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page 5
Stone Riley
Greybeard's Rant page 5
(my real artist's statement)
(C) 2005 by Stone Riley
The Contemporary movement, in painting, is dead. There was a little while around the 1970's when Contemporary paintings could tell the truth and were actually revolutionary but times have changed and the style does not speak to present experience. Scarcely surprising. That movement from the start had a starkly limited vocabulary in painting because it rejected most of painting's inherent big ideas. It's down to wallpaper manufacture now and all the painters know all this. Even those who participate say the high-end trade's a swindle. Talking with them on the subject is simply ghastly. It makes you want to take a bath.
America in the 60's: The pointless endless grinding grief of the war in Viet Nam; nearly a second Civil War at home with racists claiming to be the true Americans, their violence growing and the demands for justice growing violent too; and the backdrop of the Cold War with its constantly impending real actual destruction of humanity, the children who awoke into it now grown to adults and forced to live as if this were a normal thing. Multiple assassinations of leading figures by either shadowy conspiracies or simply through pervasive madness. In popular culture a choice of either the disappointing failures of the Hippie movement or meaningless consumerism. Nothing helped. We tried to make it better. I was there. That was America in the 60's.
Then as the 70's dawned with all of that still unresolved, existential absurdity finally hit the downstage center mark in America like it had in Europe in immediate reaction to World War Two twenty years before. Europeans had pretty much given up on smearing canvases with paint back in the 50's. What was the point after Hitler? Americans now took a grander view. It was decided that American high art could actually depict the vast empty fruitlessness of life.
The Contemporary aesthetic has a central theme that earnest work and hope are useless. To reflect this vision properly, the painter is expected to accomplish nothing. Big empty canvasses or else simple statements of repugnance or else unresolved images of fragmentation comprise the current academic genre. That was honest, one might say, when the movement started but it is simply stupid now. We have explored that territory to its full extent. We have been there, done that, and come through the farther side. We are different people now with work that must be done. Enough already.
(continued)
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