Bend Sinister, 2021

Artist's Statement

Dorothea Tanning was interviewed later in her life by someone who asked her, "What do you think of the art scene today?" "They're all just stuck in Dada 1917! Everyone is trying to top Duchamp's 'Fountain'! No doubt she had such artists as Damien Hirst and Tracy Emin in mind. So we have that contingent. Then there are the Conceptualists such as Sol Lewitt. Claes Oldenburg and Joseph Kosuth. The dry patness of the formula clings to them. And then there is the largest group active today, who have tried to behave as if Duchamp had never happened. In this group, one in which traditional fine art standards still hold sway, it's still the hand that is the most stubborn culprit clouding the way forward. I wanted to unlearn traditional painting and drawing and put it on a different footing. How does one let the world know that one is serious, then, if not by such painstaking attention to technique on the one hand and by now tried-and-true formulas deriving from Dada 1917 on the other?

For the poetic spirit's task is something far different now than it was in 1910. One does not wish to fight battles long ago won, such as establishing the legitimacy of Cubism or Surrealism, or even to be engaged in some form of extension of these now-played-out movements. One must adopt different and ever different approaches to avoid serving the dictates of the Combine. Picasso's words on this subject still apply: "Art doesn't exist to decorate the space above the sofa. Art is an offensive weapon in the defense against the enemy." But what is the enemy? It is a shapeshifter. The schools of art training cannot lead us out of the present impasse, and an ever-increasing careerism rushes in to fill the void of created by our cultural anomie. As such, I determined to avoid all the various schools and pedagogically-derived theories of art to ensure that my art is something that has nothing to do with the conceptions of David Salle or Damien Hirst!

The artist is situated, better than anyone else, if he or she refuses to follow those pathways laid before them encouraging this corrupting careerism, to partake in the struggle against repression. As such, in this era, one wants to play with the basic categories of artistic expression. But the progressive refusal of traditional means is itself now incorporated into the academy, and the Surrealist "crisis of the object" is still with us. I pursue an art of radical destabilization and refusal for this time, not the time of the Modernists or even the postmodernists, for atavism has the people by the throat.