I think I’ll avoid the tequila — I have no stomach for liquor, which is A Good Thing. And a guy who visits me regularly at the Red Barn on the desert talks incessantly about going 140 mph in various cars, but I think I’ll avoid that too. The truth is, my very ordinary life has almost more challenges than I can handle — I don’t need tequila to make me vibrate excessively (add the snort right here). I’m looking forward to reading Alan’s book and seeing what further he has to say. My grandson tells me that google is proclaiming a new internet protocol that will lose the http and be 55% faster. My digits and digitizing can’t keep up.

Good to hear from you. And keep up the thinking and ruminating — and writing on the net so I can read it!

As to your practical solution in the studio – I think a new perspective on one’s work sometimes does become miraculous! I had a friend who would stand on his head to see how to resolve a painting problem. When I asked what the hell he was doing he said he needed not just to see the work upside down, but he needed the blood rush to his head. Of course he also drove a huge motorbike and drank copious amounts of tequila. That’s a sloppy reality that our electronic extensions don’t have a clue about!

Regards,
Mark

“Almost without anybody noticing, a new cultural paradigm has come center stage, displacing an exhausted and increasingly marginalised postmodernism. Dr. Alan Kirby calls this cultural paradigm digimodernism, a name comprising both its central technical mode and its privileging of the fingers and thumbs in its use. The increasing irrelevancy of postmodernism requires a new theory to underpin our current digital culture.”

http://www.continuumbooks.com/books/detail.aspx?BookId=134279&SubjectId=1366&Subject2Id=1377

From the description, I can’t see that he’s dealing with wall art at all, but then, I haven’t read the book. But it looks like a dialogue between the two of you might be interesting.

As for “exhausted,” I pulled the linen canvases up to (my) eye level yesterday and worked on the bottoms of them (the mid/foreground, insofar as the desert has a foreground) and it was miraculous. Or at least it seemed so to me as I finished up the day’s work. Just that two foot difference in positioning changed the vision I was encountering (a vision that I myself had painted.) So I’m taking today off, before I go back to encounter reality, in all its sloppiness, tomorrow. None of that would be apparent through the computer, but it’s what makes my reality a dance.

If my response was a bit terse, I apologize. Have you been reading the Henri Art Magazine (link in the original post)? It seems to me that Mark Stone is talking, perhaps only obliquely but interestingly, about what you seem to be concerned with.

When I return to civilization, I will have a look at your book, which sounds very interesting. The Plinth Project is fascinating and I admit to having been unaware of it until about ten minutes ago, when I googled it.

Such projects bring me joy and delight, but they, like most installation art, seem to sit in a space by themselves. Their very transient nature makes them part of the City Beautiful (post modern, of course), producing a space that temporarily, like dance, forces us out of our ordinary selves.

I suppose one might argue that wall art in museums also does that, but with wall art, you can return and perhaps revisit the emotion. With installations, you only get one chance (or one month’s or one year’s) chance. The Central Park “Gates” project or “Running Fence” here in the States has the same effect on me. I love them, but I’m only seeing them on the web, experiencing them virtually. Perhaps that’s what you are saying when you speak of Digimodernism — that most of us can’t be part of the experience but get to participate virtually. But of course that’s true of the Mona Lisa, also.

I’m not sure what I’m trying to say, but I think that seeing or participating in these events through (for me) the computer is a bit of what Mark Stone is getting at in the Henri — that our virtual views are mediated by light through rather than light bouncing off, by platonic physics of light rather than by the messy, uncertain reality of what we could really see or feel if we all sat on the Plinth for an hour or had been able to walk under the Central Park Gates in February in NYC.

Of course, most of our “reality” is mediated, but my perception of the art I do is that it’s the result of experience, and however inadequately I am able to paint that experience, whatever I do is intent on projecting that experience in way that could be actually, not virtually, experienced. Or at least that pigment and oil comes closer to approximating the experience that I’ve had and thus are more likely to give a viewer that experience.

This is not to say that the platonism of the web isn’t wonderful — only that it heightens the color (and sound) so that reality might seem more drab than ever. Whereas I’m very fond of reality, and the subtlety of the subdued, crazy whacko desert that surrounds me is likely to remain, at least in my lifetime, available to me.

Maybe along with High Design, High Craft, High Art, there could be a category called High Installation. After all, Wallace Stevens noted that “Death is the mother of beauty” which undercuts my argufying…

Thank you for your response and your reference to Gormley’s Project. “Art and Perception” is just the place to put such ideas to the test. I’m looking forward to reading your book; I should check it out on Kindle, come to think of it, since package delivery is iffy in this part of Nevada. But if I stand in the right place in the kitchen, the Kindle delivers my reading matter quite nicely. Reading, now, there’s potential for messy experience well mediated by our own minds………

Part of our postmodern condition is the shifting truths that we deal with everyday. When these ideas began to take hold (in the 1960s) it was a way to come to terms with this shifting viewpoint caused by electric media. Every idea, every thought, every vision became relative, and so, the context became the focus. This has been the interesting thing about our electronic extensions – they embody this postmodern context – it is built into their programs and projected on their screens. For instance photoshop does exactly what Rosenquist and Warhol did. You can make perfect Peter Halley paintings on a simple Windows drawing program. The lens replicates, contextualizes and our understanding of “reality” is formed by it. I understand your exhausted vision!

Henri comes from thoughts and ideas that I “try out” on a few very trusted (and patient) friends who offer insight and support. They keep me grounded and on target! I am not a natural writer, I write from necessity (it helps me to understand what I am doing in the studio) and a boot to my backside is often needed.

Steve Durbin is a thoughtful photographer. I am fascinated by his connection to great early 20th century photography and how that can be reborn in this new digital age of lens based programming. For instance in some of his posts here he shows both the black and white and color photo of the same shot. I’m always stunned at how differently I see and perceive these same images. Structure and Form vs Color, Light and Space.

Thanks again and good luck with your current series. It looks very ambitious and it’s apparent that you’ll be sliding between your extensions, your vision and your memory all at once. I don’t see you getting much relief from your exhaustion in all of that!

Best,
Mark

Please don’t prejudge digimodernism too hastily – it’s more complex than just digital art; for instance I read Antony Gormley’s One & Other installation in Trafalgar Square London this summer as digimodernist. And interactivity is very important to me. But I like your piece reproduced above very much too. We live (perhaps not always happily) in interesting times…

Best wishes,

Alan

I really enjoy the Henri Magazine posts and am astonished to imagine that you’ve been doing them all yourself. The struggle you describe is perhaps inevitable as what was once fresh and new is now both tired and overly-commercialized. Overworked, banal, not comprehended as not-the-whole-truth.

Working in the desert in November has me flummoxed six ways for Sunday, not only because as sun and days change, everything changes in its forms and shape and color, but because I’m blogging on a laptop, with inadequate lighting for taking photos (not to mention seeing what I’m painting) and there are days when I feel like I’m hallucinating. Between the studio “lighting,” the laptop’s variabiity depending on the slope of the screen, Photoshop Elements’ quirks, and my own exhausted sight, I never know if what I’ve posted comes anywhere near the truth. Nor do I know if what I’m seeing when I check out any individual geological form comes anywhere near the truth.

And then I look at clean and bright photos and graphics on the web and I feel, well, flummoxed. It’s then that I go back and read in Henri to see that it isn’t only myself who finds this PoMo world outside her ken.

Thank you for checking in and for posting as you do. Steve Durbin was one of your readers who originally got me to your site.