Wayne and Rebecca Madsen

I have been listening to a podcast from the MoMA THINK series on Brice Marden, following his retrospective at the museum. Brice Marden has quickly become a hot item in the past 30 years (is that quickly), but people are collecting and talking about him in the "art scene." The podcast is of a panel including Francesco Clemente and Christopher Wool (others as well) discussing Marden's work and forms.

I believe I am from the group of people who believe painting is dead. Or at least, only alive in a postmodern re-assessing sort of way. If there is anyway to resurrect painting, I'm sure it's through a re-evaluating by critiquing what the modernists did to painting. But what I wanted to discuss doesn't deal with Marden's work, but with some comments made by Clemente and Wool.

Clemente started his presentation by claiming that he isn't a part of the contemporary scene of ideas and instead concerns himself with form. I want to be a part of the culture of ideas and have thought about how the museum culture fits into this culture. Museums are places where history is archived and debated over. Ultimately, the ideas behind history are catalogued and labeled, organized and given organizational structures. Museums, as they exist for art communities, are about what is dead - history. Not to claim that history is dead in the sense of being immaterial and unalive, but dead in the sense that historical ideas are points on which we hang contemporary ideas. Much like a funeral, where everyone talks about how wonderful the person is, now that we have hindsight to their many good points, a historical retrospective attempts to label the dialectics of a previous generation - something not of the now. This labeling is a process whereby ideas are come to be known in the now and hold their presence in the now. It is the process of collecting.

Ultimately, museum art is about ideas and giving meaning to otherwise complacent meaning-items. Ideas from the past existed and had their meaning in their contemporary circles. We, through museums, attempt to possess these ideas and give them our own explanations and objective forms. This is why I have been reaching out to collecting and archiving as my art forms - this realm of ideas is where we get "ideas" from: they are labeled by us, for us, through the process of organization.

There was something else I heard in the discussion of Brice Marden which interested me. Francisco Clemente said that "artwork of our time is dedicated to the celebration of the fact that human experience is something we can not reach." I am reminded of Zen koans and that the dialectic of "never reaching knowledge" have been around for much longer than postmodernist thought, but it is a resurfacing of the postmodernist attempting to return to preEnlightenment thought. Ultimately, I'm reminded of David Ireland and John Cage. More and more, I think about David Ireland.