Art and Business by Cecil Touchon 1997

I will be speaking from my own experience in being involved in the
exhibition and sale of my work through the gallery market over the last
eighteen years. While I have had considerable experience in this
particular area, my knowledge is limited to my own experiences and my
views are not necessarily the same as other artists. However, having
achieved a certain degree of success, which is to say, I make my living
at this point solely from the sale of my art work, perhaps some of my
observations will be of use to others.

To make a living as an artist is probably one of the most difficult,
frustrating and close to impossible things that anyone can decide to
take up as a goal in life. Nevertheless, if you achieve this goal, it is
one of the most rewarding achievements that anyone could hope for.
Imagine the thrill of going into a bank to get a loan for a house solely
on your art income and having the banker not only take you seriously,
but actually approve the loan! I did this very thing just last year.
Wow! What a feeling! Just three years ago I couldn't make the electric
bill and had my power turned off more than once over the years.

Don't get me wrong, there is nothing wrong with being poor if you don't
mind not being able to buy the supplies that you need or have a studio
to work in or be taken seriously by your family or the community at
large for that matter. Like it or not, people in general think that you
are just puttering around and not taking life seriously if you are not
making a living from your work. Strange but true.

option #1 If there is some other way that you can enjoy making a living,
go for it. Your art will suffer in terms of the amount of time that you
can devote to your art making but there is no pressure on you to produce
a living from your art activity. For many, the security of having a
steady income from teaching or some other activity is well worth this
sacrifice. If you are married, your spouse will be happy that you are
making a living at some socially acceptable activity but will be jealous
of your free time and not too crazy about you spending it in the studio
that you have confiscated from your living space especially if you are
spending some of the household budget on your unproven (financially)
activity. For all but the imaginative, if your not producing objects of
clear and obvious value, then you are just screwing around.

option #2 If you know that you will not be satisfied with option #1 but
are not financially independent try this. Work at something that will
make you some kind of a living but work hard in the studio on off hours
with the idea that art making is you first priority and that you have
every intention of eventually making a living from your efforts. In this
case you will want to do 'outside work' as a way to derive income to
support your goal of becoming a full time artist at some point in the
future. But don't get confused. Don't let the steady or perhaps good
income that you might be making from your job seduce you into reverting
to option one. You may not see any real income from your art for years
so dig in, work hard and don't think about what you could have done or
that what you are doing might fail. It is easy to fall into this trap so
you have to insure that you won't. How do you do that? How do you have
the confidence and faith to go on for years in the face of the near
impossible odds of 'making it'?

Secret: Most artists don't make it because they don't think that they
will make it and therefore it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Most
artists don't make it because they don't plan to make it. If you don't
think that you will be successful; if you don't plan to be successful;
if you don't put in the effort to be successful, you won't be
successful. No question about it.

Is it sheer stupidity to think that you can succeed as an artist? No. It
may seem that there are too many artists and too few galleries and
buyers but there is always a place for good work and a serious,
dedicated worker. When you go to the galleries you will notice that a
sizable portion of the work is not that great.Yet, some of those artists
are making a living from their work so there is always room for good,
solid work.

Is there a way to plan on being successful? Yes. You make a business
plan with short and long range goals. You schedule your time just like
any body else that plans on being successful. You set deadlines that you
work toward to get the work made and to get the work out on the market.
You study the logistics of your art and hone your production into
manageable, shippable, handleable, storable, affordable products.
Business-wise you are doing research and development, manufacturing,
representing your art business, wholesaling and shipping your product to
retail outlets (galleries).

Most artists may regard this as crass commercialism and it is, but let's
get real, this is the environment that we currently live in and it isn't
going to change any time soon. The way I think about it is like this.
When I am in the studio I am an artist engaged in my own weird art
activity. I think about my art, I make my art and I admire my work. I
hang it in my house and look at it. I consider all of the same issues
that I would other wise think about. But then, when it is finished and I
am finished with it, I become a business man with an object that I want
to convert to cash so that I can buy more supplies and pay the household
bills and maybe even go out for dinner once in a while. Being an artist
is the first thing you have to achieve but if you plan to support
yourself and your activity you have to put considerable efforts into
making business an equally important area of disciplined effort.

Secret: You can only make as much income as you have in production.

This seems very obvious yet it took me years to realize and exploit this
simple truth. It dawned on me like a revelation. I felt like I was
selling a lot of work and was starting to become successful but my check
account didn't agree with me. I wondered, what can be the problem? I
decided to keep meticulous records of my production in a journal noting
the size, medium, retail and wholesale price, date of completion, and
what gallery it went to. It didn't take long before I figured out that I
was only producing a small amount of wholesale income over the course of
a year due to my low prices and very small works so that even if I sold
the entire year's production - which is asking a lot - I still would be
very poor. No wonder I wasn't making enough money! I then decided to
make significantly larger works so that when they sold it would be a
good chunk of money. I then also made the sizes that I knew would sell.
In addition, I raised my prices. Between these two things it wasn't long
before I was actually making enough money to support myself. So simple,
and yet, if you don't analyze, and take into account this very practical
matter, you will keep yourself in the poorhouse no matter how hard you
work.

So keep a production journal. You might want to keep much more extensive
notes or even more rudimentary than mine but be sure to keep a steady
track of you work. Maybe you title your work maybe you don't but at the
minimum give each work an inventory number so that you can track you
progress or lack of progress and so that, without looking at the work,
distinguish one from another. Doing this will yield all kinds of
important information. You can track what times of the year that you
tend to be the most productive. You can study the range of sizes and
types of work that you have been making and you will be able to discover
your working pattern and rhythm. Knowing these things from your record
keeping will greatly increase your ability to plan out your future and
understand your limits.

As a young artist you have no history except the history that you
learned in art school. From keeping records of your work, you are
building a history for yourself that you will later be able to deepen
your self-knowledge with. This will help you to focus on your main
interests instead of drifting along from one impulse to another without
being aware of the larger patterns that will be emerging in you work
over long periods of time. The more clarity that you can achieve about
you working process, the more clear and refined your work will become
and therefore, the better it is for your business.

Personally, I found that if I work in series, I can build several
cohesive bodies of work that I can market and that viewers can identify
as my work. This does not mean that you have to develop a 'signature
style' that you are going to be stuck with for the rest of your life.
Break down the various concerns within your body of work and isolate
them into several different series of work so that you can pursue
several avenues of research at the same time. This way, when you have
come to an impasse in one branch of your work or you have played it all
the way out, you have several other ongoing series of work that you can
jump over to without coming to a standstill. In addition, this gives you
the ability to experiment in one body of work and then import successful
techniques or elements into other compatible series of your work.
Working like this with several directions being developed you can work
on without a pause.

Picasso, I notice did this - by doing something else, he took a break or
rest from one thing while doing another and then went back to the first
thing when he was refreshed. Put yourself on the same rigid schedule you
would do on any job. Being an artist is about the hours put in to it not
the years. Lots of people can say they have been working as an artist
for years but they might mean they put an average of 5 hours a week at
their art on saterday afternoon. You can see that someone who puts in 60
hours a week for a year has put in the same as 12 years of the other
person who put 5 hours a week. Big difference!

Secret: Talent without disciplined effort is worthless. Develop
disciplined work habits and be efficient with your time.

If you plan on being a full time artist you must learn to work in a
self-motivated and disciplined manner. This means that you are not
standing around waiting for inspiration to work. Inspiration comes while
you are working. To go into the studio and begin to work is the primer
that your mind needs in order to access intuition and inspiration. Much
of the work in the studio doesn't need to be inspired anyway. There is a
lot of work that you can do even if you are not able to get inspired.
Build stretchers if your a painter or sweep and organize or catch up on
your notes or read an art magazine. You can do some research at the
library looking for galleries that you might want to send slides to,
and, oh yes, take slides of your work (digital photos), label them,
organize them by type and date and protect them.

Set 'job hours' for your self and no matter what, work when it is time
to work. Make your working habits into a daily routine and stick to it.
When you use your art time for other purposes you are seriously
undermining your future. It is going to take "X' number of hours to
achieve a favorable business condition and it is a shame of you piddle
away those hours over years of time when you could have fit those same
number of hours into half as many years. In addition, if you work
regularly the people around you will realize that you are serious
eventually and won't see your art time as free time that you could be
doing some favor or task for them during that time period. When do your
friends come to bother you or expect you to drop what you are doing if
you are at a 'job'? Not very often! Thus, tell people you are at work
and you cannot be disturbed. Also, the advantage of keeping regular
hours creates a rhythm so that it becomes easy for you to work because
you don't have to waste energy getting yourself cranked back up like you
do if your work habits are more sporadic. Light incense of do some
repetative ritual every time when you first start working for the day.
This trains your subconscious mind to know when to be creative. And it
will be!

Secret: If you don't take yourself seriously, don't expect anyone else to.

It took me until I was nearly thirty before I was willing to say, "I am
an artist." When you are not making a living as an artist and your
hardly working in the studio, it is indeed a strange feeling to hear
these words coming out of your mouth. You feel like a sham.
Nevertheless, if you are doing the above mentioned items you have a
right to call yourself one even if it doesn't seem to ring true.

There are a number of things that you can do to help you take on the
personal identity of an artist and that you are in the process of
creating a profession out of your efforts.

1) Make up a name for your business like, John Smith Contemporary Art go
down to city hall and get an Assumed Name Certificate for your business.

2) Then go to your state comptroller's office and get a state sales tax
number.

3) go to the bank and open a business account with your company name.

4) get a Federal Tax I.D. number from the federal government. You can
write off you business expenses from your taxes if you are making enough
money that you are paying taxes.

5) start looking around for places where you can buy wholesale as a
business. Most places won't give you a discount but some will. Find out
who they are. For instance, you can buy canvas in bulk for wholesale
from canvas and awning distributors. As an artist you are a wholesaler
that means if you have a sales tax number, anything to do with business
can be purchased without paying the sales tax.

6) get some business cards, stationary, etc. with your business name on
it so that when you approach galleries you look like a business. This
always helps and make you look like your serious. Galleries want to feel
that they can depend on you to provide professional service to them when
they need it. Business-wise, think of yourself as a manufacturer and
wholesaler. If you don't feel that you will be at you current address
for a long time but will probably be living in the same city, get a post
office box for an address and don't put a phone number if you think it
will change. Or just put your website as an address and keep your
current address on your website.

7) put together your artist packet that includes images of your art, an
artist statement, a resume, a cover letter and a list of the images with
information about each one on it. Have several of these set up and ready
to go in a file box.

With a focused effort you can do all of these things in about a week's
time assuming that you can get some time during day-time business hours.
All of this effort and this business-image development can make a big
difference in conditioning your mind into the proper mind-set for taking
what you are doing seriously and encouraging others to do the same.

Secret: Even if people don't understand what you are doing they will, at
least, respect how well it was done.

I remember reading an article that someone wrote about a biennial in
Italy that discussed the general public's attitude about sculpture. If
the sculpture was in a traditional medium and of apparent quality,
nobody messed with it. If recognizable quality was absent, the pieces
were defaced. There are a number of interpretations that can be advanced
about this but for our purpose I am proposing that people in general
expect to see quality in art and when craftsmanship is lacking so is
respect from the viewer.

<>If there is any field where extravagance, in terms of craftsmanship,
can be lavished onto an object, it is art. Everyone can appreciate
quality and after a work's initial interest has been assimilated, it is
the quality of the work that will then be scrutinized. To be creative
without the application of craft-skill seriously undermines the
appreciation of a work of art and viewers will soon lose interest and
you will too. But if a work shines out, because of the skillful
attention put into a work's construction, the viewer will linger to
enjoy the fineness of the work's craftsmanship even if they would
otherwise not be interested in the type of art that is being presented.

To keep quality uppermost in your mind, think to yourself that your work
will one day be hanging in the museums of the world and everyone will be
handling it with white gloves. You don't want to be embarrassed by the
fact that you didn't bother to put enough attention on the quality of
your work to warrant such treatment. Construct your work so that it can
hang with confidence on the same wall with any masterwork of a similar
style found anywhere. Whether your work ends up in such places or not
makes no difference. But, by virtue of the fact that you have taken such
standards into consideration , you will greatly enhance the quality and
future value of your work.

Secret: If you don't have a place to work, you won't.

Without a dedicated studio space that is sitting there waiting for you
to come and work in it, the possibility that you will work on a regular
basis is greatly diminished. Depending on the type of work that you do,
you must design a dedicated working space into your living space. Even
if all you can set aside is a space the size of a drafting table, at
least it is something. It is a dedicated space. I have worked is spaces
as small as a tiny bedroom and been able to continue making art. So it
is not the size of the space that is so important as it is the fact that
it is a studio space that is not used for any other purpose. If you say,
"I can't work because I need more room to make the scale of work that I
need to make." then you are really saying , "I don't want to work." Live
within you abilities. If you don't have the space or money to work at
the scale that you dream about, adapt. Make smaller works, make models
of the pieces and use those as the main body of your work until you have
a bigger space and more money. There may be things that can only be
experienced at a large scale but if your prohibited from working at this
scale that shouldn't stop you from working. If you want to work you have
to figure out how you can do it. It is much better to make a hundred
models of future works and develop you image and style than to wait
around to win the lottery so that you can build that dream piece.

Secret: There is a market for almost anything.

When thinking about your work as a product to be sold, don't confuse
this with trying to guess what collectors want to buy. It is a bad
mistake to attempt to make art that you think people want to buy. Make
art that you want to make. Make art that is important to you. There is a
market for your work because there are collectors who will appreciate
what you are doing. Your market may be large or small but you won't know
that until it is out there in the public eye. So don't worry about it or
let this effect your creative impulses or progress.

However, there are things that you can do in designing you work so that
it is easy for galleries to show, store and handle it and for collectors
to buy and display it. For instance, if you make a lot of drawings, make
them on good paper instead of napkins or what ever is laying around.
This way, you are more likely to be able to convert you drawings into
sellable objects instead of just scraps of paper that have some drawing
marks on them. If your going to mess around with sculptural ideas, use
some decent material instead of a ratty piece of cardboard unless, of
course, that is an important material aspect of the piece. In short,
take presentational considerations into account on even the most
fleeting of your creative impulses. You are going to make art anyway so
why not add a little extra attention and make something that can be
appreciated as a work of art and sold when you are finished with it?

Secret: Art is art and business is business. Don't confuse the two.

Don't take business matters into account when you are working in the
studio. Make art! While you will want to make life easy on yourself by
designing your work to be sold, transported and stored, don't let
business effect your creativity. On the other hand, when it is time to
deal with the business end of things, be professional and be serious.
Don't let sentiment or ego as an artist effect you business judgment.
You, the business person are a representative of you, the artist. As a
business person, your interest is business not art. As an artist, your
interest is art not business. Learn how to interchangeably wear these
two different hats. When you can integrate these two very different
things and create a harmonious balance between the two, you will be
successful.

Secret: Respect your audience. Nobody likes to be insulted or made fun of.

If you intend to publicly exhibit and sell your work, you must take your
audience into consideration. Art is a form of communication so be clear
as to what you are communicating and to whom. Since your work will be
seen one on one with your viewing audience, you are carrying on a
conversation with the viewer all be it visual instead of audial. Thus,
imagine, while you are working that you are at a public gathering and
conversing with people. This is a good guide for how to work.Give enough
information in your art for people to feel that they have somehow
understood what you said instead of being cagy and making your work
impenetrable. This doesn't mean you have to be overly obvious or
excessively intellectual or provide a map to the uneducated. But it does
mean that you need to realize that most of the viewers don't know you
personally and if they cannot find an opening into the conversation,
which is your art, then you have lost them. This is your fault not the
viewer's. Provide enough cues in your work to give some modicum of
access to the viewer just as you would in a conversation.

Additionally, if your work is aggressive and insulting in its imagery or
is excessively crass or crude, it may have some shock value that will
get people to look at it for a moment, but not many people will be too
excited about having such work around on a permanent basis in their
personal environment.

The Hidden Sphere #45

A raw canvas or a lump of clay seem incomplete yet this incompleteness is, for the master craftsman, their perfection for they give rise to all shapes and forms.
Silence seems empty yet it is the greatest fullness to the ears of the musician, 
all sounds arise from it. 
 
Even though  the musician  is a master of his instrument,
his object is not to get from the first note to the last as swiftly as possible.
Even though the painter is a master of technique,  
it is the depth of his intuition that shows his greatness.
Even though  the poet is a master of words and their meanings,
His most ecstatic utterances often sound, at first, like gibberish. 
 
The mastery of technique  provides the  ability  to express creativity. 
Yet, creativity is not gained by technique. 
 
By selfless abandon the master craftsman gets in touch
with the Creative Harmony. 
He allows it to express itself through his being,  
he becomes an empty  vessel. 

The Hidden Sphere #03

When we place the master craftsmen who have preceded us upon a pedestal,  
we forget that we too have the same potential and therefore do not strive.
When we place too high of a value on the objects of art  
collectors begin to horde them for investment value,
 museums begin to protect them for their monetary value  
and start to seem like bank vaults.  
Like this, art loses its real value.
 
Therefore, the master craftsman advocates
the value of striving with humility and simplicity, 
The value of working at one's craft
without greedy ambition,
and the value of avoiding the trap of trying
to cleverly follow the fashionable.

The New Beautiful

 The New Beautiful

For nearly one hundred years artists, designers, architects and engineers have been working on a huge joint project. All of this work goes on behind the scenes and now a days without even too much hoopla if mentioned at all. It is a conspiracy of epic proportion that has seeped into every facet of our everyday lives. Whether it be in the clothes that we wear, the products that we buy, the media that we watch, listen to or use, the buildings we live and work in, even the very patterns of how we structure our daily lives, and how we think, have all been conceived, designed and produced by this cabal of which I speak.

Who are these people and what do they stand for? They are cultural providers, product designers, politicians, theorists, city planners, corporate leaders, and people in thousands of other positions we have never heard of whose names and faces we shall never know. They all believe in a better world, a world well designed, where every detail has been thought out and made to work in harmony with a myriad of other items that form the fabric of modern life.

They believe in things like ‘Less is More’ and ‘Form Follows Function’, where each object is build from the ground up as a total object, whole and integral in its purpose. Clean, elegant, sleek.

When we think of Totalitarianism we usually think of Nazi Germany’s Hitler or Russia’s Stalin. However, Totalitarianism from a design point of view is what has been encouraged for decades. This has to do with setting national and international standards for everything from book design to highway systems and automobiles and their parts, to construction materials for buildings. This is to aide in creating a seamless world where costs of manufacture are kept relatively affordable for all and the designer has predictable systems of manufacture to design with. Previously, say 100 years ago, everything was hand made and custom built. There were no two things the same. Totalitarian design has changed how we do everything.

The business end of this same group of people however, invented things like planned obsolescence and the forever new and improved version of almost everything. This is good in that it creates constant demand and allows for change. The down side is change merely for the sake of change and the intentionally designed-in self destruction of products leads to huge profits and unbelievable waste.

However, for the consumer with the money to spend, there seems to be no complaint about the rather short expiration date on the objects we buy. Many are happy to move on to a new style every 6 months. I would suggest however that our insistence on newness, while certainly accepted and embraced by the world of fashion, is not appropriate for the world of fine art. The fine arts as I see them deal with the larger and longer cycles of culture where decades and centuries are the proper increments to measure by rather than the changing of seasons. Attempting to constantly strive after making something continuously new represents more of a social dysfunction that has been creeping into the American dream for quite a long time now like a mouth full of cavities after years of constantly eating refined sugar.

Never the less, the point I wish to focus on is the idea that aesthetics have change so significantly over the last 75 years that we can now say, what was modern and once strange and radical and painfully isolated in a world built over previous centuries, has now become the New Beautiful and this new beautiful is a world where abstract painting, minimalist furnishings and never before seen colors integrate with science and technology to create an environment that wider and wider circles of people can appreciate and enjoy.

I do not mean to say that the urban world will become an empty, sterile environment where only a machine could feel at home. There is no doubt that humanity is sentimental and has a love of history and it artifacts. We love to surround ourselves with things of every period and collect artifacts from cultures all over the world. But still, there is an ever growing sensibility that prefers what is fresh, forward looking and cleanly organized.

It is in the context of this modern world that my work fits and it is this New Beautiful that my work is intended to be a part of. There are a lot of things on the contemporary scene masquerading as art but are more properly expressions of politics, sociology, psychology, sexual identity and the exploration of ethnicity. Perhaps they are areas of human interest belonging to a theatrical venue, the halls of congress or a psychologist’s chaise lounge, but are not necessarily suited to a visual art gallery setting.

Art galleries by and large are for the exhibition of works of visual art. Visual art is art that is made for the eye, for being looked at, studied, examined and enjoyed with the eye. A visual work of art has only its sensuality to speak for it because a truly visual work of art has no other subject that it is about. It is about seeing and what can be grasped by observation.

If one is to remove and strip away everything that prevents seeing a painting as anything other than itself then we are left with a non-objective or abstract painting. This is a wholly modern invention. Such paintings depend completely on the elements of composition, color, shape, process and surface to provide interest and as such are a kind of visual music that is gradually taken in by the constantly moving focal point of the viewer. How and what the viewer assimilates or acquires of the image through thousands of movements of the focal point is the work of the painter who is not unlike a composer of music. The enjoyment of such visual art is very much in the same category as the enjoyment of a symphony or chamber music.

As a visual object, a work of art by its very nature has something to do with aesthetics which are matters of artistic beauty and artistic sensibility. That sensibility, like all things modern needs to reflect the ideals of this total world that is being jointly created by those previously mentioned conspirators. Painters have had, from the beginning, an honored position in proposing the New Beautiful as it was painters who first proposed the designs of this new world we now live in. Imagine the excitement and anxiety of those early pioneers of visual design and how difficult the process of understanding must have been for them!

In the process however, the idea of Newness came into vogue. “Out with the old, in with the new!” became a major battle cry of the avant garde. Now, many years later, perhaps the idea of continual newness and the urgency and anxiety and perplexity associated with it is no longer that important. Perhaps, now that the whole world is new we can relax a bit and go back and look over the path of newness and see if there are not some things that need to be rethought, redesigned, or remodeled. Maybe New today should be more about Renew and about reinvigorating the best of what has thus far happened. Perhaps some editing is in order. Perhaps we need to reexamine how we have gotten here and where it is we are headed to besides the next new thing.

Many have given up or forgotten or even have never known the ideas and ideals that have gotten us to where we are today. I propose that there is a New Beautiful and it is all around us and that we need to take a fresh look at where our forefathers have taken us and decide for ourselves to join in the conversation and to articulate our ideals and take up our part to reshape the future into a place we all want and are able to live in.

What are these ideals? They have to do with harmony and the nurturing of human dignity and the protection of human rights. They have to do with an embrace of diversity as well as a quest for unity, a respect for nature and the natural. And there is the need for style and beauty. We should not be embarrassed to use the word beautiful as many artists today seem to be. The New Beautiful is strong and light and free. It is experimental and tentative yet elegant, simple and idealistic. What was at first naïve, in time and with practice, culminates not in pessimism but in wisdom.

A Collage Artist’s Activity

Collage artists often work according to certain ideas that have to do with exploiting found material. The vast glut of paper materials generated over the last 100 years not only provides a glimpse into the history of the recent past but the ephemera collected often reveals a uniquely private history whose authenticity and genuineness is highly prized. The subtle patinas gathered over the years by these surfaces add a great deal to the sensual quality of the collage works generated from them. The hunt for materials is a big part of a collage artist’s activity and these materials, to a great degree, determine the nature of the artist’s work and in my case, I welcome the stimulus that becomes the impetus for new methods of construction and new compositional ideas. Most often, in years past, I have focused on book sized papers found in second hand shops, flea markets and antique stores from Paris, Texas to Paris France. Recently, however, I have taken an interest in street posters and roadside billboards and the large typographic shapes that they contain in a quest to move from the small intimate scale I have been accustomed to toward a comparatively larger scale of work that might allow me to work on canvas and panel supports without losing the attention to detail. I think of these works as a sort of visual or concrete poetry albeit a nonobjective one whose interest is not in being tied to literary meaning but a meaning of a purely visual nature. -- “Man is an apparatus through which the Divine may contemplate Itself.” Cecil Touchon

"Starting demands continuing."

Composition

“Although we are bombarded daily with volumes of fragmented and disconnected information, there remains an underlying harmony at work. Collage is seemingly haphazard, yet one can control the medium through the various rules of composition. It is the composition of the whole that brings disparate elements into harmony with one another. The importance of composition cannot be overstated”

"Visual art is art that is made for the eye, for being looked at, studied, examined and enjoyed with the eye. A visual work of art has only its sensuality to speak for it because a truly visual work of art has no other subject that it is about. It is about seeing and what can be grasped by observation."

"There are a lot of things on the contemporary scene masquerading as art but are more properly expressions of politics, sociology, psychology, sexual identity and the exploration of ethnicity. Perhaps they are areas of human interest belonging to a theatrical venue, the halls of congress or a psychologist’s chaise lounge, but are not necessarily suited to a visual art gallery setting."

"The hand-made quality of human perfection, with its quirkiness and lack of exactness is the domain of art while the exactness and precision of machine perfection is the domain of applied design."

“We should strive toward clarity of vision and purity of heart - that our works bridge the past to the future - that we broaden our view to its limits and recognize and respect our place in history.”

Elegance

"Elegance suggests refinement to the point of simplicity, a dignified simplicity, reducing and honing one’s artistic quest to its most elemental qualities."

From: Cecil Touchon: Cut & Paste Interview By Matthew Rose 2009 

Seeing Needs to be Inward

"Art, at any given time is always about imagining, envisioning, developing perspective, insight and so forth – it is all about seeing. But I think the seeing really needs to be more inward especially in these times when everything all around us is screaming for our constant attention"

From: Cecil Touchon: Cut & Paste Interview By Matthew Rose 2009  

Things to Do

"Who we are has to be at the core of whatever we see in contemporary art. So getting to who we are would need to be at the top of our list of things to do I should think." 


From: Cecil Touchon: Cut & Paste Interview By Matthew Rose 2009

Very Little about Everything

"Most people – even in the art world – know very little about almost everything." 

From: Cecil Touchon: Cut & Paste Interview By Matthew Rose 2009

Failure Assumes an Expectation of Result

"When I start a collage I don’t really have a way to fail since failure assumes an expectation of some particular result. I do not impose any particular expectation on the work."

from "Cecil Touchon: Cut & Paste" - Interview By Matthew Rose 2009 

An Art of Miniature Scale

"Collage art, by its very nature, is an art of miniature scale. Most collage and assemblage art employs found materials. Since these materials are largely paper goods, the majority of those papers tend to be at the scale of books and magazines. This is going to limit the natural size of most collage art to the scale of these materials. Really, everything created by humans is based on ergonomics – that everything is based on human scale and on the efficiency of an object in relation to a human being handling that object."

from "Cecil Touchon: Cut & Paste" - Interview By Matthew Rose 2009

Cecil Touchon: Cut & Paste Interview By Matthew Rose 2009

[Matthew Rose] Collage has a long and rich history in Modern Art, beginning formally with Picasso's and Braque's experimental canvases in the early 20th century, cutting newspapers and wall papers and adding them to their canvases.  The effects were to inject a sense of found realism into their tableaux and change forever the illusion of the picture plane. Since then, of course, collage has become a dominate form of artistic production.  Schwitters most well known works are collage pieces; the Dadaists brought collage into a new world not only with physical art works but with performances in a kind of audio and perceptual collage. Painting, as a result of all this early 20th century activity was forced to change, and one might say that all painting now is influenced by collage. 

As an artist who has long worked the medium of collage in both cut paper and paint, how do you assess the state of the art of collage? 

[Cecil Touchon] I would have to say that the state of the art just now is very much alive and the number of artists working in the medium is growing. My efforts to understand and advance this constructive medium have, aside from my own art making, been in the area of developing an online community of collage artists around a central hub which is the International Museum of Collage, Assemblage and Construction (collagemuseum.com) that I founded in 1998.
 

The museum began as an online virtual museum and then, through various projects, has developed into a significant archive of actual collage and assemblage art.  The collection numbers in the thousands of actual works. My intention has been to create a focal point for collage art. I hope to draw artists together working in this medium so that we might all know each other’s work. Communicating together as colleagues, we discuss issues related to collage such as its history, techniques, materials, copyright and archival issues. We also share information about artists currently working in collage. I also wish as to inspire and promote exhibitions. Through this continuous banter it is possible to get a sense of what everyone is thinking about and what ideas are circulating.

Because of the prolific production of paper goods in the 20^th century, there is a super abundance of paper and other materials for collage artists to work with. This leads to a very wide ranging spectrum of imagery that artists are exploring. There are, however three very different trends going on right now and that could be defined as book arts, fine arts and craft-oriented collage making. My central interest is the fine arts angle. Certainly in this area there is a large number of working artists. However, the collage art community is such that there are many amateurs, perhaps mostly amateurs, as compared to professional gallery-based artists who support themselves through the sale of their work. This is both a matter of practicality and personal choice. Many artists do not wish to be bothered with the issues surrounding the sale of their artwork. Thus they are much more interested in their creative pursuits unencumbered by a quest for commercial viability and collector interest. Because of this there is a large population of artists who we are likely to never become aware of except through something like the Collage Museum. Most collage/assemblage artists are themselves collectors. They collect the elements and refuse of everyday life and see these things as material for possible inclusion in future artworks.

I suppose you could say that a healthy arts community built around collage is dependant upon this vast array of detritus generated by a consumer-based culture. These are artists who have an anthropological appreciation and love of material culture. It certainly then follows that the artist-run museum will develop as a new genre - a kind of meta-assemblage of examples in the genres of collage and assemblage.
 

[MR] Your activities comprise both composition of found papers and painted works.  How do you explain the relationship between them? Does one influence the other? Does painting allow you to scale differently? 

[CT] Collage art, by its very nature, is an art of miniature scale. Most collage and assemblage art employs found materials. Since these materials are largely paper goods, the majority of those papers tend to be at the scale of books and magazines. This is going to limit the natural size of most collage art to the scale of these materials. Really, everything created by humans is based on ergonomics – that everything is based on human scale and on the efficiency of an object in relation to a human being handling that object.

From the standpoint of art, especially painting, the natural scale of the art object is quite a bit larger than that of paper goods. So to make a work of art such as a painting, where the natural scale might be something like 3x4 feet or larger, poses a problem for a collage artist.

Collage is my first love. I like to work with found materials. I like paper. But at the same time, I feel the need to work at the larger scale typical of painting. After a great deal of thought I decided that I would make paintings using my collages as studies or preparatory works. I see the collages as their own finished works but I also see their potential as suggestions for paintings. My current method is to make my collages and then, from among these, select the ones that I believe will make an interesting painting.

[MR] Many of your Fusion series collages are created in tight color ranges.  One finds ochres and blacks and reds and the sense is they have almost a historical pedigree, as if they were produced from the 1920s and 1930s.  Is that intentional?  

[CT] Actually the color schemes that I tend to use are intended to convey a classical, timeless feeling. I think of art in terms of decades and perhaps centuries rather than seasons. In the world of fashion one thinks in terms of seasons and each season – to distinguish it, to make it feel new – requires a constant change in the color palette. Each season has its own range of colors. There is a continual shifting around of the color palette to give a feeling of constant change in order to make everything seem forever new. However, the items that make up the fashion world are all disposable. You wear this or that thing for a few weeks or months and as soon as it seems a little worn or a little out of date, it then goes quickly to the trash. Art objects are not like that normally. When people acquire a work of art, it is usually something that may well be passed down from one generation to the next. So for this reason, it seems a good idea to me to work with a color palette that has a long, sustained historical presence. When it comes to paper, the color scheme is usually black, white, beige, red, blue, and to a lesser degree yellow, the palette is based on commonly used printing inks. The natural color of paper, along with black and red are the most common schemes. My color palette also has a good deal to do with contrast and to achieve contrast you only need a light and a dark color.

[MR] You have a very fine sense of geometrical composition in your works. One thinks of Schwitters and Malevich in looking at these pieces.  Yet your resource material is extremely contemporary – found poster materials where you cut out pieces of large letters and compose abstractly.  Can you illuminate that process and how you arrive at these works?  Are these works the result of actively composing works or are they planned in advance? 

[CT] Certainly Schwitters and Malevich have been of interest to me over the years as well as Miro, Picasso, Laurens, van Doesberg, Vantongerloo, Popova, Klutsis and many, many others. I have always had a love for abstract and non-objective art. For me, these are the most like music. I also have a strong interest in the creative explosion that happened in the 1910s and 1920s that set Western culture on its current path. Many new ways to think and work were developed by so many different artists during that time. We are still working through all of the implications.

There are several different constructive trends in my work. However, upon close inspection you will notice there is an underlying reliance on a loose grid-like composition of rectangular forms. In some cases the grid composition is obvious but in the case of the works using lettering, while there is an underlying grid based composition, the printed matter on the rectangles creates a separate composition based on the interaction of the bits and pieces of the lettering forms. I like the use of these letter forms because they allow me to arrive at interesting new relationships that would not otherwise be possible.

Also, in the more painterly black and white works that have a lot of gestural painting on them, there remains this underlying grid based composition but I am also looking for opportunities to create constructed gestures. Fitting the parts together through collage techniques affords me more control over the final composition.

I do not work out the specific compositions ahead of time – they are improvisational in nature. I do work out my systems first, however, making certain rules for myself about how a work will be constructed. I may even have a vague idea of what I want to achieve. Each work is something of an experiment. I don’t know ahead of time what it will look like. When I discover a new system of construction, I will often create a suite of works to explore the idea. Later, I look at the group and add additional works to it over a period of time, even years later.  Very often I will even work in a random or chance-oriented way so that I do not limit the outcome by my own preconceived notions or solutions – all this just to see what might happen. Interestingly, I am almost always happy with the results. When I start a collage I don’t really have a way to fail since failure assumes an expectation of some particular result. I do not impose any particular expectation on the work.

[MR] Cecil, you are also quite well known for a range of performance and other Fluxus-oriented activities, such as the Fluxibitions you've curated.  What is the role of Fluxus in your collage work? 
 

[CT] Anyone who spends any time involved with contemporary art will have at least heard the name Fluxus. When asked, however, most people are completely in the dark about what it is or who was/is involved in it. Most cannot distinguish what Fluxus art is even though it has been around for nearly 50 years. This may be because, most people – even in the art world – know very little about almost everything. Perhaps a person is fairly familiar with the work of this or that specific artist but I notice that most people seem to know very little beyond the most rudimentary things. That said, even Fluxus artists are hard pressed to explain Fluxus. Still, when I came upon the Fluxus community online through an email group called Fluxlist in the 1990s, I immediately recognized a strong kinship between Fluxus and my way of looking at things. Over the years I have developed a strong connection with the contemporary Fluxus community. I have studied Fluxus strategies and ways of working. There is a certain minimal aesthetic in Fluxus that is coupled with a strong conceptual foundation when it comes to art making. There is also a love of the humble and ephemeral. Then there is the idea of producing works in such a way that they could be made by literally anyone even without a background in art. This is, I think, rooted in the scientific method in the sense of structuring experiments: Ask a Question - Construct a Hypothesis - Do an Experiment - Draw a Conclusion.  Fluxus, in fact, is not intended to be an aesthetic pursuit as in traditional art. Fluxus is really more like artists playing around with science and developing socio-political experiments – but not with the idea of arriving at any particular or practical result. It is more like turning Dada artists loose in a scientific laboratory. Their interests are not those of scientists.

So while we could say that Fluxus has no particular interest in style or aesthetics nevertheless, one can start with a seed of an idea and end up making art. By continuing forward, one’s art will develop into some sort of a style. In my case, the works of mine that I would identify as being related to Fluxus might fall under the category of visual poetry, assemblage and private performance works expressed as event scores. The majority of my works that deal with lettering forms originally started out as a Fluxus idea, and that idea was to create compositions out of randomly chopped up lettering and then reconstruct an abstract 'poem' from the parts. I wanted something that frees the words and letters from their practical use as bearers of literary meaning allowing them to function on a purely visual and concrete level. I also make a lot of collage poetry, photographs, occasional assemblage works related to Fluxus ideas and other individual works in various media including sound works. I probably have a couple of CDs worth of sound works that I have made since 1999 some of which have been featured on radio programs of experimental audio works.

[MR] One of my favorite pieces of yours is from the Fluxihibition 3 show, where you sanded down the surfaces of some eye glasses in homage to George Maciunas.  It is a simple yet fascinating work, not only in that the piece is for the "Chairman" of Fluxus, but also in that it echos what Contemporary art seems to be all about – seeing. How should we see contemporary art if our eyes are clouded by who we are, technology and our incessant projections? 

[CT] Who we are has to be at the core of whatever we see in contemporary art. So getting to who we are would need to be at the top of our list of things to do I should think. It usually isn’t. Normally we are all focused outwardly on the spectacle of life -  in this case, spectacles. Art, at any given time is always about seeing, envisioning, developing perspective, insight and so forth – it is all about seeing. But I think the seeing really needs to be more inward especially in these times when everything all around us is screaming for our constant attention. This seems to be leading to widespread Attention Deficit Disorder. Everyone’s attention span is becoming shorter and shorter from our inability to develop concentration and contemplation which require that we can spend time to clear our minds and become inwardly quiet.

The glasses that you mention are similar to those normally worn by George Maciunas. This particular pair I found at an antique store, are perhaps from the early part 20^th century. I used them because they help to call up the Dada and Surrealist era. I wished to convey a connection to art history through their use and to allude to Daniel Spoerri’s Fakir’s Spectacles – those ones that have pins glued onto the lenses so that when worn, you would blind yourself.

[MR] Your current show in New York is a kind of retrospective, bringing together works from as far back as 1982 and works from only earlier this year. How do you see the connective line in these works?

<>[CT] My series of collages has always been intended as a sort of diary – an unbound diary like your recent project A Book About Death which you invited me to produce a poster for. There are several connectors in my work such as improvisation, abstraction, chance, order and a quest for elegance. Elegance suggests refinement to the point of simplicity, a dignified simplicity, reducing and honing one’s artistic quest to its most elemental qualities.

<>

[MR] My guess is that artists as diverse as Cage and the affichistes (the Nouveau Realistes in France from the 1950s and 1960s like Raymond Hains and Jacques de la Villegle) as well as Ray Johnson have all played a part in your production.  How would you assess your influences?

[CT] When still in the last century I saw my position as being a part of the clean up crew of the 20^th century. My idea was to go back and dig through the rubble of artistic production and the ideas embedded in them and take up those aspects I considered worthy of continuation and exploration. So most of my artistic production has been an examination of the proposals of the avant guard as it developed in the 20^th century. I see the 20^th century as a profoundly important turning point in human evolution. I want to take the time to try to understand modern art history and to contribute in leisure to what earlier was accomplished in haste. I look at everyone's work and I look at it over and over again. I keep adding new artists to my perusal. All of the artists you mentioned have been a part of my examination as well as many hundreds and perhaps thousands more. They all interest me for their contributions. Each artist has his limitations but taken as a whole community, this cabal of artists has created a rich tapestry that can be unendingly explored. All of the time artists who are new to me come to the fore. Notable, for instance, would be a Chicago artist that I don’t believe I had ever heard of until a year or two ago by the name of Robert Nickle who taught at the University of Illinois in Chicago. His work is remarkable; it surprised me that I had been unaware of him even though I grew up in Saint Louis. There are so many wonderful artists, it is hard to be aware of everyone.

As an artist it is difficult to spend as much time researching as we might wish to when we have to spend so much time on our own work. It is possible to get lost for years at a time in the private world of your own studio. So I am quite certain there are many, many other artists I have yet to discover. My project, The International Museum of Collage, Assemblage and Construction is my attempt to keep up with who is out there working. Meanwhile I keep on working, synthesizing and recomposing the world on paper and canvas and in objects.  

Matthew Rose is an artist and writer based in Paris. His most recent project is A Book About Death SEE: http://abookaboutdeath.blogspot.com for details.

Fluxus: We Continue. by Cecil Touchon

Fluxus from the beginning was intended as an activity for amateurs. And I say that with all due respect. I approach it that way: as a pastime done in spare moments. It is not the sort of thing you would expect to pursue professionally, although I suppose one could and some have. I see people working today with fluxus as three different groups…
Those who are retro fluxus artists and look backwards at what fluxus was and try to sustain what it was in the 60′s and 70′s and consider it over. These tend to be among performers who like to perform the old school works. Then there are those who have been working parallel to fluxus for many years but just have not been involved with the specific individuals and/or do not wish to associate themselves with the fluxus community. Then there are those people, like myself and many of the gang on fluxlist who have been working in a fluxus way for most of their lives and then discover the group – mostly through fluxlist – then began working with each other and have decided as a group to not rename what we do and create a new identity but rather accept and honor what is there and make it our own and create new works, new scores, new performances, new networks. It is the logical next step.
So we claim Fluxus. That seems to us perfectly in keeping with fluxus principles and we value our community. We are inclusive with each other and make plenty of room for the old school guys – whom we love and admire and study and hang out with as circumstance permits – and contemporary fluxus artists as well. We are now, the last few years, unabashed in our embrace of fluxus and see it as a perennial thing that can be and is passed from one generation to the next uninterrupted. Starting demands continuing. We continue.

May 22, 2010
Cecil Touchon

Fluxus as a Oral Tradition by Cecil Touchon

Fluxus as a group, by keeping it open and alive is a new strategy that previous art groups have not been able to pull off in the past but – due to most of us understanding how all that works, we are circumventing that burial. All of this discussion is really about all of us who were not originally associate with fluxus back in the 60′s and 70′s staking our claim to the “type”or genre that could be called fluxus. I was born in ’56. I have been doing fluxus-like stuff at least since ’75. I didn’t know you had to join a group – I would have thought that rather stupid at the time. I lived in Saint Louis not NYC but a number of us were engaged in the same sort of work. The same was going on world wide. Fluxus is really just a basket of many trends that were current then as they are now. Now we use the term Fluxus as a banner so that we can all find each other who have been working in relative isolation but who share a common ‘something’ what we all identify as dada/fluxus/avant/pop/retro/whatever. If fluxus came up with any new ideas that were not already in the ‘air’ (which is questionable) then we have to ask, why should those new techniques, traditions, etc be ignored. No, when we all see new ideas that need to be incorporated into contemporary practice, we do it. If it falls under the name ‘fluxus’ then you might as well call it fluxus. The root ideas of fluxus encourage such treatment and we, in my opinion, are being generous to fluxus by retaining the name and honoring the hard work already done by all those known and unknown. We are at the point where constant newness is a little bit stupid as a strategy. With the advent of the internet, we know too much to think we are doing something no body did before. Previous generations could maintain such arrogance by being ignorant of those things happening at a distance.
So the old museum model of pedigree based on who knew who, where and when is now an antiquated tehnique and not valid as a way to track things and influences. Ideas now spread world wide in a few minutes.About Fluxus, the tension in the current discussions around Old School Fluxus and New and Improved Fluxus is based on two different and diametrically opposed things:

1. The desire to cap Fluxus around the lifetime of George Maciunas and then build a collection of works (like the Silverman’s) based directly on Maciunas and his direct circle and his reach. This is like building the bible and then separating out the Apocrypha. That is what has been going on. From the collection point of view there has to be a cut off point or the collection can never be consider complete in accord with the mindset of collectors. When the items in the collection are clearly defined, then value can be added based on how ‘authentic’ any particular thing is in relation to the collection perimeters. Then everything else is something else; not the collection. Then other collectors can collect with confidence that they are collecting relevant and recognized items. It is like real estate or church sanctioned saint’s relics.
2. Then there is Fluxus the idea and the community. That is a lot more sloppy, more open ended, and impossible to capture by history or by collection. It is dynamic, wide reaching and involves so many players across so many decades that it is impossible to deal with it. That is what all of us today are involved in and then the whole conversation is the interaction between these two perspectives: the collectors and the creatives or practitioners. The hard part is on the collectors if they are trying to apply old collecting concepts to an idea like fluxus that has always intended to defy and deflect those ideas. That is at the root of everything in Fluxus being anti collectible and performance based by converting it to conceptual ideas that transcend the objects or ephemera that contain them. Fluxus art is like the moon reflected in a lake. You can see it but it is not the moon, just a reflection. But that has not stopped anyone from figuring out how to collecting it – it has in fact created a whole new way of collecting and understanding what is collectible over the last couple of decades. Even Fluxus has economics.

Conclusion: I think today we need to understand how this attempt at anti-collect-ability was something of a failure and to then rethink how to approach art and capitalism in less of an adversarial way. Maybe even accept and embrace it. Then mess with it! I think it best not to work against things when instead we can work with them.
Cecil Touchon

The Fluxus Community Today - by Cecil Touchon

February 15, 2011 

Fluxus, since many people still have never even heard of it, continues to have the ability to surprise. But the advantage is, most people have been influenced by the ideas or have experienced Fluxus even though they don’t realize it. There is more subconscious precedent in the back of people’s minds today than there used to be in the past which provides resonance and people have the ability to connect with it even if they are not sure why. So there is often an almost guilty recognition among some that they ‘love this kind of stuff’ even if there is something of a disconnect. For artists this disconnect comes from the belief that Fluxus is a historical event – a closed circle – that is long over and do not realize that it continues to live and grow through the present generation of practitioners and that they could be a part of it in the present if they feel the connection.
Regardless of what Fluxus ever was or is now or shall be in the future, it is first and foremost a community of people who communicate and work with each other in the context of Fluxus – of Fluxus as an attitude, as a tradition, as a trajectory, as a point of view. Fluxus has always been experimental and has always challenged boundaries – famously, the boundaries between high and low art or the boundaries between one medium and another and ultimately the perceived boundaries between art and life.
Therefore, it should be no surprise that Fluxus artists do not recognize any boundary between the past and the present or between insiders and outsiders. The Fluxus community today is a self organizing, porous organization. Membership in this community is based on interacting with other members of the community and participating in group projects. The more one participates, the more of a core member one becomes. It is that simple. It is a matter of interconnectedness. That is what makes any community.
If virtually anyone could become a part of the Fluxus community, and anyone can, then the question might then arise, “But is what all of these people are doing really Fluxus?” That seems like a good question. It could be suggested that the recognition of what is Fluxus would need to emerge from the activities of the members of this community and the ensuing dialog around those activities. As a group dedicated to Fluxus, it is inevitable that certain things will come to be regarded as Fluxus and many other things will not. It is really a matter of consensus within the group. If the group remains open and experimental then what is Fluxus amid what they are doing will be recognized and favored as such – everything else will not be. Since Fluxus is open by nature, new ideas can and will emerge, these new ideas will find their way into the canon of Fluxus if they are in accord with the general nature of Fluxus as accepted by the community thus allowing for change and transformation which are, in themselves inherently Fluxus.
During the founder’s time, George Maciunas was the ‘chairman’, the man in charge of deciding what was Fluxus and what wasn’t and he often changed his mind. In his absence, the Fluxus community is not restricted by the limitations of a single individual’s vision. As an experimental idea Fluxus at its core, is democratic by nature rather than hierarchical. When looking at the definition for hierarchy there is a relevant quote: “it has been said that only a hierarchical society with a leisure class at the top can produce works of art”. It could be said that Fluxus challenges that view in that works of art can be made by anyone in any society depending on how one defines what constitutes works of art.
In Fluxus, power is no longer invested in a single individual or small group of insiders deciding what or who is or isn’t Fluxus. The power is, rather, invested in the community. Each individual in the community is in charge of his own domain and responsible for his own place in the network without approval from any ‘superior’. This is cleverly alluded to in a recent work by Keith Buchholz who, using a well known Maciunas work: NO SMOKING, removed the ‘S’ making a new work: NO MO KING meaning ‘no more king’.
Fluxus today, equipped with the examples set by Maciunas and the other seminal members, has the capacity to grow and expand according to the ‘Laws of Fluxus’ established through precedence rather than the decrees and judgments of an individual authority. Are you a member of the Fluxus community? You ought to be.
Cecil Touchon, Director
The Ontological Museum

© Cecil Touchon