Stricken Part 3A

PART 3

A. Temporal Syncopation

***
He is hung over. Upside down. Living, if you can call it that, in an apartment in Gypsy Alley. A stone’s throw from the tavern. He perceives this to be his ego’s suicide note, these mad scratchings on the adobe walls, behind his paintings. He mashes his cigarettes out on the tile floor. He hangs dead birds from the vigas. He is possessed by a desperate urge to leave something behind: a map for a tracker who’ll hunt down his soul. who’ll rescue him from this wasteland.
[Deadlines Lifelines, p.1]

I have scanned the virtual horizon for clues to explain the 2026 zeitgeist, and the incessant feedback portends a novel type of entropy, symptomatic of cascading nodal overload. What befell the optimism, the faith in democracy alive in my youth? We the people, and the nation we put together to pursue happiness, are #maxxed to the hilt. We suspect the tattered state of the union didn’t just materialize. It’s by design. Vietnam, the dread of nuclear war, the collapse of the labor movement, the resurgence of the globalist 1%, AIDS, the consolidation of media, the rapacious financialization of American society, drugs, culture wars, offshoring, bad tax policy/austerity, attacks on the safety net, public education, consolidation of media, expansion of the inequitable penal system and tech-empowered total surveillance state, erasure of the commons, polarization of civics, the impunity of Big Pharma/Oil/Ag, and, of course the ascension of the Net, especially 2.0… Dimensional analysis permits us to inspect all of these contributing factors individually, like particles, in patterned combinations, like wave forms, or as energy flow with compounding material and nonessential effects. For me the methodology skews in favor of art over science. However, basic dimensionist principles are widely adapted to many research-driven fields, e.g.,sociology, demographics and datamining, with countless applications for generating profiles and measuring impacts, trends, efficiency, waste, productivity and consumption. So, what do I believe had the most deleterious effect on America? Why, the incremental, relentless corruption and debasement of free speech/expression in this country, which is exemplified by the Citizen’s United SCOTUS decision.

As an artist, albeit a stricken one, I strive to meet the moment via the roundabout logic of plastic actualization. What do I mean by that? I imagine a solution of one part Ruskin, two parts McLuhan, a quarter cup of Baudrillard, bring it to a simmer, folding in and basting a melange of my favorite art heroes, seasoned to taste with the salt and peppery memories and imaginings that roll across the screen of my inner eye. My brain is doing cartwheels, figuring out the path out of this or that creative wilderness, minefield or landfill — I can’t decide which to call it. A logistical morass and miasma, akin to a quasi-legislative shouting match in the British House of Commons. The cacophony of metaphor that predicates my art making is I’ve learned a festivity of illusion, a carnival of escapist distractions, wherein lurk the shadowy figures of Doubt, Thieves of confidence, tempting one with false comparisons, unfair or unattainable objectives, or conversely, boisterous Boosters of Hubris, and the whisperers tantalizing the Self with dreams of riches, celebrity and fame, unfettered promiscuity, Excess, Power…

Realism or pragmatism is the antidote for the ludicrous displacement of value, meaning and purpose such reveries foment. It does help to participate in artist fellowship, if available, because so few of us don’t wrestle with the vortex of projected grayscale intangibles, material uncertainty, the gravity of post-contemporary upheaval and permeating, suffocating mass dismay. For a minute we pretended it away, through social media performance, until lived reality obviated that tactic’s absurdity. The Blockchain boom busted so fast and hard, leaving nothing more than a (metaphorical) smoking boot with a gory foot stump inside. MAGA devotees are lately the pathetic fodder of reels. Their idiotic to-the-death defense of the indefensible, coupled with impenetrable adoration for their the dealmaker-emperor-in chief, inflamed by the stubborn refusal to admit they’ve been played for rubes, confess they’ve been conned. For myself there’s no joy or fun to be had in the mockery of them in those ridiculous red, white and blue clown suits, or not much anyway. Not til you ponder the winners and what the spoils are, can you frame the losers and the loss properly. Even the rapture of sports fandom has been decimated by the profusion of legalized platform-betting and the conversion of athletics into a vanity whimsy of the superrich and a trillion dollar international hotdog-eating contest played by the media conglomerates. In case you’re wondering, if you’re not family, you’re food.

The Big A professional art world is only different from the global sports world in the details. In art we used to discuss medium, more than media. Which is no longer true. For now, for my first post-stroke art project, I’m leaning toward watercolor and ink, which I’ll discuss later [Note: chronological disorder]. Rather than using collage, digital or analog, or Mammon AI, in any guise. It has to be Art For Humans, but even that worries me. Am I on a fool’s errand, conjuring images with fog and mirrors, and framing them with echoes and shadow? Alas, will I be forced to admit the task is beyond my talents, or my considerable physical limitations? Which is when it hits me like a round kick upside the ole cabbage. Like the scene in Animal House, when John Belushi is making his ludicrous, incoherent pep talk, and we see him glitching. Art doesn’t require reason or words to exist, and I could not for the life of me tell you why I need to make it. Nor could I predict what might come of the gesture of trying, because the art act itself is in defiance of the odds, occurring as it does outside numeric law.

[Back to IRT: I completed my second left handed painting; a Modigliani-esque nude; and Elvis has left the building. The horrid catastrophe in Tibet and Nepal and the deaths of Yayoi Kusuma, Dolly Parton and Tim Curry provide the backdrop for my aesthetic breakthrough. I would be more inclined to continue with a broadcasted daily narration of Lefty’s (potential nome d’arte?) progress, if the systemic unraveling weren’t so abruptly, rudely, noisily obstructing dispersion of this bitsy, hopeful message. Lula and I will be narrowcasting instead, to a shortlist of friends, family, artsies, etc. As you know dear reader, I did go with ink and watercolor, and the results were unpredictable, a revelation. All the trepidation aforehand, turns out, was misplaced. The lessons were unforeseen. The role of practical experience combined with knowledge is inestimable, also in-class and -studio teaching and learning. The mind was the instructor of the untutored left limb, which subtly reminded the formerly dominant right side it still possessed animus. The heart acted as producer for the psyche’s direction, underwriting the synthesis of concept with handmade image. Even though I can barely walk 100’ in a good PT session, I was dancing like a Matisse cutout!]

[4]
I met Allan Ginsberg
At Casa Sin Nombre
At an opening
For his show of photos
We chatted very briefly
(I was soaked with cheap wine)
Before he fled
With his oriental boy
Photos of Kerouac Cassady et al
Gary Snyder pissing, boys holding hands
All over America…Where is Burroughs?
I think space aliens did it
He wants you to know his date of birth. He wants you to know where he’s sitting right now, as this book writes itself. Heaven arrives a parcel at a time. He is knocked off his steed by a bolt of lightning. The Dream has no beginning and no end. A cast of tens. A weaving. Everything is related. Everything changes.
[Deadlines Lifelines, p. 2]

La Belle 12” x 9” watercolor on paper (2026)

PLATES

Boy (2004)
CGU Studio 1 (2007)
CGU Studio 2 (2007)
Coil (2001)
Hand Iron (2005)
Lodge (2003)
Dancer (2003)
CGU Studio 3 (2007)
Wovenform + Pixel Painting (2008)

Stricken Part 2H

The Bear 12” x 9” watercolor and ink on paper, 2026

H. The Bear

Yesterday I completed my first serious artwork since the Stroke, 15 months ago, an ink and watercolor painting on paper, entitled “The Bear.” My dear JG had generously donated the modest funds with which we purchased the art supplies to get started. My brush collection is still in storage. After the Stroke I had instructed Lauren to give away my paints to friends in the Astoria [OR] art community (Bill and Annie), who had been immensely supportive prior to and during our move to NorCal under duress. I had ordered a set of Beampaints, and Sunday, after Lachlan’s AAU hoops minicamp, we shopped at Dick Blick in Berkeley, picking out a couple of fine watercolor brushes — one for washes, one for detail — india ink and a 2-for-1 pair of Canson 9” x 12” 140# cold press wc pads. I waited to begin painting until the following morning, allowing the creative juices to simmer overnight. I was absolutely thrilled to paint again, which came as a bit of a surprise, given that post-stroke, I was certain my life as studio painter had finished. In fact, I embraced the idea without reservation, from an art historical perspective rooted in the examination of artists’ lives, a Western tradition at least half a millennium old [shoutout to Giorgio Vasari, RIP], and one cultivated in Asia centuries before [s/o, The Mustard Seed Garden Tree]. I felt blessed to have survived the Stroke, even in my impaired condition, since it would, I reasoned, afford me the opportunity to reflect humbly on my artist life and perhaps take measures to ensure its perpetuation, as legacy. I found comfort and solace in how prolific I had been over a roughly 40-year span, not just as a plastic artist, but as a tech and media creative, as theorist/thinker, as an arts advocate and educator. Looking back, I found much to be proud about, even after acknowledging all the imperfections exposed along the way, in myself, the work, my relationships, the Way itself. On the whole, after a phase of intense retrospection, while still hovering near Death’s door, I decided to be satisfactorily retired as a practicing artist, and to dedicate my remaining time to participating in and enjoying my son’s exploits, my wife’s company and that of a few close relatives and friends, to the extent possible.

Yet, here we are! The gently persistent encouragement of folks I trust and admire, e.g., artists Joe Adams and David Pushkin, allies John Price and Diane Avice du Buisson, et al., eventually softened my stubborn resolve. The hunger to create overcame my attachment to the level of technical mastery I’d attained. Material concerns swept aside conceptual in- or prohibitions. Finally, my love of making art was stronger than its denial, which encompasses all manner of negation to which my mind/spirit is susceptible. Once more, art for me equals survival in matters of matter and beyond it, in the visual experience and its extrasensory opposite. Art is manifestation of a thing that didn’t exist before, and art reveals the welcoming nature of creation, towards the New. The artist is the vehicle for this mysterious event, which actually is anthro-fundamental, humano-normative. I could go on, but my poor words will never match the transcendent sensation, the intense vibration coursing through the paint, the painting, my flesh and blood, the viewer’s encounter with the art, its image, the story and all the stories that art evokes by being itself, in and of itself. Yes, I still gush, like a teenager in love’s thrall. Isn’t it wonderful?!

After a lifetime devoted to art, I am unclear: does art create the artist (and Man), or vice versa; are both true at once or over time? In art, I doubt the efficacy of binary subject and object to represent human reality, and in that doubt one becomes comfortable in not knowing, or rather knowing differently. Is it exaggeration to suggest that art reminds us how to be humans, if humans painted the cave walls of Chauvet? Conversely, art provokes the most inhumane impulses, expressions of ignorant disregard for beauty, adoration and the embodied sublime, a fact verified by countless acts of violent articide: in the news today, we have pictographs “as old as the pyramids,” adorning the Texan stone faces that Trump’s “Big, Beautiful Wall” would obliterate. Or consider the monumental Buddhas of Bamiyan the Taliban shot to pieces with cannon and missile in 2001? Or what about all the art willfully, violently destroyed out of hatred, or ruined by neglect, by relentless and rapacious Time, and Nature Herself. I finished the latest film adaptation of Ulysses right before commencing work on The Bear. The sacking of Troy resonated, especially the beheading of the Athena statue (and her human counterpart), which exposes the complexity of art, in binding History and Event, with body, mind/spirit in emotion, tying together our inclinations for cruelty and kindness, chaos and grace. It is wrong to liken art-making to madness (although it may be its closest asymmetrical relation)? They are truly antithetical. One is the homeopathic remedy for the other. Which is why Freudian analysis and its many derivatives are the Enemy of Art. To proclaim that Freud killed Pollack is not hyperbole. Which raises the question of what to make of Lucien Freud’s painting.

[Notes on the painting process] I started with a layer of overlapping washes. I had never used Beampaints before. The palette in my application of it is evocative of the hues of bruising, with which I’m trenchantly familiar. I began to use the small brush, touching the paint to the paper, daubing gingerly, lightly, minus the confidence of my right hand’s dexterity. John Lurie pops up in my mind’s eye, along with appreciation of and sympathy for his watercolors. I am unable to construct a formal armature at first, but I resist frustration, the despair, the whispers that the task is stupid and pointless, or worse, mediocre. I try to work at the kitchen table in the wheelchair, but after only a half hour, the pain in my right hip and left shoulder becomes debilitating, and I relocate to the bed. Lauren assists me in arranging everything. For the next five hours I am transported without going anywhere. Once the base layer is laid down, I periodically turn the pad, as I apply long strokes. Eventually, the procedure yields an irregular lattice of color. I will eschew recounting an exhaustive list of thoughts, memories, associations, etc., that percolated into my consciousness while I struggled with my sinister unlearned digits and pestering arthritis. In the background played French films: The Artist and the Model; La Belle Noiseuse; and Renoir. I notice an emergent dimensional form in the painting, which I initially resist. It is the disembodied, primitive, stylized head of a bear, which has powerful associations for me. I was once stalked by bear in New Mexico, which culminated in a dramatic confrontation and was followed by what I can only describe as a visionary experience, which I’ve chronicled elsewhere (in the White Buffalo text). For the next, last, phase of The Bear, I introduced the ink, making the latticework more complex and dimensional. At the end, when there nothing left to add, I signed it fitfully, clumsily, PJM, in the lower right corner, as if la cabeza del oso negro were about to gobble me up.

Painting is the greatest of the great teachers by whom my life’s been blessed. No summary of yesterday’s lesson could be adequate to convey the profundity of it, which I feel dumb typing on this laptop, even though it’s true, mercilessly so. Because art like this is a keenly solitary enterprise, which must not be offhandedly conflated with abject loneliness and isolation. What an odd contradiction! Because, while one is painting, memories awaken, folding and unfolding in convolution that interweaves past, present and future. These immaterialities are not evident in the art, but inhabit it, like ghosts trapped eternally in a house, even after the finite constuct is reduced to dust. Only love remains, which Benjamin incorrectly designated as aura. Art is love and its absence, its loss, which anyhow is not possible. Art never abandoned me. I only have to do/make it (latin, hacer), and once more am re-/un-/discovered. If I were to compose a verse on the subject, it would be a meditation on the amorous residue that we sense when we gaze at the moon. All that endures after the collapse of a fabled lunar kingdom, which flourished a million million years ago.

PLATES

Death Becomes Me (1998)
Bar Codes, Rituals + Subliminal Tapes (2004)
Heartless (2001)
Inside><Outside (2000)
Jackson (1997)
Overflow Show (2005)
Studio Dreams (1996)
Venus (1998)
Zia Diner (1994)
Chestnut Square (2002)

Stricken Part 2G

G. Neo-techne

Wednesday I was channel surfing, when I landed on an episode of 60 Minutes from earlier this year, the subject of which was AI “art,” rhetorically posing the question whether it was art at all. Naturally, Refik Anadol presented the pros, while Jerry Saltz and Molly Crabapple supplied measured counterpoints, if not outright cons. I proffered my position in an (unpublished) analysis for Ereignis a couple of years ago, strenuously arguing against the assertion that the output of first-wave text-prompt image generators met any reasonable standards for artistic merit. It’s been couple of years and hundreds of billions of invested dollars later, and, mountains of slop aside, talented creative practitioners (like Anadol, or my beautiful Bushwick friend Delphine Diallo) have leveraged integrated AI into global art world success. Which doesn’t mean that I’ve had to revise my initial impression of the technology, or its indefensible colonization of the real, analog arts ecosystem. At a time when an incomprehensible concentration of wealth has thoroughly decimated the cultural infrastructure. The art life is becoming increasingly precarious. The fragile social compact that flourished fleetingly in the 20th and 21st centuries, a democratic model sparking to life between world wars and radically redefining art, is in a state of dissolution and disrepair. How can we tell? We have markers we can point to: free public art education, exhibition and performance; the art critical press; free access to cultural institutions. All we have to do is review the outrageous attacks by the President, DOGE and those aligned with them on our nation’s premier museums, monuments, venues, and his ham-handed attempts to dominate the American imagination by installing his name, image and likeness on everything from money to warships and Capitol architecture. AI inundates the debacle, pays for it, is camouflaged by it. The New Swamp, replacing the one Trump promised to drain, is industrial, weaponized AI. It is using Gaza, Lebanon and Ukraine as testing grounds, producing hundreds of thousands of smashed and starved bodies. AI is powering the militarized ICE/CBP carceral, deportation, surveillance/spy complex, paid with a bloody fortune in taxpayer funds. AI is assisting corporate insurance giants in maximizing profits by depleting health care, reducing exposure to climate catastrophes through targeted lobbying and policy manipulation, coverage loopholes, client selectivity, market diversification and monopolization, financialization, etc. And OMG Wall Street. We are being SWAMPED by AI, its oligarchy and its toxic artificiality.

Delphine Diallo, collage for The New York Times (2018), *Everywhere and Nowhere* – Copyright the artist

Presently, (believe it or not) I am seeing the issue from a new angle. The titular maxim Art for Humans, the lodestar of my three-decade project, has taken on an added significance, in light of the ascension of the AI Machine. More than ever, I am clear on what constitutes vocational and occupational art, and what distinguishes it from its commercial cousin and technology enabled simulation. As well as what the stakes are, if we lose the power to discern among these phenomenal varieties loosely associated with creativity. For me, a critical element in the human-art-machine discourse is sentience, but at this point, given the immensity of pressure exerted by advocates intent on achieving no less than world domination, is there any hope for a truly collaborative exchange, rather than one premised on exploitation and the obliteration of opposition, or to put it another way — choice? After watching the aforementioned AI art segment [RIP 60 Minutes], as I was scanning the AFH still image archives at Flickr, I happened upon a photoset dated 2008, entitled “Scrambler (Josey Wales).” Back then I owned a CRT TV monitor and paid for cable. Now and again the transmission would glitch and digitize. I found the disrupted, chaotic images on the display to be quite beautiful, and took many digital photos in two sets: the first featuring a fractured and pixellated Grace Kelly in To Catch a Thief; the second featuring similarly de-figured Clint Eastwood in his iconic turn as a post-Civil War outlaw. I recognized similarities between these pictures and some of the graphics on the episode of 60, which illustrated how massive libraries of scraped images are incorporated and activated in Anadol’s monumental media expositions. He claimed hilariously all 150,000,000 of them were ethically sourced! My media-tic associative connection between my harvested glitch content and Refik’s supersized/immersive imagination slaughterhouse/screensaver device elicited another oblique turnabout in my ongoing Drift. I recalled my EGS courses with Lev Manovich, on data visualization. I’ve continued to trace Lev’s trajectory in the domain. Needless to say, I disagree with his boisterous defense of AI as a viable expressive tool, and most of his provocations regarding tech-aesthetics. However, with respect to both Anadol and Manovich, and so many others in the overlapped fields of culture, commerce and science, whose bread gets the most butter depends on one’s willingness to subvert one’s humanity by bending the knee to the invisible, unreal Masters of the Universe, and their fake mind/spirit.

The Exceptional and the Everyday: 144 hours in Kyiv; Lev Manovich

TECHNE
Techne: (Gr. techne) The set of principles, or rational method, involved in the production of an object or the accomplishment of an end; the knowledge of such principles or method; art. Techne resembles episteme in implying knowledge of principles, but differs in that its aim is making or doing, not disinterested understanding.
— G.R.M. (FROM THE DICTIONARY OF PHILOSOPHY)
[AFH Real "PURE" Digital Tumblr, September 17, 2009]

PLATES

Scrambler (Josey Wales) 1-9, 2008

Stricken Part 2F

F. Precognition

A New Dimension (installation view), “The Bloombergs,” Silver Shed Gallery NYC (2012)

Social media, for all the boosterism, has been co-opted to serve as a processing tool for online social exchange by the usual corporate syndicates.
While it’s very true that individual participants are still finding excellent uses for the systems, and that beautiful community organizing movements can work on Web 2.0 platforms, the macro is slaughtering the micro into media bits for consumption, and the promise of broadband and universal web access is failing to deliver democracy. What mostly occurs in today’s social media is an extension of media syndication, for commercial purposes.
This analysis doesn’t reach the real problem, however. The power-value of MS, FB and Twitter isn’t primarily in their advertiser apps. The juice fueling these platforms is their value as data pools, as case study environments, and back-door surveillance networks. An average user, enjoying FB for its capacity for reconnecting people separated by time and distance, isn’t usually aware of or concerned that an anonymous administrator or analyst or Homeland Security agent can acquire and apply data contained in a FB profile, 4Dimensionally integrating that information into massive databases to whatever end.
When the financial sector giants, the ones who caused the financial catastrophes of 2007 through the present and for the foreseeable future, began to divvy up the major social media sites among themselves, using blood-money from their US racket to do so, I’d had enough. If my high school friends want to let me know what they’re up to, they can email me at art at artforhumans dot com. I’ll be dumping all Google apps soon. “Do no harm,” my ass.
— AFH Real "PURE" Digital Tumblr, “Deactivation of AFH Social Media,” March 16. 2011

Notre Dame Grotto and Golden Dome (1983)

[1982] After abandoning psychology and theatre arts as majors, I settled on English at the end of freshman year, which was mainly dedicated to introductory classes: philosophy, theology, sociology, anthropology, psychology, and a liberal arts section which turned out to be marvelous, due to the instructor’s prowess (the dean emeritus, enjoying his golden years, whose name I can’t recollect, today). I received a first-rate survey of Western Lit at ND, which included: intensive forays into Existentialists, Comparative Lit, like Calvino, Marquez, Kazantzakis, et al. with Werge; the formidable John Matthias and Joe Duffy’s superlative courses, which introduced us to Pynchon, Owens, Davies, Pound, Eliot, Yvor Winters, and so many others. By the spring of ’85, having read hundreds of thousands of pages of words, literally, I reached saturation, which abetted my wholesale shift to art, my commitment to which became vocational. For the next dozen-plus months, I stumbled along from one extracurricular madcap, boozy misadventure to the next, in the meantime feverishly painting a series of mixed media portraits of the artist-alcoholic as a young man that would comprise my unauthorized senior thesis show. Upon graduation from Notre Dame, and barely surviving that terrible motorcycle crash aforementioned, I got hit by lightning (no kidding), and shortly thereafter hit the highway again with my lifelong mentor Don Vogl, his son, also Paul, and another former student of my professor. Along the way, I obsessively plowed through dozens of the popular Louis L’Amour Westerns, purchased at truck stops, as we tripped from South Bend to San Francisco, Vegas, Santa Fe, and back, camping in parks like Yosemite, Redwood, Rocky Mountain National and dozens of others. Don painted lovely plein air pictures. I filled a sketchbook with ink blot-like compositions — which, by the way, developed into a lifelong practice. [RIP, Don. You were one of the most important figures in my life.] Highlights: A full moon at the base of El Capitan on tuinol, weed and whiskey, chatting with Bambi; dropping acid at the Grand Canyon, then driving through the red en route to Sin City; capturing a very large tarantula at White Sands, missiles zooming overhead. My confidence in concrete Reality was definitely getting precarious.

My fellow graduates were interning on Wall Street, on deployments, or celebrating their scholastic achievements in domestic hotspots or abroad. The nerds went straight to med school or whichever grad program/professional training pertained to their designated career path. A lot of them got right to work, in the family business and whatnot. Me, I was spending a decadent month in a custom van on the road with three or four exceedingly colorful guys. One of whom had just finished a prison stint for knifing an Irish football player in a bar brawl. We had this shoebox full of all sorts of drugs (Don never partook), and also buckets of beer, and the radio — a perpetual source of rancor, since our tastes in tunes diverged precipitously. Things got REAL, and real complicated, sometimes in a slow burn, other times like Vesuvias, or a barrage of bottle rockets on the 4th of July. We had no GPS, no cellular or smart phones, no Internet. It was a vastly different world, in so many respects. That was forty years ago, but it may as well be 4,000. When reflecting on those differences, to me the most pronounced is in the character of American folk in general, the pace of our lives, how we connected and interacted with arc other, our expectations, how we expressed grief or pride, the rituals. The crazed velocity of change, its inertia, has left most of us untethered from any fixed assumption of knowable causality. Certainty is dead, and disruption rules.

No wonder a remarkable number of Americans identify as artists and/or entrepreneurs (see Sholette’s Dark Matter), in most cases, a short-lived delusion, shattered as soon as one approaches a dealer or just a gallerista, concocts a semi-legit business plan, or just a spread sheet for startup expenses and revenue projections. “Never let the truth get in the way of a good story,” an old Irishman I knew used to say! Auto-identifying as an artist still can serve as a glamorous justification for being broke, without viable prospects, desperate, bodily unwell and generally unstable. As long as you’re able to present a vivacious hustler-creative avatar mirage for the streams, you’re still in the Game, am I right? Who’s going to contradict your nominal improviso, in the absence of artistic definition? Be sincere, or not — it ought not matter; either stance can gain traction, depending on your target demographic/platform, if you take the leap and go wired! If you are strenuously committed to your phantasm, I recommend avoiding counter-narratives, like those populating the feeds of Bloomberg News, and also that you not track his (Michael Bloomberg’s) substantial art world exploits, just one his many transactional, public-facing patronage gestures, especially during his corrupt third mayoral term, a structural premonition of Trump, who cloaks his graft and grift in the flag, not front-page NGO grants. What I mean is, don’t bother yourself with pesky macro-economic facts and figures (e.g., the Handbook on the Economics of Arts and Culture). Don’t investigate Eli and Edythe Broad’s brand of “venture philanthropy,” KB Home/Sun America, which made him a billionaire, and was instrumental in causing the Great Recession. You’ll not want to grok the big picture of art’s relation to power in late stage capitalism. I did just that in the early 2010s and paid dearly for the indiscretion of principled dissent. I recommend Hannah Arendt on the topic of complicity among friends, too, if ignorant bliss proves unsustainable. Ain’t it sad, what a soul has to set aside, to simply paint a happy mountain or tree? [God bless you Bob Ross, RIP] Tang ping.

Stricken Part 2E

E. Origins

I was born in the eastern mountains to a tiny village where the mothers cling to babes, and cougars stalk in the night. I grew to manhood in emerald forests and in holes in the hillsides. Like many a young man, I grew restless when I came of age. In the spring of my eighteenth year, I bid my family and our people fare-thee-well; the womenfolk packed my sack with light and tasty delights, and the men took my hand offered wise advise, and the children hid behind their mother’s skirts. I was at once melancholy and elevated, for my fate lay ahead of me, awaited me like a maid in her chamber, the Shiva. So, I took to the paths, roads and highways, to seek my destiny.
— The Trial of Jim Dandy 1990?)

My generation was the last for whom comic books and pulp fiction were a formative force, gripping mostly young boys’ collective imagination. We can talk about graphic novels, Mr. Beast, Drake and Web 2.0, but post Covid, hardly anything of my childhood remains intact. At most, what’s left are echoes, nostalgia, skeletons, hardly enough to mock. What the girls were into back then? Because I didn’t have sisters, and my popular female cousins weren’t forthcoming, the preoccupations of the fairer sex were mysterious beyond my ken. As for the macro-culture, I don’t want to infer that TV wasn’t making a dent, because assuredly it was. But it was the golden age of network television, and our viewing options in rural southern West Virginia were quite limited, relatively speaking. Same deal with radio, AM and FM. In Beckley, we had a couple of radio stations, movie houses and record stores. Word of mouth was how you found out about the latest hot number, show, style, etc. Persistent effort was required to be trendy. The economics of cool were much more modest, after the 50’s. Magazines could give you an edge, on top of their utility as diversion. Childhood I thought was divided between stuff you were expected to do: from chores to sports, plays and recitals, block parties, church, parades, holidays and family dinners, that sort of thing, and a lot of it was fun, or not terrible and dull; and the stuff you did on your own, plus the neighborhood stuff, which with us, usually ended with a fight and/or some kid bawling or parents calling the children home for supper. There was greater societal cohesion. I hung out at the hobby shop, where I scored military miniatures, paints and brushes, glue, and at the newsstand. Dad generously supported these habits, and never punished me for swiping a few bucks from his wallet and pants to indulge them. Iron Fist, Sgt. Rock, all the DC and Marvel icons populated my inner world. The passion of my comics fixation proved a gateway drug-like aperture into escapist text, and serial printed matter. As a teen I got hooked on Howard’s Conan the Barbarian, after I’d fanboyed on comic book Conan. Same with Doc Savage. Every so often we’d take a drive to Charleston, which included stops at camera shop and excellent hobby shop, a nice restaurant and maybe even the Sunrise museum.

A funny thing happened. I got hooked on books, and spent hours at our small town public library, after school, on weekends, in summer. It helped to have a labor historian mom, who also voraciously consumed mystery novels, and a dad who assiduously took medical journals and read complete sets of both World Book and Encyclopedia Brittanica, A-Z, just because he decided to. By the time I finished high school, I had read hundreds fiction and non-fiction titles, worked on the school newspaper and literary journal, written poetry, was making music and mixtapes, performing on the stage, collaborating on cool projects, like launching a variety show with kids from school. Mostly, it was a blast! Glorious. Special. All that, plus Star Wars, Jaws, D&D, Parliament/Funkadelic, Devo, and everything, including my jock life, which I haven’t even broached yet, and girls, my dear Appalachian mountains, dance/ballet, the telephone, Myrtle Beach: an amalgamation, this becomes my art, art life, and my original social aesthetic. Europe, the Church and its Reformation, New York, Hollywood, philosophies from Socrates to the 68ers, they were all external factors, of variable determinacy, but I wouldn’t interrogate these influences until college. In the 80s, what I and plenty of others around the world discovered simultaneously was a promising new possible future, juicy beyond belief or measure, emerging from the rubble of previous decades’ 20th Century upheaval and technological acceleration. As soon as our visionary window opened, revenant malevolent forces, mostly bent on retaining, maintaining and obtaining the levers of domination, of control, allied with psychopathic nerd greedheads, run-of-the-mill bloodthirsty thugs, maniacal religious fanatics and untethered amoral spooks, teamed up to crush our living dreams, smash the new planetary consensus, commonwealth, or whatever the blessed movement we were fomenting and which was organically emerging in a manner that some referred to as pre-figuration. Which is too bad, because, as has become plainly, painfully obvious, humanity was being given a final opportunity to mend its ways, level up, mass consciousness-wise, and reconnect with the earthly paradise that was our birthright, which was going the way of the dodo, or Hiroshima, or the moon. We blew it and we knew it, by Y2K, or 9/11, or to present-tense this civilizational train wreck, a few selfishly evil pricks and they botox-faced hoes are spoiling the everywhere forever dream party for the rest of us. About 8 billion of us, not to mention, a whole planet of sentient beings. If you read nothing else, before it’s really too late, read DFW’s Infinite Jest. A laugh a minute. Or cry.

PLATES

Meta-elements and patterns series 1-5

Stricken Part 2D

D. Prospectus

“I think that only time tells about painting. No artist knows in his own lifetime whether what he does will be the slightest good, because I think it takes at least seventy-five to a hundred years before the thing begins to sort itself out from the theories that have been formed about it. And I think that most people enter a painting by the theory that has been formed about it and not by what it is. Fashion suggests that you should be moved by certain things and should not by others. This is the reason that even successful artists—and especially successful artists, you may say - have no idea whatever whether their work’s any good or not, and will never know.”
- Interviews with Francis Bacon by David Sylvester, p. 69

[The 4D Road cinema studies resume; back shift to literature; drift into New Media, and so on.] Monday started with Stranger Than Paradise, which is now one of my top ten favorite motion pictures, joining another Jarmusch film, Dead Man. on the list. Both are Drift stories. The former opened the floodgates to a lifetime of memories of criss-crossing the continent by plane, train and automobile (RIP, John Candy). The poignancy of Stranger Than Paradise, Dead Man, and I can throw in Down by Law here, arises from twists on American fables, parables and tropes: rags to riches; low lives and mean streets; the immigrant experience; luck and industry; the interplay of savages and schemers with the Man on their heels; beauty, innocence and the hovering malice of exploitation; the convergence of worlds old and new. These themes and threads in turn tap into ancient legends, myths and archetypes. Which I traced on through Bergman’s Wild Strawberries, and Goddard’s Contempt, the Odyssey, and round and round we go, going, gone: (back io the future?) to 2001: A Space Odyssey! Does anyone else recognize a relativity to Rafik Anadol’s splashy projections in the eye-popping closing sequences of 2001, which, by the way, is inarguably a great Drift film, and also speaks directly to public AI discourse, Singularity fears, etc.? …in Permanent Vacation, the Drift is explicit. More Drift filmography: Slackers, The Road, Road to Perdition, Bottle Rocket, Easy Rider, Powwow Highway, the Hobbit, Wild at Heart, Being There, Wings of Desire, Road Warrior, Forrest Gump…on and on.

Adjacent to this rich kinetic media content seam is Drift literature’s dynamic 2D inter-cultural mother lode. Wide as the world, old as mankind, and going strong today, with no sign of abating: e.g., Gilgamesh, Beowulf, the Monkey King, Bhagavad Gita, Exodus, the Divine Comedy, the Canterbury Tales, Candide; and frankly, this is just a shortlist off the top of my head, derived from a fundamental or universalist criteria. Can an argument be put forth for a Unified Road/Drift Theory of language? An excellent topic for a seminar, say I, wistfully, given that such a liberal-minded chimera of a course is as likely in 2026 academia as one focused on great labor victories of all time being cheerfully offered at the Wharton School! Whilst a speculative curriculum operates like a thought experiment in our depleted and fractured, increasingly privatized national educational schema, one may yet be able to cobble together or “curate” a plausible, sound, personal set of texts by which one is inspired, inflamed, informed, or charmed — the equivalent in platformed vernacular to top# playlists, favorites and bookmark chains. Which multi-serve as ad bait, community circle identifiers, profile enhancers and so on. The medium thrives on preference as commodity. Not too long ago, accumulating an impressive literary reference catalog was a signifier of cultivation, intelligence, curiosity, open-mindedness; attributes associated with hallowed Enlightenment ideals. Silicon Valley’s civilization-scale techno-blitzkrieg project is diametrically opposed to the prior models for mass acculturation, particularly democratic ones (see Dewey). The evidence is literally in our faces, at our fingertips, in the APPS! Our attention spans are plummeting. Folks are losing their ability to solve problems. Mental illness is ubiquitous. We are not reacting correctly to barbarity, abnormality, cruelty. Much of this maladjustment is directly attributable to the proliferation of wired/networked electronic devices. Which are more and more dependent on machine-learning. Panic is appropriate, sister!

I’ll confide in the reader a few selected works in the Road-lit genre that moved me deeply when I first read them: Kerouac’s On the Road, Least Heat-Moon’s Blue Highways, Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. They meshed inextricably with my identity, defining significantly my peculiar American perspective: Beat-inflected, contemporary indigenous, Gonzo. Don’t forget, I came of age in the Post-War era, the 60s and 70s, in West-by-God Virginia, a period that is egregiously under-examined and misunderstood by the “coastal elites,” who were therefore almost entirely unprepared and dismissive of the Reagan-led reactionary shift that laid the groundwork Bush I and II, the neocons and Trump, on the one hand, and neoliberal Clinton and Obama, on the other. From dopey Ronnie through OWS and my beloved Bernie, my view of politics, the economy and society resembles the unspeakable, inexcusable horrors of Battle of the Somme, that wasteland, if it were live-streamed at a beyond-luxe soiree for the glitterati internationalists, the Davos crowd, a mix of old and new millionaires, billionaires and the odd trillionaire, their servants, management, carnal playthings, trainers, dietitians, PAs, security, pets, and celebrity entertainers, chillin’ above the Cloud in a SpaceX-branded sky palace. Soundtrack is Krakatoa, by B-52s.

PLATES

Transmediale Sketches 6-18

Stricken Part 2C

C. Synthesis

[From White Buffalo; The Story of a Mayan Prince & Others; Paul Joseph McLean Among the Scholars of War; Frontispiece; 1990]

CODA
By Ezra Pound
O my songs
Why do you look eagerly and curiously into people’s faces
Will you find your lost dead among them?

Were J.P. and I similarly predisposed? It’s hard to be sure, especially after four decades. We naturally recognized in each other a longing for freedom that the road seemed capable of delivering then, which, by the by, seems endangered, if not extinct, in 2026. Did we take it too far? I’ve always thought JP was more the pragmatist, in Vans or loafers and a tie. Who’s to say! Fuck, I thought that was the point, to take it to the limit (Eagles)! The American interpretation of carpe diem relied on cash, a Rand McNally atlas, and the Boss (Nebraska, but his whole catalog, plus a hundred other great songs, albums, bands, artists). Lucky for us, back in the day, you could ramble on the cheap, if you were not adverse to periodic situational discomforts (e.g., out of money, sleeping on the floor in a dingy basement under somebody else’s coat) and the odd, gritty egalitarianism economy travel occasionally demands (…with three strangers). In my case, alcoholism consistently skewed outcomes, and not favorably. Now, I do recognize the the questionable accuracy of my rearward gaze and assessments. How reliable is my eyewitness testimony, forty years after the fact, post-stroke, peering through the warped lens of my tenuous perceptual apparatus? Fairly early in recovery, I was forced to admit that I’d lost the ability to discern between truth and falsehood. Has that ability regenerated over the past three and a half decades, like a salamander’s tail? To which I would say, at least to my own satisfaction, I’m on on pretty solid ground, truth-wise. I can at minimum assure you I’ll do my level best to not pull your leg, hoodwink you or steer you wrong. That, at a juncture in which blurring the line between fact and fiction has never been more commonplace. I could finger the prevariagator-in-chief (ew), but the BS that dude spews day in and day out (Joy Division) obliterates the curve then.What is the truthiness gold standard today, anyway? Wait! Don’t reply: we might risk jettisoning reason altogether, if we started agreeing on the obviously real; the crisis of veracity is hardly an academic literary abstraction, early in the second quarter of the 21st Century. It is literally a sign of civilization melting down, like the reactor at Chernobyl. To summarize, I’m not going for photorealism here, not trompe l’oeil, not brut, or any aesthetic pushing harsh objectivity or clever illusion as deception, cushy sentimentality as camouflage for nasty intentions and/or predatory malevolence, subversive or subliminal messaging, or straightforward ugliness as provocation or flaunting the lack of meaningful constraints. Nope. I wouldn’t want to give Plato an excuse to boot me out of his Republic, not that he would know art. even if it cracked him in his skull like a 2x4.

I’ve devoted a lifetime to investigating the Road Man thoroughly, if not objectively, as a dimensional phenomenon. I’ve gathered enough anecdotal data to form rhizomatic theories about it, sufficient to mold a curriculum on it, to subjectivivize it. In so doing I can deduce that to wanderlust is inherently human, even though one person won’t feel the drive as keenly as another, for any number of reasons. As such, virtually all cultures produce exemplar representations, stories, images, songs, that describe, perform or depict their precise paradigm of wandering. Our (humanity’s) expressive diversity on this theme is indeed remarkable, and our appetite for Road-urge-related content is practically inexhaustible. It has many names: e.g., the Path or Way; Quest; usually presenting and perpetuated as Gesamtkunstwerk; it’s all-direction scalable — reducible to the individual or expansive, encompassing what we call world-building; historical, as per migrations of peoples; or more abstractly, applicable to movements, in the political sense. I would argue this universal Road fixation/fascination is as fundamental to human nature as love itself, and as strong as our idea of home, the wish to belong someplace, and to know that place is where you will always belong. The dream of Paradise as destination at the journey’s end hinges on the traveler’s survival of a myriad of threats and dangers. We need roots, but dwell on rootlessness, and are torn between the fixed pole of stasis, and the idealization of endless, constant motion. We perpetually mourn that which is lost or left behind, and with matching indulgence, fantasize about the horizon’s imagined promise, which rarely meets or exceeds our lofty expectations.

Stricken Part 2B

B. Compulsion

[Johnny Law Kilt Mah Bruther, pg. 2 > First draft, circa 1988, plus several revisions over the years]

ghosts shades of memories memories
flickering in twilight
autumn scars
& Johnny Law monitors it all on CB channel 9
shivering at midnight
under the cover of darkness
the fire unattended burns low
I, the shy one
see the girls at the meeting hall
dangled in the hush of elegant whispers
catapult in the spark shower into legend
in black steel trimmed with chrome
Johnny Jack, American child

[Back to 1984, or was it ’85] What a trip! Somewhere on the Road — where exactly? Did I get a snapshot at the fateful instant? — I fell deeply in love with my country. Or was I seduced? No, it’s wrong to use the language of romance to describe this chimerical feeling, a collage of hormones, allegiance pledges, a million sights, sounds and smells. Like mist in a Kentucky valley, crickets and toads in a Mississippi evening, and gasoline at the pump at a mon’n’pop filling station in Jersey. My biggest revelation in those early years (roughly ’82-’90) was how enormous the USA is geographically. It was the metaphysical expanse that blew my mind wide open. By God, TEXAS! With JP that summer I got to absorb America as a wide-eyed naif, an innocent, trying to figure out. what cool is and how I could be that. Oh to be young and clueless, reckless with abandon, and full of simmering juice! In a month we traversed thousands of miles, cruising through and pausing in wildly differing ecologies and cultures, North, South, East and West. I fell in love with roadside attractions, some hokey, some illuminating. Eventually, the history, kitsch, commerce began to blend together and blur. We sprinted up the Rocky steps, giggling, stoned. I played mournful sax, a paean to miners, on a rocky outcrop overlooking a valley creek in my hometown under a bright full moon. The World’s Fair in the Big Easy was amazing, especially those gorgeous neoclassical sculptural decorations. The balmy ride along the Gulf Coast was just WOW! On our trek I fell in love with then-affordable local and regional quick-serve foods (which were largely made from scratch, but in big batches, wryly, commonly touted as “home cookin’”): Chowder! Biscuits and Gravy! Gumbo! Barbecue! We ducked and dodged giant flying cockroaches in Houston, hanging out by Big D’s pool, with Christmas lights all around, festooned like a Mexican vacation resort. …We somehow made it back to South Bend in time for classes. At the start of junior year, I wasn’t refreshed and invigorated by my summer break. I was a strung out wreck.

Back at school, I grappled with my powerful Road conversion, which haunted my days and nights. A glimpse of the freeway would trigger overwhelming, irrational bouts of longing. I daydreamed about the Interstate. I sympathized with those lonesome outlaws when they crooned about the lost highway calling to them, telling sad tales about how they end up running on empty or on the run from the Man, eventually pulling on a smoke, sitting by a jukebox playing Hank or Patsy, in some rundown honkytonk, bone-weary, whiskey-drunk, beat-down and broken-hearted. The flip side of that depressing trope filed me up, too! Skynyrd, Tom Petty, Jackson Browne, and dozens of others became my life’s soundtrack after that summer with JP. My Road obsession began to manifest in impulsiveness, manic spontaneity. The drive-to-drive adeptly configured itself to be intimately personal to me, similar to a death encounter. [Those unfortunately were occurring with increasing frequency, which we can get into later.] On a whim I would hop a flight to New York out of Chicago, on People’s Air, $49 each way. Imagine! I was selling hand-painted FunkShunArt t-shirts to fund seat-of-you-pants jaunts all over the continental USA. The Road was becoming my mainline fix, an overarching mindset and frame of reference, a secular replacement for the Catholicism of my youth, whose influence was rapidly waning, with every toke, blackout, hookup, Violent Femmes concert and art stomp up and down the Avenues of Manhattan. I was becoming aware of the rich and varied Road symbology, and the many arcane codes, the twisted metal burnt out metaphors. Mine would turn out to be a permanent awakening to the American land and people and what binds us [Main Street], at depth.

This phase of realization entailed profound psychic change, which unfolded contiguously to my fanatical immersion in and devotion to art life, which itself came on like a flash flood, avalanche or meteor shower, capsizing me, swamping me, plundering the good boy persona I’d cultivated in high school. Now, I was living a nutty version of Art School Confidential, chasing muses, visiting hundreds of galleries and dozens of museums, partying and painting day and night, doing shows, readings, screenings — and scrambling to maintain a decent GPA, call home at least once and shield my parents from any fallout my misadventures generated. I imagined I was discovering who I might really be meant to be. A new self-image was materializing, with serious implications for my future, my life path. In the immortal words of the Allman Brothers, (I had decided) I was born a ramblin’ man, and began concocting a lineal argument, quasi-factual, to support that contention. The rationale was circular: I inherited a potent predilection to wander (genetic defense); I behaved the way I did because of an impossible-to-resist-or-deny desire to wander, which was the result of a) peer pressure, b) acculturation, c) drugs and alcohol, d) bad parenting, e) bad society, etc., etc., etc. In short, nothing was my fault, if I got in.trouble for any of the wild child stunts I pulled, which, again, was happening more and more often, becoming more of a chore to hide, with serious consequences attaching. In reality, the friction could be chalked up to my reticence to embrace being and becoming 1) a 20th Century American artist/writer/thinker, 2) an alcoholic, and 3) Free, a true, pure Road Man, without knowing how to do it, or what any of “it” was , or what “it” meant, or that that was really what I attempting. I can’t help but admire my youthful audacity and pity my alcoholic denial, willfulness and ignorance. Instead, I did what any liberal arts-trained fellow when faced with an intractable metaphysical dilemma would do. I pantomimed a scientific method of self-discovery. For example: I prospectively charted my Urge to Road (U2R) as a clinician might chart a disease: the U2R became pronounced when I turned 18 and left home for college. U2R started to manifest in modest weekend sojourns, then fall (to Colorado) and spring breaks (Oregon), and a couple of awesome late summer weeks in California, then sophomore year… Twelve action-packed months later, I was progressing toward an epiphany. …Like that. {The text would benefit from a fancy graphic here; data visualization; Cartesian planes… Ed} Needless to say, authority figures and loved ones were becoming concerned by my passionate disintegration.

PLATES

Gallery 1

[Description: Samples from the California Car Culture print folio (circa 2007)]

Gallery 2

[Description: Samples from WP Last Rites FUNerAll Road Trip (2009), LA2WV]

Stricken Part 2

A. Conversion

In my dreams last night I brought out a pile of my manuscripts and proceeded to integrate fragments of them into Stricken. My dream self explained to me the ins and outs of the procedure, providing immaculately detailed examples. It was wonderful and went on a long time in both worlds. Upon awakening, I thought it over. The more I thought about the idea, the more excited I got. Over the past couple of weeks, I’d added 8,000 words to this text, an addition that came with a high cost: terrible pain on my arthritic left shoulder joint, due to the hunt-and-peck technique I used to type on the MacBook Air with my remaining viable arm and digits. Being an author hurts, man! Part 2 of Stricken at first was consistent with Part. 1, but the all-directional story gained momentum until it was an eruption, a 4D MEGAzine, a form and/or style (Blogger on ‘roids) which I had claimed to abandon, months before the stroke, because I lost confidence in the average online reader to possess the stamina to scan, much less close read any piece longer than 450 words. Thanks Web 2.0! Anyway, I must now concede that the Stroke has degraded my editorial impulse, which never was a strength. So I’m going through with it: I finished second draft of Stricken Part 2, and plan to insert entries from my old, mostly unpublished books, dissertation thesis and poetry collections throughout the essay. And in the manner of the MEGAzine, introduce dramatic voices for commentary, elucidation or meta-lit purposes. I do invite feedback, and would welcome input. Some of the friends and family still following my soc.media streams are accomplished wordsmiths yourselves. If you have a minute, and are so-inclined DM me or add a pointer or correction in the comments section. My dream self advised to crowdsource edit Stricken, which is kinda what you have to do when you don’t already have an editor, i.e., when you are writing on spec, like I am. Happy face emoji.

[Deadlines Lifelines, pg. 1 > First draft, circa 1987, plus several revisions over the years]

fog in eyes of morning
plastic sun through blinded window

Hello Day

stretch seams of memory
time past
was it time propelled the orb in which I find myself
or the orb self-propelled

The covers stick to my legs.
I perspire.

Oh, summer.

with neither currency nor even tobacco
credit nor endurance
worth no longer equal debits
the Author approaches his journal
waving his quill at sunshine Real

what interpretation would you offer this man
whose rational faculties he long ago abandoned
as insufficient or worse
useless

for what reason in Death’s misapprehension & the neglect of Now?
a simple blessing on those of Will
whose insistent prodding produced an afterlife in one mortally attired

[1984] On the transatlantic flight from Zurich to Boston, I had an allergic reaction to the penicillin I’d been prescribed. My finger had gotten badly infected in Israel, after the Red Star of David medics patched me up. I could have lost it to amputation, had the infection gotten much worse. The swelling was hideous, as my digit filled with pus and blood. The pain was excruciating. I took buses from the north to first Tel Aviv, then Jerusalem, to procure treatment. I was delirious, and don’t know how I managed any of this on my own in a foreign country. The first doctor opened the wound to reduce the swelling/pressure. A couple days later the second cauterized the incision, in order to stanch the loss of blood. I’ll spare the reader gory details, but I assure you, it was gory. I had no idea how dangerous the antibiotic was for me. I realized something was wrong in a Swiss airport bathroom stall, during the plane change and short layover. Once we were airborne again, the rash in the crotch (rapidly spreading) was the first symptom, followed by a raging fever, then the throat closing, labored breathing, all-over weakness, lightheadedness. I rang the stewardess, who, expressing some concern, brought a blanket and orange juice. She huddled with other stewardesses, and somebody notified the captain. They paged for a doctor among the passengers. He was a dapper, ambivalent, composed chap. After looking me over, he quietly declared I was suffering from anaphylaxis, and there was nothing to be done, returning promptly to his seat. It became clear that Swiss Air wasn’t about to turn the plane around for me, so I shook and shivered for hours, struggling to breathe. I recall confusion, being afraid and feeling alone with my fate. I failed to grasp how the unexpected and surreal a visitation by Death at 30,000 feet could belong only to me in a certain way, though lots of people were nearby. And yes indeed, this was real, it was happening. Nothing romantic about it. No way to talk yourself out of it. Then, obviously, I survived, and upon my disembarking the airliner, Dad the dermatologist diagnosed my malady immediately and correctly, stopped at a pharmacy en route to our hotel, the Piaza, scored Benadryl and ephedrine I guess, and like magic, I was in couple of hours all better!

My liminal Beantown stateside homecoming was Joycean, or Faulknerian, by which I mean it was a layered, faceted funhouse mirrors affair, alternately rapturous and bleak. I felt emotionally raw, overly sensitive and inside-out, like a snake that had just shed its skin. In hindsight, l admit I was a handful for my parents and siblings, and probably for most of those with whom I had any incidental contact, e.g., hotel staff. It should have been fun and happy, a nice, memorable family vacation. Instead, because I was in the throes of extreme culture shock, and a handful of mental, emotional and spiritual crises — not terribly atypical for young man of twenty, but exacerbated by undiagnosed early onset alcoholism and PTSD from my very recent near-death experience — I selfishly ruined it for everybody. An episode of projectile vomiting after an enormous seafood dinner did not help anything. Plus, Boston is, simply put, uniquely weird. One sunny Sunday morning, a little hungover, I ventured outside and found myself immersed in the annual Shriner’s parade and convention. Picture a huge teeming throng of pale, drunk, cigar-chomping middle-aged and -class otherwise patriotic American dads whooping and hollering openly on the central boulevards of that historic port city, flamboyantly costumed as gay caricatures of Arabs, waving scimitars, teetering on stilts or driving miniature clown cars, grabbing ass, guffawing like madmen. I climbed and sat on a plop art marble perch and chain-smoked cigarettes, expressionless, peering through the darkened lenses of my Ray-Ban aviators. This absurd, madcap spectacle was a perfectly uncanny distortion of the dangerous, explosive, rapidly modernizing ancient world I had just bounced in and out of, making a getaway by the hair of my chinny-chin-chin. As I pondered the passing phantasmagorical parade, something snapped inside my psyche, and my future suddenly dematerialized, slipped into a state of indeterminacy, or flux. My shit unwound fast. I would no longer be spending the remainder of summer in Appalachia. Not remotely possible! Out of the question! Oh, the histrionics. Mom and dad didn’t know what to make of it, or me, and I did not possess the necessary equipment to explain myself to them or anyone else. Which somewhat explains the Why of my turn toward art thing as Deus Ex Machina. Art does not ask for an explanation and be itself without one. An artist must confidently act before the explanatory narrative eradicates the freedom feeling one needs to create free art.

That afternoon, I commenced a frantic search of the Globe’s classifieds, answered an ad, made a phone call, and ricocheted to Cape Cod — I don’t remember how I got there from Boston, just how awkward it was to shear away from the family — securing a gig as counselor at the Hyannisport Y camp for underprivileged youth. A frenetic, but often lovely, Waldenesque month later, I flew the coop once again, embarking on a cross-country road trip with my buddy J.P. in his nondescript, sensible, boxy American-made sedan with the cool moniker, “The Gray Ghost.” We wrote, performed, rehearsed, studied, discussed and listened to songs and drank bourbon, visiting our friends and family along the way. I composed lyrics and improvised vocals, while he banged out tunes on his guitar. We passed through White Plains, Cohasset, Philly, Pittsburgh, Beckley, Savannah, New Orleans, Houston, a few other places, big and small. J.P. educated me on his proper rules for traveling the mythic American Road: there is a driver, navigator, sometimes passengers, with clearly defined roles and parameters; stopping for gas (so cheap back then) was a focused, regimented activity, and stopping to pee in between those fuel stops was frowned upon; Chicken fried steak and cherry or key lime pie as key metrics for evaluating diners; off-road fun, e.g., in homage to the Situationists, long-walking high as an ersatz X-sport; an eccentric frisbee golf, which I personally thought stupid at the time, though my views on it have softened considerably; inebriated arts/history/philosophy, a competitive discourse; and incessant and encyclopedic Rock’n’Roll exposition, at depth. Before now, I had no clue you just do this, pull a stunt like this! Forty years later, I ask myself, what if we had just kept going? Or, while we’re speculating on possible futures that never materialized, because I chose another one before I knew one could choose, what if I had phoned that captivating Amazonian beauty from the kibbutz I met on the bus from Capernaum to Tel Aviv? I would ask Siri or Claude, but what good would any answer they might concoct do me or anyone. Maybe if Sam Altman or Elon attaches a Holodeck-like contraption to the prompt form at least I could lose myself in a rich and believable hallucination, a la the Matrix. My red dress fantasy girl was a golden brown sabra in Greek sandals, Daisy Mae cutoffs, a blue tube top and sun kissed curly long hair. The Agent was Israel as it is in 2026

Plates

LIST

Masada
Old City Bath
Low Tide, Cape Cod
Boys on the Lake
Dane 1
JP 2009
Dane 2
Gulf Coast
JP’s Guitar
Dome
Eagle Atlas
Graveyard
Place
Poseiden
HiRise
The Pond
Qumraan
Jerusalem
Rising (Detail)
Pittsburgh Punk Girl
Rising )Horizontal)
Zeus
Savannah

Stricken

4D Form, “No Mas,” Co-Lab, Austin, TX; digital graphic for animation (2013)

Part 1

As an undergraduate art student at Notre Dame in the 80s, I obsessively researched, pouring through the main library’s stock of 25,000+ coffee table books. Henry Moore was one of the first artists to grab my attention, and he still does. A few hours ago I saw in my instagram feed a wonderful clip extracted from an antique documentary that zoomed in on the famed sculptor’s hands and tools. I realize I hadn’t come close to an encyclopedic knowledge of the canon, and never will. It may not be humanly possible. An open question is whether AI could make it so. Or whether there is any likelihood of a coordinated public/private project to chart, catalog and explore the role of art in civilization. A database, in a word. In 2026 it is fair to ask why and for whom such a thing should be contrived. Admit it. We can no more agree on what art is, than we can war or peace, right or wrong. “We” has lost the semblance of cohesion, and meaning is hanging on by a thread!

I vaguely recollect Google trying to launch a comprehensive online culture portal and library, a warehouse for digitized artifacts, but copyright foiled the attempts some time ago. Those in a position to decide whether or not to launch such a vast humanitarian effort appear to have had other plans and priorities for the technology, and attaching civil policy, governance. How to justify or rationalize the turn from art to techno fascism, or whatever this is? Expediency or efficiency? God gave us permission? Because force can be expressive, too? Is it a turn or an eternal dance? The all-in gamble on Artificial Intelligence ended the West’s Enlightenment once and for almost all. Instead of archives and a 21st Century New Deal, we are training machines to replace humanity, draining water reservoirs, burning through stockpiles of munitions and mismanaging energy in crazy ways.

It’s Monday and for the first time I watched Bertolucci’s The Conformist — on our big flat panel TV, wireless via YouTube, with subtitles. The Plato’s Cave scene was magical, in the sense it precipitated in my mind a series of contingencies, congruencies, revelations. Cinema can do this. Suddenly I could vividly recall lectures, texts, arguments, art pieces, mine and others, linked to the ancient conjecture. I found this cascading effect to be immensely pleasurable, but sad, too. The past manifests in a sequence of memories, analogous to the behavior of water, its flow properties. Plato’s imaginary subterranean souls and their shadows are a staple of my artistic and philosophical construct, a foundation principle — not that I’ve adhered to it constantly, not at all. Bertolucci is right to apply the Platonic allegory towards the messiness of fictional assassination. Plus I adore the movie’s marvelous abased classicism, its visceral grittiness and sexy materialism, woven into the script, the production design and cinematography. The Conformist's relevance to 2026 geopolitics to me is obvious. Causality and interpretation are problematic differently, in violent dramas of desire. Time travel is the cheat code for all psychic illusion and fleshy fantasy.

If you follow my practice, you know I’m ever curious about dimensional platform dynamics and effects. Lately, my curiosity has me chasing albino rabbits in Meta fields. Yesterday I entered a string of prompts like “media theory” and “4d art and design,” and waded through the hate- and lust-infused slop, until the content stream’s flow shifted. Eventually the seam, the thread, led to Martin Heidegger. Maybe Heidegger was right about being - I don’t feel qualified to argue for or against his assertions. Nor do I know how to reconcile the old black and white interview displayed on my iPhone screen, with the 1000s of images before and following in the gram’s generative AI chain, the appropriately nicknamed “doomscroll.” Zizek and Kittler made cameos, me swiping, clicking away with my good left hand. Angelicicism/Film01 (now Sex mag) increases in significance daily, in my estimation. Major cine finds were The Battle of Algiers and Tarkovsky’s The Stalker. Takeaway: Displacement and disorientation are existential givens, the norm, over the past couple of millennia, and may have always been.

I was in Israel in the heat of summer in the early 80s at the caves near Qumran, where the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered, on a field trip led by the then-spry little Englishman scholar and theologian called Joseph Blenkinsopp. The previous semester, I had signed up to work on an archaeological dig in Capernaum. Most of my Domer classmates preferred Eurail passes. On my formative journey to the Middle East, I took hundreds of pictures with a Nikon my dad gave me. Next stop, we visited the Dead Sea. I floated on its salty buoyant waters, careful to keep my damaged finger out of it. I had no nail on the middle one. A rock from a Roman wall had crushed the tip, but that’s another story about searing pain, the Chagall windows at Hadassah, the killing of the Son of God, Megiddo, the Israeli wars in Lebanon and Michael Jackson. Was mine a truly different Israel than today’s version, and how does either measure against the one polluting my Instagram, or the Michigan Senate race? My God, you would not believe today’s pixillated Holy Land’s shocking ugliness, brazenly churning in the sordid banality of the streams. Its depravity spreads like a plague of locusts to New Jersey, Paris, the Phillipines. Darkness unfathomable. The spectrum of stylized reactions, like Kabuki, or German Expressionist performances, or Baudrillard’s orgies, are consummately troubling. Because they situate grief, outrage, bloodlust and so on together in the attention market-machine. The entire apparatus is absolutely craven, a complicity vortex.

At the fringe of one night’s slumber, I reminisce about the artist Janet Lippincott, who was so kind to me when I was starting out. She bought me lunch at Babe’s on Canyon Road, a sandwich probably. [The quality of my reverie is variable, ranging from sharp particulars to fuzzy impressions.] Janet invited me to visit her Upper Canyon Road compound, with all those feral cats. I didn’t know how do get comfortable there, due to my substantial angst. Which is too bad, because the old gal was a gem. Janet and her paintings were fashioned of the the same indomitable spirit that defeated Hitler on the Western Front, A bloody stubbornness, angry and grieving all at once, repulsive and lonely, raw, bitter and deep. She was uniquely authentic to the bone, but unlike the so-called influencers, Janet achieved a persona the old fashioned way, through hard-lived experience, not pantomime. Periodically, the essence of freedom itself manifested in her art, which is not the same as beauty, exactly. Forgive me. Accidentally, I have resorted to telling a ghost story again. The American West, the High Desert, it absorbs and buries the 20th Century in its arroyos and shadows, like all the other times. At the risk of sounding metaphysical or poetic, Cormac McCarthy solved a semiotic iteration of the hypercube at the Santa Fe Institute, which is located about a mile away from where Janet lived, before expiring. I can’t get his books out of my head, especially the last couple, Stella Maris and The Passenger. Blood Meridian changed my concept of America forever.

In the afternoon I queried “the best of French and Italian cinema” and was rewarded with ranked lists. Zombie Hollywood remains in a state of collapse, while the mergers and acquisitions dominate entertainment news, with the sporadic blockbuster hype as a counterbalance to industrial atrophy and condemnation. This afternoon I watched Goddard’s Vivre sa vie. The brilliant cafe conversation (again Plato!) is magnificent and cruel. A paradigm lives within it, welding the infinite to the mortal flesh, sparkling in the tragic dialogue between a wizened thinker and a soon-to-be-murdered whore. The overlay of irony thick as cigarette smoke. Since the Stroke my mind is prone to ideological or aesthetic drifting. During these trauma-induced flights of fancy, LOL, it’s a matter of intellectual diligence, spiritual protection, or emotional discipline to veer away from despair and such negativities as the smog of malaise foists on a damaged brain. Grace must be invited and indulgence repelled, actively, on the daily. Truth be told, after the intensity of my days-long immersion in the algo-swamps and data-palaces, I am afraid art, literature, thought itself, are barreling toward extinction, along with the Real. Just an observation — not a preference, a diagnosis, not a prediction or prognosis. The future is not written, but it may be illiterate. I rediscover Noah Becker on IG, after a long separation, and rejoice.

n the mayhem of history’s prolonged suffering and demise, post-mortem (credit Fukuyama, Neitzsche, et al.), one circles back to Adam Curtis chatting mournfully with Dean Kissick behind a paywall, which I manage to breach. I don’t think either of them actually gets art as an artist does, effortlessly, which is to say, naturally. Yet, their observations are crucial, and devastating, in conjunction with or as an amplification of Curtis’s programs and Kissick’s recent critical essays. Inevitability — the ending of things — is in the air, isn’t it? The glorious and corruption-poisoned World Cup of 2026 and its blissful and tragic melodramas were a fantastic, if stunted, diversion. Messi. The interventions of tech, Trump and Madonna. The heat, ICE, the unavoidable subtext of diverse global terror, of ghastly stultifying inequity. Fright was attending the feast, but we again escaped with our skin intact.

In a wistful moment, I sought out the ghost of Martin Fuller, who was briefly my chum in New Mexico, during my downward spiral. I found I liked his art much more than I had nearly four decades ago. Playful works on paper are what I recall. Full disclosure: I was fanatical and extreme, even vicious, in my shallow and macho aesthetic judgements as an unaccomplished young artist. Not that I was often wrong, mind you, in the long run, which also holds true for Donald Judd, one could point out. Not to suggest my blustery hot takes were on par with his. I wonder if the head trauma, from the motorcycle crash, brawls and football violence (the American kind) exacerbated my volatility. Martin and I hung out a few times drinking at El Farol, And one night our revel was interrupted by the entrance of the poor lady who survived Jackson Pollack’s fatal crash, Ruth Kligman. She carried herself like a dead movie star. We Googled her, Lauren and I, and at first my memories didn’t match the results, until we found some photos of Kligman sporting dyed hair. On a side note: Do you know about the Sullivanians? How an evil psychoanalysis-saturated cult destroyed America’s greatest artist? I recommend the Art Angle podcast episode on the subject, hosted by my former editor Ben Davis. Anyway, I wish I’d gotten to see Martin’s studio in London, to visit his club, where he showed in the end. He told me stories about Francis Bacon holding forth there.

When I did visit South Kensington, the year was 1996. On a honeymoon stroll with my second wife Sophia, we happened across Francis Bacon’s studio. He was already deceased by then (1992)]. …Before that impenetrable maelstrom of mad inspiration (Bacon’s studio) was relocated and reopened in Dublin, Ireland in 2001. Preserved like a fossil in shale. And also that immensely entertaining plaque honoring Sir Charles James Freake, whom I unofficially adopted as my beloved spectral patron on the spot. This was at the start of what would become me Scottish Travelogue project, wherein I would reconnect with my extended kinfolk on the McLean side, propelled by the completion of my Hanbleceya obligations with Servando. Shaking off the loss of custody of my firstborn son, Will, after years of battles in family court. Not incidentally, I happened to be in Edinburgh for the return of the “Stone of Destiny,” an event met not by a cheering throng of proud Scots, but with massive, onerous and dour silence. From London we were bound for the Highlands and Islands. We were off to Oban, Mull. Staffa, Skye, Callanish, Glencoe, and many encounters and misadventures, culminating in a profusion of art and text created for exhibition and virtual publication.

I was sure, convalescing after the stroke, my productive artist life had ceased, as such, and my remaining time would be otherwise occupied. Now, I’m having second thoughts. Maybe I was too hasty. Suspended in the interstices of sleep and waking, I’ve been prone to envisioning fabrication sessions, and exhibitions, in tremendous detail. I experienced one such mirage Sunday. I built multimedia constructions from components that exist and are presently in storage nearby. These elements include large hybrid paintings in various stages of finish, to which I added (in my dreaming) layers of tinted Plexi, containing or decorative framing devices and touches of pigment, printed matter, modeling texture and so on; the mounting of small works collaged in series combining elements from previous productions, like CONTENT, Art for Humans Gallery Chinatown, DDDD/01/Journeyman Projects; a new collection sourced from my father’s photos and captions, as they appear compiled in his original scrapbooks, which chronicle our family and community life in Beckley, West Virginia, where I was born and raised.

The remainder of that Sabbath morning was devoted, after coffee, to advanced play with Instagram feeds, reels and algorithms. These purposeful engagements are underwritten by practical expertise and theoretical literacy. It’s a peculiar post-internet, post-contemporary technical approach, and crazy intense. Think Clockwork Orange mind-saturating, -configuring forced opticals. Interspersed with web crawls of former artsy acquaintances, friends, collaborators, influences, e.g., Hillary Foxworthy, Brent Stewart, John Mulvany, Jim Herrington, Tim Burton and others. I’m still in direct contact with some of them, the breathing, wired ones at least. I’m also chasing discourses tangential to art world trends with parallels in the broader intersecting fields of culture. I would add to the content-context mix politics, finance and system dynamics and effects, but that would improperly characterize my program as abstract to the point of meaninglessness or absurdity.

Code Duello 2 (detail), David Lusk Gallery Nashville, TN, 2014

On the contrary, I go granular, baby! In a very compressed metaphysical window, inside the perceptual uncanny of my Lord’s Day phantasmagoria,, I was able to piece together a representative summary, a snapshot, of my mediatic worldview, as a fluid, fractal thing in motion, timely, with both objective and subjective features, presented as a riddle whose answer will come in the form of an art-like response or the absence of one, something in the neighborhood of a signature on an untitled febrile assemblage or mosaic. Whether or not this speculation is realized, the vision itself improves my capacity to properly behave, to enact adequate morality, in the chaotic circumstances of the day. My personhood has perpetuated itself, somehow. Unfortunately for humanity, the Big Picture my weird process mapped in many respects is toxic, dire, unspeakably horrific. Humanity it seems is facing an extinction-level cataclysm, driven by commingling forces and factors, to some degree manmade and, in my view, supernaturally, preternaturally or unnaturally malevolent, which could be distinction without a difference. I can’t discern if that hyperbolic assessment sounds dumbly ambiguous, cliched and even milquetoast, or if it belies a vast well of truthiness. Who can tell, when there’s so much noise and shouting? Bottom line, I am convinced I have no interest in contributing to any panic, appropriate or not. Grinding axes is over for me.

Instead, the proposal on the table, so to speak, involves curation, creation and conservation in triangulation, the context of which is hemispheric. Fomenting a movement, as it were. A recent prime case in point is Kid A mnesiac, an exposition for complementary visuals by Thom Yorke and Stanley Donwood arrayed in an immersive installation energized by a classic Radiohead soundscape. In juxtaposition, as negation: A vacuous digital nihilism, a simulacra of lifey-ness masking the void; that would be Dataland, a Google joint fronted by Rafik Anadol, and a massive flex by the AI industrial complex. Both formulations occur or appear in the pop-up temporary-contemporary realms of soft power, propaganda, and consumer-oriented spectacle. One instance promotes a happy futurism, a smart screensaver, while the other is more accurately aligning with Ginsberg’s Howl — a generational crisis that unfolds as a dystopian cinematic nightmare. One encourages participation and wonder, the other resistance, as in “laying down,” until the moment for rising up arrives. Both are pointedly, materially impermanent. Culture as residue.

“Lost Causes,” The Anarchives/ the Spatial Occupation at Hyperallergic; Brooklyn , NY, 2012

Not long ago “vibes,” shortened from “vibrations,” which we could explore — a la the Beach Boys, science, etc. — registered style-wise in the hipster pantheon with buzz, status, popular traction. Dread is not a vibe in that sense, although they operate in the mass communication space similarly. What’s up with the latest phase of studied pretense of ambivalence, the neo-non-plus? Is this the sound of tuning out, a marker of informatics overload? A signal not of beats, but of our shared 99% beatdown experience? Its hard to be enthused at the prospects of free thought/speech/will/action/movement during wartime, in the midst of endemic poverty and ubiquitous infirmity, hunger, and the rest of the grim shite. When skies are darkened by smoke from wildfires, eruptions or bombs, it affects us instinctually, which is to say, as animals. You can follow the phenomenon in the feeds, the dread percolating, gaining momentum, accelerating into panic. The algos are the medium, in which fear is transmogrified and consumed, digested and converted into monopoly money, and into a mode of social energy, a raw resource to be refined and/or further redefined to who-knows-what end. The nifty procedural bit involves fabricating a fungible product from processing the equation fear + chaos = uncertainty to cover for rampant pillaging of the commons; that is not traceable to any agent cultivating a specific nefarious, self-aggrandizing outcome. Complication and convolution become camo for the narcissist class, the oligarchy.

A 4D media scan can be as easy as floating down a placid river on an inner tube, or as big a rush as riding class 5 western wilderness rapids with a crew of rowdy friends. Late one evening last weekend, I drifted into Vonnegut’s musings on Dresden in Slaughterhouse 5, turned a bend which put me in the trenches of the first world war, after which I cruised through battlefield Europe part two (narration this time provided by Tom Hanks, a/k/a Captain Miller), or two bazillion, depending on your chronological math. When is Europe not a war zone? About the Drift: one analog to my network dependent protocol would be my old pal John Guider’s habit of hopping in a canoe, splashing into the currents of an American waterway and seeing what happens, through a camera’s lens. I can extrapolate the same model maximally, and posit a thematic and structural linkage to mythos, to Ulysses in fact, whose epic drift is undoubtedly one of the most renowned, and sizzling hot again in 2026. The perpetual Oddysey. Kudos Elon Musk for threatening to bankroll a next-gen AI remake as an immaterial etnhic cleansing flex. Switching lanes: Shout out to the one and only Speed Levitch, and The Cruise, a masterpiece in the genre, and Linklater’s Waking Life. in which Levitch also graphically appears.

If I were to identify a common thread binding my latest meanderings, it would be the collective loss of trust apparent all round. With that loss comes the draining of joy and love from the everyday cycles of life. How realistic is any urge to spontaneity, to furtively enjoin with friends and neighbors in frivolities such as the arts, when civilization burns to ashes and disintegrates? What passes for fun in peacetime and seasons of plenty comes across as madness amidst catastrophe and lack. Struggle is no longer a sign of virtue — it is merely a trudge, a necessary qualification for survival, and no guarantee of anything at all. Faith and hope in relation to art must be reevaluated when contextualized within a framework that supports or at least permits apartheid, genocide or rampant impoverishment of the many, by the endlessly greedy and shameless few, and their minions. Worse yet, it feels like the most terrible among us are getting away with it! Revolution is therefore in the air again, which is to be expected when art has been strangled for the satisfaction of psychopathic despots, frolicking as they commit tyranny. Demanding we worship them, or at least like them, gazing upwards from under the boot.

AFH Update 2026 Plus Links

The Artist in his Nashville Studio, 1998. Photo by Rebecca Walk

Greetings!

In May 2025 I suffered a stroke, which necessitated our moving to Petaluma, CA. My right side was affected, which means I will have to undergo significant rehabilitation to regain functionality in my limbs. Fortunately, I retained my intellectual faculties such as they are. Sufficed to say, it has been a tremendous challenge to deal with the loss of my ability to paint at the level I was painting prior to the stroke. We are exploring ways in which I can continue to be creative and express myself in 4D objects and texts. I’m proud to announce that the Rauschenberg Foundation awarded me with an emergency medical grant for which we are very grateful. We are also very thankful to friends, family, and supporters for providing essential contributions to help over the past couple of years.

I thought this would be a good time to invite you to explore the numerous projects and exhibitions I have created over the years, catalogued online.

Here are some links to get you started:

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Select a page and create a visual link to it. Learn more

News

AFH 2025 Holiday Special

AFH 2025 9 x12 x5 Holiday Special

PRESS RELEASE

Art for Human and Astoria-based artist and writer Paul McLean are happy to announce a special Holiday offer on select 12” x 9” paintings from McLean’s VyNIL Cycle. Five original art works from the series will be available for purchase to friends, family and collectors, via the AFH social media portals on the Facebook and Instagram platforms through January 1, 2025, at a significantly reduced price. The selection includes samples from the Topos, 4D Quantities, WorkNet and Currents, Flow + Reproduction sub-series, completed between 2016 and the present. The archival medium for these brilliant and colorful works is Flashe vinyl paint by Lefranc Bourgeois, which gives the art a distinctive matte finish and graphic intensity. AFH and Paul McLean periodically presents special, limited-time offers and discounts in appreciation for those of you who have supported his art and projects in the past and continue to do so. For additional information, please contact Paul or Lauren McLean by email, phone or DM.

ART

CFR #43, , 4D Quantites #6 | Flashe Vinyl on Canvas | 12” x 9” | 2019 | $800 (+ $125 shipping and packing)

CFR #20 | Flashe Vinyl on Canvas | 12” x 9” | 2019 | $800 (+ $125 shipping and packing)

CFR #45, , 4D Quantites #8 | Flashe Vinyl on Canvas | 12” x 9” | 2019 | $800 (+ $125 shipping and packing)

WorkNet Study #1 | Flashe Vinyl on Canvas | 12” x 9” | 2019 | $800 (+ $125 shipping and packing)

Topos #8 | Flashe Vinyl + Golden Acrylic (Underpainting) on Canvas | 12” x 9” | 2019 | $800 (+ $125 shipping and packing)

Paper 2025

Text by Paul J. McLean

INTRODUCTION

It’s tempting to begin with a chronicle of my lifelong relationship with paper, with the tools of the sketch, the model, the drawing. I think at this point in the life journey, the initial impulse is reflective. One is prone to recount all the episodes and examples of a thing, a type, the connection with whatever it is, as it has unfolded over time. Of course, such an exercise can prove educational, should one be situated amongst students, or those prone to expand understanding of a shared interest. However, I am inclined to be more specific and focus on the current phase of development in the craft and practice, this particular point in the evolution of the 2D art aspect. Keeping in mind that this work is fundamental and extends to most other areas: like animation; composition; vision; framing; and so on.

"Screen #1 Sym Cell + Pattern | 1200 px | 2024

ABOUT PAPER 2025

As of this writing, I have completed a dozen and a half of the projected 100 or so small works on paper (and a few digital pieces) that will comprise the series. I therefore have a sense of the project, its direction, the flow. We will see. There may be some forays into figuration along the way, and other oblique content moves. Maybe some landscape and objective representation to come. For now, I’ll be commenting on interesting features and realizations that arise from or emerge in — “appear” perhaps is a better word — the earliest phase of completion.

"Thing #7 Sym Cell + Pattern | 1200 px | 2024

∞

To begin. The sets as denoted by title extend from previous series, such as WovenForm, Grid, Ellipticals, Symmetric(s), and the Anthromatons or Homo Generators (a nod toward my Thinker-mentor Wolfgang Schirmacher). The graphic styles in each sub-series can be traced back over the past few decades in my work. Some imply rendering in 3D materials, others suggest movement such as rotation or sliding and shifting. The mechanical is often referenced or alluded to. Tribal design (e.g., blankets, rugs, pottery or decoration) should be acknowledged by the artist as precursive. There’s more context to add (always), but that’s enough for now.

As the Paper 2025 series progresses, I have become aware of a facet of the work that I wouldn’t say is new, but rather that it is in these small paintings and drawings, for whatever reasons, more clear to my eye. That is, that these pieces map the “currents” that operate in the complex 4D paintings I produce, at the level of the subterranean. Having more or less always rejected the presets or rules of Western tradition composition, and other traditions, too, I have built paintings that suggest an idiosyncratic approach toward filling the usually geometric parameters that define and frame “art” in that lineage. The tension between containment and liberation from restraint is a major thread in the contemporary, but my proclivities have for a long time bent toward the post-contemporary. My formal and technical training — at this juncture not really divisible from what I would call LOVE of art, meaning exclusively painting and drawing, within the brackets of a certain art history — presuppose a level of acceptance of the rectangular, triangular and circular formats. From very early on, I described my program as “the figure on abstraction.” Over the past forty-five years of painting, I haven’t veered far offline from that description. The frequently speculative representation of people, places and things in my art owes as much to comics and the moving image, as it does to a strictly art historical model. That said, the worldly and otherworldly mesh in which the subject and object intermingle in Western art does not preclude the imagination from its natural shift toward the Dream.

If the reader will forgive the pun, we ought to get something straight, here. My art is intentionally non-geometric in its most recent (abstracted) configurations. By which I mean, literally, that I have over the past several years eschewed the tools, the mechanics of the edge and line. In the VyNIL series, there is no deployment of the ruler. The refinement of forms is a function of brush proficiency, a function of hand and eye coordination, for the purposes of provisional perception. The visualization plays on the preconception of the viewer, whose graphic preferences have been shaped by exposure to virtual, digital imaging and formats. Mine is a strategy that induces the dimensional domain of the new media that has become ubiquitous in the cultural field, as the given precept for the visible communication. I tacitly adhere to the idea that art requires no linguistic complement. Painting and drawing as art do or should not require language to be directly transmitted to the viewer, in my view. To echo Frank Stella, what you see is what you get. That said, I also believe that there is more to the visible than what the eye can see. This is a matter of ontology, of experience, conveyed via the observable, in happening, or event and being. Beyond the sensual encounter, we are also moved by other dynamics and forces, touched by what is not discernible as the strictly physical. For us humans, optics and interpretation are inextricably intermixed or -linked. The medium for that linkage is awareness. I suspect that the general resistance to free designs derives from deep psychological, ideological and social inhibitions, inhibitions which I have always felt mostly immune from. If I had to venture an informed guess, I might admit, though, that I have nevertheless remained somewhat fixated on the tensions common to my generation, and those immediately preceding and following it, instead of surrendering to the potential infinite creative freedom suddenly and readily available in this moment. Not that I have shied from exploring the novel potentialities, which manifest obviously in computer- and network-based art, performance, installation, environmental- or experiential art, or time-based production, etc. Those who have followed my artistic evolution or collaborated with me on multi-dimensional and -disciplinary projects know the opposite is true. It is that, in the completion phase of my art life, I have discovered the joys of simplicity, in the dictum of less-is-more. The affinity with simple stuff is informed by the consciousness of inference. Complexity is revealed through contingency, and I know longer put in upon myself to document or exhaust all options latent in a thing or situation. More and more, I am satisfied, with some exceptions, in recognizing the mystery of the thing making itself, the power of process to manifest outcomes that defy the dictum of surface, the concrete and the causal. What is possible is not necessarily obvious in what has already materialized, even to one who is fluent in the signs of realization and actualization. The inflection of chaos and chance fail to encompass the phenomenon of becoming. On a related vector, I have attained a position of comprehensive curiosity about the qualities of knowing and not-knowing, as they pertain to art, and by extension, the other formal means of expression. If there is a valid regret in the singular and finite existence, it is that one does not witness necessarily the finish of what one notices has started in the world. On the other hand, in art, the beginning and end are unified in a single object-thing, denoted by the signature. A kernel. At its best, then, art is a gesture at the true universal, if not the truth itself, which for anyone is conjectural. In other words, it is a sign of humanity (one human) conscious of and believing in truth, and worthwhile, meaningful and valuable, as such. And like all signs, a frail gesture of the mortal being, presumptuous of timelessness. Like a tuning.

October 28, 2024, Astoria, Oregon

True Blue

“Meta-Elements Objects Series (Blue)” Sym Cell | 1200px x 1200px

TRUE BLUE

By Paul McLean

cerulean

blue-lit halo above his lapis lazuli dome, blue birds, western jays
nesting in hair dyed powder blue, listening to the blues, grooving
to Howlin’ Wolf and Johnny Winter “I’m a M-A-N!” dancing in bleu
robes of gallic franc royalty, crown of glittering gold + tavernier,
Virgin-powered, blue-blooded, 440—490 nanometre, face-painted
gorm ceilteach, targe in one hand, a claymore in the other

peering through American Windows in Chicago, I asked the artist
if he had a favorite blue hue, but there was no sound at all anymore.
pale blue eyes of the northern hunters, piercing the air like arrows,
gliding through the waves, blue gray dolphins dancing alongside
amongst the spouting breath of blue whales, yon smashing splashing
tail, listening rapt to the mourning, haunting Southside song

if Lennon’s round spectacles had blue lenses, not rose-colored ones
thinking of oceans & heavens, or the bottomless pool, porcelain glyphs, true
my boy, just old enough to string words into sentences, Lachlan
told us, before he came into his body, there, he was a blue orb
then arrived here on the liquid blue ball, like any child, wondering
Why is the sky Egyptian? Why not Savoyan or Argentinian? The blue
team prevails in the Civil War. Peacocks, periwinkles, sapphires.

ultramarine

blue, period. color keeps space between it or any name, without
question in the mind of the beholder, but which blue? Yves had his
Idea, not mine. On the job in LA, scooping with silver-plated spoon
leftovers, carefully transferred to clear plastic baggies, then applied
to canvas in Austin, asking her to come watch, while the paint was still
wet, so beautiful we wept, at the easel, her hand on my shoulder,
Radiohead on the CD player, soft in the perfect dusk Texas light.
She quit her job and became an artist

Inky Pthalo or Prussian blue. angels, zipping through the air. dappled
daubed, brushed, stroked, stained. it’s all in yer head Gorillaz sed.
covers up to his neck in the poochy futon bed, phone disconnected
he slips past the veil into dreaming, where everything tonight is azure.
superblue moon 2024, blue state convention, speaker on the floor.
signs of unrest, lightning flashes, thunder rumbles, mountains of ash,
civilization crumbles, no right to choose, the best always lose, police
form a blue line, kettling the crowd, clouds of gas and smoke, in neon.
Columbia blue, helmets, a party awash in cash, crashing, smashing

poets both romantic and suicidal, indulge blue reverie. the connection
is not coincidence. parallel fields of indigo and cornflower. my supply
comes in paste or gel. you hide yours between the sheets of a big
book, not on a screen, in a movie or film, where secrets disappear, only
to change, again, into nights, then dawn, as Time begins unraveling,
becoming clay, schools of fish, a heron, in harmony with tides, lovers.
neutral primary blue. rich and fulsome. rolled up & hugged to your breast,
a bruise, a teardrop, a glimpse of a moment long past, a tint of the skin,
unbreathing, unbound, a lost toy, never to be found, an idle fantasy,
or so she imagined, as she turned in the turquoise blue gown, glaring
at her blind mother in disgust, a shade in a shadow, whose tune
has no player, nor instrument, whose scent is rust, decay and dread,
the cage door ajar, a child calling to an empty house, yard and street,
no sax on the rooftop, not a care in the world, no meat and mutton
to eat, unframed & unfollowed, unfriended & ghosted, today’s NPC.

cobalt

blue chip. who doesnt love Pantone swatches, millions of colors
in Photoshop, web-ready blues? I know I do. the optics, the science,
chemistry, physics of blue. psychological preferences on the spectrum
of the visible. infinite blue. natural, never-the-same twice or ever. we
experience blue, the effect of blue, perceptual, sensual. designer,
artificial blues, the eliciting of emotion, quantified blue, the blues
of many names, belonging to place, people, to things. blue pills.

personal blue. you imagine the world all one, made of many blues.
it can never be so. maybe another planet, with a different history,
similar but not, subtly different memories, the tones off just a bit.
we dont inhabit a blue machine, a fabricator of blue content, dusky
or deep, enveloped by blue context, unfolding in its peculiar
frequencies, absent red, yellow influence, never quite black or
white, not bewildered or besmirched by greens, oranges or purple.
the gels in the cans above the stage for this performance are not
exclusively blue. the chorus sings tunes besides the blue ones.
cool blue, soothing, calm. harmonious blue. underwater breathing.
a guitar player, yes, but the melody is starry night. i have loved
Vincent’s blues, and also Miro’s. Rothko knew about blue. Blue
is not easy to paint, which is why YK blue is a good answer for
the 20th century. the logic of blue is itself, not anything else, a
thing of which every child is aware, every baby born who first
looks upon life’s reality with blue-tinted eyes, freshly minted,
heaven-sent, a gift, like water, like air, not crying yet, just here.

“Meta-Elements Objects Series (Blue)” Sym Pattern | 1200px x 1200px

SUMMERTIME BLUES

“Currents, Flow and Reproduction Series #140 Blue Series #21 (Mega-Elements #1)” | 48" x 36" | Flashe Vinyl on Canvas | 2020 | $5000

SUMMERTIME BLUES

INTRODUCTION

Welcome to the nexus of information on “Summertime Blues,” which provides a comprehensive overview of artist Paul McLean’s Blue colorway for his VyNIL Cycle, details on individual artworks available for discount purchase during the online flash sale, an artist statement, a description of the show objectives, images of additional pieces in the series, context (i.e., theory, references, etc.) for the works, more about the artist, his motivations, intentions and influences, and McLean’s vision for the VyNIL Cycle and Blue sequences.

Blue Hybrid #1 Sym Pattern | 1200px x 1200px | 2024

PRESS RELEASE

For Immediate Release in All Media

Valubl Projx and Art for Humans are pleased to present “Summertime Blues,” an online show and sale of “Blue Hybrid” paintings by Astoria, Oregon-based artist Paul McLean. From August through September 2024, we will be offering discounted pricing for selected pieces created by the artist from 2020-21. Images of individual artworks will be posted daily on AFH social media, and supplemental information, including additional available “Blue” series paintings by McLean will be published on the AFH Mystic Novad website.

CONTACT:

Paul + Lauren McLean

EMAIL:

artforhumans@gmail.com (Paul)
laurengmclean@gmail.com (Lauren

PHONE/TEXT:

(615) 491-7285 (Paul)
(916) 206-6564 (Lauren)

DM/AFH SOCIAL MEDIA:

Facebook: /artforhumans
Instagram: @valubl

WEBSITE:

www.mysticnovad.com

BLUE HYBRIDS

NOTES ON BLUE HYBRIDS GALLERY: All paintings displayed above are 12” or less in their longest (vertical) dimension. All are created with Flashe (vinyl) paint. The substrates are (mostly) canvas, a few are Flashe applied to multimedia, one (#19) to wood. All are priced the same: $550 (Dated 2020-1).

ABOUT “SUMMERTIME BLUES”

SUMMARY

“Summertime Blues” is a Valuabl Projx | Art for Humans Production.

“Summertime Blues” is an online show and sale of Astoria, Oregon-based artist Paul McLean’s Blue Hybrid series of Flashe vinyl paintings created in 2020-21. The Blue Hybrid series belong to McLean’s VyNIL Cycle opus, which consists of four phases: Network; Work Net; Currents, Flow + Reproduction; and the Cycle of Completion. The Blue Hybrids are part of the third phase, Currents, Flow + Reproduction (CFR), and sub-categorized by the artist as Meta-Element artworks. “Summertime Blues” will focus on the Blue Hybrids, which are small paintings, all of which are 12” or less in their longest dimension. Most are painted on canvas, though some are over-paintings on pre-existing (often framed) artworks from the Cowboyz + Cowgirlz series, and others. McLean documented the creation of the Blue Hybrids via AFH social media (Facebook and Instagram). The Blue colorway in the CFR phase of VyNIL also includes medium-sized paintings on museum board (nodes and bundles), a large canvas, a framed work on panel, as well as compositions on vinyl records. The framed work and the vinyl records were exhibited at the artist’s exhibit at Made In Astoria in 2023. Otherwise, none of the artworks featured in “Summertime Blues” have been previously shown.

Currents, Flow and Reproduction Series #137 Blue Series #20 [Hybrids (Meta-Elements) #15] | $1500 | 15” x 15.5” | Flashe (Vinyl) on Masonite, Framed | 2020

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Paul McLean is an artist, writer and thinker living and working in Astoria, Oregon. He has studied at the University of Notre Dame, Claremont Graduate University and the European Graduate School. Mclean was exhibited in the USA and abroad, including solo shows at Yarger|Strauss (Beverly Hills), SLAG Contemporary (Bushwick) and David Lusk (Nashville). His writing has appeared in the Brooklyn Rail and ArtInfo. His projects have been covered by LA Times and Artnet. His analytic and theoretical focus is on 4D/Dimensional systems.

BLUE NODES

Blue Nodes #1-8 | Variable Dimensions, circa 40+” x 30+” | Flashe (Vinyl) on Museum Board | $2000 | 2020

BLUE HYBRIDS

Artist Statement

The impetus for the Blue Hybrids series is not singular. Let me explain. After my family and I relocated to Astoria, Oregon from Bushwick (Brooklyn, New York), my son Lachlan had his own bedroom next to ours in our house. Blue was his favorite color. I invited him to pick out some art for the walls, and he responded by asking me to paint blue paintings for his bedroom. I said, “Sure!” And that is how the series got rolling.

There’s more to the story, though. At that juncture in the VyNIL Cycle, I had more or less settled on a set of recurring forms in the paintings. These consisted of more than two dozen simple shapes, some geometric, others alphabetic, and a few, like the feather, that evoked the natural world less abstractly. I thought of these in terms of iconography without overt association or rule-based meaning. I was not interested in establishing a visual language as such. There is more to say about this, but for this artist statement, that is sufficient for our purposes.

I had a subterranean impulse to animate the icons, imagining a morphing sequence of these shapes, evocative of dance. For art historical references, I thought of Picasso’s blue period, Giuseppe Arcimboldo’s famous and weird painting, “Vertumnus,” and the Matisse cut-outs. As the reader might deduce from the short list (there were loads of other referents, some of which I will mention below) I was bent toward figuration, although my theoretical frame had more affinity with pre-figurative thinking. I was also envisioning the iconograms as sketches for 3D models and sculptures. The full schematic I imagined as an immersive environment containing graphic elements, suffused color produced by lighting arrays, blue audio, sculptural forms, autonomous paintings, murals and wall treatments, projections and monitors displaying animations and movies and more.

I have great respect for modernist formal painting and sculpture (e.g., Miro, Calder, Mondrian, et al.), and I believe that influence is in play in the Blue Hybrids. Another source of inspiration was graphic design from the inter-War period. I have a long love affair with modularity and rock piles, such as those at Joshua Tree. Reviewing the paintings for this project, I remembered questioning whether, then how, the icons might touch each other. The phenomenon of contact and exchange or relation was an artistic and thematic consideration, in the Blue Hybrid series, but in the VyNIL Cycle in general. Finally, I was thinking about musical notation as a living language, and this in spite of my resistance to the explicitly linguistic, to resorting to sign and symbol as a visual crutch.

If there is an aesthetic nomenclature for the Blue Hybrids, it might involve some conjunction of the recursive, the minimal, the reductive. However, these keywords are contradicted by the painting process I employed in the paintings — which is additive. I don’t at all have a problem with such contradictions, I think because of the presence or consideration of time in my art, operating on an instructive or constructive basis. The structure of the image is similar to a snap shot, with the viewer unable to determine by visual clues whether the composition or configuration is evolving or decaying. Perhaps I am proposing an instant between the two poles of appearance and disappearance. For some reason, blue seems to me to be the optimum color to portray such a moment. I did conduct trials of other colors (reds, greens, yellows, etc.), but none seemed to have the same visceral quality or intensity of the blues.

Blue is associated naturally with sky and water. Here at the furthest northwest tip of Oregon, blue is atmospheric in a way that is unique in my experience. The color suffuses the environment, and for myself and I would say many others (based on anecdotal surveys among visitors to the regions and locals), this suffusion extends metaphorically to mind state, particularly during the long, cold, rainy winter season, which encompasses late fall and much of the spring. I have wondered whether my Scottish heritage predisposes me to this place. I do know that the Flashe palette of blue hues pops very specifically here, on a white background. I find the interplay of Ceruleans, Ultramarines, Cobalts, etc., wonderful, and emotive, especially when juxtaposed with Teal and Veridians or Aqua, or even Pthalos. I have also wondered whether this is partly due to the cascading stories of fires and heatwaves associated with global climate change. After all, there are just as many news reports of hurricanes and floods.

BLUE VINYLS

Blue Vinyls #1 + 2 | 12” diameter | Flashe (Vinyl) on Vinyl Record | $550 | 2020

OBJECTIVES

I described above my idea for a blue immersive art experience. At this point, though, I have completed half a hundred of these paintings, sufficient for an exhibit. “Summertime Blues” provides an opportunity to pitch that concept to qualified dealers, gallerists and curators. I will note that such an exhibit could conceivably be scaled up somewhat, by adding a few larger art works to go with those already finished. Those interested in the project should contact me via email, phone or through AFH social media DM, to discuss options, timelines, logistics and other considerations.

When launching “Summertime Blues” I thought to cap sales of individual artworks at 4-5 Blue Hybrids. I will stipulate to those purchasing the art that consequent to any sale, the buyer should agree to permit the inclusion of the purchased painting in the speculative “Blue” VyNIL show. I already make that stipulation on sales of the VyNIL Cycle artworks (that they remain available for exhibition, should the collected works be slated for display in a significant venue in the future). However, these matters of course are open for discussion, and not set in stone. Alternatives will be entertained on a case by case basis.

Currents, Flow and Reproduction Series #191 Colors Series #15 (Blue Series #51) [Meta-Elements Object-Study] | 24” x 18” | Flashe (Vinyl) on Multimedia on Paper | $1000 | Date: 2020

BLUE MEGAS, NODES + VINYLS

Artist Statement

MEGA-ELEMENTS #1 + META-ELEMENTS #15

“Mega-Elements #1” (pictured above at the beginning of this post) to my mind is one of my most accomplished paintings. I hold Blue Hybrid (“Meta-Elements #15,” ME15 hereafter ) with the same regard, albeit for different reasons, I think. I will try here to explain myself, although I am not entirely confident of my ability to adequately do so. Mega-Elements #1 (ME1 hereafter) is composed similarly to other paintings of roughly similar dimensions in the Currents, Flow + Reproduction series (CFR hereafter). Visually, the painting consists of repetitions of the iconographs spread all over the vertical rectangular picture plane. As I recall, the Flashe blue hues are evenly distributed throughout. The non-rule rule was I would not repeat any shape + color combination. I doubt the casual viewer would guess at the level of concentration necessary to successfully distribute the elements of the painting on the base color. I have described the process metaphorically as high-order mathematics, or Thinking (i.e., thinking for in rigorous philosophical pursuits). Whatever one’s level of confidence, precision and accuracy in rendering, coupled with an awareness of the visibility of each move made in the execution of the composition, generates a certain creative anxiety in my experience. Some artists are better at this than others. Speaking for myself, the requisite focus over an extended period, plus the physical strenuousness of the mark-making, done mostly with tiny brushes and movements, proved very demanding, stretching my abilities beyond previous limits. I am not here applying to the reader for sympathy, because the creation of ME1 for me was an almost transcendent experience. Signing the completed work was an act suffused with joy, with a sense of accomplishment, the right kind of artistic pride. I live for such moments. They are why I enthusiastically return the studio again and again. I wouldn’t like for the reader to somehow mistake the above account as overly technical. After decades devoted to art and its making, one comes to the realization that the spiritual aspects of artist life, such as they are (which I feel inadequate to fully communicate IYKYK), must rate at least as important as the technical, social or professional aspects.

As for ME15, the technical intensity of the composition + paint application was a radically different thing. Compared to ME1, the painting was done in a flash, it seemed. This is not exactly true, of course. In fact, it isn’t true at all, in the case of either painting, if you induct their production/exhibition histories into the accounting. Which is to say, if you consider both as 4D paintings resolved over time, from start to completion. Let me explain. Both ME1 and ME15 originated as paintings in the mid90s. ME1 began its art life as one of my Scottish series; ME15 as one of the Tobacco Road paintings. Each has been added to and appeared in multiple showings since then, in several iterations. Sometimes, fairly rarely, I have made paintings whose art lives extend this way, paintings which seem to resist resolution, even if they might temporarily seem so resolved (and I have even signed them, signifying as much). These two artworks, then, were twenty-five years in the making. ME15 seemed to practically resolve itself, relatively immediately, when I commenced to rework it for the Blue/CFR sequence. I recall feeling quite shocked. And also overwhelmed by the beautiful simplicity of the composition, which I would characterize as harmonious, even melodic. The picture in its over-painted pre-existing frame (by Ambiance, Nashville, circa 1988-9) reminded me of master modernist paintings I had the opportunity to art-handle for major collections, while employed by LA Packing, Crating and Transport, or during my stint at Goldleaf Framemakers of Santa Fe.

BLUE VINYLS + META ELEMENTS OBJECT STUDY

Since the conception of the VyNIL Cycle (VC hereafter), I have been including paintings on vinyl records in the sequence, because it just seemed to make sense to do so. All of the VC vinyls came from the same trove of albums someone had left outside our Bushwick loft building I think in 2019. I had been planning to somehow acquire a number of 12” records for the project, so, imagine my delight at discovering the perfect amount by my doorstep! At such moments, one feels the support of the universe in one’s creative endeavors! The titles were wonderful, too, by my standards of musical taste and ironic sensibilities as well (check the archives for amplification). The vinyl on vinyl paintings evolved. The earliest efforts were quite complex, but became more so as the VC progressed. By 2020, the series had shifted and the compositions were simplified, and demonstrated my interests in refining the iconographs and minimizing or refining the components in the picture plane. The vinyls of this period reflected the shift. Keep in mind that I envisioned displaying the vinyl-paintings on spinning turntables mounted on the wall, or displayed in arrays or suspended from the ceiling by filament, as I did in Heartless01, circa 2000-1. These works are meant to be presented as kinetic installation elements.

The Meta Element Object Study belongs to the. series of VC works on paper, beginning with the Card series and continued through the Cycle in a various iterations. There are several convergent ideas at play in the configuration. I was thinking first of the Petri dish, of life contained within parameters for study. I was also thinking about digital file systems and information flow. Thirdly, I was thinking about ponds or living bodies of water, maybe also about swimming pools, and children at play. Finally, for now, I was thinking about screens and electronic content. On the conceptual level, I would disclose that there is much to this configuration than these four ideas or themes. For the purposes of this statement, though, that disclosure is sufficient. Further, I would share with the reader that I sense that the Meta-Element Object Study points to a new seam or thread, which I might pursue in future studio projects.

BLUE NODES

The Nodes have, as a practical matter, deep roots in my work, beginning as best as I can recall with the simple wooden building sets of my youth, which are still common today. When I endeavored to learn Photoshop for artistic purposes, I could see the connection between those basic kid’s building blocks and the digital tools developed for graphics software. In my painting and drawing practice, really, from my earliest efforts at developing my own iconography, coded image-objects or symbols, the line enclosed by filled or open round points at either end was a staple. I decided it would refer to the Timeline, or Lifeline, or Deadline. When I began using maps in my travels, the start-to-stop mark-making when plotting a journey added another layer of meaning to the iconography. Later, in the 2010s, the circle or disc connected by linear forms reappeared as margin doodles made during lectures I attended at EGS. By 2020 or so, I began to take them more seriously, making pencil sketches on grid paper in between painting sessions. In VC paintings (and this built on previous realization) I began thinking of the barbell shape, the sideways “8” or infinity symbol, and map-timeline iconograph as inter-related forms. In the Node series, though, I was thinking of information networks, of rhizomatic systems and other matrices for dispersion, communication, travel and movement and so on. Of the several color ways I tested, I found the Blues more to my preferences, although I believe that is a subjective matter.

Blue Hybrid #1 Sym Cell | 1200px x 1200px | 2024

N-fusion Study #2: Art and Storytelling

N-fusion Study #2 Sym Cell, 1200 x 1200 px (2024)

Art and Storytelling

Notes on N-fusion Study #2

By Paul McLean

Background and Contextual Overview

The impetus for this essay is an inquiry by the purchaser of the painting, my childhood buddy John Price. We are both older gentleman, now. His life course did not veer through the art world. As we refreshed our friendship through a social media DM thread, John expressed interest in N-fusion. Not unexpectedly, he asked for more information on the artwork, along the lines of “What is it about?” Or, “What is the inspiration for it?” Or, “What is the thinking behind it?” in other words, “What is its concept?’ (Specifically, John asked, “…what inspired this piece?”)

I have made many paintings, and sold quite a lot of them over the years. Earlier in my career, I worked as a sales representative in art galleries, sometimes employed by the owners, sometimes in galleries or art spaces that I owned or directed or both. Very commonly, buyers are curious to know about the artist’s ideas, the circumstances of the art’s coming into existence. To satisfy the collector or potential collector’s curiosity, an artist might share a story or narrative that becomes the context for the art in question. The presenter or dealer will frequently assist in the contextualization process. We know that once a person purchases the art and installs it in their home or office, they will often have the opportunity to share the work with friends, family and acquaintances. The art’s storyline in this way is passed through to others. Art can also serve as a conversation-starter, a social catalyst. Art and its contextual narrative can spark interaction, beyond its visual impact and presence.

For collectible artists, resources are deployed to consolidate the story attached to the artist and art. Writers, critics, art historians, dealers, fellow artists and so on are invited or recruited to construct a bespoke story or narrative, which is made available to any interested in the artist and work. These days, social media and networks serve to disperse and amplify the art in context. Lines of definition are blurring, and it is now a thing that the networked aesthetic and metadata can even be recognized and acknowledged as the art itself. In this scheme, no actual art object is necessary. The context to a degree supplants the object and its embedded content. We have seen virtual art simulacra become sufficient for the purposes of market and discourse, centered in computer and communications device technology. Art comes across to a viewer in the new economy as an aggregate of image and context, combining in a merged field as hybridized content, with speculative potential. Words like “artificial,” “synthetic” and “intelligence” or “machine” are the parlance of those domains. Subject and object co-exist in a compressed thing - both immaterial and material - to which the identifying term “art” is applied. The NFT boom (and bust) tested the viability of provenance overtaking the importance of the art itself. Prompt-generated art has dramatically disrupted established notions of authorship and collaboration, and raised important questions about artistic authenticity, derivation and compensation. With online AI widgets, the text in the form “makes” the art!

A great example of Art and Storytelling!

If the rules of storytelling in relation to art are evolving, or at least changing, a student of the history of talking about art would be, speaking for myself, should be, inclined to admit that the language pertinent to art is and has always been changeable. Thinkers, who are inevitably wordsmiths also, have turned their attention to art, since Plato did so in imagining his Republic. One cannot know, but one can speculate that the earliest expressive use of paint and what we think of as basic art materials (stone, wood, minerals, fabric and so on) had to have been accompanied by storytelling, or some kind of vocal complement. Maybe, chanting, and dancing, percussion — which are the basic elements of ritual, of what we call culture or society. It seems a natural human function, peculiar to our most common, communal arrangements. Basically, people tend to develop ways of living that revolve around storytelling and images rendered concretely. The embellishments are as colorful Nature itself, and as variable as human beings, ourselves. Yet, it is important to recognize that one of art’s unique qualities is its autonomy as an object, accessed through the sense of sight first, then touch, possibly. Pre-contemporary art exists a priori to its interpretation and its nominal definition. Such art can be seen and not heard, can be unspeakable. It can be experienced in silence.

∞

Another wrinkle on contemporary art storytelling practice involves valuation on its own terms. The story becomes the details of art’s quantification over time, and its speculative value. Above I mentioned art sales in relation to art talk. There are definitely levels to that game. At the top of the commercial hierarchy of art, the lingo (i.e., “art-speak”) applied to art is similar to that sort which pertains to many speculative or risky investments or assets. Inflected by academic or institutional formalism, the word-smithing for venture art can be as obscure as legalese or medical terminology. Signature art in art management circles is not uncommonly described as branded, and such art is analyzed on the basis of return-on-investment (ROI). Art in some circles and exchanges is reduced to its numbers, and specific logistical factors that affect availability and acquisition: e.g., location, legal status, current ownership, etc. It is tempting for me to refer to such art as market product, or industrial art, or commercial art, although this last descriptor is confusing due to the historical meaning. Design and graphic art for commercial purposes used to operate in a silo demarcated from fine art. No longer is this necessarily true. The borders are blurry.

What’s hot or not is the grist for the international art fair mill, whose aficionados routinely rely on consultants or other specialist services to determine whether art is worth investing in. In this domain of the art world, spectacle drives the quasi-public coverage, while a preponderance of the actual economic activity unfolds privately. The mechanics of this art exchange remains mostly opaque and highly unregulated, situated as it (the art market) is in the broader international economy of the global-high-net-worth class. There is much more to say about this phenomenon, but I have written and spoken about extensively elsewhere.

Also within the spectrum of contemporary art storytelling, we see art used as a vehicle for movements committed to reforming society. The program of reformations extends to the individual member of society, coming from all directions, through media and social or interpersonal relations. Generally speaking, art and culture are co-opted by movements to facilitate the alteration of perception and imagination, in general and particular. The prospects of such efforts aside, the advocates of art in the service of ideology may be pushing either reactionary or revolutionary visions, although delivery systems may obscure one from the other. The tooling of art follows protocols that by now are centuries old, with roots in Catholicism. Propaganda methods may be refitted for a great range of issues, including product marketing. Propaganda deploys art and artists as specialists with a unique profile for cultivating emotional support for ideologically-based movements, to sell product or expand the reach of the markets, or to rationalize or justify the administration and exercising of power, in its manifold iterations. Presently, art is practically fractal and fungible in its utility to the powerful, and to those who desire power (or inclusion and acceptance in the administration of power). It can be hard to tell for the casual viewer what the art on view is intended to do, or communicate, and who or what might be motivating and cultivating its creation or conception. Art has come to rely on disclosures for necessarily clarification. Unfortunately, given disclosures themselves can be misleading, or obtuse and in need of additional clarifications. The contextual narratives at any stage of dissemination can be the cause of controversy, by intention or accident.

From a series of woodcuts (1545) usually referred to as the *Papstspotbilder* or *Papstspottbilder*, by Lucas Cranach, commissioned by Martin Luther. Title: Kissing the Pope's Feet. German peasants respond to a papal bull of Pope Paul III. Caption reads: "Don't frighten us Pope, with your ban, and don't be such a furious man. Otherwise we shall turn around and show you our rears". (Wikipedia)

In the midst of great technological change and historic shifts in the distribution of global power and information, identity has emerged as a focal point of tension. This is especially true post-Freud, in the 20th and 21st centuries. The faceting of self is accelerated by the virtualization of post-industrial, post-colonial — post-contemporary — existence. Adding to the dimensional stresses on Self is a burgeoning planetary awareness of challenging environmental conditions, and the prevalence of crisis and catastrophe due in part to climate change. The digital, virtual faceting of identity is ubiquitous for a large portion of the global population, i.e., those connected via social media and mobile communication networks. The rest of the population is increasingly rendered by powerful, authoritarian forces into euphemistic categories of exclusion, relegated to sub-class status, e.g., “nonessential,” as we saw during the pandemic. People(s) are involuntarily registered or identified by empowered entities and individuals and demographics groups as “precarious,” “unfortunates,” “deplorables,” or even “expendable,” in extreme cases. Art in this scenario becomes a tool of mediation, justification and rationalization, utilized by actors, agents and operators committed to polar sectionalizing of populations, to turning one side or person against an other, or staking claim to ideological territories, through signs, symbols, words and images. The subtext may be racial, moral, political, and so on.

∞

I bring these points up to highlight the complicated job description art is currently asked to perform. Art is being fashioned into a lens through which global dynamics are to be witnessed and interpreted, or reconciled. In my analysis, I see this trend folding into the fake news and conspiracy theory phenomena, but also the industrial manufacture of imaginary conditions. In the media matrix, art plays a special role. An elliptical field analysis can be helpful in understanding the dynamics of conceptual drift among cultural domains. Such analytics rely on one’s ability to track patterns, frequency and appearances in the media spectrum over time. Take “Zombies” as a media case, for instance. A first point of reference might be art critics Walter Robinson and Jerry Saltz’s diatribes against what they termed “Zombie Formalism.” From there, one can commence a study at more depth of the emergence of the Zombie as a sub-genre in cinema, television and gaming. Eventually, one can sketch critical interpretations as to why zombies have become ubiquitous across entertainment media, and finally in the minds of celebrated art critics of the 2010s. My inconclusive conclusion at the end of the process? I believe the excessive representation of zombies in mass culture over the past several decades to be linked to a real dystopian scenario unfolding (as in rising incidences of homelessness and addiction, of “deaths of despair”). Using this methodology, one can review other media phenomena, which ultimately cross streams with the art world. For examples: The over-representation of law and order/crime content in mass media; the valorization of surveillance and intelligence in enforcement regimes; even the plethora of superhero franchises. Any or all of these can be attributed to systematic campaigns to buttress power structures and their beneficiaries, or normalize the conditions of social devolution, and reinforce command and control apparatuses. Or in the case of “woke” media, to undermine traditional ideas and norms of social reproduction. Art in its broadest definition becomes in this way a battleground in a multi-dimensional conflict. We used to call it “culture war,” but clearly the stakes are bigger. One only has to reflect on the historic Donald Trump scenario for confirmation.

∞

Introducing this essay with the above material leads us back to basic aesthetic questions. First off, “Who is an artist today?” Then, “What is art today?” And “Who and/or What is for?” Eminently pertinent to these questions are these last questions: “How is art made?” And “Why?” Not only do I believe that every artist must answer these questions, I would argue that each work of art is itself an answer to them all. I would further submit that each generation is responsible to face and answer these questions. In a democracy, each generation has a duty to fend off the oppression of art by anyone who would, by whatever means or to whatever ends, seek to superimpose or assign any dictation of art upon the populace. Whether that party is the state, a religion, an oligarchy or aristocracy, or any other inducing power, does not matter. Democracy depends for its existence on freedom of expression, and art occupies the the pinnacle of the free speech hierarchy, whether you imagine that construct as a tower or pyramid, or some other volumetric form. These sentiments risk oversimplifying some very complex issues, as complicated as we are. Art in the framework I map here is inherently democratic and revolutionary, with elements of representation and conflict interwoven in progressive idealism (a paradoxical framing). Art as such is messy, and slow to materialize. It is also inclined to disappear. The distinctive quality of this type of art, however, is that nothing its processes is wasted. For comparison, turn to ideas such as “Creative Destruction” or “Planned Obsolescence.” In the post-contemporary period, ideas of art and creativity are not equivocal, whatever the hype professionals might have us believe.

∞

I like to outline these considerations and concerns at the beginning of any writing project whose subject is art, especially my own. I regard the above contextual remarks as a precursor for dialogue, a point of origin for a rich conversation. One of the objectives I discern for such discourse, is the identifying of conceptual, perceptual and ideological limits to free expression, and establishing the means by which we, in a productive, civil manner, might well breach such limitations. Art does have its subversive side, after all. I have found such exercises in art talk to be invigorating, inspiring, informative and more. At various times, I have been fortunate to participate in fantastic aesthetic banter, and these episodes remain some of my favorite memories of art life. When I am sitting alone in the studio at my easel, I will on occasion recall a vivid snippet of one those spirited exchanges, echoing in my mind — and smile.

N-fusion Study #2 Sym Pattern, 1200 x 1200 px (2024)

Technical Notes

Let’s get right to it. I made and published (more or less weekly) photo documentation of N-fusion as a work in-progress. The panel dimensions are 36” x 24”. I applied a gesso base coat in two layers, adding a third layer of Flashe in a close-to-white tone. The initial layer of pigment to begin the composition consisted of blocks of color. I don’t use a straight edge in the VyNIL Cycle paintings, or any guide or measuring tools. I did not begin with any preliminary sketches. The composition in its entirety, start-to-finish, is improvisational. My casual-causal procedure is intuitive, although this term is not comprehensive as a description. I don’t establish set rules, in the way Steve Roden (one of my CGU instructors) did. Mine is more a game of pretending there are rules where there are none. That said, my art does contain citations of many technical precursors and art historical references. N-fusion, with its layout of ersatz or non-uniform rows and columns in a sloppy grid synchronizes with traditional Western painting fundamentals, for instance. I maintain a running tab of painters in the back of my mind, as I work. Recently, these include Peter Halley and Stanley Whitney, and Robert and Sonia Delaunay, particularly the couple’s paintings made after the 1910 through the 30s and beyond. The list expands to influences like Mondrian and Albers, whose work has been important to me for decades. Because I devote much time and energy to research, which accumulates over time, and have visited many art galleries, exhibitions and institutions to see the art in person, the library or catalog of relevant, referential art and artworks at my disposal for any project by now is relatively massive.

The Net has proved to be an incredible resource to my search-based study for art. A vital aspect of new media-based research is the accidental connection. There is much to relate on this topic, but for this essay, a clipped citation is enough. Net technology has been in my wheelhouse, since the early 90s and Netscape 2.0. I have maintained a fairly open border policy between the virtual art domain and the IRW one over the ensuing decades. My internal creative mechanism is not biased against disciplines like science, network computing or mathematics. Therefore, I get a distinct thrill when I, for example, Google Mr. and Mrs. Delaunay and happen across the Delaunay Triangulation. Inspecting the visual representation of this computational geometric configuration, I respond immediately, because it exhibits qualities that I know through painting. W I do identify as a dimensional (4D) artist since the early 1980s, and this is in part what I’m referring to when I stake that claim. I have written reams on the topic, if the reader is interested (reach out).

My studio painting approach is serial, grounded in trial-and-error. Flow is a term that resonates, with a nod toward another CGU (Drucker School) author and lecturer, Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi. I think though that what I am referring to as flow has more to do with production or creative output than a psychological state. I am certainly not opposed to inter-disciplinary collaboration, crossover intelligence (as the above paragraph demonstrates) or multi-disciplinarity as an academic or practical matter, as anyone familiar with my collective and collaborative work over the past four decades, knows. If nothing else, for God’s sake, it can be fun! That said, I would argue that comparative studies on the quality of creativity among disparate disciplines is conjectural, and has been pursued over the last half century for the wrong purposes to the wrong end. For reasons rooted in institutional validation and self-interest (funding), academic authorities in management studies have found it appealing to conflate their subject with art-based practice and thought. At the risk of being provocative: In my opinion their arguments are rarely compelling, or reciprocal.

There is also the problem with massive consumer portable culture corporations and syndicates (SONY, Disney and YouTube come readily to mind), who have invested billions into campaigns to elevate machine technology by displacing so-called analog or traditional mediums. I think the long-tailed trends of suggesting art function more like a business, a related or contingent ideological messaging strategy, are not beneficial to art as a long-term proposition. Conversely, I find managers’ claims about creativity — using art as a metaphor for what they imagine they do at work, or would like their employees to imagine they do at work or play — to be disingenuous at best, cynical or delusional at worst.

Studio painting of the kind I have known is largely a solitary pursuit. The primary relationships are simple: artist to craft; artist to painting; artist and painting in art history; art and artist to viewer. The dealer, academic and critic all can play vital roles as mediators and interlocutors, helping a viewer appropriately contextualize artwork and artist. The social value of art and artist, as this essay frames it, is, in the post-contemporary period, very much up in the air, like a cloud.

∞

As noted already, N-fusion is one of a series of paintings entitled The VyNIL Cycle, which consists of several hundred pieces in four sub-series, and a bunch of sub-sub-series. Over the course of the past eight or so years I have almost exclusively devoted to this project, a specific practical methodology is one of the things that distinguish these works from previous ones in my oeuvre. The primary structural driver for me with VyNIL is to produce art that embodies a completion phase for my artist life. I have been thinking of these artworks in aspirational terms of legacy, scale, value and more. My objective therefore has been to commit the remainder of my art productive years toward the fulfillment of the vision I have for VyNIL, as a singularly defining body of work. Choices I make with respect to materials, formal composition, scale, consistency among the individual paintings and so on reflect my goal. I wouldn’t expect the reader and viewer to be receptive to these assertions, or make sense of them based on the appearance of any one or bunch of VyNIL Cycle paintings. It’s just how it is.

Techniques and compositional strategies have evolved throughout the Cycle. N-fusion arises out of the body of work. Still, each VyNIL Cycle painting is unique in its own right, and each painting is at the same time one of many. It shares features with others in the set as a whole. The series overall is unified, as mentioned above, by the Flashe vinyl paint, and the limitations of the manufacturer’s line of retail products, as they are made available to a retail buyer/user like me. Stylistically, the Cycle contains many variations. I don’t wish to overwork this point, but I do mean to observe one of the fundamental differences in digital or virtual and analog or actual media. In Real World painting, no perfect copy exists. The nature of kind and type, of sets and cycles, repetition and pattern, in the two realms is not identical. VyNIL engages with these disjunctive realities. It is not a stretch from here to suggest that art in the post-contemporary ought to, because the separation of realities is poignant and existential now. Maybe it always has been for us, but the intersection of programmed and lived experience is undergoing a profound transformation, because of ubiquitous technology, fast global communications and networks.

In the first several years of VyNIL production, I worked primarily straight-from-the-jar, while I became acquainted with the medium’s (Flashe vinyl’s) idiosyncrasies. I learned that some colors required multiple layers of paint to be fully opaque. I discovered I preferred the full opacity generally with Flashe. More translucent finishes were not as attractive, to my gaze. I learned to build layers mindfully, conscious of light-to-dark layering, and the tricks of underpainting, as one does with watercolor, or skin tones in traditional oil painting. I did from the beginning of production create half-tone mixes using the white Flashe paint, which permitted nice, amplifying areas of intensity, when conjoined or otherwise integrated with the full-strength pigment. In the Currents, Flow & Reproduction series, I began to introduce colors combining multiple colors in various tonal intensities. The compositions were toggling between complexity and simplicity, and this seemed naturally or organically to link to my confidence in the color distributions and applications. I am - sorry - painting in broad strokes in my accounting of the technique and evolving series content. As the Cycle progressed, the technical turns from painting to painting might be abrupt or incremental, depending on some internal calculus on my part that really only comes into focus as the sample becomes big enough to reveal the logic of the sequence, such as it is.

Roundabout, a word on substrates. My first experiments with Flashe were applied to small canvases and panels. On a dozen or so of the latter I mounted works on paper with sketches. I tried finishes on those (satin Golden medium), and additional enhancements with other media (ink, pencils, acrylics, etc.) From there, did a sub-series of sixteen small canvases that had figurative elements overlaid on simple abstract backgrounds, with Brice Marden-inspired color-webs. I added Flashe-painted forms that I later called Meta-elements to compositions on wood, made with stamps and Dr. Martin’s ink in patterns. I commenced the Net Work series in earnest with a large professional canvas, and just like that, I was all in. I had secured a posh studio at the border of Williamsburg and Bushwick, and the pace of production was very high.

Once the VyNIL series had taken off, I began to re-appropriate paintings from previous bodies of work, overpainting them with vinyl, sometimes keeping original elements with modifications. This was new for me. I produced sets of very small Meta-element paintings on Italian paper. Mostly, the substrates were canvas, panel and paper. The continuation or conversion experiments were challenging, in that the pre-existing textures required me to adapt the forms and techniques I was settling on for VyNIL, or to find solutions that made the optical effects I wanted possible. The finished (textural) paintings appeared consistent at a distance of 10’ or so, but on closer inspection the viewer would discover that the surfaces were variable from painting to painting, sometimes wildly so. In one sub-series, I overpainted a bunch of what I had called “3D-pixel paintings’” (circa 2006-7) surfaces, assigning single Flashe colors to each legible feature of their acrylic topology.

After we moved from Bushwick (where the series starts) to Astoria, Oregon (where I am working now), we transported the contents of several storage units we had in Upland, California, including a sizable cache of artworks. I pursued the overpainting project in earnest for months. I converted dozens of paintings on panel, canvas and many types of paper into VyNIL output, applying Flashe over a broad range of media and different textures. I reconstituted or rebooted pieces from a string or chain of series that spanned my career to that moment, including (not in chronological order): undergrad and grad thesis shows, Dim Tim, A Prayer for Clean Water, Nagas, Tobacco Road, Bar Codes, Cowboyz, Code Duello, CONTENT, and so on. Ultimately, I became convinced that for my purposes, the optimum substate for Flashe applications was a wood panel with minimal texturing. All that experimentation was invaluable, however. I came to understand all these gestures as formal compression, or flattening, but they also had to do with the conduct of completion.

∞

The color selection process throughout VyNIL production is eccentric in a certain way. I do not establish any formula for color composition. I think of it as a call-and-response thing. The distribution of color across the visual or visible surface throughout the VyNIL Cycle is intuitive, to a degree. Again, this term is only partly satisfactory, because the progression of the painting from session to session involves what I might call inertia or momentum. I have a long-running relationship with color as a practical matter. I have explored color systems and theory; the science of color; color physics and chemistry; studied optics, the mechanics of the visual; even the psychology of color. These days, I don’t think about color, much. I try to put the knowledge of color behind my back. I’m more concerned with acting on my artistic instincts through the painterly application of color to a surface — in a way that’s effortlessly my own. I do possess a Masters degree in fine art, after all.

To sum it up, more or less: When choosing the next color to be applied, I have an idea, based on previous results, about which color is right for the next step in the sequence. The Flashe, as mentioned above, is either used straight from the jar, or I mix colors in containers. After the first several layers, for which I use different flat and round brushes of various sizes, the rest of the paint application is done with very small brushes, mostly “0” gauge. The Flashe paint consistency and chemistry seems to vary from color to color. This impacts my technical approach. Again, familiarity with the medium has come through experimentation and practical experience. To a degree, the medium is a determinant in the painting’s outcome.

“Portrait of Lachlan As a Young Artist” | Flashe Vinyl on Canvas | 24” x 18” (2021)

I am not matching color to anything, usually. I might dance around representation as it pertains to color in art history. When I did my VyNIL portrait of Lachlan, for example, I did want the flesh to be fleshy, as far as that goes, because I was making that artwork for my young son, and I didn’t want him to have any doubts about it. For N-fusion, though, I was after more. I wanted the painting to be subtle color-wise in some of its features, and very overt and contrasty in others. I intended the color to indicate or infer the infinite possibility of color choices, a clue about my thoughts on the linkage between color and infinity. Simultaneously, I desired each color to come across as a beautiful instance of finitude, having a present state, which is not exactly presence, but close to it. The array of color in N-fusion reminds me of poetry, without the literal part. Only the painting itself is literally (itself), meaning “as a whole,” as an object. Its component elements are not objective in the same way. They have multi-dimensional contingency built-in. They are combined in a past tense, and re-combining with every viewing, for every viewer, in each moment, differently, always, as long as N-fusion exists to be and for being seen.

I believe now that I am drifting into the subjective nature of N-fusion, which might also be described as its philosophy, which is like its aesthetics, but not quite exactly so. For me, philosophy of art and aesthetics are like branches of the same knowledge tree. I can share on this, with the disclaimer that I wouldn’t say that painting is about thinking. By the same token, I would say definitively that N-fusion is not really about anything. The only thing real about N-fusion is the painting itself, by which I mean N-fusion the art object, not N-fusion as an image. N-fusion is not like a book at all. I can play with the idea that it is, but a thinker can do that kind of operation with literally anything. I have always found it curious, that philosophy is so intrigued and fascinated by art. Philosophers for millennia now have concerned themselves with art as its mediators and explainers. I don’t like to critique their success or failure in this project anymore. After a decade attempting to compose a dissertation on art, media and philosophy for the European Graduate School, I am satiated with the Mind on Art.

I have come to admire the quixotic pursuit of the right idea, the truth, about art. I have tremendous respect for some of the great philosophers who endeavored to decipher that mystery (art). Art is a chimera, especially in the post-contemporary period, and there are reasons for this. The logic and ethics of art cannot be forced to “settle,” by which I mean, “to coagulate.” At least today we can revel in our situation in a moment in time, when no definition of art is uniformly designated, and no mandate for art is complete or total, if it ever really was. On the flip side of this acknowledgement, we unfortunately or fortunately (depending on one’s political or ideological perspective) have really no guidance on quality or accepted measurements for art’s parameters. This is not an ideal scenario, when it comes to generational transmission of art. If one were to make cry out on the High Line or the ancient streets of Venice, “Can we fellow artsy travelers agree on the principles of art?” …Nobody in all likelihood will rush in to make a list. To continue melodramatically, Is art (and civilization, and mankind, etc.) then doomed to become extinct? N-fusion, if it were about anything, would be about those questions. Since it isn’t, though, as its maker, I would suggest that it IS from my perspective, an appropriate art for a world whose people refuse to decide what art is, or even what kind of art (world) we desire anymore.

As Milo once said, “In the beginning, art and world were one and the same, and we with them.” And this gets at the tragic in post-contemporary art. It is a feeling of longing, and lack of resolution.

Witnessing and Creation

N-fusion Study #2, being the second of two studies, would be a dimensional expansion of the first iteration. The key subset to which N-fusion #2 belongs is the pre-sale/-commission series commenced in 2023. These artworks were programmatic, in that they were created in the studio, chronicled on and sold through Art for Humans (AFH) social media portals (Facebook and Instagram). Moving to Astoria, Oregon in 2018 meant dealing logistically with distance between us and the supporters of my work in New York, LA and elsewhere. I realized in the first year (2019) that the plans I had for setting up shop on the Northwest Coast were not viable. During and after the pandemic and socio-political polarization of 2019 or 2020 through 2022 my professional prospects appeared to be further diminished by shifts in the field. So, I launched a quite muted program of making small-scale paintings, and pre-selling them on the socials to my lists on the platforms. So far, this has proved a successful, if humble, strategy. N-fusion #2 is a much larger painting than the others in the subsidies, but it, too, sold, and in one of the most pleasant ways paintings can sell — to an old friend, an exchange that is serving to renew or refresh the relationship.

N-fusion Study #2 | 36” x 24” | Flashe Vinyl on Panel | 2023-4

Because N-fusion #2 had a priori a format, one might assume that the process of its execution would be functionary, facile or derivative, simply a matter of scaling up the design of N-fusion #1 by design. In dimensional painting, this is not the case. The enlargement of the paintable surface, and the divergence in ratio, entailed that the project in many of its aspects would require reorganization, the adaptation and adjustment of methods and applications. Scale is critical to such a maneuver, but there’s more to it. If one thinks of the vertical x horizontal planar surface of the painting as a field with dimensional aspects, one realizes that the painting will not only consist of 2D forms, but the embedded perspectival illusion of 3D volumes, as well. Further, push-pull configurations for spatial arrays of components must be considered. What I would call native 4d painting infers animation of internal elements in the framing edges of the geometric plane, whether it be rectangular, triangular, circular, or whatever. That is to say, the picture will provide the viewer with the sensation of movement, even though the actual painted image is static. In 4d, we must address space, time, depth and motion, even when the actual viewable surface of the painting is more or less flat.

The perceptual paradox is non-sensical in the literal description, but makes perfect sense in the viewing. The experience of the viewer depends on the scale of the painting, due to the interpretive expectations associating with the optical apparatus. Small paintings activate far-away vision, while big paintings activate the feelings of immersion. Middling paintings, like N-fusion #2, do something else. In an oblique way, I am disclosing the challenge I decided to take on by magnifying the formality of N-fusion #1 and translating it to the larger panel. I understood from the outset, based on practical experience, that the exercise would not be like an arithmetic or automatic operation, but an exponential one. Which turned out to be the case. I began N-fusion #2 in December 2023 and completed it in June 2024. The production timeline was about fourfold longer than those necessary to discharge the smaller studies. In my artist history, I never before exclusively devoted half a year to any single painting. For reference, between 1996-2005, I averaged an exhibition every six weeks to three months! During Art for Humans Gallery Chinatown (2007), we produced 26 exhibits and live art events in roughly ten weeks! N-fusion #2 required me to “level up,” in my easel painting practice. The affected areas in performance include concentration, discipline and patience. Which is funny (LoL), because the typical initial viewer response to the painting is not registering to craftsmanship as rigor. Expressed (initial) viewer reactions have been visceral, more attuned to the wild and boisterous concatenation of colors and shapes than the technical challenges in the making of N-fusion #2 (or #1 for that matter). The more time a viewer spends with the art, however, the more forthcoming are comments on the art’s evident degree of difficulty and technical depth or craftsmanship. I admit to being pleased by this viewer-art dynamic.

∞

In reviewing the painting documentation, and then uncoupling my catalog of memories from the fixed visual references, I discerned a liminal space separating the two. What to make of this — not exactly a disparity, but more like seeing a thing from different angles, or maybe a parallax effect? I surmise that an artist sees the painting, but that is only one facet of the creative act. Painting is a physical action, and throughout the painting of N-fusion #2, my body was wracked with arthritis. I am certain that fact compounded my short-term reflections on the painting’s production. Yet, my recollection of this pain is fading fast, to be displaced by critique, esoterica, and something along the lines of poetic reverie, even amazement. Beyond or post-posteriori these observations, another gaggle of factors and formulations drift into forefront. The blocky composition draws from previous incidences in my work, preceding VyNIL, as in HUM 10 + 1, but within the earlier stages of the VyNIL Cycle as well, as in the large Meta-Element paintings I showed last summer at Made In Astoria’s back room gallery. In N-fusion #2 I did something new.

I introduced sphere fragments irregularly on the blocks’ edges. When I did so, I thought of animation cells. The combination brought to mind the landscape in relation to sun and moon, celestial bodies rising and setting on a plane or horizon line. The pinched ellipse shapes, evocative of teardrop or liquid iconography, hover over the sloppy grid. These shapes are painted in the same hues (from the same batches) used in N-fusion #1. I decided not to add an array of multi-colored ovoid forms, as I did in the first N-fusion study. The multi-colored bamboo-leaf like shapes that appear all over the composition structurally-speaking are bisected color combinations, pointing every which way. I won’t list all the other pre-figurative formal elements, but will outline a few of the primary ones: circles, biscuits (rounded-cornered rectangles), elongated pill-like shapes, many also bisected color combinations, although some of these became much more complicated as the painting progressed. N-fusion #2, by its completion, is not properly comprehended as a simple sum of all these parts, which is to me a critical point, or at least a clue about the method and painting.

The painterly experience for N-fusion #2 at times reminded me of solving a puzzle or a complex equation, and this has often been the case in the more complex VyNIL paintings. My Pattern series (Bushwick, circa 2015-6), exhibited in the “For Paris” memorial show at Dane and Samantha Rex’s Wild Hearts Salon is an important precursor. The methods I am using now are quite different from the Pattern works, in several significant ways. I won’t delineate these here, but to say that the VyNIL paintings are sequential, but less mechanical. Repetition is materialized according to an alternate visual rhyme and rhythm. The requisite focus and intensity at the easel is similar, but heightened, now. To frame the activity in labor terms, N-fusion #2 was a harder job in every respect, because it required a certain cerebral agility and commitment. I realize how vague or abstract this description might be for the reader, and I am probably doing poorly at precisely putting the observation into words. N-fusion #2 was created not by code, but by an inversion of the idea of code. For viewing, however, I think the effects of the two series (Pattern and VyNIL) on the viewer, especially the casual one, do have a resonant quality. Even though the execution of N-fusion #2 was demanding (on me, the artist), as alluded to above, the art itself does not convey this fact in any overt manner. I suspect that under the surface I am playing with the rules of the decorative, which is a container for the normative. On another note, during the painting of N-fusion #2, “contouring” was a recurrent imperative. Part of the technical difficulty has to do with the edging of forms in Flashe paints. The strain on eye and hand was a constant after the initial stages.

∞

The areas where the blocks intersected became phenomenal— at some point about halfway through the build-up of numbers of elements and colors. A good metaphor is the chain reaction. The first signs of this occurred when sphere fragments shared a line or corner. I came to think of the intersections as blooms, or rather the site where a bloom might arise, an area of energetic potential. Back-to-back, the sphere fragment combined to create double-pinched ellipses. My breaks from painting mostly involved sitting on our back porch, and taking in the impressive overgrowth of flowering bushes at the edge of the grassy areas. I think the backyard scene affected the painting’s structural and technical disposition, its energy. I also believe that the special light here in Astoria, where the Columbia River meets the Pacific, affects my use of color now. During N-fusion 2’s production, I was aware of these loose associations, but was mindful not to elevate them to the representational level. As less of the blocks’ base colors was visible, as the “foliage” multiplied, the prospects of naturalistic realism for N-fusion dissolved. If it seems I am tip-toeing around discourses on the Natural and Abstraction, I think that is a fair assessment. To which I would respond by saying the VyNIL has from the beginning been for harmonizing the Artificial or Virtual visionary with an Imaginary nature. It is also for the unconscious consciousness, which is not the same as Void or mechanical sentience or lack thereof.

By this I mean that the post-contemporary reality is suspect on all fronts, and rightly so, and multi-faceted or -dimensional. My paintings are meant to be experienced not just visually, or theoretically, which is to say, literally or contextually, as artistic content. I mean these paintings to be experience bodily, and this is also a domain of feeling, of sensation, the sensual. I do like these paintings in their overt evocation of the beautiful, as effulgent, ebullient Things. They are meant to be instances of happiness, joy and freedom. No matter what else might be happening in the world, and the art world. I think the above statements reveal much about my intention for the VyNIL Cycle, and in particular for N-fusion #2. I often wonder whether such an intention or motivation is too reactive, or a symptom of exhaustion, or an acknowledgement of one’s (and art’s) powerlessness in relation to the mundane and banal unfolding of catastrophe and cataclysm common in the post-contemporary period. My answer is spiritual, not secular, and not psychological, and many other nots. After all, catastrophe and cataclysm are not novel to humanity, which is not to say, we do not experience rupture and fracture anew in each horrifying episode of obliteration and chaos. The spiritual mode of existence is not outside destruction and its obverse or converse, the Creative. Spirituality, broadly measured, is an embrace of both, either- and or-.

I do understand or situate my practice of art in a spiritual framework. Which I believe obliquely my regard for the referential as fuel for my art-making. Which indicates why I might suggest that Angelicism01 and Film01, and the New Models and Joshua Citarella podcasts provide the proper post-contemporary context for N-fusion #2. They are not symbiotic or co-dependent entities. Rather, we share the same atmosphere, or the same hemisphere, or the same social sphere and creative/destructive spiral. My playlist included Radiohead and The Smile, but also Chopin’s Nocturnes. The post-contemporary must address time and its ending, from a directional point of view. This small sample of background audio in the studio wouldn’t denote “the Spiritual” to anyone but me, and so be it. The studio soundtrack is a seam coursing through decades of artist life, and I have shared my preferences and likes/dislikes, favorites and so on elsewhere. My point is, talking about the Spiritual and Art, opens the text to influences and inspiration, and we all understand this. To discuss art and not spirit is to leave the unspeakable to its own devices.

Instagram post at the official **Angelicism01/Film01 portal**.

I could and would add much more disclosure here of a biographical sort, and share circumstantial information about what was happening in my life and the lives of those close to me while N-fusion #2 was coming into being. Pardon me if I save those confessions for another time, place and project. Anyway, I am not sure how valuable any such disclosure is to the art post-facto. I could also insert a chronicle of the course of historical events unfolding between December 2023 and June 2024, but if you are reading this, you were there yourself, or have access to the archives. And I would argue that my position on personal confession and art post-facto holds true with respect to the historical and art post-facto. Up to a point. of course. The point is, whatever might have been going on out there, beyond the four walls of my little AFH (home) Studio/Astoria, where N-fusion Study #2 was started completed, what was happening spiritually for and within its maker is as important, and perhaps more important, than anything else. The question, naturally, is where do in here and out there start and stop? It seems clear that the border between the two is blurry at best, and permeable. Is this also as true for art, the Thing, as it is for us humans?

With that speculative declaration posed ultimately as a query (and not set in stone), I wanted to discuss the completion phase of N-fusion #2. Toward the finish, I would often enter the studio already worn out, to some degree, not just by the painting, but by other life-y matters. Yet, day after day, session after session, I was sure there was another level that had to be done, achieved or reached, something dimensional, but I wasn’t certain what that was. A painter will know the feeling, and it can be one of the worst we contend with, a sort of grim despair at resolution out of one’s reach and falling or fading away. One must be mindful not to burst or crack, and attack the painting or strike at it destructively out of exasperation. In the extreme, this overreaction is not hyperbole. We have too many art historical examples to wave off the danger. Anyway, I introduced the little “leafy” forms (ellipses pinched on one-end, like the “teardrop” shapes), which are visible other paintings in the series. I think of these as signs of “growing things,” and I mostly used the “darker” colors in the Flashe palette directly from the jar. It worked! And just like that the solution necessary to reach the finish of N-fusion had arrived. The remaining sessions were essentially mapped out, concluding with the signature.

The end, just before the signing, is one of the best moments. I search the painting for anything left to be done. If I find nothing, it is time to tattoo the art, to brand it with my runic PJM. This process of finalization can span a day or two. I might sleep on it, and sign in the morning after dawn. I might wait until I have afternoon light, which in this Astoria studio is just lovely. I think it is true to say that nothing about a painting is more wonderful to me than finishing it. I love the other bits dearly: the anticipation and commencement of the work; its presentation and exhibition upon completion; the documenting and selling; the conversations — all of it! But none of it is sweeter than those last strokes of the brush, and I couldn’t really explain that, more than saying it is a sense of fulfillment unlike anything else. I doubt it is the same for all painters. I have spoken with many artists who feel like their paintings are never quite finished, that there is always more to be done. I am very grateful that is not my experience.

N-fusion Study #2 | 20” x 16” | Flashe Vinyl on Panel | 2023-4

The Key Show

In June 2024 I was pleased to participate in a group exhibit hosted by the excellent Nashville gallery Zeitgeist, celebrating the artists who occupied spaces at the historic former May Hosiery Mill, which at the time I was there was called Chestnut Square, or simply Chestnut. Below I will post the show’s documentation, with links to an article by Joe Nolan for Nashville Scene, photos of the opening taken by my friend Dane Carder, the image of the painting I submitted (“N-substantiation”), the e-vites I created for the project, and more. The image above and the one at the end of the post are digital cells/patterns derived from “N-substantiation.” For additional content please check out the illustrated essay, “The Chestnut Experience,” which is also published on this blog.

PR-blurb from the Zeitgeist website (LINK):

The Key Show

Zeitgeist is pleased to present a group show that pays tribute to the history of our neighborhood. The Key Show features over 25 artists, who once had studios in Wedgewood-Houston. Join us for the opening reception, June 1, 5-8pm. On view June 1 - 29, 2024.

Last year, Janet Decker Yanez put together a show featuring anyone who still had a key to their former studio in the May Hosiery Building and the Martin Trust/Houston Station buildings.

An early iteration of this exhibit was hosted by The Browsing Room at the Downtown Presbyterian Church and this June, Zeitgeist is hosting an expanded version that includes more area creatives.

This exhibition is designed to be a platform for conversation, remembering, and sharing what was the vibrant creative community in the neighborhood from 1990 through the mid-2010’s.

This neighborhood would not be what it is today without these and many more creative individuals.

We want to keep that story alive and honor the artists who made Wedgewood-Houston, and keep from paving over our history.

participating artists:

• Jimmy Abegg

• Michael Bielaczyc

• Dane Carder

• Jeff Danley

• Janet Decker Yanez

• Bob Durham

• Theresa Dyer

• Mike Calway Fagen

• Beth Gilmore

• Terry Glispin

• Erin Hewgley

• Rocky Horton

• Buddy Jackson

• Heidi Kuster

• Emily Leonard

• Julia Martin

• Bruce Matthews

• Lesely Patterson Marx

• Michael Mcbride

• Paul McLean

• Michael Mucker

• Tim Murphy

• Adrienne Outlaw

• Margaret Pesek

• Greg Pond

• Hans Schmitt-Matzen

• Terry Thacker

• James Threalkill

• Meg Walborn

• Barbara Yontz

• Lain York

• Manuel Zeitlin

This is the listing from Locate Arts website (**LINK**)

Below are the photos Dane Carder took at the opening.

"N-substantiation" [Currents, Flow and Reproduction Series #41, 4D Quantities Series #4 (VyNIL Cycle)] | 12" x 9" | Flashe Vinyl on Canvas | 2019

My PR-blurb for the AFH socials (FB + IG):

I'm pleased to announce that "N-substantiation" will be included in the upcoming group exhibition at Zeitgeist Gallery in Nashville entitled "The Key Show," which opens June 1st and runs through June 29th. An opening reception will be held on June 1st from 5-8PM in conjunction with the WeHo First Saturday art walk. "The Key Show" will be celebrating studio culture in the May Hosiery Building and the former Martin Trust/now Houston Station buildings from the 90’s- up through the mid 00’s. I am happy to participate in the project and will contribute an illustrated essay, which will be posted at Mystic Novad and presented in some TBD format during the exhibit. Zeitgeist has invited the 30+ participants to share stories and pictures of their experiences working in those historic Nashville buildings, which Zeitgeist/Lain York will most likely assemble into a slideshow presentation or something like that for display during the opening/exhibit. More details to come!

To purchase "N-substantiation" please contact Zeitgeist Gallery.

INFO:

Street Address: Zeitgeist Gallery, 516 Hagan Street #100, Nashville, TN 37203

Phone: 615-256-4805

Website: https://zeitgeist-art.com/

Email: lain@zeitgeist-art.com, anna@zeitgeist-art.com

My Closing Party e-vite for “The Key Show”

“N-substantiation” Sym-Cell Pattern (PJM 2024)

The Chestnut Experience

By Paul McLean

Photos by Trey Mitchell (2001)

NOTE: This essay is in BETA. I will be adding links, correcting grammar and typos, doing some additional light editing for content, making a list of references, etc., while “The Key Show” at Zeitgeist Gallery is on view. If you have any questions about the essay, want to bring my attention to mistakes or omissions, or have helpful suggestions, please don’t hesitate to drop me a line or add a comment below the text. I hope you enjoy “My Chestnut Experience!” - PJM, 5.29.2024, Astoria, OR.

INTRODUCTION

A quarter-century has passed, since I first occupied studio space at Chestnut Square, an occupation lasting a handful of years. For me it was a period of tremendous creative productivity, involving lots of activity on many fronts, generating memorable episodes of great variety. Through the fog of memory, some impressions from this creatively fertile time stand out more than others. Among these a few of those impressions warrant chronicling here, with the caveat my anecdote selection process will be entirely subjective. I hope by sharing my stories I can offer a meaningful contribution to “The Key Show” exhibition hosted by Zeitgeist, linking the building, the people and moment with current efforts to nurture artistic community in Nashville. In “The Chestnut Experience” I’ll also share observations and opinions on a range of issues I hope readers find relevant and/or interesting.

Made at Chestnut: “White Cube” - Golden acrylic paint in hand-finished MDF container (PJM and Eric Johnston, 2000); presented on lead-wrapped wood, Astoria, OR, for “End of the West” installation (2018)

For context, on either side of Y2K The Music City, and by extension, the USA, were undergoing monumental changes. Politics, technology, economics and culture were in a state of flux. Between the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, and the horrific fracture that was 9/11 the world entered a phase of upheaval that I would characterize as the fraying of historical fabric at the macro level. Generational narratives seemed resolved or obsolete. If only briefly, the conflagrations and angst of the 20th Century one felt might give way to a new, promising reality. Advances in personal computing and network communications precipitated the massive restructuring of society and all its sectors, a trend continuing through the present day. Dynamic changes material and virtual accelerated dimensionally, local to global, affecting us individually and collectively. In short, from history’s ashes, Mankind was poised to move out from the mushroom-cloud-shaped shadow of nuclear war, leaving behind us nightmares of worldwide cataclysm, toward a tech-enabled dreamy future utopia of novel ideas and experience. It was a fun mirage, while it lasted.

Most of us hadn’t yet realized that the seeds for rampant inequality and political polarization had been planted already in the shabby and burnt-out remnants of the Old World Order. We didn’t comprehend how fragile the situation was, and that cascades of crisis would soon upend the potential future we glimpsed. After 9/11 Philosopher Jean Baudrillard wrote in his controversial essay, “The Spirit of Terrorism,” “The whole play of history and power is disrupted by this event, but so, too, are the conditions of analysis. You have to take your time. While events were stagnating (in the 90s), you had to anticipate and move more quickly than they did. But when they speed up this much, you have to move more slowly — though without allowing yourself to be buried beneath a welter of words, or the gathering clouds of war, and preserving intact the unforgettable incandescence of the images.”

Remember? It was the Clintons versus Gingrich, Armey and DeLay, the rise of the Moral Majority and Christian Nationalism, rallying against abortion rights as the central organizing drive pushing the culture wars. Tipper Gore versus obscene rock and rap. Campaigns against publicly-funded art, leading to the Mapplethorpe, Serrano and Ofili scandals. The empowerment of Neo-cons and neoliberals, corporate syndicates and their globalist advocates, platformed at the World Economic Forum in Davos and girded by think-tank-proliferated Management theory. Then, Bush v. Gore, and the turn toward China, away from Japanese industrial might. On the horizon was Citizens United, and the incremental removal of safeguards to protect us against monopolies, privatization and consolidation. In Silicon Valley, the tech miracle was already moving in a much darker direction, in the wake of the dot.com crash. The nerdy hippies were getting greedy and power-mad. The country was being torn apart by conflicting ideologies and a predatory winner-take-all economy was fueling the fires of discord. Fox News and conservative talk radio were radicalizing half a generation, while the other half after the “Me Decade” further receded into a quagmire of narcissism, under the banner of Self-actualization and Identity.

If 9/11 marked the shockingly abrupt end of the modern and contemporary eras, or the beginning of the madness and excess defining the first quarter of the 21st century, the decade prior to 9/11 resists demarcation and definition. To call that decade complicated is insufficient. The threads of meaning intertwining and unwinding in the 90s and early 00s must be recovered and re-assembled in order to get at the truth of recent phenomena, like “fake news.” When we look back now on that fraught and febrile time, we notice that patterns were emerging, subtle shifts in the logic of things, a new questioning of the concrete and immaterial nature of existence over time. While this convolution had much to do with the arrival of ubiquitous digital media in all its manifestations, it is key to note that other drivers operated then to either determine or subvert the unavoidable change that was happening. Some of us in places like Chestnut (there were other such nodes across America and beyond our shores, it turns out) were trying to make sense of it all, in Real Time. Through the arts and creative life. We would soon find out about each other via the Internet, but also through traditional, analog channels. We didn’t realize until too late how naive we were, which is not meant as an indictment or pejorative.

"N-substantiation"Currents,” Flow and Reproduction Series #41, 4D Quantities Series #4, 12" x 9", Flashe Vinyl on Canvas, 2019

Fast-forward to 2024. Without fretting much about who the “we” is for a minute, where do we stand? I propose that we are in the post-contemporary period now. That term (post-contemporary) is not my invention, but for the sake of situating my discussion of civilization at scale, from big to little, establishing a platform for my remarks and the underpinning analysis matters, at least for my purposes. Not only is it a matter of logics, it is a question of physics and nature, pertaining to humanity and our perceptions. My essay will have elements of reflection in it, but not only those. The timing of the invitation — to write about the Chestnut experience — for me is fortunate on several levels.

Rather than attempt to elaborate on the above paragraph, I obliquely recommend readers familiarize themselves with the thinking Liam Gillick is doing on the subject, for instance in his 2010 essay “Contemporary Art Does Not Account for that Which is Taking Place,” and in his 2020 dialogue with J.J. Charlesworth in ArtReview (“Is This the End of Contemporary Art As We Know It?”) . Then, I’ll make an elliptical move and point to an illustration of my preoccupations. My example is Return to Reason: Four Films by Man Ray. Jim Jarmusch and Carter Logan (SQÜRL) reconstituted the selection of moving images by Ray originally made in the 1920s with an audio soundscape. The derivative assemblage was reformatted using the latest cinematic (digital + analog) technologies. What is Return to Reason illustrating? Many things, but we can focus on a few.

The inherent looping power of the time-based media (resonance)
The nature of artistic reproduction in the 21st Century (the mechanical)
Collaborative and cross-disciplinary practice as a woven form (twining)
The peculiarity of language transiting through the post-contemporary
The durability of the subject and object of human vision, in and of art (the perceptual attraction)
The conjunctive presence of architecture (form) and concept (virtuality) vital to post-contemporary composition

In my estimation, this list helps explain what was going on at Chestnut during my stint there, but also what was up more generally. To expand the orientation, we can imagine a process of mapping connections among events, on the basis of relevance. I am going to draw here on my old friend Bob Solomon’s (producer Woodland Studios — if you know, you know) non-binary affection for both reverb and echo. On my map of the Chestnut Experience, which (the virtual map) is to a degree chronological, I am placing a pin in 1928. That pin placement is a bit arbitrary, within the brackets of Man Ray’s movies, as re-presented in the 2023 derivative (released on the 100th anniversary of the original Return to Reason). The 1928 marker prefaces the great Wall Street Crash of 1929, and splits the phase between the end of WW1 (1918) and the beginning of WW2 (1939). A (re-)viewing of Man Ray’s four films is inflected by these serial events/disasters.

Made at Chestnut: “01” cut-vinyl adhesive on 12” vinyl record (PJM, for “Heartless01”)

Spinning the wheels of time forward, another pin is placed at Y2K, which I identify as the inception of the post-contemporary period. The most important feature of Y2K? It was an event that never happened. However, in the history of network computing, the question is whether Y2K as a media technology phenomenon was an early indicator of the global transformation by electronics and communication that coalesced in the aftermath of 9/11. I am referring not only to the emergence of Web 2.0, but also the vast expansion of surveillance enabled by the new digital social realities, as well as the fundamental alteration of economics and markets Big Tech facilitated. By 2007-8 and the onset of The Great Recession the seeds of dimensional crisis planted in the 80s and 90s were bearing their toxic fruit.

A pin to mark the posterior border of our map is the easiest to place. It goes in at June 2024 at the opening of The Key Show. At the end of 90s, when I had a studio at Chestnut and was living the artist life in Nashville, such as it was, I don’t remember any foreboding that the world would soon descend into a prolonged struggle, within which the very definition of civilization significantly dissolved. I know that, while watching the collapse of the Twin Towers on a screen at Fido with dozens of people, I was aware that everything had changed. None of us at the time could have imagined how drastic that change would be, and how far in all directions its reach would extend.

Watching Return to Reason I got the impression the artists involved were operating in dimensionally resonant circumstances. I felt affinity with their mindset, as expressed through creative decisions, symbols, settings, props, costumes, experiments, editing and so on. Reflecting on my artistic production and the ideas cycling through the output from the mid-90s through the early 00s, I am wondering whether those times have something to tell us about the current moment (2024). I am wondering whether, within our post-contemporary connecting-dots chrono-/topological game above, we prefigured a grim possible future, one closer than it appears in the rearview mirrors. I shouldn’t be surprised, if so. Artists are always the canaries in the coal mine of human strife and derangement. We are the oracle seldom heeded. But also the timeless tinkers whose inventions prefigure the worlds to come, or that might have been.

IN BROAD STROKES: THE NASHVILLE ART SCENE, CIRCA ’95-6

I rolled into Nashville in ’96 with a headful of artsy steam and a new bride, on the heels of an extended creative run (doubling as a honeymoon) in Scotland, preceded by a decade embedded in the Santa Fe art scene and market, which then was competing with LA for second place in the standings behind New York City, in terms of sales and cultural heft. In Santa Fe, where I landed after undergrad studies at Notre Dame, I had learned to hustle, maintaining a prolific painting practice, networking, working in and with galleries and art support businesses, and writing. The cost of living in Santa Fe was comparatively high, and the property values were through the roof. Arriving in the Music City, I was shocked at how affordable everything was. At once I got to hunting for a studio and a place to live. In short order, I found both.

It hadn’t taken long to get the lay of the land, art-wise. Nashville was what I would call an open market. In spite of a mid-size American city population (about a million souls), Nashville had an oversized media profile, due in large measure to the flourishing country music industry. The visual art infrastructure, however, was limited to a dozen or so retail galleries, a couple of museums, the programs at Vanderbilt, Fisk, Watkins and the Tennessee Arts Commission, interesting pop-up and alt.art collective projects, plus odds and ends. Some artists — Somers Randolph, Alan LeQuire, Paul Harmon, and Myles Maillie — had garnered attention and followings, though by divergent means and methods

The scene was de-centralized and siloed. Cumberland Gallery and Cheekwood catered to the sensibilities of Belle and West Meade, Green Hills, Franklin and their enclaves. Zeitgeist and Hillsboro Village were pretty popping, drawing crowds from the colleges, the businesses on Music Row, and other constituencies in the West End and 8th-12th corridors. Downtown and East Nashville were in the early stages of a substantial development expansion/transition phase. Arts Company was making the most of a bric-a-brac approach, and In the Gallery in Germantown was focused on African arts and Black artists, primarily. Local Color had a pay-to-play set-up in Midtown. Aside from this, not a lot was happening, certainly nothing cohesive.

Made at Chestnut: “Growing Things” - acrylic on canvas, for “Jewels of the Nagas” at Yoga Source (2001)

I would soon discover after a bit of digging that Nashvillians serious about collecting art were mostly shopping elsewhere. Traditional Southern salon-style showings still were happening in people’s homes, conducted by trusted intermediaries or consultants. Benefit auctions were a preferred way to nab a piece by a favored local artist, usually at a discount price. ‘Exposure” was a word bandied about. An artist was expected to do routine free stuff. Also, there was nomenclature confusion. if one self-identified as an artist, a common response might be, “Oh, really? What do you play? Are you in a band?” Yet, I discerned in my early days in Nashville a genuine hunger, interest and enthusiasm for visual arts in the community.. I sensed the potential for transformation across the cultural spectrum. The conditions were right.

First, Nashville was booming, but also had substantial anchor economics. HCA was emerging as a major force in corporate consolidated or managed medicine. Ingram, an industrial giant, was solid across its diverse portfolio. Nashville was regional center for publishing, design, post-production and printing houses. Country Music was a global phenomenon, with an enormous fan base. These and other factors were contributing to the city’s makeover. Suburbs were starting to sprout in every direction. Gentrification was altering many of Nashville’s neighborhoods and whole sectors of the city. Sprawl and gnarled traffic were the downside, but it was nothing compared to NYC’s and LA’s. Nashville was becoming a Creative Class model destination. At the cultural core was a unique receptivity to collaboration, owing to the musical traditions convergent in Nashville.

CHESTNUTS

Through word of mouth, I got together with sculptor and jeweler Somers Randolph, whose coffee shop Blue Sky Court and Untitled efforts had helped to shape awareness of the importance of art for art’s sake in Nashville. “Fear No Art” bumper stickers were common. Through his projects and art-related organizing, Somers demonstrated the value of art entrepreneurship, using his oversized personality and connections to bridge divides among business leadership, artists, collectors and civic entities. Somers had hatched a plan with John Reed to carve out studios on Chestnut’s first floor, and I agreed to join them in the endeavor. The building tenants already included a few other artists, such as Joe Sorci and jack-of-all-trades Foster Jones, but the bulk of the other occupants were engaged in everything from selling furniture or cabinet-making, fabrics, to commercial art and so on. It was a hodge podge, a melange of folks and professions.

Chestnut Square (formerly May Hosiery Mills), like many old, converted and subdivided factory buildings and industrial complexes across the country, has a remarkable history. At one time May was the biggest employer in the city. By the mid-90s, it was a red brick shell, on the verge of dilapidation. It had no central heating or cooling. The plumbing and lighting/electrical system was a mess. It had a single working freight elevator. The loading dock was an endless source of territorial contention. Tenants were expected to solve their own garbage needs, for the most part. One heard about break-ins and thefts, and we were warned about the criminal elements who were malingering about. Telephone service was not provided, and not a simple matter to obtain.

On the upside, the rent was goofy cheap, and, when you’re a fanatical young artist, the prospects of art production with the minimum oversight or interference from management can be appealing. If those “positives” meant putting up with the occasional Lord of the Flies moments, the odd disputes and logistics or maintenance problems, so be it. After participating in the build-out, I sub-leased a studio from Somers. I forget the exact dimensions. The mostly unfinished drywall did not reach the high ceiling. The breakers might blow at any minute, depending on what was plugged in the outlet. A film of ancient grit and dust covered the exposed surfaces. The paint was peeling off the walls and there were leaks and weird chemical smells. Noise pollution could be a problem, as could some of one’s “eccentric” neighbors. There were spiders (more on this later). And so on.

I made the best of it. On good days, I imagined I was living the artist’s dream! This would be my atelier for the next handful of years. Looking back, I can say that Chestnut was profoundly important in my artistic evolution. I accomplished an astonishing amount of often experimental work. In the many long hours spent in that very un-pretty factory building, I accumulated a tremendous body of experience, which has since proved invaluable. When Lain invited us to share Chestnut tales, visceral memories I had not tapped in ages cascaded into my consciousness. An artist studio can and should in certain instances be a solitary environment, and it turns out there is nothing necessarily romantic in that fact. Chestnut provided creative isolation in plenty.

It also could be a special, even unique site of exchange. For the first time in my art career, especially after Somers left for Santa Fe and I moved into his bigger space, the studio became the architecture for encounters, a hub, if you will, for conversations, performance, for teaching, and - most importantly - fostering relationships colored by the grunge atmosphere of Chestnut. Nirvana never sounded better or more authentic than it did blaring on my studio boom box in the wee hours. To remember Chestnut Square then for me is not much different from trying to recall a vivid dream, in its lurid, lugubrious details. Studio Time is not normal time. This scruffy studio eventually possessed its own charmed if not charming life, was animated by its own edgy vitality and spirit. I took this all very seriously. I was careful who I invited over - the roster was exclusive, if quirky. Over the course of months and years of use, mundane studio procedures took on the characteristics of offbeat alchemical ritual.

“Diana” [PJM; source photo 2000, digitally manipulated and output for “CONTENT” (2010)]

The Chestnut studio became a vehicle for vision, the manifestation of which required gritty physical mix of focused often sweaty labor interspersed with spells of Seeing, more than looking, of studious inspection and intense introspection. Art is a strange concoction. The studio can be likened to a laboratory, but my lab was neither clean nor controlled, as such. The world, nature can be an artist’s workshop, if you’re a plein air painter. Chestnut had its own artificial or plastic worldliness, which isn’t to imply it was an unnatural place. When you pulled into one of its unpaved parking lots, you could feel it looming. I loved it. Chestnut then always had a touch of broken-windows danger to it, the threat of fire or collapse. Or being mugged. You had to have your wits about you.

Today, because of computing, the idea of artistic production has all the same features of doing a spread sheet or playing in an app. For reference, see the MIT MakerWorkshop, a model much-emulated through STEAM-inflected academia. Common contemporary modalities allow for an artist to delegate production to men and machines on the other side of the planet. That was not my Chestnut experience. In the space that I eventually called Art for Humans Studio #1, a real 4D drama did unfold. Although visitors and voyeurs passed through it, I was the primary witness, viewer, audience. Chip Cox and Dane Carder briefly shared the space with me. Collaborators, such as Charlotte Avant played special roles along the way. But in the end, in hindsight, my Chestnut experience was uniquely my own. Twenty-five years later, having occupied a fair number of studios all over, and having in a variety of capacities visited many artist studios of great variety, my qualified or side-eyed fondness for that long-gone place and time remains.

Dog Show #11 (Photo by Trey Mitchell, 2001)

If memory serves, my most recent visit to Nashville was on the occasion of a solo exhibit at David Lusk Gallery in 2014. The development in the WeHo area that includes Chestnut IWedgewood-Houston-Chestnut Hill) over the past two decades has displaced my chronicle and recollections of the Chestnut Experience. It’s such an American storyline. All the sudden, your city was gone. This is not your beautiful house. This is not your beautiful wife. The totality of such post-contemporary phenomena, foreseen by Pretenders and Talking Heads, is breathtaking. The phenomenon evades recursion, because the reductive approach when applied to this subject becomes clogged with absurdly incompatible explanations and inconsistent perceptual frames. I believe it’s meant to. Fashioning any post-modern theory-addled gobbledygook into an explicatory blurb (“The synecdoche and metonymy together comprise the simulacra as existence”) is patently insufficient for obtaining meaning out of the thing. Meaning is an afterthought in capital redevelopment projects.

Strictly materialist rationalizations and justifications carry the gravitas, inertia and momentum of essentialist utilitarianism. Which is to say, they ignore inconvenient. collateral impacts, by necessity and convention. The confluence of narratives only becomes weirder as the particulars are parsed. The Chestnut Experience I recounted warrants not even a footnote in the promotional accounts being promulgated by the plethora of interests now invested in Wedgewood Village. For me, it’s hard to merge the realities of now and then. It’s a challenge to not relegate our lived Chestnut drama to immateriality, the spectral realm of a ghost story. The virtual representations of the development, coupled with the press and marketing info attached to the operation, only disorient me further. I catch glimpses of the old Chestnut, but they cannot fuse with either the past or present.

∞

Made at Chestnut: “Refugee,” charcoal, stencil, Golden acrylic quinacridone red-gold on wood for “War” series, 2002

Having lived in cities like NYC and LA, of course I am familiar with the phenomenon of historical displacement. But the basic features are the same when considering how my home town of Beckley, West Virginia has changed, since I moved away in 1982. More or less the same drift holds for every station stop along the route of my life. It is a common one in America over the past several decades. Whether you identify it as “Creative Destruction” or gentrification, however you contextualize it, one of the symptoms of the phenomenon is the evaporation of shared memory, of social cohesion attaching to architectural longevity or sustainability. The malaise is borne of the lack of continuity in the configuration or composition of place and people in the temporal topology. We have, consequently, a real crisis of belonging brought on my the continual loss of recognizable landmarks in our constructed realities.

In the post-contemporary, more and more, the phenomenon is a function of policy, dogma, and redistributive economics. The wholesale retooling of the country’s imagination as it applies to urban design theory for quality of life and work has manifested in projects just like Wedgewood Village in Seattle, Austin, Atlanta, Boston, Phoenix, Minneapolis, Chicago, Denver, etc. The Big Tech players (Amazon, Google, Apple, Microsoft, META) have played an oversized role in the idealization of this programmatic or schematic reconstruction. Big Finance (Blackstone, Blackrock, et al.) have capitalized on conditions created by The Great Recession, exacerbated by mass migrations from the coastal states during the Pandemic, but also due to a blob of other contributing factors.

Competing visions of the future and nostalgia for the past can be either explicit or implicit in these rapid-redevelopment schemes. Wedgewood Village is a middle step toward the Smart City model. This trajectory suggests the accelerated abandonment of an of American Lifestyle that is rooted in the interwoven mythologies of our iconic small towns, distinctive regional cities, and the bi-coastal metropolises, connected by planes, trains and automobiles, mail, phones and other lines of communication, old and new. The Highway is a key element of that construct. Think of how much this confabulation informs our culture and arts, in its totality heralded as the American Dream. The WeHo district is what Bruce Sterling identified as “Design Fiction.” As such, it creates a believable simulation that mashes up concepts (i.e., history, aesthetics, ideology) and desire to output a tech-dependent product that subtly communicates nostalgia and futurism simultaneously. The elements of natural, worldly risk are mitigated, as per corporate maxims. The whole operation is thoroughly, prominently managed and branded.

It all smacks of Baudrillard being right, and Heidegger, too on the problems latent in the post-War advances of technology. When one begins to critically analyze the scenario, odd associations turn the exercise into an encounter with hyperreality. What materializes, from that angle, is an uneasy realization that Disneyland’s Main Street, USA is a conceptual precursor of Wedgewood Village and similar developments. One can extrapolate from this insight, that a conversion program permeates post-contemporary existence. Consider the banal menu of CGI-heavy Hollywood comic book-based blockbusters. Or any other consumption-driven markets, dependent on our shared cultural experience of now-vacant myths. Also consider, how those imaginary constructs are being systematically displaced and replaced. How can the wave of reactionary sentiment be surprising, given the ubiquity of these weirdly schismatic distortions of conservative imagination?

What I find most interesting in all this is how art and artist appear and disappear as the phenomenon progresses. Naturally, because I’m an artist, this facet sticks out in my mind, but I get that the situation is kaleidoscopic. Due to the post-contemporary nature of the phenomenon, someone else might be drawn to an entirely different thread, as interesting and pertinent to them as mine is to me. For instance, within the constraints of our subject — the phenomenological Chestnut Experience — a Jewish person might be more curious about the history of the May Hosiery Mills due to the owners’ immigrant story and role in saving German Jews from the Holocaust. They might contextualize the story/phenomenon differently, linking the Zionist May family history to what is happening now in Israel and Gaza. Post-contemporary reality is multi-faceted and -dimensional. We can approach it from all angles, but we’re not looking at it from the outside, in. In truth, it’s the opposite way round.

Proposal video for the Frist Center CAP inaugural. The exhibit concept segment shot at Chestnut begins at 2:40.

The painting I am submitting to exhibit in “The Key Show” is a visual representation of the phenomenon outlined above. It is titled “N-substantiation,” from the “Currents, Flow and Reproduction” series of The VyNIL Cycle.” A post-contemporary (4D) painting is not about anything, as such, in the way art following the concept-to-object modality would be. “N-substantiation” is not the manifestation of an idea, although theory and thought evoke its basis IRL. Art has its own authenticity, autonomous from discourse, nominal and numerical systems.

In the Post-digital or post-internet phase, it is facile to overlay the linguistics of machines and networks on art. Art is also resistant to theoretical or critical contentions (e.g., contingency, especially as per Derrida and Jean Luc Nancy) rooted in Continental, ‘68er post-revolutionary thinking. “N-substantiation” is art, not content, image, in-context, and so on), nor is it its own negation. The painting is a fact on its own, incontrovertibly real. The language and all interpretation of it is a derivative of its actuality, its being, in and of itself, to refer to the ancient Kantian framing. It owes its real-ness as much to physics, chemistry, optics - I.e., science - as it does to words and disciplines like psychology, sociology and anthropology - I.e., the modern and contemporary humanities, including modern/contemporary history.

With respect to artistic intention — which according to certain schools of psychological and sociological ideology is problematic, if not impossible — one of my central motivations in creating “N-substantiation” and the bodies of work to which it belongs is to make a beautiful painting, within an evolving series of paintings. I intended its colors to be lovely, its composition to be harmonious, to show mindfulness and care. In the VyNIL Cycle I am expressly concerned about the technique applied. These artworks are not technically perfect, in my estimation, but they do evidence artistic proficiency, in the traditional sense. They do not cleave to Classical precepts of the Ideal. They progress along evolutionary lines, as quasi-autonomous objective events, reflective of time and place, and inextricably link to their maker, myself.

Made at Chestnut: “Blew My Mind Guy” - acrylic and ink on paper, 2001

“N-substantiation” is situated within the progressive movement of Western painting, and in my mind, this is not an assertion that automatically demands or affords dispute or repudiation. Especially not of the sort that is typical of the recent art world swing (e.g., see 2024 Venice Biennale, “Foreigners Everywhere”) toward Identity and Inclusivity being the prime drivers of aesthetic credibility. My artwork abjures the re-definition of art in the service of political and social reformation, on the basis of race, gender, geographical redistribution or recognition, among a host of externalities current en vogue. My painting, as an art object, has absolutely nothing to do with any of that, which is intentional, but also a function of my focal art experience/education(s). Which does not mean I am against any other artist or art claim. Which is to say, my art is not reactionary. The exact opposite is true, because I am a democratic art practitioner. Ultimately, as much I love the melting pot, I am for my own art, and all its roots.

My contention is that “N-substantiation” is as a post-contemporary art object phenomenologically representative of the lightly contextualized/-izing Chestnut Experience put forth above, and by extension, the concordant stacked phenomena noted throughout this essay. That statement prima facie might strike the casual reader and viewer as convoluted, complex and confusing, and understandably so. To get the drift of the declaration, they (the reader/viewer) would not only need to possess a fairly thorough familiarity with the arc of my art, thinking and writing to relate “N-substantiation” with the 4D sketch of “The Chestnut Experience” and the phenomena it explores; they would need to possess a broad foundation in the various domains and field perspectives layered into the study. On my side, that is a lot of expectation to foist on a viewer or reader, which is why I don’t worry about it much anymore. Further, it explains to a degree why I choose to create paintings now that are visceral, appealing, and inclined to surface beauty, work not dependent on the viewer’s visual or theoretical literacy.

Not that long ago, on the other hand, I felt passionate in my advocacy for educating as a means to end, or at least resist,f art de-definition and thematic dissipation. I committed to a wide-ranging practicum for improving dimensional art analytics, for my own edification, then for informing others, via media and networks. These days, I am more inversely or internally practical, and wizened. The journey has been long and twisty. So, for example, I may realize what Don Judd was getting at when he argued that New York was more concerned about real estate than art, because I researched his life, art and thinking at depth, during my MFA studies in 00s at CGU. And I also understand what motivated Judd to relocate from NYC/Spring Street to Marfa, TX. I can further appreciate, as a result of the investing in Juddian studies, how one of America’s great art destinations was founded. I wouldn’t like the reader to regard my artsy disposition these days as jaded, tarnished or gnarly, but it’s okay either way. I came by it legitimately. Ultimately, the proof is in the art itself, which does not lie. As for the relationship between “N-substation” and the sketchy Chestnut Experience: they share at root the same elliptical logic. In this framework, action is more a determinate than the idea of art. It is a post-Pollock perspective, not argumentation.

This video really gives a sense of the interdisciplinary activity we were generating at the time. Chestnut was very much a nexus for the action.

In 2019 and -20 I penned a three-part response to Daniel Buren’s seminal 1979 essay “The Function of the Studio.” Buren is the accomplished contemporary artist who has for decades used stripes (and other design tactics) to affect a great range of substrates and surfaces. My three-part series is titled “The New Studio” (see Part 1, Part 2, Part 3) and contains a thorough analysis of Buren’s theory and practice, which in turn serves as point of origin for an in-depth dimensionist interrogation of the artist studio, its evolution and status quo. My study covers much ground, approaching the subject from multiple angles, and I recommend the texts to flesh out some of the speculative research and views I bring up in “The Chestnut Experience.” “The New Studio” concludes with a meditation on hyperrealistic or Meta- features of the Atelier Brancusi display at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, in the context of Buren’s assertions about Brancusi and his studio.

In subsequent illustrated texts I extend the investigation to cover post-contemporary art production phenomena like Meow Wolf, and some of our artsy interventions from Occupy Wall Street, among other related topics. The artist studio is worthy of its own field of art historical study, encompassing a rich and diverse structural set comprised of forms and practices and the ideologies that bind them, all of which has been disrupted by the new technologies (e.g., prompt-based AI image generators, which I wrote about recently HERE). Today the definitions of art and artist and their role in society are as a result almost completely fungible, although this assessment applies variably among art world hierarchies [This observation is ironic, given the meteoric rise and crash of NFT “art” - PJM]. One can as I have track lineages from Michelangelo through Warhol to illustrate types of studio-based art production, and provide prodigious examples of variants over centuries through the present.

Few artists today occupy a single studio throughout their careers. Most migrate from space to space, according to their needs and means. Some artists have never worked in a dedicated studio space, toiling in corners of their home. Others only experience the studio as part of an academic curriculum. It is more likely today that a self-defined artist considers a computer or mobile media device, a tablet or smart phone, to be their “studio.” This trend is massively encouraged by the makers of hardware and software for creative applications. Social media has added to the complexity and confusion infusing the post-contemporary idea of an artist studio. To see what I mean, check out Devon Rodriquez, and his 2023 dust-up with Artnet News editor and important writer on art and technology Ben Davis.

Made at Chestnut: “Vision,” assemblage from found and printed materials, tape (PJM circa 2000)

In his rise to fame, Rodriquez shared videos on Tik Tok of himself sketching portraits of subway passengers, to whom he would give the completed sketch. Rodriquez through his preferred Web 2.0 platforms and channels attracted an enormous following, and built a lucrative art and media business career in the process. Where, exactly, would one locate Devon Rodriquez’s “studio?” Is it the A Train, or the commercial production-quality set where he was filmed sketching a portrait with spicy hot Cheetos dust for a viral video? To this example I would add another important post-contemporary art phenom, Angelicism01. The “art” is itself multivalent and dimensional, which terms also are appropriate for Angelecism01 the “artist” - which in fact is a credit-sharing fluid collective, cleverly distributing their non-definite or -conclusive cinema as projections in a selective or curated sequence of events in venerable showcase theaters. This serialized revelation of their extinction art is generating a radical discourse through multiple cultural media channels and generating significant attention in the circles whose pre-occupation is pop-cult currency and attraction, among the masses of followers. For Baudrillard and others, the domain of seduction.

Detailing the components coming together in Angelicism01 is not necessary here. The takeaway is that this marginal art world phenom is highly decentralized but capable of congealing into art-newsworthy action, within very traditional frameworks, using very non-traditional or new media tools and applications (e.g., Tik Tok, samples, memes, ephemera, etc.). Again, in Angelicism01 we have a really fascinating and compelling artistic and/or creative enterprise, timely and relevant, which exists outside the previous conceptions of artistic production. Here I would make a gesture to loop the subject of Buren and Angelicism01, by pointing out that both proclaim extinction as the urgent core of their post-revolutionary interventions. The connotations of “Extinction” for art and artists have changed radically over that time span, between the 1970s and today. 

Projection video for "Heartless01" (2001); the section of video shot at Chestnut begins at 9:43.

A recounting of the Chestnut Experience (located in the middle of the extinction timeline above) must include more than the dimensional analysis or its phenomenology. The reader would be short-changed, if this essay were only that. This holds too for a dry chronology couched in the language of utility and economics, in the age of extinction. The historicity of the Chestnut Experience, as preserved and forwarded through syndicated monopoly media for ready dissemination (see Seth Price’s “Dispersion), is rooted in an ideology that pretentiously stipulates that meaning and value are only manifest within the context of capitalist narratives —for examples, Manifest Destiny and the underpinning notion of the march of Progress, i.e., the logos for conquest and civilization of the wilderness, savages, ignorance, and so forth, framed as inevitability. The materialism of development of real estate over time requires a very narrow limiting of views on what and who are essential, and in turn, that which (and those who) in both information and actuality will be made invisible. The ontology of the players and agents is subsumed by and in the game of ownership and acquisition, which operates more like a regime for monetization through thematic and systematic extraction and exploitation. Violence as a key feature of the process has lost its overtness, which is by design. At certain times, it reappears, when dissent and resistance against Command provoke a reaction from power actors (e.g., OWS, Standing Rock, Cop City, or the pro-Palestine/anti-genocide peace protests).

Made at Chestnut: “In God’s Hands,” acrylic and ink, for the DddD exhibit “In Sickness & Health” at In the Gallery (2000)

In “The New Studio” I shared images, moving and still, of my studio-based artist life. The subtitle for the concluding section of the text reads. “The Studio Is a Function of the Artist.” This provocation flips the modern and contemporary script in favor of the studio models possible in the post-contemporary, and to some extent the post-internet/-digital modes of production. If my framing the phenomenon in art-speak blurs the simplicity of the triangular form of the phenomenon’s essence as lived event within a dimensional formal, symbolic and/or structural framework, I would argue that problem is due to the confusion of technical and epistemological in the definitions of art and artist. The problem is compounded by the traditional hierarchical overvaluing of ideas/text over creative craftsmanship in fine art (episteme versus techne, to use the Greek terminology). Beyond the discursive is the specificity of not only the art, but the artist as well, both of which can be argued to demonstrate the qualities of an Event - a happening in real time/place - on or within the human continuum, as such, both in being and productive of becoming.

The pictures illustrating “The New Studio” reveal the facet of the art life that probably is its most attractive feature for casuals and practitioners alike: the peculiar vibrancy of the life dedicated to art. The quasi-mystical art life so far has been pretty close to impossible to adequately represent in film, fiction, dance or music or any other medium, digital, analog, performative, or time-based. The artist life as such from what I can tell is untranslatable, and not only in the world of words, but also in the realm of all sensual expression. Poetry and poet share certain of the same characteristics, and Heidegger in his thinking on the Thing, Giving and Technology, surmised poetry would surpass art as a vehicle for cultural transmission. But from my artist perspective, absent the image, poiesis remains at an expressive disadvantage. The two disciplines (art and poetry) orbit the expressive world as sun and moon, with all due respect to the potency of the latter. Paul Valery in his 1928(!) essay “The Conquest of Ubiquity,” quoted by Walter Benjamin in The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, predicted music (delivered to the home, as it turned out, by Spotify and Apple Music) would top the hierarchy, and there are merits to his case, if only quantitative, as in volume/users. Again, these conjectures obviate the art object as the sui generis Thing. I think this makes their arguments partial non-starters. The reason has something to do with the peculiar mesh intertwining art and life, finite and infinite, which is to say relative to Time, that constitutes a generative form both material and immaterial. The energy that fuels art is perhaps the same or close to the reproductive energetic that drives and sustains our will to survive, and also makes babies.

At the easel at Chestnut, working on the “War” series, circa 2002

∞

The art studio historically can manifest as a multi-use facility. Throughout the 20th and early 21st Centuries, “studio practice” has come to mean nearly anything. Compare at the art world apex the art labor plants of Anselm Kiefer, Ryan Trecartin and Beeple (a/k/a Mike Winklemann). Or Marina Abromovic (an institute), Jeff Koons or Damien Hirst. Or Urs Fischer, Ai Weiwei or Yayoi Kusama. Then, check out Hyperallergic’s longstanding series, “A View from the Easel,” which features studio photos and artist responses to a handful of conversational prompts. Over the course of hundreds of posts, Hyperallergic has accumulated enough documentation to platform a robust discourse about studio conventions and utility, a practicum for art production. Is it trite to say Artist studios are like snowflakes?

That assessment provides an adequate context for moving our focus to Chestnut and pondering what was most unique about it, in its transitional period between manufacturing facility and Creative Class development. The most special thing about the Chestnut Experience from my perspective is what I and we made of the opportunity afforded us during Chestnut’s years of decline and neglect and subsequent restoration and conversion into its current iteration. Some of us made art, yes, but all of us made memories out of relationships that were and remain central to our life stories, individually and collectively. I admit to a certain humanistic bias, but I will contend that it was us artists who kept Chestnut “alive” long enough for it to be recognized again for its makeover potential. It’s a common enough pattern. Artists take over raw or neglected buildings, neighborhoods or districts, followed by the developers, the bars, restaurants and hotels, and then the Yuppies move in. Bye bye art scene!

If one considers the root of studio, one realizes the studio is a codified architectural locus for study. What is the subject of study for an art studio, if not art? It turns out that the subject of art is in practice the study of life, as much as it is the study of technique, art history or the theory of art’s role in society. Because of art’s nature, the project within the bounds of the art studio is the making of things out of life, from the stuff of life. In a working studio, the progression is productive of the exhibition, the means by which the artwork, the thing of art, is reintroduced to the world, as an object whose subject is some aspect of life itself. In this model art is processed and performed in the art studio by the artist, with a two-way- or reciprocal-through-put binding art directly to life. The output, the object, is subsequently re-invested/-inserted into the lifestream as such via public exhibition. It all happens in the spirit and format of a gift exchange, even if money changes hands down the line, as the formal exchange take on the complicated characteristics of external economy. This procedural description is elliptical, and somewhat recursive, but it gets at the distinguishing quality of that which instills art and artist with value and meaning, outside and preceding the economics of means and value, what makes us essential in any healthy community, which is more than its economics. Artists always are Outsiders in the Capitalist society, where art gifts and their administration are dictated by the philanthropic class (e.g., Eli and Edythe Broad), who just buy things. They don’t make art, they use it.

VAAN Open Studio Tour flyer, circa 2001 or -2 (PJM)

The bittersweet subtext to the actuality of the May-to-Chestnut-to-WeHo narrative is a conjecture. It is a What-If scenario. What if we lived in a parallel dimension, in which society prioritized art over Return on Investment (ROI)? What if Nashville was run less like a business in that alternate reality, and the city was governed with different priorities? What if our economic model was aligned with gift exchange, instead of the one that more or less determined the outcomes we witnessed over the past century, playing out on that particular parcel of land? To entertain the speculation, our reverie would necessitate society having a different schema for the distributions of wealth, property and labor. That alternate society - let’s call it “N-10city” - might be modeled after, say, the precepts outlined by Thomas Paine in “Agrarian Justice.”

The apportionments in the configuration would generate a different, better outcome. Maybe? All of which to say, “Another World Is Possible.”

Artists are dismissed as dreamers by the so-called pragmatists among us, who are generally found to be heavily invested in the status quo and the prime beneficiaries thereof. Our futures however are a function of our imagination. Art as a discipline is a means by which the imagination is oriented to achievable results, as a practical matter. Rather than ignore the directional suggestions from community-centric artists, who look back while looking ahead, society might be better served by giving a seat to them/us at the civic planning conference table. I’ve sat at that table a few times, and we artists belong. It would probably help if artists unionized, the prospect of which is akin to herding cats. I know. I’ve tried! When it happens, the artist’s inclusion in governance inevitably shakes things up. We Americans have precedents for such a model in the WPA Arts in Action programs of the New Deal. Fruits of these programs are still visible today, throughout Tennessee almost 100 years after the fact.

Made at Chestnut:” Signal Flag #57” for SEAM01 at TAG (The Attic Gallery), PJM 2001; layered digital adhesive vinyl and banner print

One can see few signs that an alternate vision for art and artist is likely anytime soon. More likely is proto-fascism, oligarchy and autocracy, nationalist theocracy or some combination thereof, a state which some days seems to have already arrived.. These sorts of power structures produce certain kinds of art (portraits of royalty, propaganda, and so on). We were conjuring speculative alternatives. I wonder, What if Bernie Sanders had been elected President in 2016 and/or -20? Sanders’ inclination to reintroduce the policies of FDR in the 21st Century for Americans might have manifested a revival of the post-Depression, pre-WWII public art programs. Such a revival might have entailed the redistribution of art power from top to bottom through some achievable adjustments in cultural policy in the United States. Let’s talk about it! That discourse has been fundamental to my practice for decades, and carried forth through radio shows, publications, via the web, etc. My Masters in Arts Management from the Drucker School adds a qualifying credential to my CV, and I’m proud of it and the work put in there. Through that program I met a lot of impressive people on the admin side of the art world, and was afforded access to LA’s non-profit art and culture scene I wouldn’t have otherwise had access to. But the preponderance of my ideas and opinions on the subject of the role of art in society are born from “real-world experience” gained over the course of a career in the arts, shaped by a lot of research, conversations with authorities on the subject, and more.

In 2009 I was one of nine working artists who participated in the first (and as far I know only) online forum on the NEA and public arts policy in America, hosted by WESTAF and encouraged for by the freshly minted Obama administration. I argued then for the establishment of a next-generation version of public art/WPA-style programming. It became obvious in short order who would create headwinds for a 21st Century New Arts in Action movement. The opposition arose from the consumer portable art industrial complex. Massive corporations like SONY and Disney were consolidating cultural power in the 00s through a dimensional strategy branded so as to displace “Art” with “Play,” “Creativity” and “Innovation” as keywords. The top tier art world, its collectors, the major institutions, auction houses, fairs biennials and retailers, the art intellectual/academic professionals dependent on these entities - none had any interest in the success of a logical, democratic, bottom-to-top reformation of the domains for arts and culture. Which is still true today. To be honest, They won the culture war over art, and we all are losing art as a consequence.

What are we losing, exactly? One can put it in abstract terms, using words like “opportunity” and loaded phrases like “freedom of expression.” One can delve into the literature (e.g., Gregory Sholette’s important 2010 book Dark Matter) or follow current analysts like the aforementioned Ben Davis, or track the excellent threads of New Models, Brad Troemel and Joshua Citarella, and so on. These sources illuminate the major issues in play now and introduce you to people who are organizing towards alternatives that might prove sustainable and more democratic than those that have dominated the field and (still) dominate today. One of the most promising speculations these alt.art folks entertain is the possibility of alternative platforms and currencies, although we should keep in mind there are immensely powerful forces behind parallel developments, most notably in AI, but also in correlating arenas (e.g., METAverse/VR). Bootstrap or DIY artist-driven projects probably don’t stand a chance against these behemoths.

Joe Sorci in his Chestnut Studio, circa 2000 (PJM, for Joe’s Destination Gallery exhibition)

I spent hundreds, maybe thousands of hours in my Chestnut studio. Primarily, I used it as a painting studio, but I also executed many drawings, sketches and studies there, using various media (pencil, pastel, charcoal, ink and so on). The collectives for which I served as Lead or co-Lead Artist, DddD and 01, sometimes met there, in whole or part. I taught private art lessons in the space, usually allowing students to use my materials. Visitors dropped in throughout the day and night, sometimes by appointment, sometimes on a whim. The building was locked outside of business hours, so logistical arrangements might be necessary. It wasn’t unusual for other Chestnut denizens to stop by during a break, to borrow a tool, or to have a coffee, smoke or chat. The stereo played radio and CDs. The lighting consisted of the infernal fluorescents and an array of clip lights, supplemented by colored lights and a pair of black lights.

The trains rolled by at regular intervals, always blowing their horns as they passed. They provided atmosphere. At night the building mostly cleared out. I often scheduled my day so that the evening hours were dedicated to extended painting sessions. It wasn’t unusual for me to work into the early hours of morning, sometimes until sunrise, depending on production deadlines, or because I needed to complete a painting layer or finish a work and didn’t want to interrupt the flow. Over time, I settled on a playlist or soundtrack for the studio. After midnight I often listened to Art Bell, which could get spooky. Radiohead was a mainstay, but my CD collection contained about fifty CDs. The rotation would change, but was consistent over time. A tune for all occasions.

When I would get tired or zone out, I had a heavy bag I would work over. During breaks, I would check messages and do call-backs, depending on the time of day or night. I sometimes wandered the halls to see who else was around, after washing brushes in the hallway slop sink or using the bathroom. The one closest to my studio was always disgusting. Although I had heard rumors the building was haunted, I never saw a ghost. One did hear the odd, unidentifiable sound occasionally. Chestnut then had the the vibe of a real-life movie set, although I’m not sure for what kind of film. By 2000, I had begun to explore photography, animation and moving image in earnest, in conjunction with computer-based processes. I purchased several video cameras and still cameras, digital and film. The studio (and by extension, Chestnut Square) became a backdrop for a series of shoots and media projects.

Collaborations happening through the DddD/01/AFH collectives with filmmakers, videographers, photographers, as well as interactions with post-production facilities like Ground Zero and Chromatics, changed the way I thought of the studio and studio production. Working with models, actors, dancers, musicians and an assortment of talented characters, inspired me to pursue modes of expression on the broad spectrum of arts and science. In a given day then, the studio could host a painting or drawing session, a photo shoot, a production meeting, an art class and a hang-out. Man! One never knew what might happen from day-to-day, or week-to-week. It was awesome while it lasted. Unfortunately, for all kinds of reasons, the run eventually came to a close. Sometime in 2002 or -3 I made the decision to close down my Chestnut operation. Part of the calculus — my parents were in bad health; so I left Nashville and returned to West Virginia to help take care of them.

Made at Chestnut: “Effigy,” acrylic on wood, for “Where My Feet Stick to the Ground” at Peanut Gallery (1997)

I recognize in hindsight how fragile, how precarious the Chestnut Experience was. I have no illusions about it. There were many, many beautiful moments. There were also the brown recluses who infested the studio for a year or two. I got bit many times, over fifty by my count. I accidentally set up an optimum grow environment for the critters, by leaving the lights on 24-7 and not installing an air-conditioner/climate control. Until Chip picked one up one summer, and I started turning off the overheads when exiting the studio, the arachnid plague was dreadful. The post-industrial art studio has its romantic aspects, but it’s not a place for the timid of heart. It takes a certain type of person. An OG studio artist must withstand the solitary nature of the work, or at least be comfortable within those parameters. The studio as multi-use-facility is another beast altogether.

To manage that sort of hybrid operation, one must have the skills and mindset of an executive producer, or a circus ringleader. To toggle between the two modalities requires a schizo personality. I don’t mean to suggest the collective/studio or multidisciplinary artist is mentally ill. But there is definitely a schism between the two programs or processes (solo/collaborative or group). Which is why a space like the one I occupied at Chestnut was so invaluable, and productive. It was big enough to compartmentalize, in both the actual and metaphysical sense. But without the community of people who animated it over time, that studio would have been nothing more than a decaying vestige of a bygone era, the epitome of industrial waste. And what animated the people who animated the space, myself most certainly included? The shortest, best answer is the love of art and life.

VALUBL OBJX: Afterword [CODA] at Ereignis

Click on the image to visit the online gallery exhibition.

I am pleased to announce the launch of the online exhibit, “VALUBL OBJX: Afterword [CODA]” at the web portal for the Ereignis Center for Philosophy and the Arts (Norway). The virtual exhibition consists of eight digital images with captions, presented in a simple click-thru format. The graphics are cells selected from the animation “I don’t understand it,” which was produced for my IRL show

“VALUBL OBJX” at Made in Astoria, a gallery in Northwest Oregon, USA, late in the summer of 2023. The comments/captions compress two essays composed in the aftermath of that production.

I wish to extend my gratitude to Dr. Torgeir Fjeld, for inviting me to participate in this project. It has been a pleasure to collaborate with Ereignis, and a joy to see our efforts achieve realization. I hope you enjoy “VALUBL OBJX: Afterword [CODA]” and take a moment to explore the newly redesigned Ereignis web portal.

PJM - Astoria, OR (January 2024)

VALUBL OBJX: 8 Captions

VALUBL OBJX: Afterword [CODA]

8 Captions

By Paul McLean

PLATE 1

In the Post-Contemporary Period (PCP), everything is smeshed together. An image flashes across space and time to be eventful. In Plate 1 the embedded sketch contains a cauldron. The reference is The Book of Changes, or I Ching. The picture is an animation frame. In the frame, the stylized figure, mouth open, is forming a Canto. (RIP CG Jung, and Ezra Pound). A drawing of a person cannot produce sound. The cartoon is levitating the ceremonial pot. Did you notice the word “LEGEND” next to and above the container? A recessed (buried) map charts the territories of indigenous tribes in the American Pacific Northwest, where I now live and work. Layers of digital textures: details of my EVENT Series vinyl paintings; samples from the NODES Series of sketches and paintings on museum board; and copyright free stock images of ink on paper. What are the image’s prime points of interest, and how does the eye progress among the optical attractors? The sound is Off.

PLATE 2

In two texts, I chronicled my passage through Post-Show Mode (PSM) and Post-Post-Show Mode (PPSM) after the closing of my exhibit VALUBL OBJX at Made in Astoria gallery in Astoria, Oregon. In PSM/PPSM, the artist may transition from the activities of art production and presentation into a relatively inactive phase, one that may be permanent. I immediately drift into this mind-space when the art is removed from the gallery wall and returns to the home, studio or storage. Over a long artistic career, I have learned to avoid the trap of looking backward at what just happened, in the bravado-tinted guise of Wolf Man, or forward, like an odd befuddled prehistoric bird, wondering about what’s next. It is better I find to resign oneself to temporarily inhabiting hybrid, present-situated quasi-creative persona, a virtual self-aware replica. […Think of it as s-Artist Prime (or sAP)?] Recovery, recreation and cautious reflection are recommended. Reactive or reflexive impulses are not. Is it beneficial during PSM/PPSM to survey the dimensional context of one’s existence? In small, gentle doses, possibly.

PLATE 3

During PSM/PPSM I can’t avoid feeling inside-out, sensitive, vulnerable, especially if there are no reviews or little to no quality community discourse following the closure of an exhibit. This is doubly true in the absence of sales. Feedback need not be affirmative, as long as it is constructive. In the social media era continuity is added value. If one has little to post, after a busy publishing schedule, the platform algos recognize the drop in frequency, and move on, to emphasize more frenetic-paced accounts. For the user the interruption of virtual interaction can be jarring. The feeling is similar to waiting over-long at a bus stop or train station. Discomfort reveals the extent to which one has been trained to push content as a sign of life. One may crave followers’ like-clicks. It is not advisable to fill one’s streams with digital placebos, either. Take a break instead. Re-absorb the releasing compressed energies, as in digestion.

PLATE 4

PSM/PPSM can precipitate the artist’s confrontation with the ambient romanticism hovering over the creative lifestyle. One can be bedazzled by a positive reception for an exhibit. Embracing the role of the dandy in the show’s afterglow can be cathartic. Alternatively, one can sink into despair, loathing, and maudlin indulgence. Success and Failure are polar extremes that can dent the fragile identity with which most of us in the arts operate, when we are not bounding from pinnacle to pinnacle of inflated confidence, earned or not. It is helpful to have in place solid markers of value by which one can discern meaning in an artistic progression. Expressive realization does not fit linear analysis well. The process is dimensional, evolutionary. Being and becoming are art’s immaterial core. However viewers, peers, collectors, dealers, critics and casuals respond to the exhibition, the artist is anchored to things, and anchored by making them, in contradiction to Chaos and Chance.

PLATE 5

The skin is a costume in gaming, the vestment of a “meat puppet” in virtuality, where the player is alien, a migrant passing through the 01 ether. The phenomenal circumstances of the artist in PSM/PPSM resonate with the actual person temporarily inhabiting the foreign territories of VR. In the simulation, consequences accrue by design, within assigned parameters. Appearances and experiences are governed by physics and logics peculiar to the artificial environment. In the Real World, in Real Life, one discovers the nature of choice. Human reality is a wovenform function of decision-making. Fate is the medium for the NRP character, not us 1st-person agents. Keeping in mind that art is no game, but the two domains are mimetic in some facets, artists in the PCP must diverge from the programming presets that might be systematically superimposed upon them through media, platforms and social conventions arising from the forces driving politics, economics and culture in the historical moment. Our autonomy is a singular responsibility, to the degree possible within one’s set of givens. A profile is not destiny. Be a free radical. An anomaly, if it suits you.

PLATE 6

Stringing together alt.affirmations is fun: Be Punk. Be unconventional. Be unmanageable. Hashtag ‘em and post ‘em with selfies on the Gram. Another good exercise is generating dodgy truisms: For an artist, eccentricity is not a vice; Advising an imaginary creative collective is redundant, because we share a weird original, authentic mindset; The soundtrack of living is bio-instrumental, as easy as humming or whistling… PSM/PPSM is fertile ground for non-sequiturs, even nonsense. Out of the churn of one’s creative reorganization and redirection, the nonsensical should give way to the poetic (RIP John Berryman). Which is not to suggest one throw caution to the wind. Be a wary visionary. A useful tactic or technique for an artist in a state of reformation is buffering. Insulating oneself from righteous anger, fear mongering, addictive consumerism, and other ugly facts of PCP life, makes room for new viewpoints. One can turn the PSM/PPSM toward connecting data points, outside the miasma of push campaigns competing constantly for one’s attention. An artist can seek absorption elsewhere, including the wilderness, the archive, the journal. A book can be an asylum (e.g., Cormac McCarthy’s final duo of novels), for the aesthete aficionado of the hyperreal.

PLATE 7

Whatever you do, don’t give up. Being in the void does not necessarily entail becoming the void itself. One in zero is not a death sentence. It is a clue about representation. It is also a warning about the determinate power of narrative. An artist in PSM/PPSM ought to refrain from composing fictional accounts of the past or future. Hesitancy in adopting existential subtexts to explain things is encouraged. I have found that the conception of trustworthy alternate personas for these intermediate situations and scenarios is hugely helpful. I find that navigating the intermissions in art life can take on its own expressive form. Cultivating formulae for surviving the inevitable creative troughs one goes through over years and decades of dedicated artistic practice is nigh essential. The trick is perspective. Keen perception requires rigor, especially once one leaves youth behind, and time does its number on each of us, more or less. What one must never forget is that art is a gift, whatever its price. Like life, to make of what we will, while there is yet any freedom at all.

PLATE 8

The artist mind has been long associated with lunacy. If one happens to be an artist who shows with frequency, enough to be a cyclic exhibitor, the PSM/PPSM could be likened astronomically to a waning moon, followed by an emptied sky. An experienced sky watcher has confidence that the lunar decline phase will pass, and the waxing and full moon will reappear in due course. For some of us, though, PSM/PPSM is like an annular eclipse, such as the one that will occur Saturday, October 14, visible across much of the USA. The heavens grow dark. We are witness to a celestial phenomenon, an event, a natural weirdness, not unheard of, but not normal either. The heavenly stuff that colors superstition, myth and legend. Art rarely if ever attains the gravity, intensity or longevity of those culturally significant undercurrents (superstition, myth, legend). But an artist can dream, yes? And it is not crazy to, when the waking world is a-swirl in the myriad of madness.

Thursday, October 12, 2023, 10:15PM (PST)

Astoria, OR