Index:
1) Introduction and Criticism
2) Intrusive Thinking and Creativity
3) The Role of Missing Information in Creativity
4) Art and Algorithms
5) Art, A.I., and Culture
6) Autism and The World
7) YouTube Channel and Miscellaneous
Art versus its Admirers: The arts divide naturally between creators and community. Most artists, being socially lacking, aspire to a monk-like existence—or at least default to a reliable sanctuary when they want to define themselves in opposition to everything else. The community, by contrast, is attracted to the idea of the creator, although members therein may have little genuine interest in the creator’s welfare. Let us not forget that the community of art exists principally to be a community. It is social, so intends, by its meetings and get-togethers, to plan other events that look suspiciously like more meetings and get-togethers. The community loves its own company, especially in settings where art serves as a backdrop, or as something to be discussed in lectures where the attendees can be seen attending.
Personal Reality versus Photorealism: We are living in a golden age of photorealism, although many current proficients are not as candid about their sources as those who initiated the approach in the 60s, 70s, and 80s. I dabbled in photorealism in my earliest studio painting classes in 1983. A few images of this type are seen on my first Portfolio page. This technique still occupies a small corner of my toolkit, but I prefer working from real-life and imaginary objects. Both binocular vision and the imagination force one to blend (interpret) perspectives. A camera is monocular and flattens everything by definition, making the photo-reductive taint hard to cast off.
Surrealism versus Pop Surrealism: At the time of my exhibition at La Luz de Jesus Gallery in 2002 in Los Angeles, Pop Surrealism bore minor comparison to figurative Surrealism as it was originally conceived in 1920s Europe, yet with the addition of a popular culture overlay circa Mid-Century United States, mostly originating from California. My 2002 exhibition felt like a homecoming due to so many kindred spirits converging on a moment in history. Most artists had cultivated a unique style within their own hot house, and it was exciting to compare notes.
Since then the term ‘Pop Surrealism’ has come to be defined more peripherally and less integrally to what has evolved in actuality. It may now serve primarily as a descriptor for whimsical and decorative flourishes added to, many times, a subculture like gothic tattooes or skateboard art that has turned to canvas and gallery exhibitions for a better payday.
Where imagination is the engine and not photography, the art may be less imaginative than one has right to expect. Here the art may evoke nostalgic children’s book illustration, with soft pastel nursery room colors and lots of playroom clutter.
Mark Ryden was the catalyst here. He re-envisioned the kitsch commercial art of the late 1960s to great success, and this success has spawned a cottage industry of big-eyed children painters. Macabre Halloween clichés are sometimes added to this monotone sensibility to create gothic offshoots, although this somber style prefers a grayer color scheme.
At the very least, there is a strong graphic arts orientation to whatever Pop Surrealism has become. Graphic design is a durable adhesive in any art form where it is introduced. These descriptors are stylistic; and if there is any dimension within them that may be described as original to the artist, then these become less obvious as more artists embrace the style and imitate it. In this regard, Pop Surrealism plays into the criticisms that fine arts levels against art movements of its type: The work looks like mass-produced commercial illustration, so is thought of as nothing more than illustration. Intent of the artist matters in these definitions, although many Pop Surrealists seem comfortable repeating themselves and building a market around their brand.
Art movements have their pioneers; but they soon run out of pioneers. Next come the imitators and the improvers on the style: i.e., second and third generation iterations of the original ideas, only without the self-awareness that this is the exact business in which one is engaged. From there, it is a race to the bottom, although nobody will recognize it as such until a new maverick comes along and points this out. A new group of young turks form around this rejection of the existing order.
Rinse, lather, and repeat…
Los Angeles, Low Brow, and Me: I first visited LA in 1998 for a college art convention, where I interviewed for teaching positions in the Midwest. As luck would have it, I spent mornings hanging out in a Santa Monica coffeehouse while my friend pursued work at his law office down on Wilshire. This coffeehouse sat near The Rico Gallery, where a work of mine had shown in a group exhibition a few months prior. Gradually I drifted over there and introduced myself, and tried to make the most of my nonexistent West Coast connection.
That gallery was not unlike other galleries personally known to me over the years, including the Chicago gallery that represented my work in the 1990s. An unnameable dread accompanied me when I stumbled into the The Rico Gallery on that bright, sunny afternoon. Nowadays, I would name that feeling as too little foot traffic syndrome. Few galleries thrive as businesses, and most last no more than a few years. (The Covid Lockdowns may have killed off small business art galleries once and for all.)
I returned to LA in June of 2002 for a two-man show at La Luz de Jesus Gallery. Those paintings may be viewed on my third gallery page. I wanted desperately to move to LA in order to cement my relationship with the emerging Low Brow, Pop Surrealist arts community, but, as I explain on the same gallery page, this was not going to happen for me with Aspergers. Regardless, Los Angeles held a romantic allure for many years, with a lot of what ifs…
Romanticism aside, LA went downhill slightly from my first visit to the second. In the intervening decades, this decline has accelerated. I imagine life for artists in the city has not changed significantly, although, as the Low Brow movement has morphed over time, I doubt its founders find as warm a welcome now as they did then. All art movements end. Surrealism, for example, lasted only until The Second World War. Art movements tied to a specific location may survive in fragments for a while longer, but as their founders age and gradually depart the scene, the moment is lost. The vital ideas that once infused the movement may nevertheless endure for generations.
An independent film made around 2010 featured Low Brow artists known to me from 2002, but I suspect that many of these artists have not flourished in the intervening years. My YouTube channel, though unsuccessful so far at making inroads into any art scene, may be just as good as any letter of introduction from someone presently living in Los Angeles.
Juxtapoz Magazine and The Loss of Vital Moments: As one ages, one purges. I subscribed to Juxtapoz Magazine for several years beginning in the late 1990s. Long before my romanticism for LA waned, this subscription was ended because I sensed Low Brow was running out of steam.
As the market solidified, ads (often the same ones repeated from issue to issue) became more prominent in the magazine. The same cast of artists were appearing too frequently in the feature pages. Moreover, newer artists began to look like leftovers from Postmodern New York galleries. This rebranding did not fool me, although developments of this sort are understandable given art magazines need to pay their bills and grow their businesses. Unfortunately, this strategy, when compared to the typical lifespan of an art movement, follows the same projected path.
My idealism at the time of my LA show made me blind to what is painfully clear to see now. This art market effect is best described in a Bob Dylan lyric: “He who is not busy being born is busy dying.”
Juxtapoz Magazine and Missed Opportunities: Candidly, a smidgen of resentment also shaped my souring opinion of Juxtapoz after 2002. I had been promised a spread in the magazine that never materialized. The value of presenting high quality original oil paintings at La Luz de Jesus Gallery should have been a no-brainer.
Low Brow was very much a game of inside baseball, and perhaps this explains why Juxtapoz Magazine’s showed little interest in fresh perspectives from outside Los Angeles. This is the age-old dilemma of throwing pasta at the ceiling: Whatever sticks first is what you go with. No more experimentation is required.
Hi Fructose Magazine began publication to counteract this counter-culture drift towards conformity. But it too became a victim of diminishing returns, which required commercialism to save it: As Pop-Surrealism began to splinter into various niche styles, Hi Fructose has become better known for its merch of established artists than for discovery of new original talent. (They never responded to my submission in 2022!)
Apart from glimmers of mercurial imagination here and there, much of the art I revisited in the pages of Juxtapoz has not aged well. Much of it comes off as amateurish and calculated. Many artists were rushing into this new market. Pop culture imagery was hastily incorporated into new work with little reflection or maturation. This rough and ready quality, though lacking the virtue of time-honed craftsmanship, nevertheless matched Low Brow’s natural disposable culture aesthetic, so it was what it was.
A painting of mine was reproduced in a book that commemorated La Luz de Jesus Gallery’s Twentieth Anniversary in 2011. The artwork for this show and publication was notably better than where I left the movement in the pages of Juxtapoz in 2003.
Evolution to Extinction: La Luz de Jesus Gallery cannot be spared criticism in how it has evolved over the years. Its website presently describes its submission criteria as “figurative, narrative, and lowbrow.” Each of these descriptors is like an unintended straight jacket, where the art to be considered becomes narrower by definition. What is left looks like the curated aesthetic of a vintage store version of Pier One Imports.
First, “figurative art” is just Opposite Land of Abstract Expressionism. There is no virtue in rejecting one blanket approach for the other, apart from the vice of filtering out useful hybrids. The strange art aesthetic La Luz professes to embrace begins to look curiously less strange. When viewed collectively, the body of work may be described as strained, anemic, or sterile because it struggles to stay cleanly within the boundaries set for it.
I submitted a drawing for a subsequent group show at La Luz some years ago and was told by the then-director that my work “was not figurative enough.” Perhaps a better rejection would have been to say that my art was not hoity-toity in that drab (but indefinable) postmodern way.
I am reminded of Art Forum Magazine of the late 1980s. It was filled with pages of copious text describing contemporary art. Few (if any) images were paired to its feature articles. This omisson was excusable. Modern art of this time was uniformly terrible. But for its different focus, current Lowbrow shares an identical crisis of identity.
Respectable art—and this is what La Luz now promotes—veers dangerously into ethereal-ness. The art does not jar or excite, but instead evaporates on your tongue like a dry, over-priced white wine. It is decorative yet non-intrusive. It blends surprisingly well with shabby chic apartment décor.
Next comes the “narrative” descriptor of La Luz’s house style, which, for me, is even more offensive than the term “figurative.” Great art appeals to the non-verbal senses and not to the journalistic left brain. Tell a story if you must, but give the viewer the option of ignoring your story—as most will do if the picture, on its own merits, seduces them.
It may be simply that these criticisms miss the central problem of every age, which is that no one intends to become mediocre. You just end up there, anyway.
Alternative Comics and Me: Comics are so far back in my rearview mirror that it is difficult for me to write about it. That history predates this website, and the pages in my Comics Portal that reflect on this time do so sparingly.
I have earned my primary income from teaching art at a community college, exclusively on the non-credit side where older students are generally more appreciative of instruction. This income, as minimal as it is, and where combined with the security of social safety nets, has allowed me to live independently as an autistic adult. It is hard to overstate my terror when confronting the world. Consequently, I have experienced little pressure to conform as an artist in any sense—not that I would have known how to pull that off.
I have had more success as a cartoonist than I ever had as a painter, largely because comics do not require the artist to live in the city where the comics are published. Regardless, a series of bad decisions, especially regarding the inferior publication method of my Xeric Award comic book, Epic Dermis n1, with a local printer in the late 1990s, contributed to a cascade of failures.
It did not help that I was a square peg sizing up round holes. My unique blend of drawing and storytelling was to combine the goofy with the grotesque. Throw in a dash of sexual innuendo and New Yorker comic sophistication, and you have something that was nearly impossible to describe—and completely impossible to market! In retrospect, my concoction of improbable influences carried over, with little alteration, into my painting—and with the same unsuccessful outcome.
Some within the alternative comics community were accepting of my wide net, while purists were less so. There are many different ways you can go with comics, and none of them are prosperous, so arguments about purity and approach can be safely dismissed as navel-gazing.
My fatalism may be justified by the number of alternative comics that I admire. It is a short list. I am not drawn to memoirs or journals about one’s life or feelings. Comics artists are especially self-absorbed in this regard, and though their garden variety feelings of inferiority and neurosis may attract readers who are similarly afflicted, feelings rarely rise to the level of insight, or humor. Most comics artists are not Franz Kafka.*
As for humor, funny is not really a thing in alternative comics. I suspected that some in this community counted my sense of humor as a character flaw. A boundary is drawn between comic book artists and cartoonists around the subject of humor. Gags and wordplay are dismissed as children of a lesser god, and one’s attraction to humor is assumed to be of an unoriginal or sophomoric nature.
This reaction is understandable since drawing ability is easier to come by than a geniune sense of humor. Unfortunately, wit often gets written off in a way that portrays the hasty critic as being unappreciative of talents that he neither possesses nor values. This lack of cultivation is never apparent to the uncultivated—which is not to say that it does not exist.
If I were to brag on myself in any area of my interests, it would be this: As a natural contrarian I am a decade or so ahead of everyone else. This was true in the early 1990s when political correctness first became a thing. It was immediately clear to me that this form of self censorship would a contraction in creative freedom, as well as be another example of time-tested human hypocricy. Politics is never pressing business in any of my creative pursuits—except for comics, where the best humor must always have an unimpeded horizon. Sacred cows were a frequent target for my comics until I ceased making them, although my jabs were so obtuse at times that the offended were never quite sure if I had openly offended them. I was neither a journalist nor a pomelic as a humorist, so preferred coming at my subjects from abtuse angles that kept people guessing.
By the end of my production of the Blender Kitty comic strip in 2010, I had already transitioned into being a novelist; and by the endpoint of my Profiles in Confusion comics in 2015, I was no longer interested in being funny. Writing a novel was a better form of world building for my creative energies at this time, although here too I was sizing up a pockmarked landscape of round holes.
(*) My YouTube Channel about autism and the arts would have more followers if I made more videos about my trials and tribulation as an artist with autism. But such complaining would make me nothing special, and that is the point: YouTube is yet another version of confessional comics.
Copyright © 2023-2024 michael l. teague all rights reserved.