From Painters Painting, 1973:
“The problem of American Painting had been a problem of subject matter. Painting kept getting entangled in the contradictions of America itself. We made portraits of ourselves when we had no idea who we were. We tried to find God in landscapes that we were destroying as fast as we could paint them. We painted Indians as fast as we could kill them. And during the greatest technological jump in history we painted ourselves as a bunch of fiddling rustics. By the time we became social realists we knew that American themes were not going to lead to a great national art. Not only because the themes themselves were hopelessly duplicitous but because the forms we used to embody them had become hopelessly obsolete. Against the consistent attack of Mondrian and Picasso we had only an art of half-truths lacking moral conviction. The best artists began to yield rather than kick against the pricks. And it is exactly at this moment when we finally abandon the hopeless constraint to create a national art that we succeed for the first time in doing just that by resolving a problem forced on painting by the history of French art we create for the first time a national art of genuine magnitude. And if one finally had to say what it was that made American art great it was that American painters took hold of the issue of abstract art with a freedom they could get from no other subject matter and finally made high art out of it.”
So there you have it. In a nutshell. The beginning of the story. I love this movie, almost more than anything - except the Warhol parts because I find him to be basically unbearable. When the filmmaker is talking to Jasper Johns about whether or not he was imitating the dadaists, particularly Duchamp, he tells this story about already being a painter and not knowing anything about this artistic movement when one of his buddies takes him to a gallery to introduce him to the work of Duchamp. He goes on to explain how he felt about the fact that people assumed that he was emulating other artists, and what it really means to be original, if that’s even possible at all.
I was already considering myself a painter, although I still couldn’t say it out loud, when I discovered who I just might be inside the grand historic scheme of things. Nearly 10 years ago I dragged 13 of my paintings into a prestigious gallery down the street so that the curator could help me price them for my first show (I am using the word “show” very loosely, folks.). I lined the pieces up around the room, leaning each one against a wall below a painting attached to a 15,000+ price tag. She walked slowly and looked them over. She told me that they were “good” and remarked that I was obviously a budding ”abstract expressionist”. And then she said I could sell each one for at least $300. I was thrilled.
That afternoon I went to the library to figure out what abstract expressionism really was (Did the world actually exist before I had the Internet?). I can remember flipping through the dusty pages of the art history books; googling the words on the library’s common computers. I had never been called something before, never been attached to such a distinguished title. In an instant I felt a part of something bigger than myself and my one room apartment. I was more than just my broken heart and loneliness. I was an artist.
Early on I painted a piece that looked just like every other bad Pollock knock off I’ve ever seen. It wasn’t accidental. I had just finished reading his autobiography and I felt that mostly I just wanted to be him, or at least someone a little bit like him, so I began to paint as I imagined he would, nervously circling the canvas with my brush, dripping, dropping, doping myself up and dumbing myself down. I told myself it was in honor but I know now that it was not. I naively believed that by pretending to be another more successful artist I could avoid becoming the artist that I already was. Let’s be honest. I hid out. And ironically, people loved this fucking painting. I still have it just to remind myself of how fraudulent I felt when people praised it. I knew it wasn’t mine, that it wasn’t channeled from beyond and that mostly it was shit. I copied. Plain and simple. End of story.
I haven’t seen it yet but there’s a documentary called RIP: A Remix Manifesto, described as “a probing investigation into how culture builds upon culture in the information age.” It asks the question: “Do… methods of frenetic appropriation embrace collaboration in its purest sense? Or are they infractions of creative integrity and violations of copyright?” These days I’m not so sure. I’ve stiched a bit of Rauschenberg and Twombly (and Campion, Coppola, Crowe, Dillard, Sarton, Kingsolver, Allen, Kenyon, Mann…the list goes on and on and on) into my brain so it only makes sense that my current work will be infused with what I’ve learned there. But I am more careful as I get older because inspiration is a very different animal from imitation and that little line is still so thin… so easy to cross, so simple to say:
I just didn’t realize. I swear I didn’t know.
But in a flash and blink it’s over and all that you’ll be left with is a plagiarized pile of someone else’s work, someone else’s letter to the world. We made portraits of ourselves when we had no idea who we were. Why yield when we can kick?
