I've been working on my "history paintings." (I love the sound of that - it's so pompous!) It seems that history painting is everywhere today and the strains of photo-surrealism are at the base of all of it. In my work I've been trying to come to terms with how a new vision might work in everday life - how we might see someone in a room, our lover in bed or a person in a cafe. The visual workings of this are based in cubism and computers and these things have changed how we use our eyes - I am creating a type of "wonky vision" or human vision in a lens based world - so wonderfully described by Hockney. The Impressionists did a very similar thing when they balked at the Academic history painting and the impending hegemony of the lens. They decided to paint their world with the lower genres and with new techniques. Portraits by Renoir, landscapes by Monet, genre painting by Monet - to the Academy this seemed to suggest a lack of ability combined with a lack of ambition. Painters were required to tackle the bigger-grander subjects, but the Impressionists knew that life and art existed in the personal- in the way they used their eyes in a new age. They discovered a new way of painting that would play to the intimate nature of their aesthetic. They understood that technological changes create a need to define the fact that we see and understand life differently.

We all know the story - Impressionists, because of the differences, had to find new venues to display their work. They had to find visionary dealers to display and sell it. Finally they achieved a belated triumph of their vision - well that's the nice art school version anyway. It wasn't so nice or straightforward for them though - they experienced deprivation, ridicule, and in some cases, death - not exactly the contemporary idea of a successful career. Today painting is ruled by the very lenses that the Impressionists pushed against. It's apparent in most of the art we see - painting, sculpture, video etc. Postmodernism's basics are predicated on the nature of the reproduced image and that is a lens based operation. Modernism started as a reaction against the lens and has wound up in its thrall. Even abstraction - the one hope against this myopic visual servitude - has become a recepticle for all forms of lens based slavishness. That is part of Hockney's thought - that the computer would allow artists to once again be able to manipulate the pictures - to draw in the photograph. The problem is the nature of the lens itself and the programming that encapsulates it. In photoshop one can simulate a painting with programmed brush strokes, painting styles etc. Once saved it's digitized as a photograph. Basically the computer has captured the programming of painting and contextualized the finished product as a photographic document. It provides a digital reality that is exactly the same programmed ground for any image that has been digitized. Images, brush strokes, paint, color anything uploaded becomes the program and the program is based on how a lens interprets visual processes - ie a photograph. Many abstract artists today create their works in the computer then transfer the computer image to canvas either by hand or through mechnical means. Whatever transfer process is used - the lens is the producer of the image - the physical object is simply the product. The expansive nature of human vision is hardly taken into account. Today's history painting is rife with this sort of programmed imagery.

The other part of the POMO equation is the strain of surrealism that runs through most of the art we see these days. It is not formed from the abstraction of vision like we see in the art of Matisse, Picasso or Kandinsky, but from the otherwordly constructs derived from the subconcious as seen in the work of Dali, Magritte and De Chirico. POMO abstraction insists on reissuing the Surrealist doctrines that contain "...the element of surprise, unexpected juxtapositions and non sequitur...." Rather than work that is based on the mechanics of visual experience and derived from a practice of painting - this work is based on the representation of the unconscious and subjective using previous styles of art making - ie: realism, naturalism and academic techniques. Surrealism was a twist to the academic history painting of the previous century. Today this theoretical strain is encoded by the programming of the lens and the academic POMO passion for the precedent of the "strange encounter." In the academies and galleries there is no consideration for the mechanics of vision - only the onslaught of the programmed lens based image. There is a strain of caricature in this "realism" - a benign strangeness / not quite right - not quite threatening - Yuskavage and Currin come to mind - Koons' puppy, Serra's steel, Nauman's videos among many others - Surrealist precedent permeates the POMO consciousness and is programmed into its practices.

What has been lacking is the way Modernists' vision changed how work was made. Matisse's vision demanded a release of emotion in his work and found ways to express that with color and line. A green stripe, a red studio, or a looming back all were found in the mechanics of looking. Picasso demanded his forms break and reform imagining how 2 dimensions could refigure into 4 by adding the element of time to his painterly illusions. Kandinsky broke apart landscapes and refigured them into an abstract vision of movement - how to see in interior space and endless time. Our age doesn't consider such specifics - and it's to our detriment. The "strange object" rather than coming from how we see or how we might see is now part and parcel of the academic experience - we exist in and continuously reproduce a world of strange objects. The POMO academies have settled on encounters with the reproduction of unreality rather than realities derived from visual innovation.

to be continued....