On Taste

You ever just wake up one day and realize you’re carrying around twenty years of psychic dead weight for no reason?

I used to do a visualization exercise where I would imagine my inner headspace as a landscape that I could walk around in and explore. During one of these sessions I came across this.

"Knotted Thoughts". Acrylic on board. (c) Halloran Parry, 2016.

A Gordian Knot of tangled up thoughts and emotions so old it was rotting in place. I kept walking. 

Metaphorically, of course.

It wasn’t hurting anything just floating there in the sky and I made the strategic decision not to try to pick it apart. I had no idea what was all bound up in there. I had a plan to (metaphorically) plant a seed on top; something with deep, invasive roots that would gradually force the rope apart like a weed slowly destroying a sidewalk. I’d (metaphorically) water the seed and the seed would gradually grow (metaphorically) into a giant floating tree with a pile of (metaphorical) rotten, untangled rope underneath that would slowly decompose into the landscape. It was going to be a long process, but a gentle one. And then I’d have a (metaphorical) tree in my head.

Instead, about four weeks ago, someone else came along with a big sword and some dynamite and cut the thing straight through.

And then I had to confront what was inside.

There was a teacher in elementary school who taught us about prejudice. She explained the human tendency to make judgements about things quickly, and that this prevented us from gaining a deeper, more complete, more empathetic understanding of the world. And for whatever reason, it stuck in my head, and I’ve tried to honor that precept: first, understand. It has served me well, particularly with people. Most people are just trying to get through a day, most people are fundamentally good people, and when most people make bad decisions it’s because they don’t have any good options available to them. This is a particularly handy viewpoint in the current... everything.

But in focusing so hard on not pre-judging, I forgot to judge at all. I legitimized everything in my own head and every time I ran across something I didn’t like, I decided that it was my own shortcoming preventing me from understanding it. 

For an artist, this is paralyzing.

If you equate dislike with moral shortcoming you lose all sense of curation. There are many choices in art that can only be made through the lens of preference and if you’ve conflated preference with moral failing then, my friend, you’ve gone and muddied that lens with puritanical, Grade A horseshit. And then, well... you can’t see. Then you can’t make any choices at all. If you’re a visual artist, you can try to find legitimacy and beauty in having voluntarily deprived yourself of an entire sense through your own stupidity, or you can decide it’s a fucking problem and go do something about it.

In my last newsletter, I referred to a lecture on Taste. That lecture was the big sword, the gargantuan length of honed steel that effortlessly sectioned up my internal Gordian Knot into so much mildewed hemp spaghetti. It suggested a path forward.

Step 1: The Taste Board

Mood board, vibe board, whatever you want to call it. It contains stuff that I love. Not just art, not just paintings, but interests. 

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Step 2: The Gallery Abominate, a.k.a. The Mood Board of Things I Hate

Not stuff I merely dislike, or stuff that doesn’t interest me, but art that I find actively repellant. This was my purgative exercise, my aesthetic emetic, a way to give myself permission to stop making headspace and excuses for all the stuff other people find important that I just don’t like. There are certain things that I never want to see in my work, and this is a collection of it. There’s a painter who handles his shadows in a clumsy, overwrought way. There’s a group of pieces with awkward and unconvincing body language. The entire Abstract Expressionist movement. Dadaism. Conceptual art. This is not a commentary on its worth or its quality, but on the fact that none of it is stuff that I actually like. Critically, it’s a collection of things that I never, ever want to creep into my work, even by accident. I’m not going to show it. It’s a very secret, private thing. It contains work by living, working artists, and no one’s life would be improved by me admitting publicly to disliking their work. 

But not all of the artists are living, and the following story of how one of the entries in The Gallery Abominate ended up there serves to illustrate why the gallery exists.

The digital version of The New York Times has a feature where they pick a painting and have you sit with it for ten minutes, just looking. I saw it for months before I finally decided to try it one day, and wouldn’t you know it, that day was the feature’s first foray into Abstract Expressionism. So I sat and stared at this for ten minutes. 

“The Seasons”, Lee Krasner, 1957 © The Pollock-Krasner Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

The piece in question was Lee Krasner’s “The Seasons”. It’s a seminal work in her catalog. And there is no understanding this work without knowing the grimly triumphant context in which it was created.

Krasner was married to another painter (who I will decline to mention by name because this is about her, not him). They both painted professionally, and so they both had studios in their house. Well, I say “in”. Hers was a room in their house. His was an entire barn on the property. So she got to paint her little paintings while he constructed giant murals. Scale is its own form of artistic legitimacy and Krasner was severely disadvantaged in this arrangement.

The husband, whatever his artistic virtues may or may not have been, was not a particularly shining example of matrimonial decency. He had many affairs. Very publicly. All over the world. As he was a noteworthy public figure at the time, they made headlines. He also indulged in alcohol more than he probably should have (but if Mad Men has taught me anything, over-consumption of alcohol was the defining characteristic of the fifties).

This all came to a predictable and spectacular end when the very public Husband and his very public mistress on a very public trip to France died in a very public car crash, very publicly attributed to the Husband’s drunk driving.

People knew, is what I’m saying here. 

“The Seasons” is the first painting Lee painted after her husband’s death. It’s 17 feet wide, and to do it, she moved her entire studio to the barn where he used to work. This piece, then, represents reclamation: of life, of work, of one’s own personal narrative.

RIP Jessica Walter.

I mention all this because it matters; it’s important context that one needs if one wants to understand this painting and its significance, both to the artist and to the culture. It’s also context that I didn’t have when I suffered through ten minutes squinting at it on a 30-inch monitor. The NYT gave me that background after I’d made it through ten minutes of gritted teeth and cursing the entire Abstract Expressionist movement. I’m giving it to you because it matters and because I want to make it clear that my intense dislike of this painting is not a commentary on its merit. 

But dear god do I hate it, and I’m done pretending otherwise. 

Something went deeply awry in the American painting scene after World War II. Representational art (art that looks like stuff) was inextricably tied to commercial illustration and advertising (NC Wyeth, JC Leyendecker, Norman Rockwell, etc) and so the fine art scene, worried about being too likeable (I’m just guessing here), went off and founded a whole bunch of art movements based on making stuff it’s almost impossible to comprehend, much less like, at first glance. Abstract Expressionism was one of these. 

The Abstract Expressionist painters are trying to sublimate raw emotion into paint strokes with as little intermediary editorial as possible. They’re going for honesty, they’re going for authenticity. I get it.

You know who’s really good at expressing raw, unfiltered emotion? Toddlers. You’ll also be aware that we as a society consider that kind of uncontrolled emotional outburst a mark of immaturity and we all spend years learning to refine our expression of emotion and thought to a point where it becomes communication, i.e. something other people can engage with. Three-year-olds struggle with this, and we expect it; we expect more from adults.

When I look at this painting, what I see is a temper tantrum, and that’s a problem for me as a viewer. I can’t engage with a tantrum. 

There’s no attempt to communicate. No craft, no refinement in the mark-making. No planning, no problem solving, no consideration whatsoever for the viewer. And that was what the piece needed, that was what Krasner needed at the time, a reclamation of her own identity and a decisive act of unfiltered expression. But it’s not what I want for my own work. In fact, it’s the antithesis of everything I’m trying to do. 

Now, call me old-fashioned, but I believe if I’m making paintings that I want other people to look at, much less pay for, I owe it to those people to make something that honors their presence a bit. Something that at least tries to reach the viewer. If art is a dialogue between the artist and the viewer, then the artist owes it to the viewer to enter that dialogue in good faith. In my work, “good faith” means recognizable subject matter and a high level of craft. You, the reader, may or may not like my work, but I hope you never get the impression that I don’t care -- either about my work or about you.

Anyway. This may sound like an unnecessary hit piece on a dead woman. It’s not. It’s an unnecessary hit piece on my college courses and the art industry (oh yes, it’s an industry) at large, which made me engage with her work and the work of her peers. It’s an unnecessary hit piece on all the cultural forces that coerced me into, over and over again, sitting through someone else’s visual tirade that’s not about me, not aimed at me, not composed for me, but nevertheless is catching me in the blast radius. I’m only really angry about it because people keep trying to make me understand how important it is (looking at you NYT), and they got so busy spilling ink over relevance that they forgot the most important question any viewer should be asking themselves, which is, “But do I like it?” 

Well, I’ve tried. And I don’t like it. And I’m done. 

I’m done caring. I’m done spending the brain space. I’m done trying to like it and I’m done spending attention on it. I’m ignoring any art that doesn’t show up in public in good faith. 

You might wonder what I’m going to do instead. Hell, I wonder what I’m going to do instead. I suddenly have all this free brain space and I’m not quite sure what to do with it. If you’ve ever done a massive kon-mari session, you end up with much less stuff and much more elbow room in your own living space, and for a while, it’s all you can do to enjoy the calmness. Your whole reality is different and you have to get used to that new reality before you decide how you want to change it and make it yours. And that’s how my brain feels right now. Massively emptier, lighter, a bit raw. So I’m going to give it a minute, let it air out. I’m not sure what I’m going to do yet, but maybe by the time I write the next newsletter, I’ll have an idea.

And thus, the Gordian Knot slowly but surely decomposes into the landscape, one rotten, moldy loop of internalized shame at a time.

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