An Opinionated Rant on Painting, America and Contemporary Art

I recently overheard a professor saying that no matter what you do, you are always contemporary...and it makes perfect sense. If you are speaking only of the concept of time. Of course, if you are present here and now, you exist here and now and, therefore, what you do is here and now. But that does not necessarily mean that what you produce is artistically here and now. I also heard said professor say that if you take all of what's been done, jumble it up and reorganise it, you've got something entirely new. Not so, if you ask me. If you jumble it up, you've just got jumbled up art history that is easily picked apart and assigned to its proper place.

I imagine that being a contemporary painter must be difficult!

For a medium so long been used, the only frontier left is to paint the future on vapor. (If someone figures out how to do this, I will call you the greatest contemporary painter of our time...not that that means much coming from a BFA student...) So many times, I walk into a gallery and I see paintings that imitate one considered "Great" or "Genius" and I think that "Great" or "Genius" must be turning in their grave. And yet, "appropriation" seems to be the current genre we are stuck in when it comes to painting. You cannot just pull from the past and call it contemporary because YOU are alive at the moment. How about finding contemporary content...content that is contemporary because it is unique to our time?

Which leads me to, yet, another concern...our time is unique. In America, we are suffering. We are losing the battle (on every front imaginable) and everyone is feeling the pain. Where are the contemporary American artists? Where are the American artists willing to make a stand against or for contemporary issues--where are those who are labeled from abroad as "American"? What is inherently American art? Is there such a thing?

Let me say this: look away from those archaic mediums and baby boomer era artists. They've got it wrong. It recently came to my attention that some of them think that good American art has to come from either: a drug-crazed ass hole or a narcissistic "mad scientist" (to quote PAINTER Stephan Batura). No. This is the year 2008 and Andy Warhol is dead. We must take American art into the age of modernity and reinvent the artist persona to fit the individual--Andy Warhol created the artist celebrity, but that doesn't work by pure default. When artist is equal to celebrity, the art fades into the background and the story is then written about the artist. Don't get me wrong, biography is important and good information, but what then of the art? THE ART?

This country is already viewed as a nation of apathetic egotistical jerk-offs. Why allow our art to continue on in such a light, too? We can no longer languish in a past crumbled to bits.

All of that said, painting still has its role in contemporary art, but it cannot stand alone any longer. It can be a supplement and be "Great". Or, painting has got to stop trying to reinvent and start INVENTING. Fabricate a new contemporary, American identity. And while you're at it...try something new...I'm so TIRED OF PAINT.