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Mash-up #29 |
“Someone once said “Knowledge lasts as long as fish.” It is not easy to accept that everything becomes history, including us. But when I attended the opening of the newest version of MOMA several years ago the experience left me empty. Whatever I had learned in the last century, I felt, would not serve me in this one. My teacher and mentor was Richard Stankiewicz. His formalist ways of teaching (that he had learned from Hans Hofmann) had served me well, but no more. Fortunately, through a grant from an anonymous donor in late 2003 I had the time needed to recreate for myself new ways of seeing and working. My solution was to stop working on a personal, or “individual style”, and adopt other artists’ “styles” to create compositions I call “Mash-ups.” “Mash-up” is a musical term describing popular songs that are digitally blended or “mashed up.” The result is a new song, often jarring because it echoes the past while operating in the present. The idea of “mashing up” is the catalyst for my new series of paintings. I use fragments of images from popular American artists working in the last half of the 20th century. By fusing these fragments together, I break them loose from the dictates of museums, galleries, and other tastemakers. Outside of their original context, these fragments allow aesthetics of different eras and genres to metamorphose, while simultaneously holding their original identities. Viewers are forced to reassess icons of American art and come up with a new context informed by their own history, rather than those imposed by modernist tradition. After constructing mock-ups from fragments of images, I compose small egg-tempera or gouache paintings on heavy paper attached to plywood panels. The painting styles are those of the artists being “mashed up.” My intention is that viewers identify with the source of these fragments and concurrently engage with the new content of the work. In the end, viewers are left on their own to construct a new story. Jason Stewart
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