The conversation around race and representation in regard to my art continues to expand as more people add to it, which is, of course, the goal. One of the paintings hanging up at my show Hello Cruel World at Guerrero Gallery right now depicts my friend Weez in his prison cell. We conceived of it together and I executed it. I told him that I might take some heat for being a white artist making a painting that could be interpreted as being “about black suffering,” especially in the wake of Dana Schutz’s Emmett Till painting. He and his partners in prison came back with a response that added another piece to the puzzle of my understanding of art, culture and power. He said that you can determine an artist’s sincerity by how the works looks and feels–that aesthetics mean something. (Susan Sontag: “All aesthetic judgement is really cultural evaluation.”) We equated this way of evaluating–the look and feel–with street smarts as opposed to book smarts. When your life depends on knowing another’s true motivations, you don’t listen to the words spoken (the political positioning of an artist statement). You listen to the body language, the vibe, the words that aren’t spoken. It’s the same with looking at art. If you know real, you see through fake. If you don’t know real, you read the artist statement. In academia, people are taught to ignore the signals from their bodies, their feelings, their hearts. If an argument is logical it must be truth. I think this is why people who aren’t educated in the arts see the realness in my art and those who are educated sometimes see only the signs and symbols and what they were taught these symbols mean and how they should be arranged and never get as far as feeling the work. I report on this not as a defense of my work, but as a point of learning for us all about how the criteria for evaluation varies across social groups and that if we are truly interested in revolutionary or subversive ways of thinking, we should listen to the wisdom coming out of the streets and the prisons.

I want my art to part of charting the territory between social groups. Our separation is the new frontier.

To stay afloat on top of it…

Some existential mid-life birthday prose:

What else is there to do but to keep walking? When you’re lost with no food or water, you should just keep walking. It’s days like this though, when you see the same landmark for the 45th time, that you face the fact that you are indeed going in circles. For the 45th time you say there must be another way. You stop and sit and wait for direction. None comes, so you get up and keep walking. My clothes have changed, my face has changed, I’ve built up callouses so my boots no longer give me blisters, I even carry different things, but the lost feeling remains. It could be that this lostness doesn’t originate in me, but in the bad maps that promise a destination. This lostness may have started when matter left its home in the void, and I’ve been wandering in widening circles ever since.

Been looking at this painting I just finished (The Keys to the City, based on Velazquez’s The Surrender of Breda) in regard to the current political situation and had a revelation:  power wears many masks–Trump masks, Clinton masks–but ultimately its face is the blank reflection of not recognizing our own power (and responsibility). Look at all of us on the left, united by personal connection and shared struggle–a 3rd party. At first I thought I was making a painting about the power of not trying to win–surrendering the keys–but now I’m thinking of surrendering the keys as a cop-out. The way I painted my face doesn’t suggest a peaceful empowerment. It looks like the despair of accepting the weakness of no face and leaving untapped all the vital power contained in the intimacy of shared struggle.

The Keys to the City  /  96 x 72  /  acrylic, spray paint, glitter on canvas

After Jesus’s mystical teachings were appropriated by the church, the luminous presence of the divine in material form (the light in our eyes, the aura of plants, etc.) was relegated to the heavens where its grace could be doled out by the guys in charge. This removal of holiness from the body and the earth left a spiritual vacuum in the European heart. This vacuum is what the colonizers set out across the globe to fill–with gold, the next best thing to the light of God. In churches, in art (mine included), the presence of gold stands in for the absence of God. I use Hobby Lobby glitter instead of gold leaf  to make missing God affordable for everyone.

According to the gold fiend himself, Christopher Columbus: “Gold is a wonderful thing! Whoever owns it is lord of all he wants. With gold it is even possible to open for souls the way to paradise!”