Overt and Under

Daring to dream

noreply@blogger.com (Chris Willcox) — Thu, 24 May 2012 14:22:00 +0000

An excerpt from "Encounter at the End of the World" by Werner Herzog, 2007.

Ai Weiwei Interview

noreply@blogger.com (Chris Willcox) — Wed, 11 Apr 2012 03:18:00 +0000

I recently had the opportunity to ask Chinese artist Ai Weiwei a question on The Stream, a social-media based news program on Al Jazeera English. You can see the entire interview, including my question below:

My questions is towards the beginning of the program, at 2:10.

Anselm Reyle

noreply@blogger.com (Chris Willcox) — Sun, 18 Mar 2012 16:12:00 +0000

Reyle’s work has the ability to look futuristic and nostalgic at the same time, making it accessible and appealing to a broad spectrum of viewers. His lacquered aluminum junk baroque assemblages simultaneously appear familiar and foreign, as if objects from a time capsule were bulldozed and drenched in nail polish. Beyond their obvious art-historical references, it is the surfaces of these glossy paintings that seduce, and one can’t help but forgive the artist for their sheer redundancy. ... Like Warhol, Reyle has an eye for spectacle and a sense for turning cliché contemporary culture on itself.

1, 2, 3, 4

[text sourced from Flash Art]

On Systems

noreply@blogger.com (Chris Willcox) — Sat, 28 Jan 2012 21:42:00 +0000

Robert Ryman, No Title Required, 2006

Every thought, method, or artwork exists inside of system.

At the base of any system is a set of premises that defines the system’s boundaries and methods. These cannot be questioned from within that system because the system needs them to remain coherent. (A dog chasing his own tail.)*

No system can ever capture the entire truth of a thing because it (the system) is necessarily restricted by its premises.

Systems are like windows. You may need to gaze through a number of them to understand exactly what is on the other side.

A system comprised of a network of different systems is still a system. Such a system offers a wider view of things, but may lack the internal coherence of its constituents.

The validity of system can be determined by a number of different criteria: correspondence to external reality, aesthetic pleasure, life affirmation, and so on. We adopt different systems based on the criteria of the task at hand. (It is better to be a problem thinker than a system thinker.)

Art exists in a system with different criteria than regular life. A urinal in an art gallery thereby takes on different significance.

*Even Kant, who sought to rigorously critique of a system by using its own terms, left implicit premises unquestioned, namely the possibility of synthetic judgments a priori. (His problem was only how such judgments were possible.)

Are We In Control of Our Lives?

noreply@blogger.com (Chris Willcox) — Sun, 31 Jul 2011 19:24:00 +0000

Amor Fati (detail), 2011, Oil and synthetic polymer resin on canvas.

Are we in control of our lives? There are two ways to look at this.* Whenever I burn myself with coffee while running to catch a train I ultimately miss, I understand that I am part of a malevolent universe both larger and more complex than myself, and that no matter how hard I try, I and everyone else will never be anything but unwitting recipients of its blind and oppressive patterns. But that same night, when I plug my iPod into the stereo and suddenly everyone at the party seems to be having the same conversation, I can’t help but adopt the other approach: that we really can shape the events of our own lives. Freedom exists. Genuine connections are possible. In and of itself, either approach is too extreme to be right, but something between them needs to be. I make paintings to figure out what that is.

Like thunderstorms and subway schedules, there’s not much I can do to control the way a half-gallon of wet paint falls onto a canvas. I can push and pull at it, but gravity is doing most of the work. What I do control, rather, are the conditions in which this process occurs: the paint’s color, its texture, the proportion and size of the canvas it falls on. By creating a context, the content creates itself. There are thousands of paintings that could happen, but only one that ever does. Everything is possible in the future, but only one thing exists in the present. Do we control that? Maybe.

* Actually, there are probably thousands of ways to look at this. My mind, however, tends to dwell on two of them.

What is the job of a painting?

noreply@blogger.com (Chris Willcox) — Mon, 27 Jun 2011 01:53:00 +0000

Tall Blue, 2011. 58 x 18 in. Oil and Synthetic Polymer Resin on Belgian linen

What is the job of a painting? Does pigment on canvas serve a larger function in the way we look at and understand the world around us, or is it simply another form of gratuitous decoration? Evidently ideas are involved: the bookshelves tremble under the weight of so many artists statements, comparative essays, and all manner of postmodern pontification. Yet so much of this veritable body of literature feels insular and derivative: a game of musical chairs where concepts are changed and interchanged from one text to another, taken apart and reconstituted in such a way that though they take the form of originality, they remain a patchwork of recapitulation. Consider the Arty Bollocks Generator, something of a meme among art school types, with a single click it generates artist statements that are as convincing as they are sardonic. Like all successful satire, the Arty Bollocks Generator is funny because it is based in truth. What it appear to be saying is that much of the language surrounding art is interchangeable and therefore meaningless; that despite the grandiose verbiage involved, artwork itself does not carry enough conceptual specificity to mean or relate to anything in particular. The seemingly good-intentioned humor of the meme betrays what is actually a very serious and complex question: to what extent does art engage in conceptual and intellectual dialog? There are certainly meaningful concepts within art: abstraction, representation, color, the blurred line between the real and mediated, to name a few. But if these concepts are strictly internal, that is to say if they operate only behind the hermetic seal of the arts, then they are not meaningful ideas but industry jargon. The real question is, does art mean anything outside of art? Could art help us to understand a world where art does not exist?

The biggest problem we encounter in trying to answer a question like this is one of range and restriction. Art and language operate in different sorts of contexts with different sorts of boundaries, rules, and conditions. Consider a similar difference between language and math. Both are methods we use make sense of the world around us but both pick out different features of that world. Certainly we can use language to talk about math (and indeed math too can talk about language) but ultimately words cannot sufficiently capture the range, specificity, and function of numbers. Any verbal explanation of a complex mathematic proposition will eventually reach a point where the words begin to fall short. So too with art. When we try to put art into a philosophical or linguistic context, we invariably lose much of that we are trying to describe.

Like language and math, art is a means by which the world around us is made sensible. It lacks the precision of the other two approaches, but of course the world around us (at least from our vantage point) is not always precise. For artistic content to be meaningful it must correlate to reality/experience in a way that is significant and relevant outside of the artwork itself. This is to say it needs to provide a means by which we can understand our lives. Great art needs to do so in a way that does not overlap with other forms of expression (math, language, music, dance, regular visual phenomena, and so on). What this means is that after looking at an artwork we should have a decidedly new approach to something, and, often frustratingly, an approach that should evade our attempts at linguistic expression. Language and art are both tools we use to get at truth, but truth in and of itself is neither linguistic nor artistic. Though art allows us to get at truth, it restricts the range of all possible truth into a smaller range of artistically expressible truth. Language and math restrict (or frame) truth in their own ways as well. Applying language to art is a further restriction still, giving us the putative range of the linguistically expressible truths inside the set of artistically expressible truths. What the Art Bollocks Generator demonstrates then is not only how few linguistic concepts art can describe, but also the reflexive: how few artistic concepts language can describe. The job of a painting is to engage with truth, but in a way outside of other forms of expression.

Tall Blue (detail)

Amor Fati

noreply@blogger.com (Chris Willcox) — Thu, 09 Jun 2011 04:00:00 +0000

Amor Fati, 2011. 64 x 42 in. Oil and Synthetic Polymer Resin on Canvas.

This is the first painting I've made in my new studio in Brooklyn. This fact in and of itself seems to bestow a certain significance onto the painting. But what?

The first painting in a new space establishes a frame or a context for subsequent paintings made in that space. Frames are important: they provide the necessary boundaries for content to exist. Kant reminds us that without certain basic frames, say time or space, experience itself cannot exist. Not all frames carry this epistemic significance, but no matter how trivial a frame is, it provides some vantage point into unframed immensity of the universe. One frame this painting makes possible is that of a point of comparison, both stylistic and temporal, for those which are yet to come.

Open Studio Poster

noreply@blogger.com (Chris Willcox) — Thu, 19 May 2011 15:03:00 +0000

Open Studios In Long Island City

noreply@blogger.com (Chris Willcox) — Tue, 17 May 2011 17:29:00 +0000

Chris Willcox, Untitled, 2010. Oil and Synthetic Resin on Canvas.

This weekend Reis Studios, in Long Island City, Queens, is hosting their yearly open studio event. From noon to six this Saturday and Sunday (May 21st and 22nd) you can visit the studios of the nearly 150 artists who work in the building, including myself. I've got ten paintings up for display about about sixty works on paper. You can find me in on the third floor in Studio 344. The building is down the block from MoMA PS1, near the E,M,G,F,7,N and Q subways lines (Google Map). I would love to see all of you there.

Sketching

noreply@blogger.com (Chris Willcox) — Mon, 02 May 2011 18:19:00 +0000

Chris Wilcox. Sketch, 2011. Paint and Digital.

More and more I find myself using my laptop as a sketchbook. Ideas often begin as paintings, then become more thought out in photoshop, only to resurface as other paintings. Here, photo editing software isn't necessarily a means to an end as much as it is a means of thinking.

Been awhile

noreply@blogger.com (Chris Willcox) — Mon, 25 Apr 2011 00:56:00 +0000

Chris Willcox, Narenschiff, 2011. Oil and Synthetic Resin on Canvas. 72 x 72 in.

How's it been? Since we last talked I have moved to New York, worked a brief stint at Gavin Brown's Enterprise, and am now working with the neuroscientist Eric Kandel on a new book about art and neuroscience.

I am also putting together a new site that will organize all the paintings into one place. In the future, images will be posted there rather than here. This is going to free up a lot of space on "Overt and Under" for me to write about a broader range of topics; the art writing will continue to show up here, but alongside things like whether the internet is a superorganism, or why New Coke failed despite being an ostensibly better soft drink. And as I currently find myself working in a neuroscience lab, I have a lot of new ideas about how art, the mind, and the brain all fit together. I can't wait to share them with you.

In the meantime, here are a few of the paintings I've been working on the past few months.

Chris Willcox, Guantanamera, 2011. Oil and Synthetic Resin on Canvas. 72 x 72 in.

Chris Willcox, For a Lack of Something Better, 2011. Oil and Synthetic Resin on Canvas. 56 x 42 in.

Talk soon,

Chris

Evening Paintings

noreply@blogger.com (Chris Willcox) — Tue, 16 Nov 2010 21:14:00 +0000

32 x42 in., oil on canvas

36 x 120 in., oil and synthetic resin on canvas

25 x 38 in., oil and synthetic resin on canvas

12 x 25 in., oil on panel

40 x 50 in., oil on canvas

You know when you need to do something but there arent any practical possibilities? Somtimes the best bet is to do something ridiculous and symbolic.

noreply@blogger.com (Chris Willcox) — Tue, 26 Oct 2010 03:47:00 +0000

So this past Saturday I was in Sketchy Subjects, a show in a lovely little apartment gallery in LA called Salon 1641 (wordpress, facebook). The show was curated by my dear friend Hallie Parker. I wasn't able to get out west for the opening but it looked like a great time. The show was curated around the idea of a sketchbook: how different artists visually manifest their goings on and half formed ideas. I think it's a really great idea for a show, often the process towards getting to work - the rocks artists have to look under - are really much more interesting than the pieces themselves.

I submitted a collection of about 70 small paintings that have been floating around the studio for the past year or so. They're all on printer paper, hardware store paint chips, sandpaper, etc. All the paintings are in those dinky little plastic sleeve protectors from the office supply store and bound in a paint splattered three ring binder which I think I once used for science class in middle school.

Anyway, here's some pictures of that event. (I love pictures I really do. I look at them everyday)

You can see my book there in the front left. The one with the blue painted valentine, and the oily roy lichtenstein postcard.

Here are two of the paintings I had in the book:

"For a Sweet Person" Oil on Paper Valentine, 2010

"For Someone Sweet" Oil on Paper Valentine, 2010

A few new images

noreply@blogger.com (Chris Willcox) — Sun, 17 Oct 2010 00:46:00 +0000

Sketches of Subjective Truth

noreply@blogger.com (Chris Willcox) — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 19:13:00 +0000

(crossposted on myartspace-blog.blogspot.com/)

There's an old and dusty question kicking around metaphysics: what exactly is truth? Is something truthful if it corresponds to reality? Is something truthful if it is useful in describing the universe? I should approach this question with the appropriate caution: there is an answer there, but I am in no position to find it; I am an artist, not a mathematician or metaphysician. Formulating these sorts of truth finding equations has never been part of the job description. And yet truth, of some kind, does seem relevant to the way we talk and think about art.

Just last week I found myself describing the latest album by Chicago electronic music producer The Flashbulb as something acutely truthful. While admittedly cliche, something in the comment seemed appropriate. But what then is true about this album? What separates it as particularly truthful from any of the many other glistening artifacts populating the narrow subgenre of 'breakcore electronica?'

Arboreal (the album in question's title) is just as factual as about any other type of music: it has a number of tracks, each with its own specific BPM, key, chromatic structure, etc. Yet hidden somewhere between these factive points there's an irreducible element of human emotion: at times heartbreaking, at times triumphant, usually both. What is true about Arboreal is not anything about tone or sound or key, but something about being alive. This is the truth of any good art. It is a mysterious and elusive type of truth, and may take a bit of work to get at on behalf of the audience, but it is there and it is real. In order to make sense of this intuition towards truthfulness however, it seems as though there needs to be another dimension, or at least another type, of truth beyond merely the factual.

To clarify: I do not mean that metaphysically deep truth of analytics and academics, that stale inert truth of billiard balls and mathematics and maps. What I mean is something more personal, humanistic, poetic. Not a truth of the outer world but the inner. That subtle and impermeable Kierkegaardian subjective truth. I also do not mean anything like those frilly and silly Platonic forms: there is an undeniable reality to heartbreak and triumph, at least to the person experiencing them, but that does not mean that they are in themselves hardwired into the superstructure of the universe.

German director Werner Herzog has spoke at some length on the topic of subjective truth, or in his worlds "ecstatic truth." While his conversation tends to hinge on a critique of cinéma vérité, he taps into the meaning and place of subjective truth in a much broader (or perhaps less broad?) context. Earlier this year he spoke on the subject:

We must ask of reality: how important is it, really? And: how important, really, is the Factual? Of course, we can't disregard the factual; it has normative power. But it can never give us the kind of illumination, the ecstatic flash, from which Truth emerges. If only the factual, upon which the so-called cinéma vérité fixates, were of significance, then one could argue that vérité-the truth-at its most concentrated must reside in the telephone book-in its hundreds of thousands of entries that are all factually correct and, so, correspond to reality. If we were to call everyone listed in the phone book under the name "Schmidt," hundreds of those we called would confirm that they are called Schmidt; yes, their name is Schmidt.
...
But in the fine arts, in music, literature, and cinema, it is possible to reach a deeper stratum of truth-a poetic, ecstatic truth, which is mysterious and can only be grasped with effort; one attains it through vision, style, and craft.

An artist has proven Herzog's point about the vapidity of telephone book truth. In the 1960's François Morellet made a series of paintings and prints compositionally organized using a telephone directory.

Random Distribution of 40,000 Squares using the Odd and Even Numbers of a Telephone Directory, 1960.

Courtesy Museum of Modern Art, New York © François Morellet

Oil on canvas, 103 x 103 cm.

To make the painting above, Morellet traced a grid of 200 by 200 squares, and, with the help of his wife and children, assigned each of the squares a number from a telephone directory. If the sum of that number was even, he would mark the squares with a cross, if it was odd he would leave it blank. 40,000 squares later, he painted those with a cross blue and those without red. The painting took the better part of a year.

There's a certain satisfaction in knowing that this composition had almost nothing to do with Morellet's subjective preference. Looking at it, there's not a whole lot we can learn about him, or ourselves. In fact about the only thing we can learn about him or ourselves is that he doesn't want us to learn anything about either (other than, perhaps, about a certain fondness for red and blue colored grids on behalf of the artist.) But as this satisfaction dissipates, what the viewer is left with is, more than anything ever before, a painting of a desert landscape: a bleak and arid view of a place where no human has ever been nor could ever go. This painting is painstakingly factual, almost more factual than any painting ever could be (Gerhard Richter's Color Charts from 1973-4 and onward are also good contenders for this distinction). But there is nothing to them beyond the painstaking factuality, no truth, no subjectivity. What separates a Morellet from a Rothko or a Kiefer is that you simply can't look at one of his paintings and have one of those this-is-how-I-feel moments of psychological self-identification. There is no catharsis, there is just square upon square upon square of telephone directory.

It's no secret that the arts and art history routinely are met with downward glances and budget cuts from academic administrators at all strata. Part and parcel of this prejudice is the notion that the art is not involved in truth-finding like the other members of the academic pantheon. And maybe they're right, a rock band or an installation artist is never going to add a whole lot to the sum of knowledge surrounding molecular chemistry, international trade, or terrestrial geography of the early-Cambrian. And maybe that's a good thing. Art does get you that kind of truth, the kind of truth you can put down on paper and tell people you've figure out. But it does add to the knowledge you have about yourself and about how you fit in to the world around you. It's tough to imagine how an outsider could decode the 80's without Jeff Koons or Eddie Van Halen, or understand Gen-Xer angst without Damien Hirst or Kurt Cobain, or understand themselves without whatever portions of the kaleidoscopic spectrum of macroculture they self-identify with. And in this way I think art is much more involved in truth, real on the ground truth, than almost any other type of intellectual pursuit. It may not be a truth of objectivity, but nothing ever is. When we stop learning or thinking about art, what we stop learning about is ourselves, and that really is all there really is.

Chris Willcox

New Directions

noreply@blogger.com (Chris Willcox) — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 22:53:00 +0000

So then, apologies for not putting up any new images recently. The past months have brought a lot of personal and artistic change, and I wanted to wait until the dust settled before sharing anything new with a wider audience.

These next two paintings have been produced in the past week or two:

Abstract Picture, oil on canvas, 36 x 48 in.

Abstract Picture, oil and resin on canvas, 24 x 36 in.

I'm in the process of working on another three pictures right now. The largest of these is an expansion of the above painting. Here is a photoshop draft of what the final project might look like:

Like all of my paintings, I began by building a canvas. This one, however, is far and above the largest I've ever built. At two and a half by ten feet, the stretchers (the wood frame the raw canvas fabric is stretched over) were something of a challenge to put together, especially as I no longer have an art school wood shop or any power tools at my disposal. There is, however, a certain sacrosanctity the comes with using only hammers and handsaws; it is a slow and meditative process where one becomes fondly acquainted with the dimensions and volume the painting long before even picking up a brush. And if, as some have said, the painting is an arena in which the artist acts, then a working blueprint of that arena is pivotal to the creative process.

After the stretchers are built, unprimed raw canvas is cut, stretched, and stapled to back of the wooden frame.

This raw canvas is then covered in about five coats of a white acrylic sealer and finally sanded to a smooth finish. Now the painting can begin.

More pictures to follow.

Blogosphere

noreply@blogger.com (Chris Willcox) — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 16:41:00 +0000

Blogosphere, I'm sick of your insane demands.

Three comment like-button share with your twitterfriendmyspacephotojar.

Blogosphere there are so many things I want to tell you but I haven't got the words.

Do you ever wonder if the complexities of human emotion and the dynamic struggle of modern man can be expressed without the aid of java script?

And what ever happened to the animated gif?

I'm sorry I haven't written you recently, blogosophere, times are tough.

Blogosphere, when will you learn to chew with your mouth closed?

When will you be worth your billion subscribers?

Do you even care about your subscribers?

Is this some sort of sick joke?

Blogosphere, one time someone told me that if you really wanted to reflect on the vapidity of our condition you should really just go to the shopping mall. Do you go to the shopping mall? The other day after the storm I went to the shopping mall and all of the street lights and stop lights on the street were out but they were still on in Nordstroms.

Nordstroms didn't have the shoes I wanted anyway.

(I'm only kidding Blogosphere, I make minimum wage)

Are you going to let your emotional life by run by Perez Hilton?

Everyone I know reads Perez Hilton.

They love it.

Blogosphere you are the neglected child I never asked for. When did you become such a responsibility?

One-thousand plus unread items.

I am obsessed with unread items.

Blogosphere why don't you leak us some useful classified information?

Why don't you tell us something we didn't know already.

I'm not going to postpone my whole day to listen to your babbling.

I'm not going to listen to your response videos.

I know there are more images behind your links.

Blogosphere, are you the collective unconscious?

Is the sublimity of the post-post-modern zeitgeist embedded in the fabric of your tweets?

Can you tell me who I am and what I'm supposed to be?

And was Nickleback really the top grossing band of the last ten years?

Blogosphere, I bought your smart phone but I don't feel any smarter.

I've had it up to here Blogosphere.

I'm tired of your tone. Don't patronize me.
This whole thing is too one-sided for me to stand.

Blogosphere I'm moving up, moving out.

New Blog

noreply@blogger.com (Chris Willcox) — Mon, 22 Mar 2010 00:09:00 +0000

I've just begun blogging for myartspace.com, the online artists network which recently awarded me a scholarship. If you enjoyed my more philosophical posts on 'Why We Make Art' and 'Visualizing the Invisible' you should definitely check out what I'm writing over there. The blog has been around for four years now, and has had really amazing content on it. I've been reading it for about two years, and am honored to be among its writers.

You can check it out right here: http://www.myartspace.com/blog

Eye Candy

noreply@blogger.com (Chris Willcox) — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 20:23:00 +0000

Untitled (love)
16 x 16 in.

detail.

And here's a preview of whats to come, a new series of paintings about Abu Ghraib:

Note: this is a small detail of a larger painting.

Finally, a bit of saccharin hyperbole. Simultaneously appealing and appalling, these paintings juxtapose familiar media imagery surrounding ideological warfare in the Middle East with a candy colored painterly aesthetic of gloss and frosting-like paint application. This culminates into an irresolvably tense amalgam of self-consuming dualism.

Myartspace.com scholarship

noreply@blogger.com (Chris Willcox) — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 06:17:00 +0000

Great news this week - myartspace.com has awarded me one of their undergraduate scholarships!

Myartspace.com Art Scholarship 2009 Winners: Chris Willcox

They also conducted an interview with me, which is up on their blog

Chris Willcox Interview

There's a number of images on the website that I haven't yet put up on the blog, so make sure to check it out. There's some pretty terrific work up by the other awardees that's also worth a look.

Organicmobb

noreply@blogger.com (Chris Willcox) — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 17:38:00 +0000

The folks over at Organicmobb put up some of my writing over on their blog. Organicmobb is a great little transatlantic artists collective, featuring artist, architects and designers from the US and the UK. The blog is said to feature "amusing trinkets of wisdom and attitude" which I suppose I have now contributed to. Go on and check them out!

http://organicmobb.com/2010/01/22/chris-wilcox/

Two new paintings

noreply@blogger.com (Chris Willcox) — Sun, 20 Dec 2009 19:42:00 +0000

Here are two new paintings I've produced these past few months. These two are representative of the larger body of work I've created this fall. I'll upload the rest of the group once I have the chance to get high quality photographs of them.

How Much Does Jesus Love You?

40¾ x 27 in., Oil and Glitter on Canvas, 2009.

Oneadays

13½ x 33½ in., Oil on Canvas, 2009.

noreply@blogger.com (Chris Willcox) — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 00:51:00 +0000

Today at the Office
Oil on Canvas
18 x 72 in.
2008-2009

Paradoxes often seem anathema to the way we approach an understanding of the world and assign it meaning. Nonetheless, they seem to greet us at every turn, and perhaps contain more truth than the predicates we normally prefer to ascribe to things. In an increasingly complex world with increasingly complex relationships, it would seem as though we often have little else to base ourselves on than the poetry of contradiction.

noreply@blogger.com (Chris Willcox) — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 15:47:00 +0000

I've got two fairly large pieces in the works right now, both of which will take a good deal of time to finish. In the meantime, I thought I'd share an old favorite with you guys.

Recognition

30" x 40"

Oil on Canvas

2008

My interest in the medical stems primarily from an obsession with the basic existential issues of life and death. The invention of modern medicine has had a profound impact on the way we look at these things. Pervading our culture is an unspoken belief that medicine has cured death: while we all accept the inevitability of death in others, we continue to secretly believe that we will continue living forever. The daily procession of medicine and multi-vites further supplements this internal notion that we will never age and never die.

On Visualizing the Invisible

noreply@blogger.com (Chris Willcox) — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 15:26:00 +0000

I wanted to elaborate on the idea of art as a means to visualize what cannot be seen - a topic I raised in my last post. There are a few ways to conceive of this. The first is literal: art as a illustrative tool, a means of visualizing physical things typically inaccessible to us through ordinary perception. Visionary, shamanic, and religious art tends to fall within this category. The artist records in some way or another new images derived through dreaming, praying, meditating, drug use, and the like. The art acting as a recording of a vision, a this-worldly window into an other-worldly realm. Though otherworldly in design, this art remains a visual description of visual phenomena - albeit a removed visual phenomena.

The second, and in my opinion the more interesting way of looking at it, is understanding art as the visual manifestation of an idea or feeling that regularly defies typification. A way of showing what for ontological reasons cannot be shown. Perhaps a better way to think of this is not to think of art as a way of seeing what cannot be seen, but as a way of saying what cannot be said. Words like "death" and "fear" are so far removed from the qualitative states they're meant to represent that they ultimately communicate nothing more than factual information, mere bullet points. (And perhaps this is a good thing; consider how tough life would be if we fully took on the connotations of the word death every time we heard it. Think about the stress and emotional turmoil of the evening news.) Yet at some point these states need to be communicated, and this is where art steps in. Consider Hirst's famous "The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Somebody Living" a work representing a shark in a vat of formaldehyde. This sculpture is not meant to demonstrate what exactly a Tiger Shark looks like, nor to illustrate a certain method of taxidermy. Indeed to reduce the piece to this is laughable. This isn't showing us something visual to represent something else visual, it's not an illustration or diagram in any typical sense. The work rather shows us something visual to represent something much much more evasive. The shark isn't a symbol for a shark, but a symbol for the qualitative states of fear, of death, and for countless other uncountables. Hirst isn't concerned with shark representation, but in what a shark represents. And in making this move he brings these morbid and curious issues to the viewer's attention in a much more direct and expedient manner than conventional language ever could. The face of a tiger shark conjurs up a flurry of emotions far beyond what language could touch. Whether we like it or not, seeing a shark makes us feel, makes us encounter something within ourselves. And the communication of these feelings, these unspeakable and evasive qualitative states, is the function, if we can call it that, of art.

Reading a work of art like this requires a lot more out the viewer. There is a big difference between looking at a piece of art and saying "that is what it looks like" and saying "that is how it feels," or even "these are the countless ambiguities surrounding this issue." Yet if we're looking at art as more than a diagrammatical exercise, as more than a tool to help us imagine another image, this sort of effort becomes necessary.

Until we're ready to make this move of course, there's still the vast and untenable sea of commercial fo-art. My recent favorite in the category is the Schlafly Brewery Art Outside Art Fair. A yearly event held every September in St. Louis, calling on "edgy and unconventional" artists to participate in a collective orgy of childish aestheticism and bourgeois ignorance (my words, not theirs). Here you can buy paintings of dogs skateboarding through cartoon cityscapes, and tasteful collages of cows mooing at a setting sun. Yours truly was turned down this year because of "short space".

'Til next time, stay sleek, stay sly.