Thursday entry (for 10/15/09): Lowbrow

Quote on topic by an expert:

"To me, Lowbrow art is what the scene originally started as…work that stayed true to it’s more 'working class roots' more or less, and focused on the fetishization of counter-cultural icons (such as hot rods, surfing, rock n roll, monsters, drugs, ect). I find this work to be more transgressive, provocative and very non-polite…it has a purity underneath because it was never intended to be anything other than what the artist was responding to in his or her life. I can’t see this type of work ever truly being accepted by the 'high' world." --Kirsten Anderson

Annotated bibliography:

Anderson, Kirsten. Pop Surrealism: The Rise of Underground Art. San Francisco: Ignition Pub./Last Gasp, 2004.

Pop Surrealism: The Rise of Underground Art begins with an essay written by lowbrow artist and Juxtapoz magazine founder, Robert Williams. In his essay he recounts the event in which art history writer Nancy Dustin Wall Moure contacted him for his expertise on the California underground art movement for a book she was writing that covered the past 430 years of California art. In the essay he later goes into detail describing where lowbrow art, also known as pop surrealism, stemmed from and the genres it includes.

"I belong to a rather loose-knit group of artists that, because of a fifty-year dominance of abstract and conceptual art, have been left isolated from the more conventional academic mainstream. All of us, with few exceptions, function in the craftsmanship-based realm of representational art. To better understand this, you have to realize that we gain our source material and inspiration from some of the most illustrious, colorful and controversial influences and graphic traditions that one could possibly emerge from."

How this topic relates to my work:

The concept of lowbrow art plays an important role in my body of work, because while lowbrow art has it's own art genre, it is also closely related to kitsch art for they are nearly one in the same except for the fact that lowbrow often times will have deeper intellectual thought behind the art object whereas kitsch is art for art sake. But both are regarded negatively and both are considered below high brow art.