+ 6 - 1 | § ¶khrushchev
Painting has proved itself a phoenix, the perpetual un-dead.
There is something inherently appealing and seductive about motionless depiction.
There is something strange and obsolete about painting and video and photography cannot put an end to it.
If we were to see art as a tree; mimesis, depiction, aesthetics and the elusive ‘Quality’ would be firmly entrenched in its root system, the trunk would consist of that which is substantial for the arts; the human condition, and the various and continually developing -isms would form its branches, and source of energy.
Artists themselves have never been overtly concerned with stigma and continually prune and clip away dead wood.
All art forms are mimetic by nature, imitating, portraying, simulating or depicting something else. Modernism’s probe to ban literature and representation from art too can be seen as depiction, depiction of itself, a pleonasm, an image of theory, modernism is dead wood.
We have come to realise that running the un-elected vanguard for the ignorant masses is, after the timely demise of all other ‘Great Ideologies’, no longer a feasibility or a position to strife for. Revolution is bourgeois.
Artist have always studied, imitated and copied each other, there has always been a great deal of ‘inter-textuality’, art is to image what literature is to word.
Peter Breevoort, April 2007