An interview with artist John Westmark

I recently attended the opening of an amazing artist from Florida,US here in Singapore at Collector's Contemporary. See here for John's work and here for Collector's Contemporary Gallery

John Westmark was born in the Southern United States. John’s first exposure to artmaking was watching his mother draw on paper scraps during long Baptist sermons.

John holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Kansas City Art Institute and a Master of Fine Arts from the University of Florida.

He presently works and lives in Gainesville, Florida. Westmark’s work has been exhibited widely and is held in collections worldwide. Recent acquisitions include the Council on Foriegn Relations, Washington, DC; and the Frederick
R. Weisman Foundation in Los Angeles, CA. John is a Florida Individual Artist Fellowship recipient, was recently featured in New American Paintings, and has been selected for the Bemis Center for Contemporary Art Artist-in-Residence for the summer of 2010. Westmark has earned a position on the watch lists of museums and institutions.

John’s solo show at Collectors Contemporary marks his Singapore debut. The show is on view through September 30, 2009.


I spoke to Dr Koh from Collector's Contemporary gallery and here is what he had to say about John:

My partner and I started collecting John's works before we actually met him. We were in Miami for Art Basel and saw his works which was part of a group show in a local gallery at that time. After 3 intense days of art overload we chanced upon that group show and found his works refreshingly original.

About 6 to 8 months after that, we started communicating by email. We gradually, acquired more of his works and kept the communication channels open.

John's works are so strong and distinct that we found it difficult to fit into any of our group shows. As we acquired more, we felt that it would be best to give him a solo show.


Finally, I had a few questions for John. Here are the questions and his responses:

A. Tell us a little about both your flight series and folklore series.

The flight series was the beginning of my work with the sewing patterns. The close visual relationship of the sewing pattern pieces and sections of aircraft was quite attractive to me. So the first pieces were these Orwellian winged contraptions. The exploration into flight and how it forms and impacts our lives led me to mythological references, such as Icarus, and many others. The notion of flight and myth and
mankind is still a very fertile place to conceive work from – a kind of faith versus reason argument.


Gradually, my focus has become two-pronged, the flight work and most recently, the folklore series. With the folklore work, the sense of narrative becomes a key component to the work - the sense of a story. Several key sources of folklore/storytelling are the Brothers Grimm and the rich heritage of storytelling from the Southern United States. I'm also looking at folklore from around the world, and interestingly, the are many similarities in the moral and message of stories from very different cultures/societies. There is a common human thread that speaks to good versus evil and finding the "right" path. But I will also say that a great many tales are very dark and do not always have a happy ending. The "happily ever after" line is pure Disney.


B. Brockelman links collage to a postmodern knowledge system rooted in paradox. You use collage extensively in your work. Do the epistemic contradictions of collage find any bearing in your work?

“Collage practices—the gathering of materials from different worlds into a single composition demanding a geometrically multiplying double reading of each element—call
attention to the irreducible heterogeneity of the “postmodern condition.” But,insofar as it does bind these elements, as elements, within a kind of unifying field ..”

- Brockelman, T. P. (2001). The frame and the mirror: On collage and the postmodern. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.


Ah yes, well put.
Collage has been a pleasant surprise. If you would have asked me about collage a few years ago, I would have scoffed. For many years, I embraced the definition of the artist as a pure painter and nothing else. It's naive and embarrassing, but true, I would not consideranything other than paint and canvas. Now, things are different, and I do agree with Brockelman in that the postmodern condition is and must be inclusive of any process or material, there is a pluralist approach to making art now – and at the root level heterogeneity is the catalyst for metaphor. And I don't just mean the implied material metaphor that collage presents; rather, conceptual metaphor, the ability for a work to "flip" meaning for the viewer. For me, as a viewer and an artist, I get the most joy out of artwork that oscillates from one place of conveyance to another without being obnoxious.


Bertolt Brecht remarked that the mechanics of collage run contrary to the organic model of growth...assumptions of harmony, unity, and closure. The idea that collage is an act of disruption through assemblage of pre-existing images is appealing. It is a fascinating premise: the appropriation of material created by machines of reproduction with a specific intent opens the work up for a new set of associations – essentially reactivating it. Yeehaw!

There is something really interesting and appealing about arrangements of letters..

Text-portraits by Ralph Ueltzhoeffer and a word cloud for this blog by wordle.net

Art is politics

I was at the opening for an exhibition at VWFA entitled Curating Lab: 100 Objects (Remixed) yesterday. It was a crowded opening and there was little time to look at many of the artworks there. I will head back before it ends on the 30th of August.

I write this because I am intrigued about a comment made by Heman Chong in his opening question in the transcript of an interview between curators for the exhibition.

A quote from a german art critic Jan Verwoert was used -" Art and politics belong to the same trade".

I am intrigued.

I have always thought of politics as a struggle for power in the Max Weber's sense. You talk about the politics of a country or corporate politics where oneupmanship is the salient defining trait.

So Jon Verwoert must mean politics in a different sense.

"They [art and politics] share the medium of gesture, which, in its expanded sense, encompasses all the physical manifestations through which people confront each other and seek to evoke desired responses, whether by speech and expressions of body language or by the display of signs and signals in images, texts, music or architecture".

Is Jon Verwoert saying that politics ( and art) is about invoking a desired response?
In the case of art, the above statement seems to subscribe to the aesthetic theory of utile. Art has a function. It evokes a preconceived, premeditated response.

But the above position is trite and I am not concerned about it much. It is discussed forever in art circles.

But what about the other position, vis-a-vis politics is about invoking a desired response? Is this only in a limited sense? Perhaps.

Read another look at art is politics taken from the great xurban.net

Art is politics. It is political as opposed to politics as management (ie. of state), a profession, a power play, manipulation or propaganda. As a matter of existence, art aims at the political as the ultimate means of emancipation, absolute freedom from commodification, if such is still possible. Art is a critical necessity as long as it fights being a part of the spectacle, as it aims to turn the spectacle upside down, as it exposes the 'culture industry.'

The crisis of art and with it the artist in the 'center' (West) stems from the impossibility of politics as such, within the captured psyche of the consumer culture. Political correctness without the political agenda, or art as expression of the ethnic and sexual self is bound to be neutralized through the all encompassing spectacle. While this appears, as it did to Baudrillard, as the 'complete liberation' of art and the artist, free from the historical drive that kept the tradition alive, it also marks the disappearance of the impulse, the loss of the cause: Not that of a liberation en masse (a revolution), but it renders the production (ie. of culture) irrelevant as such.

In the periphery the situation is just as bleak, as the tranquillized masses are more prone to turn into a mob of fascist/nationalist/religious thugs. The lie of globalisation, besides creating a monster as such, aims at a liberation of a different order, that of the capital and free enterprise. While it is business as usual, the power (ie government), already corrupted, becomes more oppressive, more violent. Yet still, if 'pockets of resistance' are a possibility, they are possible within the very pores of the military-police state, as the unavoidable necessity of existence, of simply 'being.'

Ironically, the last refuge of art as politics comes around a full circle, to that of the historical avant-garde in the time of crisis, but with a difference, not as the history repeating itself in the historicism's bordello. To expand on Benjamin's 'optical unconscious' one demands a 'geographical unconscious', a slip of the tongue apart from the genetic, folkloric, regional, traditional and 'oriental.' In these parts of the world, the 'reflexes' of the totalitarian regimes are without a doubt on the oppressive side. But for the ordinary man, the accidental/instinctive favors a special blend of violence, pity and a deeper sensation of poverty that is peculiarly geographical. Already in Istanbul, owing to a long tradition, the civil organization of social space displays an autonomous charity of its own, rarely disturbed by the authority. While the post colonial sphere is marked by inept institutions of the western kind, Istanbul leads a life of its own, again disjunct between tradition and change, but nevertheless with a sense of decency, a comraderie as it surfaced after the 1999 earthquakes. The will of the artist-intellectual in this geography should follow from this, that is an acknowledged belief in the best intentions of the civillian majority, a kind of third world humanism.

Hence the imposibility to turn inwards, a subjectivity of the work of art that misses the catastrophic existence, the scar of social consciousness. Only here the artist avoids being a proffessional and can afford to be a dilettante in order to defy being part of the spectacle as such. The bliss (as in ignorance) is the lack of institutionalized art that turns one's self into a 'specialist' in the specialized sphere of the production at large. Just as Istanbul still resists the logic of late capitalism and the multi-national corporation with its fractured economic organization, so can the artist produce without the burden of consistent, synchronised mode of professionalism that is demanded by the 'industry.' The amateur fascination with 'real life' out on the street leads to an affirmation of sorts: While life supercedes art along the way, emancipation should be sought on varied fronts, indeed through the phantasmagorical fraternity of the cyberspace.

The phantasm of equality in the domain of the great equalizer, that is the world wide web, is bound to give way to a new alliance of the nodes of resistence that demand the recognition of differences. Once the dust is settled and the hype is over, and the commercialization of the cyberspace is complete, the second wave of the telematic revolution should aim at the politicizing of the web via truly artistic means. Referring back to Adorno, if the technique of the concentration camp is to make the prisoners like their guards, the murdered, murderers; and to abolish the difference to an absolute in the sense that nothing different survives, then the resistence is to find its path through the counter-flow of the information technologies, crisscrossing the popular media on the way in order to gather the momentum to overturn the tide. The inverse flow is where the collectivity finds its expression of being simply political, different.

Group show in Malaysia opening on 8th of August 2009

Cadres RG

My paintings at my gallery in Paris were recently framed by world famous and Paris' finest framers - Cadres RG. They have worked with the likes of George Braque and Joan Miro. Cool huh!

See here...

Framing is an art and as with any art it takes much learning and practice. Even though I tend to stretch my own canvases, I leave the framing of my paintings to the experts. I have never been disappointed.

My gallery in Paris uses the best and I can't wait to see the result.

Contemporary Malaysia art gets an airing

The above pic with the collectors Aliya and Farouk Khan with my RAIN painting in the background appeared in Business Times last week on the recent IMCAS. Read the full article here

The opening at IMCAS 2009

Here is the pic of the opening at IMCAS 2009. I am chuffed to be standing with the very very best of Malaysian artists. Everyone from Jai to Fauzan to Yusof Ghani to the Matahati group is on stage. And so is the Director General of the National Art Gallery of Malaysia and the two collectors Aliya and Farouk.

This is in my opinion the start of a new dawn for Malaysian art - a private collector is leading the way..