JOHN TOMLINSON

from "Bill Jensen" by artist/poet/critic John Yau in BOMB, Spring 2007

Bill Jensen :: Change is good for art but hard on the artist. I feel that serious artists go into the studio day after day and let the art slowly take them, sometimes kicking and screaming, into new territories. They let the making of things have its own life, and this living force brings them into areas of creating they could never have imagined. Solutions come from this working process. Sometimes you have the feeling that you are being pulled by a team of wild dogs. Looking back over 20 or 30 years, I could never have dreamt where these images came from and where the art has taken me. To make something truly amazing is to make something you could never have dreamt of.

 

Chris Kraus in Artspace, March 2015

Jerry Saltz on "Post Art": "It's an idea I love… Things that couldn't be fitted into old categories embody powerfully creative forms, capable of carrying meaning and change."

But what meaning? What change? One of art criticism's great limitations is its inability to look beyond its own context and language. Why would young people enter a studio art program to become teachers and translators, novelists, archivists, and small business owners? Clearly, it's because these activities have become so degraded and negligible within the culture that the only chance for them to appear is within contemporary art's coded yet infinitely malleable discourse.

 

John Tomlinson, addressing critic David Hickey's Facebook posting, April 22, 2015, "What would be your optimum outcome for the arts in the next ten years?" 

If artists will identify the individual and deeply personal in their work and forsake the ideological, socio-commercial and art-referential, a renaissance like no other will blossom in a burst of reaffirmation of the power of art.