Writing

TWO-EYED PAINTINGS

Bubblehead Jeff Koons is rewarded and it isn't only the confusion introduced into the art-market by Warhol that’s responsible -whose dealer may’ve been the first to see that new-money knew nothing and only wanted recognizably costly props and backdrops to their fabulous power-lives.  

I work in laughable 3D.  

Even among artists, creation of illusory depth goes too far, proper mage-makers may only suggest or indicate depth.  Sculpture, architecture, are ok but certainly real painters must “respect” the canvas, and flat is sophisticated.  And so the painting experience remains nailed to the wall.

All flat images are a form of writing.  One reads and if one knows the language, the signs, one understands.  One would think that pictorial painting is universally understood, concerned as it usually is with fidelity to appearances, but we’re told that tribesmen with no contact to techno-society are bewildered even by photographs.  Intelligent as they may be within their culture, they do not see what we cannot help but see.  

Painting free of obligation to record observable things are more private, one must learn the language of signs they’re built on.  Yet wonderful and understandable 2D images can barely withhold adoration of 3D.  And as much as they strain against existence as dimensionless surface, depth events remain fictitious.  Not that fiction is so bad.

Depth illusion is something else.  One sees depth, easily mistaken for reality.  An appeal of illusion is that it can offer depth-experiences impossible to reality. 

The impetus to painting was probably magical-control via likeness, the voodoo doll.  Then picturing things in a defiance of time took root, only much later devolving into decor.  Then, in a struggle to go beyond decor, picturing became subtle and far more truthful to the means of painting, and even began to delve into the space between atmosphere and objects.  Painting was soon allowed to show itself as nothing bu thinking with paint, spread on a surface as exactly what it was and no longer pretending to be what it was not.  Rembrandt no more, you gain something and you lose something. 

So much for honesty to materials. 

Art is unruly and goes where it can.  It must, if we're to see and feel all we can of existence before the enemy, stupidity, obliterates everything.  

I’m caught up with the way two eyes work together to feed relatable flat images to our coupled brain-hemispheres, to our brains, for conversion to depth.  The slavish and plodding, so earnest senses developed over millennia can be wondrously fooled, opening up territory for still further experience, wholly new fictions.

I do this via cinematic means, making 3D happen, but not by simply picturing things in depth; my work explores seeing itself.  3D cinema allows me to present literally unimaginable sights that with familiarity become imaginable, picture-able in mind.  (Transcendence and still further transcendence.)  I began with brushes and I believe my art is a development of painting, is painting.

Of less importance is the fact that I still employ paints and brushes and sticks and whatnot to compose my Nervous Magic Lantern live-performances (no film, no video).  It's tricky but, in creating my projection-slides, dizzy paint applications on clear plastic, the physical painting counts for nothing; it’s all about what happens on-screen when projected.So I paint with a loose sense of future-effect during projection mostly concerned with texture.  Each disk has no up or down, can be turned during performance, and only a part is shown at any one time, held parallel to the lens or tilted at every possible angle.  Focus of the part is effected by proximity and angle to the lens, a single glass element, but with additional lenses placed between slide and lens for certain effects, most often to selectively magnify a section.  

A spinning shutter before the lens introduces action, and where the light-beam is intercepted by the spinning shutter (a round disk with two wedges cut out) has enormous effect on the depth and directional character of the screen-image.  Things move! in a totally mysterious way shapes and forms comprising the screen image keep moving and in every direction, without moving anywhere.  Doesn't go back and forth but maintains direction- until the projectionist intercedes.  (My name for the phenomena is Eternalism and it can’t be imagined.)  For some of us the beating light can be missed when watching standard projections.  

Above all, the image appears in depth, a depth one might think possible to step into yet with possibilities of sudden change (concave/convex, near/far, solid/open, above/below and from every point off view) impossible in real life.  Further into the impossible, the 3D can be seen by both eyes or by one since (unlike stereo viewing) all information is going to both eyes.  

The Nervous Magic Lantern came about after working 25 years with The Nervous System, two stop-motion projectors side by side that held near-identical film-frames for long periods of time and overlapped their separate images (via the spinning shutter) onscreen, exploiting similar and different to create otherworldly moving 3D images.  

Both systems now figure in my video output.  Transient performance was getting us down, myself and collaborator-wife Florence.  Now, gone digital, the Eternalisms can linger.