Power lines

Crucifixion, H 6 in x W 8 in, grease pencil on rag paper, 1982

This drawing from 1982 shows some earlier interest in power lines and built-up black structures. It's an expressive, figurative piece. There's a ropey description to the gash of blood in the hand and torso making a rhythm between the body and the power lines. And the blackened head of the figure forms an inert mass - a form that is consistent with Jack's current work.


Something about his work affirms the observations of childhood as telephone lines drew an outline of the landscape for us as we travelled in the back seat of our parents' cars. Road travel was an everyday occurence growing up in Ontario.( I don't know if it still is. ) This is a rural, industrial landscape, a mental landscape, and possibly a faith-based landscape as well. These early drawings have landscape elements that are seen again in the recent work. Blackblackblackblueblack, for instance, references a low industrial structure that figures prominently in Jack's figurative, crucifixion drawings from the early 80s.

The title Blackblackblackblueblack is like a poem for a military toy. I find these landscapes, forms and wordplay expose a contemporaneousness about time as a constant present. Or maybe, simply, middle age does that!

In the Flemish Renaissance paintings of the Christ figure on the cross the crucifixion is Every Day. This northern Ontario landscape - I'll hazard a guess - is based on Sudbury where Jack grew up.

PS - I found this book by Robert Lax Love Had a Compass. The concrete poetry (pp 15-17) complements this entry.

Textless Universe

Blackblackblackblueblack h 84 in w 72 in, oil on panel, 2007-08

The language of a discipline is not meant to be a spoken language, at least, not a conversational language. That might explain the dearth of writing about John Brown's paintings. In conversations (particularly as the word has come to be used by PR) we usually speak with subtitles that say Please don't get me wrong and This is nice social engagement isn't it. Isn't it?

It's not possible to have a nice conversation about John Brown's paintings. They are full of urgent sorrow. They hold pain as a result of their process and of course that's part of their beauty.

This film idea isn't really about the artwork so much as the person. There are certain qualities some artists have that seem like a capacity for processing the undigested feelings of the larger social sphere.

The imagery of these works is revealed rather than built-up. Some bulk of perception is lifted and these forms are exposed. Forms that have to do with nerves and the tenderness of endurance.

Image of Blackblackblackblueblack scanned from the exhibition catalogue. May not be this pink in reality.

"Rage for Order"

Here's a documentary called Rage for Order featuring artist Jessica Park, presented by Oliver Sacks.

In this film we see the brain and, in particular, the cerebellum (the little brain) as an object. The relationship between the cerebellum and the rest of the brain, the big puffy lobes above the cerebellum, is like the physical, limited, corporeal body as it exists within the unpredictable atmosphere of weather systems and the cosmos.

I'm reminded of the paintings and writings of Henry Darger (known for his epic scrolls of the Vivian Girls saga) who was obsessed by weather conditions and cloud formations. Brain activity and weather are one and the same. We seem to take cover from the weather but we are involved in it. Thinking is a kind of electrical storm.

We are at the mercy of our chosen overlords. Who is your overlord? One of mine is Money. I just got a bill in the mail that was unexpected and an electrical storm ensued - then I noticed the bill was to someone else, it came to the wrong address, and I am still in the throes of a subsiding electrical storm of panic.

What about public opinion? What other people think. When, for example, you find out a friend doesn't like something you did - does that set off an electrical storm? All those big puffy lobes are crashing down on the cerebellum.

As much as I adore Oliver Sacks I feel the torturous probing of intuition a kind of autopsy on the living. I don't think I should be privy to the secrets of other people's private worlds, but still I am curious. I think this odd hang up about inner privacy and outward expression is why William Burroughs believed words to be a kind of virus and Jacques Derrida spoke of an inner tormenting voice that came to him before sleep, telling him to destroy his writing. (Derrida's Archive Fever is a fascinating account of the roots of psychoanalysis.)

In this film, Jessica Park's mother, essayist Clara Clairborne, tells us about the popular theories of autism when she was a young parent. Her agitation is palpable. An eminent psychiatrist, holocaust survivor, wrote an influential book on the subject of autism that, you can see, caused a lot of distress in this woman. It is her documentation of Jessica's early development that allows for any kind of window onto the art of Jessica Park.

In an essay by John Mays - a Fiction about John Brown (which accompanies the current show at Olga Korper Gallery) the artist says that trying to understand the source of art is an idle pursuit.

Still, this is an electrical problem.

Spectatorship

You know the story about how Velvet Underground only sold something like 3,000 copies of their first LP, but everyone who bought it formed their own band? I wonder if there's an artist with the same kind of influence.

I became a spectator. I say artist sometimes because I think about art a good deal, but practically I'm a spectator. I don't even know if there's an in for me with art. Are people in it? Now I don't think I've ever gotten it. I know I loved it, but that's love. I'm talking about social immersion of some kind. Having business at an opening, or needing to exhibit something...That eludes me. No family ties. I enjoy going to certain art galleries like the Belkin Gallery at UBC. But I don't respond in kind. I get disappointed that art has to be within a certain series of protective layers. And theatre, public art, publishing - all of that - has to be ensconced in its occupational ideology. I think it used to be a form of food and was necessary as such. But today it's more of a cuisine than a sustenance. There's a stance one takes.

When we talk about inside and outside are we talking about belonging and not belonging? Is alienation a kind of necessary condition for participating? I mean, otherwise, what is participating? What is one trying to get across, or through, in a practice? What is a practice other than a series of trials and errors?

I don't want art to soothe me.

Yesterday I was working as a cashier at a drugstore. Everyone was soaked, it was dark at four, Phil Collins was playing over the p.a. and a toddler was wailing - bawling relentlessly just aggravated and fed up and finished with the whole scene. He gave voice to everyone's basic condition. Wherever there's a kid wailing like that it brings everyone to face their mortality.
And I was wearing a pin on my uniform that said "I'm new. Thank you for your patience."

Two way glass and romance

October 31, Dan Graham gave a 90 minutes talk at Emily Carr U. He concentrated on his mirrored, glass pavilions. He mentioned, a couple of times, how Jimmy Carter's presidency and policies called for a non-monumental idea in art and architecture. His pavilions focus on social interaction and how individuals and groups utilize the spaces for practical and romantic purposes. He references pop and rock music regularly in his work and the relationship between 'inside' and 'outside.'

Not to go off track here, but I wonder if there is that social element of rock'n'roll bullshitting anymore. You know back in the 70s that was a socially acceptable position to take. Guys would return to visit their old high school and allude to or imply that they knew or hung out with someone like John Lennon or Dylan - or Max Webster. They wanted to be perceived as roadies and it was ok to be a hanger-on to someone of the rock'n'roll elite class. But that was pretty over in the 80s except for its vapour of irony in bands like Sonic Youth - compatriots of Graham. There's a tongue in cheek acknowldgement of the rock'n'roll bullshitter in Graham's work. It's like a pressure valve that once might have been a tactic to release any possibility of grandeur but now rock'n'roll has an annointed and knighted cast to it. I don't feel it as a populist sign at all anymore.

A coincidental wrinkle, before I went to the talk Q lent me his borrowed copy of Sartre's No Exit and I started to read it on the bus on the way to the school. It struck me that this play and its themes of people watching people being watched, people reflecting people, angled walls and anxiety about surfaces was a key to Graham's work. In fact he did mention Sartre's Being and Nothingness as having an influence on his early architectural installations and models.

But I can't look at a veteran contemporary artist's work, that involves issues of inside and outside without thinking of psychiatrist RDLaing. I just keep running into that over and over again.

I think this is the first time an artist has invoked romance - audience as lovers in public space - as a theme in contemporary art. I wonder if it appears, when artists become older and venerable, as if their oeuvre was always about love?

John Brown October 30-November 29, at Olga Korper Gallery Toronto

Blackgreenblack, 60"x72" oil on panel 2008

Before perspective

Driving a point home is, by its very nature, a fallacy. Rhetoric is very attractive and alluring. We want to chisel and crystalize and clarify and resolve. It comes from being a spermatozoon. We were spermatozoa and an oocyte. We were potential for a multitude of possibilities. As individuals we latch onto one of those ideas and we keep refining our logic in an ongoing contest. It's just a force of origin.

I read these articles about the art market as if those words are supposed to go together at all. Production - now that is another story. But art isn't a commodity. It's a process. The reason people buy objects is to symbolically select, by transaction, a facet of that process. There really are no art objects. I can see them but I can recall them with the same cognitive process. I don't need to own one to relate to it. It doesn't matter whether an object is ancient or was made recently. It doesn't matter if I am in the tail end of human story or in its ancient past.

The objects are made to show someone that we exist. Our beloved no longer believes that we exist so we have to prove it over and over again. And we do it by pretending we are participating in something we understand, as if we belong to it, as if we are in our element. But we look over our shoulder to see if we are seen. We make incomprehensible art because we want to know if someone will clarify our confounded state for us. We wonder if being confounded is more honest than being knowledgeable. Then we wonder why we should be honest. So we make art and sell it to each other. We exchange symbols, and it's all sex.

detail above


Paintings on this blog are by John Brown unless otherwise noted.
Exhibition at Olga Korper Gallery, Toronto through the month of
November, 2008
Accompanying catalogue written by John Bentley Mays.

Makeness

I have to think up a more accurate word for what is called filmmaking - because it's not film and it's not really making. It's taping and wangling. Tapewangling.

I'm not attracted to tapewangling.

But filmmaking is really more of a handicraft like sewing or knitting, more and more. As the tools of that medium become regarded for their historical, symbolic value it feels like we can choose to live in a made world or theoretical arranged world - or both.

The other day I was helping a shop owner move her inventory of stuff to a new location. She deals in objects that are valued for their historical properties but also for their de-valued properties. Labels, cigar bands, letraset, keys, test tubes, dye cut paper, foil, ink stamps, wrapping paper, parts, doodads, yarn, matchbooks - tonnes and tonnes of this stuff, up to rafters. They are all tangible: old, process printed, inked relics, disintegrating. They are the objects that pack the corners in uneasy dreams. The stuff dreams are made of I suppose. Print is disintegrating, film is decomposing, digital media is not here for the long haul. But the disintegration is still tangible as particles that have the weight of their history embedded in them.

I have an uneasy label under my name on my website. I've given myself the tag of illustrator and filmmaker because I was taking a course in self employment. Everyone in the class had to be a noun who verbs. So anyway, the site is odd. I make slippers. I sew things. I write things and look at art. I enthuse about art. I pine for the experience of making-ness. Kids live in a made world. They handle beads and wires and wool. In an hour they have produced a toy or a gift and they've made themselves a history. What about all the hours of experience of making that occurs for the event of tapewangling? Where do those memories go? I feel that they are storehoused white elephants.

Absence is its own thing

Absence is memory of a thing's presence. In John Brown's paintings over the past few years the process of scraping and systematic removal of paint is a form of making imagery.

I'm thinking about injuries and healing as a process that reveals a new form. Bones and tissues are different after an injury. Some parts are never replaced and there are physical gaps.

I was feeling accustomed to the "resultant" dis-appearance of the paintings when I noticed, by contrast, his more recent work supports a build-up of painterly forms, painterly staccatos, flat black angled forms like stealth bombers, industrial bunkers, or Ned Kelly's armor; forms conceived as invisible, as negations.

Along with the black forms are flare-red islands, some appearing consructed and some topographic, with a ferrous mineral quality. The colours and forms indicate an industrial landscape not devoid of a human presence - but an extension of human activity and physicality.

Redredblack, oil on wood, John Brown, 2008.

gnosticatacitsong

Meet the filmmakers event: Mike Hoolboom in an interview with Dana Claxton at Cineworks, October 1, 2008

I was paying attention to questions or statements from Hoolboom that would incite Dana Claxton to talk about the kind of things we don't know about. Anecdotes, stories, observances, problems, finding words.

The reason I was watching the form of the interview unfold is because I am preparing a study of some kind - maybe an interview documentary, maybe a scripted format piece about my friend Jack and his painting. He has warned me that he can be tight-lipped about a lot of his ideas about painting. I think he's reticent to disclose or package his nature in a journalistic format of any kind. So I noticed Claxton was matter of fact about the content of her films and the simple process under which many of them were made because obviously her films are her own activities. But after some time, and after a sequence of heartfelt observations by Hoolboom, the interview began to take a shape that was evocative of Claxton's personal history. And in a way it was a kind of satsang for me. Both filmmakers are at home with the sacred in art without talking directly about the sacred. It came up in this way, for example - in describing a subtle art installation he'd witnessed recently, Hoolboom said: It might as well not have been there. Absence was accounted for in the conversation. The place is packed with absences.

My own historical absence took its place beside me tonight as I reflected on the conversation. I used to make one up (a personal history) but I don't anymore. I just don't have one. The notion is foreign to me.

Art at this crossroad is a pallindrome. Gnostic, a tacit song. Forward and backward are the same direction. Anything with tangibility is now a miracle. Is it possible that we understand through art that life itself is enough?

No such thing

Two things:
Rothko installation at the Tate Gallery
and
My Valuable Hunting Knife

For some reason blogger wants this to be italicized. Please excuse the urgent-looking type.

My Valuable Hunting Knife is a song with a video by Guided by Voices. In it a number of things are held and displayed. They look like things that would have been hard to part with at one point. They could be things that people fought over. But at some point, such objects fall out of favor.

In the Rothko exhibit it's the opposite. Interpretation has fallen out of favor. There's a fatigue around the spiritual, ineffable artwork. Or maybe, rather, we're more game than ever to talk about things that once had no handles to latch onto. Radical art doesn't give indications about how to respond to it - it's just an experience. Talking about experience leads to questions about existence and that leads to mystery. Now, as a species, we've experienced mystery and Rothko is material stuff. We've had our hands on transient things, but physical constructions of pigment and canvas and wood and metal demand that we square with them as phsyical things that have duration. Maybe we've traded places with art and we're now able to notice how temporary we are; the fleeting nature of technology is an extension of us.

Incomprehension

Sept 17 at UBC: Dieter Roelstraete discussed the 'thingness' of art as:

"an experience of incomprehension; the defeat of a one-dimensional understanding."

"...the promise of the frustration of desire when accompanied by the desire to know everything."

Dieter Roelstraete began by stating, as a philosopher, he is trained to mistrust things and even treat them with disdain. He declared himself a non-materialistic person. In a room full of art students I wonder if this set him apart. He also made a clear distinction between the use of the word thing and object. Object has its opposite: subject. But thing resists that evasive action. The talk proceeded to address a kind of anxiety in the air, evidenced by the standing room only turn-out, about information overload and a yearning for identification with the hand and what is made by hand. He mentioned critical nostalgia - a longing for contact with objects that have a soul. I wonder how this differs from animism. But I think what he's talking about is the sensation of experience I get when I go into certain pockets in Vancouver especially on Main Street where I see young people typing on typewriters and small, hole-in-the-wall art galleries showing fragile, unmounted drawings as if the last three decades didn't happen. It's not a Luddite stance it's a deadpan insistence on filling time with non-digitized activity. Basically, experiencing life.

The experience of painting - to experience a painting or encounter a painting is different from engaging in critical discourse on painting. Critical discourse on painting is its own activity. But how do we share the experience of art without the handles of being a trustee of art. What would it sound like to talk about painting such as John Brown's painting without referencing art?

I wonder this because there are thresholds that people pass through when they have impulses to make marks or write words that aren't addressed or directed at an audience - then at some point a decision to speak to an uncertain body like the artworld takes shape and the utterances become a kind of dialogue with citizens of a planet of art. Is there a change of citizenship that transpires when people become artists or art critics? Do we insist that difference be asserted when the question of art arises?

How do we inhabit the planet of suffering and mystery without leaving it and making distance or deflecting it with art?

I want to make some kind of film recording of John Brown's painting. I've known him as 'Jack' for about 28 years, since he was a student at University of Guelph. At that time he was showing figurative painting at Carmen Lamanna Gallery on Yonge Street in Toronto. I've followed his work somewhat closely because of interest in the work which has maintained a kind of separate relationship to our being friends.

Today we were talking about the fact that his paintings are viewed by some of his collectors as having a spiritual quality. It's a category that makes me feel like a crescendo has occurred and that discussion henceforth must be hushed. It almost seems as if the work somehow washed something away for the viewer. I'm dissatisfied with that idea because there still remains the work and its thingness. It is not in a transcendent state. It is planet earth. Wood, oil, material - a
sensed object and a result of physical stamina and physical process. But still I wonder why this aura of transcendence attaches to Jack's paintings. I get the sense that his paintings are suffering and yet steadfast. They seem to be enduring our time. And for me they are the patina of a thought process.

I wonder what a person who paints (or writes, etc) would be doing if they didn't know there was this avenue of activity. I don't like to use the word expression because to me it sounds like pumping milk without a baby. And the word create has a similar vulgarity to it. Things have always been here - there is nothing created but rather exchanged and transmogrified. Something that might have existed in another form has been transmogrified by actions and behaviour. Maybe it feels like something was brought to light that would have otherwise unsettled us in the dark.