The "Again" Moment we sought, at the end of the pandemic (e.g. We can resume our lives, again.) Public art by: Seongmin Ahn

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In regard to the current pandemic, there was no specific date we experienced as a society when things suddenly and drastically changed and no specific date for when all of our lives suddenly got back to what we were doing before. 

So there was no bifurcation and there has been no collective and permanent “again” moment for us, a moment where we could all say that this thing is over and we have won and life will resume, as the pandemic insidiously drifted in and continues to linger almost two years after Covid-19 was detected. 

Yet, all of our lives were interrupted and each of us has had to either begin again or plan for this. Artist Seongmin Ahn focuses on beginning “again” as she presents her public art project around various neighborhoods in New York City.

Again is an ongoing multi-site, multi-media public art series involving murals, floor pieces, signage, paintings and prints. It first appeared as a vinyl cut installation at the Korean Cultural Center (NY) in 2020 and then at the Wang Cultural Center at Stony Brook University (Long Island, NY) and Dongduck Art Gallery in Seoul. 

It currently appears on multiple billboards partnered with Save Art Space and a community mural in Queens is coming soon.

What is the message you are trying to convey in your Again project?

The Again project began from a small “hybrid” letter painting, developed during the most trying period of the quarantine, in the spring of 2020 in New York City. It is my message to the public that we can begin Again, despite the devastation we went through and are still going through caused by the pandemic.

Are you conveying this message in a way that it is particularly relevant to the folks in New York City?

I painted the first Again painting in English and Korean, which are my two most comfortable languages. As I developed this as a public project, I wanted to reach out to diverse groups who speak different languages in their neighborhoods. Believe it or not, research shows that more than 600 languages are spoken in the New York metropolitan area. 

I used to live in Woodside Queens, neighboring with Latino immigrants, and then Forest Hills, Queens, with lots of Eastern European Jewish immigrants. Currently, I live in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, where Italian, Polish and Hassidic Jewish folks make their homes. Diversity is the true character of New York and in order to reach out to these different neighbors, I wanted to visually speak to them in their languages.

In which neighborhoods are the murals being displayed? Which groups of New Yorkers are you reaching?

When I first developed this painting into a public project, I thought about neighborhoods which were hurt hard by Covid-19. So when I looked for mural sites, I was actively searching for walls in Corona in Queens, Longwood in the Bronx, Bedford Stuyvesant in Brooklyn, etc. 

But there were problems in regard to contacting building owners and getting permission. And then, as the pandemic lasted longer than expected, I realized that all of us were impacted by the pandemic in every aspect of our lives… those who lost their loved ones, to those who lost their jobs, and from front line workers to little school children who couldn’t go to school for such a long time, losing their opportunities for proper learning and socializing with peers. 

So, from that point I have looked at every possible neighborhood and location from streets in Harlem to walls of corporations and museums. I would like to have a balance between different groups of people with `different ethnic backgrounds, social and economic status. We all are essential New Yorkers.

It must be difficult for you to get feedback since strangers are looking at your work and have limited means to contact you. Have you been ok with this element of the project – not getting the positive feedback you might otherwise have received?

Well, getting feedback is always nice and encouraging. And sometimes I get inspired by feedback especially when it suggests a new idea for a future project. But for a few decades my art practice has been almost like a monologue. I would prefer to focus on the creating process to effect my vision instead of how the final product might be received. Once I put my artworks out in the world, I let go of them and move on to the next project, rather than looking back. I am just too busy thinking about how to realize new ideas into physical presence and how to solve technical difficulties.

How does your message reflect your personal experiences during the pandemic in NYC?

One of my most ambitious exhibitions in my 25-year career as an artist had to be shut down as soon as it opened due to the lock down in New York City in 2020. As it was co-organized by an influential non-profit gallery and a prestigious commercial gallery with a long history, we expected quite an amount of exposure in the artworld. 

We scheduled multiple events and lots of art professionals from all over the country were supposed to visit us. Plenty of public attention was expected as well. But nothing happened due to the lock down. So, I was devastatingly disappointed and depressed, even becoming physically ill. Again was also a self assertation that I can begin Again no matter what happened to me. I wanted to transfer the crisis into an innovative opportunity.

Also, during the lock down we were directed as to who should go to work, who should stay home. This whole conversation made me think “Are artists not essential workers?” and “How can I become more essential through my art practice?” So, I began to develop more public projects with an assuring message to contribute to the community that I belong to.

Do you see this project developing further into more neighborhoods or even cities?

The idea of using international languages to speak to different ethnic groups is more functional and feasible in New York as the city has the most diverse immigrant communities. However, there is no limit of possible locations. I select specific pairs of languages that speak better for the community where it is installed. For example, Elmhurst has large Indian population, so the billboard in Elmhurst has Hindi and English. I can expand this project to any city in any country. I just need to keep adding more languages.

How were locations actually chosen?

Getting permission for a mural was really challenging and it is also an ongoing struggle to finalize a location for an Again mural. I considered different platforms and all the locations possible except very wealthy neighborhoods. For Again on billboard, I have three locations in Harlem in Manhattan, Elmhurst in Queens, and Bushwick in Brooklyn. Harlem stands for my Black neighbors, Elmhurst has lots of Middle Eastern, Central Asian community members. 

Bushwick is very mixed depending on the blocks. I am currently working to finalize a location in College Town in Flushing, Queens for an Again mural. The Wang Cultural Center at Stony Brook University also hosted Again in a vinyl installation for their lobby. I want to have balanced platforms and locations considering different ethnic groups and ages and have diverse ways to send out the visual message.

How is this project a continuation of themes in your work and how does it diverge from what you have been doing?

My previous works were personal, emotional and philosophical searches to answer questions concerning my own struggles and questions. On the other hand, Again is my effort to continue a dialogue with the public, which naturally sprang out from social and political agitation in recent years. My first word painting was “Black Lives Matter; I was strongly impacted by the social movement caused by the death of George Floyd.

I still show a continuation in terms of how I value aesthetic presentation along with a conceptual idea. I am fundamentally a visual artist, not a writer or social activist. My work must be visually pleasing to me. The visualization process mostly begins from traditional visual languages.

Do you hope to do more public work in the future?

I definitely want to do more public work. Public work created different opportunities for me. It expanded my vision and capability beyond a small canvas and small studio space. Now I am looking at big open spaces in the park, or huge and nice walls of buildings differently. Also, a public project is a collaborative effort involving different bodies of people. 

As an artist, I initiate a project, but I must coordinate collaborative contributions from a funder, hosting organization, fabricator, my personal assistants, etc. Even this relatively small public work was sponsored by Café Royal Cultural Foundation and the Queens Council on the Arts. Save Art Space played an essential role to expand this project on billboards. As I plan to expand Again into a grander public project, I will need more professionals to collaboratively work together. This is a whole new experience to me, which I enjoy and appreciate.

Black Power in Print: The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

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Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts has an excellent online exhibit and Internet resource zone which covers such issues as the visual iconography of the Black Panther Party as well as early attempts by African American artists to break the color barrier at some of America’s ‘finest’ museums and galleries. This is important in light of what it finally took for African American artists to be included in American art galleries and museums.

Had it not been for the outrage and protests following the murder of George Floyd, black artists would probably still be under-represented in the most prestigious galleries and museums. White gallery owners and curators did not make it easy for artists of color to gain access to an art viewing and buying public. The meaningful inclusion of artists of color was not a gradual progression but a continual hurdle. 

This collaboration between Boston’s MFA and New York’s MoMA helps show that the artists were out there, but they were ignored. The American art world was permeated with racism and it took violent riots stemming from decades of frustration and indignation to finally scare this segment of society into opening up. After the reaction to what happened to George Floyd, and the accompanying fury against all racial hypocrisy, the powers that be had little choice but to finally acquiesce. All power to the people.

                                                Dana Chandler

The show Black Power in Print is in conjunction with MoMA, which recently added numerous copies of the Black Panther newspaper to its permanent collection as part of a donation by Patrick McQuaid. They have featured the work of Emory Douglas, who was responsible for the eye-catching and morally gripping graphic illustrations and photomontages for the paper.

Black “class” consciousness

Friedrich Engels wondered whether the mistreated, underpaid and overburdened working class of early industrial Europe might even be aware of their oppression and exploitation, given what he perceived to be their “false consciousness”. Engels was following up on Marx’s idea that the lower classes will readily embrace the values, vision and ideology of the upper classes. 

Much later Pierre Bourdieu would offer the concept of symbolic violence - those who suffer social and economic injustice often accept their suffering as being perfectly justifiable and their own fault. But these were all middle-class guys examining workers from a distance and their pessimism about workers’ perceptions came from the outside. In the 1960s, the Black Panthers of Oakland, California proved (the myth of) false consciousness not to exist among the economically and racially oppressed in the USA.

                                                Bobby Seale

The Panthers emerged as a radicalized proletariat – they represented working class and poor black folks and were openly Marxist (although they welcomed alliances from progressives of any color). Marxism was an overwhelmingly important component of their makeup, and this is often downplayed when considering their agenda and their work in their communities. 

The fact that they were avowed socialists was, however, one reason why Fred Hampton was murdered in his sleep by the Chicago Police Department. It was bad enough, in the eyes of J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI, to be black and activistic, it was much worse to be black, activistic and socialist. What’s most significant about the Black Panthers is that they brought America’s racial issues and problems into socialist theory, and showed how race and class could intersect and be embraced by a socialist social science.

The founders of the Black Panther Party for Self Defense, Bobby Seale and Huey Newton, decided to be more than theoretical socialists waiting for history to develop and attempted to protect their community from police abuse while providing services to their community not expected from the government. The Panthers understood that racism, discrimination and segregation had led to the adverse status of black folks in America, but they did not become absorbed in the Black Power orientation toward racial pride and cohesion. 

They refused to ignore the economics of capitalism which was the ultimate enemy for them. Although class and race intersected, focusing on race, in itself, was a red herring to them. J. Edgar Hoover actually considered the Panthers to be the most severe security threat to the American way of life at that time and many members of the organization were framed and/or murdered by the police/FBI.

                                                            Huey Newton

             

Among the highlights of the visual iconography of the Panthers is a poster of their 10-point plan. The plan included demands for full employment; reparations payments for black folks - General Sherman’s idea of giving every freed black person 40 acres of land and 2 mules after the Civil War was referenced; decent housing; an educational system that provided a knowledge of self and one’s position in society; an end to the war in Vietnam pursued by a white-racist government and business class; an end to police brutality and the right of black folks to carry arms to protect themselves from the police; the release of black prisoners from America’s prison-industrial complex; trials of black defendants before juries that could understand the experience of the defendants and, mirroring the language of the Declaration of Independence, a call for separation from the dominant American culture.

The Panthers got tired of waiting. When Martin Luther King Jr. wrote his letter from Birmingham jail, he mentioned that the early Christian Church had been a thermostat for and not a thermometer of its times. He seemed to be urging the contemporary church in America to step forward more into social activism and to change society while helping black folks integrate into it. The Panthers attempted to be this type of thermostat through other means. Perhaps their methodology was ultimately vindicated by the actions of infuriated Americans who took to the streets demanding change.

The idea that folks in the poorer classes cannot even perceive their own abuse was a middle-class academic dogma that the Panthers put to shame. More than anything their legacy, as reflected in this show, is that reform must come from those folks who are being neglected and abused and that those in power will often not listen to reason. It took the nation-wide protests following the cruel killing of an innocent man to finally shake those in power. The Panthers showed that integration was essential but it had to be integration under the terms of those being integrated – because only those folks could be the true moral reformers of their society.

                                                            Fred Hampton's Door

Read the thoughtful and incisive essays of Daniel Gauss: https://goodmenproject.com/author/daniel-gauss/

The Blurry Monk and the Sleek Advertisement

 

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I was sitting in a coffeehouse in Phnom Penh when I saw this monk walking toward the large advertisement. In Phnom Penh monks wander around in the mornings "begging" for donations or food. 

I saw very poor shop owners provide monks with money because, from what I was told, they believe it is good luck to do this and bad luck not to do this. Buddhist monks must thank God for superstition every day of the week; without it they would probably get a lot less food and money.

So I saw the monk moving toward the advert and I thought that if I snapped a photo it would be a good contrast between the (alleged) values of the monk and the values of the advert.

The photo didn't come out that well because of the glare from the glass through which I took the shot and the fact that the monk was moving and he came out blurry.

Yet, I think the photo still works and I wanted to share it out here. 

The monk is moving, he is blurry, because he represents transience or impermanence. He is constantly aging. 

The jewelry ad represents a type of permanence, or it represents the permanence of the inequality that is readily seen in Cambodia and other 4th world countries.

Cambodia has suffered from 39 years of a dictatorship which is going to be followed by several years of a dictatorship from the original dictator's son. For 39 years the dictator, a former Khmer Rouge officer, did very little to lift his people out of poverty.

If you go to Cambodia it will break your heart. The level of poverty was worse than anything I had seen elsewhere and I have traveled to 11 Asian countries.

But back to the monk. Another thing I wanted to ask through this photo is: to what extent is the monk really divorced from the economic system he begs from, and to what extent is he participating in that economic system?

Read some amazingly thoughtful essays by Daniel Gauss here, for free: https://goodmenproject.com/author/daniel-gauss/

 

Stephen Wong Chun Hei and Chow Chun Fai at Tang Contemporary

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In Stephen Wong Chun Hei’s paintings, the city of Hong Kong reflects artificial, supernatural, and even gaudy colors. Indeed, it is as if nature and the city are both plugged into the same electrical outlet, reflecting the same neon shimmer and shine. Meretricious Hong Kong is still, however, distinguished from a once insouciant nature that now exhibits its own razzle-dazzle because of its proximity to the city. 

The city represents both the transgression and transcendence of nature, along with its exultation of nature. The city was implanted within a natural environment and the perception of nature is transformed and heightened for the urban viewer by the relationship. This is apparent as well in his new paintings in A Mirage of a Shining City, at Tang Contemporary, which is based on the Fo Tan area of Hong Kong, once an industrial center now occupied primarily by artists and where he and his partner for this show, Chow Chun Fai, reside.

                                                                         Hei

In Wong’s work, super-enriched colors are enhanced with a type of luminescence, and the real presence of the city accentuates the élan vital we may not fully sense when we engage nature on its own terms. Although Wong enjoys hiking and sketching before coming back to his studio to paint, he was apparently inspired during the pandemic by satellite images from Google Earth, and by painting from above the reciprocal power relationship between the natural environment and human construction (according to a profit-driven motive) can be more keenly discerned. It is significant in his work that along with various human-made structures such as domiciles and institutions, hiking trails and means to escape the city for the mountains are often presented.

                                                                      Hei

More than anything, we are engaged by the colors and forms of these paintings. According to Edmund Burke, the beauty in art causes one to want to own it; the sublime astonishes and awes the viewer into a state of speechlessness. It is the artificial radiance of the paintings which arrests our attention and brings the experience of the city to us in a flash of recognition without the mediation of language. 

The artist holds a mirror up to reflect the most fulfilling experiences of the city to us, minus the poverty, suffering, struggle and conflict (which cannot be seen from a bird’s eye view). Perhaps the paintings are an attempt to suggest that even the more troubling aspects of the city add to its energy and excitement and are a challenge for us to pursue more meaningful and humane engagement in the city.

                                                                      Hei

By focusing on the interrelationship between Hong Kong and its surrounding countryside and imputing a type of video game animism to both, Wong helps save the relevance of the ancient art of landscape painting. He adds an extra dimension to the “Dream Journey” in traditional Chinese painting. Although inspired by David Hockney’s experiments with the landscape, he brings his understanding of the nature of Hong Kong and its challenges to infuse these paintings with a different meaning from Hockney’s countryside images. 

How does the transcendence of Hong Kong as an especially dynamic world city alter our perception of and need for nature? After all, biodiversity has been losing ground in Hong Kong since the early 1970s. Is Hong Kong moving toward a sustainable relationship between the city and surrounding environs?

                                                                      Fai

If Wong’s work presents a type of subjective mirage dealing with Hong Kong and Fo Tan, Chow Chun Fai follows with his own fantasy creations within the city drawing upon Hong Kong as a nostalgic stage for well-known and classic films. Chow dives into the popular genre of Hong Kong Cinema which has reflected the complex moral and social ambiguities of the city as well as helped shape or reinforce expectations for life in Hong Kong for many in and outside the city. As a tip of the hat to his friend, Chow borrows from Wong’s supercharged palette to reference various scenes or characters from films in contemporary Hong Kong.

In one painting we see the Tony Leung and Maggie Cheung characters from Wong Kar Wai’s film masterpiece In the Mood for Love. The film attempted to capture the ethos of a lost Hong Kong from the 1960s, as a setting for a story about the loss of companionship and compassionate love. Chow shows the fictional characters in contemporary Hong Kong (the first 7-Eleven came to Hong Kong in 1981, long after the setting of the film). 

                                                                  Fai

The city is portrayed as something relatively permanent while a deep but ephemeral moment of grief occurs within it. Or, is the grief meant to be portrayed as relatively permanent as well, as the characters have reappeared suddenly in contemporary Hong Kong, even though they separate and never reunite again in the actual film? Are all of these film characters interlopers in contemporary Hong Kong? We even see Travis Bickle from Scorsese’s Taxi Driver walking toward a traditional Hong Kong taxi to begin his day.

More than one canvas is given over to the 1990s comedy The God of Cookery. This is a romantic comedy in which Temple Street Market factors largely. It involves everything from beef balls to the Hong Kong triad to Shaolin monks in an epic journey for one character toward both greater humanity and greater cooking skills (there seems to be a correlation in the film between the goodness of one’s heart and one’s ability to provide culinary excellence). We see various scenes from the film depicted at one time in the vicinity of a 7-Eleven, which seems to represent to Chow an aspect of Hong Kong’s current state of being. They do seem to be everywhere in this city.

                                                                      Fai

So what might it mean to have these interlopers from past films appearing now? Obviously and literally these characters show the changes Hong Kong has been through and they point to changes yet to come. They also might represent the timeless values of Hong Kong and how the people of this unique city created their own culture as a blend of ethnicities, cultures and motives. 

So both mirages (the outside and inside mirages of the city) allude to something very real – Hong Kong has been and will continue to be a world-class city that radiates with its own unique and often otherworldly brightness.

Art Is Not English! (a brief play about the need for art interpretation classes, and the need for more compassion and humanity in education)

 

Please feel free to read the 5-minute play that I wrote, and which was published in 'The Hooghly Review', a fine literary magazine run by very good people.

Click the red link below: 

Art Is Not English by Daniel Gauss

Artistically, we are still doing what they did in the 1960s

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In a new show at the Dayton Art Institute, Changing Times: Art of the 1960s, several pieces from the permanent collection are used to take a look at just how radical and dynamic the changes in art were in the 1960s. The show focuses on pop, figural, minimalist, op and conceptual art movements and even takes a look at some abstraction that carried over into the decade and how abstraction changed from the Abstract Expressionism of the 1950s. 

The recent attack in the art world against “zombie formalism” shows that both the critically incisive attitude, and the experimentation that occurred in the 60s, survive and even form a basis for much of the work in art galleries to this day.

In the 1960s art changed due, largely, to a dissatisfaction with formalism. The formalist creed was foreshadowed in the famous quote from artist and writer Maurice Denis in the late 19th century:

Remember that a picture, before it is a picture of a battle horse, a nude woman, or some story, is essentially a flat surface covered in colors, arranged in a certain order.

So modernist or formalist artists focused on the process of creating a painting, believing that form and color were the keys to conveying something meaningful and that the subject or thing being painted was extraneous. Painting “things” was, therefore, abandoned for abstraction. This formalist approach was the dominant form of visual art in the 1950s and the early part of the 1960s, before it was found insufficient in light of the revolutionary changes and challenges which developed in society and the world.

Rosenquist

Jackson Pollock, for example, purported that his movement over a canvas, while pouring or dripping paint, was a direct form of mark-making that more closely caught and conveyed what was happening inside of him. Action Art was direct transmission from the inner world to the outer world that, hypothetically, could then be recognized by and deeply affect viewers of the work. Mark Rothko claimed that his paintings were pure spirituality and would impact others without the mediation of human cognition or analysis. 

When Andy Warhol began producing multiple appropriated images from popular culture, this was a complete repudiation of the formalist belief system. The idea that color and form could have a direct impact on viewers, that no analysis was necessary and that folks could just absorb the universal insights of great artists was found to be absurd and replaced with images reflecting our everyday reality and a process essential to our society.

Rothko

To a certain extent, Warhol was sardonically replying to the formalists. Perhaps he was saying, “OK, I am interested in process and form too. But the process I want to use or refer to is mass-production. The form is the repetition of images. If you are telling me that I can derive meaning from your type of brush strokes or geometrical forms or color choices, I am telling you that there’s equal or superior meaning in using mass-produced, repetitive techniques.” 

Instead of making you think of what squiggles of oil paint might mean, he wanted us to think of what mass production can mean. Mass production feeds people. It provides clothing for us all, books, music… virtually everything. It also provides economic exploitation in the world. There is more meaning in mass production than in paint drops. Instead of paint underlying a message, a production technique was now the basis of the image. You had to deal with the good and the bad of this economic process before even thinking of the image.

Motherwell

And there is as much, if not more, humanism in Warhol’s repetition of images than in any Action or Color Field art. He reproduces soup cans that were a staple in the diets of millions of common Americans. He does not reproduce hundred-dollar bills, he reproduces simple dollar bills, used by everyone. He presents common movie stars, a common tragedy (a car crash), a common form of social control (capital punishment). The repetition of the images represents the shared experience that was now possible in a developed society. 

More idealistically, it could have represented a common goal to rise as individuals and as a society through new means of communication. He selects certain images because he knows we all are familiar with them – they can all resonate with each of us and provide accessible meaning. You do not have to stare at a bunch of Campbell soup cans and hope something magically rubs off on you. You are back in control of the process of interpreting art, not a passive recipient of another’s genius. 

As one looks through these pieces by Warhol, Lichtenstein, Dine, Oldenburg, Johns, Ruscha, Rosenquist, Rauschenberg et al., one sees how the mundane is resourced as a means to subvert the intentions of the formalists and involve the viewer in a more active examination of his/her life.

The change away from formalism was also accelerated by the spirit of protest and change in the world at large. The dominant trend in the art of the 50s just was not sufficient to encompass all that was happening in the 1960s. Exploration of the outer world became much more exciting than navel gazing. Indeed, the path back to the inner world was through images from the outer world as art was meant to engage the viewer on levels of conscience and morality and to challenge the viewer to strive for a higher, more humane level of being. 

Michael Goldberg

We see this in many of the figural pieces in the show: the photo of Bobby Kennedy by Craig Hickman, the Civil Rights marchers by JoAnne Schneider, the famous photo of a hippy putting a flower into a National Guardsman’s rifle barrel by Marc Riboud, Newark as the “other” America by Ken Heyman. The pieces that embrace figuration are a complete rejection of formalism and offer the belief that there is still too much meaning to be derived from one’s contemporary human companions to reject this approach.

Although Pop Art and figuration take up a large part of the show, we also see minimalist, op, conceptual and abstract pieces. Indeed, looking through the various types of movements in the 60s one has to marvel at what an influence these movements are still having on contemporary art in current galleries. One movement that did not have much impact, however, was Op Art. 

It was begun in the 50s but had its heyday in the 60s. It presented visual patterns that disoriented or dazzled the viewer. It was meant to arrest one’s attention and to pleasantly stun one for a time. At its best, it was a statement about perception and the way that aspects of visual reality might be ordered to overwhelm one. Its main influence, however, was in clothing and design.

Interestingly, in the abstract and non-objective selections, we seem to see a more cognitive approach to abstraction developing, abandoning the belief that viewers can be beneficially affected naturally or without effort, without intellectually analyzing work. In many pieces, there is a blend of abstraction and objects and other pieces seem to present visual puzzles. Alan Davie’s Entrance to a Red Temple, Raymond Both’s Landscape, Robert Conover’s Conflict, Grace Hardigan’s Pallas Athene and even Robert Motherwell’s Study in Black and White #2 might fit into this category.

Finally, we have a selection of pieces that fall into the conceptual category by artists like Sol LeWitt, Jasper Johns, Ronald Brooks and Shushaku Arakawa. Conceptual Art was the most “political” of the movements as, at its core, it was non-commercial and often did not produce a sellable product. Instead of being intuitive and produced through deep introspection, the conceptual artist was super cognitive and did not shy away from presenting ideas or using ideas in the creation of a piece. 

There was no attempt to create the beautiful and no attempt to reach the viewer by obviating his/her mind. Engaging the intellect was paramount. Although it was said to have lasted only six years, from 1966 to 1972, Conceptual Art pervades contemporary art galleries.

In the 1960s attempts at engagement diversified. No longer was there a mystical belief that the genius artist could beneficially affect and enlighten a passive viewer. The 60s put the viewer back into the picture as an active participant in the interpretive process as the artist often embraced a common experience, without judgment, to make art more accessible to a larger public.

Jeremy Olson, Sci-fi art, a possible victory won by creatures who savor egalitarian social relationships and cooperation.

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The SPRING/BREAK Art Show, held during Armory Arts Week, is an exciting alternative to the behemoth Armory Show, where an art lover can easily feel like an interloper. At Armory, each gallery pays an enormous amount to sell their wares and they often bring out the glitz and warhorses to do just that. You and I pay for the privilege of walking around and gawking, hoping something might be meaningful enough to redeem the expensive ticket. This time around I overheard a woman say that the Armory Show reminded her of county fairs she attended in her childhood, where a bunch of farmers and ag experts would gather to judge and sell the best heifers and hogs while normal folks paid for the right to view this process. Good analogy.

The analogy does not fit SRING/BREAK, however, where there are no interlopers, artists create for all the right reasons, and viewers are immersed in one experience after the other. 

At SPRING/BREAK the paintings of Jeremy Olson immediately caught my eye. He paints with a diligence and discipline that reminded me of the technique used by someone like Dürer, but each painting seemed its own little narrative concerning alien creatures in another part of the universe. He explained to me that each painting can be considered a type of scene from what might be called a stage of post-collapse rebirth or post-capitalist society. His meticulous technique should not be surprising given his influences include Bosch and Bruegel combined with semi-figurative weird creatures throughout art history, Louise Bourgeois, Duchamp's Étant donnés, sculptors like David Altmejd and Huma Bhabha as well as kitschy sci-fi book covers from the 70s.

Scientists are telling us now that we will find intelligent life in the universe within the next 50 years, and we can probably be certain its mannerisms will be recognizable as fierce competition and tribalism seem to be the core of this universe’s values. Olson, a sci-fi lover, presents the fact that spiritual and social evolution, against the grain of everything this universe is throwing at us, is a core value of the intelligent creatures imprisoned in this galactic system. He shows the revolt against the harsh values of a universe dominated by the Second Law of Thermodynamics and a possible victory won somewhere out there by creatures who savor egalitarian social relationships and cooperation.

So Olson is definitely not a dystopian and can foresee a type of society similar to that in the sci-fi classic The Man Who Fell to Earth as opposed to that of The Three Body Problem trilogy. In The Man Who Fell to Earth David Bowie plays an alien from a planet where aggression has been eliminated and kindness, generosity and cooperation have become a part of the very genetics of these beings. In The Three Body Problem the Universe is described as a dark forest where cosmic civilizations savor their brutish natures and compete with and annihilate each other for shits and giggles. Acts of kindness become acts of weakness in this trilogy, as when a female human refuses to do her duty to destroy Earth to prevent aliens from enslaving humans, only to have stronger, more militaristic humans do her job for her. So Olson is on the side of us who are in the gutter but looking at the stars.

Indeed, Olson mentioned that he now is creating work which expresses a strong degree of hopefulness and sincerity, without becoming mawkish, and the whimsy or even goofiness inherent in this sci-fi type of platform serves him well in this purpose. He has a self-admitted affinity for drawing weird and cute creatures which may have a universal appeal kind of the way Dr. Seuss characters transcend race and ethnicity and can represent any human being at any given time.

So some contemporary artists have attempted to show what a post-capitalist society might look like, and we often see ruins of machinery over-grown by weeds with naked people cavorting about (it is a back to the garden scenario). Using his sci-fi, cute-alien scheme, Olson presents a post-racial aspect to his utopia as well as preserving technology as a tool which can be safely and sustainably used in an egalitarian society. His beings have not chucked technology and gone back to the garden, they have plowed ahead and problem-solved, which is the only choice for us as I do not want to be cavorting naked over rusted subway tracks picking berries someday.

SPRING/BREAK is a fair in which curators and artists work together to present work, and Jeremy Olson’s show was curated by Vanessa Albury, another highly talented New York City artist.

Check out thoughtful essays by Daniel Gauss at The Good Men Project: https://goodmenproject.com/author/daniel-gauss/