Owe Not To Paint James Stanfield

One of the first ways I was able to get a foothold on Joseph Beuys’s output was to think that just after WWII all German artists must have felt that they should stop making art. Art, so easily associated with patronage and appreciation, must have seemed an unreasonable gesture when your nation had been torn apart, and the people around you starved. This must have felt double when you realized that you had some role in the deaths of so many others. This must have felt triple when you understood how much the rest of the world was demonizing you. No one wanted to hear your voice anymore. You owed it to the world not to make art.

I understood Joseph Beuys’s practice as an illustration of how one survives such a time. How one can become transformed and reborn, and even while doing this still manage to take some of the important things from an unpopular heritage into the future. I saw – and still see – Beuys as an energizer of students, a political voice for those who should not speak, and a guide.

As America is an advanced capitalist system and since art in New York is a big part of that, and since painting is the object that provides the most easily packaged experience of art, I have chosen painting as a whipping boy. I’m not saying that I don’t appreciate painting, because I have really fallen for a few of them, but today I would be hard pressed to find a painting that is politically subversive. The ones I see are all politically benign. If you’re unable to stay outside the realm of the collector – no painting is supposed to - and equally unable to embed such a critique, you are merely a participant in a money-is-our-politics culture. This is a bananas capitalist governance that has demanded we destroy millions of lives in every pocket of the globe.

The same can be said for most of the sculpture I’ve seen here. Much of it leans solely toward pleasure. Most of it refuses to complicate its political use.

I’m not saying we should not be paid for our artwork, and I’m not saying that we should shun all collectors. I am saying that it is important to look at the forces we are currently governed under and find our artwork's eventual destination in all of that.

There is wealth in New York - wealth like I’ve never witnessed before. Artists want a slice. That’s no different from what anyone else wants, but I would like to remind artists that we are still the voices that slide up and down the economic ladder. We talk to the insanely rich, the mildly wealthy, the building owner, the homeowner, the average plebeian, the poorer prole, and, sometimes, even the destitute. Often we do all this talking in one day. We possess tools, not the least of which is beauty, that aid us in producing things that slip into all these people’s lives.

At a time when what money wants it gets, it becomes important to remember that we can’t beat our insane version of capitalism with artwork, but we can complicate the cycle of exploitation. Until our leadership creates a nation that puts some ideal above money, I owe not to paint.