T-Shirts, Togas, or Au Naturel? : The Problem With Clothing In Art

It has been said that the foot is nobler than the shoe, but is the sandle nobler than the flipflop? In renaissance Italy before planes, trains, and automobiles biblical characters were represented wearing fashions from their current time. This is presumably because it never occurred to them that people would have ever dressed any differently. In Rembrandt's dark, jewel-studded biblical narratives he seems to have invented his own fanciful interpretation of Jewish clothing. But why don't these inaccuracies look naive or silly to us?

An interpretation of Bouguereau for a photoshop contest on worth1000.com

One of the snags of our over-scienced post-industrial age is that we now know everything, so we no longer need our imaginations. Another is that we don't make anything ourselves. Our day-glow hats and fanny packs are one size fits all, and will be out of vogue next year. Clothing is designed for the convenience of the manufacturer in worldwide uniformity. Shirts and jackets are emblazoned with company logos and pants are made extra baggy to fit our masses.

"Foreclosure" by Max Ginsburg

I don't mourn modern inventions, because they have afforded me more time and freedom to create.  The problem for a visual artist though is that it is difficult to make poetry out of the throw-away objects of mass-production.  The options before us are kind of like this:

1. Embrace modern fashion with tongue-in-cheek humor
2. Select less offensive or conspicuous contemporary fashions, or simplify by playing down the uglier aspects of them.
3. Invent your own clothing styles
4. Dress your models in period costumes, most likely mismatching different past eras.
5. No clothes at all.  (Easiest, but sometimes yields awkward results.)
6. Sheet.


Best of luck friends.

Rembrandt

Massaccio

William Whitaker

Odd nerdrum

My painting "Iconoclast"

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Little Rock's Nerdrum

I recently took a tour of the Drawing Center's collection and was delighted to find this. If I remember correctly the figure is about life sized. I photographed it with my iPhone and some if it was cropped out.

Richard Thomas Scott

If you're Nerdrum's right hand man you've got to be good.  Richard Thomas Scott not only paints well but does a great job articulating exactly what it's all about. He is a contributor for Art Babel, a great blog on which he often writes about Nerdrum's process, which is always terribly fascinating.  Richard is a great painter in his own right, and has no shortage of skill and vision of his own.

My personal favorite.

Odd owns this one.

Wyeth and Odd Nerdrum

Living Grand Masters: Odd Nerdrum

So I'm reading "On Kitsch" by Odd Nerdrum. I agree on most aesthetic fronts, such as the principles of skill, passion, universality, and rejection of mass taste. Using the distinctions made by Clement Greenburg and other modernist art critics between art and kitsch, Nerdrum happily falls into the category of kitsch along with many great painters dismissed by the art establishment. I also like the distinctions between high kitsch (Wagner) and low kitsch (bad moose paintings), as well as between camp (my former boss, Jeff Koons, who actually mocks kitsch) and true kitsch, which is completely in earnest.

"The Murder of Andreas Baader" Possibly my favorite, painted in the seventies, and borrowing strongly from Caravaggio.

I like pictures of Odd Nerdrum. Cool looking dude.

I learned in college that "artist" is too loaded a word to place on myself, but my personal problem is that I do not want to sign a manifesto that all of the sudden limits what I can and can't paint. I guess I fall into the kitsh category according to both Greenburg and Nerdrum, at least for now, but I don't really care either way. I just want to make things that I think are great and revel in that which I love about great paintings.

Here's a link to the Nerdrum institute.

Nerdrum was the first contemporary painter to really grab my attention as a freshman in art school, and I still love him. I thank him and my other favorite painters for breaching the time/space barrier and reminding us that painting is not about the here and now, but for all times and all walks of people. He is an individual painting for individuals, which is way more important to me than the kitsch/art debate.