The continuation of a new series of Remodern America videos. These videos are possible due to the technical skills of my wife: I am the director, and she makes my vision come to life. It’s another fun part of our creative collaborations.
Video Number Six: Masculinity and Art
A video on art and masculinity. Art is not an American male priority. With our focus on responsibility and practicality, art might seem frivolous. It’s considered a hobby, therapy, good for the kids. We have little sense of its potential power.
I don’t fundraise off of my blog. I don’t ask for Patreon or Paypal donations. If you’d like to support the Remodern mission, buy abook. Or a painting.
I love the dark and powerful music Australian singer Nick Cave made through 1980s to the early 2000s. Starting off with the nightmare postpunk band the Birthday Party, then forming his own epic Old Testament/Southern Gothic flavored anthem group Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, Cave survived addiction, angst and personal tragedies to become one of the elder statemen of alternative music.
Now Cave has intensifed his visionary explorations into another field, visual art.
“One can tell from viewing his work that Cave is serious about making art. In ‘The Devil — A Life,’ a honed and aesthetic sensibility is apparent in well-executed ceramics, which cleverly reference Victorian porcelain but which feature Lucifer as the main subject. The works relay a tempestuous tale that oscillates between good and evil and stirs corners of empathy in a strange sort of way, a way we might have felt before from his music. Cave loads in a lot of symbolism and draws on topics around death and violence, but also love and religion. Darkness is always paired with light…
These larger standalone pieces evolved out of so-called spill vases that he had initially started out making—Cave’s interpretations of Victorian vases that would hold a roll of paper or a twig, used to transfer a flame from one place to another in the house. ‘I wanted to make these because I wanted my work to be well and truly craft, so that it would not put me into the art world,’ Cave says. ‘On some level, it is the last place I wanted to end up as a musician—the track record is disastrous. I went to art school [and so] I had a lot of artist friends and making art was a serious thing; they put their lives into this. This idea that you can knock out some paintings between tours felt like a kind of a vanity. That’s why I wanted to make craft things.’”
Their folkloric style and craftiness, however, is exactly what makes them appealing. In an art world where so much work is just about a clever elevator pitch, the works Cave has made are sincere, clearly the result of an inner world percolating outwards, and products of an interest in process and curiosity. Maybe that is the irony—Cave’s attempts to avoid being read as an artist as such landed him in an art gallery. And that in-between state of Staffordshire ceramics (which he actually collects himself) as neither high or low art is what makes them so interesting to the art world, but also to Cave. ‘They are a bridge between craft and art, essentially made to bring a little joy into people’s lives,’ he says. ‘There is a naive innocence about them—no pretension.’”
I don’t fundraise off of my blog. I don’t ask for Patreon or Paypal donations. If you’d like to support the Remodern mission, buy abook. Or a painting.
Art is not an American male priority. With our focus on responsibility and practicality, art might seem frivolous. It’s considered a hobby, therapy, good for the kids. We have little sense of its potential power.
**************
I don’t fundraise off of my blog. I don’t ask for Patreon or Paypal donations. If you’d like to support the Remodern mission, buy abook. Or a painting.
The continuation of a new series of Remodern America videos. These videos are possible due to the technical skills of my wife: I am the director, and she makes my vision come to life. It’s another fun part of our creative collaborations.
Video Number Five: Empire Follows Art
Over the last century, our way of life followed art away from reality and into a fantasy world generated by The New Aristocracy of the Well Connected, where they reign supreme. Art for them is just another form of propaganda to propagate their own power.
I don’t fundraise off of my blog. I don’t ask for Patreon or Paypal donations. If you’d like to support the Remodern mission, buy abook. Or a painting.
The continuation of a new series of Remodern America videos. Number four is a video about painting and intellectual theory about “the end of history.” There is no end to history, just as there is no end to human potential. Great art reminds us of this.
I don’t fundraise off of my blog. I don’t ask for Patreon or Paypal donations. If you’d like to support the Remodern mission, buy abook. Or a painting.
THE REMODERN REVIEW 