Leonard Bullock on art

 
Struttin with some BBQ
1995
1991 – 95 (NY, cialis Cologne) – Mischtechnik auf Fieberglas
122 x 103 cm
Copyright : Leonard Bullock
Courtesy : Galerie Poller, buy viagra Frankfurt am Main

Dear Mr. Belcher,
I was touched by the raw honesty of your letter. It gives such a generous & unguarded picture of your struggle to continue to practice making art. I admire you. Perhaps it is unfair, but I still hold England to be contemptuous of pursuits which are non utilitarian. Naturally, I mean this generally. The exceptions to this stricture there are legendary. Nonetheless I think Howard Hodgekin (sp?) was spot on when he said upon receiving the Turner that to be an active painter in England one was
already in “enemy territory”. Despite the enormous fanfare of the London scene this remains both under & overtone. What the London scene seems to defer to most of all is spectacle. {Status in public isn’t far behind.}

There are now many articles about the professionalizing/ academicizing of the art school; there’s an art history instructor at the University of Virginia named Howard Singerman who wrote an entire book on the subject which I haven’t been able to get my hands on. I have read little pieces of it, and responses to it , but at the moment I can’t find this stuff, so I can’t even give you the title. I’m sorry. I know this doesn’t do you much good. The reason I mention it is to say you’re not alone in thinking this was a make-work farce which became a horrible travesty. The schools now promulgate much of the, what the Germans call “Austellungskunst”: exhibition art.

I honestly haven’t done that well myself. My life as an artist has been like a roller-coaster. I have shown in a few famous venues; won some prestigious scholarships & awards; the problem may be psychological. That I must admit. Though I think it is also my stubborn desire for my work to continue to change. I am not one to settle into a signature style.
I live in a W.G. here. It means wohngemeinschaft: shared apartments. I have to most of my money into the maintenance of the studio and the art. One of the main reasons for staying here these last few years is that I have my health insurance here. I had a radical cancer scare back in 2003 and if I’d been in the U.S. I’d be dead.They took care of me here, and my friends & family really came through. Your family must recognize that you are devoted. I hope that you are one of the ones who can say their family appreciates what they do. Or at least has grudging respect. My family has gotten the news, although they’d rather I made enough money to participate in the family events in every season. At least half of what traveling I can do I do to try to sell my work, or to do short teaching engagements. I just scrape by. It’s nerve wracking. These isn’t any remedy. One either has enough enjoyment of the practice as it is, so that in & of itself it is satisfying; or there’s the bitterness, which leaks in unavoidably when it becomes apparent what an institutional charade much of this has become. Unfortunately one can sustain both. I do.

The field is rife with people who are almost allergic to techniques and even a dialogue about techniques and the significance of the materials to the practice; unless of course you’re speaking of new technology. I think it is curious the amount of antagonism there is to the dialogue about materials & techniques, and the teaching of it as well. At least there is here in the german speaking realm. The general gist is that these things don’t carry the same syntactical, or metaphorical status as vocabulary & figures of speech do in linguistics. As if the properties of forms are like a clothes line upon which on hangs (verbocentric) meaning. As if no meanings or implications arise >from form. This is couched in many terms but it really is driven by puritanically reductive habits. Ok, I’ve strayed from my intentions here. Let me go back.

In England things have changed in that London is genuinely an international art center. This doesn’t mean that the plight of artists who are trying to develop their own critical “systems” for sharpening their own critical acumen for developing some kind of form ; hybrid form we used to call it; sorry, its a bit of the old N.Y. school in me. ( I come by it honestly. I lived there for nearly twenty years.) There are many more grants and art fairs and public institutions now, but doesn’t mean that the curators in those places are out scouring the country for artists who have developed independently. Hell no! They’re looking for much of the same trivial/topical trash their curatorial peers seek. It isn’t far removed from fashion; its safety in numbers. To say that curators are risk averse is much too kind. They are bidden by the higher institutions on the food chain to bow to the pecking order. Europe isn’t like it was in the 70’s, when there were exhibitions of Americans and asians and artists from the U.K. who were given their first major shows in intrepid Kunsthalle’s and small museums. Sometimes they were the ones letting N.Y. know what was going on right in its own backyard. Today it is all a part of the same machine. There are small institutions which haven’t been given their bona fides yet. But usually there’s a young curator there who’s waiting for the chance to prove he/she can play the toady, be recognized as someone who knows what’s good for him; show they’re willing to play the game and be granted access to the next tier.
You have to take these theoreticals with a grain of salt. It’s your right, and I hope your pleasure, to let them know that they no longer rule the art world uncontested. This is something you can do sotto voce. A few years ago Joseph Kosuth was here in Basel. His work is of the ilk that describes an intention, literally. When the pieces are made they sometimes unintentionally invoke questions of their own necessity as objects. I remember Saul Ostrow, a critic in N.Y., used to say,
“Joseph Kosuth is a really smart guy who does really stupid work.”( That should be one that you can fire off next time you have one of them in the studio.) Anyway, Joseph was here in town for a show and we know each other glancingly; so we had dinner. Other than tell me how he fucked my girlfriend 20 years ago, there wasn’t the kind of fireworks I expected. The reason was I just wasn’t so much interested as I would’ve been ten years earlier. I told him that I just didn’t agree that it all naturally flowed towards verbal interpretation, towards the <verbocentic> route he’d hewn for so many years. It was humorous the way he reacted. He was disappointed, I could see it. I was willing to debate other things with him, so he knew I wasn’t ducking a fight. But this which he’d staked so much on, well, I told him it was one choice among many. The day in which this attitude was thought inevitable is past.
I’m very pleased you know about the show in Edinburgh. I’m proud to have done that. It was a splendid time. Just before I came back to Europe in ’94. Was there for two months in Edinburgh. Did a lecture at the Tramway, I believe it is called, in Glasgow. Then a friend of mine came from Cologne and we went to the Hebrides for two weeks: Islay, Jura, Colonsay.

We camped several days near the Ardbeg distillery on Islay, amongst the goats, seals and hundreds of birds. The seals would swim up into the cove to check out our camp site. Driftwood was our only fuel. Even though it rained, I kept a fire going for three days. I remember those meals fondly. The islanders were very warm. I’d never had so many strangers buy me whiskey. Well, we were there during the highland games.

The show was put on at a gallery that is no longer in existence, as far as I know. It was called “out of the blue”. Trudy Gibson was one of the girls, girls; they’d castrate me in N.Y. for that. She was one of the owner directors of the gallery. We got wonderful reviews, yet sold nothing. Trudy and all the people who were participating in the gallery worked very hard to publicize it. A show like that, of something really contemporary from N.Y. is a very rare thing there, I realized. Someone at the lecture asked me afterward if this show was representative of the “End of Ideology” attitude in the U.S. after the fall of the Soviet Union. (I think I answered that I didn’t think we’d get so lucky, and of course we haven’t. The winds just blow from other directions.)

I’m going to do some research on the names you sent me. I’m sorry that I’ve gone off a bit here. Would like to go further, but I have to get to work again.

Thank you again, and I welcome mail from you, or comments which you might post.
Please let me know, Leonard