Conversation About Painting, # 1

For my thesis, I'm interviewing painters about the state of painting in reference to the art-world and to society in general. This first conversation is with fellow graduate student at the University of Cincinnati, Kara Strouse.

We started by refrencing a quote by an essaist, Robert Storr, “ Painting is hardly the king of the hill it was for most of the 20th century. Nor is it likely to do so again.”


Kara: You know I've been thinking about that because the first critique that we had in Mark's (Harris) class, the question he asked was, "Why painting?" That's a good question. I was talking to him about painters that abandon painting and at some point go back to painting, or people that never painted at some point, later on, go to painting. It seems like the people that are most avidly against painting, or are doing the most talking about why painting is esoteric, or out-moded, trite; they are trying to make their way with something else. It's a battle for visual power. On one end, I can discredit painting so as to make room for "X".

Dick: It's my feeling that Kosuth, the artist that we talked about a lot in advanced painting, was just trying to make a name for himself, an opportunist. Just stir some shit up and not necessarily say anything really profound.

K: Arthur Dante goes on to claim the death of art. I read a response by Richard Shushmin. He claims that Dante/others were kind of right, but a lot wrong. That art didn't die but art as we know it certainly collapsed on itself. How he was evaluating art died. How can the same thing not be for painting? How we consider 20th Century painting, that might be dead. What made a painting then?

D: Right. People will still make paintings that look like them but they might not be very relevant.

K: I think too, that time is an issue. I think we are so aware of our time.

D: There's a man that works out of Essex studios and all he paints is Pollock look-alikes. Here he's doing something that at one time was revolutionary, and yet now it's just a decorative object.

K: That's interesting. I read this article called, Repeat Is Not Return, the idea that to repeat something still does not have the same effect. To revisit something but not to revisit it just the same, but to say; why did it go out of style? Why was it not relevant? To go and extract things that are still there; still left. I never put that into context as someone who's still doing something like this, never rewound, stuck in a mode.

D: You did that with your Rothko copies?

K: Yeah.

D: Then there are artists who take photographs of photographs.

K: To what extent is that gimmick? How much of it really makes you think differently and how much of it is just f#cking bullshit to make a name for themselves, an artstar.

D: How can you consciously look at yourself and say, "Wow look at this body of work I did it's really, I dunno, speaks on a lot of levels!" I couldn't do that. I couldn't just create a body of work of just photographs of photographs, copies of a copy and so forth.

K: I think it speaks more of the art world and the institutions of art, and the pressures that people have to make something original. You can make anything your life's pursuit. You pick something and without question just because you are curious or frustrated, you purse it. You're not bogged down by institutions like this (school).

D: I'm really sick to death of over-analyzing my work. I want to go back to those days of wonder and excitement. What do you think about that?

K: I think it's important in balance, in grad-school it's really good for giving you concentrated, bulldozer, plow you over, whether its analyzing yourself, your perspective; "Why am I here?" You go through all sorts of questioning, but (school) it's a microcosm. It's not real, it is, but it's so perverted as far as life goes. To see a whole, you are just one of these perverted environments, thousands. You have to see outside of school, just to get your measure, like where you want to be.

D: How really important is this bullshit that we put ourselves through? (In my opinion) The fine-arts (in America) have become just another specific interest in a sea of interests. There is a group of people that travel around the country and race snowmobiles on dirt tracks. A racing circuit. I look at the fine-arts as akin to this. What do you think?

K: It's like, the loss of cohesiveness, expand and contact: something is big and important and it dissipates and dissipates, at one point it contracts but it doesn't contact in the same manifestation of itself and elements are still there and relevant. That's across fields. There are aspects of psychology, sociology that are no longer considered relevant, then oh, some of it is; pulling it back and forth. The unfortunate thing is we don't have appreciation for beauty on a daily level. You look at strip malls, and that, maybe it can be beautiful. I just think about ancient cultures, they decorated things very consciously, not to say we have no more wonderful building design, but for the most part you can go down to Atlanta and you can find beautiful architecture, but what about on a common level? What about McDonald's? They're not beautiful. Maybe they have commercial beauty? They are easy to recognize, become a part of everyone's memory, nostalgia, but they didn't market it to be beautiful. They marketed it to be recognizable and get people to eat there.

D: What if it was beautiful?

K: They did it for money. That's the point. We don't have a collective understanding of beauty. Although everyone thinks seascapes are beautiful. Maybe, I don't know some people are sick of seascapes.

D: Are you?

K: Sick of seascapes? Seen a lot of seascape paintings. Some are really beautiful. The actual sea is kind of quite humbling. That's hard to replicate. It's hard to be a painter because it is image based. It's not considered very socially active; changing things, or being very generous or noble.

D: Right. There seems to be this attached significance. What's it gonna do for everybody? The image is secondary an after-thought. Sometimes, there isn't an aesthetic property to the image. Is image important to art anymore?

K: I agree. I think they're both important; Image and idea. I think a lot of work right now is experiential. It's not to say that there's people having experiences with images that are intimate. A lot of collaboration going on right now, it's like your work not valid, especially if you are a painter if you're not doing some sort of collaborative, experiential art. Weather your collaborating with some corporate group and they don't know it, or specialists in another field to make something. Sometimes it doesn't matter if someone has a experience that's meaningful to them; if it's at a stank-ass museum or a contemporary gallery. Even your memory can be triggered by smell, triggered by words, it's still an image.

I still think it's valid (painting). I understand not taking full weight in it. I think people were having problems excepting work that wasn't painting, and now that's not the case do we still need to be trashing painting? Their point was, that it's not the only thing that's valid; it's carried on to it's not valid at all. Which I don't think is true.