#cinque hicks – @nickkahler on Tumblr

The classic Japanese dry garden of the Muromachi Period—what is typically called a Zen garden—was never intended to be a direct imitation of nature. Its miniature mountains, rivers and shorelines were in fact modeled after Chinese landscape paintings of the same period. That is, the Zen garden imitated an imitation.

Cinque Hicks, "On the Art of Gyun Hur," 2012 (via artamerica)

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nickkahler

Most of what you probably believe about the role of the artist in society comes straight from the pen of Symbolist poet and critic Stéphane Mallarmé and his cohort: Verlaine, Rilke, Rimbaud, Yeats, and others. It goes something like this: the artist is the unique visionary whose insight into the world is so powerful, so inherently salutary, that the artwork needs no justification outside of itself. Its only obligation is to its own internally created reality. And that work of art, when out among people, must necessarily enlighten anyone who would trouble to probe its self-referential obscurities. The myth of the artist as the high priest of the dark, creative demiurge is so airtight in Western culture that any artist who behaves differently risks being accused of not being an artist at all.

Cinqué Hicks, "Living Walls and the Perils of Public Space," 2013

nickkahler

Political tribalism didn’t start with public art and won’t be solved by public art. But if we can’t use it to work out a vocabulary of compromise, a language of productive disagreement, then all the controversy will have been a waste. Public art won’t save democracy, but it may at least remind us how easy democracy is to lose.

Cinqué Hicks, "Living Walls and the Perils of Public Space," 2013

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nickkahler

Every modern person in a pluralistic democracy such as ours must constantly question what he or she assumes to be true about the world. Every cosmopolitan, multi-cultural society in modern history has developed some culture of healthy doubt, and the US is no exception. Doubting our received beliefs is what allows different races, different religions, and those of different political viewpoints to avoid all-out war and, occasionally, even live in something approaching harmony. The opposite of doubt is certainty. And it’s certainty—the belief that no legitimate explanations for the world exist outside one’s own—that marches soldiers onto battlefields and flies planes into buildings.

Cinqué Hicks, "Living Walls and the Perils of Public Space," 2013

nickkahler

Allegory‘s naked torso, fish scales, and alligator head caught Roti in the bear trap of the public’s idea of what art means. But the swift and silent way in which the mural was finally destroyed likewise highlights how limiting, perhaps even toxic, the idea of “the community” has become in its modern guise. According to several press accounts, opinions among the residents of Pittsburgh were split at best and, at worst, those opposing the mural may have been a minority, albeit a vocal and powerful one. But all of that complexity, with all of its potential for nuanced interpretation, was wiped away with the monolithic coat of gray paint that “the community” allegedly demanded.

Cinqué Hicks, "Living Walls and the Perils of Public Space," 2013

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nickkahler

Broad, common symbolic systems form part of what critic Michael Kimmelman has called the 'aesthetic common denominator' required of all public art. If the work doesn’t avail itself of that common denominator, one will be imposed on it, as it were, against its will. Ironically that imposition is likely to leave both the artist and the audience feeling aggrieved.

Cinqué Hicks, "Living Walls and the Perils of Public Space," 2013

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nickkahler

According to Roti’s own statement, Allegory does in fact have a very precise and unambiguous meaning for him personally: fishes represent humanity, the key represents the ability to stop time, and the moon represents uncontrollable forces of nature. For the artist, there is a neat one-to-one correspondence between images in the mural and their meanings in the real world. But the glossary needed for that translation exists in the artist’s head, not in any commonly understood, generally available mythos. That’s when audiences create their own meanings. In the privacy of a gallery or the controlled context of academic settings, this act is almost always benign. Many artists even cherish the ways in which audiences help them create meaning. But when the work is placed in a broader public space, those meanings occasionally get out of control.

Cinqué Hicks, "Living Walls and the Perils of Public Space," 2013

nickkahler

Many contemporary artists have taken these ideas to a twenty-first-century extreme. This neosymbolist work can be almost photorealistic, yet it specifically rejects any commonly accessible reality or any established pictorial language. The more recognizable and readable the figures in the work, the more outlandish other elements of the composition must be in order to free it from the tether of common experience. Hence the explosion of pattern, color, and surreal narrative in many such works. The work of, for example, Marcy Starz, Jason R. Butcher, and Joe Tsambiras exemplify this mode of working. All three local artists, along with others working elsewhere such as Camille Rose Garcia and Os Gêmeos, might be considered neosymbolists whose exquisitely drafted works are replete with private symbols and obscure, self-contained narratives.

Cinqué Hicks, "Living Walls and the Perils of Public Space," 2013