Updates and Downgrades

Updating all the softwares on the computer and the peripherals — my scanner is out of luck and won’t function until someone writes the appropriate code — is a reminder about the necessity of staying current, the threat that hangs over all aspects of contemporary life.

Catherine Redmond, Update, 2013, ink on paper, 6" x 6"

Catherine Redmond, Update, 2013, ink on paper, 6″ x 6″

There’s the good news — see The Proactive Artist, Ryan Lammie — and then if you read this opinion from The New York Times, Slaves of the Internet, Unite!  by Tim Kreider, you get a sense of the more difficult environment in which artists are trying to thrive.  It is exaggerated with the advance in connectivity and its demands.  

 

Staying Current as a condition, however, is based on a false premise which haunts most of us beyond our iPhone updates. Fashion is built on it as is cable news.  It is a special burden on the creative person who needs time to develop and hear his voice.  Unfortunately, fearful academics are virulent broadcasters of this condition.   To salve their own doubts, I suppose, they foist their fears on the innocents they teach.

 

It is a destructive tactic in art education.  Rather than honor a creative need and the time it takes, the anxious academic, beams out anxiety like left-over gravy on everything.  “Is this contemporary?” he asks the bewildered student who can barely manage a brush.  It is much easier to create anxiety than to offer positive suggestions of hope for maintaining a creative center and the long journey toward competency and self-expression.  Any time an artist is out of touch with his own deep studio practice, staying current means something akin to doing everything and valuing nothing.

 

Thinking about Software

Interior for a Flash movie, drawn in Adobe Illustrator on a Wacom Tablet

Interior for a Flash movie, drawn in Adobe Illustrator on a Wacom Tablet 

My fun in learning Illustrator and Photoshop was about the way it extended consciousness.  I am not aware of any way that it altered or expanded my imagery or my narrative, but more that it opened possibilities as a new extension of my eyes and hands.  No matter what current theory proposes, Art is always an extension of the corporeal, specifically of touch.  This is especially true for the painter.

 

So what do these other interfaces do, in their abrupt reduction to the flat screen?  They trigger off ideas that may not have been released otherwise.  To draw on a tablet or with a mouse gives an Other kind of experience that is thrilling and re-equilibrating, not equivalent to a piece of charcoal in hand, a brush or a pencil as it caresses a page, not better, never more sensuous, but in a delicious thrill unique and its own.  No artist should deny himself that experience.

 

The two modes aren’t in competition.  They are just different.

 

 

I am much less interested in seeing the work that computer interface produces than I will be retrospectively in looking back at the way the consciousness of the artist will have changed.  If it does.