Lynn Rigberg wrote in the catalogue, Bill Schenck 1968-1983, “The 1960’s gave rise to a Pogo-esque sense of self recognition: The enemy in residence was within our own culture. As Horror bubbled over at political assassinations and escalating war in the Far East, our esteem of self and of values blurred. For the moment, the question of who we were became too uncomfortable, even as what we are threatened to reveal itself.
As we tussled with contest and content of the country wrestling to define its spirit, art’s contemporary heritage already held elements that would emerge as ingredients in the vocabulary of a new generation of artists. The sometimes violent, often self destructive, subjective stage was set with colorful explosive visual expletives of expressionistic and post expressionistic art.”
The use of text incorporated into visual art fascinated me from the time of my first awareness of comic books. Andy Warhol and Roy Lictenstein took comic book art to a new and profound level of credibility in the early 1960’s by replicating individual “cells” to paintings on canvas. I came into contact with these canvases in the fall of 1965.
In 1970, I began a series of western paintings that were based on black on white movie stills. The process was one of deconstructing the photographic image in a “paint by number” system with the use of a palette that was not naturalistic as would be found in much of the first generation of photo-realism that was emerging in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s. The use of text would come somewhat later in a series of rodeo images that I began producing in 1978. Quite often I employed commercial brand names behind the central figures in the paintings.
These paintings evolved into a series of Kellogg’s cereal box fronts that involved cowboys, cowgirls, logos, calligraphy that was all my invention. It was at this point that I began to create a much more overt socio-political commentary.
There was a “Graffiti” series that followed. Although not technically like the taggers that painted graffiti in the subway systems of New York, it was more of (again) a “paint by number” system of marks that had a vague resemblance to early mid-1960’s work of Cy Twombly.
By 1990, a central character named “Cliff” emerged as a troubled, distracted, cowboy hero who was extremely conscientious of political correctness but failed sometimes to act according to the intellectual concepts of what political correctness prescribed.
The latest incarnation is decidedly less western and very much more graphic, ultra violent, and generally darker; apocalyptic in nature. I have found this work to be a near perfect vehicle to describe a personal dialogue in autobiographical terms. In some images, I have created a nonexistent parallel universe to situations that do exist in our current clash of cultures, religious and holy wars, extremisms that appear to be beyond anyone’s control. In these images, I try to achieve a heightened level of perverse chaos, the complete unraveling of civilization, the ungluing of social fabric.
ARTIST
STATEMENT
Thirty-four
years ago I moved to New York and within a year of living there began paintings
based on black and white publicity photos from western films. I had already encountered
the work of Sergio Leone, the man who brought the spaghetti western to international
prominence in the mid-1960's. I was very attracted to the moral ambiguity, the
Catholic-ness, the anti-heroism that at times was indistinguishable from one character
to another in Leone's work. Specifically it was said of his "Dollar"
trilogy that the theme was an all pervasive "dance of death" with an
unending sense of betrayal. His work seemed to fit exactly with the social upheaval,
the sense of revolution that permeated the air worldwide throughout the middle
and late 1960's.
My imagery took a slow evolutionary turn sometime in
1999. Stylistically the work has been consistent since the late 1960's. The content
has changed. I have dealt repeatedly with narrative themes. The narrative has
changed. The biggest departure was allowing the process of photography to become
an end in itself. The use of photographs or slides has been an inherent reference
for all my image making of the last thirty-seven years. The palette of the paintings
is altogether different than the earlier "pop western" paintings of
the 1970's and 80's.
In the last two years I began making black and white
images using film as the basis for digital photographs. Cinematography has probably
had more impact on my career than any other two-dimensional media. I thought there
was something essentially powerful about the black and white film noir movies
of the 1940's and 50's. There was a mystique that is unique to the medium of black
and white film. About fifteen years ago I began to pay a lot more attention to
the twentieth century black and white photographers. I purchased subscriptions
to all the photograph auction sales at Sotheby's, Christies and Bonham&Butterfields.
I began accumulating books on photographers. Having steeped myself in the history
of book medium, I launched my career in this new direction while continuing to
paint.
I have always tried to inject high emotional content into the
work. In the earlier years, the presence of pattern and positive/negative space
was very dominant. I was intrigued by the contradiction of an anti-painterly surface
with a romantic subject matter. The same elements would come to play in the tug
of war that was caused by using photographs as a point of reference. The photographs
convey the illusion of deep space or "real space", but are themselves
two-dimensional. The inherent flatness of the photographic image can be exploited
to create a tension of flatness and pattern while simultaneously balancing the
illusion of deep space.
By the early 90's I began exploring images of
irony to a further extent than before. Moving to New Mexico in 1997 escalated
the pace and ultimately the focus that my paintings would take from then on. Living
in New Mexico is a unique experience; it is living in a country within a country.
It has a history of religious pueblo ritual that is separate from the rest of
the United States. There is also a history of hundreds of years of cultural and
ethnic tension. I find this very compelling and a rich source to draw upon.
During the evolution of this new work there continue to be any number of external
elements that inspire my imagery. These days however, my paintings and photographs
represent less and less what is out there in the "real world." Even
the painted landscapes are becoming more invented. The process is a re-organization
of "real world" objects, figures and space into an interior dialogue
that are representations of how I interpret my connection to these objects rather
than depicting representations of the objects themselves.
Quite often
the content of this new work uses icons, often in a contradictory or unexpected
context. The iconography juxtaposes cultural, religious, darkly erotic, violent
and political elements. The vast majority of these images take place in the southwestern
deserts or in interiors with altars that allude to the southwest. To quote Odd
Nerdrum in his definition of the symbolism of the desert, it is "a place
of hostile indifference, the destructive abandonment of human being into nothingness."
I refer to the paintings and photographs that I have made since 1999 as "Jornada
del Muerto" (Journey of Death). It is also the title of my new hand-made,
hand-bound book in a signed, numbered edition of ninety.
—
Bill Schenck
