| FROZEN ZEN [continued
from page one]
ON PHOTOREALISM, FROM THE MAN WHO COINED THE TERM… My fascination with Martin’s work was growing. I felt like I was peeling skin from a cosmic onion…some layers explaining an illusion, other layers revealing yet other illusions. I was curious about the whole Photorealist movement, and also wanted to get some perspective on Dennis’ drawings from someone more knowledgeable about art: I know his work fascinates me, but is that just because I’m a layman and don’t know any better? I decided to talk to an expert. Dennis’ work is handled by the Louis K. Meisel Gallery in New York. It didn’t take me long to realize that Louis Meisel is the expert. Asking around in a casual way, I found to my surprise that many Oklahoma City gallery owners know who Meisel is; they’ve all heard of him. As it turns out, when it comes to Photorealism, Meisel is The Man. In fact, it was Meisel who actually coined the term "Photorealism." So I called the gentleman and he was gracious enough to spend an hour on the phone with me, patiently answering my questions. A brief history of Photorealism, according to Meisel: "Around the middle of the 1800’s, the camera was invented. Until that point artists had recorded places, faces and things…they recorded history. All of a sudden, there was a machine that could do that. Cezanne, Renoir and Degas said: ‘Gee; we don’t have to make our art look exactly like a person…instead, we can make our impression of what it looks like.’ They began to cast off some of the restrictions and requirements placed on the artist. That idea of diminishing the restrictions on the artists led to Modernism. "Eventually you got to Abstract Impressionists in the 50’s. They threw away imagery completely and simply made pictures of paint. No illusion of third dimensional space, which was a realism of sorts. They went on until about 1960, and along came the Pop artists. The Pop artists broke a little bit and they brought imagery back into painting but they adhered to most of the new rules of flat surface, scale, composition, and form. At the same time Pop Art came along, Minimalism continued eliminating restrictions on the artist, until you got to a person who painted pure white canvases…you walked into a gallery and you saw a canvas, and it was painted pure white! And it was about the brush strokes and the texture in the white. On the other hand, there was another guy who did pure white canvases with nothing but a thin band of color around them. "At that point Modernism split. Minimalism went one direction, and Pop Art led to Photorealism. In the mid 60s Chuck Close started painting his giant portraits. The paintings were nine feet high and painted in black and white. Then Richard Estes appeared making paintings of store fronts and city streets. It was more about the windows and the reflections. Then Tom Blackwell, with his motorcycles, and Audrey Flack who came along and started painting still lifes of things on her dressing table. The thing that unified what they were doing is that, in order to make the paintings they wanted to make, they couldn’t sit in front of an object or a landscape and do a million drawings in order to gather the information required to make the paintings. They did that with a camera…they stopped the action. If you look at a motorcycle that’s all chrome and pipes, and you move it an eighth-inch, all the reflections change. But if you snap a picture, you’ve nailed it. You’ve got it for good. Now you go back and do the painting. Of course, you’ve spent ten years developing the technical ability and skill to paint what you see. "It draws peoples’ attention to things that they’d never otherwise see, and maybe couldn’t see because of the changing nature of the subject matter. In 1969, after putting six of these artists together—finding them, buying their work, and deciding to show them—I said: ‘This is…photographic realism; it’s photographically inspired…hey! Photorealism!" In 1970 the Whitney Museum did a show called 22 Realists, in which were seven of my Photorealists. In that catalog the word ‘Photorealism’ appeared officially for the first time. "These artists were in California, Chicago, New York, in Texas…they didn’t know each other. They didn’t ever meet each other until I had the first major show of their work in New York in 1973 and I invited them all to come to my home. There they met for the first time. People said: ‘That’s not a real movement! Louis Meisel invented it and he’s just a thirty-year-old punk kid and it has no importance!’ They were wrong." True to form, Meisel is a most passionate promoter of the movement he helped to define, and he speaks unhesitatingly about the astounding work Martin consistently produces. "Dennis is a gem; a jewel. I see the best quality, technically skilled work that exists in the world, anywhere. Everybody who thinks they have it comes to me. I’ve never seen anybody who can do what Dennis does. He wanted to accomplish something with drawing, and he found a way to do it. But the way that he does it is so incredibly, impossibly difficult, time consuming, and discipline-intense...well, almost nobody else would even attempt to do it." I asked Louis about something that has always puzzled me: Why are people seemingly drawn to art that looks as if it’s been literally tossed on to the canvas, art that looks as if it might have been produced on an assembly line, or perhaps rendered by a baboon, but not attracted to Photorealistic work—work of such obvious quality and beauty? He says it starts with art schools, who aren’t much interested in teaching Photorealism. "One of the problems with Photorealism is that when college kids see it in textbooks, they see a photograph of a Photorealistic painting, and they think it’s an actual photo. They have no idea what it’s like to stand in front of one of these paintings in the giant scale that they’re painted in, and experience them in real life. But once they do, their perspective, their whole life is changed, as far as the way they view art, forever." Dennis told me that when he was attending school, realism was frowned upon. Is this still the case, I wondered? Louis Meisel explained, "The schools won’t teach Photorealism, because they’re trying to be multi-cultural and politically correct and they don’t want to discourage 99.9% of the world from doing something. They want to tell everybody: You have the chance to do it. So they eliminate the standards. You know, a New York City firefighter, in order to pass the physical fitness test, used to be required to carry a 150 pound bag of sand out of a third-story window down a ladder and away from the building. But no woman was ever able to pass that test. So the fire department said, ‘OK, women only have to take a 100 pound bag down the ladder.’ And I said: ‘What if I’m the one in the window of a burning building, three stories up, and I weigh more than 100 pounds?!?’ How can you eliminate standards in any profession anywhere so that more people can do it? But that’s what the schools are doing, not only in art…but in music, in literature. "The artist who emerges from art school not knowing how to draw or design or do anything…one out of a million, because of some quirk, finds a gallery and/or a critic in New York and he has a flash for two or three years and he sells some paintings. The other ones, though, don’t have a chance of making a living. Artists can’t even teach anymore nowadays—which is what artists used to do when they couldn’t make a living selling their paintings—because they don’t know anything! They were told: ‘Oh—you just have to express yourself.’" The other part of the problem is that people are so accustomed to mediocrity, they’ve come to accept it. Photorealism, however, demands the most painstaking attention to detail and quality. This discourages artists from working in the discipline, and those who do pursue Photorealism cannot produce work in sufficient quantities to ensure mass exposure to the work. The subject of quality animates Meisel. He’s obviously frustrated by the absence of quality in almost all areas of life. "I did a lecture at the Smithsonian a couple of years ago. There were about 2,000 people there. I said to them, as far as the word quality is concerned, ‘The word quality exists in the universe. What it means exists in the universe. If we eliminated everything that every one of you knew or read or understood about everything in art, music, design or what have you, and then I showed you ten paintings on canvas and ten sculptures and ten automobiles and ten evening gowns and let you listen to ten musical compositions…in your mind, you would be able to compartmentalize them in order of quality. Of the 2,000 people in this room, 1,950 would be right on and would be able to recognize quality, without anyone telling you how to assess quality. And in a hundred years, if they did the same thing, the results would be the same.’ Mankind is continually redefining quality and it always ends up being the same thing. "Dennis’ work is unusual, difficult to do, and permanent. He knows that the quality he’s producing will be around long after we’re all gone. People look at a Dennis Martin, when they see a picture of [his work], and they say, ‘Why don’t you take a photograph? You could do that in one second. Why spend three months doing that piece?’ What people don’t understand is that his work goes so much beyond what any photograph, what any camera or film could ever produce. Photographers could try for the rest of their lives and they can’t do it because only the human hand and eye can produce that…a lens and a piece of photographic paper can’t do it. If it takes Dennis three months to make a drawing, it’s three months of decision making. It doesn’t just happen with the snap of a shutter. It’s constant attention to detail and discipline, to finally get where you want to go." Meisel warned me that my admiration for Photorealism in general, and Dennis’ work in particular, might be looked upon with disdain. "Your so-called ‘intellectuals’ will laugh at you and sneer at you saying: ‘You’re being so naïve, sappy and stupid. Why don’t you find good art out there?’" He also told me that the relative rarity of Photorealistic work helps explain the art collector’s disinterest…they don’t want to wait months or years until the next piece is produced. "If you appreciate Dennis’ work, you will become very frustrated if you decide to collect that kind of art because you can’t find it. If you’re one of the few people who becomes intense about collecting art, you’ll have to look in other directions for other things. It’s frustrating; the rare is hard to find. And a lot of people won’t wait for the next rare piece a year or two later. They want something every month, and as a result, they have to lower their standards." So how much does this kind of quality cost? Count on paying between twenty and thirty thousand dollars for one of Dennis’ metalpoint drawings. My suggestion to you, if you’re interested in acquiring a Dennis Martin, would be: get one now while they’re inexpensive. I have a hunch the price is only going to go up. With this magazine—and whatever subsequent material we may produce—we have a goal for our readers: TO FASCINATE. This isn’t an easy task in an era when everybody has access to unbelievable amounts of information, when everybody is bombarded with countless images from around the planet, when everybody claims to have "been there, done that." So when I see something that astounds me, something that forces me to drop my jaw and say "Wow!" then I feel I’m really on to something. I’m not the first to view the work of Dennis Martin, of course…still, I feel the excitement that comes from seeing something astoundingly beautiful for the very first time. Unfortunately, there’s no way we can capture the splendor of his work using the reproductive techniques available to us; we simply cannot bring you the soft gold tones and the startling realism of a drawing five or ten times the size of this magazine. In fact, we noted a grain in some of the images that is not present to any degree in Martin’s original works. We found that this was due to the grain inherent in the slides we were provided of his work and not part of our typesetting process. When Dennis Martin draws skin, it is as smooth as looking at your own in a mirror. So, as you view the art is it’s reproduced here, please remember that it’s a poor substitute for the real thing, despite the best efforts of our fine pre-press people and our wonderful printer. My wish for you is that you someday have an opportunity to view one of Dennis’ drawings in person, up close and personal. It’s a truly transformative experience. go to page 3 |