(^102) | APRIL 2016
right
Arete
(Black figure on white horse)
Oil on canvas
96” x 116”
2000
Collection of
San Jose Museum of Art
opposite
Penelope
Oil on canvas
40” x 48”
1980
Collection of
Crocker Art Museum
straining to be ever more quirky and edgy, I find the rich
singularity of a painting to be more interesting right now.
Especially when it returns to keen observation and careful
representation, something that even prehistoric artists
practiced—a reverence toward nature and the integrity of
the thing seen.
One problem with most contemporary art is that it is soaked
with irony, which can be a wonderful visual or rhetorical tool,
but becomes a cliché and a convention when everyone is
using it as they have been for a long time. The concepts that
bad is good or that the ordinary is extraordinary are ironic.
So much art in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries
has utilized that twist. It’s a plague, actually, as written by
the late David Foster Wallace that, “irony has gone from
liberating to enslaving.”
When the world is looked at with irony, what sort of
danger does that present, as opposed to handling things
with sincerity?
For Socrates, irony was used as a method of questioning and
seeking truth. For contemporary ironists, it’s a method of
hiding from truth. Artists inoculate themselves from negative
criticism with irony—one doesn’t say what one means or
mean what one says, so a critic can only describe, and
describing is mostly what critics do these days. The danger
of conventionalized irony is that it conditions people to be
irresponsible, to just do whatever and then say “my bad.”
Certain important ideas and archetypes are hardwired
and thread themselves through all of human history. They
manifest themselves in different ways based on variations
of local factors. It’s possible to be timeless while addressing
your own time.
I believe in being flexible in time, not inflexibly attached
to our own period. It’s a kind of time traveling, as cited by
Nicolas Poussin, who never once painted a contemporary
scene or event, or dressed his figures in the clothes of his
time. Filippo Brunelleschi, the fifteenth century architect
and artist chose to go to Rome to study the ancient ruins
and then apply that knowledge to new architecture. Earlier,
the writer Francesco Petrarch did the same with Roman
literature. These were some of the first humanists to help
rescue the Western world from a thousand years of cultural
darkness and religious dogma. The whole idea of humanism
tuis.
(Tuis.)
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