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