About a year ago I had a studio visit with a New York art dealer who was in town and interested in looking at my work. At one point I was telling him about my life and I mentioned that I had been teaching Art History, among other things, for the past six years to make a living. "It must be a real drag being around all those old crusty paintings all day," is an approximation of his response.
It's a peculiar cultural condition, this historical amnesia that is joined with a relentless pursuit of the "next". Every season witnesses the birth of another "star", ushered in with the ritualistic grandeur and pomp that surrounds the coronation of one more prince, one more princess. It's hardly a rare event, but nonetheless each show is reported with a breathless urgency that suggests the arrival of a revolutionary genius, and we rush to bask in the lambent glow of these New Young Visionaries. I first heard about JP Munro, an artist who is more or less my age, and has graduated and entered the world in a sequence generally parallel to my own, in the type of article that is emblematic of this corrupt hype and empty promise. It was frustrating to me as a graduate of The Wrong Art School At The Wrong Time, to see the seamless connection that joined another art school with the world of commerce, and I mistrusted then, as now, the proclamations of greatness and importance that accompany this type of inside arrangement.
JP MunroBut JP is a great artist, and we are interested in many of the same things. It's not his fault that there is a large soulless machine looming above us all, and as I've watched his painting over the years I've come to be captivated and inspired by not only the peculiarity and depth of his vision, but his singular commitment to the world of history and ideas that I, as a teacher, am immersed in on a daily basis. I'm glad he has continued to work and has found success, because as a painter I've come to realize that very few among our ranks are willing to step outside the fashionable box of self-obsessed pessimism, and actually indulge in a genuine reverence for our media. This would entail painting in a very "uncool" enthusiastic way-in this case with both a certain measure of observational naturalism (passing through the eye rather than the camera) and the shockingly "conservative" application of a representational space suggestive of a return to the mimetic origins of Renaissance Pictorialism. That this type of painting would, actually also require some….gulp…talent, might be the reason that it has remained out of fashion for so long. I'm endlessly hearing about how we live an a "de-skilled" age and I have to say that this is a big huge bullshit excuse for lack of chops if there ever was one. It has nothing to do with all art implying the Conceptual, we live in an age where people don't bother to learn how to paint because they can get by without ever having to. This time might now be over.
JP MunroYesterday I noticed a few photos online of Terence Koh's recent opening at the Whitney and I realized immediately how the power of JP's work is specifically manifest. The Twentieth Century notion of Art History can best be seen as a mechanistic construction and buttressing of a grand dialectical model of rhetoric and it's subsequent unraveling. Dennis Hollingsworth has written eloquently on this problematic subject, and I would invoke Lyotard as one of the high priests of anti-matter, who's project has embodied this quest to negate the teleological certainties that Modernist Doctrine seeks to reify. In such a model, the narrative validity of historicity is undermined, and there are no real ways to satisfy an inquiry into meaning by looking towards time-based categories. All we are left with are two moments. The Now, and The Eternal.
Koh and Munro are both grasping for the Sublime in arresting and powerful ways, but each version of the Sublime can be thought of as passing through either of these two dimensional conduits. Koh's project clearly propositions it's audience with the seduction of a charismatic Super Star. The brilliant light is the light of persona, of fame, wealth, success..of Narcissism. The Sublime Now is an ecstatic reverie of the Ultra-Hipness of present-a cocaine white fog of being here, being now, being alive. Koh is the Christ like vehicle for the joyous ecstasy of inclusion and exclusion. Through Him, We are joined as One..We belong…We, are all that is. This is a moment of Sublime Now, and it is over as soon as the light switch is turned off.
JP MunroWhen I look at the sun and close my eyes I can see the veiny tendrils that feed the cones and retinas in my eye with blood.The tangled conduits remind me of a painting that JP has hanging in his studio, a lush and verdant forest, overunn, and hopelessly dense. This is the forest of History..an impenetrable and infinitely complex jungle of connections and causal paths. Beneath the canopy, protected from the burning light of The Now, in this quiet and shady reprieve, the seeker finds oneness with the Eternal Sublime. Looking to the past is a way of looking at the future. Giambattista Vico has written, among many others, of the cyclical nature of history, and I think that acquiescence to this model is a way of realizing that the past, present, and future are all one movement. Tied together and ultimately indistinguishable.
JP MunroJP often paints battle scenes, horrific and singular moments of bloodshed and pornographic death. I think about something that he said to me about the power and optimism of Revolutions and the eventual shit that they inevitably devolve into. Despite this realization, in the moment of climax, there is hope, belief, and a feeling that life has worth, even if it ironically must be sacrificed to be realized. The eternal and the now are then in fact not opposed, but each is constantly vibrating into the other state. They are in fact, here, the same thing.
I'm reminded of a passage from "The Crystal World" by JG Ballard that seems like the most fitting way to tie up these thoughts. To me it reads as a pretty accurate description of the universe that JP has created with his paintings. The Sublime that I must conceed is after all both Eternal and Now.
…..this illuminated forest in some way reflects an earlier period of our lives, perhaps an archaic memory we are born with of some ancestral paradise where the unity of time and space is the signature of every leaf and flower. It's obvious to everyone now that in the forest life and death have a different meaning from that in our ordinary lack-lustre world. Here we have always associated movement with life and the passage of time, but from my experience within the forest near Mont Royal I know that all motion leads inevitably to death, and that time is its servant.
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