My in-process essay on tradition, emulation, and neo-avant-garde, an idiosyncratic and subjective reply to Jeff Wall's 2006 Hermes lecture, is coming to occupy most of my non-store time. It's the first essay I've written that's not targeted to a particular exhibition, publication, or audience. About 2000 words so far, in cramped longhand, mostly written on the ferry on the way to or from Vancouver Island. A weird mix of references and citations, most previously unknown to me: Kant's Critique of the Power of Judgement; Marx's Capital; Adorno and Horkheimer's Dialectic of Enlightenment; Plato; Aristotle; Elaine Sturtevant's cryptic and funny "artist's statements." Am I enjoying the process? Not really; I'd much rather be out with the camera, or reading novels, or at the local garden center, loading up on perennials for my balcony tubs and windowboxes. But it seems important to test the relevance of these sources against lived experience, against reading on the bus, Skytrain, or ferry, and against feeling sad, lonely, hung-over, and grey. I guess I am interrogating the relevance of critical theory and philosophy to the "lived experience" that generates my pictures. Other artworks (Wall's; Sturtevant's; Lee's; Daumier's; Reubens') are intensely relevant to this process; there seems to be no barrier between them and life. I absorb theory and philosophy much more slowly, and with far greater difficulty. It seems important to read the source texts without a secondary critical apparatus, or the coercive "help" of tenured faculty. Maybe I will misread my sources, but the misreadings will be my own, and no one else's.

(Re-edited mid-afternoon in response to repeat calls for clarification)
- posted by cjb @ 10:32 AM