Dennis Hollingsworth

Hyperlinked Apologetics

When I have visitors to the studio or when I find myself showing my art works to interested parties out in the world, inevitable questions arise. Most of them deal with the usual topics: "Why do you paint this way? ... Is this abstraction or figuration? ... How do you do this?" All easy questions, and I can go on at length and keep the audience captivated.

One of the issues I usually am called to address is the apparent diversity of expressions of all the works. That's an easy one: "Through contrast, one becomes conscious." This must be a quote I heard from somewhere. I can track in a direction for three, five, ten pieces and then I have to shift in an opposite direction. Or, I simply have to follow inspiration wherever the spirit drives me. No muse, no art. If this explanation doesn't satisfy, I summon the image of a sailboat, tacking into the wind. Port, starboard, repeat. If we haven't moved on to other topics yet, I could always drop the nuke: "Being half American and half Filipino, my identity was always a constant interpolation." But I usually don't unleash the beast, it's too complicated, gratuitous, and sublimated.

Fire and Forget.

Sometimes, I get the question that will usually stump me: "What's the title?" The Cheshire's grin blooms and I look squarely into their eyes and say: "I don't remember." Cocked and loaded comes the exegesis: I title my paintings after I make them. My method is to comb the weblog for words that will leap out to me, insist themselves to be the title for the piece. The words will ring out. The weblog has never failed me as a source of the names of my art works yet. I inscribe the title and sign the back of the painting, post images of the painting in the weblog and hyperlink the title to the source post where I divined it in the blog and boom, I'm off to the next adventure. Yes, this practice might be post hoc in terms of the manifestation of the art work in relation to titling, but it has the advantage of thwarting the urge to illustrate. Illustrative art is problematic, at least for me. If you want to delve into the meaning of a title, click on the hyperlink of the title of the painting that you'll find in this blog, this will start a trail of bread crumbs that can potentially lead you towards my intentions.

There are certain other moments in an art conversation where I tend to draw a blank. Not fun. For example, I met up with an old collector friend the other week, the ever delightful Steve Shane, catching up after the long pandemic period of social isolation. Refreshing. We toured an exhibition at the Whitney as a pretext for the meet, a surprisingly insightful show, by the way. So as not to distract our attention of the tour, we chatted outside with a cup of coffee at a table on the terrace. Along the conversation, he asked out of the blue:

"Who are your favorite artists?"

My mind went blank. Nothing. Nada. Bupkis. But what of question is this, so devoid of context? Well, it was innocent. Provocative, yes. If you want to get to know an artist better, it could be an effective opener. Metaphorically, I pulled my pockets inside out. Got nothing for you right now, Steve.

Days later, my mind drifted to what I could have said. Malevich, I have a book open in my studio. Ryman, his works drove me to expand the plasticity of paintings' support all the way to the nail on the wall. Lasker, a formative influence in that Hans-Michael Herzog's coining "frozen spontaneity!" defined his paintings so effectively. This drove me to think of what my painting could be if I could invert this formulation. But why stop here? Why not the titan Goya, whose "Saturn Devouring His Children" had transfixed me in my thirteenth year... or Picasso, who kept challenging himself in multiple sequential genres... or Kandinsky, whose legendary non-objective abstraction doesn't hold water since he really was representing music, whose works for me are a remarkable delimited recombinatorial menu of singular paint applications? Any short list I could have delivered to Steve at that moment would effectively cut short my universe of influence going forward. On the other hand, I had short changed my ability to sell myself to an interested party. Not very smart on a tactical level. But then again, Steve's already an old friend, an ally.

There's an art to talking about your art. You don't want your words to replace the object you've created. Upstage it. Hype it out of existence. But the words of my mother come to mind: "You sell with stories." Back in the 90's, she used to shop Europe for antique fabric and sell them stateside. Textile arbitrage. Her stories were real and natural catnip in a Californian antique fair: "This vestment was from a retired bishop in Southern France... We arrived at the estate, met by guard dogs at the gate, the owner let us look into his dusty attic covered in spider webs and long unopened crates..."

Ellipsis: "...the omission from speech or writing of a word or words that are superfluous or able to be understood from contextual clues."

If you don't want to oversell the work, kill it with words, suck attention away from the piece to yourself (now I'm thinking about Dali, but then he was his own living art object), you have to learn how to master a kind of ellipsis. Andy Warhol was famously coy. Was he being deceptive when he denied transparency with the public? Is there an adversarial relationship between an artist and an audience whose proclivities are to box him/her in? Bruce Conner was a magnificent asshole. Caustic, abrasive, his letters to museum curators are a marvel of withering disregard. He was defending his art and all art from trivialization by art industrial career professionals. Boy, what an aura that guy had... or has, still. It's longer essay or great dinner conversation to truck out all of the artists who had slipped the noose of public image. Yves Klein, Sigmar Polke, Alfred Jarry, Duchamp... the night would be long and the wine would flow.