Brendan Jansen - in search of a medium

Hi Beth. I don't agree that Brendan Jansen's show "sucked." I'm intrigued by his work and want to see more. About viewing the show that's there (videos) instead of the show that isn't (photos), you have a point.

You reviewed the exhibit you wished were there, instead of the one that was. Whatever the artist says, it's about what you called jittery, and you gave it way too much credit. I saw it. It sucked. When he shows photos, let us know. Till then, you should stick to the videos and give them hell.

Gawd artist's art-babbley statements suck shit! Looks like a trippy show though.

Hi Brendan. Your work (at present) is about uncertainty. That's what I thought when I saw it, and my perception of what you said when I talked to you. The gap between our perceptions illustrates the reality of the theme. Your videos don't work, but I think something is going to work for you in the future. Regina

It's not my place to rebut quality judgments of my work, but I think I should take advantage of the dialectical potential of the blog form to reply. Ms Hackett mischaracterized my intentions as revealed by the work and the press release cited, and her misunderstanding led to a flawed critique. Perhaps because work concerned with the "unreliability of perceptions" abounds, she thought it natural to interpret the work as that.

Had she spent more time with the videos I think she would have noticed something different about the work, namely that what she mistook for a dissolution of form was no such thing. The perceptual shifts in the work actually show more, not less, about what is depicted, and I would argue that form is never "assaulted". Viewpoints shift, structure is recast as a staggered procession of planes about an axis, and in one case an object alternates with another, but in all cases a kind of cohesive structural form maintains, the exact thing that is missing from normal photographic depictions.

Never in my time as a painter or since have have I been concerned with the unreliability of perception, or "lost faith" in my "ability to undermine the solidity of their depictions" whatever that means. If anything, my intentions have been just the opposite. My interests are more related to the question of whether and how depictions show more truth, being artifacts of only conditional truth anyway (and not illusions), not the dismantling of perceptions of reality or notions of perceptual truth. Cubism would be an obvious touchstone, especially as an antithesis to the other obvious touchstone, Platonic idealism.