Stepping out on the Mat

One thing every artist needs to face is objective reality; the reality of his or her place in the overall spectrum of contemporary art. Art, needless to say, is not like mathematics in which you are unequivocally right or wrong or like sports in which you win or lose. In art what is loved in one place is very possibly loathed in another; work which one connoisseur admires will be reviled by another seemingly learned expert. And, we must not be fooled by the warm exclamations of friends and relatives. Art understanding is confounded today by a plethora of new definitions ranging from the post-modernist "anything goes" advocates to the intransigent "golden rule" diehards.

The term "provincial" (naïve, simplistic, substandard) as it is used (pejoratively) when talking about art refers to the phenomenon of so-called artists working outside the mainstream who remain mired in cliché, derivation and bad technique. There is nothing wrong with provincial work per se as long as the artist or performer knows it. Even if he or she doesn’t know it one might say, "So what, as long as they are happy?" I agree, so what, in as much as a modicum of happiness is all any of us can hope for in life anyway so if it makes somebody happy to paint ochre fields and saccharine sunsets in the style of Pizarro or photograph the Sierras like a surrogate Ansel, so what? After all, 99 % of all so-called art produced, in America at least, is excruciatingly second-rate. In California alone there are 35, 000 registered "fiction writers". I’m sure there are just as many photographers and painters even if they are not registered with some inspirational organization. We see some of this stuff during the summer in our local parks. At least nobody is getting hurt with these maudlin therapeutic renderings.

On the other hand, what if some guy in Bishop, California wants to learn a martial art like Tae Kwon Do. That is fine for exercise and perhaps even for parochial self esteem but I am not sure that he should assume he will be able to survive the mean streets of Watts or East St Louis with his twice-weekly, no-contact play-fighting.

I mean, the point is to know how good you are, or how bad you might be relative to the best in the world. Once, I had an inflated idea of how good I was in judo because I had done well in tournaments and I had earned my black belt at the Royal Marine Commando Training Center in Sussex, England. I was at an annual conference of university photography teachers in Colorado Springs and one night I went to a match between the U.S Olympic Judo team and the Tokyo University team and, stupidly, I thought I was good enough to compete with those guys. The next evening, rather than attend the dinner-dance with my photo colleagues, I went over to the Olympic training center and found myself working out with the United States Olympic Judo Team. I mention this incident with the profoundest chagrin at the memory of my audacity and foolhardiness.

In sports you really know where you stand; you win or you lose, period; you don’t walk off the mat with a broken arm and say you won. In mathematics your conclusion is provable. In business you end up rich or you failed. In medicine your diagnosis is correct or the guy dies. But in art; where are the parameters? How can you ever know if you are any good or not? Too many people play air-guitar.

We love our own work. We hang it all over our walls, beautifully framed in masturbatory self-congratulation. Recently, I started playing pool again and one night came home and announced to my girlfriend that I thought I was ready to compete in the local tournaments. Apparently I had forgotten about my thrashing at the Olympic Judo venue because the same thing happened on a four by eight-foot piece of slate. Whenever it was my turn, which was rare, there was so much real estate between the cue ball and the object ball you’d need laser-guided technology to make the shot.

Of course, the good players make it look easy because they are so adept at getting "shape" on each ball that rarely do they have to make, what looks like, a difficult shot. "Its all in the line my boy." Ingres said to Degas.

I have a deep fear for example, that maybe my photography is as bad as my judo and pool. There are times in galleries and museums when I think to myself, "What the hell, my stuff is just as good as that!" I don’t really know anymore. The reality might be closer to the Olympic Training Center than I would like to admit.

The point is to pursue whatever excites you, to the fullest extent possible; to give it your absolute, best effort and not worry about success or failure but revel in the doing. The important thing is to do it one hundred percent. Don’t delude yourself with half-baked, dilettante, coffeehouse attempts. The real athlete and the real artist are working all day, every day on their projects. The fact is, we can’t all have our picture on the cover of Rolling Stone or have shows at the Modern or play in Carnegie Hall. I think however, that if we give it our best effort for twenty years we will, ultimately, find a level of acknowledgement, satisfaction and (local or regional) recognition with which we should be happy.