The Ironic Twinkle
Wednesday, October 22, 2008
Sorry it's been a bit quiet around here, but even a guy like me who lives on dry bread and the scent of pesto needs to make a living some weeks. And maybe take the odd depression break. You know how it goes.I really wanted to do a comparative piece, featuring Jan-Henri Booyens and Odili Donald Odita, a kind of riff on revisiting abstraction, modernist nostalgia, etc., but I haven't managed to see the latter show yet. So you can look forward, maybe, to some insight on that later, or give me a hand down in the comment section. For now, just Jan-Henri:
It's really hard to look at Booyens recent work, The Matt Sparkle, without thinking of it in terms of his Dominant persona, Avant Car Guard (at least 1/3). It's hard to not see a cool ironic thing happening in his paintings, but I'm not sure that's the best way of looking at it. That's the price you have to pay for being a rock star.
The most interesting part was the clear influence of digital media on the painting. The squiggly, scribbly lines are the direct descendants of mouse-made lines, like in MS Paint. It reminds me of the current taste for old computer styles (bad home pages, silly animated gifs, old school games, visible pixels, bright colours, arial and comic sans, etc) which is sweeping over the internet. The child-like clumsiness of that old html style becomes something captivating when translated into paint. It captures in part something very contemporary, a reflection on the taste for digital obsolete aesthetics, which is very now, or even digital kitsch, like twinkly text on Facebook
. It also, in part, reflects the same concerns of the people who are drawn to that aesthetic: an accelerated nostalgia for the recent past and a fear of the big bad future where the robots that take over the world aren't clumsy and endearing gifs, but slick social machines. All wrapped up in a sheen of irony, that makes the yearning and fear colder; the incongruity is funny not terrifying.Painting itself is also playing with this cold irony, which can be seen clearly in the emergence of 'bad' painting. It's not anything too new (if you imagine Elizabeth Peyton, one of the early 'bad' painters is having a major museum retrospective right now). It's basically a clever way of criticising painting, while still being a painter. Teasing the emotional drip while still dripping. Being clever and intuitive. Having cake and eating it.
In Jan Henri's work this play with ugly can sometimes be really good. Playful, apocalyptic and mesmerising.
And sometimes less so.
The irony, however is tempered by a romantic edge (with titles like There were no footprints in the dust behind them... and People used to dream of the future) and sometimes even a vague political sense (RDP and Dead Dove Freedom). I start to get a bit confused, like looking at a strobe light: ironic/sincere/ironic/sincere.
posted by Robert Sloon at 12:03 PM
9 Comments:
if you get the fact that everything you take seriously is socially constructed, then you are ironic about your own sincerity. If you don't then you fall into the trap of imagining that there is something true and innocent out there, or worse that you are true and innocent and someone else out there is not.
the nice thing about painting generally, if one is doing it now, is that it has to do with recognition of complicity, whereas "new" media can be taken on in a way where the artist imagines themselves to be innocent (possibly even holding up a torch of truth). a very unattractive thought.
Great comment, 12.21.
Oh my god, I was just drowned in a blurb of empathetic dribble.
Blah blah, painting sux, and these stink. To cool to try harder...
and you are not saying anything
ps very good sparkles
How many times does this question really need to be pondered over? I mean, you'd get pretty angry if every time a band got on stage they spent half an hour apologising for playing guitars and debating whether people really should still be playing guitars after all the embarrassing things hair metal bands did with them.
Which particular question are you talking about?
You have a nice analogy though. The hair metal band thing. However, no-one's expecting painters to apologize. I think trying to understand work, analyze visual information, piece together bits of the puzzle is to art what dancing is to your guitar player.
I remember in the 90's when all fliers for deejays (bands were dead) were all made digitally and everyone thought it was so new and hot. And then one day I saw a hand-drawn poster tied to a street lamp in long street, and it made all the digital ones look so out of touch. And then bands came back too, and their viewpoint and the viewpoint of hand-drawn stuff is all part of the same cultural era.
The same thing happened in the art world, only most of it is still in the 90's because people are a bit slow and they get sucked in by theory that has not yet caught up with painting and can't categorise it into its slick 90's window boxes.
Especially in South Africa, where we still think the yBa is the only thing happening in art because we are so cut off. We are living in a time warp.
Looking back now, one can clearly see that Kurt Cobain was a contrary little moptop cunt. He sucked the joy out of hair metal, which was a perfectly good musical phenomenon, ending myriad musical careers and forcing a situation where 80's rock stars now have to come out of early retirement to host godawfuck reality television shows instead of enjoying their golden years respectably churning out biennial Christmas albums.
Furthermore, in an ironic twist on 'here we are now, entertain us', weak-stomached little Cobain injected himself with a lethal dose of smack and birdshot, and escaped the televisual horror that he, in part, initiated. ...
My thoughts on Hair Metal vs Grunge:
The truth is I'd rather be David Lee Roth sporting a comb-over to the Playboy Mansion and dry-humping catering staff than Layne Staley dying in my own fluids and being discovered two weeks later.
One way or another, pathetic gets us all in the end. Medicating to escape it turns out to be futile.
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