There was this lady friend of mine who would begin swearing, reflexively, whenever someone mentioned Christopher Hitchen’s name. It was a strange spectacle- and the sort of thing that is amusing now, but not even a little funny when it was actually happening.
“He’s a racist, mysoginist, shiteating scumbag fuckface!” was the opening tone of her thesis, and it got harsher from there.
I tried to further the conversation once by saying, ‘yeah… but he’s a good read,’ which is a tropey, often used defense for priggish contrarian art-jocks. Hemingway and Bukowski and Ezra Pound often needed this kind of disclaimer, which means these conversations were doomed before they started.
I don’t have anything interesting or novel to say about Hitchens except that when I think of all the effort to relate to his life or death I can almost feel the imaginary eyes of my imaginary reader turning a barrel roll and nose diving into that frantic interior space where any inspected mind furiously harbors an individual and proprietary right to project our own pathetic singular voice as an even more relevant arbiter of the great conversation. It’s a pretty convoluted image.
I made this painting of Hitchens during the People Matter project. I picked him to paint because at the time I was focusing on the discord between content and commenters. He was an icon for that electrified, weird boundary- albeit from a previous, less networked generation.
One night I came home disastrously drunk, spinning. I tried to lay down but the bed kept skewing in extreme directions- so I made my way to the studio. I had maybe 80 paintings finished and laying on the floor and I grabbed a thing of wood and a pen and eventually some dripping acrylic and gloss and painted while watching Hitchens debating George Galloway on youtube and also googling Giacometti for no discernible reason- pseudo poetics, I guess.
When I woke up I had this tiny, melting, unimpressive half semblance of a Hitchen’s shaped head. It was not a painting of him. I hadn’t put in the work to earn a painting of him. Instead it was a painting of the inability to resolve a lingering feeling or impression about this thing Hitchens represented in my tiny world view, aided as it was by the gargantuan collective mindshare of ‘the internets.’
When we talk about ‘internet aware art’ I think this kind of short hand is in play. Half notions rendered as symbols for ‘the thing itself.’ I want you to think of this painting as an image of Christopher Hitchens in the mind of a painter-cum-blogger, swapping links like shucking corn. It’s lossy. But now I’m just speaking in trendy gimmicks.
At the closing of the show foursquare founder Dennis Crowley snagged the painting as a gift for Jason Kotke, who he thought would enjoy it, maybe. I felt pretty flip about the painting itself - and cooler about the idea that Dennis, who had transformed the world into an interactive game board, wanted to give some shitty thing I made to someone whose blog I read frequently because it kept me up to date on ‘the internets.’
Who knows where the painting is now, if it made it to Kotke, if it’s on a wall or if it’s a coaster, or in a dumpster, and really, who cares.
If anything about this way of making a painting is art - it’s the fledgling effort to give a basic visual form to an unresolved packet of notions. How I relate to big and small ideas is so much the product of how they enter into my world, through whom, and in what shape I pass those ideas onward, and again, through whom.
For my steadily declining dollar, a painting is still the most direct, if clumsiest way to give a notion its shape. Maybe I’m just a tactile sentimentalist, tumbling to keep up heirs, or maybe I just ain’t seen a gif yet that I could rest a whiskey on. (rimshot)
Thanks Christopher Hitchens, for setting both the high and low watermark as a bawdy boozy intellectual brawler. I’m gonna go ahead and blog about it.
