Benton’s narrative painting of the boy, the man, and the dog are a family experience we are all familiar with even if we didn’t have it. There is no clash between them and the bucolic explosion of nature around them. Man and nature are one – a novel idea America has never lived by. The same curving lines describe both like ripples in a pond, echoing their happy message, to go forward, face the future as if to say “The world is with you.” Benton painted in the wake of the great depression, about hope and rebuilding the west.
As we enter a depression of another kind, the end of our life on this planet as we know it, we need art to speak to our spirit as it first did in cave paintings, but our artists today only seem to speak to each other and a color field of purest pink is not enough to warm you when you can no longer see the sun. You cannot have a revolution without hope but, instead of hope, artists lecture us on how to see, talk to each other over our heads, shock us like lab rats or prod us like hysterical cattle. The future is bad enough without being ridiculed by a giant aluminum balloon dog or depressed by half a cow in formaldehyde or told we don’t get it in spite of all our college degrees. Gone are the days when Bernini would unveil a public sculpture to the ecstatic adulations of a mob far less educated than any of us could possibly be. In fact, there is nothing to get, we are left out of the present art game of money.
Since Pop art, we arrive with shopping carts of irony and mockery, boasting how we have long since out grown Benton’s nostalgic quality along with Norman Rockwell’s illustrations for Saturday Evening Post magazine covers, which made our moms smile, and God knows, we all hate mom. But late at night, alone and naked we cry over the greeting card sentimentality of commercials that slither out of our TV. Benton created a heritage for us as fake as those magazine covers but it truthfully mirrored how we wanted to feel about ourselves. His paintings are as authentic as banjo music and as individual as Mark Twain’s voice. To say we have outgrown Benton is to say Mark Twain is for kids; when in fact he keeps the child in us alive, and that child is hope.
It’s odd that we don’t mind being emotionally manipulated by movies, but never by art. Art must be intellectual lest it sink into the realm of communist propaganda postures (which are quite compelling), yellow journalism, and that ugly word, illustration. The Catholic Church understood the power of the artist’s voice in the community. It hired the best artists to express the Church agenda and along the way, we all managed to get some pretty good art out of it. The depressing new Christians sit on folding chairs in giant auditoriums with not a shred of art around them. Are they afraid of it? Too bad. I would love to see a Jeff Koons three story aluminum Jesus suspended from the Golden Gate bridge like the upside down locomotive that will soon be hanging over LA.
Artillery Magazine Vol 4 no. 5 June 2010