An ambivalence about life. A detachment, clean and without guilt that defies the romantic notion concerning childhood innocence. It is a profane illumination of sorts, to live without sentimental condescension or routine exercises in nostalgia yet without the myriad and incomprehensible maze of symbols and signs that the early dawn of reason and common sense seems to bring out the dictator and tyke tyrant inherent inherent in the first lung fulls of logic, an air which seems permeated with the first whiffs, the stale odor as a premonition of a fall from a higher place which paradoxically posits that as we grow physically we lose height.
Dusty Boynton. Whats Normal 2010. ---For children, three-dimensionality was ascertained by touch, not sight, which reached its purest state when it was set apart from other senses. Color itself, however, is not at its most powerful when it seeks a homogeneous essence, but rather when it reveals the incessant movement of tone and shade. Above all, in the eyes of an innocent child it refuses to be subordinate to the tyranny of form... Read More:http://www.rubinoffsculpturepark.org/events/2011Jay.pdf image:http://www.artnet.com/artwork/426112952/156/dusty-boynton-whats-normal.html
…Dusty Boynton’s works are as timelessly fresh as ever: her inner child remains alive and well in her art. Again and again we see children, often as fantastic as the flowers that accompany them. In one work, Cowgirl, they have luscious, rather womanly red lips and four white teeth, the first adult ones a child might grow after it has lost its baby teeth. There is no bottom row of teeth, confirming the child’s immaturity, even as the florid lips confirm its sexual nature (as Freud showed). Indeed, the flower has become an erotogenic zone, if also an intimidating emblem of vagina dentata, thus bringing the male fear of castration into the unconscious of the picture. The flower is a brilliant dream condensation, an uncanny triumph of imaginative displacement: Boynton dreams herself repeatedly. Read More:http://www.dustyboynton.com/reviews-essays/donald_kuspit.html
It is to be standing in the middle of non sensuous similarity where everything is connected, unified, between what is said, thought,meant and seen. Color is simply an arbitrary system of mere signs. There is always an attempt to regain the child’s magical power, to create even artificially a paradise and to access it by rational means, a range of experience that could be described as near schizophrenic. That is the magic of childhood approaching mental derangement, one which delights in sudden sparks, in spontaneous psychotic episodes which penetrate abnormal states that deviate from the norm.
---The child, Benjamin writes in "Old Forgotten Children's Books" (1924), "inhabits" his books. Children, he argues, not only actively describe the stories put before them, but "inscribe the pictures with their own ideas in a more literal sense: they scribble on them"--- Read More:http://www.english.ufl.edu/imagetext/archives/v5_3/ulanowicz/ image:http://www.artsjournal.com/realcleararts/2011/10/toledo-hals-part-two.html
In another column, headed “The Magic of Nature” in the same sequence of notes, he uses a current thought to set up a final quotation from his youth: “In the things from which it shines back silently and in the mute magic of nature, God’s word has become the communication of matter in magical community. / ‘Moreover, the communication of things is certainly communal in a way that grasps the world as such as an undivided whole.’”…
--- ...they are in a class by themselves because they convey the tragicomic moods and perspective of the child. They do not simply appropriate or copy the "child's art" look but are spontaneously made by Boynton's inner child, which remains alive and well however "emotionally enlarged through the greater command of the expression-medium" than a child has, to use the words Hans Hofmann used to distinguish children's art, "approached through the purely subconscious and emotional," and subtly eloquent and aesthetically rich adult art, such as Boynton's--- Read More:http://www.dustyboynton.com/reviews-essays/donald_kuspit.html image:http://www.artnet.com/ag/fineartdetail.asp?wid=425991521&gid=156
…The nonsensuous similarity, now fleeting, speaks to a primal form of communication in which the world is “undivided” — in which “manifest configurations” existed between human and constellation, thing and thing. The experience of standing under the southern moon, of watching children play at being windmills, at looking through the eyeholes of a mask or writing words with graphological attention, is an “anamnesis” of “this lost similarity, which existed in time.” To express these ideas, Benjamin is reconsidering his own youthful, and far more overtly theological, thoughts about the original character of language. Read More:http://finnb.net/a/b/writing.htmla
---Dusty Boynton’s paintings are deceptive, on many levels. Stylistically they bring to mind the drawings of children (if Jeffrey Dahmer made drawings as a child). They also contain traces of more adult artists, such as Willem de Kooning, John Dubuffet, and Marlene Dumas. The initial impressions of children’s drawings are offset by the size of the paintings, some of which are 4 feet wide. On a computer screen they look as if they were made with crayons and hard lead pencils, but they are of course carefully crafted in oil paint. These are very smart works, playful and dark. They make references and stand on their own.--- Read More:http://accordingtowhat.net/category/contemporary-art/page/3/
…“where the world is full of color in a state of identity, innocence and harmony. Children are not ashamed,
since they do not reflect, but only see.”- Benjamin. Crucially, does imaginat
engage with form, form being the implied hazard of structure and rules and does the child emancipate form or the contrary? Color is a receptive quality and opens to the spiritual essence of objects and not their arbitrary forms. So, perhaps to color outside the lines and to live outside the law one must be merely imaginative….
ADDENDUM:
When you look at colors, the intuitions of fantasy, in contrast to the creative imagination, manifest themselves as a primal phenomenon. All form, every outline that man perceives, corresponds to something in him that enables him to reproduce it. The body imitates itself in the form of dance, the hand imitates and appropriates it through drawing. But this ability finds its limits in the world of color. The human body cannot produce color. It does relate to it not creatively but receptively: through the shimmering colors of vision… In short, pure color is the medium of fantasy, a home among clouds for the spoiled child, not the strict canon of the constructive artist.
– Walter Benjamin, from The World of Children’s Books, 1926, tr. by Rodney Livingstone in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume I: 1913-1926, 1996
COMMENTS
