Essays
The Suggestion Series
My new series of paintings is entitled “The Suggestion Series”. This is a subcategory of my ongoing “Fragments” series that I have previously discussed. I started working on this project a year ago, and it’s become quite an adventure.
I asked fifteen people for ideas, verbally or in writing, that would become the basis for fifteen paintings. I would paint whatever they said; their words would be the basis for the paintings. Some contributors were strangers. Some of the contributors I barely knew, but came to know well. Some people I already knew well and learned more. I encouraged people to avoid “visual” ideas and steered them more toward abstraction.
When I started the project, I wasn’t sure if I’d even like the suggestions I’d be forced to work with. The results were unexpected. I was surprised by how willing everyone was to share themselves and how candid some of the statements were. I was surprised how often people wanted to discuss ideas involving God, life, death, etc. One unsuspected side effect occurred when several participants met each other and formed their own social relationships, changing the meanings of the paintings in the process.
And why are there sixteen paintings now? Because one guy had two ideas, and they were both so good, I had to use them.
One woman’s suggestion/painting involves her preoccupation with the other fourteen participants, their ideas and what their paintings look like.
The contributors didn’t disengage from the project after offering their ideas, and they continue to have an ongoing involvement in the process. The interviews ranged from five minutes for some contributors, to hours, days and weeks for others. The interviews themselves became lengthy discourses about everything under the sun, and it was alternatively fascinating, terrifying and hilarious. Where will it go now? I have no idea; I’m working on the paintings, just along for the ride. This project sprouted legs and ran away from me a long time ago.
Will the fifteen participants coalesce and form a Jeff Koons-esque army, looking for craftspeople to execute their ongoing ideas? Creative self-discovery does this to us. That’s the P.T. Barnum element, there’s a sucker born every minute! I suckered them into putting on the “creator” hat (albeit willingly), and I suckered myself into a position where I had to admit that this thing was out of my control and had a life of its own, and the best position for myself as a painter was to sit back and watch. Oh, and also to benefit from their great ideas!
I am sincerely grateful to the participants. Thanks for being involved in my project and also for being so into it!
As of this writing, I am almost through the interview phase, sketched nearly all of the suggestions and I’ve completed six of the actual paintings. Stay tuned to the website, I plan on posting the other paintings as I finish them, and I look forward to your feedback.
Neil Innes Concert —Tuesday, October 19th 2004
Time to go see Neil Innes in concert at the Magic Bag in Detroit! On the way to Detroit, I was reading the complete short stories of Truman Capote, published in honor of what would have been his 80th birthday on Sept. 30. I read The Headless Hawk and part of A Christmas Memory. Hang on; we’ll come back to this later.
After not too long of a wait, Neil came out and opened with “I’m the Urban Spaceman”.
The songs, jokes and stories that followed made for a really fun evening.
Before and after the show I chatted with the other audience members. Many of them had seen Neil with The Bonzo Dog Band 36 years ago, which was the last time he had toured in Michigan. They remembered, and they came back for more. This fact amazed me.
It made me think of my job as a music buyer for an independent record store chain- a job that ended in the year 2000 (along with the company itself). One of the basic fallacies of the music industry is the idea that music lovers have a short attention span. Another fallacy is that people can always be told what they want to buy.
As a buyer, major label representatives met with me and told me how many pieces of a new item I needed to buy for our five retail stores in Michigan and our 300 college bookstore accounts. These could be returned for full credit within 90 days; therefore, there was no reason not to buy their recommended amount of new releases.
Besides, as I found out, if we didn’t go with their numbers initially and we sold out of a new title, they would hesitate to send another shipment, since we “lowballed” their original suggested number. I don’t know about other folks’ distributor/label rep relationships, but that was ours.
Why force such a specific number, some of you may ask? Because these wholesale figures are what the billboard top 100 chart positions are based on. The major labels heavily promote and decide what will be a hit before anyone even hears it. And, theoretically, a cd could be a big hit even if we’d returned all of our stock within 90 days, not having sold a single one. Then, wait a few months! The next new thing will come along, and forget what is being sold today, it doesn’t matter anymore. The ninety day rule treated music like it had the shelf life of a dairy product.
Fortunately, Mr. Innes can discuss these issues in a much more entertaining manner. His new “Ego Warriors” song/movement is a refreshingly irreverent stab at that tired old sacred cow, the mass media. Don’t take my word for it, see the show or check out www.neil-innes.org.
During the performance, Neil told the audience to congratulate themselves on taking part in the subculture. No one told us to buy his cd’s or see his live act, there was no enormous advertising campaign, it was what we wanted! This is why the music industry will ultimately fail, and good riddance. We can buy our music directly from the artist, whether it’s online or at a show like this one.
36 years later, the audience still knew what they preferred to hear. There’s no marketable substitute for good entertainment and good storytelling in the “meat world”. Back to my book: In the story “A Christmas Memory”, a young character based on Capote receives a dime from his elderly cousin to go and see a movie. She won’t come along, however. The old woman tells the boy to come back and tell her the story, because she prefers to hear it that way-in his own words.
National Public Radio Interview with Sharon Anderson,
concerning Los Angeles County Museum of Art exhibit entitled Inventing Race.
On April 23, 2004, I was interviewed by National Public Radio concerning an exhibit at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The exhibit was entitled “Inventing Race”.
The genre was familiar; 18th century Spanish painting. Each painting featured a man, woman and a small child. The Spanish words painted directly on the canvas described the race of the parents, and the resulting race of the child. These paintings were meant for the eyes of the Spanish living in Mexico, warning them not to breed with Blacks and Indians, their moniker for undesirable indigenous peoples.
Those who did mix the races were depicted in increasingly shabby dwellings, usually in the midst of some form of manual labor. There was a glimmer of hope for those wanting to improve their lineage, however. Potential mates could be chosen to make the lineage more “white”, and these children were referred to as “return-backward” races.
After leaving the exhibit, I was chosen by an interviewer from NPR to discuss what I had seen. I discussed the class and race implications of the paintings, contrasting the fine dwellings and even finer clothing depicted in the “purer” images of the Spanish with the cramped, shabby dwellings of the mixed races, all of whom were poor laborers. Racism often comes in the form of dominant groups removing the economic power from the so called undesirable races, thus making them the dominated. Many years later in Mexico, the famed muralist Diego Rivera would depict indigenous workers in a glorious light. But, in this exhibit, the colonialists view overshadows these later more positive representations and we are reminded again that history is written by the conquerors.
Gerhard Richter: Retrospective
Chicago, IL August 2002
Sometimes a painting seems to be observing the viewer instead of the other way around. The Gerhard Richter Retrospective seemed to contain alert representatives of some other world instead of a collection of paintings created over the last forty years.
As an artist, I admired such a diverse and plentiful assortment of work. After entering the first room, I realized I would never be able to look at the entire exhibit as much as I wanted; time restrictions disallowed the kind of intense scrutiny that these paintings demanded.
Representation of the natural world is the thread that runs through all of Richter's works: paintings resemble photography, abstracts resemble landscapes and landscapes contain a mood and gravity unparalleled in the genre.
Richter became best known for his representational paintings that are based on and styled after the photograph. Later, after I had read a collection of his writings, I realized that Richter "blurs" his images to make all of the objects seem equally important, or equally unimportant. But, as he points out, you can't blur paint, paint is paint.
Photography can be out of focus, however. Herein lies the challenge. Since its 19th century inception, photography has become a medium that creates a strong belief in itself. A photograph exists as proof that something is real. The photo moved beyond mere representation and is now generally accepted as "true", a document of "reality". For most people, painting may not be quite so believable. By painting an image based on a not-quite focused photograph, Richter illustrates this discrepancy and presents us with questions about painting and photography.
Which image feels more "true" to us? Which is the "real" representation?
Revised April 23, 2007 2:41 AM
Copyright © 2006 by Sharon Anderson. Use of any images, graphics or content herein requires her explicit written permission.