Dope painting. Acrylic & spray paint. ©2015

DOPE

Lust.

Ink is thicker than blood.

For an American audience, Charlie Hebdo is like a crossover between Mad Magazine and underground comix from the 60s, full of satire and sex. It’s as if Robert Crumb and Jon Stewart had just been gunned down during a board meeting at Comedy Central.

I lived in France and read Charlie Hebdo throughout my teens. So I am using the hashtags #JeSuisCharlie #IAmCharlieHebdo to show my support for fellow cartoonists and express my utter sadness at their brutal murders.

However this hashtag, while well intentioned, is misleading. For if everyone is ‘Charlie Hebdo’ then everyone is a victim, which is exactly what the terrorists want. But if ‘being Charlie’ means having the guts to stand up to censorship in ALL its forms, including having the right to poke islamic fanaticism in the eye, then I’m all for it. Unfortunately, I feel the opposite is beginning to happen.

London imam Anjem Choudary correctly said in defense of the Paris shootings: “If freedom of expression can be sacrificed for criminalising incitement & hatred, Why not for insulting the Prophet of Allah? #ParisShooting — Anjem Choudary (@anjemchoudary)”

His ironclad logic is unassailable in this world of political correctness and ‘tolerance’. When you outlaw ONE WORD, you potentially outlaw them all. When freedom of expression, WHATEVER IT MAY BE gets threatened, freedom of thought gets censored too.

People are already being jailed for saying something stupid on Facebook or posting videos. Professionals are being fired for their political or religious views. ‘Hate speech’ is a criminal offense. But who gets to determine what qualifies as hate speech? Does Anjem Choudary get to make that call? And if not, why not?

If it is NOT OK to use certain words, whichever they may be, whatever the context, then censorship has already begun. Cartoonists, writers, artists, thinkers will begin to self-censure in the name of tolerance to disguise their fear. This is already happening.

Certain thoughts and opinions become taboo and mental repression sets in, whether it be coerced or self-inflicted. History is littered with entire civilizations being brainwashed this way, ie: Nazism or Communism. This is not something new.

What is new is that our generation, from the mid 20th century until now, has never had to face a true war on the Western homeland. We have enjoyed over 65 years of peace, with no major disruption to our modern way of life.

It felt natural for me as a kid and a teenager to dream of becoming a professional cartoonist. In fact, I have based my whole life on believing that being an artist was a valid, useful and worthwhile profession. I went to art school, got jobs doing illustrations, TV graphics, magazine layouts, paintings, video installations, music concerts and my childhood dream: cartoons. Even though I have had to navigate economic ups and downs, I always believed being an artist was a good thing.

Now art has been weaponized. Artists are at the forefront of a cultural war.

Every artist is going to ask themselves if their art will offend. Some will seek out controversy as a shortcut to publicity but most others cower away and end up erasing their ‘provocative’ drawings. The net effect, I fear in the long run will be that fewer and fewer people will stand up for those who are genuine champions of free speech, like Charlie Hebdo.

So while it’s great to say #IAmCharlieHebdo, especially when everyone else is doing it, who will in the end be bold enough to risk everything to say something that is politically incorrect, or offensive to some, or ‘hate speech’?

I am an artist and I can’t answer that question.

Beau Tardy

Recent work by Beau Tardy.

Dollar High by Jazzy Burn's

New Orleans Art Insider: LaPopSexTVArtShow at Barrister's

Sunday, May 26, 2013
LaPopSexTVArtShow at Barrister's

Got Cha by Beau Tardy.

The Claude Arts District is often considered a post-Katrina phenomenon--and it mostly is--but this show illustrates how deep the experimental Marigny-Bywater art scene's roots really are. Curated by Beau Tardy and Michael Fedor, themselves veterans of Fedor's former (1987--1990) Marigny-based Galerie Avant Gout, it also includes works by Patti D'Amico and William Warren whose Waiting Room Gallery in Bywater was active from 1997 to 2008. Both spaces catered to emerging artists, a tone that continues in this show. Tardy, who worked for MTV in New York for years, was inspired by mass media's fixation on erotic titillation as seen in GotCha, (left) a manipulated image of a babe in a vortex of flashy graphics like those TV ads that somehow inspire salacious thoughts based on nothing more than subliminal suggestion. The paintings by French counterpart Louis Jean Gorry are far more graphic, but his style is as raw as scrawled subway station graffiti. Somehow slick is more insidious. But fellow Frenchie Cyr Boitard, (left) takes a more romantic turn in his Proustian evocation of the soft porn of the past in images like an updated Toulouse Lautrec hashish fantasy.

Michael Fedor's intricately surreal collages such as Goliath, suggest something an absinthe-inspired French Quarter Max Ernst might have created in a dark corner of the Napoleon House in the lost days of yore, a sensibility complemented by Patti D'Amico's mystically tinged canvas The Medium, among others. In 2008, she and partner Warren moved to Water Valley, MS, where the omnipresent kudzu inspired him to paint humanoid vine critters like Kudzu Blues Man, a wavy gravy exercise in animist pointillism in the form of a vinous Delta musician. Throw in Margaret Meinzer's adjacent expo of pop-expressionist dreamscapes like A Small Boat at Sea and it's a weirdly wonderful show in the grand St. Claude tradition of ad hoc epiphanies by artists with eternally youthful attitudes--a sensibility that resonates neatly with French digital artist Nicolas Sassoon's Green Waves, a vast surround-sound and light environment of choreographed pixels in motion at the May Gallery in Bywater, and Irish artist Jane Cassidy's electronic music-video composition at Parse. Both of these sublimely ethereal shows at two of the newer art spaces in town extend a long local tradition of experimental art in unlikely places. ~D. Eric Bookhardt


LaPopSexTVArtShow: Group Exhibition Curated by Beau Tardy and Michael Fedor, through June 1, Barrister's Gallery, 2331 St. Claude Ave, 710-4506

"Popcorn" feat. Mayra Leal

"Popcorn" feat. Mayra Leal, by Beau Ledoux Tardy.  LaPopSexTVArtShow on Flickr.

La Pop Sex TV Art Show at Barrister's Gallery. New Orleans. May 1 to June 1, 2013.

Tagged Wall installation by Beau Tardy at Barrister's Gallery in New Orleans. Series of 12 panels of high resolution 5 color HP z-6100 thermal laminated and mounted digital prints. Digitally painted featuring actress Ashley Greene. Each panel $200, signed and certified.

Beau Tardy, Cyr Boitard, Louis-Jean Gorry, Mara Marich and Sebastien Birchler.

LaPopSexTVArtShow. Barrister's Gallery, New Orleans. Saturday, May 11 until June 1.

LaPopSexTVArtShow, the premiere, is a group exhibition by international media artists, Beau Ledoux Tardy, Mara Marich, Cyr Boitard, Louis Jean Gorry and Sebastien Birchler, opening on May 11 and running until June 1. The opening reception will take place at Barrister's Gallery in New Orleans, May 11 starting at 6pm.

Surveying the pop culture landscape from a privileged vantage point as international media professionals, the group presents never before seen work that bridges the gap between analog and digital, old world and new world.

From Emmy-nominated MTV writer and producer, Mara Marich, to award-winning motion designer and editor, Beau Tardy, French advertising film director Louis Jean Gorry and film set designer Sebastien Birchler, LaPop artists reconfigure mass media and Pop Culture into art, utilizing paint, pixels, video, mixed media, collage, sound and installations.

For the new Pop Culture Artist, everything is fair game. They sample from all existing media and cultures: internet, TV, movies, books, cartoons, music, games, fashion and advertising. Sampling is the new creative paradigm by which these artists reconfigure the recorded past and create the present.

In today's Electronic Culture, everything is accessible through one big wired global central nervous system of which we are all a part. Everyone is an artist and Pop Culture is the culture. Faced with cultural chaos and hysteria, LaPop artists remote-view the future and provide clues on how to successfully navigate from old to new.

LaPopSexTVArtShow is an exciting immersive art event designed to provoke and excite.

For all media inquiries contact 917-407-3319.