Commentary: Slaying the Shibboleth

 Richard Bledsoe "Hapless Scrivener (Make With The Word)" oil on canvas 48" x 36"

Post Modernism had a profoundly negative impact on contemporary art, which is why it needs to be strongly repudiated. It attempted to substitute a simulation of art, a Mobius strip of relativistic theories propped up by sophistry and hypocrisy, in place of the actual human processes of creation, discovery and self knowledge. Post Modernism looked like it had significance because its domination in the media, academia, and the cultural institutions. But it fails to speak to or for the vast majority of people in this world.

What is pandering these days is to go along with the art establishment-to keep producing junk with a sociology lesson attached, instead of really exploring yourself and your medium. The medium is irrelevant-art can be made out of anything. The power of art comes from the artist's ability to capture a visionary moment of truth in tangible form-that place where the specific leads to the eternal. 

Our society has suffered because for awhile artists stopped reaching towards eternal values.  Post modernism said there are no values-it's all the same, just a matter of taste, no one can say what is good and what is not. In fact, PoMO says, the worse something seems the better it is, and the average person is just too dumb or backwards to get it. But the elite get it. It's a way prove membership as one of the anointed-embrace the nonsense. We've had decades of fawning over the emperor's nonexistent clothes. 

Well, no more. The culture elites have run the train off the tracks and the damage they've caused needs to be repaired. If we are going to come through these turbulent times intact, artists must stop supporting the establishment's status quo.

Conflict is unavoidable, because incompatible world views are in competition. Remodernism presents the return of art as a revelation-an inclusive, spiritual activity. The elites encourage art as a wedge, a status symbol; they use the debasement of art to enforce their positions of power and influence. There can be no compromise with those who seek to use the holy practice of art to to undermine the human spirit.

-Richard Bledsoe

Commentary: Bafflement of the Public

"The history of modern art is also the history of the progressive loss of art's audience. Art has increasingly become the concern of the artist and the bafflement of the public." -Henry Geldzahler

Accurate summation by a notable curator, historian, and critic. As artists we have become guilty by association with a lot a meaningless dreck being passed off as art. That's why the audience is baffled, they know intuitively art has gone wrong. It's time to stop all the relativism. There is Truth, there is Beauty, there is Quality. Artists above all need to commit to higher standards for themselves and the works of their peers. 

-Richard Bledsoe

Commentary: Inadequate Art

 Marcel Duchamp "Fountain"

Strange times we live in. It's going to be getting a whole lot stranger too, so it's best to be prepared. 

Art is my healthiest obsession, so I cultivate it. What I've seen in my contemplation of art and the systems that have grown up around it is both a terrible indictment and a glorious new chance.

The contemporary art world is still infected with replicating viruses caught from Duchamp's urinal. For a century now we've been hearing the same joke, with variations on the same old punchline. To encounter Duchamp and his myriad offspring is to leave the world of art, and to enter into philosophy, semantics, theory. What we have been presented with for too long is an intellectual approximation of art, a commentary, not the thing itself. Art is not a discursive process, a debate, an explanation. It's an encounter with something that can not be spoken, that exists beyond reason.

 

The way the art world is run encourages this mistaken view of art. Yesterday's counter culture is today's establishment, and the trendy radical ideas of a few generations ago are dogma today. Contemporary art all too often brandishes hostility, obscenity, or obscurity at its audience. Most people, when confronted with this type of contemporary art get the point-this is not made for people like you. Its inaccessibility lends it a spurious sense of superiority.

But this is not good enough anymore. With the tough times we have ahead as a culture, art can't remain as a plaything of a decadent elite. The artists need to return to the true function of art-as an exploration of human potentials, universal experience, an evocation of a state of consciousness that there are no words for. 

We need this now. The artists need to show us our strength. To keep playing referential games and sneering at the values of others would be to fail in our duties at a perilous moment. Too much of what is being presented as art is inadequate for these times. It's getting to the point that this is worse than a mistake, it is actively destructive.

The good news is this era of error is ending. What takes its place is up to us. 

-Richard Bledsoe

Commentary: Shock Art

 

 Damien Hirst "A Thousand Years"

"Adhere to your own act, and congratulate yourself if you have done something strange and extravagant, and broken the monotony of a decorous age."
-Ralph Waldo Emerson 

It's a strange time in the contemporary art world, where this quote is kind of turned on its head. So much of the monotony of post modern art is its lack of decorum. Artists without vision or talent can fall back on creating sterile reruns of the type shock-the-bourgeois antics that rocked Paris around the time of our great-great-grandfathers. Our animal bodies do all sorts of messy things-procreate, defecate, die and decay, that polite society conspires to keep discreet. It's a real shortcut to play in this mud to stir a reaction.This type of work, striving for scandal since it can not offer insight, says nothing about the artist who created it or even the times we live in now. There is not enough substance to inflate disposable trash into greater significance.
In this age where the establishment keeps shoveling out dead end muck, to be strange and extravagant is to be concerned with qualities like skill, honesty, vision and integrity in art. 

 -Richard Bledsoe 

We Are The Small Things

"Great things are done by a series of small things brought together."
-Vincent Van Gogh

Phoenix Remodernism: The Manifesto

This is the current version of the statement which I've refining for about the last year or so. I've posted in connection with exhibits I've curated, but it also serves as a more general declaration of observations and practices. It was inspired by the Remodernist Manifesto by Billy Childish and Charles Thompson. Their insights in the failures of contemporary culture and the urgent need for a spiritual renaissance in art gave me the context for the exciting developments happening my local art scene. We are contributing to the next phase of civilization.

No one should be surprised, because it’s the same old story. The era of dissolution has come around again.

Civilization is seething, crumbling the carefully constructed but carelessly maintained social structures which have been taken for granted. This breakdown is global in scale, and it is accelerating; for millions of people, life will never be the same. It is the end times. But more importantly, it is also a new beginning.

As this turmoil unfolds, challenging our most basic assumptions, artists in Phoenix are contributing to the latest chapter of the ongoing story of art. There’s still plenty of groupthink Postmodern work getting made: redundant formalism, paint-by-numbers pop, and insubstantial conceptualism. Detached and irrelevant, these modes of art do capture something of the spirit of this era, as a time of decay. Invested in the old order, a cozy cocoon of crony capitalism, the creators of these works are provisioning a tomb with mummified ideas and simulated treasures.

However, there are artists who reject the futile remake/sequel dynamic that has come to dominate the establishment. All throughout the Valley of the Sun there are artists whose work is not contrived to fit existing art templates, but is an organic outgrowth of their own experiences and personalities. These artists work in a variety of styles and mediums, and no one label would fit them all.

Among all this diverse creativity, some artists, while following their individual visions, have arrived at common ground. Phoenix Remodernism has grown into a recognizable movement.

Our work is appropriate for a young city in an ancient land. With the wonder of youth, we wander in the ruins of fossilized civilization. With our own hands, we assemble from the debris affectionate homages to the human condition, works afflicted with humor and humbled by grace. We don’t care about impressing the gatekeepers, we want to interact with everyone. We are story tellers. We love where we've come from, and we preserve that love for the future to see. We invoke an eerie nostalgia for the past, for we accept we will be joining that infinite regression. We are the latest iteration of the American character: ordinary people working as explorers and inventors, self-reliant and productive. We make a complex art for complex times.

Remodernism began in London in 1999, founded by punk rock Renaissance man Billy Childish and painter Charles Thomson as a protest against elitist art world politics. Remodernism recognizes art making as an inclusive, spiritual activity, and encourages a DIY mentality.

Remoderism is the return of art as a revelation. We are showing things about ourselves that can also be universally recognized. Our art symbolically represents flawed, searching humanity participating in birth, existence and death. It is mysterious and moving, comic and tragic, clumsy and elegant. It is a celebration of the beauty and weirdness of life.

-Richard Bledsoe 2012

2012-And So It Begins

"No bird soars too high if he soars with his own wings."

-William Blake