Must
Reads:
Artist as Celebrity Perfomance, Hawai'i 2004.
Tom
Schulz – Letter From The Director: ISAAC SCHULZ - MIDDLE
If… there is a painting which is lifelike and which is good for that reason, that work has followed the laws of life. If there is a painting which is not lifelike and which is good for that reason, that work has followed the laws of painting.”
Japanese aesthetician Tosa Mitsouki, quoted in “The Image Factory: Fads and Fashion in Japan” (Donald Richie, 2003)
There is a space that exists between the was and the will be that is the now. In Iona it is referred to as the thin place, an ephemeral schism between the known and the unknown. In America, the now is often fleeting – something to get through. A sound bite, a photo opportunity, an immediate idol. Fifteen minutes of fame. In Japan the now is all there is, for the past is unknowable and there is no future tense in the language that might describe what may come to be but does not now exist.
In the work of Isaac Schulz, this is the middle. Having lived and worked in Hawaii and Tokyo for the past six years, he has faced to the east and found The West. Turning, he has traveled to an East once taught to be Exotic Other which is now growing familiar to him. He is in the middle. In the middle of his culture of origin and a culture that is chosen. Once an alien in a familiar known, he embraces being an Alien in a brave new land.
And this is the position in which the viewer is also placed: between the image and the culture, between the performance of painting and the history of painting, between the high and the low. It is within this middle space that the delineation of typical cultural boundaries begins blurring.
In employing the strategies of commerce, Schulz introduces the viewer to the cute (kawaii) as a subversive and provocative method of critique. By utilizing the colors of Japanese advertisements and merchandise, he evokes a billboard effect that speaks to the selling of art. By using mixed paints from The Home Depot, he allows that the working “Every-Man” can blend an image and build a deck by weekend’s end. He brings the patterns of Japanese poetry into the visual field that kanji (written characters) evoke, yet substitutes his own vernacular so that the paintings speak to the subject of middle even as they remain a personal expression.
These are the tactics chosen in an attempt to develop an exchange between the areas outside of the middle. It is not necessarily a conciliatory action, but neither is it a form of cultural colonialism. These ‘foreign’ symbols are not used or borrowed. They are not appropriated as say, the Impressionists used them to illustrate a Non-European other in the late eighteen hundreds. As an American that embraces the Japanese culture, Schulz chooses rather to recognize the way that seemingly disparate cultures inform each other. Reply to one another. It is in his referencing fashion for example, that we are led to see how a particular society may take a shared commodity (cell phone, big pants) and make it particular. Shared, without being lost or taken. There is comfort in this middle, for upon entering a dialogue, there is allowed the creation of the new without the deprivation caused by desirous yearning.
Another important aspect of this work deals with the spectacle of art business. In the same way that Andy Warhol and Murakami Takashi celebrate what (for them) is an essential connection of art and business, Schulz also recognizes that it may be ridiculous to educate students as ‘art professionals’ in institutes of higher learning. This is especially accurate in an analysis of predominate modes of thought regarding what it is to be an artist. Particularly compelling is the maintenance of an uneven standard that refers to anything beyond an artist’s impoverishment as ‘selling out’. In another line of work, financial reward would be seen as success. His painting ‘performances’ (creating paintings before an audience in a club atmosphere) evoke the excesses of the Eighties. Again we find ourselves in the middle—balancing the desirable and the ethical.
These paintings and performances pose two fundamental questions: why is art consistently elevated beyond accessibility? And why are commercial aesthetics held low? Conversant in both the high language of painterly-ness and the commerce of kawaii, the artist has earned the permission to ask such questions.
Perhaps from our position in the middle, we the viewer owe him an answer.
That’s how it is with want. As long as you lack something, you yearn for it without cease. If only I could have that one thing, you tell yourself, all my problems would be solved. But once you get it, once the object of your desires is thrust into your hands, it begins to lose its charm. Other wants assert themselves, other desires make themselves felt, and bit by bit you discover that you are right back where you started.
-- “Mr. Vertigo” (Paul Auster, 1994)
Artist, Live Painting at Studio 1, Hawai'i, 2004. |
