Alter(native) Facts

The artists have their say!

To further exhibit different viewpoints and artist interpretations of their art and their experiences of the world, they were asked to answer the same four questions.

Artist: Jeffrey Bishop

 

Picasso said, “art is a lie, but it is a lie by which we know the truth”

 

1) Can you explain how this statement affects the art you make?

 

It does not [affect my art]. I don’t think art is at all a lie. Nor do I think it makes one understand truth. I don’t think it has anything to do with “truth.” It is what it is.

 

2) How do you react if something is presented to you as indisputable, unquestionable?

 

I react rather negatively to absolutes, unquestionables and indisputables of all kinds.

 

3) Does that reaction, if you have one, (#2) resonates in your drive to make art? Explain briefly.

 

I am interested in making work that surprises me, makes me doubt what I do, sometimes makes me anxious.

 

4) Do you have a favorite artist whose work you think particularly illustrates Picasso’s quote? A particular work?

 

I have very many artists that are favorites at any given time but I don’t think (good) art ever illustrates an idea or even a great quote from a great artist.

Jeffrey Bishop, Quiver #16 2017

Artist: Ava Hassinger

 

Picasso said, “art is a lie, but it is a lie by which we know the truth”

1) Can you explain how this statement affects the art you make?

Someone once told me that we all have our own truths to tell and so that is something I think about when I work. James Baldwin once said, “the purpose of art is to lay bare the questions hidden by answers”. As artists we look for the answers to those difficult questions, without really knowing.

 

2) How do you react if something is presented to you as indisputable, unquestionable?

 

I think it ultimately depends on the source. If it’s someone I trust, then I might believe them and even agree. If is someone I don’t trust – well then, I am immediately skeptical.

3) Does that reaction, if you have one, (#2) resonates in your drive to make art? Explain briefly.

 

I might hear what others say but the only person I really listen to and trust is myself.

Ava Hassinger

Ava Hassinger

Artist: Suzy Kunz

 

Picasso said, “art is a lie, but it is a lie by which we know the truth”

1) Can you explain how this statement affects the art you make?

 

No.

 

2) How do you react if something is presented to you as indisputable, unquestionable?

 

Look for outliers.

3) Does that reaction, if you have one, (#2) resonates in your drive to make art? Explain briefly.

 

Maybe.

 

4) Do you have a favorite artist whose work you think particularly illustrates Picasso’s quote? A particular work?

 

No.

Suzy Kunz

Artist: Charles Olson

Picasso said, “art is a lie, but it is a lie by which we know the truth”

1) Can you explain how this statement affects the art you make?

As soon as we perceive our environment, recognize a person or a sound, we cease to see things as they are and start overlaying our own memories and judgments. Artists don’t reveal reality as it is, but hopefully how it feels or how it could be. Sometimes the most important human truths lie in the realm of emotion and possibility. These are truths that art can reveal.

2) How do you react if something is presented to you as indisputable, unquestionable?

As a scientist, I expect facts to arise from verifiable sources such as accurate measuring instruments or reliable historic records. I think that ultimately, everything we take as true is really a model of understanding that is most useful in our present moment. As our understanding develops, what we consider useful can also change. In other words, what we consider indisputable one day may become disputable another day.

3) Does that reaction, if you have one, (#2) resonates in your drive to make

art? Explain briefly.

 

As my craft develops, so do my aesthetic and conceptual options. Making visually attractive objects was not a priority for me for many years, but I think my objects are getting more attractive, even if they remain a bit awkward. Years ago, I would have been accused of “selling out”. Now I feel like I’m making deeper connections between form and content.

4) Do you have a favorite artist whose work you think particularly illustrates this idea? A particular work?

 

There are many artists I enjoy whose craft meanders in the space between elegance and awkwardness: Sue Coe, Christy Rupp, Josep Guinovart, Henry Moore and Kara Walker are a few.

Charles Olson

Artist: Stephen Cimini

Picasso said, “art is a lie, but it is a lie by which we know the truth”

1) Can you explain how this statement affects the art you make?

I sometimes think of the surfaces I create in the geometric shapes of my paintings are organic elements that don’t exist in nature but could.

2) How do you react if something is presented to you as indisputable, unquestionable?

 

Do my best to ignore it.

3) Does that reaction, if you have one, (#2) resonates in your drive to make art? Explain briefly.

 

No.

Stephen Cimini

Artist: Douglas Zimmerman

1) Art is a lie: Picasso.

Can you explain how this statement affects the art you make?

Well I wonder, is art the truth and everything else is a lie? Good art, that is. Different tricks of the trade are used to manipulate emotion. Indeed, was Picasso referring to that – how in order to transcend one’s inhibitions and repressions, does the artist need to boldly reconfigure what one what normally sees?

2) How do you react if something is presented to you as indisputable, unquestionable?

I walk away.

3) Does that reaction, if you have one, (#2) resonates in your drive to make art? Explain briefly.

Yes. I find myself walking away often. I keep walking. So finally I stumbled into an art studio and picked up a brush.

4) Do you have a favorite artist whose work you think particularly illustrates this idea? A particular work?

God. Too many to mention. But – today anyway: Soutine, Schiele, Avery, Pollack and Neal. Monet’s Water Lilies strikes me as appropriate for the quote.

Douglas Zimmerman

Artist: Leda Arensberg

 

Picasso said: Art is a lie.

1) Can you explain how this statement affects the art you make?

My work may disregard outer reality (being an illusion – a lie) but reveals my own truth in personal imagery.

2) How do you react if something is presented to you as indisputable, unquestionable?

 

In life I would tend to investigate, but in art I would disregard.

3) Does that reaction, if you have one, (#2) resonates in your drive to make art? Explain briefly.

 

I create images I love regardless of the indisputable.

4) Do you have a favorite artist whose work you think particularly illustrates Picasso’s quote? A particular work?  Miro.

Leda Arensberg

Artist: Bernice Sokol Kramer

 

Picasso said: Art is a lie.

1) Can you explain how this statement affects the art you make?2) How do you react if something is presented to you as indisputable, unquestionable?3) Does that reaction, if you have one, (#2) resonates in your drive to make art? Explain briefly. 4) Do you have a favorite artist whose work you think particularly illustrates Picasso’s quote? A particular work?

 

I could not answer all your questions. This is what I can say.

Art is a transformation of thoughts and emotions into something that exists in a different plane or realm.

Have you ever seen Bernini’s Ecstasy of St. Theresa? Bernini made marble into fabric.

Bernice Sokol Kramer

Artist: Victoria-idongesit Udondian

 

Picasso said: Art is a lie.

1) Can you explain how this statement affects the art you make?2) How do you react if something is presented to you as indisputable, unquestionable?3) Does that reaction, if you have one, (#2) resonates in your drive to make art? Explain briefly. 4) Do you have a favorite artist whose work you think particularly illustrates Picasso’s quote? A particular work?

Am not sure if this works for what you were shooting for, this is the way I can relate with your question on Picasso’s quote.

I like to answer this questions with a series of questions and this stems from my interest in questioning the veracity of historical account through generating alternative narrative to support my work.

What is a lie? What is truth?

What is fiction? What is reality?

How can art be used to subvert or questions notions of historical truth or lies? Can ‘art’ truth fill in existing gabs in history / reality?

How do we situate ourselves in History?

How is truth validated and who validates?

What is fact? factual truth?

Alternative truth / facts?

Myths?

Lies?

Truth?

Half truth?

History?

Alter(native) Facts exhibit. In foreground – The Oba’s Headdresses.

Artist: Ken Nelson

Picasso said: Art is a lie.

1) Can you explain how this statement affects the art you make?2) How do you react if something is presented to you as indisputable, unquestionable?3) Does that reaction, if you have one, (#2) resonates in your drive to make art? Explain briefly. 4) Do you have a favorite artist whose work you think particularly illustrates Picasso’s quote? A particular work?

In the work I have been doing recently, I am looking at fragments of reality – specifically small sections of street PAVEMENTS and sidewalks. By focusing on these fragmentary sections of reality, something else entirely is often the resulting product. These sections of reality become something abstract.

What the viewer sees is often something different than my original inspiration. The cracks, crevices and repairs in a street surface, can be viewed as a river, estuary or delta as seen from above.

Reality in this case becomes the reality of the viewer.

Reality = Abstraction

I think that due to recent events, our initial response is to question most things presented as fact. A fact can be perceived as fiction – depending on whom is presenting that “fact”.

In art, it is the artist’s job to question fact. A landscape painting, no matter how realistic, is not a true representation of reality. It is one person’s approximation of what reality was at one particular moment.

Is a landscape by Richard Diebenkorn any less a representation of reality than one by Frederick Edwin Church?

Is a still life by Matisse, any less a true depiction of objects than one by William Harnett?

Is Picasso’s Portrait of Dora Maar, any less a depiction of an individual’s personality than a portrait of our nation’s founders by Gilbert Stuart?

An artist is always trying to find the truth – But which truth? Reality = Abstraction.

Ken Nelson

Artist: Billie Cohen

Picasso said, “art is a lie, but it is a lie by which we know the truth”

1) Can you explain how this statement affects the art you make?

It does not – I try to not “think” of anything. My practice of creating art, drawing, painting, is more like a direct meditation.

2) How do you react if something is presented to you as indisputable, unquestionable?

 

I don’t think there is anything unquestionable! The initial reaction depends on the source from where it is coming.

3) Does that reaction, if you have one, (#2) resonates in your drive to make art? Explain briefly.

 

I don’t find a relationship at all.

4) Do you have a favorite artist whose work you think particularly illustrates Picasso’s quote? A particular work?

 

Does the word interpretation mean lie?

Billie Cohen

Billie Cohen

Artist: Mary Jones

Picasso said, “art is a lie, but it is a lie by which we know the truth” 1) Can you explain how this statement affects the art you make?

I think of it more as a place. I just read “Robert Lowell,” by Kay Redfield Jamison, and he described mania as a “magical orange grove in a nightmare.” The studio, the process, it’s something like that, an Oz that I find after a threatening thud with reality. It’s colorful there, and I’m looking for some courage and brains to function along the way.

2) How do you react if something is presented to you as indisputable, unquestionable?

My ideas about art are defined by movement, attention, and change. Again a quote by Robert Lowell, “The light at the end of the tunnel is just the light of an oncoming train.”

 

3) Does that reaction, if you have one, (#2) resonates in your drive to make art? Explain briefly.

I work on my craft and try to learn its language. It might be on the floor, on the wall, or in plain sight. It could be a recipe, an accident, or an intention. Like a chemical reaction, it will morph and mutate instantaneously.

 

4) Do you have a favorite artist whose work you think particularly illustrates Picasso’s quote? A particular work?

It’s Picasso’s quote, and he owns it. I like his late drawings. I like the morphing of artist into model, a fusing and exchange of sexual roles, bodies, mythologies, and power. His imagination is uncurtailed and fluid, always ahead of him, a kind of theater, and like theater, directed play revealing emotional truth.

 

Mary Jones

Artist: Leslie Jimenez

Picasso said, “art is a lie, but it is a lie by which we know the truth”

1) Can you explain how this statement affects the art you make?

It doesn’t. The art I make is based on personal experiences, and the way I render these experiences in a visual way, (I) respond to how they make sense to me. Not sure if my personal story aligns with Picasso’s who might have had an experience that prompt him to make that statement.

 

2) How do you react if something is presented to you as indisputable, unquestionable?

 

I challenge it by asking why is “that something” unquestionable, an according to

who?

 

3) Does that reaction, if you have one, (#2) resonate in your drive to make art?

Explain briefly.

 

Yes, it does resonate. In my work, subject matter may vary, yet in every context  I explore (there) being standards of beauty, motherhood, womanhood, gender, or community, I’m constantly asking myself (and the viewer) how notions and rituals come to be? How is a culture, systems of beliefs and notion of identities formed and established?

 

4)Do you have a favorite artist whose work you think particularly illustrates this

idea? A particular work?

 

Louise Bourgeois “Pink Days and Blue Days” 1997

Leslie Jimenez

Artist: Hilda Green Demsky

 

Picasso said, “art is a lie, but it is a lie by which we know the truth”

1) Can you explain how this statement affects the art you make?

The title of my art, “Climate Change Is Not Happening,” is a lie. It is a lie to call attention to the truth. Our earth is drowning slowly by rising waters. I think about water all the time…what we drink, and how we often pollute our rivers and lakes. Rising temperatures and melting glaciers are scary. All of these environmental conditions scare the heck out of me, and it affects my work.

 

2) How do you react if something is presented to you as indisputable, unquestionable?

I have a hard time ACCEPTING ANYTHING THAT I AM TOLD IS INDISPUTABLE. I believe there is flexibility in the interpretation of almost everything. I make art because I have to—it’s what I do– but I have oft times politicized my work by painting about issues that concern me deeply, i.e. global waters being polluted. Detritus is washing up on our shores in many countries. Lately I have avoided painting floating garbage and am painting what is beautiful and essential in our environment.

 

3) Does that reaction, if you have one, (#2) resonate in your drive to make art?

Explain briefly.

 

My second painting, “The Sky Is Falling” is about polluting our skies. The cosmos is full of garbage.

 

4)Do you have a favorite artist whose work you think particularly illustrates this

idea? A particular work?

 

Lee Krasner. I like her quote,

“I am never free of the past.

I have made it crystal clear

That I believe the past is part

Of the present which becomes

Part of the future.”

I can relate to her highly personal marks which come from the subconscious.

Hilda Green Demsky

Hida Green Demsky

Artist/Curator: Denise Jones Adler

 

The questions are made up by me. The manifesto comes out of my intense inquiry into this topic when it came roaring into our consciousnesses with recent events. Knowing what I know, some clarification seemed to be necessary and what better reason to put on a show than that? I do not believe that art is a lie, but that it has at it’s heart a willingness to be open to other possibilities.

Denise Jones Adler

The Stoning