SUBJECT MATTERS
All Subjects Matter
Copyright 2014 - Charles Wish
Manipulating material solely for the purpose of some visual display is a curious undertaking to be sure. What I often find equally curious, though, is the variety of objects (and non-objects) that end up in these displays. I like to keep notes when it comes to these things, the following are some of my favorites.
What’s it All About
For me the basic aim here has been to harmonize the visual stylings of some rather clichéd American ideals and, possibly, castoff some of their jadedness while doing so. That told, there are usually three things that come to mind most while I’m working: ideo-aesthetics, cultural exchange/cultural pliability (especially where identity is concerned) and, last but not least, just the act of painting itself -- something which always seems so clumsy and dated while I’m not doing it and pretty much the exact opposite while I am.
I tend to view what I do as a consideration on how to deal with some of the Regionalist movement’s inherent contradictions. If you study the work, especially the landscapes, of Wood, Benton, and Curry, you will find visual ties to Dow, Fenollosa, and Batchelder. If you study the work of Dow, Fenollosa, and Batchelder, you will find ties to Kakuzo, Koun, Hokusai, and the Japanese Ukiyo-e school of painting and printmaking. And if you study the work of the Ukiyo-e, you will find ties to Buddhism and Tao, which means ties to China and ultimately India. So, in their push for an art form that screamed hyper-American localism, they ended up borrowing from compositional habits that were anything but -- which is something that has long fascinated me.
Agrariadelic
Once upon a time, I set out to paint some pictures about a relationship; or, more specifically, my dad’s relationship with America and my mom’s relationship with America having a relationship. Both of my parents have boatloads of love and devotion for this place, this ideal we call the USA. However, both of them also have very different expectations about what they should be getting in return for their patriotic investments.
So, one of the very first things I needed to do in order to achieve the goal of painting the complexities of these liaisons was to find two distinct sets of aesthetics which best conveyed the differing points of view regarding my parents’ national-identities. Funny thing about it is, where my mom is concerned, the set of aesthetics which best described her ideas of the American promise would come from an entirely different country. Not only that, but in the country where these visual ideas and symbols have been kept alive for some time now, these particular images would be considered on the conservative side. Whereas my mom’s ideas and expectations of America are most certainly not considered conservative at all, at least not here in the USA.
A set of aesthetics is an entity unto itself, an entity with its own heart and ideals. The real truth about it is, they couldn’t care less about our social wrangling. Oh, we put on a good show of trying to weaponize and pit them against each other, but at the end of the day, when all the dust has settled, they are still completely unscathed and self-secure. What’s more, the ones we have vainly tried to label as enemies (you know, in the name of our limited causes) will always get along just fine; all we need do to experience this eternal comradery is simply step aside and let them play on their own terms.
Narratives
Narrations are important to me. Since none of us can ever totally observe what’s wholly going on in the universe, we all have these observational gaps, so we fill them in with stories. You know, like the one about the angry dragon, stingy leprechaun, generous tooth fairy, God, emptiness, the story that there is no story, whatever we imaginably choose. These narratives are crucial to our human development; often times helping us to reach a place of better understanding than mere repositories of empirical experiences ever could. However, one doesn’t want to wither away in a world of futile fantasy. To temper this, I’ve come to live by the following rule: the more a story suggests reasons for us to fall under the daze of extreme negative concepts (i.e. hate, jealousy, intolerance, despair, outright frustration, outright injustice, absolute hopelessness, absolute fear, etc.), the more discordant it is with reality. Of course, painting has not only helped me to widen and fine-tune my own narratives in regard to this maxim, but it has also helped me to deepen my understanding and relationships with the stories of others, always reconfirming the validity of the altruistic compass which I’ve come to gauge all narratives by.
Uniqueness with an Armature
As far as I know, human beings are the only living organisms on the planet that produce their own external time pieces. I love clocks. Each one is a distinctly crafted gadget with its own specific characteristics, while still being capable of precisely performing the same universal function. However, not too many of us ever directly ask a clock what time it is. Instead, we look elsewhere for the answer and then forcibly manipulate the clock into conveniently reminding us of what we’ve found. I like to think that every clock has something unique to say entirely on its own. And without having to dismiss our collective ideas on temporal stability, each and every one of us should never feel discouraged about asking just what these firsthand statements might be. This attitude of subjective autonomy tempered with objective mechanism has always fascinated me. So, it’s no wonder that this genial outlook would offer some influence when it comes to appropriating subjects into my work.
The Semiotics of Sex & Death
Symbo-pantheistic is a pretty good way to describe the abundance of imagery you’ll find in Tantric art, with Shiva and his eternal consort Devi as two central immutable characters -- eternally entwined in a binarically, non-binaric union. Although you may find a reversal of gender roles and even the total dismantling of concepts like unified consciousness in some Tantric Buddhist texts, Shiva (the divine masculine) traditionally represents universal unqualified awareness and formlessness while Devi (the divine feminine) traditionally represents universal energy and the ability to manifest and sustain form. And whether implied or directly stated, it’s overwhelmingly clear in all Tantric literature: no manifold form falls into being without the interwoven alliance of these two principals, and no manifold form falls out of being without the transformation of something into something else.
Consciousness and content, creation and transformation, all are adoringly mingled in the eternal play between forms and awareness. From a symbolic Tantric perspective, everything is rife with this universal joining and everything is subsequently rife with its universal transformation. In this regard, it would be absurd to allow one’s primary focus to become overrun with a morbid obsession for humanized moments of termination (i.e. death) or a wanton fixation for humanized moments of gendered interweaving (i.e. sex). But, it would also be just as absurd to ignore or, even worse, try to escape the omniscience of those two things. All forms are connected and in possession of these cosmic generalities.
Discovering these generalities, not so much by studying instances of human carnal behavior or mortality in particular, but by deducing the general gist of these phenomena inherently woven into all instances, is the objective. To me this is much of what art is about -- helping extrapolate such generalities from particulars where they may not be so readily apparent. As living organisms, we are always running towards some form of creativity, while running away from some form of destruction. The genius of Tantric symbolism is there really isn’t any place that far for us to run.
Surrealism vs. Psychedelia
When I first began to publicly display my work (circa 1999), many of those who came forward to discuss it used the term “surreal.” This is understandable because there is a dreamlike attitude there for sure. Freedom of interpretation is paramount, so if surreal is what you would like to call what I do, by all means feel free.
However, the imagery that finds its way into my work really doesn’t come from an attempt to describe my dreams or any other part of my unconscious thought process. All be it, I’m not opposed to including images from my dreams in these paintings; some of them do contain them. But most of what’s included here stems from symbolic sources connected to older and more universal preexisting traditions, whether I’ve ever dreamt about them or not. The differences between Surrealism and Psychedelia are both subtle and striking. Where surrealism seeks to create an illogical interdimensional hybrid of an outer-reality with “another” inner-reality (a dualistic sentiment which fundamentally goes against underpinnings of a cohesive whole), psychedelia describes a continuing reconnection from our current and often dualistic misperception of a unified single reality, which is almost always followed by the logical conclusion that there was never any substantial variance or disunion to begin with -- just a more complete and transparent experience of the same One entirety, within or without. And though I may be splitting hairs here, it is for these reasons that I like to think of my work as more psychedelic than surreal.
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Art, Propaganda, & Spirituality
According to many acute art theorists, if the work states a formal position, then its most assuredly propaganda. But, if it asks a question (the less formal the better) well then its most assuredly qualified to be judged as a work of art. So, where does spirituality fall into place when it comes to all of this? I mean, many of the heavyweight museums of the world are chock full of art that definitely declares some sort of absolute metaphysical stance. How do we reconcile?
For me, since there is a spiritual element in what I do, I kind of look at it like this: If I forcibly handed you a map that I know isn’t going to take you any place you would really like to visit, and what’s more, your arrival there only benefits me? Well that wouldn’t be a good thing. But, what if I could hand you a map that led you somewhere you would really like to encounter? And what if up until then you weren’t aware of this place or if it even exists? Would that be a good thing? There’s a question in every map as long as you approach it with the right answer. But don’t take my word for it, just follow the other-brick road.
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