searching for visual depth

in my humble opinion:

looking for visual depth, developing layers of visual communication, is a different endeavour than creating fashion. although i'm sure fashion designers would disagree. to me the contemporary world of fashion exemplifies everything which i find so difficult to palate in the art world (and beyond).

fashion. as well as money-intensive extensive advertising. it seems we care about little else. in dutch they say: if only your hair looks good. (then all is well, is implied). keeping up and creating superficial appearances, preferably based on age-old clichés especially about gender, sex, age, influence, affluence, happiness.

women fall for the bmw swat, 2005

what then could art be? so often i see art which is little more than the above sentence. and this art is then proclaimed by art gurus to be profound. well, i apologise for sounding like a character out of the emperor's new clothes, but most often i don't see it!

for me art should not divulge everything immediately. let it simmer on the boilerplate of your sub- or unconsciousness. let it change the way you see, feel. not by some vague philosophical `concept' but by the visual imagery itself. these things take time.

hm. there i go sounding all grumpy again...sorry folks. but then again: how often do you hear someone complain about the superficiality of fashion, art, advertisements,...? not to mention the societal costs involved.

advertisements especially: it is comparable to the tropical rainforest. since everybody is advertising, everybody must advertise more and more, else one does not catch any sunlight. this means that we as a society are spending (energy, effort, creativity,...) increasingly on advertising, instead of on better ideas/products/care/cooperation.

and this same blablabla phenomenon pollutes the art world, i think. artists & art must be pimped up more and more and more, to justify the fashion-like overattention and overpayment.

it seems we all need fairy tales to give our life meaning. for this no price is too high. please do not rupture our soap bubbles of self- or other importance, be it in the context of religion, way of life, music, art, whatever. if you do so, then we will close ranks on you, decry you, ignore you, whatever is most effective.

not to say that i would truly know better. but i feel the balance is missing. fine, repeat all the old clichés with a modern icing. they are not clichés for nothing, and some icings can be interesting. but why not also give generous room to non-clichés? or why not bark ferociously at many of these clichés which are not helping us any further since primitive mankind became, well, non-primitive enough to in principle look further than first instincts.

is art meant to be affirmative to: we are monkeys with a thin icing of civilization, and even thinner icing of spirituality. or can art also explore a deepening of civilization, spirituality? does anyone care, anyway? does this matter? etc.

(oh, i know, there is no doubt some clever art-historical term for this question perspective, and the perspective itself is no doubt considered outdated. superseded by postmodernism or postpostmodernism, or part of it and therefore ... well i'm no art critic.)

comparison of artists - how? who? owh!

today a friend compared my work to that of leon adriaans, a dutch artist (1944-2004). because, according to my friend, he worked so directly from his feeling, intuition, subconscious, or similar phrasing which i don't precisely recall.

be this as it may, i looked at pictures of his work on the internet...and found myself wondering yet again at the way we all look and experience so differently. i do not see any real similarity in adriaans' work and mine, in fact he seems to have worked in a style which is no doubt contemporary but which does not appeal to me at this superficial first webglance. i will come back to it however, since i don't trust my first judgments in these matters.

(you see that i'm following the tower of babel thread from bruegel, previous post).

i'm often left with a feeling that there are ravines as well as distorting static between what i wish to communicate and many -even interested- observers. is this what leads many artists to oversimplification? `if i put something new but not trivial in it, my message becomes open to ambiguous interpretation' ?

gypsy girl, 2007
there is a video women in art by philip scott johnson showing a merged-together sequence of women-in-art. the one thing that immediates strikes me in this video is that the extreme majority of these women are `pretty', doll-like, young...and that the painters use rather conventional realism to communicate the conventional message of conventional beauty...like the so manyth hollywood feature where dashing handsome brave & strong man saves world & pretty (no more qualification necessary) woman from mishap.

(somewhat by quantum association:) it appears to me artists are expected to create visually unambiguous messages, quickly assimilated in existing patterns for judgment. so that it doesn't unduly tax the energy of the casual observer.

in the netherlands, if people do not like a painting, they say: it doesn't resemble anything. as a very negative qualification (this is really true, believe it or not).

so what room does this leave for developing new visual foundations? well, that problem probably holds for many disciplines. writers are supposed to write books with a certain not-too-difficult format, style and characters. composers/songwriters idem.