Jamie Bollenbach/ Now at www.JamieBollenbach.com: Please enjoy the work

Fifteen Minutes of Not Mentioning Andy Warhol

These paintings developed during my MFA program at the University of Washington in 2001 from a traditional figure drawing experiment where a model moves, and new drawings at each movement are superimposed on the previous drawing. This idea of still image as a description of the passage of time was famously used in Marcel Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase, which itself was based in early motion capture photography. But in my work, the direction of the work is reversed; where the early moderns - including the proto-fascist Futurists - were embracing technology, metal, speed, time and, apparently, the future, this work is in a sense trying to stuff the 20th century back into observational painting; the notion of time employed is organic and human, photography rejected, the marks gestural and muscular but pushed back into pictorial space, the synthesis of mood, process and image elevated over an illustration of external philosophical concept. My paintings argue that the dynamic of vision, illusion, and painting process is intellectually serious activity, that concepts which are essentially written language are incomplete, that conceptual art's jokeiness wears thin and that Pop Art is long exhausted, indistinguishable from its hollow, ubiquitous and uncritically capitalist subject matter. But it is not a defense of painting as paint - paint and painting processes are only useful inasmuch as they enable intellectually rigorous art. If little pots of mud still teach us about the nature of being, identity, philosophy, love, hate, politics, and blue, wonderful. It is true only as long as it is true. Each painting, each drawing, every image and object created by an active human consciousness connects to all other such objects and their formative processes. Art is simply a refinement, more ambitious, putting out tendrils of sensing into the most delicate and fleeting of concepts and experience. Painting allows, demands in fact, awareness of each element which creates the painting, both technical and in terms of subject and subject matter. Done well, it extends the possibilities of what all people can become aware of; done well, it adds to collection of all art works and processes, making available a bright little packet of new information to anyone who cares to examine it. It is the peculiar pressure of painting that each brush stroke is in a way connected to every brush stroke ever made in the 40,000 year history of painting. Whimsy, pretty and decorative aspects aside, this work is good if and when it meets this test, if it attaches to the body of all Art, sensitive to a new, ephemeral yet inarguably describable experience. The paintings here represent artwork from 2002 to present.

Friday, June 05, 2009

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Jamie Bollenbach/ Now at www.JamieBollenbach.com

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Fifteen Minutes of Not Mentioning Andy Warhol

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