my place in contemporary art?

So a few days ago, I think I finally came up with the question I've been asking myself since February of this year...and it all happened with the help of a dumb facebook article! Below is a segment from draft two of my Thesis Paper.

Michael Chabon, American novelist and short story writer, describes the underlying purpose of Wes Anderson’s film-making when he writes:

The most we can hope to accomplish with our handfuls of salvaged bits --the bittersweet harvest of observation and experience --is to build a little world of our own. A scale model of that mysterious original, unbroken, half-remembered. Of course the worlds we build out of our store of fragments can be only approximations, partial and inaccurate. As representations of the vanished hole that haunts us, they must be accounted failures. And yet in that very failure, in their gaps and inaccuracies, they may yet be faithful maps, accurate scale models, of this beautiful and broken world. We call these scale modes ‘works of art’” (21-22).

When it comes down to the bottom of everything, what am I doing? The quote above is a goal obtained after a lifelong career. I keep it written on my studio wall as a reminder of something for which to strive. What I am doing right now is offering a different kind of multi-faceted narrative and storytelling. I offer the viewer an experience. With a growing cultural interest in narrative and an expansion of storytelling, with transformations taking place in the form of books translated into a continuous television series to mirror what happens when a reader gets completely involved in a book and must stay up all night so that he or she can discover what happens, and with contemporary art becoming more interested in experience, I am under the impression that contemporary art is at a place where it should also continue pushing and breaking limitations of the narrative.

Discussing the future of storytelling, Hayden Royster, author of LightWorkers, writes, “On October 27, 2017, people across the world threw parties to celebrate the release of [“Stranger Things”]. . . Various Eggo waffles inspired treats were available for snacking. Signs like ‘Welcome to Hawkins’ were hung from mailboxes . . . partygoers dressed as their favorite Hawkins resident. . .” What Royster is suggesting is that the love for “Stranger Things” goes beyond a nostalgia for costumes and the ‘80s. This event and events like this indicate that the way our society creates and consumes stories is changing in a substantial way.

Walter Benjamin saw this paradigm shift much earlier. In 1936 he wrote, acknowledging the changes in cinematic technology, “the distinction between author and public is about to lose its basic character . . . Literary License is now founded on polytechnic rather than specialized training and thus becomes common property.” This means that if a person has the capabilities of using technology, then a person can tell a story. This gives an artist, such as myself, license and power to tell a story because I have the necessary means within different media at hand. “Stranger Things” was created with a purpose of being consumed successively in one cohesive narrative, like reading a book. We are in a culture which allows for stories to be entirely immersive through streaming and binge-watching. The task of the artist and the author may have an increasing challenge of keeping the audience’s attention, but art, like literature, is never going to disappear.

I inted to keep the viewer’s attention through multiple entry ways of interest in multiple media and in telling the story from the “making of” to the finished artifact, creating a gallery space in which the viewer is completely immersed into the story, in this case, the story of For Wintonbury. My paintings are set up cinematically with a frame and a setting that appear as if it could be a room or a backdrop of a room or an idea of a room from a compilation of observed and remembered scenes from the author’s past. The viewer is given the choice to read the book (of collected short stories) or watch the movie (view the paintings/visual objects) first. Some may consume both at the same time, following the works of art while reading the correlating pages.

The viewer, for however long he or she chooses, may contemplate For Wintonbury in the gallery space which has temporarily transformed into the artist and author’s mind. This exhibit and this shift in narrative which I am proposing becomes a sort of time lapse of making. The viewer is not only given one singular, final product manifested in a painting. Rather, the viewer gets the opportunity to absorb a painting, read the story behind it, notice objects in the painting that enter into the study, and view the artist’s and characters’ thoughts and preliminary work. The viewer is given the opportunity to become as much or as little involved with the story and characters as he or she desires. An Eric Fischl or a Todd Hido implies a full narrative, but I seek to give my audience more than an implication.