Kirk Robinson answers.....
What is your definition of art?
Art is what people think about after their basic needs are met. It is the acknowledgment of all of things beautiful and ironic, sometimes while being chased by a tiger.
How would you describe your artwork?
When I do, it never sells.
What influences your art?
Music is a big motivator. My need to create and my gut reaction to music seem to originate from the same basic place. If I could paint the images that certain songs have provided me, look out.
Who are your favorite artists?
I really love Shrigley. He really captures the nature of this beast....and on a notebook page to boot.
What is your favorite artwork by another artist?
"Falling Bough" by Walton Ford springs forth first. It's an epic piece that I experience on the same level that a child experiences a favorite picture book.
Describe one challenge you constantly face in your practice?
As the father of a toddler, time....always time.
How do you know when an artwork is complete?
When I haven't yet covered up all of the good stuff.
What is one discovery you have made while working?
I will never make the marks I want to see until I stop trying to make those marks.
What is the role of the artist in today's society?
To remind us that computers cannot make art.
What else are you interested in besides art?
Fresh air.
What do you consider your greatest achievement?
Finding balance.
What is the trait you most deplore in yourself?
My lack of trust.
What is your greatest extravagence?
Pure, unadulterated anger.
Where would you like to live?
My own self-sustaining compound that I could defend from various strategically placed gun slots but never had too because there is very little beyond the gate anyway.
Who are your heroes in real life?
Isn't that exactly where they usually cease to be heros?
What is your mantra?
I already have everything I need.
Recently in the New York Times, Ken Johnson wrote a review titled "They're Chicanos and Artists. But is Their Art Chicano?".
I took note firstly because the theme reminded me of when I wrote art criticism in Washington, DC for a small publication. A review I made of an exhibit at the time at a women's cooperative, while generally positive, made note of an hypothesis of mine that there is art made by women, but that it should be first judged as 'art' before considering by 'whom'. This was in the 70's and the times were ripe for political discourse re: the blatant slight of minorities in the mainstream art culture. Needless to say, my comments created heated responses.
Johnson does not negate these inequities, but as his opening sentence states "Is it time to retire the identity-group show?". He goes on to note that artists of many different backgrounds and sexual orientations have been assimilated into the art world. That there are more women than men in this year's Whitney Biennial.
In reference to the exhibition he reviews in this article - "Phantom Sightings: Art After the Chicano Movement" at the El Museo del Barrio in NY - he notes that some artists who were invited declined to be in a 'surname-based' show.
Johnson closes saying 'It has long been said that the identity-based show is an evil whose necessity would disappear in a more equitable world, but museums and grant-giving foundations will continue to support this kind of project because of its appeal to various interest groups. In truth, it is as much a bureaucratic artifact as a curatorial one." New York Times, April 10, 2010.
This leads circuitously to another quandary: the antiquated pigeon-holing of artists and their work into non-sensical 'isms' in order to compartmentalize them for greater understanding within the context of their peers and precedents. I come from a background of time-linear thinking in terms of the history of art, but while those classifications are helpful only as a means of contextualizing history, I find the same generalizations that are applied to contemporary artists and the work they produce limiting, confusing, and, more dangerously, separatist in thinking.
In this day and age, no artist works in a vacuum. With the level of mass communication, information and ideas are homogeneous and inter-disciplinary. Thoughts and actions cannot so easily be typecast with the latest catch phrase and/or postulated ism. For the life of me, I still don't understand what post-post modernism really means. Such an obsession to tie everything into neat little be-ribboned packages belies the very definition of 'modernism' itself. The democratic assimilation of disparate opinions and backgrounds into a singular free expression. Let the historians worry after we are long gone as to how the puzzle fits. I prefer to enjoy the soup.
