Democracy and Anxiety

While you're digesting Les Misbarack and before introducing you to my own videos, I'd like to go back to one of the first statements I made in writing this thesis.

I use painting and video to tell stories. These stories are about the mechanisms people use to understand and mediate anxiety-producing situations. For good or bad, democracy produces anxiety.

I'd like to spend some time now investigating the ways people can use stories as mechanisms for understanding and mediating anxiety-producing situations.

Some of the images that I use in my paintings are disturbing. In investigating the need to use these images, I came across an explanation of how this type of imagery is analyzed by art therapists, where it is recognized that “the disturbing image intrudes and threatens the existing order.”⁸ As this thesis has been crafted during a political season in which both parties are promising awesome and seemingly radical changes to the existing order, the images that at first seem disturbing actually become a sort of balm. As Shaun McNiff offers in his text Art Heals, “Even when we we welcome abrupt changes, the psyche might need the assistance of disturbance to realign itself.⁹”

The great thing about blogging vs. thesising

OK, if this were my actual thesis paper it might be rude of me to be break your attention span in the body of the writing, but since it's not on paper I can whip off into tangent-land at any moment.

With that brilliant segue, I bring you Les Misbarack!

The Origins of Painting and its Representational Value

In his 1913 essay The Origins of Painting and its Representational Value, Leger wonders how “all those more or less historical or dramatic pictures shown in the French Salon can compete with the screen of any cinema." He follows that question with a remarkable assertion, "Visual Realism has never before been so intensely captured.” With the advent of digital video-publishing resources like youtube and hulu, artists are again forced to wonder how something called a painting can possibly compete with the eye-catching power of Leger’s film, much less the richness and self-absorbed cleverness of Youtube,⁶ used by 72 million people in July 2008 alone.⁷

Purely Dynamic

I am not interested in making objects. Instead, like Ferdinand Leger (1881-1955), I am caught up in the potential for everything to “converge towards an intense realism obtained by purely dynamic means.⁴” Leger, a painter and sculptor, approached this intense realism through one of the earliest short art films, the 1924 fifteen-minute montage called Ballet Mechanique. ⁵


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Moving Pictures Before Modern Art

How can a painting tell a story? How can a painting pass through time? This problem has been approached constantly throughout human history by cultural forces from Greek vase painters like Euphronios,( ca. 500 BC)² to Chinese scroll painters from the Song Dynasty like Zhang Zeduan (1085-1145), known for his panoramic painting Along the River During the Qingming Festival.³ It is only quite recently in human history that painters, influenced by the writing of critics like Clement Greenberg (1909-1994), discarded narrative for a formal approach to painting as object-making.

THESIS: Chandler Pritchett

I use painting and video¹ to tell stories. These stories are about the mechanisms people use to understand and mediate anxiety-producing situations. For good or bad, democracy produces anxiety. I deal with this anxiety by using sequential imagery to deconstruct the passage of time and the ritualization of the narrative. To control the element of time, I am showing the drawings and paintings I’ve made through the lens of a video-maker. This process also lets me control the order and pace of the stories I’m trying to tell.

Patrick Holbrook

Last week Patrick Holbrook came to Memphis to give a lecture about new media.
I really enjoyed talking to him.
He recommended that I read about Sharon Hayes
and that I look at Paul Chan’s war pieces
and Elizabeth Subrin.

And he taught me how to make a button using Flash! How fun!

When I asked him where to send my work out into the world
he said to look at galleries like Hallwalls in Buffalo N.Y.
or Lumpen Co-prosperity Sphere in Chicago.
even though the co-prosperity sphere doesn’t really look like Epcot.

Check out his work at
http://patrickholbrook.com/

leger

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SAVE THE DATE

My thesis show will open November 7 at the Art Museum of the University of Memphis.
More to come!