Digressions in Paint

Recently artist Bill Gross sat down for an IM chat with me, except Carl Baratta, another artist, answered. What follows is a conversation that accidentally became an interesting discussion.


I really want to see a huge revival of Gene Davis' paintings and esp. drawings!

Sorry Bill, it's Carl.
Gene Davis huh? You thinking about stripes because it's summer? Because you yearn for the NJ shore?

I love stripes.

They love you. Maybe you and they should get married.

I really wish I had a house that one of his paintings would look good in. Big walls with a window that looked out onto my sweet pool and coniferous trees.
Then the stripes would be meaningful.

Yeah, the stripes definitely need a place to get them going. Why do you dig stripes so much?

They're less complicated than bricks for one. [Gross makes paintings of bricks.]

Hahah.

And you can use them for camouflage if you wear stripe shirts.

That's fair.

Davis' paint[ing]s are so pointless and without affect. And right now that seems appealing, plus it would seem so weird if there really was a revival. Hey, it happened for Lucio Fontana, and who would have expected that?

I never understood stripe paintings....... did it really?
Oh! You mean like 10 years ago?

It's still going on really. He has a career again, surprisingly weird.
What's not to understand about stripes?

There's this thing I've noticed as of late. This fascination with stone faced abstraction. Why do you suppose that's what's up right now? At 1st I thought it was some knee jerking from all the unicorn art that was bopping around the last 10 years. But now I'm not so sure.

Well, I think there is a reason beyond the anti-unicorn one, but we'll have to hash that out later cuz I gotta go push a cart.
...
But it starts with people such as myself not giving a shit about other people’s stories. Willie Doherty and the like want me to give a shit about their world, but truthfully, when I step back from thinking that I should care, I confront the reality that I couldn't give a shit. Then the ante is upped and someone tries to entertain me [like] M. Barney... with his retarded surrealism, and I still couldn't care less.

Stripes don't ask me to care about someone else’s reality, so I thank the artist for giving me something that can stimulate my own thoughts. About sweet shirts and chicks with umbrellas.

That's fair.
Yeah, I think if you are going to go the route of entertaining stories, there has to be some serious formal play that's interesting to fall back on. Otherwise the work is solely hinged on the artist’s charisma.
And we're all fucking nerds so that's a mistake.

We ARE ALL nerds!! :-( OK I really gotta run.

Aight. Don't cry guy. Nerds are the new preps!