Jet lag

I had a dream.

"Untitled " 58"x80" oil on canvas

My dream was in two parts. I spoke with two people, the first was with a Chelsea art dealer, the second was with a young black woman and artist in New York. The dream was both affirmation and defense of my art and a devastating personal critique.

Firstly, I asserted the right of my art to be on galleries walls. I invoked its quality in comparison to the other work present. I remember clearly the conviction of my feeling from this section of the experience. The dream proclaimed the urgent need for the work to be seen and for it to have an audience. When saying audience I meant that the work needed a cultural community with which to have a dialogue. I went to a screening recently where the director Olivier Assayas stated that the precondition of a work being art was it never took the audience for granted, but established a discussion between itself and the viewer. The dream advocated for such an exchange and then in it was a premonition of how the conversation might unfold.

"End of Civilization" or "barbarians at the Gate" etching 18x24"

The second part of the dream morphed into banter with a young artist and could be imagined on the subway. It was a loud friendly funny affirmative talk about family traditions ,TV consoles, values, culture, and art. Since the young artist was a woman and African American our experiences and opinions differed. She argued that the work I sought to exhibit was "yesterday," from a time past. Today the work is about identity, she said, a rejection of white male concepts of universality. The problem, my dream was telling me, is that is exactly where my art is posited. It is born from that tradition. It invokes the spirit of the enlightenment; it revels in narrative; it challenges orthodoxy; it suggests revolutionary (class) politics; it asserts the ideas of individuality and justice; it embraces the complications of a Christian identity in a postimodern time; it celebrates universal ideas.

(Forgot title... from a Borges short story) 12x16" etching

Martin Luther King’s dream used the logic of those same “its” to renounce America’s failure to realize its own ambition. But his speech also ushered in a new age of identity politics: race, gender, age, sexuality. The dreams young phantom was embracing this new era in her critique art. By the end of the night my sub-conscious presented me with an irresistible dialectic of my own work and its position in the contempoary public arena.

"untitled" 22x30" water-colour

As a Footnote I was re-reading Monsignor Quixote with my morning tea and my heightened sensitivity to the subject led to redacting the following from the text and doctoring it to apply to art. Sancho is talking to the Monsignor about chivalry and the church, but I have replaced “art” as the subject of discussion:

“You remind me of your ancestor (Don Quixote) who believed in all those aesthetic traditions quite out of date even in his day"

…but the voice of true art does not go out of date.

yes it does

what nonsense you talk

and you have broken away to do your art in a world that no longer believe in those old images anymore.”