Fill in the Blank

This week I made my way uptown and caught the High Times Hard Times Show along with a bunch of claustrophic gallery shows sympathetic to the cause. I guess you had to be there to appreciate a lot of this stuff. High Times Hard Times is problematic to me - it looked like all the work that my older professors were making - painting as stuff to be fucked with. Conceptual art had really blown people's minds I guess, and you can almost smell the acrid rag weed that these folks must have been smoking - I know - my old professors smoked the same crap. The would also say things like - hey man it's all about the...then you'd have to fill in the blank . Luckily I had some early eighties hipsters that encouraged painting - but they used to say things like - hey man it's all about the...then you'd fill in the blank. Thankfully I drank Jim Beam with pitchers of 2 dollar beer and after a couple of shots the rag wasn't so bad...then I'd fill in the blank - I had to get to New York. Most of my professors were from New York and a motley bunch they were - from different schools of thought - 60s, 70s and 80s - they had left for easier climates, easier jobs and suburban group sex parties - those that live on are on their third marriages, have tenure, and show once a year at the faculty exhibit and the local downtown antique shop/gallery - the days of group sex parties a distant memory - along with 30 inch waistlines, a full head of hair & any dreams of real thought about art.
A few of the paintings in this show have tropes I recognize - Ross Bleckner saw a couple of these - Peter Halley saw a couple of these - in fact neo geo abstraction had it's grounding here. This HTHT painting mixed with lens based image production, Walter Benjamin, Baudrillad and phase one 80s marketing equals the "postmodern american painting" that I've come all this way to have an argument with. My work both here on Henri and in my studio is nothing like any of this - it is an unusual animal. Maybe it's just that parental authority thing or that sibling thing - but I ain't buying it. It's better to rule in Hell than serve in Heaven...or somesuch Miltonian horsecaca. The problem for me again is the insistence on materiality. It is the American solution to everything. Make it bigger, make it physical, make it real. And all the while we fall deeper into the trap of our own visual myopia. We mistake appearance for reality. Postmodernism is all about the appearance of things. We pump things up to enjoy their physicality without first developing the underlying field of reality that provides a foundation for this bigness. It's like Pam Anderson's breasts and the tiny little body that is slowly and sadly shrinking beneath them. Or Hollywood's need for the big opening weekend. Or the epidemic of obesity. Or the museum addition. Or the expanding art fairs. Or... fill in the blank.
HTHT had moments of real clarity for painting. The power of the big stroke. The power of painterly illusion. The power of a visual identity. It also failed miserably to provide a future, a groundwork for painters to grow or react to - which is why Pop returned first as expressionism, then as abstraction and now as figuration. Pop was split in three through the eighties and nineties, hell it even swallowed up Minimalism and made it cute. Today we refer to it as plurality even though it all comes from the same group of chefs. Like Mcdonalds we have a choice of hamburger, chickenburger or fishburger - but it's all Mcdonalds. Postmodernism has failed, it was failing fast in HTHT but it was Europe that revived America's idea bank for a short while with an infusion of the (what was the word...oh yeah...) transavantegarde and the beginnings of marketable POMO. Richter, Polke, The Italians, The English etc etc - gave us back their take on our ABEX/Pop/Minimal culture just as we collapsed into a puddle of paint poured on the floor. Warhol was reborn, painting began selling again, the Loisaida exploded, Rent became the runaway musical experience, the art market rose, blipped and rose even higher, art selling modeled itself as a corporate enterprise deciding to never again have a down time because success is never a risk - but greatness is, and well, fill in the blank.
I got all this from HTHT. Can you imagine what a terrifying bore I must be in person, walking through this show, my mind racing, my thoughts careening from my life to these times and back again, wondering if soandso saw this artist and recognizing this or that and relating it to work I saw last week in Chelsea or years ago in Soho? I am formulating something else for painting and it is in my own studio work - the personal, the image, the abstract, Matisse, Tintoretto, Picasso, Veronese, Late Dekooning and ideas and images that I fill into the blank. As I said my work is an unusual animal. HTHT hopefully will not be forgotten soon - some of the painting in the show is thoughtful and real - David Reed - a very unusual animal himself - and a staunch defender and exemplar of abstraction - writes a wonderful essay about HTHT in the catalogue. Basically he salutes those artists & times, laments that they have gone unknown and challenges all of us to fill in the blank. Kudos Mr. Reed!