Paper Rad's Jim Jones - Photo: www.comicon.comThe online urbandictionary defines the colloquial adjective “Granola” as:
A person who dresses like a hippy, eats natural foods (granola), and is usually a Liberal, but in all other ways is a typical middle class white person, and is likely to revert back to being straight when they finish college.
eg. Did you see that granola chick at the farmer's market buying bean sprouts? Yeah, her new Volvo was parked next to me.
The other straightforward definition of a person deemed to be granola is simply hippie. One can be slurred for granola leanings for a myriad of reasons. But to be called granola is typically to be insulted or at least belittled. It is a term of judgmental derision that as an artist I am redeeming and applying it to an early 21st century postmodern art aesthetic: An unorganized, multifarious, raw and youthful movement rooted to hippies; it’s roots are important because granola’s main practitioners are a strain of hipster; the hip root that both lends itself to hippie and hipster is not an accident. The hippie concern for bright colored clothing, a stress for self expression, and the rebellion against the more conservative standards and values of mainstream society is well reflected in the hipsters concerns brightly colored 80s influenced clothing, independent music and culture and a stress on self expression.
In the visual arts the aesthetic of granola is primarily driven it’s formal qualities that are hugely influenced by cartoons and comic books. Granola arts practitioners such as Seth Scriver, David Shrigley, Jason McLean, Maura Doyle, Paper Rad, Dearraindrop, Kineko Ivic et al. all share some of the same things: bright colors, weird and strange and youthful subject matter, a gross fascination with childhood nostalgia, disregard for modernist influenced ‘good taste’, a strange breed of expressionism and perhaps the most damaging of all: the seeming lack any sort of intellectual rigor. Above all their target is the depth of the imagination: that deep and cavernous interior world that parents and teachers cannot penetrate and is deeply rooted to expressionism of the 20th century.
Honestly, at first I was just looking at bad art. I saw this art as lacking a certain level of quality that for me has been deemed a high quality, an art worthy of not hanging on gallery walls but art worthy of hanging on the National Gallery’s walls. Sometimes what I notice is that this art is no more than a doodle: in the case of Jason McLean’s cartoons, his art is just that… a doodle. Dearraindrop composes forms that are piled on with neon pinks and day-glo greens and the deliberately fluid drawn line that is supposedly liberating this art from modernist stodginess, it at once pins this runniness in the milk between the honey and the oatmeal and the organic flax of: Granola.
I remember seeing Maura Doyle’s and Annie Dunning's Lucky Stick for the first time. A twig with a piece of yarn and a small sign announcing that the stick is unlike the other sticks from the urban park it was found, this one chosen by the artist is lucky. The gesture of the Lucky Stick is childlike and rooted in nostalgia for childhood and naivety. One can pretend to hear a child in the park catching mummy's attention "I got a lucky stick! I got a luucky stiiiiiiick." Similarly, Paul Butler’s relational collage parties that bring people together to make art and to have fun together are an extension of kindergarten art class and absolutely not modeled after Fine Art crits with theory based professors. The latter is eschewed. Instant Coffee’s relational events do a similar thing. Bright, loud, lurid and fun are the keys and “professionalism” is seen as a threat: to be professional means buying into a system of quality that represents an old guard and it's rules that make the gallery a boring place and space. Granola art practitioners, it would seem, would be happy to be coddled back to the comfort of grandma’s kitchen table with some fresh paper and a set of fresh pencil crayons for a session of consilidated enjoyment. Before we fall in to the tired argument of ‘my kid could do that in 5 minutes’ let me make something clear: I don't think any could do it. I don’t dislike Granola Art. I don’t think it’s bad art.
In fact, the more I happen to see it, the more fond I become of it and the better I appreciate and understand it. I still don’t very much like it but then art is not always about liking disliking. More than anything it has been a personal challenge to my own perceived ideas and because it's challenging it holds merit. Art, art criticism and art history is about currents and placing them within some sort of framework that can help us understand the world around us, who we are and where we are and how all of it fits together. So what’s happening? Why are young, well educated artists, in rich 1st world countries choosing to focus their attention on faux naive pursuits of the pencil, brush, space and related experiments? That’s what I’m wondering.
In Toronto, I can place the influence of Kensington Market as important. The place is a geographical oddity in the midst of a modern global center. Hippies to left, hippies to the right, and more hippies per square meter than I've ever witnessed. The proliferation of organic produce, cheap eats, "bohemia", and the Anarchist Free School are big influences. But it doesn't really account for granola's American reach, unless we say that Toronto is influencing Paper Rad and dearraindrop. Perhaps it's not too outlandish.
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