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. Dennis Claxton
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To be born in San Jose, says it all. San Jose is the San Fernando Valley suburb re-constructed. San Jose has as much of a downtown as Van Nynes did in the 50s, boulevards of shopping intercut with official government buildings for Social Welfare, Employment, Police, DMV, Juvenile Justice and metered parking in a vast sprawl of cars, an ocean of cars, like some land of treasure J.G.Ballard dreamed in Empire of the Sun.
Little wonder Tansey is cranked, a kindred spirit. Even so I am jealous. He went to the fancy overpriced Pasadina Art Museum school where the buildings are all architectural interior design models from the arts and crafts movement. I went to Northridge, where we had to create some sense of soul, in the empty world of Bauhaus functionality.
Since I've never seen one of Tansey's works I assume they are air brushed off photographic collage projected onto large canvas. (that's the way I would do it.) They could be painted with a soft brush and thinned paint layered to achieve the meticulous shadings. I could never afford an air bush system, so I used the latter or spray cans to get similar effects. A lot later I learned how to do a black chalk drawing, smear it for the the 3-d effect, fix the chalk with fixative, and then over paint varnish tints and soft brush work. The inscrutable surface is the key. No matter how close the viewer gets, they can not understand how it was done. So the art achieves a master status, since all evidence of the `hand' is missing.
The monochrome is very important. It focuses attention to form, where color destroys form. Think of Monet and atmosphere, juxtaposed to the linear and blunt Van Gogh. Picasso recognized this drawn feature, as the echo of Goya's prints where the scratched contoured lines create the patch work form of the figures---blocked out in high contrast aquatints of black and white. The reduction to black and white, sets up the stage of pictorial drama, within which the stark narrative of rape, murder, dismemberment, torture, and the chaotic junk heaps of bodies and trash of war are given expression in the starkest terms available. The soft arches and pointed steel bayonets create the compositional drama of death by penetration...bayoneted pregnant women or the bare chest of peasants facing the firing squads.
In any event, reading this:
``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.''
The jack-off established art world still can not bring themselves to actually write about the Subject Matter of the paintings. Whenever I read shit like that, I just want to get my Webley .45 and blow their brains out. God, shut the fuck up.
Do they, the absurd critical world, for example understand that their own chatter about the subject and the narrative are the subject and narrative of the paintings? I don't think they do, which is so funny and crazy about these paintings.
Gotta stop here. My martinis count is over the permissible posting line I drew for myself a few weeks back.
CG