12/10/2006

Brendan Cass

53 comments:

Painter said...

Brendan Cass
Freight + Volume
542 West 24th Street
New York, NY 10011

no-where-man said...

"pop expressionism" = fun. scale is everything with these.

Sven said...

I like Bergen and Lofoten ffrom the jpegs


kind of using dufy,utrillo and kokoschka like tropes but the addition of the 99cent store aesthetic plus a jockum nordstrum feel make it taste fresh in some wierd way
this postcard shit goes too far for me though
wonder how they'll look in person

zipthwung said...

I dunno i like the jpg better than the actual paintings. Its like the Benjamin Edwards uptown....speaking of glass houses, stones, communal living, paranoia and zietschadengeistfreude.

dont tell anyone I said so.

This is not a message. You did not see this. There is nothing here.

zipthwung said...

A relatively successfull (teaching job, showing in chelsea) artist voluntarily explained to me, sort of out of the blue, that being successfull (showing in chelsea) didn't change their world. I felt sad, because it reminded me of my lack of centered being-in-the-world and wandering in a blind, white, limbo, maybe with a flashing blue light leading me in circles of meaningless conspicuous consumption.

Earlier I had a conversation about how there is "rich persons art", and then there are levels on down.

I was thinking just now - "conceptual art" which takes no money at all, just lots of leasure time, is sort of the lowest and the highest form of art, economicly speaking.

Is it art at all? Does art need a medium?

Is painting art? I think real painters dont have to care. Painter-philosophers might care.

But what about warrior-shamans?

I know they are hard to deal with, because as a rule they are dogmatic and often bloodthirsty.

But put that aside and do a little role-playing.

What would a warrior-shaman-artist do?

youth--less said...

i dont know anything about warriors. but a shaman-artist must please the people. that's their job

no-where-man said...

Man lives in the sunlit world of what he believes to be reality. But... there is, unseen by most, an underworld, a place that is just as real, but not as brightly lit... a Darkside.

heidi said...
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
heidi said...

These really standout and are extra interesting because they hold my attention without the use of darkness....... or claustrophobic anxiety...... or end of the world /soylent green/ manufactured babies/and the oncoming slaughter paintings.

I feel light, and refreshed, I see the horizon of a bright sunny sunshiney day--- what is this oh so strange feeling?

zipthwung said...

Impression — I was certain of it. I was just telling myself that, since I was impressed, there had to be some impression in it … and what freedom, what ease of workmanship! Wallpaper in its embryonic state is more finished than that seascape

Louis Leroy

Oh the withering sarcasm! Take that, Brendan.

This painting isnt Kitch, but it lacks tanins and although it has structure, the legs run sort of predicatably parallel. Predicated on a historical knowledge of impressionism, I presume.

It is said that the some of the snow on your TV screen is noise from the big bang. Carl sagan asks us if we have looked in the mirror and seen an infinity of you. Carl says we are all star stuff, and that in order to understand the universe we must first bake an apple pie.

This painting asks us to smell the private opium poppy field, adn then extrapolate that and go to Afghanistan, where the warlords are funding jihad with heroin exports.

So let us steal the apple pie cooling on the window sill, baked with love, and send it through the ironicly distant factory of hate. Let us replicate. Fabulous fabulists fornicating to fruition, one dot at a time.

zipthwung said...

MACYS

what do chuck taylors signify this season - Anyone? Beuler? Beuler?

Anonymous said...

when i was walking around this show not too long ago i heard someone say dealio

but internet and real world collisions freak me out so i didn't say anything.

PrettyPablum said...

This painting makes my teeth hurt

I am so not into the faux naive stuff. I think it's a scam. Like all your professors telling you that to become a real artist you must "unlearn" everything you just paid tens of thousands of dollars to learn. What a ridiculous mindfuck.

youth--less said...

the thing thats unusual about it--the thing you rarely see--is the really fast hand

also like the way he brings your attention to the surface after he has created perspectival space--with the same color splash of paint in the frgrnd as in the bkgrnd

heidi said...

prettypablum
i always like your comments, you cut right to the heart of the matter and put a new inquiry/observation into it all, that is a good thing.

zipthwung said...

bunk, it wasnt me, honest. Im a deaf mute with detatched retinas. Everything looks impressionist unless I turn my head eighty degrees to the side and have a mai-tai. Then it all comes into sharp focus.

But I did just read about art-world as costco (from the outsaiders perspective, no less) and Id like to take Jungian credit, a vulcan mind meld of sorts - for that comparison over "dealio", which was more of a throw away affectation. An ironic signifier of my age and class, I suppose.

I mean my art-fair/world as shopping mall (a hackneyed cliche) was freshened up by a double reference to K-Mart and a panoptic prison from one of my favorite sci-fi movies - originally a student film. And also the word LIMBO which I appreciate for its use as a place in hell - as well as the popular party game - roast the genius's chestnuts. But I like to let people unpack the genius that is post moderism at its most terrible sublime. Witness my mind collapse under the strain of trying to find meaning in the most insipid an inane. TO claim scholarship in a field of hair splitters and masters of trivia. TO secure a position as a tenured hack of all trades. To do what I love without travail and get free medical dental.

Costco is more apt comparison, though because it requires a membership and is curated for quality.

Indeed, costco is a good model for business - a co-op - meaning co-operative. Copulating the hippy ideal of the WHole Earth Catalog commune green-brand dealio - only not so crunchy. Ethical spending. Im not sure but I think Costco is better than Wal-mart on just about every level.

But do artists feel coopted by the market or embraced. Thats a tricky wicket.

But here I am conspicuously consuming words and explicating minor tropes when I have almost finished my gesamkunstsneeze, my last bid for viability in the middle class.

Good Luck brendan, theres allways e-bay. Oh but I bet its sold allready. Well Ill eat my shoe in advance.

zipthwung said...

"art fairs that come to feel like circuit parties for the ultrarich.
"

youth--less said...

i mean back in the day, the shaman had to lead the tribe in catharsis and transcendence. if not, he got the blame. ouch.

zipthwung said...

The banality of resistance.

JD said...

Leroy Neiman.

Professor Mouth said...

Sheesh. Zip's really sucked all the oxygen out of this chat room, eh? Seeya.

zipthwung said...

Theres this dude that does sci-fi landscapes on the street with stencils and spray paint - im sure youve seen him?

PADME means lotus and symbolizes wisdom. Growing out of mud, but not being stained by mud, lotus indicates the quality of wisdom, which keeps you out of contradiction.

zipthwung said...

‘Banal’ may once have been a neutral term, referring simply to the trivial and the everyday as derived from its original reference to the commonplace or its openness to use by all (as in banal-oven), but by the twentieth century, in the English language at least, it had become firmly associated with the negative effects of modern life. ‘To banalise’ has come to mean the reduction of a higher value to a common trait, often through the medium of consumer society and, indeed, modern character has often been trivialised and rendered indiscriminate, as in the ‘banalised masses’ of Saul Bellow’s Herzog. Accordingly, for many commentators, mass consumption has been inextricably bound up with a notion of the banal, and thus today banality cannot escape these negative or pejorative connotations.

Sometimes the spectacular and not the ordinary is needed in the addressing of citizenship issues. The banality of consumption cannot always provide these spectacular interventions and consumption cannot therefore be the only basis for citizenship: citizenship remains much wider than that.

PrettyPablum said...

Thanks Heidi the Ayatollah


There is a lot of speculation that many of the impressionist painters suffered from eye disorders- namely one that escapes me now- that caused lack of depth perception and one that caused shapes and colors to vibrate when placed relative to one another.

PrettyPablum said...

My cousin grew up in Soviet occupied communist Lithuania and in 1991 when communism fell, she moved to London.
She works an office grind and saves up all her money to go skydiving on the weekends, it's her passion.

Tatiana said...

This is so tacky / cute I can not really find which side of this to stand on. Makes me think of all those gardens in French chateaux.

And I am afraid I agree with professor mouth: zip, please keep your continual peppering of cryptic comments to a minimum. or something. perhaps the others disagree but i think it sort of kills the pace of the dialogue.

no-where-man said...

simple cataracts maybe a bit of myopia, we learned about it in psychology class. this us a fun site. Art, Vision & the Disordered Eye.

Anonymous said...

i prefer an aged single malt. eh, who am i kidding, anything brown usually does it.

the dude was younger and kind of hip. a bit more gregarious than my mental zip. i would of been disappointed, much like this work

all yall some haters

zipthwung said...

Aye Aye. Keepion it brief. ROmance the looky loos....
press your eyeballs what do you see?
DO it now.

arebours said...

I would like to see an area in here that is not all floofy

zipthwung said...

I propose a ban on purely formal or like/dislike critique for all artists with an MFA. Its insulting, for one. For two its boring.

you have been warned. This is not a message. You did not see this. I do not exist.

heidi said...

I used to wonder that also KB, then the system beat me down, now I accept the "bad drawing" niche and the "faux outsider clumsy paint handling" niche and sometimes I see the crunchy goodness within. Not often though.

Now if I am in a coffee shop or bar or see a glimpse of a 1st year student sketchbook (well that one doesn't really happen often, but hypothetically speaking) ...... I start to imagine it in a fresh white walled Chelsea gallery and what I would think of it then.

zipthwung said...

i allways read bad work in a nice gallery as an implicit critique of the system. Im cool like that.

no-where-man said...

if the press release is any indication tis the glib gentlal sect... don't get your painties in a knot - it completes the work to easily. let it just stand on its own.

heidi said...

What I'm about to write has nothing to do with this artist--remember on other topics how context was called into question (like KB's comment above), or an artist's degree in response to hierachy and art place entry, whenever it was discussed in some length, some random blogger would pipe in with scathing comments that would derail the pace.

What is this truth that the matrix men don't want the keanus getting too close to?

You know just as he gets closer then they start descending in droves to hold him back?

Because the matrix people are out there....waiting to pounce, so the truth won't be uncovered, or the system will collapse on itself. (??)

no-where-man said...

well in the matrix a central theme is computer programmer by day hacker by night...

i don't get the connection to the Art system.

heidi said...

I guess the connection to me is a pre fabricated universe that you step into and assume you have free will but it is all artifice...most things are pre determined in this place by existing wealth, random (or not so random) connections, it's a bit of a stretch but similarities indeed! It is dangerous to speak of lest you get called a sourpuss loser, better to pretend it is not happening and ignore the matrix structure?

actually all those juicy topics are being churned out and chewed up @ anonymousfemaleartist blog......

traderguy said...

zip: get a life!

zipthwung said...

may i take your order?

heidi said...

Thanks thousand points of light!
You certainly have a cache of good books up your sleeve--
I will most definitely check it out.

poppy said...

we live in an unpercievable matrix it is true, not a computer one like in the movies. We are all connected and our senses are limited and we haven't enough. Try being a pigeon or a bee for a day. Fortunately the axises that bisect and connect, which are plenty, have mutiple entry points and go unoticed and are intended to give the impression of choice. Anyone do the same drugs as me???

poppy said...

ps. If we new half the truth of the universe it would kill us immediately. Try throwing a 5 foot tall singing santa into a dogs life and feel his heart go into overdrive. What the fuck is this?
You know.... those drugs..

jk .. im reformed

no-where-man said...

i spent the night at a p. party.. the city spum and spum and so did we... central park. i am still smaken my lips the chicken lemon was insame... and nyc on those skates spin my little baby spin

poppy said...

nwm,...
sounds fum...wish i was there..:)

operation enduring artist said...

i like this.
i do not yet have an mfa
will this affect my...
affect
what are the surface like on these?
deeeeep
i do not like these.
i do not yet have an mfa
i am invisable
i sing the song of silence...
would you could you would you join my dance?

Anonymous said...

i got my MFA at Wal-Mart, cheap. (got some new eye glasses and a toaster oven the same day!)

zipthwung said...

I was complaining about the glossy surface on some chelsea paintings - but now I think I dont like the chalkiness of these. It seems like acrylic house paint - primer.

Earning (as opposed to buying or honorary) an MFA makes you beter at rhetoric.

The only reason you should be in college is to destroy it.
-Abby Hoffman

That abby, he didnt like the meaning of money I guess. Purchase intimacy? Gag me with a spoon. Drugs are illegal. Im straight edge.

zipthwung said...

Mistake paint - ever use that? Its pretty cool - yyou get all these weird colors no one likes.

And thats good.

zipthwung said...

we live in a matrix?

heidi said...

yes

zipthwung said...

thats bad.

zipthwung said...

?

Anonymous said...

I like landscapes. I don't like this one. I feel like the artist loved his painting more than the subject.