DESTROY THE IMAGE: A Short Evening with Michael Alan

Michael Alan’s studio spilled with art—some pieces were bubble wrapped, some scotch-tapped haphazardly to the walls, some finished and others in progress. Masks, sculptures, costumes, paintings and sketches bled in from the peripherals. On his laptop, Alan flipped through a few older avant-garde music projects as he scanned for the appropriate audio to set the tone for his latest performance. Swimming in art, as we were, Francis Bacon’s declarative mumble, like a chill from the past, put an appropriate umbrella over the scene: “For me, chaos breeds images.” For Alan, now a rising artist in New York City, this didn’t seem unfamiliar territory. The studio confirmed, Alan has experimented deeply in every medium he’s been drawn to.

My maiden encounter with two new pieces that Alan wanted me to pay particular attention to (both works in progress) were a cacophonous face-slap of twirled-up color and shape. Yet, I quickly found myself melting into the motions, suggestions, sensations and possibilities twinkling on the canvas. Alan had put together a kind of meta-landscape of thoughts, feelings, signatures, relationships, and affects in a pleasurable spread of interconnecting colors, densities, lines, curls and dots. It gave the impression of observing our united non-physical experiences as they’re jostled around in physical spaces and situations from an elevated perceptive. Imagine a lengthily and encompassing musical piece meeting the semi-individualism and hyper-connectivity of the Internet, only drawn out in splashes for you. The work was kinetic without being annoying and messy without being pointless—on the contrary, it was invigorating.

Alan: “Everything at the same time, even with just one line. I am speaking about the current state—now, yesterday and the past. Motion and its rapid state of change is reality. My response is to express that in the work, drawings, paintings or installation/performances. I want the work to continually change as you look at it, densely layered or in its subtle form. This is the most honest thing I can say conceptually and back it up with my process. It is important to embrace what is around us—mix it, poor it on the floor and spiral it back out the window.”

Though others may knee-jerk and note a grotesquery (in some) of the pieces, nevertheless there is an undeniable and affirmative jubilance present, in that the works lack an all too common sterility and conceptual lifelessness that’s dominating art today. Rather it veers from this trend and peruses melody. Herein, Alan answers the call of the ever commandeering inorganic, which has tarnished the breadth and depth of sentience.

Alan: “I’m talking to our civilization, a controlling force; we are heavily influenced by endless tirades of nothings. Nothings. Objects, art, propaganda, business filled with nothing—All I can do is try my hardest to make a visual change.”

The most welcoming element about Alan’s meta-landscapes, figure drawings, masks, sculptures, paintings, videos and so on are the pieces are actually welcoming. They are not some anti-post-pseudo-quasi cerebral jive that leaves you gray and confused as to whether or not you accidentally mixed up the contemporary gallery for the shopping mall; left somehow more disenchanted with humanity than you were before entry.

Alan’s work is not only a sensory pleasure to absorb, but it leaves one with inspiration—indeed the true crux of art; the promethean torch relay. This torch is very real here and passed along through performance pieces. The performances he’s organized have recently undergone a metamorphosis. Originally the “Draw-a-Thon Theater” brought together performers that were all too happy to publicly strip-down and take upon roles, characters, and patterns of motion that added a physical intonation to the already present melody. The backdrop, theme and tone changed every performance. There have been shows based around exorcism, corporate drudgery, and Alice in Wonderland, to name a few. More recently, the “Living Instillation” takes these nude performers and saturates them into breathing sculptures of shape and nuisance, but again, they’re alive. Alan then attempts to build people and art through a new symbiosis.

Over the years, artists have gathered around the performances to capture the mobile multi-pieces on flurries of sketchpads, brushes, chalks, inks, markers, oils, film and all. Music always accompanied, sometimes live. Here Alan’s art makes more art—a kind of animated invitation to the community to explore their own unfettered creative instincts. This gives the events the feeling that you’re attending dances you always hoped existed.

Alan: “Distrust what is easy. As a painter, a human, you must go back in on your life, your childhood, your experiences and image relation. Destruction is creation. There is a balance where the destruction meets the calm.”

My interest in Alan’s work came about from its subtle removal from postmodernism’s new storefront form. Postmodern art has been obsessed with re-revealing the horrors of the contemporary world, much like a stage magician that has done his trick so many times the audience becomes conscious of the exact slight-of-hand the performer employs. When these tricks become stale, which is almost an instant punctuation; the performer aggrandizes the illusion to what would be truly Biblio-mythic dramas, if they weren’t such lame charades.

If works of art are valued for their price tags, rather than their ability to inspire, then art is yet another wasteland of spectacle; propagating shock, novelty and liquidity over all other intents. This makes sense when we see the regrettable dominance of an artist like Jeff Koons, whose fortune-priced works look like over-sized versions of the children's toys you find in a 25-cent vending machine on your way out of a supermarket; or Damien Hirst who nonchalantly exalted the media-greed-war zeitgeist with his “For the Love of God”: a human skull fashioned out of platinum and adorned with nearly ten thousand diamonds. (Hirst was recently interviewed alongside Shawn Carter, better known as “Jay-Z,” another example of artistic subversion turned profit, as the roots of hip-hop are historically antiestablishment, yet like his hip-pop contemporaries, it’s all about getting rich or dying in the line of revenue duties.) Here we have a standoffish and alienating experience—One of shock, then gloom. These types of art spectacles are yet another example of the flourishing (to the point of tragically laughable) dead-ends created by a deified, art for profit-motivated status quo. These anti-intellectual absurdities, hailed as ‘postmodernism’, accent the collective, morbidly overzealous swan song of our pathologically hip species.

Alan: "To find an honest image: destroy, distress, and inspect…in my work I try to create an examination rather than an answer of multiple realities. But the main focus is with change. By showing change I address all of the above and alter the image. If everything is changing than the image should not stay the same."

It is roundly encouraging to see that others have caught on as Alan's multitude of works and performances get the attention they deserve. In my own estimation, it's due to Alan's uncanny hacking into the childlike, if not a nearly naked point-of-view. His works are bequeathed of the verbally agreed-upon and actively conventionalized devastation of life and meaning. A seemingly pre-nurtured perceptive and expression has observably opened up a floodgate of creativity, not only in Alan himself, but in works of others—this is what seems responsible for the sustained interest in Alan’s happenings. It is art that is inspiring and producing more art through its very existence. As the New York Times said, “To recapture what has been lost… update it with a huge splash of paint.” I am not alone in feeling an air of thrill after galumphing away from an encounter with this wavelength of creativity.

See more at: http://www.michaelalanart.com/art/
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