In Which the Artist States Things

I'm publishing a requested artist statement, rewritten from other things. Take that, blithe bloggery!

Jamie BOLLENBACH

Artist Statement

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Each painting, each drawing, every image and object created by an active human consciousness potentially connects to all other such objects and their formative processes – and like music, the substance of this dialectic is not interchangeable with written language. My paintings argue that within the nexus of vision, material, illusion, and painting process is an irreplaceable process for understanding, in Gauguin’s well-known phrase, where we come from, what we are, where are we going – questions too beautiful for the comfort of contemporary ears, and perhaps too easy to deconstruct your way out of. To simply understand the physical, temporal, visual, and emotional presence of another person in the same room is a rich problem with no simple paradigm, and painting is well suited to juggling the different aspects of this inexhaustible complexity.

The most recent paintings developed during my MFA program at the University of Washington in 2001 from a traditional figure drawing experiment where a model moves, and new drawings at each movement are superimposed on the previous drawing. This idea of a still image as a description of the passage of time was famously used in Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, which itself was based in early motion capture photography. In my work, the direction is reversed; where the early moderns were embracing technology, metal, speed, time and gunning for the future, this work stuffs the 20^th century back into observational painting traditions; the notion of time employed is organic and human, photography bypassed, the marks muscular but pushed into pictorial space, the synthesis of mood, process and image elevated, a question clarified internally within the painting process itself.

Painting demands awareness of each element which creates the painting, both technically and in terms of subject and subject matter. Art puts out tendrils of sensing into the most delicate and fleeting of concepts and experience. It can extend the possibilities of what all people can become aware of; it adds to collection of all art works and processes, making available a bright little packet of new information to anyone who cares to examine it. Our experience of the world, and perhaps what the world is, was changed by J.M.W. Turner as it was by Newton.

Concepts which simply illustrate written language are incomplete; conceptual art’s jokeiness wears thin and Pop Art is exhausted, often indistinguishable from its ubiquitous and uncritically capitalist subject matter. But this is not a defense of painting as paint - paint and painting processes are only useful inasmuch as they enable intellectually rigorous art. If little tubes of mud still teach us about the nature of being, identity, philosophy, love, hate, politics, the texture of living flesh and the true nature of blue, it is wonderful, and to be studied with joy.

Anselm Kiefer, perhaps the most ambitious painter working, pushes this most ancient of media into its full nature and impact, and he has no embarrassment for his incisive, emotional, individual, brush and mud-drunk process. Some of the better painters today don’t work with paint: James Turrell, Gary Hill. But they all have the same attentiveness to material, to space, to specificity and to the implication of infinity which I believe the most powerful artwork depends on.

Pushing around the mud to chase the temporal and solidify the ephemeral, I embrace painting traditions, but painting is art to the extent that it continues to create art. This most ancient of media, an almost curious shelter in the contemporary blizzard of pop images, provides irreproducible processes for the exploration of our nature as visual thinkers, as identities and cultures, as breathing, bleeding creatures struggling to be fully conscious of their time and place.