conceptual painting for dummies

So apparently painting is not doing too well. It's "beside itself" with grief. What is it so upset about? For one, it's mad about how it gets put on walls, and then bought and sold and put in storage. Well painting, I have something to tell you: even performance gets bought and sold these days. Although in a way you have a point--performance may be purchased but it doesn't get put in storage. When a performance is inactive, it doesn't physically exist. You, on the other hand, have to contend with your fate of prolonged dormancy, which is going to be very sad and boring for you. Perhaps if you can find your place in the network and incorporate that active transient thing where info-context-mood just flows through over and around you, you won't be so bored and stuck in the 'art as commodity' stage of pergatory--you'll be engaged in the present even when inactive because you've accessed the context of the network as part of your highly flexible meaning. Maybe if you incorporate the awareness of these complex forces into the visual aspects of yourself, you won't look so silly and dated and "bought" when you get looked at again ten years later. You know what's going on. You know its all about mood. You've found a new sublime, and it isn't a landscape.

I have to credit fellow Hunter MFA guy Cab Broskoski for turning me on to this article. The content applies to his process for sure, and it contextualized some of the thought threads I've been tangled up in as well. The tricky thing is that this transitive networky perspective can have sort of a constipating effect on creativity. If we think of creativity as a tap into the unconscious (i know, trite, but its true), then this kind of superego over-development is a dangerous game. Of course not working this angle just makes you look like a sell-out, and no self-respecting artist can live with that. Its what psychologists call a "double-bind."

Some Vocabulary Words:
Aporia: A gap in logic or consciousness or a point at which a text is most explicitly indeterminateor self-contradictory, as in deconstruction. It is never completely solved or closed by the author or in the mind of the reader.
Cynosure: 1. a person or thing that attracts notice, esp because of its brilliance or beauty2. something that serves as a guide