POST 59: BAWDY BUSTY AND BRUEGEL- ESQUE

A friend of mine who had once been an English Lit major stopped to visit recently and pronounced my artwork “Bawdy and Chaucerian.” I personally think “Bawdy, Busty and Brueghelesque” is more accurate.  Unlike pornography, my characters are meant to parody, make fun of lust rather than to titillate. I’m trying to mirror a society of make-believe lewdness and very little real feeling. If you want a rather sad peep show, take a look at the students who come out of a local high school nowadays. My stuff’s tame compared to real life. Ordinary, hard-working people can routinely be found wearing outfits we used to associate with streetwalkers and burlesque queens. And given the fact that half the American population is seriously overweight, this makes for some significant overexposure (and unintended humor).

So what does that have to do with ART and why is the current art world so devoid of images of real life, let alone satirical ones? A friend recently described the latest “hot” painter on the New York art scene, (work goes for 100s of thousands of dollars). He does giant panels of shimmering silver leaf. Gorgeous stuff and a technical tour de force, but no challenge to social mores. What does it tell us about ourselves? Satire, the stuff I do, is especially unacceptable. It’s like no one dares look at the real world any more, let alone pay money for art that does. Maybe we really do need artists who tell the bitter truth: modern day Bruegels, Hogarths, Daumiers and Goyas, as well as a clutch of really nasty 1920s German Expressionists. Unfortunately, there’s no place for them in Hedge Fund zillionaire dwellings or their collections. Why would they encourage parodies of themselves? Why should they pay their hard-earned money for someone to cast a critical eye on the society they created and support?

And so we get legions of artists today who see only blips and bumps and produce gimmicky “installations” and clever wordplay. No emotion please! no social criticism, lots of sexuality, none of it true to real life. When I bring someone new to my studio, he or she is often taken aback by all the lusty, busty characters around them. But they talk to you;  (at least they talk to me) they’re real! Once I make you aware of them, you’ll see them everywhere.

By the way, I Googled  Chaucer’s “Wife of Bath” (having slogged through it once in college, there was no way I was going to read the original text again.)  Since my work is allegedly “Chaucerian,” I think I’m going to have to deal with her and her five husbands (not all at once) in a future blog.