SELF-PORTRAIT AS A YOUNG ARTIST

Detail: Center Diptych of the WEST WALL with bust, Self-Portrait As A Young Artist of STUDIO SECTION 2008-2009

Diptych: wood, gesso, acrylic, colored pencil, graphite

96" x 97"

 

Above: Monologue of the Artist, with Child and Hobby Horse drawings on bas relief

 

Below is a transcription of the words of the quadrant above:

 

Monologue of the Artist

 

Who I am signifies nothing. What I am signifies something. What I seek signifies everything. I know not who I am. I know

not what I am. I exist as a question that has no answer—as an answer that has no question—as the cleaving wedge between

absolutes—as the mortar that cements opposites—as the paradox that eludes reproach. I am feared, resented, titillating and tiresome. I am the gray space between black and white, untransversable and obliquitous...an unfathomable separation that spawns questions and inhibits answers...shades of gray in osmotic separation unto infinity. My very existence belies the

metaphors of dogma...this I know, but I do not know what it signifies, not for me, not for my work— and not for others. I

sense that I must redefine myself in terms of a new configuration. How I have been shaped must be reconfigured...undone

and reconfigured, for I was shaped to hate myself, to hate the very spine of my selfness. Through the deception of love and

duty, my selfness, the core of me, was crucified, without pain or permission—the agony postponed. My re-creation of selfness,

my pursuit of that which was stolen and perverted through love and through fear is one of profound joy. This I that I am I

have ripped from the womb of mediocrity and it will end because I will end, and I will end because it is over. Knowing that

there can be no judgement other than my own, I intend to live my life in neither intimidation nor subservience, pandering

neither to culture nor to history. Being hierarchies of winners and losers, they are simply that, playgrounds in a separate reality.

I am, was, and will always be a young artist; Death is my only concession to age and death is only an inconvenience that will

leave my work unfinished. My distance from the horizon has never wavered. I continue to exist on an unchanging arc of

possibility. I would speak now of my one exquisite experience with transparency, that once and only orgasm of exile which

rips one from the security and complacency of a past and future into the chaos of the eternal now. There is no return...the

experience is overwhelming, the orgasm, explosive and inexplicable. There are no words, only the knowing that one must

survive within a seismic shift of metaphor. I now exist on the other side of the mirror; the hierarchies of history and culture,

incoherent. I have embraced failure—reward, a distant memory. I speak now from inevitability. Time is of no consequence.

There is only now. I cannot project forward or back for they do not exist. What I was and what I will be is for the metaphors

of others. I speak from the now for that is my amness. There is no other. Another event that requires no sequel to reinforce

instruction occurred while viewing Donatello’s Judith and Holofernes: A pigeon alighted on Judith’s head and shat, thus

proclaiming Art’s nothingness. Art, history, and culture exist within human solipsism. Humankind and its realities are artifacts

and nothing is as it should or must be. Only the pigeon had the advantage to inform...Nature does not share our reality. The

entire human condition is an invention. I find great beauty and horror in this enlightenment. We are both free and enslaved

by choice. Religion, culture, Art, war, history—civilization, nothing, absolutely nothing, has to be the way it is. Humankind

is a gestalt of many metaphors jockeying for the alpha position of reality; that image which flatters the majority in the mirror

of possibility. The war for position is engaged ceaselessly on battlefields of live or die intensity bloody with error and

circumvention. It is a winner take all conflagration where losers are slaughtered like flies on tongues salivating acid...What we

accept is an accumulation of repeats. It is on the common battlefield of culture and art history that my conflict lies. It is their

aura of inevitability that galls. But they, too, are artifacts, artificial and self-proclaimed arbiters of a synthetic intellectual

systematization which imposes the smothering order of sameness protecting predictable repeat from the chaotic impulses of

response and epiphany. Nothing must be the way it is—especially the bland mediocrity of processed thought. How contained

and neatly packaged it is now where every programmed gesture becomes a new ism; how quickly dealt this one card deck,

the avant-garde, the expected and demanded Ace in the play of hierarchies and linearities. Commerce and culture have

homogenized into an inseparable putrescence fit only for blind consumption. Even irony—especially irony—has lost its edge.

Vulgarity has outdistanced its subtlety. Only the culture and history itself lend credence to irony’s persistence. Art history, still enthralled with its reflection of masculine metaphors, continues to perceive itself as creator and anointer of movements

and moments...this is irony of the highest order. Since 8/6/45 all metaphors of masculinity have been struggling to

remain indelible as they fade into the palimpsest of evolution. History, by virtue of its definition in the human lexicon,

is ironical in the extreme for it has failed to record its own demise. 8/6/45 was not a link like any other in a chain

of linear recordation. It was the definitive event marking the end of history and the laying down of fossils. Art history

has become the ultimate authority in the validation of artifacts and the culture dutifully collects these would be

fossils for the presumptive proof of time’s linear progression. This retention of evidence has assumed a bathos bordering

on pathology...But I am not a culture-maker, neither critic nor curator of artifacts or articles. I am an artist and must

seek—or invent—the truth...and that, too, is an artifact. I search, then, for that which I have invented, an abstraction

as ephemeral and duplicitous as I, myself, an invention layered invention upon invention, like fossils in sectioned

complexity. As I descend this purpled plane, this triangle wedged between Art and history, their opposing forces press

me smaller. Soon they will be rid of me, the who of me, leaving an ascending wedge of whatness to re-engage

separation. This hourglass is the who and what of me, my life, my truth, my isness, and homogenization of Failure

and Desire. I am in the time of strangers...Names no longer signify. Spaces have been emptied and refilled with

unlined faces. Dark hair turned white and dark again. Genders shifted, sexes changed. Whos have turned to whats

and back again. Dreams and memories have blurred boundaries of premonition. What is this schism of histories that

has left me on one side of the horizon and culture on the other? Personal memory is my truth and all else is hearsay.

Art demands this loyalty and I abide. This is not choice—it is abdication. If I subside, so be it. If I am lonely, so be it,

for I reside among strangers...But I am not lonely; my perceived loneliness, an exclusivity of purpose. I sense I am

wrestling with a chimera—a tactility of fabulous dimension, a reality more significant than my own life. I am dwarfed

by it, attaining stature only through engagement. My life ended with it’s first embrace—and only then did my life

begin. Now I know no other and am exalted in its suffocation. It is my isness and by it must I be measured. I expect

nothing more...I demand nothing less. My whoness wanders the vaults of what might have been. So many choices

and yet no choice at all. I have done what I am doing and rejoice in its possibility. Always there is failure, always

there is possibility. Only in death can success find purchase...And still I am torn by history, by remembrance, by the

idea of never being forgotten, to live on in my artifacts...And here lurks hope, that monstrous seducer, destroyer of

the now, hope, grasping, snatching purveyor of misery and perpetuator of culture, enemy of Art. Culture demands

allegiance and exacts punishment for non-compliance. Art is its enemy and is a threat to any culture that must, by

definition, be cumulative and hierarchical. Any defection or deviation is a depletion of authority, power, and control;

a direct and unadulterated response to Art is anarchy. Art’s endurance and survival is serendipitous. It relies neither

on cultural intimidation nor the recordation of history. It is free associating and catalytic affording any viewer, at any

time, at any place, with any artifact the possibility for response exclusive of the culture-maker’s obsession for

intimidation and indoctrination. My now is dominated by the parity of art and culture. They are become

synonymous.This presents for me two questions: What difference does it make? And: What are you bitching about?My answer to the first question is: Because I am an artist...and my answer to the second: Because I am an artist. I

revolt against enforced historicity—especially when there is no history to enforce; then it is tyranny, and then, as

always, is now. Consensus is neo this and neo that. The distance between isms has shrunk to preposterous dimension.

One can smell the fear and anticipation. History is being manufactured beyond draftsmanship and its frangibility is

percussive. Our culture-makers would have us believe that “contemporary art stresses the importance of multiple

coexisting interpretations and the role of the viewer’s perceptions in ‘completing’ the work.” This appears to be the

law of first pretensions: the denial of vacuity and the con of altruism. From where comes this preening self-serving

superiority to presume to know what art should be and the roles artist and viewer should play to “complete the

work” and to complete what work? Obviously, “the work” refers to that of the culture-maker since it is he who has

created the roles and set the rules for the continuing homogenization of art and culture. With his metaphors of

investment and entertainment, Art is being vitiated from the inside out. “Art for fun and profit” is not my metaphor.

It is this culture’s own. When culture-makers “discovered” the masses, art became just another stall in the marketplace.

Viewing the now with the monocularity of a young artist with a 77 year old male homosexual is justified by their

juxtaposition. The struggle for the furtherance of self has been similar and singular, a laminate of expansion and

contraction to avoid cracking and crumbling. The desire to annihilate and erase has been experienced from both gay

basher and critic. The intent of an insecure critic who commits an ignorant insecure hatchet attack review is no

different from the ignorant, insecure, and bigoted rants of the homophobe. The desire to inflict pain and fear is the

same. This is not a complaint—rather, perhaps, a clarification. A young artist, no less than a young person, is prepared

for such assault and I, for one, have never met an old artist—only, perhaps, dead ones. But death can come at any

age...even to critics and homophobes. The walking dead surround us. As I work this wall, my mind slips through the

narrow throat of this descension onto the plain of possibility. New work is scattered and obtuse. I wander this wall

as a familiar though it will not release me until failure is confirmed. What if there were nothing worth saving from

a culture such as this that depends so heavily on history to commend it for having taken up time and space? Primarily

this culture exists in magazines, photographs, reviews and bloated intellectualism...a belief system, really, that relies

on wealth and intimidation. Art=culture...Culture=art. A simple, elegant equation. Unfortunately, it is a lie. It

resembles Catholicism; all aspects are outsized, ritualized, and hierarchical...Whos beneath whats and small whats

beneath larger whats, huge imposing galleries with huge imposing artifacts with huge imposing prices by artists with

huge imposing names, all manufactured by huge imposing culture-movers with blind taste, all operating behind the

humble non-self-serving, cultural metaphor of “...stressing the importance of multiple co-existing interpretations

and the viewers perceptions in ‘completing’ the work.” This farce is so obviously naive—or devious—that it defies

credibility. Just as Catholicism has nothing to do with Jesus, this cultural metaphor has nothing to do with Art. It is all bullshit and pomegranates, having only to do with commerce and commodification. Desire is the essence of human isness. Everything that I have ever been or will ever be springs from this single source, and from here springs history, culture, and Art. And each spawns artifacts and ideas; metaphors vying for survival. The human condition’s struggle for survival has been magnificent and, in the face of what is to come, erased.

Done