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ArtKrush has published a second installment of its "art online" series. (The first was here.) This blog is on the link list as a "new media blog." I'm down with that as long as new media means "the ism that follows and subsumes conceptualism in the history of art" but I do consider this an art blog. Art made with a PC, blog-in-a-gallery, and computercentric reviews notwithstanding, during the last six months the following have been discussed, depicted, or parodied on this page: Charles Ray, Judy Pfaff, Cindy Sherman, Ludwig Schwarz, Roxy Paine, Ryan McGinness, Sol LeWitt, Richard Woods, Kelley Walker, Klaus Mossetig, Allison Smith, David Moreno, Vincent Van Gogh, Triple Candie's "Limelight" exhibit, Miklos Suba, Chris Burden, Fiona Banner, Mark Dagley, Don Voisine, Marc Handelman, The Art Guys, Gary Hill, Doug Aitken, Elaine Sturtevant, Salvador Dali, Claes Oldenburg & Coosje Van Bruggen, Tony Conrad, Ralston Crawford, Ken Lum, Ivan Albright, John Pomara, Jackson Pollock, Matthew Geller.
The following exchange appeared in Houston's online magazine GlassTire back in 2001:
Tire Iron #6 3/15/2001
Inman Gallery
by Bill Davenport
I confess: I myself show at Inman Gallery, so if you feel that this invalidates my opinion of other work shown there, you can stop reading now.
John Pomara's glossy enameled panels are competent, affectless, impersonal. In the past I have used the phrase "toxic pond sludge" (I meant that in a good way) to describe Pomara's abstractions, but these new works at Inman gallery are cleaner. The panels are either black or white; the black ones suggesting nighttime landscapes, time-lapse photographs of headlights on a rain-slick city street. The proportions of the white panels suggest sheets of milky paper, squeegeed into horizontal zips like writing.
In both cases, the vertical orientation of the panel counteracts the horizontal stretch of the painting. Compare these works to Barnet Newman's: if Newman's vertical zips are the figure reduced to its essential gravity-defying assertion of existence, Pomara's horizontal streaks are the equivalent distillation of landscape, stretching flat and sliding sideways at high speed.
John Pomara, Pipeline, 2000
oil enamel on aluminum, 30 x 24 inches
Although they are emphatically about the glossy deliciousness of industrial paint, Pomara's works don't feel like paintings. Their exposed edges show that each is a thin sheet of aluminum laminated to birch plywood. The panels seem manufactured, not painted: the result of the impersonal operation of chance and technique.
The odd, syncopated hanging of the show does a lot for the work; irregular intervals between the panels make them into a sort of Morse code: intermittent, static-laden signals on the information superhighway. In the entranceway, a large black panel is hung next to a similar small one, upsetting one's expectations of typical gallery-style installation. The two panels have an odd relationship: a large and small version of the same thing, or possibly one close-up and one far away.
A discussion of Pomara's work is incomplete without referencing the very similar works of Houston artist Tad Griffin, Pomara's former student. Their co-existence is an opportunity to make subtle comparisons that highlight nuances of both artists' works, which are usually submerged. Here we are comparing, not pears and oranges, but Bosc vs. Bartlett. Both Griffin and Pomara swipe intermittent stripes of black and white paint across aluminum panels. Pomara's recent works are more pictorial: his streaks condense at the middle of the panel to imply depth, demarcating foreground, middle, and background; Griffin's all-over patterns are a depthless skin stretched across the surface of his paintings. Griffin's intervals are regular, but not mechanical; he is a man imitating a machine. Pomara's irregular compositions of stripes and gaps are the opposite: a painter using mechanical techniques to depersonalize his pictures. If we can collect one or two more Texas squeegee painters we'd have a school!
Response to Tire Iron #6 3/15/2001 [Update: this comment has gone missing from Glasstire but I saved it here]
Bill Davenport makes some good points about John Pomara's work. I have a couple of quibbles, and a thing or two to add. First, when I read that something is "competent, affectless, and impersonal," my first question is, why? I wish Davenport had gone more into the reasons a painter might deliberately work that way. My own theory is that many painters are still drawn to "the gesture," an unplanned, frequently exhilirating way of generating visual information, but are sick of the romantic action-painter myth left over from the '50s. The use of squeegees — or in Pomara's case, customized painter's shields — to blur and scrape away paint is a way of literally eradicating the gesture, but also adding another exciting, randomizing variable in the creation of a picture.
John Pomara, On Line, 2000
oil enamel on aluminum, 72 x 48 inches
This new variable suggests fresh content: the "impersonality" and "affectlessness" of the times, yes, but also a reference to the new visual landscape given to us by technology — "intermittent, static-laden signals on the information superhighway," as Davenport nicely puts it. There are plenty of interesting artists working in this territory: Stephen Ellis, John Zinsser, Bill Komoski, Shirley Kaneda, Mark Sheinkman, William Wood, Carl Fudge, Rochelle Feinstein, to name a few. Instead of the somewhat belittling "squeegee school," a better term would be mediated abstraction, referring to media in both the material and communications sense. This is an international tendency among painters, which both Pomara and Griffin are aware of and plugged into. And which, I might add, Pomara continues to work and evolve in. If we must compare Pomara and Griffin, a better job could be done. "Griffin is a man imitating a machine," Davenport says, while Pomara is "a painter using mechanical techniques to depersonalize his pictures." Isn't that a distinction without a difference? I'd say Pomara, with his succulent surfaces and all-too-human imperfections, is a man imitating a machine, while Griffin, with his high-polished control of every millimeter of a picture, is more like a machine imitating a man. (And I mean that in a good way.) - Tom Moody, New York
My reply has been edited slightly for punctuation and syntax. Some newer work by Pomara is referenced here. Earlier posts on him are here and here. With five and a half years' hindsight, I'd say that almost none of the painters mentioned in my reply represents much of a viable school any longer, except Pomara, who is busy morphing it into something else. Those *were* artists imitating machines, or a machine look, and little besides--that was probably not a good phrase to apply to him, because he's actually thinking below the surface of the computer, using processes of creative decomposition with imaging software to develop a new "pixelesque" iconography. His work belongs in the new media dialogue--painting is just a part of it.
Some recent paintings by John Pomara:
Titles are, top to bottom, Luv Connection, Corporate File, Digital Dating, Double Dating, Jailhouse Rock, and Jetsons (all oil enamel on aluminum). Earlier posts on Pomara's work, expaining a bit about the process are here and here. The current, stylish group handles digital content in a thoughtful, oblique way. These appear to have architectural subjects, but it's wholly invented or aleatoric architecture--emerging out of the process of deforming imagery at the pixel level. What look like "wrecked scans" a la Karl Klomp's "glitch video" work are just a starting point--the logic of messy revision and chance is continued into the painting realm, which is already very much about significant accidents, since the AbEx days. Pomara also makes photos and ink jet works in this vein, and there is much back and forth among media in his studio process.
Update: Some links to writing on Pomara in Houston's GlassTire online magazine weren't working in my April 2001 post but those pieces have now been located: Bill Davenport's review and my reply. The reply is unfortunately captioned "Responses to Tire Iron #6 by Jeff Dalton" but my name is in there somewhere.
Update: The text of Davenport's review and my reply are here.
Update, May 5, 2009: Those links were broken again. I'm linking to the barely formatted "print" pages as there is no way to permalink the articles. Get it together, Glasstire! Oh well, at least the writing hasn't disappeared completely. Rather amazing after 8 years on the web.
Above: John Pomara, oil on paper, ca. 1987. Speaking of painters braving the switch to 1s and 0s, the piece above is what Pomara was doing in '86 and '87 (gorgeously painted semi-abstractions with roots in AbEx, the east village, and '60s sci fi book covers) and below is a detail of a recent piece:
Pomara starts with a pixelated blow up detail of an image such as a face and gets busy crunching in an imaging program, refining and deforming and refining until something that looks like modernist architecture emerges. He does still paint, and these images are used as stencils in that process and also printed out as stand-alone photo-works. I maintain that a painterly eye transcends media and we're too fixated on the physical stuff: obviously output is important, and that's something we're all wrestling with. I'm confident that solutions will continue to be found that will save us from the dreaded fate of becoming printmakers. Calling the output "photography" is one conceptual end-run around the problem.
Looksmart's FindArticles is putting old art magazine articles online; from the blowing my own horn department, I offer the following links:
Frances Colpitt's Art in America piece on abstract painting in Texas, which discusses an interesting scene we had going there in '94-'95 (continuing to this day even though several painters moved to NY). Also discussed besides yours truly are John Pomara, Aaron Parazette, David Szafranski, Jeff Elrod, Giovanni Garcia-Fenech, and others. It's amusing to read her description of Elrod's (then) slacker paintings of Atari game imagery, since he eventually became a somewhat stylish reifier of vector flotsam. (Boy, there's an article; I wonder who will write it?)
My Artforum review of the French (Corsican) artist Ange Leccia's solo at the Contemporary Arts Museum (CAM) in Houston. I described this big-scale Fluxo-conceptualist's entire show based on how it compared to various strains of abstract painting, using commodity art as a straw man. The show was good, but in retrospect I'd say it was a meditative climb-down from the work that got him known--the curious conceit of doing ephemeral Yoko Ono gestures with massive heavy-industry-produced technology.
From my first year of New York Artforum reviews, a piece on Barbara Gallucci: a 1996 show that Roberta Refused to Touch. Well, I remember she did a big roundup of hot new Soho galleries that month and managed not to mention Lauren Wittels' space, which was definitely hot at the time. There was some personal back story associated with the exhibit that I was definitely aware of, but I chose to review it with a "cold" interpretation.
Church of Lo Fi
A friend just jokingly referred to my preference for old computer programs over current software as my "religion." No, religion is believing you have to buy the newest program to make the best art. The opposite of that is...iconoclasm?
But idol-smashing can be dogmatic, too, so maybe it's better to couch the discussion in terms of "desired artistic effects." My old dying Mac SE makes cool sounds from the clipping and distortion that comes from "overdriving" the machine's limited synths, just in normal use--rhythmic patterns of clicks, ominous atmospheric rumbles... You won't get that with garageband (or maybe there's a pallette called "old Mac flaws"? I don't really want to hear about it). Also, there's something about working against limitations, as opposed to having a machine that "does it all for you." Think movie special effects on a budget vs profligate CGI. And finally, there's a certain exoticism of hearing/seeing old tools as they were before years of "improvements." Some of those improvements are engineering tweaks (for speed, etc) but others are simple value judgments the user had no input in. As Dan Graham once said--in so many words, and not necessarily for this reason--the "recently outmoded" can be one of the more fertile and radical places for artists to work.
Anyway, if lo fi is a religion, here's a chapter of the Bible, written by painter Alexander Ross for the "Static" show co-organized by John Pomara and me in '98 (I especially like the bolded para.):
The Recent History of Static in Recorded Music
by Alexander Ross
The static trend in rock music grew initially out of the fuzz guitar sound (best known from the Rolling Stones' "[I Can't Get No] Satisfaction"), which imitated an over-driven or distorting amplifier. Hard-rock outfits continued to push the "guitar wall of sound" well after the '60s, refining it into a subtle and controlled art.
The creative fringe took interest in an accidental by-product of this distortion: the overtones of fuzz, a warm "pink noise" (white noise is static without tone, pink noise is static or "snow" with a hum, or discernible pitch) that rode seemingly independently on top of the music. An early exploration of this might be Eno's "Needle in the Camel's Eye" from 1973, where the constant smashing of guitar chords creates a wall of wavering noise above the song.
A foundational work appeared in the mid-'70s with Lou Reed's controversial and fan-disappointing double LP Metal Machine Music, an all-static-and-feedback statement that figures in rock history much the way Futurist noise performances function in the history of theatre: pure, unequivocal rebellion.
There were some notable static undergrounds coming along in the late '70s/early 80's, namely Chrome (out of San Francisco), and a little later Fi (pronounced "eff eye"). Throbbing Gristle might also be mentioned here, as well as This Heat and Cabaret Voltaire (for example, "No Escape" off their classic first release, Mix-Up). The first group to make the intentional breakthrough into pure static would have to be The Jesus & Mary Chain, who eq-ed the bass-end off the fuzz chords entirely, leaving a shrill, static constant running relentlessly throughout their songs. Next would be Kevin Shields of My Bloody Valentine, where the static becomes more textured and smeared, literally permeating the music. The effect is a sexy, dreamlike blur echoing early '90s trends in fashion photography. Static finally becomes the main subject with the rise of Flying Saucer Attack (Chorus is a good example), out of Virginia, of all places. Here the static is totally frontal, and the music sort of whispers at you through a snowy haze.
The advent of the compact disc in all its sterile flawlessness brought about the realization that technological defects such as tape hiss, amp buzz, record groove ticks, and ultimately the computerized glitches sometimes heard on the CD itself were now interesting sounds never before utilized in conjunction with music. This, combined with the inexpensive home recording boom, coalesced into what became known as LO-FI. Major players, largely confined to the US and New Zealand, include Lou Barlow/Sentridoh, Daniel Johnston, Guided By Voices, and (from New Zealand) post-rockers The Dead C and This Kind of Punishment.
Mid-'90s developments quickly cross-over into the techno-ambient realms with Oval, who boldly dominate the glitch and hiss scene. Mention should be made of Scanner, an individual who scans cell phone conversations and create pieces out of them, with the natural static of the transmission wavering in and out. Most recently is Porter Ricks, also techno-ambient, whose distant discotheque is heard pleasantly through walls of dreamy smush.
The ambient/industrial sector was long-ago onto the static phenomenon, but here there is no music at all, just pure, wonderful noise. Examples here would be The Hafler Trio, Arcane Device, Tibetan Red, PBK, and early Nocturnal Emissions.
I've returned from my Texas trip. Highlights include watching herons, gulls, and turnstones on the beach on Padre Island; seeing my uncle Roy's amazing 1/8 scale model steam railroad, comprised of over two miles of track, switches, bridges, trestles, and turntables winding through his ranch property in central Texas (pictures to follow); visiting Scott Barber's exhibition at Barry Whistler Gallery (during pre-opening installation) and John Pomara's studio in Dallas; meeting writer Frederick Turner at an otherwise weird University of Texas at Dallas soiree in the redeveloped Sears Building south of downtown; seeing long-lost family and friends.
Congratulations to my friend, artist John Pomara, for receiving a thumbs-up in Wired for a show he curated called "jet_seT." The exhibition, at the University of Texas at Dallas, deals with artists using new printing media, but contrary to the "art of the future" spin Wired typically puts on things, most of the folks he picked disrespect the technology quite a bit. This applies to content as well as form.
Dallas-based painter John Pomara has a show up right now at Inman Gallery in Houston, which has been getting some attention. Seems Pomara's former student Tad Griffin got known in Houston for a style and conceptual line somewhat similar to his, and the scene's so intimate that the idea of two artists mining the same vein makes people uncomfortable. Bill Davenport's review appears here, and my reply is here. Below is a jpeg of Pipeline, 2000, oil enamel on aluminum, 30 x 24 inches.