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ESSAY: Frank Shifreen and the Materialism of Shamanistic Painterly Visions

12.20.06

An essay I wrote about my good friend Frank Shifreen in reaction to criticism I over heard on his painting art show at Macy Gallery at Teachers College at Columbia University.


Frank Shifreen and the Materialism of Shamanistic Painterly Visions

Frank Shifreen himself can explain in much greater detail than I can the content of his art: the shamanic inspirations and the like that gave rise to his body of imaginative work. It is always unfair for a writer to try to understand what was 'meant' by or what some image might ‘represent’ compared to the way the artist himself might describe it. As a good friend of Frank's, I would hate to try and explain the intricacies and complexities in the content of the images and get it wrong!

Contemporary painting (at least through my observations of contemporary art magazines, gallery and internet imagery, as well as being involved in the field for over a decade) has become increasingly reliant upon cleverness in the manipulation of the image. There is a kind of pop perfection that increases salability and commercial value—paintings to be seen on the walls of wealthy patrons or corporate offices, lending cultural power and prestige—a failure of art as the aggravator of cultural transformations. To quote Paul Virilio (2005),
“They have masked the failure or the accident with commercial success
…the pride of contemporary art has masked its failure and its weakness.
You have the inflation of the dealers, the immense wealth of the galleries
and the artists, the delirious prices of contemporary painters, but at the
same time it’s a façade, and it’s going to fall. (p. 64)”

Contemporary painting serves as a propaganda tool, using its creator in unsuspecting ways to realize the imagery of the capital classes. It is hung as a sign of power on the walls of an office, a private home, etc., in order to draw an onlooker into the 'behind-the-scenes' of who or what that institution is in support of. This is so whether the images presented are for 'charitable' means (e.g., children’s art) or blatant prestige (as in, ‘Have you seen my Picasso?’). There is always going to be a certain amount of exploitation of the image maker involved. Images become advertisements, marketing ploys for whatever particular public or private establishment hangs them, as Raymond Williams (1980) might say.

Materialistically, contemporary painting is an art that produces `against the grain.’ Natural image flows are deemed uninteresting. Materials must be pushed to their limits, breaking their bonds; they are made to act one way as opposed to letting the material properties of the paint, for instance speak for themselves. Letting materials flow with their given properties is uninteresting to the average population that has been conditioned by electronic technologies such as the television and film to expect some ‘special effect’ from the materials involved. It is not a question of pushing the material and making it do what one chooses but, instead, as Gilles Deleuze (1987) writes, “it is a question of surrendering to the [material], then following where it leads by connection operations to a materiality instead of imposing a form upon matter. (p. 408)”

Peace is uninteresting. War breaks the boredom. Sanding against the grain dominates the ecologies of the wood. Contemporary painting dominates the eyes of its observers.

Frank Shifreen’s work has never been a work of domination. He acts intuitively in reaction to the materials that he is given; he paints with the grain. He goes with the flows, like a seasoned craftsman, though not at all with the same aesthetic of refinement.

As a practicing artist in New York City from the late 1960's until today, Frank has a very compelling personal historical knowledge of contemporary artistic practice. He's been around; he knows the scene and is acquainted personally with many of the recognizable names involved in the art world over the past four decades. But no matter how the trends and fads have fluctuated, Frank has always remained on the edge of fame, not stepping into or receding but always experimenting with the 'new' – and always staying true to
himself.

Though new materials for artists to work with are always emerging, Frank has never been one to be afraid to experiment and incorporate new technologies into his work: film, regular and then digital video, and other types of digital manipulation. All these he has
employed to express himself naturally with various forms.

Frank’s work is much less interested in clever trickery than in informing spectators on the processes involved in their own personal creative processes. Paint sometimes randomly splatters on the edges and across the surfaces. His canvases look ancient and dusty as if they were just pulled from an attic or museum. His palette can be bright but often recedes into grays, a product of the mixing of contrasting colors. Intense expressive actions are often embedded in the surfaces.

His recent show at Macy Gallery was a testament to these processes in improvisation. This work presents itself less as a recent body of work and more as a recently created retrospective. Ideas build on each other and layers of information erupt from the canvas
surfaces. Whether the surface is physically large or small the same emotional energy prevails in each.

This work, like many of Frank’s other works, has one odd inherent property – the massive body of work itself resists being edited down and insists on retaining its cluttered character – and I do not mean this in a bad way. Instead this body of work calls viewers into Frank’s own world, as his work always does.

Frank’s work becomes more of an ongoing performance piece that has no beginning and no end – as Deleuze (1987) might say “always in a state of becoming (p. 408).” And many times this performance is the wonderful nature of Frank himself! Unfortunately this performance aspect is very seldom noticed, typically being discarded as nothing more that a disturbance. But perhaps the greatest art is the disturbance itself! In every regard, Frank has gotten this completely right.

There is a constant fluctuation in Frank's body of work—his painting, sculpture, and his performance of concepts and ideas—by virtue of their convergences that interweave in a complex mesh of notions and intensities. Sometimes those intensities are very high and even reach their zenith, a point of no return. At other times they are reserved and
intellectually driven. It is this interesting balance and juxtaposition of intensities that I find most interesting in Frank's work.

The work is not modernist, as one might think or want it to be. It is not always pretty or well executed in style. It is not like a well-designed, oiled machine that will always run reliably the same. The painted works do not have what one might call a 'minimalist'
aesthetic that is sometimes looked for in 'high' art nor an expressionist one that one might assume from the artist's rich artistic history. There are simply too many oddities and peculiarities involved for his work to be defined or categorized easily. This might be a
problem for the traditionalist or formalist onlooker who has been institutionally educated in the ways and means of idealized 'artistic' languages—which often conform to the properties of the economy. Unconventional and dissenting ideas often don't come out of established and conventional functions.

As a result, this work is not always going to sit pretty in a gallery as we might think it should. It could be said to be a period of intense action laid out as a presentation of a history that happened to take place—a history of movement and motion, of intensities and trauma that played out over a given amount of time. This production time has been a time of weaving processes and bifurcations.

One cannot edit 'the real,' or real-time, as it happens; only afterwards can the
manipulations (such as digital ones) take place. You cannot edit a burst of energy nor can you edit a burst of creativity or improvisation as it is taking place. Imagine Miles Davis and John Coltrane being edited down from a 50+ minute piece to a 3.5 minute radio
version for the consumer—what a tragedy that would be! This is work that is not about the hit radio station. It is meant to be experienced in the real-time in which the work was produced, as Frank Shifreen himself should be experienced in real-time—closer to a do-it-yourself aesthetic or total punk rock than some L.A. glam band. It is anarchistic art of the highest caliber.

Frank is not interested in the creation of pop-cultural manipulations. He is not interested in 'edits' of reality that have the potential to deceive the viewer and manipulate the image for political goals or commercial appeal. The work is much closer to the Situationist practice of drifting, of losing oneself, abandoning all conventional purposes and
rationalized coordinates to seek out radically distinctive orientations in experience, but on an unpredicted global scale as though you could wander across entire regions, spanning the gaps between worlds or spiraling weightlessly through civilizations (Attali, 1985).

In his Macy Gallery show, the intensity of the experience of the specific actions in painting was laid out as a bare bones system—a historical process revealed, a demonstration of real-time let-go, without holding back or letting up. This reflects an experience of painting as process not as product, a continuation that is always continuing
despite the appearance of static moments.

Arguably, Frank's work is that of an outcast on the fringe of the institution. An outcast sees society in a particularly political light, as opposed to, say, the art historian, who reflects society's deepest values. But in some ways, the work, like Frank himself, has gained the acceptance of both the outside and the inside - the practitioner and the
institution. He is, as Jacques Attali (1985) states, "simultaneously excluded (relegated to a place near the bottom of the social hierarchy) and superhuman (the genius, the adored and deified star). Simultaneously a separator and an integrator."(p. 12)

The paintings presented in the gallery were a burst of temporary energy, hung for approval or non-approval. But no matter how one might feel, all onlookers had to admit that this show was brutally honest on all accounts. The work told us we are all dreaming that we can regain a certain intellectual and artistic dignity.

References:
Attali, J. (1985). Noise: The Political Economy of Music. University of Minnesota Press.

Deleuze, G. & Guattari, F. (1987). A Thousand Plateaus. University of Minnesota Press.

Virilio, Paul. (2005). The Accident of Art. Semiotext(e). New York: Columbia University

Williams, Raymond. (1980). Culture and Materialism. London: Verso. (See Chapter 4, Advertising: The Magic System)

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