-hatched drawing techniques of an earlier era. But now the original B&W drawings are digitized and printed using contemporary technology so they are an interesting mix of the traditional melded with current technological advances. As it is neither old or new, my current work feels that it is aiming at something timeless or outside of time.

The post On Time: It’s All Relative first appeared on Marion-Lea Jamieson, Artist.

Is the job of artists to reflect the times we live in so as to make our fellow citizens aware of the historical mistakes we as a society may be repeating? Should artists be confronting us with our greed, stupidity, and all the other deadlies we constantly commit? Or should we be celebrating the slow progress of conscious human awareness? How can an artist distinguish between their own perception of reality and what is actually going on out there? How do we know if our sins are more numerous and deterministic than our saving graces?

The post-moderns, post-post moderns and other recent schools answer these questions by assuming that we can’t perceive what is real because reality is made up of momentary impressions that we superimpose on the world around us. Some might even suggest that there is no independent reality, there are only disparate individual perceptions created by cultural norms, personal histories, situations and emotions. By this logic, artists cannot depict reality as it is an illusion and they must avoid attempting to impose their personal understanding on their audience as this is dishonest and even unfair.

This leads us to the second part of the question posed by Barnes: is art a concentration of reality? If one accepts the logic outlined above, then reality cannot be depicted, let alone concentrated. But perhaps artists, through their craft, discipline and experience, are able to distill experience into a hyper-real depiction of the world around them. This is the case in many non-Western cultures and was the case in earlier European cultures before the pursuit of realism became the measure of excellence. In First Nations cultures on the west coast of British Columbia, artists capture the history, stories and spirit of their culture rather than individual emotional states or experiences.

The power of a work such as this can’t be denied and its concentrated energy negates the idea that art can’t depict reality. But this is a reality on a different scale that the one debated by the post-moderns. This is the type of reality that Westerners lost sight of as scientific reductionism took all our attention.

Early Europeans also used powerful images to concentrate and communicate the essence of their culture, and this has been explored in an earlier blog . One such powerful image is the sculpture below:

These works provided a schematized, abstract rendition of human traits, in this case, fertility (mother-goddess). They were depicted in stages of pregnancy, giving birth or showing maternal affection, parts of life independent of individual artistic bias.

Is art a superior substitute for reality?   Can we attain the same level of understanding from an excellent novel by Julian Barnes as we can by exposing ourselves to life in all its variation, wonder & squalor? Does a well-written novel, riveting play or mind-altering painting represent a more refined and accurate conception of reality than the lived experience of a non-artist?

This topic can be diverted by the issue of digital vs. non-digital reality and the current worry that for many, if not most of us, “real” reality has become a dull reflection of what we can find in our devices. Is a well-written novel, riveting play or mind-altering painting intrinsically more valuable than an hour or two on Facebook, Snapchat or TikTok? If we accept that there is no “real” reality anyway, it’s quality doesn’t make any difference.  But if we don’t accept this, we might suggest that an undifferentiated virtual world with no limitations or standards is a formless, dumbed-down alternative to a well-written novel, riveting play or mind-altering painting. These collate societal  experiences into artworks that don’t substitute for reality but distill it into something greater than all of our busy minds. So in that way, yes, good art is a superior substitute for mindlessly getting through the day.

But the last part of Barnes’ question is the big one: is art just a beguiling irrelevance? Is it defensible to be working diligently to create artworks in the context of world hunger, war, climate change, mass migrations, mass species extinction etc.?

Shouldn’t we all down pens, paintbrushes, ballet shoes and violins to distribute needed supplies to exhausted refugees? Remove invasive species from nearby wildlife habitat? Sit in front of our legislature with a placard demanding a sustainable future?

We artists defend our practices by arguing that in a world of greed & violence, the arts preserve the best part of humanity and provide an alternative paradigm to getting & spending. This doesn’t really answer the big question, but it will have to do for now.

The post A Superior Substitute for Life first appeared on Marion-Lea Jamieson, Artist.

For the last hundred years it has been a truism that the job of art is to progress by creating shocking images that shatter past expectations. But how relevant is it to épater la bourgeoisie anymore? The bourgeoisie have happily lapped up bold artistic experiments designed to shock them out of their complacency and have cannily turned them into marketable commodities. And the international bourgeoisie have transformed the art market into the world’s most effective and rewarding money laundering vehicle. In Orfeo, Powers uses a musician and composer as protagonist to explore this unhappy situation and that of the arts in general. He also pokes into some other thorny questions such as, do artists have a free pass to ignore their worldly responsibilities in pursuit of their art?

The novel is a wealth of information about music and describes a world of skill, sensation and experience that most of us don’t get to share.  In his youth, Powers’ protagonist had accepted the challenge of his professors and peers to create music that thumbed its nose at accepted mores. This was in the ’60s when the task of all modern artists was to be outrageous. This protagonist musician was at the heart of a no-holds-barred musical/theatrical happening over the course of a decade in which he created work that pushed boundaries and was on the leading perimeter of the cutting edge. The risks, successes and highs of these bold experiments are enviable and the reader feels comparatively earth-bound.

Not that artists didn’t enjoy a period of youthful artistic exuberance in 60’s & ’70’s Vancouver, BC where I came of age.  It was much like the time Powers describes in Illinois: artists had funding to carry out crazy experiments without the marketing imperative. For instance, in 1973 I had a Canada Council grant to photograph costumed fellow artists in various scenarios on the streets of Vancouver.

At the time, artists had ideas and ran with them – there wasn’t the amount of self criticism required then that there is now, though perhaps there should have been. From the perspective on 2024, these scenarios could be viewed with suspicion. Were they pitiless, stereotypical caricatures of sex workers and homeless old women? Or were they scenarios that described a city (Vancouver) at the beginning of its transformation from sleepy sea-side town to World Class City with World Class social upheaval? I have always disapproved of photographing real people going about their every-day lives and appropriating their images as art. So I used actors to express the changes I saw happening in my home town: expanding transactional sex; a growing and visible cohort of disadvantaged people; and an associated growing and visible cohort of the super-wealthy who were getting away with murder.

Later, with an Opportunities for Youth grant that Chris Dahl & I received, we worked with Bob Amussen to collect a sample of work  from all the artists we knew of in Vancouver and the surrounding areas, the good, the bad and the ugly, and collated them into a published book.

The dance company I worked with, a tortured and anarchic artists’ collective, produced cutting edge work that toured the province on a shoe-string.

There was even a hodge-podge artists’ band that gathered at the New Era Social Club with found instruments that created dissonant, unstructured sound.

But as I found out, non-paying gigs and widely-spaced grants are fine for the childless. But, as in Powers’ novel, the moral question arose – is it OK to sacrifice one’s children to one’s art? Successful male artists are usually careful to equip themselves with an admiring mate to support their work. And if the child-rearing thing doesn’t work out, they leave it to the spouse to manage on her own. As The Gorilla Girls pointed out, especially at the time, male artists were 98% more likely to become successful and able to find paying work. But I was not so blessed and had to find a day job.

Now, many years later, the imperative for art to be outrageous still stands, but as asked at the start of this blog, how relevant is it to épater les bourgeoisie anymore? Looking back, Powers’ protagonist in Orfeo says “ …rebelling is itself a passing fashion, as fragile as any. The manifestos of Peter’s 20s – the movements and lawless experiments, the crazy climbs up onto the barricades – feel like a tantrum now, like his daughter refusing to take her nap. Who can say what the Academy champions these days? … but he knows that cool will give way to warm, form to feeling, as surely as a leading tone tilts forever toward the tonic.”

This is the pattern one finds in Western art movements over the last couple of centuries. Whichever Academy of Art has the funding and commissioning leverage that makes or breaks artists, also decides that either form or feeling is the necessary ingredient for the times. The Classical period demanded form; the Baroque and Romantic periods fetishized feeling; the Neo-Classicists yearned for lost formality; the Impressionists ramped up feeling; the Modernists progressively reduced form to its essence, and the Post-Modernists pushed this until art itself was almost eliminated.

Are we at the point where “cool will give way to warm, form to feeling”? Is it an inevitable pendulum swing or does it swing back because those denied recognition, funding and acceptance by the current Academy push back through dedicated hard work?  We shall see. Or likely not “us” but commentators far in the future who will look back over the last 100 years and describe how Western civilization finally emerged from a dark age of anti-art to an age of …what?

Powers hints at the possible next phase as his protagonist hears one of his musical contemporaries, “a rigid serialist”, serve up “…a bouquet reeking of lyric consonants…a serious composer surrendering, turning his back on the last hundred years, and sinking into prettiness. And yet what courage in this backsliding. Els shakes his head at the loveliness of the florid finale. it makes him remember old pleasures condemned for reasons he can’t now retrieve.” (Orfeo, p.270)

Lyricism, loveliness, “Old pleasures condemned for reasons he can’t now retrieve”; could this be the new rebelliousness?  In this spirit I am currently re-visiting past work because I can’t remember why I stopped doing it. Why not do landscapes?

Why not go for beauty? It feels like a  repudiation of everything artists have been conditioned to believe. But let’s face it, art is not going to solve the climate crisis, mass species extinction or mass human migration. It is not going to shock the middle-classes and 100 years of attempting to do so has done nothing for society or the environment. So artists may as well return to their original job of facilitating reverence: for nature, for stillness, for God, however understood.  Artworks made with and for reverence may not appeal to the Academy, but will speak to “the usual hearty few …hungry for some transcendent thing that the human mind may never produce.” (Orfeo, p.276)

Powers suggests a way forward: “a middle path between romantic indulgence and sterile algorithms, between the grip of the past and the cult of progress”.(Orfeo p.274) No need to return to Rubenesque pink bottoms floating on Cumulus clouds or pastoral scenes of vanished country life.

Also no need to eschew landscapes, work exclusively with recycled waste or communicate that hopeless despair is the only sane attitude possible.

So my current approach is that ”… the key to re-enchantment still lay in walking backwards into the future”. I’m revisiting traditional drawing techniques of the past, from the 15th C. woodcuts and engravings of Albrecht Dürer to the 19th C wood engravings of Thomas Bewick and of Paul Nash in the 20th C. I studied and used these techniques as an illustrator and they became my trademark style. Now I am re-discovering the potential for these techniques when brought into the present via Photoshop. The melding of traditional techniques with current technical hardware opens up an unlimited potential for exploration and re-discovery of old pleasures condemned for reasons I can’t now retrieve.

The post Backing into the Future first appeared on Marion-Lea Jamieson, Artist.

A. S. Byatt’s last book of short stories, Medusa’s Ankles, was a joy to read after having waded through a slew of glib novels by young writers seeking to take liberties with the form without having mastered it to begin with. The introduction to Byatt’s book is written by David Mitchell who describes the author as an art historian whose scholarly knowledge of art informs her prose. He says her characters act as conduits for ideas about making art, looking at art and art’s centrality to the mind and the world. For instance she incorporates ideas from John Ruskin “…from whom art lecturers claim professional descent“.

Few writers, Mitchell says, embed theory in their fiction with Byatt’s boldness and success, with theories of art illustrated by the stories that house them. He uses the word “Ekphrasis” which describes a work of visual art used as a literary device. I’m delighted by the revelation that there is a word for an area I’ve been trying to talk about in the halting prose of a non-writer. But Byatt’s prose “bestows dignity upon art in all its manifestations.”

In the short story, Jesus in the House of Martha and Mary, she has the character Valasquez say, “the world is full of light and life and the true crime is not to be interested in it“.  That’s an interesting idea – artists are simply those people interested enough in light and life to devote their lives to translating it into a visual, literary or some other communicable form.

One of the collection’s outstanding stories  is “A Lamia in the Cevennes” in which an artist with a creative block falls in love, not with a mythological seductress, but with art itself. 

As in all her stories, this one is in constant dialogue with the readers, asking, What is art? Why do we need it? What does it do for us? The protagonist, Bernard, asks, “Why bother? Why does this matter so much? What difference does it make to anything if I solve this blue and just start again? I could just sit down and drink wine. I could go and be useful in a cholera camp in Columbia or Ethiopia. Why bother to render the transparency in solid paint on a bit of board? I could just stop. He could not.” “Art is a mercurial lover” says Mitchell in the Introduction. “The artists can no more ignore their art than a character can change the story they appear in, or a Greek hero outwit the fates.”

There are many other authors who wrestle with the point of making art. In his novel, Elizabeth Finch, Julian Barnes asks,”Is art a depiction of reality, a concentration of it, a superior substitute for it, or just a beguiling irrelevance?” In the case of a novel, it is easier to understand how the writer, an expert at communicating in language, can help readers to make sense of the world, to understand it and our place in it. But what about the writers’ or artists’ larger responsibilities to society as a whole? Whether a writer, or any artist must directly address and take a strong position on political developments in his/her country is explored at some length and with great delicacy by Colm Toibin in his novel about the life of Thomas Mann, The Magician. In the novel, Mann (and Toibin) concludes that artists are damned if they do or don’t take a political stand and by extension, suggests that an artist’s first and primary responsibility is to his/her work. He also concludes that barbarism is never far beneath the surface and that art is always the first of its victims. So artists keep alive a sense of grace and beauty that balances violence and brutality.

These great artists insist that creating artworks is a balance to violence, help us see and make sense of the world and I am grateful that they have defended making art for art’s sake. Thanks Antonia, Julian, Colm, Thomas and all the rest.

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Despite defaulting to the usual formula of a highly successful artist protagonist, Roxanna Robinson has managed to express how it is to make paintings and present them to the wider world, and the inner doubts and fears that arise. In her book Cost she describes the moment when the protagonist has just entered the gallery where her latest work is being shown.

This rather long but brilliant excerpt effectively captures the experience of an artist, especially a female artist, on showing her work.

“…her next thought was fear that she was not good enough for the gallery. The work was not what she had hoped. It was never what she hoped. She could see she hadn’t done what she intended. Nor was she breaking new ground: she wasn’t combining video with cake or making sculpture out of garbage or using pigment made from Moose urine. She was only trying to work deeper into the presence of landscape, to find something interior that had not been revealed before. She was trying to create a certain set of relationships. She was trying to create a glowing mystical terrain. Why shouldn’t you work deeper into a tradition instead of breaking out of it? Everyone worked within some  tradition even if it was the tradition of subversion, rebellion. What she wanted was her paintings to mean something, to have their own speaking presence. It was feeling, it was passion. Passion was what she wanted. Giotto’s tiny angels weeping and ringing their hands, quivering with grief like anguished hummingbirds.

Julia had no interest in art that jeered at passion. Irony was the suicide mode of art, parasitically dependent on the culture around it, so instantly obsolete as the culture evolved. Who cared about those ancient needle sharp skewers, so exquisite, so excruciating, so on the mark, so of the moment, so hopelessly outdated? Passion would still drive the universe.

The paintings stood their ground, made their claims, said their pieces. What was it she had meant to do? Was this it? This role of coloured panels; these flat bright things hanging against the plaster walls? Now looked at from a distance, it might be failure again. There had been something else, something quick and liquid, something deeper. That was what she had been trying for, she’d wanted to make a large bright place, larger, more radiant more frightening than here, but like it. These were only awkward, shorthand comments, incomplete versions of the larger thing. She had failed, as always; she’d comes nowhere near the mark. She would have to stand here and listen people offer kind words about work, a low drone of pity thudding through the false congratulations.

She could not change things. The pictures were done, they were up on the walls, they were presenting themselves to the world. She had failed maybe, but maybe not. Maybe what she was trying for could not be achieved. She had come as close, perhaps, as she could, as anyone could, given the limits, right now, of herself. All she could do was make things come close, as close as she could get them, to the real thing.

Actually, they were close to what she had wanted to say. There was the work to be judged, and there she was, accepting authourship. What she hoped was that people would see her intentions, that she was striving for that bright, liquid, melting thing. Now she felt full of alarmed anticipation. And also full of pleasure: it was an honour to be a part of this dialogue about art & beauty & value. Everything was near-misses wasn’t it? Fail. Fail again. Fail better. Suddenly she felt deliriously happy, inflated & buoyant with pleasure, simply to have the opportunity to participate in the great discourse.

There was nothing you could believe about your work from other people, nothing. Praise sounded false; criticism, mean. Everything was biased, of course, there was nothing objective about responses to art. There were a few friends you could trust to tell you the truth, but it was only their truths. Nothing to make  certain your place in the world of art. You had to find it yourself and then make it your home. You had to create your own balance your own certainty. No one else knew what you were trying to do. You had to find your own faith. You have to stand up for it against the assaults of logic and fear and the articulations of the whole critical world. You had to close your eyes to everything else, repeating your personal creed, reminding your self of what you were doing, why you were doing it.”

Beautifully said and relevant to any artistic discipline, the need to fail, fail again and then fail better in order to participate in the great discourse.

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The Three Graces

This piece was a further effort to explore the problem of depicting women in art without succumbing to stereotyping about Beauty, the Eternal Woman and the rest of it. This problem is discussed in more detail in another blog .

Images of The Three Graces goes back to antiquity.  Wikipedia says in Greek mythology, the Graces ordinarily numbered three, from youngest to oldest: “Splendor”, “Mirth” and “Good Cheer”.

In 1482 Sandro Botticelli included Three graces in his painting Primavera.

There is the famous oil painting by Italian painter, Raphael, who in turn was inspired by a ruined Roman marble statue in Siena, shown below, that was in turn a copy of a Greek original.

Also below is Antonio Canova’s (1757 – 1822) version in marble. He was an Italian sculptor who became famous for his sculptures that delicately rendered nude flesh. His work is the epitome of classical refinement.

My sculptural version of The Three Graces is the opposite of delicately rendered nude flesh for reasons I have explained elsewhere.  I am breathless with admiration for the technical ability of those painters and sculptors who were able to take paints or stone and turn them into a timeless msterpieces.  But that was then and this is now. The problem for contemporary artists is that the female form has been used so often that it has become a cultural icon used to convey shallow, sentimental ideas about women that are conventional and formulaic.  This is why my version of the graceful trio is made from flat planes to create monumental, powerful angular figures. This seems closer to the original conception of the Graces as goddesses of “Splendor”, “Mirth” and “Good Cheer.

But for the last four centuries, endless, ubiquitous, egregious representations of delicately rendered female flesh have become an issue. It became an issue, largely because of the women’s movement and a general critique of gender inequality. But the role of women in the arts was raised to the public consciousness most brilliantly by the Guerilla Girls. In 1989, this artists’ collective was asked to design a billboard for the Public Art Fund (PAF) in New York.  They conducted a “weenie count” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, comparing the number of nude males to nude females in the artworks on display. The results were very “revealing”  and were used in the design they submitted shown below.

The PAF said the design wasn’t clear enough (????) and rejected it. The Guerilla Girls rented advertising space on NYC buses and ran it themselves, until the bus company cancelled their lease, saying that the image, based on Ingres’ famous Odalisque, was too suggestive and that the figure appeared to have more than a fan in her hand.

The problem of delicately rendered female flesh was explored in the early 1970’s in a collection of essays, later televised, called Ways of Seeing, edited by John Berger.  The essays raise questions about hidden ideologies in visual images. One essay focuses particularly on the female nude as a subject for art which depicts women as a subject of male idealization or desire, rather than as herself . An example is Venus & Cupid by Lely shown below.

This portrait of his mistress was commissioned by Charles the Second. It shows her passively looking at the spectator staring at her naked. Berger calls her expression “…a sign of her submission to the owner’s feelings or demands.”

Berger contrasts this Western tradition of painting languid nudes to non-European traditions, such as Indian, African & Pre-Columbian art where “…nakedness is never supine in this way.”

The question posed on the Guerilla Girl’s website is: DO YOU THINK THINGS HAVE GOTTEN BETTER SINCE OUR FIRST COUNT IN 1989? As a sculptor, I am naturally interested in how often women are successful in sculpture & public art competitions or how well they are represented in exhibitions and galleries.  So to answer the Guerrilla Girls’ question, I checked “sculpture” on Wikipedia and did a back-of-envelope gender analysis of the sculptors represented there. Only about 5% of the artists mentioned are women in what should be a progressive source of information on sculpture. An apologist might say that women don’t want to be sculptors because it’s too difficult for them, or they are not strong enough or something along those lines.  For instance, when I was at a sculpture symposium in China, I asked why there were virtually no Chinese women sculptors among the 60 or so male sculptors participating.  The response I got from male sculptors was that sculpture is dirty work & women don’t want to do it.  A more likely scenario is that China, like most of the world, discriminates against female sculptors in terms of acceptance for sculpture training and granting of commissions. If in fact there are fewer female than male sculptors per capita in the West, it would be my suspicion that women chose another field because sculpture has remained a macho preserve.  And even if there were as many female sculptors as male, there is clearly a strong gender bias at work in terms of getting work & recognition.

Though the Guerilla Girls are still very much the “conscience of the art world” I hadn’t seen any sign of them in my home town of Vancouver for decades.  I was reminded about their artwork by an exhibition of feminist art at the Centre Georges Pompidou  in Paris that featured them.  Another of their brilliant and biting pieces is the following:

I love their work and wish we could see more of it.  The contemporary art scene tends toward works that are careful not to take a stance on identifiable issues or real-world problems.  An artist may allude to an issue, preferably taking an obscure approach that could not be said to present a point of view. But using art to clearly present an opinion is considered didactic, and contrary to postmodernism’s rule that the viewer’s interpretation is paramount and must not be determined by the creator. That’s why re-visiting the Guerrilla Girls was such a breath of fresh air.

Running Woman

To continue the series of dancing woman, I developed another image called Anima. It was first built as a maquette, shown below.

This maquette was an homage to Picasso‘s wonderful painting, Two Women Running on the Beach (The Race) (1922).

I loved the monumental qualities of the women, their strength, freedom of movement and obvious joy.  It was fun to try to capture these qualities in intersecting flat planes.

It’s interesting that a confirmed misogynist like Picasso would come up with the most powerful images of female freedom and strength. That is because, though he was clearly a genius, his genius did not extend to the emotional sphere.

Anima was about the true inner self of an individual, as opposed to the persona or outer aspect of the personality. The sculpture is a celebration of the female principle, depicted using flat planes in a cubist/constructivist style to express strength.  Anima also refers to the joy and momentum that I was seeking to express in steel.

In collaboration with my partner, Colin Race, the 13″ high maquette was translated into a 68″ high sculpture (5+ times as big) shown below.  To scale the model up, I outlined each part & used a pantograph to increase the scale.  Due to the limits of my cheap pantograph and workspace,  I seem to remember I had to increase the scale by 2.5 then increase those drawings again by 2.5. I drew each part on cardboard then attached all the pieces together as a rough model to see if they would fit. To construct it in steel, we built the skirt first which created a stable base for attaching the upper body & legs.  Due to small cutting errors, the dimensions of the original cardboard templates had to be modified as the sculpture progressed.  Unfortunately, it didn’t occur to me to photo-document the process at the time. The finished sculpture currently resides in the

This experiment was quite successful, except that I wanted to leave the surface in polished mild steel with a clear finish as shown above.  I spent hours researching a finish that would prevent rust & not yellow, or peel off. I found all kinds of extravagant claims for aliphatic urethane coatings that were alleged to prevent mild steel from rusting and last forever. So we used oiled & pickled mild steel, polished the picking off and clear coated Anima I with Aliphatic Urethane.  But the steel started to rust underneath the clear coat within a few months of the rainy season. The clear coat was lasting well, but rust is almost impossible to eradicate, and it showed through the clear coat. We ended up having the urethane media blasted off and re-finished the sculpture with a silver powder coat.

The finish is not as silvery as I had hoped (though above photo taken on a rainy day), but it still looks great and is a lasting finish. The only way to get a really silver finish is by using stainless steel, and I can’t afford it for spec sculptures.

The Anima I design presented fabrication challenges as all the intersections were ground smooth which took a lot of difficult, labour intensive work. So the design for Anima II was made up of cubes, rather than intersecting planes.  It was also away to test our fabrication capability for the eventual construction of my design for The Three Graces at the beginning of this blog. I submitted the drawing of Anima II shown below to a call for public art in Bremerton Washington and the drawing was accepted for a commission.

I used the same skirt design as Anima I, which again provided a stable base for constructing the legs and upper body. I didn’t make a cardboard model, but just waded in, using the cardboard templates from Anima I as a guide. But they were soon useless so I ended up using big sheets of tracing paper to create a pattern for each piece of steel.  It was sort of like designing pattern pieces for making a dress.

As the caption shows, at the time of this submission I still wasn’t aware that no clear coat can be made to adhere well to bare steel, There just isn’t enough body for it to work. So I hadn’t factored into the budget getting the piece powder-coated.

Because the sculpture would be in a seaside location, I was advised to use a zinc-rich primer which is a very dark grey. The silver colour coat was not opaque enough to completely cover the primer, so the finish is less silvery than I had wished. Live & learn. If I were to do another piece like this in future, I would get it media blasted and spray-painted as you can keep adding layers of paint until satisfied. With powder coating, you can only add 2-3 coats max (primer, colour & clearcoat).

Not having worked in Washington before, I was also not aware that there would be sales taxes. And at about this time, the US border suddenly tightened up and we could no longer talk our way through without paying a brokerage fee and getting our Ford Ranger Pick-up registered as a Standard Carrier with the National Motor Freight Traffic Association. If it wasn’t such a waste of time, it would be funny to see us in our little red pick-up with some odd sculpture in the bed lined up for hours with rows of giant semis. Then there are more fees to actually get across the border.

The paperwork alone takes so much time away from doing any actual artwork that we now avoid bringing any sculptures into the US. We used to exhibit in many of the shows just across the border and really enjoyed meeting all the sculptors & sculpto-philes to the south. Just one small illustration of the many ways in which the new Security State is strangling the culture..

To add insult to injury, the reception from the man-on-the-street during installation was lukewarm. Apparently there were differences of opinion in the community as to whether or not the City should be cluttering up the streets with public art.

Ironically, given its reception, Anima was meant to convey a positive message.  As quoted in the Kitsap Sun:

“It’s a strong piece about optimism,” Jamieson said. “I hope people will get a feeling of optimism and hope. We’re going into the future with our heads held high and a bright outlook.” Well, I didn’t exactly say that but that was the gist of it.

As a further irony, the locals began to drape the sculpture in clothes. The local Arts Council framed it as positive interaction but the Mayor checked in with me as to whether or not I was offended by this. But to me, once a sculpture is out in the public realm, I no longer feel  wedded to the original concept and if this is the way the community chooses to take ownership of the piece, so be it.

Having said that, I am not comfortable with this fad, and I have seen great sculptures in Seattle that have been draped in clothes.  Maybe this is community involvement or maybe this is a fundamental disrespect for art. Or this could be part of the postmodern attitude in which everyone is an artist.

We travelled to Bremerton one last time to maintain the sculpture and removed not only the accessories shown here, but a sandwich-board advertising local fundraising activities. The sculpture had graduated from mannequin to kiosk. While we were cleaning the sculpture, people were waiting in a car for us to leave so they could replace their advertising.

In addition to its advertising function, the sculpture was serving as part of a skateboard obstacle course and there were rubber skid marks up the skirt.  We tried everything to remove them and finally hit on toothpaste! For future reference, Crest with Flouride does the trick.

Like all of my experiences in art, Bremerton was a learning experience – mostly on how to combine artistic sensitivity with a rhinoceros-like hide.

After the Dancing Woman and Anima series I had not finished exploring my inner woman and years later, after returning to painting as my main medium, I came back to the theme but with a different approach. This approach is described in a later blog.

The post Exploring my Inner Woman first appeared on Marion-Lea Jamieson, Artist.

Anarchy & the Artist

As an artist, I’ve been interested in the attraction of anarchy to some, especially younger people. There is a deep undercurrent of unfocused anger in a portion of the population that can be easily unleashed.  This happened during the Stanley Cup riot in Vancouver and this has happened to my own artworks on display in the public realm.  Sculptures that I have spent months or even a year fabricating, and that have been enjoyed by the whole community have been trashed by this irrational rage.  Vandals have even brought tools for the express purpose of wrecking my artwork. My sculptures feel like a part of me, like my children, and I abandon them to their fate on the streets with trepidation. When they are attacked, I feel assaulted.

As an artist, the best way to deal with this is through my art practice, so a mini-series in the Running Man theme explored the phenomenon of vandalism and the public realm.  The piece shown below, called War of All, was an attempt to understand the anger and capture its energy. It was also an opportunity to muse on the idea of anarchy. The opposite of anarchy is governance, and the title of this piece refers to “the war of all against all,” the description that Thomas Hobbes gives to human existence in the state of nature, or life without government.

The Philosophy of Anarchy

There seems to be a general misunderstanding about the philosophy of anarchy, certainly among those who fear any challenge to the status quo. But many self-styled anarchists may not have investigated the background to this philosophy and its many conflicting beliefs.

Wikipedia describes Anarchism as “generally defined as the political philosophy which holds the state to be immoral or, alternatively, as opposing authority in the conduct of human relations…. Anarchists   advocate stateless societies based on non-hierarchical voluntary associations.”

 Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, the French philosopher who declared that “property is theft” is often called the founder of modern anarchist theory. Proudhon favoured workers’ associations or co-operatives, and considered that social revolution could be achieved in a peaceful manner. Though Proudhon’s arguments against entitlement to land and capital make sense, his anti-state position may not be as relevant today when corporations are more powerful than governments.

At the other end of the anarchy spectrum is the the egoist form of individualist anarchism, which  supports the individual doing exactly what he pleases – taking no notice of God, state, or moral rules. Max Stirner was a German philosopher, who ranks as one of the literary fathers of nihilism, existentialism, post-modernism and individualist anarchism. Some adherents to this school of thought have found self-expression in crime and violence. Individualist anarchists also gave rise to the modern movement of anarcho-capitalism with absolutist views of human rights and rejection of the state.

Illegalism is another outgrowth of  individualist anarchism. Illegalists usually do not seek a moral basis for their actions, recognizing only the reality of “might” rather than “right”. For the most part, illegal acts are done simply to satisfy personal desires, not for some greater ideal.  This seems to be the philosophical home of many self-defined anarchists. Framed as personal direct action against exploiters & the system, this is the rationale for spray-painting graffiti on public buildings & destroying installations in the public realm, from bus shelters & public toilets to my sculptures. Though there is a huge differences between creating guerrilla art and destroying public art, the motivation is similar and the line between the two is blurred.

I have used layers of graffiti as a background for War of All, shown above, because the issue of graffiti sums up so many social contradictions.  Graffiti artists and groups excluded from the political mainstream argue that they use graffiti as a tool to spread their point of view.  They point out that they do not have the money – or sometimes the desire – to buy advertising to get their message across, and that the ruling class or establishment control the mainstream press and other avenues of expression, systematically excluding  radical/alternative points of view.

While graffiti on public or private property can be looked at as a political act or an expression of creativity, most of it is garbage – the equivalent of dumping McDonald’s wrappers on the sidewalk. And the co-opting of graffiti by commercial culture is a widespread message that using the public realm to express your individual ego (whether a creative or destructive urge) is very cool & cutting edge.  So the five drunk guys who come across one of my sculptures downtown in the wee hours think it is hip to break it apart.  Do they figure that because my piece was accepted by the municipality for the site, this makes the artwork part of the system and therefore fair game?  Probably they don’t think at all.

Another work from the Running Man series on the sub-theme of anarchy & graffiti is called Do Not Go Quietly.

The title references the Dylan Thomas poem, with the line, “Rage, rage against the dying of the light,” and hints at resisting arrest. It again tries to capture the anger & rebelliousness that expresses itself most often in tagging & other vandalism. The wooden figures are absences in that they act under cover of darkness and have no recognizable goals or objectives.

I’m all in favour of goals & objectives.   I don’t buy the party line that art should not address political or moral issues and artists shouldn’t flog ideas. Having opinions or otherwise expressing values is didactic and not hip. We must eschew meta-narratives and accept the flotsam & jetsam of cultural tides.  The contemporary artist should be a blank canvas on which the viewer projects their own ideas, and points of view are outdated.

But no matter how unfashionable, I like to express ideas in my work.  To the right is a piece called Conversion about the transformation of ecological into economic wealth, in this case the logging of trees to be transformed into investment portfolios. I’ve used graffiti as a background to indicate that the destruction of forests (habitat for many species) for the economic benefit of the human species is also vandalism.

The level of logging carried out in the province of British Columbia where I live is ecologically, socially & economically unsustainable.  Trees are a vital part of watershed ecosystems and if too many are removed the system breaks down. Trees are being cut faster than they can grow so inevitably large numbers of loggers will be out of work & logging towns abandoned.  The logging companies will take out as many trees as they can before they are all gone, then simply re-invest elsewhere, leaving BC economically depressed.

Another indicator species of unsustainable human activity are fish.  In Fishery, I have again used the graffiti motif, except this time, the tags are those of corporate logos.

Big business gets to splash its tags in multi-million dollar advertisements in all media while the less powerful use graffiti. All economic wealth originates from the earth and its bounty of water, air, plants, animals and minerals. real wealth is in the health of these resources, not in the consumer items that the destruction of these resources buys.

Anarchy and Protest

Some believe that the real problem is restrictions on our freedom and that without them society would be a better place.  For instance, at the Occupy Vancouver rally & march there were speakers, such as the raw milk lobby (a surprisingly vocal and well organized group)  who argued that “no one should be able to tell me what I can put into my body”. This is the voice of freedom from authority, one aspect of the anarchist persuasion, which presents itself as an alternative to the current system.

Like everyone else, I’m fascinated by the Occupy Vancouver movement and the many similar protests happening around the globe. The stated goals of Occupy Vancouver on its website are:

“to transform the unequal, unfair, and growing disparity in the distribution of power and wealth in our city and around the globe. We challenge corporate greed, corruption, and the collusion between corporate power and government. We oppose systemic inequality, militarization, environmental destruction, and the erosion of civil liberties and human rights. We seek economic security, genuine equality, and the protection of the environment for all.“

There is much discussion in the media on the fact that Occupy Vancouver, like all the other protests, is leaderless and does not provide a plan for achieving their stated goals.  The corporate media calls the protesters spoiled children who do not appreciate how good they have it, in other words, how well the capitalist system has served them in Vancouver. But the system has not served the protesters well. Vancouver is considered one of the most expensive cities in North America, ranking ahead of some of the largest cities in the United States.  A Chapman University report found that Vancouver is one of the most unaffordable cities in the world, with median house prices more than nine times the median household income. A study by Demographia, which examines international housing affordability, has deemed Vancouver as “impossibly unaffordable.”

Steeped as they are in the philosophy of self-interest, ruling elites have little concern for those living in poverty and despair in Vancouver and most other North American cities.  The occupiers and their sympathizers understand that in the win/lose world of unrestricted free-enterprise, the creation of poverty is a necessary component of the system. Wealth is systematically removed from less aggressive or advantaged groups, regions and nations in order to concentrate in the hands of a few.

The success of Occupy Vancouver in bringing about change will be hampered by individualistis anarchists who want their personal issues addressed and are not willing to go through the difficult process of aggregating interests and reaching consensus. On marches we chant “The people, united, will never be defeated”, and the challenge is to find union.  The 1% and their facilitators are united behind the goal of maintaining the status quo so that they can continue to acquire wealth. They differ only on who gets how much. The 99% not only want their fair share of the pie, they want to prevent & reverse the growing gap between rich & poor, climate change, mass species extinction, pollution of water soil & air, homelessness, inequality, militarization, tyranny, corruption, moral decay, the breakdown of communities and a host of other ills.

Proposed Solutions

The common denominator in all these ills is capitalism and the global economy.  In a study titled “Survival of the Richest,” Oxfam International reported that in 2020 and 2021, the wealthiest 1% of the world’s population accumulated nearly two-thirds of all new wealth. In the previous decade, 2010-20, the richest 1% had amassed around half of all new wealth. While billionaires get richer, global poverty and income inequality are increasing, meaning more hunger, starvation, homelessness and declining access to education, health care and other social support systems. The United Nations Development Program reports that human development is decreasing in over 90% of countries.

Oxfam’s suggested solution to this terrible crisis is to raise taxes on the super-rich and big corporations in order to reduce inequality. But as the Workers World site points out, “…simply raising taxes fails to target the root cause of this growing inequality: the exploitation of workers around the world, who produce all the wealth, while the capitalist class gobbles up an ever larger proportion of the wealth that workers create. …The billionaires did not earn this money through their own labor — they stole it through the exploitation of the labor of billions of workers around the globe.” The site goes on to explain that the root cause, “Workers are never compensated for the full value of what they produce…The difference between the value workers add to a product and the lower wages they are paid becomes the profits that make up most of the billionaires’ accumulated wealth.” And capitalists can move factories anywhere in the world, to wherever taxes and wages are lowest and workers most compliant. While offering a succinct critique of capitalism and its deleterious impacts, Workers World does not offer a solution.

According to Wikipedia, “social anarchism envisions the overthrow of capitalism and the state in a social revolution, which would establish a federal society of voluntary associations and local communities, based on a network of mutual aid.”

Certainly it is important to protest against injustice, inequality, ecological degradation and all the other ills that capitalism has produced. The other part of the anarchist agenda is non-participation in the destructive economic system by self-managing our lives through community action and non-hierarchical cooperatives and collectives. Simply opting out of the global consumer culture as much as possible is a low-end anarchist solution. Here are some ways:

• reduce, re-use recycle
• buy second-hand
• trade, barter, swap
• buy nothing but absolute necessities
• buy local – nothing shipped more than 100 miles
• wear no brand logos
• buy from co-ops
• start co-ops
• grow your own
• bike, walk, take transit – don’t buy gas
• to travel don’t fly, take the bus or train
• vacation locally
• bank at a credit union

The anarchists’ vision of a federal society of voluntary associations and local communities may or may not ever become a reality. Meanwhile, we still have a somewhat democratic system in place here in Canada and we must all educate ourselves about political issues and involved ourselves politically if it is to continue.The system isn’t working and most people’s needs are not addressed because the corporate media convince voters not to vote in their own interests, or not to vote at all.  Successful political parties are indebted to donors with deep pockets and act to benefit them.  But we can still vote for candidates that recognize & oppose the subversion of democracy through corporate power. We can get involved in political parties that represent the 99% & push for strong platforms that limit the power of the 1%.

Conclusion

This post about art & anarchy has described: work I have done on an anarchist theme; the often pointless anarchy in my home town of Vancouver; and some of anarchy’s higher goals. It has suggested, in a limited way, how these might be applied. But it must be accepted that, short of overthrowing capitalism in a revolution, we are not going to seriously impede the onward march of capitalism. For those of us reluctant to engage in the crap shoot of total upheaval, we can only hope that, as Marx predicted, capitalism would bring itself down through its own contradictions.

The post Art & Anarchy first appeared on Marion-Lea Jamieson, Artist.

The painting below is based on one of the ceramic human figurines unearthed in northeastern Romania. They were made by the Cucuteni culture, which lasted from 4800 to 3000 B.C. in what is now Romania and Ukraine.

This mysterious culture appears to have worshipped Earth-Mother goddesses but there is a sometimes nasty debate among archeologists on the Mother Goddess theory. This represents a collision of world views: there are the passionate proponents of the theory that the Mother Goddess or Earth Mother preceded the Father God or Sky Father and that Neolithic societies were matrilineal and peaceful. The most well-known proponent of the theory that belief in a Mother Goddess preceded worship of the Father God was archaeologist Marija Gimbutas. She also argued that Neolithic societies were matrilineal and peaceful.

This is forcefully argued against with such feeling that one suspects the theory’s opponents find it threatening in some way. A Wikipedia entry on the topic of the the Mother Goddess is remarkable for its lack of coherence. The first part of the article is a less than objective attack on what the author calls the popular view of  the Goddess movement  – that the Neolithic era would have been just, peaceful and wise. The author concludes that it is highly unlikely that such a civilization ever existed, based on the following rationale:

“There isn’t a scintilla of physical evidence that anything of the kind occurred. There is no archaeological evidence of a supersophisticated civilization 10000 years ago—no gleaming cities, no factories powered by Earth energies…”.

This argument is so beside the point, it is hardly worth a riposte.

After deriding the theory of an archetypal fertility cult of the Mother Goddess which “supposedly” would have existed prior to the rise of patriarchy, the author concludes:

“Carl Gustav Jung suggested that archetypal mother goddess was a part of the collective unconscious of all humans; various adherents of Jung … have argued that such an archetype underpins many of its (I am assuming Western civilization’s ) own mythologies and may even precede the image of the paternal “father.” Such speculations help explain the universality of such mother goddess imagery around the world. The Upper Paleolithic Venus figurines have been sometimes explained as depictions of an Earth Goddess similar to Gaia.” 

So the author contradicts the earlier stance that there “isn’t a scintilla of physical evidence that anything of the kind occurred” while providing evidence from Psychology ( under the heading New Religious Movements). This evidence supports the idea that Neolithic worship of the Earth Mother Goddess preceded belief in the Sky Father God.

While the Wikepedia entry makes no effort to be objective, then gets lost in conflicting evidence, another footnote to the entry admits that:

“the issue of the Mother Goddess continues to be an exemplar for the problems of studying women in antiquity: mysterious images disembodied from their contexts, multiple scholarly biases and motivations, and conflicting interpretations of the scanty and fragmentary evidence.”

Belief in gods and goddesses is a complex issue in the history of human thought. Philosophers and other thinkers have wrestled with, not only whether earlier human societies worshipped a Mother Goddess before a Sky God, but the very existence of a Supreme Being of any gender. Pascal argued that a rational person should live as though God exists and seek to believe in God. If God does not actually exist, such a person will have only a finite loss (some pleasures, luxury, etc.), whereas if God does exist, he stands to receive infinite gains (as represented by eternity in Heaven) and avoid infinite losses (eternity in Hell).

How is this relevant to the Mother Goddess debate? An article in the Guardian on a UN report summarized the infinite losses, or hell on earth, that we humans are creating. There is an argument that this destruction can be traced back to our widespread belief in a clear mandate from the Sky God to rule the earth and everything in it for our own wants & needs.  As a result, human society is in jeopardy from the accelerating decline of the Earth’s natural life-support systems: coral reefs dying; rainforests desiccating into savannahs, nature being destroyed at a rate tens to hundreds of times higher than the average over the past 10 million years.

The biomass of wild mammals has fallen by 85%, natural ecosystems have lost about half their area and a million species are at risk of extinction – all largely as a result of human actions. Two in five amphibian species are at risk of extinction, as are one-third of reef-forming corals, and close to one-third of other marine species.

At least one in 10 insects are threatened with extinction and, in economic terms, the losses are jaw-dropping. Pollinator loss has put up to $577 billion of crop output at risk, while land degradation has reduced the productivity of 23% of global land.

Other impacts on humankind, including freshwater shortages and climate instability, are already “ominous” and will worsen without drastic remedial action. “The health of the ecosystems on which we and other species depend is deteriorating more rapidly than ever. We are eroding the very foundations of economies, livelihoods, food security, health and quality of life worldwide,”

If Pascal were alive today he would likely suggest that a rational person should live as though the Mother Goddess or Earth Mother exists and seek to believe in her and act accordingly. This would entail worshipping nature instead of converting it to consumer goods and then dumping it in the landfill, and preserving the earth because it is sacred. If the Mother Goddess or Earth Mother does not actually exist, such a person will have only a finite loss (some pleasures, luxury, etc.), whereas if the Mother Goddess or Earth Mother does exist, we all stand to receive infinite gains (as represented by the continuation of life on this planet for our children and grandchildren) and avoid infinite losses (Hell on earth as represented by a scorched planet where humans have destroyed the ecosystems on which they depend).

Meanwhile the Hot Mother Goddess debate can be viewed as a clash between those who see the need to change the very basis of our belief systems and those who cling to those beliefs. A corollary of belief in the Father God is that one species and gender created in His image has a mandate to rule the earth in his own interests. The Mother Goddess or Earth Mother is a challenge to that world view at its most basic level as it entails an earth-centred approach to our economic and social organization rather than a human-centred one.  Those committed to a system oriented toward the interests of human males understandably feel threatened by such a radical change. So they counter with convoluted and contradictory attacks on the earth-centric view that we humans were previously in matrilineal societies and worshipped a Mother Goddess. Meanwhile our earth mother continues to heat.

The post The Hot Mother Goddess Debate first appeared on Marion-Lea Jamieson, Artist.

The problems are formidable. The UN states:
“While the world has achieved progress towards gender equality and women’s empowerment… women and girls continue to suffer discrimination and violence in every part of the world. …Providing women and girls with equal access to education, health care, decent work, and representation in political and economic decision-making processes will fuel sustainable economies and benefit societies and humanity at large.”

Statistics shows the appalling lack of gender equality:
• every year in Africa there are three million women and girls at risk of female genital mutilation.
• in 30% of cases globally, women suffer violence from their partner within their home.
• More than 33.000 girls become child brides every day. Globally, 12 million girls get married before the age of 18 every year.
• Women are 47% more likely to suffer serious injuries in traffic accidents, because the safety features of cars are designed for men.
• Women in rural areas of Africa spend 40 billion hours a year to collect water.
• 137 women are killed every day in the world by a member of their family.
• Worldwide, it is estimated that around 35% of women have experienced sexual and non-sexual violence at least once in their lifetime.

• Worldwide, women earn on average 23% less than men.
• Women spend an average of three hours a day more than men in household chores and family care in developing countries, and two hours a day more than men in developed countries.

• Single mothers with children make up about 75% of all single parent families and suffer higher poverty rates than single fathers.
• Women are largely excluded from the executive branches of government and are rarely leaders of major political parties.
• only Belgium, Denmark, France, Latvia, Luxembourg and Sweden scored high on eight indicators (from receiving a pension to freedom of movement) that influence the economic decisions made by women during their careers.

• Femicide is “intentional killing of a woman following the alleged transgression of gender roles deriving from tradition and social norms. Transgressive behaviour therefore varies according to the social context in which the crime is perpetrated“.

There are the problems of parental leave punished by companies and governments, the consideration of the ‘responsibility’ of women in sexual violence, hatred (also online) for women who are judged by their appearance instead of by their professionalism, etc. The UN estimates it will take another 108 years at the current pace to achieve gender equality.

The question is: Why did Western cultures reject the European Neolithic belief in the female principle as a life-giving source and nature as our Earth Mother? How did we instead a become a culture that subjugates women and degrades the planet?

The European Neolithic culture’s reverence for nature as Earth Mother was expressed in their arts. This took the form of inscriptions on ceramics and their sculptural images that often depicted sacred female forms or goddesses.

These goddesses were powerful deities usually taking the shape of animal/human hybrids that showed the relationship between the female life-force and the forces of nature. Clearly the degradation of women and nature is not an ingrained human attribute, but could be considered a relatively recent development. So there is the potential for humans to return to their earlier more benign beliefs.

In my art practice from 2019-2021, I worked with the art & images of the European Neolithic era that existed between about 6000-3000 BC. Research indicates that early human kinship during this era was everywhere matrilineal. Images from early human societies in what is now Western & Eastern Europe depict figures incorporating human female and animal characteristics that are clearly supernatural and/or divine.

One image used in paintings from my Neolithic series was a female form abstracted so that the arms are like wings and the body narrows down to a point like an insect. My theory is that this figure represents a bee goddess, which often appears in Neolithic art. As we are only now re-discovering, bees may be the force of nature that will determine if life on this planet as we know it continues.

As discussed in another blog, that series of paintings created between 2019-2021 explored the pre-historic alternatives to patriarchal religions.

Patriarchal religions are based on the idea that the human male is made in God’s image, human females can only access God through men, and all other species are subordinate to humans. The theory that inspired this series of paintings suggests that the patriarchal religions are the root of, not only the problem of gender inequality and violence, but the disastrous impacts of violence against the planet.

Michelangelo’s gorgeous painting, shown below, is the powerful and iconic image of this system of belief.

The challenge for the patriarchal religions of the world is to reconcile the conviction that God has passed the spark of divinity directly to human males and no others, with recognition that the rest of Creation is also of divine origin. As our understanding of nature deepens, we are faced with the inevitable conclusion that we depend on the earth and its life-giving force.

The post Finding the Life Force first appeared on Marion-Lea Jamieson, Artist.

Many artists have been inspired by what many authoritative figures have called the “primitive” artwork of either contemporary or ancient cultures. Artists instinctively recognize the compelling strength and impact of these works. In an homage to the sophistication and skill of these ancient artists I worked on a series of paintings from 2019-2020 that were inspired by European Neolithic images, such as the one on the left..

The series questions the idea that art, and indeed the human race, are progressing such that whatever is created today is superior to what went before. It investigates the concept of an Avant Garde that rejects the misapprehensions of the past, brings art boldly into the present day and charts it’s path into the future. This concept is undermined by the work of European Neolithic artists that were creating images as subtle, evocative and strong as anything that has been created since.

Their art has a power that appears to come from total involvement of their minds, bodies and souls in their work. They were not, like contemporary Western artists, motivated by the imperative to create work for the market or personal gain. It seems that Neolithic art sprang from a deeply spiritual connection to nature and their culture. These qualities are often missing from the work of contemporary Western artists who lack a passionate, all-consuming belief in what they are doing.

Another fascinating aspect of European Neolithic art is that many of the themes that appear and re-appear in their work also appear in disparate and geographically distant cultures.This suggests that there are powerful images integral to human consciousness that can be used to create a connection to, and understanding of, the world.

Finally, the artwork of the Neolithic era in Europe is of interest to me because I am a descendant of Europeans. Though the lineage is convoluted, the influence of the images created by Neolithic artists inspired Egyptian artists, who in turn influenced Greek artists, who in turn influenced modern European artists, who set the contemporary visual arts on their current trajectory. But currently, that trajectory is often one of cool intellectualizing, in which artwork requires an explanatory page of curatorial interpretation for the viewer to get it. While the busy mind is everywhere omni-present in post-modern, post-post-modern and other modern schools, a sense of body & soul are lacking. And the death-grip of post-modernist academe encourages artists to eschew a passionate, all-consuming belief in what they are doing in favour of ironical detachment and cynicism.

Images from early human societies in what is now Western & Eastern Europe, often depicted figures incorporating human female and animal characteristics that are clearly supernatural and/or divine. Divinity at that time was not an exclusively human male attribute and these images ascribe divinity to non-humans as well as female humans.

The immediacy, power and beauty of Neolithic art and the arts of contemporary cultures that are still connected to body & soul are therefore an inspiration. This is why to be at the forefront of art may mean being in the Devant Garde rather than the Avant Garde.

The post At the Forefront of Art first appeared on Marion-Lea Jamieson, Artist.

Some suggest that the preference of the establishment for abstract art, rather than representational art, sprang from the uproar associated with  a mural done by Diego Rivera.  A program called The Rockefellers on PBS describes Rivera’s confrontation with the American oligarchy and its implications for freedom of visual expression.

Rivera was an artist with strong political convictions that were not satisfied by abstract art. Drawn by the social movements unleashed by the Mexican Revolution, Rivera returned to his homeland in 1921 where he developed a unique style that combined the influences of European art and Mexico’s distinctive pre-Columbian iconography. In his populist murals, he used vibrant colors and simple scenes to illustrate his Marxist ideals and the plight of the working class throughout Mexican history. In 1922 his revolutionary convictions led him to join the Communist Party.

In 1932 Rivera travelled to the US where the culmination of the trip was to be a large mural as the centerpiece of the most talked about architectural project in the country —- the new Rockefeller Center.  While still in process, a furor erupted over a portrait of Vladimir Lenin included in the mural. The mural was removed, hammered off the walls and all evidence of it destroyed. 

Another example of how realist art threatened the establishment was the Tim Robbins film The Cradle Will Rock (1999). It is a true story of politics and art in the 1930s USA, centered around a leftist musical drama and attempts to stop its production. It includes a dramatization of the confrontation between Rivera and New York’s elites set in the context of a general repression of the arts during the mid-1930’s using anti-communism as a rationale. The film suggested that this was the turning point in the history of modern art in which the political, media, financial & industrial ruling classes decided to actively promote  abstraction as a politically neutral, non-threatening art form.  Abstract art is safe art in that no contentious political issues are raised such that anyone could notice.

Not that hot debates haven’t raged over abstract art.  The was a big kerfuffle in Canada in the 1990’s when the National Gallery paid $1.8 million dollars for Barnett Newman’s 1967 abstract painting, Voice of Fire, with a red stripe and two blue stripes. (The image shown below was downloaded for purposes of critical commentary on the artistic school or tradition to which the artist is associated, by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation and qualifies as fair use under United States copyright law.)

But this is the kind of issue that politicians love – where the public attacks some small vulnerable minority like artists, rather than questioning the governing party’s self-serving policies.  Though it is fun to witness the play of forms, colours, lines & ideas in abstract art, how can this be justified in a politically apathetic culture in need of consciousness-raising?  This, of course, drags forth the whole question of the meaning and purpose of art.

For many years I worked on the Running Man theme, described in an earlier blog, as a vehicle for investigating political and philosophical issues, using a representational image that was abstracted so as to be widely applicable. The figures were expressly designed to raise questions about our economy, society and culture.

When Running Man had run his course, I experimented with the purely visual universality of abstract painting while remaining wary of the pitfalls of decorative art. Below are a few examples of works from a series called Ephemera. These were studies for future sculptures in sheet acrylic and were depicted as though constructed from highly coloured transparent sheets of two-dimensional plastic.

Later works imagined creating these forms in three dimensions in the more durable medium of concrete. I did a number of drawings and paintings to develop a vocabulary of sculptural forms and the resulting sculptures experimented with concrete pigments to create a painterly surface. The drawings, in oil pastels on paper, were done during the Okanagan Thompson International Sculpture Symposium where I created a steel & resin public artwork called Running Man . This piece and other works on this theme are described in another blog. I was living in a cabin beside an organic orchard just outside Kelowna BC and when not working on my commission, I cranked up Glenn Gould‘s Goldberg Variations and played with oil pastels & coloured paper.  The results were an adventure in line & colour.

I was guided by an inner sense of direction and excitement in the work, using an unrestricted palette and exuberant scribbles, eschewing precision and favouring expression.

When exhibiting these drawings and the later paintings that grew out of them, I described them as exploring the relationship between mind and body; time and space; physical and spiritual. The actual motivation behind these drawings and paintings was play as opposed to consciously working toward the expression of  some profound meaning. These descriptions came because of the need to provide a rationale for artworks in the real world. But really I was just having fun. These drawings were used as a basis for a series of oil paintings called 2D/3D.

Having said that my primary objective was play, as opposed to consciously working toward the expression of  some profound meaning, any artwork exists on a number of different planes and no one plane describes its totality. While playing with colours, lines and forms is a critical ingredient of painting, a painter is at the same time looking for harmony, balance, and rationality in the work. The work has to work and in order to do so, the painter has to set up criteria, even if those could not be verbalized. This in turn requires that the painter has internalized those qualities – not necessarily in relation to the “real” world, but in relation to the work. It could be said that the daily pursuit of the elusive goal of expressing ideas visually provides direction to artists in the same way that a religious discipline or philosophical framework provides structure and meaning to others.

This is not a far-fetched analogy because the creation of visual art demands in-the-moment presence that is otherwise sought in meditation and other disciplines associated with religious practice. The act of drawing & painting can produce a level of awareness that is not dissimilar to the results of meditation or prayer. The joy many painters experience comes from overriding the over-busy mind and being present in the moment.  And to be in the moment, in the zone, all other worries, problems, desires and ambitions have to be put aside to listen to the artwork speak (or not) and be tuned into what needs to be done next in order to bring it to life.

The act of creation is not always joyful and uplifting. In most cases, the thing imagined and the actual result are unrelated. For instance Cross Purpose #1 was re-painted as Cross Purpose #2 to move away from the work as a painting and make it more of  a sculpture study. It went throught several more iterations before it finally came to rest.

There is a tension between painting to produce a painting and painting as a study for something else.  Sculpture has to exist in 3 dimensions – to withstand gravity and all the slings & arrows that sculpture is heir to, so a sculpture study has to make sense as though it existed in the real world. The freedom to allow surfaces to appear & disappear without explanation, as can be done in painting, is lost.

In the Fall of 2002, I began creating abstract sculptures in concrete based on the vocabulary of forms developed through these drawings & paintings.  If pressed to explain the series, I would say it was an experiment in combining feminine and masculine energies, hard and soft lines, curves and angles, balance and imbalance, lightness and weight.  To wax even more wordy, I would say they explore paradoxical states of being, the resolution of differences and the melding of opposites.

Below are a few examples:

Conundrum, is one of the few sculptures for which I documented the process. The following images show the piece in progress.

First an armature was carved out of found scrap high density polystyrene using a hot wire and saws.  More about hot wire cutting is discussed in an earlier blog and more in another earlier blog. What isn’t shown is the next stage where this polystyrene armature was entirely covered with expandable wire mesh (stucco wire) which provides a surface for the concrete to grab onto. Also not shown was the rebar that was attached with this wire to strengthen the top arch.

Then the concrete was added as shown below.

The concrete used is a mix of 1:3 cement/ sand with liquid added to make it just wet enough to stick.  The water is a 1:3 glue/water mixture to add strength.  Later I added fibers for more strength. With the gravity-defying surfaces that need to be covered in a sculpture (ie overhangs etc.) the concrete can’t be heavy.  It is hand applied, built up in layers, with each layer kept moist to allow the next layer to adhere.  I would mix small amounts of concrete at a time (maybe 4-5 litres max) so that the concrete wouldn’t dry out but would last for 3-4 hours of work.  It’s slow, careful work, not like pouring a pad all in one go.

The last few layers of concrete incorporated iron oxide pigments, as shown in the final image.  Apparently this pigment is not good for you, so I wear thicker gloves for this portion of the work.  Normally, I wear thin latex gloves to have maximum manual control.

I intensely pigmented small amounts of concrete then added them somewhat randomly to create a marbled effect.  I really enjoyed the serendipitous patterns that were created – like painting with concrete in 3D. The inspiration for this approach were ancient stones in the Mayan ruins in the Yucatan peninsula.  They effects of time on the stones had created beautiful patterns and colours.

I haven’t returned to purely abstract forms since 2005.  After that I created abstracted representational forms as discussed in other blogs.  But the pull of simply working with pure form, colour  & line is always there and I feel the pull of working with pure abstraction and no recognizable images. The debate in my head continues however, the main points of which are outlined in the next blog about art and changing times.

Many decades that have gone by since abstract paintings were le dernier cri and there were public outcries over their purchase by public galleries. From the current perspective, they seem elegant and somehow naive in the face of the radical change in attitude of the arts establishment that came after. They were not the bold critiques of social injustice of Diego Rivera, but they worked toward redefining beauty, because the pursuit of beauty had not yet become anathema. The idealism of the moderns, as expressed in the abstract works of the period, now seems to have sprung from a time that was more positive, innocent and hopeful than the present day.

There were many who suspected that elites with the money to buy art or decide what would be bought, preferred abstract art because it supplanted any movement toward social realism or other artistic critiques. But one can’t help but wonder if the irony and anti-idealism that has replaced it is even more preferable to those same elites.

The post Abstract Art vs Real Life first appeared on Marion-Lea Jamieson, Artist.

Philosophers have attempted to address issues to do with aesthetics, such as who should make aesthetic judgments and whether it is even possible to make them. This blog explores how philosophical theories have shaped current attitudes toward art & aesthetics. It suggests that the consolation of philosophy has not extended to the arts.

Previous blogs have wrestled with the conflict between contemporary art and aesthetics and attempted to identify and understand the problems and philosophical efforts to resolve the quandary of aesthetics. This blog makes further efforts at understanding. Wikipedia defines aesthetics as: “… a branch of philosophy that deals with the nature of art, beauty and taste and with the creation or appreciation of beauty… the study of subjective and sensory-emotional values”.

Analytical Philosophy

All western philosophy appears to be refinements of the thinking of its founding fathers, Plato and Aristotle. In brief, Plato‘s philosophy is a transcendental metaphysics based on his theory of forms and he is described as an absolutist.

Aristotle by contrast, believed that the proper goal of metaphysics is to present a non-transcendental essentialism. Two major schools of philosophy have developed from Aristotle’s approach Analytical and Continental.

Logical Positivism

Analytic philosophy is identified with the logical-positivist principle that there are not any specifically philosophical facts and that statements about value, including all ethical and aesthetic judgments, cannot be objectively verified or falsified. Instead, the logical positivists adopted the theory that value judgments expressed the attitude of the speaker. The first half of the 20th century was marked by skepticism toward, and neglect of, subjects, such as aesthetics. During this time, utilitarianism was the only non-skeptical type of ethics to remain popular. The influence of logical positivism began to decrease mid-century but it’s influence in the arts, especially the visual arts, continues to hold sway.

Logical positivism attempted to analyze & critique culturally damaging & limiting bourgeois assumptions. Based on the idea that what is cannot be extrapolated to determine what ought to be, this approach has given rise to a revolution in thinking. Politically and socially, this revolution has, in some instances, led to more diversity & inclusivity.  But these ideas have been applied more widely than they merit as well as misinterpreted and wrongly applied. While the main thrust of logical positivism was the uses & misuses of language, especially the written word, these ideas have been indiscriminately applied to the visual arts. Especially at the university level, administrators & teachers eager to embrace current thinking have embraced the idea that aesthetic judgments cannot be objectively verified or falsified. As a corollary to that it has been assumed that aesthetic judgments should therefore not be made and as a further corollary, that aesthetics itself is an unsound basis on which to view art. The influence of logical positivism has been to downgrade the role of aesthetics in the visual arts . This is based on the assumption that, as there is no objective way to determine if a work of art is beautiful or not, attempts to create beautiful works are naive and irrelevant. This transition can be seen by comparing Claude Monet‘s *Water Lilies painted in1906, to Mark Rothko’s “No. 14” painted in 1960 and Joseph Beuys‘ “Ben Vautier wrapped in String”, May 23, 1964 and “The Table”, created in 1971.

A previous blog has explored a change in the direction of art criticism as a result of this interpretation, or misinterpretation, of logical positivism. This change has made it risky for critics to make any value judgments about works of art and they are more comfortable expressing their views in the form of a personal response to the work, rather than trying to make objective observations. Critics are wary of forming or adhering to criteria on which to form judgments, or of analyzing artworks according to any criteria other than subjective experience.

A visual arts establishment fearful of taking on questions of aesthetics has left the determination of value to the marketplace. So the final outcome of one hundred years of philosophical works designed to circumvent the bourgeoisie’s stranglehold on western culture has been to consolidate and strengthen its grip on the visual arts.

Continental Philosophy

The term “continental philosophy” is used to refer to a range of thinkers and traditions outside the analytic movement. It differs from analytic philosophy in that it rejects the natural sciences as the only or most accurate way of understanding natural phenomena. Continental philosophy considers experience as variable: determined by factors such as context, space and time, language, culture, or history.

A major strain of continental thought is structuralism/post-structuralism. Structuralism proposes that one may understand human culture by means of a structure—modelled on language that differs from concrete reality and from abstract ideas. Post structuralism emphasizes plurality of meaning and instability of concepts that structuralism uses to define society; language, literature etc. So though these philosophers were mainly focused on the application of their ideas to analysis of written material, their work has been extrapolated to apply, however erroneously or tenuously, to the visual arts. The post-structuralist thinkers with the most important influences on the visual arts include Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, and Michel Foucault.

Barthes felt that avant-garde art should maintain a distance between its audience and itself. By presenting an obvious artificiality rather than making claims to great subjective truths, the avant-garde ensures that their audiences maintain an objective perspective. He believed that art should be critical and should interrogate the world, rather than seek to explain it. Strict adherence to this approach can be observed in any description of the goals and objectives of contemporary artists by galleries, museums of the artists themselves. These descriptions are always careful to state that the artist is “investigating” this or that in an objective way, rather than making any definitive statement as to what the art is about. This open-ended approach is a cornerstone of post-modernism.

Derrida’s work retains major academic influence and has been influential on thinking about aesthetics, art and art criticism. Derrida argued that that the whole philosophical tradition of Western culture rests on arbitrary dichotomous categories (such as sacred/profane, signifier/signified, mind/body), “by which an order is imposed on reality and by which a subtle repression is exercised, that excludes, subordinates, and hides the various potential meanings.” Derrida refers to his procedure for uncovering and unsettling these dichotomies as deconstruction of Western culture. Again, this post-structuralist approach has been widely applied to contemporary art and has become the accepted measure by which it is viewed. Any clear statement of goals or reference to absolute principles is suspect, such that contemporary art practices and criticism are based on a relentless relativism. The more vague and open-ended an art-work, the better, to avoid accusations of the artist’s attempt to impose a subtle repression of the viewer’s freedom of interpretation.

Foucault’s theories primarily address the relationship between power and knowledge, and how they are used as a form of social control through societal institutions. Often cited as a post-structuralist and postmodernist, his thought has influenced academics working in critical theory.

The rarefied philosophical musings of these thinkers have had a profound impact on contemporary art. Critics have attempted to interpret, translate and apply the moral relativism of Continental Philosophy to the visual arts to profound, but detrimental, effect.

In her book, The Long Life, Helen Small says she does not wish to “revisit the deconstructive/Heideggerian debate over the “destruction” of metaphysics – or what sometimes looks like a competition for the credit of having murdered it (Derrida v. Nietzche)”. If we define metaphysics as “thoughts which seek to penetrate beyond the boundaries of experience” by denying any metaphysical basis for either existence or thought, this view assaults traditional criteria for aesthetic judgements. Artistic forms can no longer be linked to any substantive affirmative metaphysical meaning.

Professor Helen Small, Merton Professor of English Language and Literature

No Consolation of Philosophy

This brief discussion of analytical and continental philosophy suggests that both branches of the discipline have contributed to deriding the role of aesthetics in the visual arts.  Both branches agree on a central theme – aesthetic judgments express the attitude of the speaker rather than any objective fact and artworks can only be analyzing according to subjective experience. However, the continental philosophers have been most effective in convincing the Western contemporary art establishment of this view.

The previous blog On Criticism, described how the thinking of post-structuralists colonized universities and shaped contemporary art institutions and through them, contemporary art. These assumptions have been transported to institutions of higher learning where students learn the words and phrases that are designed to convey their superior understanding of art and denote a belt of intellectual rather than technical tools. Some critics argue that universities have been transformed in the late twentieth century into institutions where the broadly humanist educational curricula of the past have been replaced by a free-market model of learning and where the assumptions of moral relativism are scarcely challenged.

As David Balzer explains in his book, Curationism, it is no longer adequate to go to art school, one must have a Masters of Fine Arts to be taken seriously. He describes how critical theory imported from Europe, mainly from France, became trendy in the 1980’s and colonized universities in the 1990’s. One of the main objectives of this critical theory, particularly post-structuralism, is to explode assumptions about language, tradition and privilege. Graduates of programs based on these new theories were embraced by contemporary museum and gallery curators as a way to ostensibly break free from their image of themselves as having a stodgy, dead-white-male-focus. Artists thus came under pressure to professionalize by taking graduate degrees from the institutions that offered these new theories, especially for those working outside painting, drawing and traditional sculpture.

While the post-structuralist theories discussed above challenged the white male privileges of the modernist era, they have led to unanticipated effects on the visual arts that, some would say, have damaged Western culture more than the previous philosophical errors. These effects include more social control by societal institutions, less creative freedom for artists and far less creation or appreciation of beauty and subjective sensory-emotional values, or aesthetics.

The impact of the post-structuralists has gone far beyond the arts and could be said to have negatively affected the earth itself. As Zadie Smith says in the collection of essays, Feel Free (2018):

“What will we tell our granddaughters about our collective failure to address global warming? So I might say to her, ‘look: the thing you have to appreciate is that we’d just been through a century of relativism and deconstruction, in which we were informed that most of our fondest-held principles were either uncertain or simple wishful thinking, and in many areas of our lives we had already been asked to accept that nothing is essential and everything changes–and this had taken the fight out of us somewhat.“

Where the cultural establishment does not tolerate expressing opinions based on firm principles, and where it is assumed that every work of art is subject to any number of various interpretation, none of which are more true or relevant than any other, there is an authority vacuum created. As David Balzer explains in Curationism, this vacuum has been filled by the sector with the most to gain from creating its own measure of value for artworks – the market. Value is imparted by popularity, sales and giving people what they want. Curators have become visual merchandisers so that contemporary art has become a seemingly timeless zone of consumerism and spectacle. Two examples of highly successful artist/merchandisers are Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons.

We have been schooled by university cultural-studies departments and their end-of-snobbery messages to believe that anything is fair game for “critical discourse” from porn to action films and mainstream hit-driven music. Balzar goes on to suggest that the equal aesthetic rights given to all expressions of human activity prevents the addressing of internal structural oppression. “It invokes an abstract idea of equality that is institutionally normalized without being able to see the means by which that normalization occurs”.

Thus this blog concludes that aesthetics in the visual arts have come full circle after a century of philosophical attempts to construct or deconstruct the ways in which aesthetic judgments are made. Instead of social control effected through value judgments by societal institutions run by stodgy white males, social control is effected through dollar value judgments imposed by the marketplace. As Balzar points out, however, the arts may be in a worse position now than before because this social control is subtle and internalized, so it is difficult for dissenters to frame their opposition in the face of an entrenched and highly popular system of belief.

How have relativism and deconstruction, in which our fondest-held principles are wishful thinking, nothing is essential and everything changes, become so entrenched? In any overview of philosophy, relativism and deconstruction are included as only one of many lines of thought and not considered the most important in terms of contributing to an understanding of the most vexing quandaries of our existence.  So how has suspicion of any clear statement of goals, reference to any absolute principles and denial of any metaphysical basis for existence or thought become the dominant paradigm? If we follow the money, we find connections between moral and aesthetic relativism and the triumph of free-market capitalism.

An interesting topic for other blogs, but meanwhile relativism has taken the fight out of us at a time when we need to battle against art as commodity and the earth as an environmental catastrophe. For these crises, there has been no consolation from the most influential philosophies.

The post The Consolation of Philosophy first appeared on Marion-Lea Jamieson, Artist.

Though many, if not most, self-defined post-modernists would seek to differentiate their views from those of Clement Greenberg‘s, there is a clear link between his theories and post-modern attitudes toward painting.Greenberg’s theory was that the point of painting was to “… determine the irreducible working essence of art…. Under Modernism, more and more of the conventions of the art of painting have shown themselves to be dispensable, unessential…the irreducible essence of pictorial art consists in but two constitutive conventions or norms: flatness and the delimitation of flatness…” Greenberg also insisted that painting establishes a purely visual or “optical space”, one addressed to eyesight alone and unmodified or revised by tactile associations.(1)

Though disparaged and eventually de-throned, Greenberg’s views have had an overwhelming impact on contemporary art practice up to the present and they have been widely accepted as unassailably true. The creative path of artists like Mondrian or Picasso might have been the source of Greenberg’s theory that painting is on an unswerving trajectory toward perfecting itself through jettisoning the inessential.

How artists were to define what is inessential Greenberg left up to individual self-criticism, but it soon became clear that only what artists that Greenberg admired deemed inessential led to irreducibly “good” paintings.

Later, Michael Fried took on the Minimalists (whom he also refers to as Literalists) for their wholly literal approach to painting & sculpture. By that he meant that they followed Greenberg’s idea about finding the irreducible essence of art to its logical conclusion which was “the surpassing of painting (or sculpture) in the interests of literalness” or what he called “objecthood”.

Kenneth Noland, Reflections Alit, 2003, acrylic on canvas, 18-3/8″ x 51″ (46.7 cm x 129.5 cm) © The Paige Rense Noland Marital Trust / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Fried drew an analogy between the works of Henri Matisse and Kenneth Noland as both having “unbrokenness, uniform intensity and sheer breadth of colour”.

Greenberg and Fried were writing at a time when the modernist experiment still had life in it and they could see that the direction of painting could either go toward work that “deadened its expressiveness, denied its sense of humanness” or work that could “stand in comparison with the painting of both the modernist and the premodernist past & whose quality is be beyond question.” They were living & writing during a period when what was considered to be important paintings were works that they had in large part encouraged through their criticism. These were hard-edged, non-pictorial, intellectual works, some of which retained some aspects of painterlyness and others that had rejected any claims to be arty. They both assumed that the direction they had pointed to in their critiques was based on a more-or-less objective assessment of the art world in which they found themselves. But a remove of a few decades reveals that their criticism was not objective in any way but emerged from their own desires to ennoble art criticism and themselves as art critics.

Fried considered that what Nolan has done is to make work like Matisse’s “radically abstract”. This agrees with Greenberg’s assertion that progress in painting has to do with discovering its essence, its irreducibility.

But perhaps in searching for the irreducible essence of painting, the baby has been thrown out with the bathwater. What artists like Nolan may have felt were inessential were aspects of painting that convey life, the human factor, nature, a sense of place, joy, warmth, paint strokes & images to name a few of what Greenberg would term inessential “conventions”.  Because some artists &critics did not consider these “conventions” to be essential does not mean they were & are inessential. They may have been inessential to those particular artists at that particular time, but may be essential to another time & place. However, this idea of whittling away everything extraneous to reveal the essence of art took hold as the dominant paradigm until painting itself became dispensable.

This ennobling desire on their part, and on the part of most art critics today, is understandable and defensible, especially in an art world that has become increasingly focused on monetary value rather than the intrinsic values of a work of art. And at the time they were writing, Greenberg & Fried were both wrestling with the emerging permission to create anti-art or non-art and demand that it be called art.

So they felt the need to formalize their objections to these emerging trends by expressing their ideas in a quasi-theoretical, quasi-intellectual mode. Much of their cogitations appear to be long digressions with no useful result – as worthwhile as the angels-on-head-of-pin debates of yore.

But through their convoluted writings they paved the way for a new attitude toward the visual arts for artists, curators, critics and viewers. This new attitude assumes that art is primarily a cerebral activity that can only be appreciated through close mental study of an art work. In other words, it is not enough to feel enchanted with a painting through its immediate visual impact transmitted to the nerves and sinews and bypassing the analytical brain.

These assumptions have been transported to institutions of higher learning where students learn the words and phrases that will convey their superior understanding of art to the outside world as well as a belt of intellectual rather than technical tools. Universities have been transformed in the late twentieth century into emasculated centres of learning where the broadly humanist educational curricula of the past have been replaced by a free-market model of learning and where the assumptions of moral relativism is scarcely challenged.

As David Balzer explains in Curationism, It is no longer adequate to go to art school, once must have a Masters of Fine Arts to be taken seriously as someone who understands art. He describes how critical theory imported from Europe, mainly from France, became trendy in the 1980’s and colonized universities in the 1990’s. One of the main objectives of this critical theory, particularly post-structuralism, is to explode assumptions about language, tradition and privilege. These ideas are explored in more detail in the next blog,The Consolation of Philosophy. Graduates of programs based on these new theories were embraced by contemporary museum and gallery curators as a way to ostensibly break free from their image of themselves as having a stodgy, dead-white-male-focus. Artists thus came under pressure to professionalize by taking graduate degrees from the institutions that offered these new theories, especially for those working outside painting, drawing and traditional sculpture.

For instance, in my home-town of Vancouver, the Vancouver School of Art founded in1925 has morphed into the Emily Carr University of Art & Design.

This university-based approach has spawned a network of artists, critics, curators and funders who speak the same language and are comfortable that they are promoting a true appreciation of art based on Greenbergian ideas about determining the irreducible working essence of art by jettisoning technique, meaning, and especially aesthetics. Conceptualist practice in particular was readily abetted by such academic training given obvious overlaps between those working in institutions and those working in academe.

The institutions of higher learning have a stake in continuing to be the arbiters of intellectual taste in the arts and have created a new Academia whose rigid conformity to the Greenberg/Fried intellectual tradition rivals that of its predecessor in pre-modernist France. This intellectual tradition – the stripping away of anything extraneous (ie visual, visceral, sensuous) – leads to major galleries mounting exhibitions that are monotonous in the extreme

and comprehensible only to those willing to read the page of explanatory text beside each piece describing why it is important and meaningful.

This does not suggest that we should dumb-down art or that there is no place for art criticism. Instead it suggests that there is a greater-than-ever need for art criticism that can shake itself free from the overwhelming influence of A New Academy and re-examine the critical tradition inherited from the 1960’s. There is no denying the fact that writing about the visual arts is difficult, as any artists trying to describe what s/he is doing for an exhibition, grant or other application can attest.

Trying to put a purely visual/visceral/sensuous experience into words is an attempt to describe the indescribable. To paraphrase, writing about the visual arts is like dancing about architecture, a category error. A writer can either surround each thought with clouds of verbiage, as Fried has done, in an effort to finally get close to the germ of the idea struggled with or, like Greenberg, simply state that s/he has good taste, knows art and knows what’s good. In order to avoid these shoals of garrulousness and ego, later writers have acceded to the belief that art criticism is necessarily subjective and that criticism can only consist of detailed descriptions of one’s personal experience of the subject artworks. None of these approaches is ideal and finding a workable alternative is the challenge for art critics today.

Fortunately, I am an artist rather than an art critic, so the task of finding a more relevant and constructive approach to art criticism is not mine, though I assume the role of critic-of-art-critics in these blogs. But my purpose is to understand what is meaningful in my painting practice and analyze the temporal/historical space in which I work and the influence of A New Academy on the arts.

The post A New Academy first appeared on Marion-Lea Jamieson, Artist.

A previous post, More on Painting, touched on the issue of identity, in terms of “self-differing”, or the self as a collection of “innumerable configurations of personality and emotion” as opposed to an “all-at-oneness”. This is a more esoteric aspect of identity than what has become known as “identity politics” in which various groups who define themselves by gender, sexual orientation, or level of ability, rightly demand greater recognition, respect and a share in social benefits.

While these demands warrant attention & positive societal action, the issue of identity and its implications for art has become a confusing areas for artists and critics in the post-modern era. The issue has ballooned into something out of all proportion to its importance as a focus for the arts. While in its original form, the exploration of identity presented some social challenges and critical philosophical questions, it has become an ideology with all the attendant dangers of wildly popular but poorly understood ideas.

The first victim in the art world, especially with regard to painting, has been an understanding of self. As I understand it, the idea of self-differing, or the self as a collection of personal and emotional reactions, is a re-stating of the relativist philosophy that Socrates opposed.

The Sophists believed that “you can never step into the same river twice” because every moment is different and there are no constants. They extrapolated from this that, because there are no constants, there can be no right or wrong, so every person should act in their own interests. Today’s neo-liberals are the modern version of this thinking.

Socrates countered this with a belief in ethical virtue as something that should be aspired to and is immutable, permanent and unchanging. As such he was the father of absolutism that continues in today’s religious traditions and other groups with unswerving beliefs in moral absolutes.

A definition of the self as a collection of “innumerable configurations of personality and emotion” is a pillar of post-modernism and revives the sophistry that Socrates opposed. A widely accepted modern version of sophistry has facilitated imposition of the Neo-Liberal agenda which has been accompanied by the rise of “identity politics”. While having no wish to detract from the justified demands for equality made by disempowered and disadvantaged groups, the cost of identity politics has been a fragmentation of what might otherwise have been a unified opposition to unfettered capitalism. The popularity of a relativist perspective and fragmentation through identification with smaller minority groups may be responsible for low voting numbers and a general lack of participation in organized political groups, especially among younger voters (or non-voters).

The relation between identity politics and relativism is described by writer Ian McEwan in his novel, Nutshell. He describes the young as “…on the march, angry at times , but mostly needful of authority’s blessing, its validation of their chosen identities. …I may need advance warning if upsetting books or ideas threaten my very being by coming too close…I’ll feel, therefore I’ll be. Let poverty go begging and climate change braise in hell. Social justice can drown in ink. I’ll be an activist of the emotions….My identity will be my precious, my only true possession, my access to the only truth.” This captures the naïveté of identity politics and suggests why it has been nurtured and embraced by neo-liberals.

In the visual art world, more so than most, the primacy of identity has had a schizophrenic effect. On one side, artists who create large, grand or durable artworks are suspected of egotism. This potent charge has encouraged a generation of artists who ensure that their works are small and self-effacing, or if not small, constructed of recycled waste products. In this view large paintings are a throwback to the modernist era when gigantic artistic egos created giant canvases.

The flip side of the current obsession with identity in the visual arts is  the unprecedented importance placed on the personality of the artist rather than the artworks themselves. Artists are brands, marketed on the strength of name recognition, rather than artistic excellence.

Nutshell: McEwan, Ian, Vintage Publishing, London, 2017

Who can judge excellence in a world without right or wrong, good or bad? The last absolutist critic to have any influence, Clement Greenberg, based his judgments of excellence on his own good taste, rather than any more fulsome philosophical rationale. Having been discredited in accordance with the current relativist world view, along with the modernist artists he championed, the market has become the final arbiter.

That we have become a culture of change, rather than a changing culture also lends itself to the neo-liberal agenda. Where the only constant is change, it has become the only absolute and almost a religion. The most damning accusation that can be levelled against those who oppose any change is that they are “afraid of change”. Thus changes, no matter how harmful or ill-advised, are protected from critiques and in every election, all parties claim, “it’s time for a change!” as though it were an ethical virtue. But the change brought about by victorious Western political parties has been an intensification of Business-As-Usual policies that enrich some and impoverish an increasing number of people and the natural world. The climate change crisis can be directly linked to the policies of parties calling for change, such as the two Canadian examples, below.

In conclusion, the effect of identity politics has been to make most people in Western cultures more aware of, and tolerant of, differences. However, the melding of Identity and Neo-Liberalism has been used by elites to deflect attention from pressing issues of environmental degradation and economic disparities. In the arts, the focus on identity has encouraged a self-reflexive culture, where art is all about itself rather than a mastery of the medium and its aesthetic potential, which has contributed toward commercialization and stunting of Western culture. While contemporary art products can be whimsical, clever and highly original, they lack commitment. Much of what we see is unconnected to the artist’s soul, expressing ideas mainly from the busy, market-oriented mind.

The post Identity and Neo-Liberalism first appeared on Marion-Lea Jamieson, Artist.

Art as Counterbalance

When the arts are under attack, artists generally defend their disciplines as providing a counterbalance to contemporary Western culture’s obsession with getting and spending, And while the attacks are increasing, artists have a decreasing ability to argue convincingly that the arts are relevant. What could, in previous decades, have been described as a general lack of interest in the arts, appears to be blossoming into antipathy towards the arts in general & painting in particular. One of the reasons for this is the sheer impossibility for art to capture the scale of the disaster the planet faces as the anthropocene age progresses through mass species extinction,

climate change,

rising sea levels,

and so on, all of which creates a widening gap between rich & poor.

In Wealth: Having it all and wanting more, Oxfam calculated that the richest 1% of people in the world owned nearly half (48%) of the world’s wealth. The vast majority of the remaining 52% of the world’s wealth was owned by the next 19% of the world’s richest people (which would probably include everybody reading this post) leaving just 5.5% of the world’s wealth for the poorest 80% of people in the world.

Artists are faced with the dilemma that the works we create are entirely unlikely to make a difference to the onslaught of late-capitalist destruction.This dilemma is nicely described by the writer, Rick Bass:
“What story, what painting, does one offer to refute Bosnia, Somalia, the Holocaust, Chechnya, China, Afghanistan or Washington DC? What story or painting does one offer up or create to counterbalance the ever-increasing sum of our destructions?”

Painting is especially helpless in this regard as it cannot compete with installations designed to shock viewers into recognition of the crisis we are part of, or photography that can record the disasters in relentless detail.

Artists are faced with the dilemma that the works we create are entirely unlikely to make a difference to the onslaught of late-capitalist destruction.This dilemma is nicely described by the writer, Rick Bass:
“What story, what painting, does one offer to refute Bosnia, Somalia, the Holocaust, Chechnya, China, Afghanistan or Washington DC? What story or painting does one offer up or create to counterbalance the ever-increasing sum of our destructions?”

But then he goes on to say, “Paint me a picture or tell me a story as beautiful as other things in the world today are terrible. If such stories and paintings are out there, I’m not seeing them.”

He is referring to the fact that, instead of acting as a counterbalance to the misery humans are creating, intellectual discussions on the role of art promote the idea that creating beautiful paintings, and indeed beauty itself, is part of the problem instead of part of the solution.  Bass suggests that,

“Rampant beauty will return”, but in the meantime, “activism is becoming the shell, the husk or where art once was….The activist is for a real and physical thing, as the artist was once for the metaphorical; the activist, or brittle husk-of-artist, is for life, for sensations, for senses deeply touched…The activist is the artist’s ashes”.

Is this true or are artist/activists arising, Phoenix-like from these ashes imbued with creativity and meaning?

Art & Gentrification

An ambivalent view of arts and activism is bolstered not only because artists themselves are rejecting the creation of art but because urban activists have focused on artists and galleries as the enemy – the thin edge of gentrification’s wedge.  Artist-driven urban renewal typically leads to artists being priced out of the neighborhoods they have helped to revive. This is sometimes referred to as “the SoHo effect.” Artists are complicit in the gentrification process, which has an impact not only on the artists themselves, but on other residents of neighborhoods that are being gentrified. This process is called “artwashing”—a term for adding a cultural sheen to a developing neighborhood that then sends rental prices up, forcing out the original inhabitants.

Artists find themselves in the uncomfortable position of being inadvertently complicit in driving gentrification, even as they are being victimized by the trend.

The term appears to have first been used in mainstream media in 2014 by Feargus O’Sullivan of The Atlantic, in an article about a tower in once-destitute East London that had been redeveloped for high-paying tenants. They were being enticed, in part, by suggestions that they wouldn’t be gentrifiers but, rather, original members of a new artistic community. “The artist community’s short-term occupancy is being used for a classic profit-driven regeneration manoeuver,” O’Sullivan wrote. He labelled the process “artwashing.” Years later, the conflict is escalating, and someone shot a potato gun at the attendees of an art show, and someone spray-painted “Fuck white art” on the walls of several galleries.

As explained by Jillian Billard in the online journal Artspace, artwashing takes place “when artists and galleries move into what is branded as a “newly established art community,” they generally don’t think of themselves as gentrifiers so much as they think of themselves as pioneers of a “new community,” (as opposed to new members of the pre-existing, already culturally-rich community).

Activists in cities with the highest levels of gentrification and displacement of longstanding residents, such as LA and New York, disrupt exhibitions and readings in new galleries. As Billard says, “It’s not that they don’t like art; rather their efforts proactively address the historically damaging effects that art spaces can have on a community’s deep-rooted residents. When developers see a neighborhood flourishing with art galleries and bougie cafes, they see a potential for exorbitant profit. Art galleries are part of a broader effort by planners and politicians and developers who want to artwash gentrification.”

In the past year, across North America, artist/activists are voicing their discontent with developer-driven artwashing and displacement. The Chinatown Art Brigade, an anti-gentrification group of artists and activists in New York, protested an exhibition by a Berlin-based artist. Their banner read “RACISM DISGUISED AS ART” as the installation included a room replete with objects indicating a sparsely merchandised Chinatown business that visitors walked through in order to view an artwork screening in the back of the gallery.

In Vancouver BC, a member of the Chinatown Action Group likened the artwashing taking place in New York’s Chinatown to developers and new businesses in Vancouver. These employ stereotypically Chinese imagery or aesthetics to gain authenticity, pay a misguided homage, or clumsily conceal an exclusionary agenda.

Though the movement is often called Anti-Art, some powerful art is being created by these activists, such as the art washing hands image shown earlier, the above image and the following by an unidentified artist on the Defend Boyle Heights Facebook page:

Another compelling image emerged from Vancouver, B.C activists protesting developer Westbank’s arrogant use of art-washing discussed in the blog Anti Art. This is a strong piece of activist art using the format of Westbank’s advertising blitz and capturing its hypocrisy and contempt for neighbourhoods. Westbank is the largest real-estate developer in Vancouver and it launched a disingenuous ad campaign called “The Fight for Beauty” for its new condo development that would displace many residents of the city. On its website, the activists posted the following:

“Everything Westbank does serves to displace culture created by the people. The real estate development company is not a cultural pioneer or patron, but a corporate entity that takes advantage of culture as a facade to push forward their profit-making agenda at all cost. They distribute their manufactured “culture” as soulless condos globally to offshore investors, while they wipe out Vancouver’s neighbourhoods and affordability. Westbank is not a culture company; it is a vulture company.“

The activists oppose artists and galleries that act as vehicles for gentrification & displacement but ironically, the images arising from that struggle are some of the most evocative being produced today. Perhaps that is because these images are coming from strong feeling and beliefs as opposed to what tends to be the coldly intellectual art promoted by the arts establishment.

Role of Arts Establishment

In addition to galleries, the arts establishment contributes to gentrification & displacement in cities under pressure from development interests. A  good example of this in Vancouver is Artscape,  an arts and culture non-profit with a multi-million dollar budget used to “revitalize” neighborhoods and promote mixed use developments.

Artscape’s method is to purchase or lease underused properties, more often than not  in low-income neighbourhoods. The spaces are then rented out to professional artists and registered not-for-profits at below-market rates. In the case of BC Artscape, the project was also helped with $900,000 – from the City of Vancouver, the credit union, VanCity and the J.W. McConnell Foundation: a match made in real estate heaven. Over the past decade  Artscape has become a very attractive partner for developers because developers can build bigger condos if they provide “community benefits” such as arts studios.

The New Avant-Guard

The arts establishment and some artists continue to be guided by the pursuit of such non-issues as whether an artist should ” move away from …the imagistic and textual and toward a probing of the real and historical” as discussed in a recent work of art criticism. But the artworks that are promoted by what the arts establishment would term, “progressive debate” have done little to counterbalance “Bosnia, Somalia, the Holocaust, Chechnya, China, Afghanistan or Washington DC”. And as we have seen, the arts have been complicit in localized class wars, also called gentrification.

Palestinians search for casualties at the site of Israeli strikes on houses in Jabalia refugee camp in the northern Gaza Strip, October 31, 2023. REUTERS / Anas al-Shareef

However, the work of the artist/activists explored in this blog are pointing the way forward and that direction is one of meaningful (as opposed to theoretical) day-to-day involvement in the ongoing struggle to protect common social and economic values from the ravages of greed and opportunism.

An article in the online journal colouringinculture.org  suggests that, “The radical avant-garde today can therefore be seen to exist in the cracks of neoliberalism as re-politicised acts of resistance against the totality of capitalism, grounded in collectivism and …nonaesthetic reason…in keeping with the radical avant-garde, disobedience and dissent, non-compliance and non-conformity, are what make us human and make us creative.” It is an interesting that anti-art activists are art’s newest avant-garde.

While the arts can do little to halt the ravages of the anthropocene age and the totality of capitalism on the environment, they are able to have a meaningful impact on local issues of gentrification and displacement. But as previous blogs have argued, they continue to enrich our lives in dark times. To quote Joseph Conrad (ignore his use of the gender-specific pronouns this was written in early 1900’s):
“the artist appeals… to that in us which is a gift and not an acquisition and, therefore, more permanently enduring. He speaks to our capacity for delight and wonder, to the sense of mysteries surrounding our lives; to our sense of pity, and beauty, and pain; to the latent feeling of fellowship with all creation – to the subtle but invincible conviction of solidarity that knits together the loneliness of enumerable hearts, to the solidarity… which binds together all humanity – the dead to the living and the living to the unborn.”

The post Art, Activism & the Avant-Garde first appeared on Marion-Lea Jamieson, Artist.

As a place to start this exploration, we can use the 2017 Vancouver Art Gallery exhibition called Entangled: Two Views on Contemporary Canadian Painting. A review by Robin Laurence titled, “Entangled shows contemporary Canadian painting is alive and well” said the painters exhibited, “found ingenious and sometimes revisionist ways of revitalizing the object and justifying their medium”.  But the paintings, such as the those shown below, uniformly rejected the notion that beauty has any role to play in painting. As this show was designed to represent the cutting edge of contemporary painting in Vancouver, why was it so clearly adverse to aesthetics? Is this anti-art or simply a redefinition of art, especially painting, as a discipline that must eschew aesthetics in order to be contemporary?

While Laurence’s review agreed that painting is considered a dead art form, he describes the painters of Entangled as not entirely convinced of its demise. “Human beings, after all, had been applying pigment to receptive surfaces for tens of thousands of years.”

Why do painters continue to paint if the medium has  been declared “dead, defunct, or worse, irrelevant”?  One good reason was given by Gamlin, the maker of oil paints  who describe painting as the most complicated, all-encompassing, and rewarding experience, “because painting requires us to see, think, feel, and perform complicated physical tasks all at the same time, striving for something meaningful, striving to make order out of the very raw material that is oil colors” and because painting makes the painter “feel so good to be so alive.”

Clearly other art forms offer the same experience, which is why artists persist despite a general lack of pecuniary benefits and worldly disinterest.  In his book, The Blue Guitar, John Banville‘s goal is not narrative but “linguistic beauty …pursued as an end in itself “. In one passage, he describes what happens to the painter protagonist as he “…sank steadily deeper into the depths of the painted surface, the world’s prattle would retreat like an ebbing tide, leaving me at the centre of a great hollow stillness…In it I would seem suspended at once entranced and quick with awareness, alive to the faintest nuance, the subtlest play of pigment, line and form”. Banville hints that in much of writing or painting this state of hyper-awareness eludes us. “How treacherous language is, more slippery even than paint.”

So why was there so little attention to visual beauty …pursued as an end in itself, in the Entangled show?  No artist wants their work to be irrelevant, so the works shown were largely concerned with challenging modernist ideas of aesthetics rather than breaking new painterly ground, with the possible exception of a few works such as this one:

The primary goal of most of the exhibition’s painters appeared to be to challenge the idea of paintings as objects of beauty, value or egotism. While clever and in some cases original, many, if not most, paid no attention to visual beauty …pursued as an end in itself.

Some, like the piece to the right are a replay of ideas that have been done many times over the last half-century. Such works reflect the dominant art paradigm in which emotions or any feelings other than amused irony are part of an outdated modernist sensibility and strictly renounced.

So why has visual beauty, pursued as an end in itself,  become an unacceptable pursuit for a self-respecting contemporary artist? And is the Anti-Art movement a logical culmination of the antipathy to aesthetics?  The following investigates a number of very good reasons why aesthetics and art itself have become suspect.

1) Looks Good Over the Couch
The most obvious reason for disavowing aesthetics in painting is its use as decoration.  Paintings are generally chosen not for their technical skill or visual discoveries but because they complement the decor. Painters at the beginning of their careers often strive for stereotypically beautiful paintings of landscapes, bunches of flowers, nubile nudes etc.

Those who persevere realize that beauty is a snare and a delusion – the more a painter strives for beauty in a familiar form that has been portrayed by other artists and recognized as such, the farther s/he gets from it. Those who make a profession of creating “beautiful” paintings that look good over the couch never set out on the life-long journey to scale painting’s  insurmountable cliffs, at the top of which is another insurmountable cliff and so on.

2) Artwork as Investment
The second most obvious reason is that paintings exemplify the commodification of art. As in this article in the Huffington Post the wealthy looking for safe investments are advised to buy real estate and artworks, especially paintings.

“The art market rebounded quickly after the last recession, faster than traditional investments. High net worth individuals (HNWI) with a portfolio diversified into art assets were not as greatly affected. Additionally, rather than investing in stocks or bonds, art provides investors with an alternative, tangible opportunity.”

They are not, of course, buying paintings they like, but works attached to a highly valued brand (aka artist). Artists have always had to deal with the philistinism of the market, but there has likely never been a period in history when the art market, with its focus solely on profit, has  so dominated artistic production and public understanding of the value of art.

3) Art & Big Egos
In the contemporary visual art world  there is the belief is that artists who create large, grand or durable artworks are egotists. To avoid this damning charge, a generation of artists has been careful to ensure that their works are small, self-effacing, unserious and/or constructed of waste products.

Large paintings are viewed as a throwback to the modernist era when gigantic artistic egos created giant canvases.

In an attempt to democratize art, especially painting, the post-modernists discarded distinctions between “high” and “low” art. Into this aesthetic vacuum stepped the phenomenon of the artist as personality and the unprecedented importance placed by the market on the personality of the artist rather than the artworks themselves.

Artists such as Jeff Koons or Takashi Murakami, are not so much artists as brands marketed on the strength of name recognition.

4) Relativism
An offshoot of identity politics has been a revival of the relativist philosophy that Socrates opposed.  Socrates believed that virtue was something that should be aspired to and is immutable, permanent and unchanging – a moral absolute.

His antagonists, the Sophists, did “not offer true knowledge, but only an opinion of things” and held a relativistic view on cognition and knowledge.  In a relativist universe where there is no right and wrong or standards of excellence, every person can only act in their own interests and neo-liberalism is the modern version of this thinking.

The implication of relativism for the arts has been that, since Clement Greenberg, no one feels they can say whether an artwork is good or bad, or even if an object can rightly be called art. Who can judge excellence in a world without right or wrong,  good or bad?  So for contemporary artists it is safer not produce something that clearly strives for excellence but to produce works that abjure technical skill and aesthetics .

5) Truth is Beauty & Beauty Truth
Our culture and its tools have changed more in the past 30 years than in the previous 1900, so that it is no longer a changing culture but a culture of change. It is a culture where change has attained a god-like status of inevitability and determinism.

In this philosophical climate, there is no potential for art to reveal truths as there can be no absolute truths , so what is the point of art? If painting is not metaphysical or about making money or beautiful objects to please the bourgeoisie, it can only be an in-your-face repudiation of all pretentious, presumptuous, egotistical aims and a reminder of all that is wrong with society. Thus contemporary artists produce works that eschew aesthetics.

6) Art & Gentrification
A new argument against aesthetics, art & culture has surfaced that goes a long way toward explaining the hostility to art and the rise of an anti-art sensibility. This argument appeared in an article by Dorothy Woodend in the online journal The Tyee.

The article states, “Beauty doesn’t need any help. How about we fight for ugly?”  This statement is odd because, after 30 years of exploitative, poorly planned, free-for-all growth, beauty in Vancouver has been effectively expunged. However, Woodend was referring to a PR campaign by one of the more neighbourhood-unfriendly developers in the city. They are running a marketing bonanza under the guise of an art exhibition featuring giant pink billboards, transit ads, posters and pink cars emblazoned with the words “Fight for Beauty”  that are currently everywhere.

This PR campaign highlights a debate about art & culture that is gaining momentum in all cities where housing is an international commodity, locals are displaced and artists who remain are forced to scramble for studio space and affordable housing. The displacement is a result of gentrification where local governments allow the demolition of affordable dwellings and their replacement with unaffordable condos. In the cities where this is taking place, activists rightly term it class war as the less wealthy are replaced by higher-income earners.

One of the tools local governments and developers use to create acceptance of this process has been termed art washing. The Vancouver Mural Festival amply demonstrated this approach. In the same way that condominium marketing campaigns re-purpose words like “community” and “regeneration” to sell boxes of air, art is used to divert attention away from the gentrification and displacement taking place. As Woodend says, “..it is difficult not to lose respect for the very idea of art itself”.

All those pretty murals, full of blandishments  like “The Present is a Gift” were a quick way for the city to run with a branding scheme for neighbourhoods in a way that ultimately served the interests of developers, realtors, and property owners – stakeholders the then ruling municipal party, Vision Vancouver is beholden to more than working class residents who live in these areas.

Ironically, given Vancouver Mural Festival’s message of improving neighbourhoods and communities, their flagship mural, titled “The Present is a Gift,” adorns The Belvedere and its painting was the catalyst that began the renoviction process of the dozens of artists who lived in the building some for over the last 30 years.

Conclusion

The reasons above provide convincing arguments for contemporary painters to eschew painterly aesthetics. Painting has been commercialized and successful painters are entrepreneurs. The connection between art & gentrification overshadows all other concerns about the arts as it is a scourge in every major city in the world. This issue warrants further exploration and research.

However, the nagging question remains – why anti-art? The commercialized consumer culture touches every aspect of contemporary society from food to games, so why have visual artists felt their disciplines must not search for visual beauty, “pursued as an end in itself “?  Clearly this question deserves  further study so I have continued the discussion in my next blog.

The post Anti-Art first appeared on Marion-Lea Jamieson, Artist.