Before I came to art school and before I had any understanding of contemporary art whatsoever, I considered myself a painter. It didn’t take long for me to realize that as a medium, it wasn’t for me. It wasn’t that I wasn’t “good” at it. It simply occurred to me that no matter how much time I devoted to painting, I could never do anything new. Painting is a medium in which virtually every avenue has been explored, and Kehoe acknowledged this in her lecture. Kehoe, however, sees no issue in this.
I admired Kehoe’s honesty in these regards, and realized that she is an artist who revels in the act of making, above all else. I feel that this love of making objects by hand is a relatively rare quality among contemporary artists. One might argue that most contemporary art has less to do with process and more to do with concept. In my own work, I consider the process of making as the means to convey a concept - which is ultimately more important than the process itself. For Kehoe, perhaps it is the opposite?
Kehoe’s paintings act as visual records of private conversations between artist and medium. This process works for her, but it is a formula I have always found to be lacking in certain respects. I believe in art that performs a social function, and causes the audience to consider a new idea or challenge their own (mis)conceptions. The only possible social function I can gather from this work - besides Kehoe’s own personal relationship to it - is that of spirituality.
I think paintings have the power to move people; perhaps more so than any other form of visual media. It’s the sort of power I can respect, but with which I certainly cannot identify. I believe that with painting comes a certain level of vanity, which rarely captures my interest when viewing a piece of art. Kehoe painted a series of portraits of deceased family members, using low-resolution JPEG images as source material. During the lecture, I was reminded of something Steve Locke once said about making art about ones’ family. It was something along the lines of, “If you’re going to make work about your family, your family had better be interesting; and - if they are not interesting – you’d better somehow make them interesting.” I tend to agree with this sentiment, and feel that I have seen far too much work in coherence to the latter form – which is more challenging, I think. Kehoe’s series was no exception, because no matter how skillfully these nameless, dead Hungarians were painted, I still felt no relation to them as a viewer.
I realized that if we were to put the artists Catherine Kehoe and Nathalie Miebach on a spectrum, they would be polar opposites. Miebach seemed fiercely defiant about acknowledging any sort of emotional connection to her work, perhaps for fear of sounding frivolous? On the contrary, it is Kehoe’s personal connection to her work that makes it interesting. When an audience member questioned Kehoe’s reasoning for working in such a small format, her answer was ambiguous: “Because I enjoy it, is that reason enough?” In the end, I think that both processes are flawed. I enjoy making and viewing artwork in which the concepts are clearly defined, but there remains room for ambiguity. If either of these components is missing, we have to question why the artwork was made at all. Total observation hours: seven.
Catherine Kehoe
Nathalie Miebach
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