I decided to wipe my ass with certain aspects of the past and go beyond post-modernism's self limiting coordinates. Gestating from Spengler's definition of Eurocentrism with some help from Gardner's art bible we can choke on the idea that Western art began at Lascauz, with cave paintings involving the human figure. Those works are thought to date from 14,000 BC and considering it's the 21st century AD, that's a long time to be depicting our species. Once painting, drawing and sculpting were the only methods to leave a visual record of an era. Whether for an artist's own satisfaction or to consciously leave clues for future generations is immaterial. As much as I feel life drawing is indispensable as a technical discipline, my goal is to reduce the use of the human figure as much as possible in the representational visual arts. It's one of the few frontiers left for the narrative painting avant-garde to blitzkrieg. Leave the recording of out times with the photojournalists and hordes of home video enthusiasts, let shows like "Cops" and "The Best of Surveillance Video" document your world.
My use of cartoon characters is an attempt to explain the human condition, the unheralded heroics of just staying alive, without resorting to the overt, hammer on the head use of we, the people. In the ritual dances of Bali, many types of animal deities are represented by actors wearing stylized masks; anthropomorphic gods, such as cats, were prime time players in ancient Egyptian polytheism. The adulation that certain cartoon characters get in contemporary Western culture is just the most modern version of this, and they get worshipped at megastores.
I consider the development of cartoon animals the same way that I regard human evolution; it was the cats that first crawled out of the primordial ink and morphed themselves erect on hind legs. As dogs stayed stubbornly down on all fours, cats such as Felix began to openly explore the possibilities of the cartoon universe. The ripped movie palace audiences of the '30s really dug it; later the first Keane-eyed TV generation got hip.
Like young Butch in Pulp Fiction, all of us were set down in front of the TV to watch cartoons and ever since Pop Art kicked the Abstract Expressionists out of Peggy Guggenheim's living room, that teevee TV Guide went psychedelic and true hallucinations hit the vidscreens of Middle America. Herman Munster drives a hot rod to PTA meetings and talking horses dispense advice to suburban husbands. Warhol had discovered early on that, in the panoply of TV, there's not that much difference between Brando and Brillo, and the art collectors agreed. Museums began to stock up on Pop and what began as counterculture became Culture. The television had become as acceptable an art influence as any pleinair landscape.
When my family moved to this country in the early '60s they treated their television set like an in-house movie theater. We would gather in the living room to watch Lassie, my mother wearing white linen gloves, my father in a suit and tie; myself brushed and shining. Saturday mornings Pops and I sat freaking on Warner Brothers cartoons, the first time either of us had ever seen them. In later years I was to still hold the cartoon world sacrosanct and, unlike Ronnie Cutrone, I never felt the urge to pervert patented cartoon characters. There is a vast difference between putting Woody Woodpecker in an ill situation and thrusting an unidentified cartoon character of one's own design into the same dilemma. I felt that it was easier for the viewer of a painting to identify with the universal everyman I was trying to depict if the player had no prior identity.
Robert Williams has pointed out that art begins with women's asses, that the accurate rendering of same is often rewarded with accolade. On a more esoteric tip I maintain that the history of Western painting revolves around the depiction of crucial moments in collective or personal destiny. That is why we see a painting of George Washington crossing the Delaware and not eating his cornflakes the morning. If I can't paint an entire cartoon I can at least depict the most critical moment of a scenario.
Anyway, it's been along time since Alfred Jarry's "Ubu Roi" managed to provoke a riot on opening night with only its first word. The so called "Fine Arts" are running the risk of becoming a toothless old dog in the front yard fed on milksop grant money; the best it can do is gum issues to distraction. Long before AIDS "victim mentality," art was about getting laid. What art student hasn't thought about fucking the nude model in life drawing class? As Bukowski noticed, it's the small things that drive us to madness: a shoelace that breaks when you're already late for work, a car that won't start when you absolutely have to be somewhere. Art is meant to address the fundamental injustices of life, not the manufactured inequities. -FIN

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