Swallows at Dusk in Rome

I don't much care for the concept of art therapy. I mean, c'mon - dominant operative word THERAPY, subordinate art, eh!? It's okay, though, twiddling with paint is cool if that's what calms you down and tells your secrets. And, true enough, when I paint I do feel a deep sense of quiet, even when I am fighting with a passage and I can't quite torque the color or manipulate the mass in just the way I want.

When I paint I feel a delicious, pristine emptiness as my conscious and unconscious mind meet and give control over to my eye.

My eye makes the choices, directs the movements of my fingers, all of my muscles to accommodate the development of the canvas. My eye wants a particle of cad, a fading pressure short-stroke from a corner loaded brush with a slight drop of the wrist and a minute roll of the index finger turning the brush slightly over my thumb as my elbow rises - all in 3/8 of an inch, all without conscious thought. That kind of emptiness and freedom from thought and judgement is a marvel. It is bliss.

It leaves me with the same feeling of total detachment from the mundane one experiences when silently watching the mystery of the swallows swarm and roil at dusk over Rome. So, I guess in that sense the act of painting does serve as a fine and elegant, not therapy, but re-ordering of the mind. In those marvelous, empty moments concepts grander than I break the conscious mind's churlish grip on the petty habit of shabby selfish absorption.

Lately it's been harder, though, to get to that quiet, parasensuality of mindful, active emptiness. I'm wasting from something that's not yet defined. Tremors and great weakness, weight falling off like spoiled, unpicked fruit. And worst, the fear of trusting disinterested strangers whose vocabularies are limited to things like- 'too early to panic', this or that test, scans and scopes and 'soon' and 'patience' and 'can't until at least November.'

When I paint I am clear. I am simultaneously abstraction in form and concretion in act - a wonderful conundrum. Dichotomy is all of art - no bright without dull, no light without dark, no mass without void, order to madness, beauty expressing the most hideous aspects of humanity, ugliness that overwhelms with beauty of statement. And right now that is mostly denied me. I am exhausted and worn.

Without my paints I'm a dark French comedy. A weak guy, lately stooped, shuffling through the market for something bland and high calorie .

When I am at the easel I'm me, I am expanded and resonant, I disappear into the whole of things.

Making art isn't therapy....it's being.

DAMN YOU MARCEL DUCHAMP

The development of Fusion Cuisine did not negate the worth and value of uni-cultural cuisine. The existence of Molecular Gastronomy does not ipso facto make a perfect demi-glace irrelevant (Thanks God!). The outre is entertaining, intriguing, inspiring - but finally it is always only a transitory amusement. Again and again midst waves of fashion a warm and homely cassoulet is still sought out and admirable. The message being love what you love, explore as you can and, even, loathe what you loathe ...but always - caveat emptor!

So, too, it is in fine art. In truth each new movement does nothing to invalidate any of the previous movements. Some who make art, some who market it and some who buy it base all their major decisions on what's trending up in the art mags no matter how silly and meaningless.

From the Venus of Willendorf right through Modernism, Post-colonialism, non-aestheticism, internationalism - art is right there alongside prostitution, Jesus and "I Love Lucy" in cheap tricks and resurrections. Art is the penultimate phoenix. Endlessly proclaimed dead only to be immediately regenerated and rebranded by the market for fresh sales a-plenty.

I blame all this "(insert prior movement) is dead!" on Duchamp. Damn that dilettante Duchamp. Dissolute sod couldn't play chess well enough so, bored, he piddled briefly with art and presto-pissoir! suddenly we're saddled with R Mutt's theoretical art.

The conceit of theory and trifling experimentation proffered as fully realized art is quite droll, really very clever. "Art for arts' sake" - sheer marketing genius. It is the functional equivalent of writing a book for another book to read. It is as if one jotted down on a slip of paper the formulae for explosive nuclear fission and dropped the piece of paper on Nagasake. (Admittedly preferrable to the fully realized product they did drop, but you get the idea.) It is as if upon being seated at elBulli Ferran Adria sent out a brief note describing what you won't be eating and how mystically good it would've been.

I love art. I love the idea of it, the theory of it, the tingle in the back of the skull when something new and genuinely extraordinary comes along. But, there is also what simple folk in the Appalachians refer to as "buying a blivet" - a blivet being 10 pounds of shit in a 5 pound bag. This kind of art fashion-idiocracy derives from Duchampian dolts pouring over the most current issue of some edgy art mag guessing what the next big thing will be. And so we have galleries full of sliced meat, paintings in menstrual blood, elephant dung, trinkets submerged in a jug of piss and (TRUE, I swear) some fool who would masturbate beneath the floor of an empty church each time a hapless guest walked across the floor of the empty church to read a sign that said some fool would masturbate beneath the floor each time a hapless guest walked across the empty church to read a sign that said....oh forget it. What utter rot.

Look, I love edge art. I was thrilled to meet and spend some time with John Cage. I sat behind him during "Suite for Toy Piano," "Feedback" and two hours of some of his other compositions at a celebration of his random-process "New River Paintings." I turned purple trying not to laugh my ass off during the performance that night of "4'33." A guy from the symphony orchestra in a crisp tux sat at a Bosendorfer piano utterly motionless for 4 minutes and 33 seconds. The audience full of hostile, squirming guys afraid they were being made fools of, dragged there by their baffled wives all furious at having to sit through 4 whole minutes and 33 bloody seconds of silent agony while nothing (but us) happened. It was rich, infectious, intellectual bliss.

I get it. I get outre art as the nexus of the interaction of pure theory and material object/space/time. For what it's worth I even accept the validity in art's evolution of stuff like "Piss Christ," though I also think it's mostly just the result of poor toilet training and bad-boy pique. Just as in evolution there are numberless remains of pointless, forgotten experiments that span the eons between pond muck and Mozart, so it is true in art. No-one should be blind to the vicissitudes of frail fashion. Art is, indeed, limitless ...and that includes lots of space for the vapid and meaningless.

Trust your eye. New movements will come along as frequently as passing water. When they do I'm sure somebody will hand us a slip of paper so we'll know it has arrived ... maybe the next one will have chrome fins. I like chrome fins. Nothing say new like chrome fins.