247. Snickers ice cream on gold inlay saucer (Snickerseis auf goldverziertem Unterteller)
247. Snickers ice cream on gold inlay saucer (Snickerseis auf goldverziertem Unterteller), 2025, Öl auf Leinwand, 15 × 20cm, (Darryn Ansted)
In 1930 in Chicago, the Mars family introduced the Snickers bar, a combination of nougat, peanuts, caramel and chocolate to their line of candy. It was only available in West Germany after 1968 and only available in France since 1989. It is almost 100 years old. Now you can get it in an ice cream flavor in my neighboring village of Störmede. It manifests well as ice cream.
We are now in the 21st Century. The mood is different. How is the mood different in art?
Before going to art school I read a couple of art books. They are classic texts. Art in Theory 1 (the 19th Century) and Art in Theory 2 (the 20th Century). I probably mentioned them already. They are great texts. They look like telephone books but the entries are only about two pages each. So they are very readable. I used to read them on the bus. The first volume is basically a discussion of every big question that one has about art. What is beauty? What is the aesthetic element in life? Does art matter? …and so on. These are the themes of the short extracts of texts from major painters and writers compiled in the book. The 19th Century volume is particularly important for these questions because whole groups of artists were trying to make new art that questioned these foundations. The idea of ‘art for art’s sake’ came out of this period.
When you finish reading that first volume, first you start to call it by its academic street name ‘Harrison and Wood’ and then you embark on the second volume. Pretty soon however you realise that all of that which you just read in the first volume is thrown out the window. In the 20th Century art explodes in your face, by design. Long-winded arguments about ‘what is beauty?’ or ‘what is the relationship between the good and the beautiful?’ and so on, are gone. Gradually you forget ever caring about the more superficial qualities of aesthetic experience. You inadvertently start to surf the wave of neo-classical, romantic to modern and you never look back. You feel like you are ‘out the back’ in the green waves. It is easy to relax into that zone, even to dismiss the others paddling around on the shore, learning to surf the shore-breakers.
Nothing, it seems would ever encourage you to leave your sweet surf spot in painting. It has a ritual feeling. You are a 20th Century man. There are a few other obsessives floating in the patch of ocean where you feel like you have found your true nature. It seems to have everything. By this stage, people talking to me about ‘beauty’ in relation to art might as well have been speaking a foreign language. I only wanted to talk about ideas.
This mood of an atomized art world with an almost absent unity or coherence was also in keeping with the 20th Century. The only people going against the grain were generally scorned. One example is the embrace of neo-clascissms in art and theory. It was plainly untenable to try to unscramble the art egg. Art was out of the aerosol can and it was not going back in. More broadly, things were existential. I can see it very clerly now through the successive generations of culture. The formula for every exhibition or biography about an artist was that they were pursuing ‘freedom’. The overweening lust for freedom that comprised the DNA of the 20th Century was ironically the prison of the day.
Everything is simultaneously still in place now of course. People are reading Harrison and Wood volumes 1 and 2 on a bus right now. People who go deep into the ocean of painting are surfing in some unusual spots around the world. What then is magnetizing me to painting a scoop of Snickers ice cream on a gold-inlay saucer in 2025. There is intentionally no idea here. There is a removal of junk from the painting. I am not sure if I paddled back into shore or if I am doing the big-wave surfing that lures people to put everything on the line.
I am just trying to make a bamboo flute, to use ingredients from the region. Were a painting to do a simple thing, it would be enough.
