well--oldest art forms are visual poetry, panting, really--
cave paintings, petroglyphs, objects -fetishes of Goddesses--
is painting relevant?
well--i started off as a housepainter, moved on to grafitti and
now do visual poetry using spray paint, housepaint, model cars
paints, basically any kind of paint that is found in trash or
at hardware store, for cheap--
why would painting be irrelevent coming from such contexts?
compared to what that is "relevant"
living language--my goodness, darn painting sprouting up all over
the neighborhood! house painting, mysterious languages of
surveyors painting numbers and signs on streets by
construction sites, chalk paintings, drawings mixed with spray
paint by girls skipping rope or in winter--kids spray painting
every mail box, telephone pole, USA TODAY or local newspaper boxes
--hand made signs advertising small businesses, yard sales,
gigs by local bads, with psychedelic or wildly collaged paintings
--itinerent portrait painter who has signs all over the place and
often stands out on street with palette and brushes in hand--
construction site painters applying rust proof paint to sites
to mark out CAUTION --HARD HAT AREA--in stenciled letters on
flourescent yellow or orange backgrounds, hastily done
while backhoes hard at work tearing up creaky old
potholed streets troubled by heaving cracked and marred tar
surfaces in process of being redone--only to crack and corrode yet
again with next spate of cold and wet weather--
large biceped men with beards and leather vests over tatooed chests,
sprouting ear rings, nose rings, tongue rings--their
skinny leather clad female colleagues--painting exotic logos for
the latest of two dozen within eight blocks tattoo parlors--
skate board kids painting talismanic and obscure protesting
FREEDOM TO SKATE slogans on sidewalks--
even "sunday painters"--gentle dreaming men and women in front
of easels staring out to the Lake Michigan shore lines, into
the meeting place of the sky and water at horizon but dimly
glimpsed in blurred gradations of water in various
states--ice, water, mist, cloud, fog--and water colors!
or Prophet Blackmon--Preacher and cobbler who paints visions from
dreams inspired by the Bible and tells one [psychic readings for
free simply y shaking one's hand--hand littered paintings with Bible
verses depicting Black angels, prophets, Jesuses, Marys--Jamaican
dj with dirty jacket and deep accent booming along with boombox painting
his signboards for sandwich boards and walls--of colorful jamaican dance
hall stylee scenes--hot couples sweating into each other holding Red Cap
Ale--or Jamaican beers--and lips locked in synch with dub
beats--billboards going up
latest one over looking pentagram intersection of five
streets--three bars, bank and liquor store marking out the
points of its star--
huge billboard painted and papered up--
van gogh with bandaged ear, and other good ear so to speak--glued to
telephone
IF VAN GOGH COULD HAVE MADE ONE CALL!
and the hotline number for Wisconsin Association of Mental
Health--in back ground diligent copyist painter marking out famous
last painting of van gogh's--
crows infield--
where he shot himself
yes--if he could have made one call!
was his painting "a living language"still"--
or simply "still life/nature morte" landscape of man no one
bought paintings by?
just a dead madman?
is painting a living language?
if done by living people on sites among other living people?
or is painting simply that "dead language" relegated to entombment
and classifications in museums?
or private collections?
or the rhetoric of art criticism: the "endgame" of art, "the death
of
the author/avant garde/painting/God/received opinions of the previous
generation/etc" --the shelf life of a Twinkie--being "longer" perhaps than
radioactive half lives let alone the thousands and thousands of years of now
"dead language"of painting, despite its continual appearance "before our very
eyes"--in such mundane yet exciting situations, sites--as street corners,
Lakesides, construction/destruction sites, yellow painted lines down middle
of roads--painted out by slow but steady patient truck with giant
funnel pouring down paint like so much concrete into the world,
yellow as daffodils in spring, dotting landscape of concrete, tar and
macadam--
a rhetorical question!
designed for further rhetorics--
usually, a "dead language" is one such as Latin, though spoken by
living persons, is not the actual from birth language of any one--
or dead indian, native languages from around the world,
extinguished by "the march of progress" or bulldozers, roads through
Amazon rain forest or any other "wilderness" any where in the world--
if considered in this light
if painting is "dead language"--
are all these painting millions --zombies, living dead?--or just
phantoms in love with mirages--and acting out "visions"--with zealous
"misguided" purpose--
or are they "elitists" who "speak a dead language" when painting,
much as priests used to intone the Mass in Latin--
yet why then-this continual painting?
to communicate levels of community in public daily life--
gesturing to the dead?
or--as Emerson wrote:
"The blank and ruin we see in Nature {painting} is in our own eye"
what is a "dead language" is not painting, but the discourse about
the discourse of painting--
and its desperate desire not to become so much "dead language" of
old forgotten journals, theses, essays--
while the corpse it proposes to exhume for further ever
more minutely detailed and footnoted, annotated and documented and
theorized analytic autopsies --
simply "rises and shines" from the morgue slab
and while the assembled learned prognostocators of death ponder
overtheir charts--
walks jauntily out of the doors, past the security guards
and exits into street, producing paint cans and brushes,
rollers, dirty old drop cloths, smudged pallettes, spray
paints, creakily swaying scffoldings---and begins happily marking and
mucking
up
"every thing in
site/sight/cite"!!!
yet these works, going unrecognized by the definers of art and
keepers of the flame of dead language prophecies--
"speak" only to those illiterate in the deadness of the languages,
of
dead languages--of the dead language of painting--
and being illiterate in the dead language of
painting, these same ones
perceive only the living embodiements of painting--
and go on cheerfully making them
little knowing that they have been pronounced dead!
--dbchirot
On Sun, 17 Dec 2000
2000, Aaron
Kimberly wrote:
> Hi Everyone,
>
> I'd enjoy hearing your comments about painting. I recall seeing a set of
> paintings at the Whitney over a year ago of "Divas". The commentary called
> into question whether painting is still a living language or
> historical/sentimental like 'opera'. Perhaps Baudelaire would agree that
> painting is no longer the ideal vehicle for engaged metaphors of modern
> life. Yet, there remains the compulsion to paint. Do we risk irrelivance?
> What do you think?
>
>
