>Getting back to Tansey, much of his magical
>humor and philosophical insight would go straight over most viewer's
>heads, including most art students.
As you've talked about and Cusset also brings out in his book, things going on outside the university were a very important part of transmitting "French Theory" widely in the U.S. Tansey is a good example of that. I think I've mentioned here before that the first time I saw Foucault on a shelf for sale it was at an art gallery in San Francisco.
btw, Tansey's parents were both art historians. He was born in San Jose and got a BFA in Pasadena. Now he lives in New York.
> I hope his exhibits have more than
>just title, date, material, and dimensions.
I can't remember if there was anything at the show I saw but I think there must have been, or much of what I was looking at wouldn't have hit me the way it did.
Here's some background:
http://www.askart.com/AskART/artists/biography.aspx?searchtype=BIO&artist=31232
The following, submitted August 2005, is from Peter Falk, Art Historian and friend of the artist.
In the world of living artists, fame can be fleeting, skillfully pumped up by promotional hyperboles of major art galleries. Mark Tansey, however, is a rarity among contemporary artists. Several books have been written about his extraordinary approach to making art, and some of the world's major art museums have given him solo exhibitions. One of his major paintings is on permanent display in the American Wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Many other major museums worldwide own his works.
Clearly, Tansey has achieved lasting recognition, placing him in the pantheon of true contemporary masters. Imagine a painter expressing the views of an art historian and a social commentator. The result is a unique surrealist, post-modernist painter plumbing the intellectual depths of art, social, literary, and scientific history. Using photographic images from popular culture, academia, and art history, he dislocates and recombines their apparent reality into new, expressive contexts of his own that comment on humanity, their foibles, aspirations and often futile endeavors.
Tansey's essentially large paintings are monochromatic, whether brown, blue, green, etc, exploring an illustrational use of tonal variations rather than more painterly values like substance of form and design. He seems bent on proving, by means of his invented, apparently realistic scenarios, that representation of reality itself may be ambiguous and problematic, not something that can be depended on.
Tansey, now living in New York, received his BFA degree from the Art Center College of Design, Pasadena, California in 1969. He also studied at the Harvard Summer Session Institute of Arts, Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1974, followed by graduate studies in painting at Hunter College in New York City, receiving an MFA degree in 1978.
Tansey's acute awareness of art history comes from two parents who are art historians. His father, Richard G. Tansey, was one of the editors who revised the 5th through 10th editions of Gardner's Art Through the Ages, the ubiquitous college art history textbook first published by Helen Gardner in 1926. His mother, Luraine Tansey, is the pioneering Visual Resources Librarian at the University of California who developed the Universal Slide Classification System. Thus, their son grew up in an intellectual environment that prompted Warhol Museum director, Thomas Sokolowski, to comment that the artist was "destined to absorb art history in the same way that Michelangelo - who suckled marble dust from his wet nurse, who was a stonemason's wife - was destined to sculpt." [ArtNews, Summer vol., 1994] Tansey's works are well-represented at the Smithsonian Museum of American Art.
Their curator describes his style and approach to making art: Mark Tansey uses irony and surreal combinations of places and historical figures to make uncanny but coherent connections between ideas and events. The canvases are based on photocopied images and figures culled from the artist's library of popular, academic, and art-historical sources. Tansey mixes and matches this appropriated imagery, using a calculated system of opposition, reversal, and contradiction to create his seemingly realistic historical scenarios. However, the artist's pictorial realities are intended less as literal truths than as metaphor.
Both matter-of-fact and abstruse, Tansey's monochromatic paintings resemble documentary photographs even though they depict wholly impossible situations. His tightly representational style invites us to believe in his preposterous inventions despite the obvious inconsistencies that beg for explanation.
Ultimately, these paintings are not just an opportunity to discover some hidden, complicated meaning. They are proof that representations, whether realistic or historical, are inherently problematic. Tansey challenges our perceptions of what seems at first recognizable, leaving us with provocative and open-ended questions, not answers.
Finally, when viewing the etchings in the A&K Collection, it is interesting to keep in mind Tansey's own comments about pictorial content:
In the late 1970s, what was particularly attractive about pictorial representation was that one faced an opening and extending realm of content rather than dematerialization, endgames, and prolonged swan songs. Difficulties lay in the long established and increasingly critical isolation of subject matter from art practice. Critical discourse and art education had restricted the notion of content to two pockets coalescing around formal and conceptual poles. To speak about subject matter in a picture simply was not done.
My feeling was that there was no longer any justification for these restrictions. Pictures should be able to function across the fullest range of content. The conceptual should be able to mingle with the formal and subject matter should enjoy intimate relations with both.
Source includes: "Mark Tansey: Visions and Revisions" by Arthur C. Danto