Plagiarism

This thing about Witi Ihimaera ripping people off is pretty funny. Apparently, he took some things other people had done, tweaked them a little, and placed them, unattributed, in his own work.

In art, we do this all the time.* It's called appropriation. Some people think it's a postmodernist thing, but it's not. It has a long and illustrious history. I reckon the cave painters busily ripped each other off. However, the examples I'm going to use are a bit more recent than that – from the fifteenth century.

In fifteenth century Italy, it was not uncommon (to say the least) for different painters to paint the same subject. Nor was it uncommon for a painter to take some figures or a compositional device another painter had used when treating the same subject, tweak it, and use it in their own work.

Sandro Botticelli and Leonardo da Vinci were contemporaries. They trained in the same bottega under Verocchio. They knew each other's work well. In 1475, Botticelli painted this version of the Adoration of the Magi:

Note the pyramidal composition of the figures, the row of receding ruins in the top left, and the standing figure in the bottom right (a self-portrait). Compare it with Leonardo's version from 1480:

The standing figure at the bottom right is also a self-portrait. Now, Leonardo's got pretty fancy with the figures, using a half circle as well as a pyramid for a much more integrated composition. And ruins in the background were pretty standard in Adorations, to signify the old pagan order of things that was swept away by the coming of Christianity.

However, I don't think I'm stretching a long bow to say that Leonardo's painting is a direct response to Botticelli's. They were pretty competitive. Leonardo is saying, 'I see what you've done, and I've done it better.'

In about 1500, Botticelli painted this version:

Note the figure kneeling in front of the virgin and child. Mentally reverse it, then compare it with the figure kneeling in front of the virgin and child in Leonardo's painting. (Click on the pic to make it bigger if necessary.) They are the same. Note as well the figure in red with a black hat that looks a lot like Leonardo (though it is also a general type). The stupid amount of figures could also be part of it: 'Outdo this!'

So I reckon Witi should tell those po-faced motherfuckers to fuck themselves. Take a leaf out of Hone Harawira's book!

*An interesting and revealing case is Picabia. When he does it with his paintings, the art historians call him a proto-postmodernist. When he does it in his writings, he gets called a plagiarist.

I should also point out that I only rip off the dead. They're my proper contemporaries anyway.

Visual art hierarchy

1. Works that are visually compelling and conceptually coherent
2. Works that are visually compelling but not conceptually coherent
3. Works that are conceptually coherent but not visually compelling
4. Works that are neither visually compelling nor conceptually coherent

I suppose I should really define my terms and/or give examples, but I'm not going to.

On thinking

It's sobering how little of any person's internal experience – thoughts, feelings, insights, etc – can be conveyed or recorded. Words are wholly inadequate to the task, very crude and simplistic tools indeed. Pictures are better (one of the main reasons I make them), but not by much really.

Once your thoughts have been reduced, simplified, and bent out of all shape to fit into the box you're using to convey them, they're pretty unrecognisable. It's not so much that you can only convey a fraction of what goes on in your head but that that fraction is a hideous travesty of it.

All the people who ever lived, all their epiphanies, gone forever without much of a trace, if at all.

On posterity

Let's just take posterity out of the equation. We're facing a major extinction on the scale that wiped out the dinosaurs. These have happened a several times in the history of life on Earth, but this is first one created by an animal species that's part of the system it's destroying, i.e. us.

It's pretty clear it's way too late to stop the process. There's no point in recycling, carbon off-setting, alternative energy, saving for your retirement, or any of that. If anything, we should be preparing to move to Antarctica. Either that or just enjoying the last days as best we can.

We're the first generation of artists in history who can't rely on posterity. We're making art for our time, and only our time.

Aleatory art

So I've been thinking about artists' intentions and the illusory nature of the self, and then I read The Dice Man by Luke Rhinehart. Now, this is one of those books that I've been meaning to read for 20 years or so. Friends have raved about it, and The Fall wrote a doozy of a song about it.

I quite enjoyed the book at the start, but then it paled. But first, some background.

There are several arguments for why neither the world nor the self exist. I'm not going to go into them now (though I do quite like this one). The Dice Man recognises this, and comes up with a method for allowing what he calls the minority selves to come into their own by giving over his free will to the dice.

The philosophers of art reckon artists' intentions are important. It's another complicated area I won't get into in any detail now. Basically, for example, an allegorical painting can't be allegorical unless it was intended to be allegorical. But if the artist's self is illusory, who or what is doing the intending?

There is a good tradition of randomness in art. Hans Arp ripped up pieces of paper and dropped them on to another piece of paper, then glued them where they fell. Tristan Tzara applied this idea to poetry and pulled words out of a hat (which was then ripped off by Billy Burroughs to become what he called the cut-up method). Duchamp did Three standard stoppages, where he dropped three metre-length strings from a metre's height and glued them where they lay, to use as measurements (ye gods, he did do some shit work, didn't he!?).

In each of these cases, randomness, rather than the artist, determines the work. Intentions don't come into it (well, directly at least).

So is the answer simply to randomly determine the form and content of art work?

I'm afraid the answer is no. This is the problem I had with the Dice Man. Replacing the dictatorship of an illusory self by the dictatorship of chance is no advance at all - you're still suffering under a dictatorship. A system based on randomness is still a system.

I'm not sure what the solution is.

Laziness

I am very lazy. When I was 18, my mother did an industrial psychology course. She gave me a test to measure, among other things, my ‘ambition’. I scored 0 out of 10.

My favourite part of the day is when I wake up and doze, put off getting up for as long as possible. In the afternoons, I sit in the studio, smoke cigarettes, watch the clouds, plants, and animals, look at pictures, and think about things.

Lazy thoughts are the best. You start anywhere, with anything, and then drift, see where it takes you. All the best ideas are arrived at idly. This is like that, you think, and, oh yeah, the other thing fits in here too. Then you mix it all together, and get rid of the extraneous stuff (cos you can’t be bothered), and you’re left with this thing.

Laziness means you don’t sit in front of a blank canvas and worry about fucking it up. You do whatever, your present whim. If it works, great. If it doesn’t, so what?

I am too lazy to want to be a ‘successful’ artist. Having to worry about keeping dealers and collectors and curators happy. Having to worry about what is written about you, or, worse yet, what is not written about you. Having to worry about whether such-and-such arsehole is getting more shows and residencies and prizes than you. And so on and so on. It’s all just too much effort.

Laziness is freedom.

Nihilism for beginners

Okay, so Kant pointed out that space, time, and causality are not properties of the world, of things-in-themselves, but rather properties of the mind that allow us to understand the world. All objects that we can apprehend exist in space and time, and have causes and effects. We can only apprehend objects in those terms; any object not in space, in time, and subject to causality would be unknowable. This means that space, time, and causality are conditions that must be met for us to apprehend an object. But things-in-themselves are not dependent on the conditions we have for apprehending things. Those conditions are properties of our minds, not of the things. Space, time, and causality are subjective framing devices with which we structure our sensations and combine them into the coherent world we observe. The world we experience, the world of appearances, is dependent on the properties of our minds.

Some people go on from this to posit an ultimate reality beyond the world of appearances. But such an underlying reality, if it existed, would be completely unknowable. It would be completely separate from us. In what way then can it underly the world of appearances?

If apparent things are constructed by the classifications and arrangements of sensation by our mind, they are obviously not real. There is no thing-in-itself, and each person constructs the world, not according to any truth or reality, but according to their own needs and values.

Kant also points out that, since the world of appearances is constructed by the mind, whatever unity it has is provided by the unity of the subject perceiving/constructing it, and that this is a reciprocal arrangement. The unity of the object is brought about by the subject grasping the different elements of the object and combining them into a whole, and the unity of the subject is possible only by doing this. It is like what the art theorists call 'intertextual space', where the meaning of a work of art is generated by the interaction between the work and a viewer. Or, as we should say, a work of art is created by the interaction of a subject with an object. That object could be a painting on a wall or it could be the world as a whole.

However, neither the object nor the subject are a unity. The self is seething mass of contradictory impulses, desires, and needs, and the world it constructs is similarly contradictory. But there's more. If the world of appearances is unreal and illusory, and it has a reciprocal relationship with the self, then the self too is unreal and illusory. They are both fictions. Nothing is real.

An open letter to the good artists

People often complain about the ‘gatekeepers’ of the art world – major dealers, collectors, curators who supposedly decide who gets picked up and who doesn’t. Many artists structure their work and their career around getting into the right galleries, the right collections, and the right institutions. Some people worry about the amount of art school graduates there are nowadays, seeing them as competition.

This is completely wrong-headed. It is important to remember that we are the primary sources. Curators, collectors, dealers, and the like are parasites. It’s not a symbiotic relationship at all. They need us, but we don’t need them. We were around long before they existed, and we’ll still be around long after they’re gone.

What matters is the body of work you leave behind after you’re gone. With a bit of historical distance, it will be obvious who the good artists were. If history is anything to go by, it is the people who follow their own path, who stay true to themselves, and damn the short-term consequences. It is the people who have something to say. Now you may answer, ‘Ah, but David those future people need to have heard of you first, and for that you need to be in major museum collections.’ Bear with me, and I’ll get to that.

When was the last time you went to a show at a public institution that made you sit up and take notice? There is a reason that they only show mediocre work. Public institutions are accountable for the public funding they receive. They usually try to do this by using viewer figures. This means that they are risk-averse. They play it safe and go for crowd-pleasers every time.

Go along to the City Gallery in Wellington and do the survey they have at the front desk. The first thing you’ll notice is that it is a marketing exercise. Try the ‘customer’ survey at Te Papa. At least that actually asks what you got out of the show, buried somewhere in amongst all the questions about advertising and product ranges. That’s all they care about – getting people through the door. Your interests and their interests don’t coincide. You don’t need them.

I'd be wary of the big collectors as well. They're perfectly capable of dumping your work at low prices when fashions change. Some have even been known to do so while you have a show on, completely screwing you. If they've done it before, they can do it again.

I wouldn't worry about the hordes of recent art graduates. People who think they can screw you over cos they are plenty more where you came from haven't thought things through.

You’re artists, people, artists. You’re meant to be creative. You don’t need to follow the conventional career structure. Create your own methods of getting your work out there. You don’t need to be dependent on gatekeepers. Nothing will change unless we change it. Don’t play their game. Create your own game. Make up your own rules. This is what it means to be avant-garde: it’s not (just) what you do but the way that you do it. We change the rules of the game. All the tools are there. All you have to do is use them.

The crucial thing you do need is something to say, something that informs what you do. It also helps to have a good knowledge of art history and a good general knowledge. Art works by associations, and the more things you have to associate the better. Read widely and well. Anything and everything can be source material. Good ideas can be found in the unlikeliest of places.

That's my two cents worth. Now I'm going to go teach my grandmother how to suck eggs.

Why I have a day job

I recently came across an old business plan I did way back. It had a nifty formula for working out how to price your goods and services.

Ha ha, thought I, let’s look at the numbers for being a full-time artist. Let’s have modest ambitions and work out how much you’d need to sell to get the minimum wage ($25,000 before tax, about $480 a week in the hand).

You need to add two-thirds of the cost of materials (you get one-third back through tax) and then the dealer’s cut. Let’s say (a completely arbitrary) $2000 for materials and assume a dealer’s commission of 40%. If you were doing this for real, you'd work out the cost of materials properly.

Dividing $27,000 (wage plus costs) by 0.6 (to add the dealer’s cut) tells us that, to get the minimum wage, you need to sell $45,000 of paintings each (and every) year.

What if you have larger ambitions than the minimum wage? What if you'd like to live on the average wage ($45,000 before tax)?

You’ll have to assume that, if you’re producing work with a higher total value, your material costs will consequently rise. Let’s say to $3000, because some materials won’t rise much more than a basic minimum you’ve already factored in.

Dividing $48,000 by 0.6 gives you total sales each year of $80,000.

These totals allow us to work out how many paintings of a certain price you need to sell to meet your target. If the average price of a painting is $2500, you need to sell 18 paintings a year to get the minimum wage, or 32 paintings a year for the average wage. That’s a lot (and I don't sell at that price anyway).

If the average price is $5000, you need to sell nine paintings a year for the minimum, and 16 for the average, wage. At $10,000, you need five for the minimum, and eight for the average, wage. At $25,000, you need two and three respectively.

This seems a lot better, but the problem is that, as your prices rise, so the pool of potential buyers shrinks, especially in such a small market as New Zealand’s. Remember that you need to sell this amount of paintings at these prices every year at least until you’re 65 (assuming that the super’s still around then). For me, that’s 27 years.

So, even if my prices were at the giddy heights of $25,000, I wouldn't think I had it made. I'd be worried about selling all the time.

If, on the other hand, you get a job at more than the average hourly rate, you can work part time for the average wage and be able to paint and show what you like, with no regard to whether they'll sell.

Increased prices limit the pool of potential buyers in a highly unsatisfactory way. They select for ability to pay rather than appreciation of the work. For this reason, I'm strongly considering having an application form for people to fill out before they can buy a painting. I'm thinking that they'd need to disclose their religious and political views as well as explain why they want to buy the picture.

Rough notes towards an argument against Baxandall

1. Prefer 'iconographical reductionism' to 'iconographical minimalism'.
2. B's argument fails on his own terms. If he asks us to prefer the explanation that explains all the features of a picture and his explanation doesn't explain the angels' handshake or the pointing finger, then we should prefer an explanation that does.
3. B suppresses acknowledged function of 15th century privately commissioned paintings as allowing patrons to show off their education and sophistication to their peers in favour of Church commissioned pictures' didactic function (deliberate deception?). This is a privately commissioned picture. Note common feature of religions to encode two or more things in same story – one simple one for general population, another (often quite different) for elites.
4. Related to 3 is that magical thinking was prevalent in the culture – systems of correspondences etc, including number symbolism. Given P's mathematical ability and friendship with people such as Nicholas of Cusa (which B might not have known about), elaborate geometrical symbolism is one of P's resources. Note limited nature of geometrical scheme B presents (another deception?).
5. Related to 4 is P's early training as heraldic painter, which would have taught him to see the division of space as a way of conveying meaning (note that B could not have known this).
6. B's insistence of purely formal solutions to problems seems unreasonable. It doesn't take account of 15th century iconography, nor of role of humanists in deciding iconographical scheme (related to 3 but in tension with 4 – resolve by arguing for P playing active role with humanists in deciding scheme (cf Arezzo)).
7. Is a reductionist account (what you see is what you get) best way of dealing with good pictures, part of whose interest surely lies in the way they work at several levels? How does that fit with B's (disingenuous) acknowledgement that his not necessarily best way to look at pictures?

Four-dimensional painting

Let us pass over the fact that there are no clear demarcations between objects, no such things as discrete objects. What we consider to be objects are constructs of the mind.

Let us accept for the sake of argument that these constructs are the objects that we conceive them to be. What is the entire object? It can’t be the object at any arbitrary point in spacetime. That’s just a slice of the object, not the object as a whole. There is no reason to privilege any particular slice of spacetime over another. The entire object is all the spacetime events involving it between when it was created and when it is destroyed.

Not only does this make it almost impossible to appreciate a painting in its entirety but it also has implications for the conservation and restoration of paintings. There is an assumption that the painting as it was when the artist stopped working on it is ‘the painting’, and that any change to it after that is ‘damage’ that has to be ‘restored’. This is, of course, an untenable position.

Over time, a painting changes. Dust and smoke particles accumulate on the surface. Varnishes darken. Pigments change their colour. Cracks form in the surface. Conservators talk about restoring a painting to its ‘original condition’. But this is, as we have seen, an entirely arbitrary designation. Why privilege the moment an artist stops working on something over any other moment in the painting’s existence?

When I’m working on a painting, I carefully blow smoke over the wet paint to trap the particles between the paint layers. In at least one case, I’ve included dark forms in the underpainting that should hopefully begin to show through the lighter overpainting in about 50 years or so.

A false dichotomy

Rose and I were walking along the waterfront on our way to somewhere or other one evening a wee while ago. It was the twilight time when some colours get really intense (cos our eyes have got both rods and cones).

We were walking past a certain public sculpture, and Rose remarked on how good it looked. I mentioned that the colours were indeed really good, especially against that background, but that I still didn't like it. When asked why, I said something like 'Native plants made out of number 8 wire? Come on!' She responded with something like 'You're not very visual at all! It's all about the ideas for you.'

Needless to say, I was a little put out by this. It wasn't until later that I realised I don't really distinguish between the two. One of the reasons I don't like the term 'conceptual art' is that it implies that there's such a thing as 'non-conceptual art', which is nonsense. It's a false dichotomy, one that derives from Duchamp's silly comment about 'retinal' versus 'intellectual' art (which was his excuse for being such a crap painter).

I've even heard people assert that you can only think with words, which is patently not the case. (Incidentally, I have a theory that this misconception gave rise to other misconceptions, such as a belief in souls and the afterlife – if you conceive of your 'self' as your thoughts, and you conceive of your thoughts as disembodied words, then it's no great leap to the idea that when you die the disembodied words remain.)

We're extremely visual animals. The human body is designed around getting our eyes up off the ground. (Hmm, I probably shouldn't use the word 'designed', as it implies a designer, but you know what I mean.) And then there's language itself. Just look at some common English phrases: you 'get some perspective', 'take the long view', and 'see things my way'. All of these phrases use seeing to talk about thinking. It'd be interesting to know whether other languages have similar phrases.

I also have a theory about the Great Leap Forward that happened roughly 50,000 years ago. Before this, human material culture was remarkably homogeneous, both in space and time. People made and used the same tools everywhere (i.e. no regional diversity) for tens of thousands of years (i.e. no cultural development). Then all of a sudden there was both regional diversity and cultural development. Conventional thinking tends to ascribe this to the development of language. However, I reckon that, rather than language allowing art to develop, it was the other way around: art allowed language to develop.

Take the earliest known art. You'll note the scientists mention that the maker needed 'fully syntactical language' to explain what it represents. What they don't say is that the maker doesn't need language to make it.

Let's say that every day you take a stone to a certain place to carry out a certain task and then discard the stone. Sitting idly staring at the pile of stones one day, you realise that each stone represents a day you've come here (maybe you'd been snacking on some local mushrooms, ha ha). Now, keeping track of days is really useful for a hunter-gatherer, but you can't carry a pile of stones round with you. Then one day you see a bunch of marks left in the dirt by some other activity. Aha! How about, every day, you make a mark on a bit of ochre?

Then you've got to explain yourself to the nongs around you. We've been trying to do this ever since.

Magic art powers

As an intertemporal avant-garde painter, my magic art powers allow me not only to travel in time but also to read minds and become invisible. Although this can be useful now and then, it's not really the point.

Recent telepathic experiments have established that the black square is the main conduit for the avant-garde thought virus through the ur-dimension. Unfortunately, we inhabit one of the minor hell-worlds, far from the centre of things. This is why the thought virus is so attenuated when it reaches here and can only infect a few select individuals inhabiting separate spacetime locations (with the notable exception of the early 15th and 20th centuries).

Practical matters

I had a very good day yesterday: out for breakfast, up the Coast for a friend's kids' third birthday party (barbie and bubbly), out for dinner, off to the flicks, and finally to Happy for a Stumps gig. It was all good.

I had a couple of conversations, one at the barbie and one at Happy, about artistic practice. I am convinced that the most important thing is that you do what you want to see, not what you think other people want to see.

This year has been a dead loss for painting. If I were to only count finished paintings, I'd've done bugger all all year. However, I don't only count finished paintings. I see the graphic novel I'm working on, the book I did for the twins, the lecture at the Film Archive, this blog, and various other activities (even aspects of my day job) as all part of a whole. That whole is my practice.

I'm only just starting out. But I hope that, when I'm done, that whole will have a well-defined shape – and that other people will get something out of it as well.

There's only one way to find out...

Systems

I went along to a Gordon Crook opening at the Mary Newton Gallery yesterday. I wanted to see it because I'm really into symbol systems at the moment. It was also not your run of the mill opening. Wandering around the work with a cup of tea rather than a glass of wine was very pleasantly novel.

The way people seem compelled to come up with systems is really fascinating. It has to do with way our brains work. We take this continuous world, break it up into discrete chunks, and categorise those chunks. This has an obvious evolutionary advantage, not to mention such side benefits as enabling language. The problem comes when we assume that the way we construct the world is the only way the world could be. Looking at everything only in terms of a particular system also means you ignore some things and distort others.

There was a superbly ironic prime example of this in today's paper. The spokesperson for the NZ catholic church, commenting on the recent claimed find of the remains of Jesus, his wife Mary, and son Judah, said: 'To suggest they've found the remains defies belief.'

Something about what I'm doing

I am currently exploring how meaning can be codified visually by combining abstract symbols with figurative representation. In The world, there are three overlapping picture planes: on one is a Gnostic symbol for the world, on another stick figures spelling out a Latin phrase in semaphore, and on the third a stylised representation of a house on the edge of a volcanic island that functions as a visual metaphor for the ideas encapsulated in the symbols. I am working under a definition of art as symbolic thought expressed materially in a self-conscious and highly associative way – something happens in the mind of the viewer.

A representation of an object can be related to other elements in a picture through purely formal means: its size, its placement, and its treatment relative to other elements. Much of my work deals with the interaction of positive and negative space, figure and ground, and painting and drawing. I try to place my work in the interzone between these poles. In Hide and seek, a figure clutching a knife lies in wait behind a vertical pencil line that divides the pictorial space. As well as depicting that interzone, this work alludes to the sometimes antagonistic relationship between artist and viewer.

I see pictorial space as giving the viewer access to an alternate world in which they have ultimate freedom to act. My current work is concerned with using these methods to present a philosophical system that I call ‘common-sense nihilism’. I have been doing a series of self-portraits in which I take on a variety of guises and identities. Self-portrait as magic bishop is not just an homage to the Dada performers of the Cabaret Voltaire, it also depicts one strategy for surviving in a hostile and contingent, not to mention pointless and absurd, universe – armouring yourself in a carapace you have made.

Full on

Just had a big day. Well, a very full on week. Very full on. I've done a few things over the last wee while regardless, but I don't think I'm going to post them just yet. Got to have a few surprises for people coming to my show in December after all.

I'm pretty much all ready for it. Just got to get a couple of things framed. Even got invites printed, and there's still two months to go. Got to be happy about that. I want to do a lot more stuff so I've got a good range to choose from for the final line up.