http://www.primitivism.com/case-art.htm
I thought this was an interesting article.
Comments?
The Case Against Art by John Zerzan
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Doreen Peri
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Zlatko Waterman
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This argument is at least as old as Plato:
http://www.college.columbia.edu/core/le ... /index.php
who advocated mutilating works of art so that his "philosopher" could more easily govern his ideal state. There was something, Plato felt, erroneous about how "mimesis" operated-- something that might threaten the stability of the state. ( see REPUBLIC, books II and III . . .).
Hitler managed ( and intended) something similar in the famous "Exhibition of Degenerate Art" in 1937.
http://www.germanculture.com.ua/library ... 072599.htm
This statement ( in Zerzan's article), like several other "stealth" definitions embedded in this essay, is hogwash:
( paste)
The primary function of art is to objectify feeling, by which one's own motivations and identity are transformed into symbol and metaphor. All art, as symbolization, is rooted in the creation of substitutes, surrogates for something else; by its very nature therefore, it is falsification. Under the guise of "enriching the quality of human experience," we accept vicarious, symbolic descriptions of how we should feel, trained to need such public images of sentiment that ritual art and myth provide for our psychic security . . .
( end paste)
This is the easy chatter of a non-artist. Real art does not "objectify"
anything, but deepens the mystery. Even these two aims ( "objectifying" as Zerzan defines it, and groping for the mystery . . .) underrepresent what art can and does do over the millenia it has been practiced by the human race. Much art is entirely spiritual ( my own "embedded stealth definition" (!)) and does not try to encode any objects or even states of feeling.
"Symbol and metaphor" are too limited and convenient a way of wishing away the mystery of art.
Art, at its best, whether Michaelangelo's ceiling in the Sistine Chapel, or Robert Ryman's white canvases
http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/ ... i_98755402
does not lend itself to easy enclosure in the definitions of psychologists, sociologists or "philosophers."
Ryman and Malevich explore the "infinite possibilities of emptiness . . .", not "objectify feeling", unless one takes "objectify" to mean the coming into being of any object. By that reasoning, a paramecium dividing is an artist.
http://www.silkentent.com/gus1911/StuffText.htm
Just a few comments, Doreen, none of them "objective."
--Z
http://www.college.columbia.edu/core/le ... /index.php
who advocated mutilating works of art so that his "philosopher" could more easily govern his ideal state. There was something, Plato felt, erroneous about how "mimesis" operated-- something that might threaten the stability of the state. ( see REPUBLIC, books II and III . . .).
Hitler managed ( and intended) something similar in the famous "Exhibition of Degenerate Art" in 1937.
http://www.germanculture.com.ua/library ... 072599.htm
This statement ( in Zerzan's article), like several other "stealth" definitions embedded in this essay, is hogwash:
( paste)
The primary function of art is to objectify feeling, by which one's own motivations and identity are transformed into symbol and metaphor. All art, as symbolization, is rooted in the creation of substitutes, surrogates for something else; by its very nature therefore, it is falsification. Under the guise of "enriching the quality of human experience," we accept vicarious, symbolic descriptions of how we should feel, trained to need such public images of sentiment that ritual art and myth provide for our psychic security . . .
( end paste)
This is the easy chatter of a non-artist. Real art does not "objectify"
anything, but deepens the mystery. Even these two aims ( "objectifying" as Zerzan defines it, and groping for the mystery . . .) underrepresent what art can and does do over the millenia it has been practiced by the human race. Much art is entirely spiritual ( my own "embedded stealth definition" (!)) and does not try to encode any objects or even states of feeling.
"Symbol and metaphor" are too limited and convenient a way of wishing away the mystery of art.
Art, at its best, whether Michaelangelo's ceiling in the Sistine Chapel, or Robert Ryman's white canvases
http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/ ... i_98755402
does not lend itself to easy enclosure in the definitions of psychologists, sociologists or "philosophers."
Ryman and Malevich explore the "infinite possibilities of emptiness . . .", not "objectify feeling", unless one takes "objectify" to mean the coming into being of any object. By that reasoning, a paramecium dividing is an artist.
http://www.silkentent.com/gus1911/StuffText.htm
Just a few comments, Doreen, none of them "objective."
--Z
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Zlatko Waterman
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A Robert Ryman painting:
http://www.guggenheimcollection.org/sit ... 40_11.html
( I defy anyone to attempt the virtuosity of "Surface Veil II")
Essay on Ryman:
(paste)
Essay by Anne Rorimer
Robert Ryman's lifelong inquiry into the notion of painting as a medium and a verb—that is, into paint as a viscous material that articulates its support—began as early as the mid-1950s. His principal concern over the decades has been with the presentation of a painted surface in relation to its underlying support. This ongoing investigation has yielded ever-new visual possibilities, however nuanced these may be.
In Ryman's oeuvre the work's "image" results from the nature of the surface that arises when paint is applied to a canvas or any other material support in a particular manner. "What the painting is, is exactly what [people] see," he remarked in a relatively early interview.1 With greater emphasis on the "see" than on the "is" of his statement, Ryman later elaborated on his basic thesis:
We have been trained to see painting as "pictures," with storytelling connotations, abstract or literal, in a space usually limited and enclosed by a frame which isolates the image. It has been shown that there are possibilities other than this manner of "seeing" painting. An image could be said to be "real" if it is not an optical reproduction, if it does not symbolize or describe so as to call up a mental picture. This "real" or "absolute" image is only confined by our limited perception.2
Ryman's aesthetic practice is further illuminated by his observation in the late 1960s that "there is never a question of what to paint, but only how to paint. The how of painting has always been the image—the end product."3 For his part he has "wanted to make a painting getting the paint across"—meaning getting paint literally across the surface and, more idiomatically, getting it across as an idea.4
Occupied from the outset with ways of letting paint engage with its surface, Ryman has continuously sought to activate the painted surface, often subtly, while simultaneously approaching the support as if it were the proscenium of a stage. Unlike Untitled (Orange Painting) (1955–59), which he considers his first mature painting, his works typically use white paint, because of its neutrality as a color, and more often than not they are square in format. The exclusion of other hues, and the equalizing of all sides of the support, minimize distraction from the paint as an area warranting the full attention of the viewer.
Untitled (1959) is indicative of his overriding interest in imbuing paint with the power to act on its own behalf. Multidirectional, interwoven, overlapping brushwork and residual globules of paint signify the performance of paint itself, rather than suggesting some quality beyond its own physicality and its behavior in response to the brush. Moreover, the artist's painted signature, the vertically upended "R Ryman," intervenes in the overall activity of the paint. According to Ryman, the signature, "an accepted element of all painting," functions saliently here as a line meant to avert symbolism, and to prevent the painting from being mistaken as "trying to say something."5 Simultaneously a painted sign and an authorial one, the orange-toned signature is engulfed in the all-encompassing field of paint. Close in color to the orange-yellow tint of the work's raw cotton canvas, the signature-as-line-as-physical-paint mediates between the entirety of the painted field and the partially revealed cloth support beneath it.
The paints Ryman has used since the 1950s have varied immensely in viscosity and finish, whether glossy, semiglossy, matte, or dull.6 These many paint qualities, along with the multifarious methods with which Ryman handles them, interact with one another in concert with the material of the painting's support and in view of the painting's scale.
Both Vector (1975/97) and Varese Wall (1975) are large in scale, and both are painted on wood panels. The evenhanded approach to paint application in these works brings up a question: what differentiates the paint of the painting from the paint of the white wall behind it? The two works pose this question somewhat differently by virtue of their respective supports. Vector comprises eleven wood units of the same size, hung equidistant from one another; Varese Wall, on the other hand, appears as one extended surface, propped up from the floor on five small bluish blocks of foam. Measuring eight feet high and twenty-four feet long, the work is braced to stand just over a foot and a half from the wall.7
The wall plays an active role in the experience and meaning of Ryman's works, whatever their size and no matter what the interaction between paint and support. "If you were to see any of my paintings off of the wall, they would not make any sense at all . . . unlike the usual painting where the image is confined within the space of the paint plane," the artist has pointed out.8 In Vector, the empty spaces between the painted panels echo the forms of the panels themselves. Ryman initially painted this work in vinyl acetate, a pigmented commercial glue, at the Kunsthalle Basel for his exhibition there in the summer of 1975. A couple of years later the eleven panels were separated into two artworks, one of five panels (Vector I) and one of six (Vector II), but they were reunited in 1979. In 1997, Ryman painted over the original, vertically brushed vinyl acetate with oil paint, leaving a new, horizontally brushed surface as impassive as the earlier one. In effect, the paint quality of Vector nearly matches that of the wall, from which, however, the panels may be distinguished in that their thin left sides are made of a clear pine wood and their right sides are of redwood. As the light plays on the work's painted surfaces, the panels seem to float ever so slightly away from the wall. In this way the work demonstrates how painted surface, wall, light quality, and overall spatial confines converge to form an image that simultaneously incorporates and contradicts the formerly blank space of a wall.
Varese Wall, like Vector, also exhibits the fine line between a painting and its background wall. Here, in fact, the painting—its title a reference to the walls leading to the villa of Count Panza di Buomo in Varese, Italy—is also a wall of sorts. This painting-cum-wall creates a dialectic with the wall of its given exhibition space, a wall that presumably is painted but is not in any sense a painting. With his introduction of metal fasteners that visibly hold his paintings to their walls, in 1976, Ryman overtly acknowledged the symbiosis between a painting and its supporting wall. Varese Wall furthermore remains ever freshly painted, as does any "real" exhibition wall, since the artist gives it another coat of vinyl acetate whenever it is installed anew.
Vector and Varese Wall anticipate later works of Ryman's in that they verge on obliterating the distinction between the thematic aspect of painting and a painting as a physical object, but never quite do—in fact, this is a distinction they insist upon. These works fully express the idea that the relationship of paint to support, though born of material practicality, is ultimately grounded in the ideational capacity of painting to be about its own activity. Ryman's paintings detail different possibilities for the application of paint. For him, painting remains an ongoing reflection on itself, and in his work it becomes ever more mindful of its differentiation from, yet necessary, attachment to a wall.
Notes
1. Robert Ryman, quoted in Phyllis Tuchman, "An Interview with Robert Ryman," Artforum 9, no. 9 (May 1971), p. 53.
2. Ryman, in Wall Painting (Chicago: Museum of Contemporary Art, 1979), p. 16.
3. Ryman, in Art in Process, vol. 4 (New York: Finch College Museum of Art/Contemporary Wing, 1969–70), n.p.
4. Ryman, in Tuchman, "An Interview with Robert Ryman," p. 49.
5. Ryman, in Robert Storr, Robert Ryman (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, in association with the Tate Gallery, London, 1993), p. 70.
6. For a full explication of Ryman's working methods and materials, see Robert Storr, "Simple Gifts," in ibid., pp. 9–45.
7. I thank Amy Baker Sandback for unpublished information on these paintings from her forthcoming catalogue raisonné of Ryman's work.
8. Ryman, in Gary Garrels, "Interview with Robert Ryman," in Robert Ryman (New York: Dia Art Foundation, 1988), p. 13.
© 1995-2005 Dia Art Foundation
(end paste)
(website showing a Ryman show hanging in the gallery)
http://www.diacenter.org/exhibs_b/ryman/index.html
Zlatko
http://www.guggenheimcollection.org/sit ... 40_11.html
( I defy anyone to attempt the virtuosity of "Surface Veil II")
Essay on Ryman:
(paste)
Essay by Anne Rorimer
Robert Ryman's lifelong inquiry into the notion of painting as a medium and a verb—that is, into paint as a viscous material that articulates its support—began as early as the mid-1950s. His principal concern over the decades has been with the presentation of a painted surface in relation to its underlying support. This ongoing investigation has yielded ever-new visual possibilities, however nuanced these may be.
In Ryman's oeuvre the work's "image" results from the nature of the surface that arises when paint is applied to a canvas or any other material support in a particular manner. "What the painting is, is exactly what [people] see," he remarked in a relatively early interview.1 With greater emphasis on the "see" than on the "is" of his statement, Ryman later elaborated on his basic thesis:
We have been trained to see painting as "pictures," with storytelling connotations, abstract or literal, in a space usually limited and enclosed by a frame which isolates the image. It has been shown that there are possibilities other than this manner of "seeing" painting. An image could be said to be "real" if it is not an optical reproduction, if it does not symbolize or describe so as to call up a mental picture. This "real" or "absolute" image is only confined by our limited perception.2
Ryman's aesthetic practice is further illuminated by his observation in the late 1960s that "there is never a question of what to paint, but only how to paint. The how of painting has always been the image—the end product."3 For his part he has "wanted to make a painting getting the paint across"—meaning getting paint literally across the surface and, more idiomatically, getting it across as an idea.4
Occupied from the outset with ways of letting paint engage with its surface, Ryman has continuously sought to activate the painted surface, often subtly, while simultaneously approaching the support as if it were the proscenium of a stage. Unlike Untitled (Orange Painting) (1955–59), which he considers his first mature painting, his works typically use white paint, because of its neutrality as a color, and more often than not they are square in format. The exclusion of other hues, and the equalizing of all sides of the support, minimize distraction from the paint as an area warranting the full attention of the viewer.
Untitled (1959) is indicative of his overriding interest in imbuing paint with the power to act on its own behalf. Multidirectional, interwoven, overlapping brushwork and residual globules of paint signify the performance of paint itself, rather than suggesting some quality beyond its own physicality and its behavior in response to the brush. Moreover, the artist's painted signature, the vertically upended "R Ryman," intervenes in the overall activity of the paint. According to Ryman, the signature, "an accepted element of all painting," functions saliently here as a line meant to avert symbolism, and to prevent the painting from being mistaken as "trying to say something."5 Simultaneously a painted sign and an authorial one, the orange-toned signature is engulfed in the all-encompassing field of paint. Close in color to the orange-yellow tint of the work's raw cotton canvas, the signature-as-line-as-physical-paint mediates between the entirety of the painted field and the partially revealed cloth support beneath it.
The paints Ryman has used since the 1950s have varied immensely in viscosity and finish, whether glossy, semiglossy, matte, or dull.6 These many paint qualities, along with the multifarious methods with which Ryman handles them, interact with one another in concert with the material of the painting's support and in view of the painting's scale.
Both Vector (1975/97) and Varese Wall (1975) are large in scale, and both are painted on wood panels. The evenhanded approach to paint application in these works brings up a question: what differentiates the paint of the painting from the paint of the white wall behind it? The two works pose this question somewhat differently by virtue of their respective supports. Vector comprises eleven wood units of the same size, hung equidistant from one another; Varese Wall, on the other hand, appears as one extended surface, propped up from the floor on five small bluish blocks of foam. Measuring eight feet high and twenty-four feet long, the work is braced to stand just over a foot and a half from the wall.7
The wall plays an active role in the experience and meaning of Ryman's works, whatever their size and no matter what the interaction between paint and support. "If you were to see any of my paintings off of the wall, they would not make any sense at all . . . unlike the usual painting where the image is confined within the space of the paint plane," the artist has pointed out.8 In Vector, the empty spaces between the painted panels echo the forms of the panels themselves. Ryman initially painted this work in vinyl acetate, a pigmented commercial glue, at the Kunsthalle Basel for his exhibition there in the summer of 1975. A couple of years later the eleven panels were separated into two artworks, one of five panels (Vector I) and one of six (Vector II), but they were reunited in 1979. In 1997, Ryman painted over the original, vertically brushed vinyl acetate with oil paint, leaving a new, horizontally brushed surface as impassive as the earlier one. In effect, the paint quality of Vector nearly matches that of the wall, from which, however, the panels may be distinguished in that their thin left sides are made of a clear pine wood and their right sides are of redwood. As the light plays on the work's painted surfaces, the panels seem to float ever so slightly away from the wall. In this way the work demonstrates how painted surface, wall, light quality, and overall spatial confines converge to form an image that simultaneously incorporates and contradicts the formerly blank space of a wall.
Varese Wall, like Vector, also exhibits the fine line between a painting and its background wall. Here, in fact, the painting—its title a reference to the walls leading to the villa of Count Panza di Buomo in Varese, Italy—is also a wall of sorts. This painting-cum-wall creates a dialectic with the wall of its given exhibition space, a wall that presumably is painted but is not in any sense a painting. With his introduction of metal fasteners that visibly hold his paintings to their walls, in 1976, Ryman overtly acknowledged the symbiosis between a painting and its supporting wall. Varese Wall furthermore remains ever freshly painted, as does any "real" exhibition wall, since the artist gives it another coat of vinyl acetate whenever it is installed anew.
Vector and Varese Wall anticipate later works of Ryman's in that they verge on obliterating the distinction between the thematic aspect of painting and a painting as a physical object, but never quite do—in fact, this is a distinction they insist upon. These works fully express the idea that the relationship of paint to support, though born of material practicality, is ultimately grounded in the ideational capacity of painting to be about its own activity. Ryman's paintings detail different possibilities for the application of paint. For him, painting remains an ongoing reflection on itself, and in his work it becomes ever more mindful of its differentiation from, yet necessary, attachment to a wall.
Notes
1. Robert Ryman, quoted in Phyllis Tuchman, "An Interview with Robert Ryman," Artforum 9, no. 9 (May 1971), p. 53.
2. Ryman, in Wall Painting (Chicago: Museum of Contemporary Art, 1979), p. 16.
3. Ryman, in Art in Process, vol. 4 (New York: Finch College Museum of Art/Contemporary Wing, 1969–70), n.p.
4. Ryman, in Tuchman, "An Interview with Robert Ryman," p. 49.
5. Ryman, in Robert Storr, Robert Ryman (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, in association with the Tate Gallery, London, 1993), p. 70.
6. For a full explication of Ryman's working methods and materials, see Robert Storr, "Simple Gifts," in ibid., pp. 9–45.
7. I thank Amy Baker Sandback for unpublished information on these paintings from her forthcoming catalogue raisonné of Ryman's work.
8. Ryman, in Gary Garrels, "Interview with Robert Ryman," in Robert Ryman (New York: Dia Art Foundation, 1988), p. 13.
© 1995-2005 Dia Art Foundation
(end paste)
(website showing a Ryman show hanging in the gallery)
http://www.diacenter.org/exhibs_b/ryman/index.html
Zlatko
havent read the Zernan article yet, but i'll surely comment when i do.
zlatko,
it seems that the Ryman painting doesn't come across on the computer. just looks like a blank deteriorating screen.
Plato was, by the way, one of the greatest artists of the ancient world. he wrote extraordinarily minimalistically dramatic scripts called Dialogues. his anti-art polemic is just that -- polemic.
zlatko,
it seems that the Ryman painting doesn't come across on the computer. just looks like a blank deteriorating screen.
Plato was, by the way, one of the greatest artists of the ancient world. he wrote extraordinarily minimalistically dramatic scripts called Dialogues. his anti-art polemic is just that -- polemic.
I don't think 'Therefore, I am.' Therefore, I am.
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Zlatko Waterman
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Marksman45
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I resent and reject two principles of Zerzan's piece
1. That bit about "objectifying feeling," transforming it into "symbol and metaphor." First, everything we experience is a metaphor -- we experience nothing directly, only after the filtering process of our senses. Second, art has nothing to do with feeling, or emotion, or anything else human (or animal or vegetable or mineral).
2. What exactly does he mean by "art"? He sets tools and technologies in another category. Art is the act of a person (or anything else, really) creating from ingredients found in his surrounding nature something new. Expounding and improving upon nature; introducing your own devise into a situation. Or, as Tolkien put it, (paraphrase) "imagination" is the act of thinking up something new; "art" is the act of making it real.
1. That bit about "objectifying feeling," transforming it into "symbol and metaphor." First, everything we experience is a metaphor -- we experience nothing directly, only after the filtering process of our senses. Second, art has nothing to do with feeling, or emotion, or anything else human (or animal or vegetable or mineral).
2. What exactly does he mean by "art"? He sets tools and technologies in another category. Art is the act of a person (or anything else, really) creating from ingredients found in his surrounding nature something new. Expounding and improving upon nature; introducing your own devise into a situation. Or, as Tolkien put it, (paraphrase) "imagination" is the act of thinking up something new; "art" is the act of making it real.
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tinkerjack
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Doreen he loses me right there with the first million years. I think he saw too many grade B movies called One Million Years BC. I know I am only the eternal college sophomore but I did manage to take an advanced course in physical anthropology, there is not any evidence of any Cro-Magnon humans skulls, (that is us, the first artists and the most efficient killers to walk this earth) before about 35,000 years ago. Assuming that skulls say something about the brains they contain, this nine pound universe inside our skulls did not exist before then. I mean that our skulls reflect the morphology of our brains. The Shape and organization, what is wired in.During the first million or so years as reflective beings humans seem to have created no art. As Jameson put it, art had no place in that "unfallen social reality" because there was no need for it. Though tools were fashioned with an astonishing economy of effort and perfection of form, the old cliche about the aesthetic impulse as one of the irreducible components of the human mind is invalid
For some reason that makes me think of this quote by Matisse..
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0, ... 28,00.htmlI cannot begin a painting until I feel like strangling someone
That venus he referrs to below is this little statuette
which was called The Venus of Willendorf by a male anthropologist as a sexist joke. It is the figure of a “Queen or Great Mother.” They were matrilineal. I thought the feet were missing but apparently not. It was made without feet.
The oldest enduring works of art are hand-prints, produced by pressure or blown pigment - a dramatic token of direct impress on nature. Later in the Upper Paleolithic era, about 30,000 years ago, commenced the rather sudden appearance of the cave art associated with names like Altamira and Lascaux. These images of animals possess an often breathtaking vibrancy and naturalism, though concurrent sculpture, such as the widely-found "venus" statuettes of women, was quite stylized. Perhaps this indicates that domestication of people was to precede domestication of nature. Significantly, the "sympathetic magic" or hunting theory of earliest art is now waning in the light of evidence that nature was bountiful rather than threatening.
This guy is a cultural anthropogist? He knew what those killers were thinking when they hunted pre-historic cave bears to extinction? Well maybe it was the climate change that did those giant fifteen or twenty foot high bears in. But they killed a hell of a lot of them. Built shrines out of bear skulls.It was a social anxiety; people felt something precious slipping away.
How about that one, does that sound like it makes sense? How the hell does he know that? Mythology had to be an oral tradition what physical evidence would we have for it? Deep thinking going on here but I can't articulate the arguement. What came first the myth or the art, how about a mythology of art? I spent my last two hundred and fifty thousand dollars for a painting of a Campbell's soup can. I don't know much about art but I know what I like.Art, with myth closely following, served as the semblance of real memory.
It is all Greek to me, I got no brain for art or music, but I know that on the day I walked through the exhibit of the decadent art of the Weimar republic in DC I had to move on fast. I was afraid I was going to cry. I don't mean misty eyed, I mean sobbing.
Just another tangent but I been thinking about “state art” Fascist art and Marxist art, how real did it make Mussolini or Stalin.Or, as Tolkien put it, (paraphrase) "imagination" is the act of thinking up something new; "art" is the act of making it real
Can I have a little travelling music? thank you Tom Paxton
Talking Pop Art
Words and Music by Tom Paxton
Well I went out for a walk last week,
I passed a shop they call a boutique.
Fancy Dresses of every size, fancy wigs to pop your eyes.
Bracelets, diamond rings, stuff for women too.
Well I didn't want to see no more,
I slipped inside the grocery store.
I took down a can of beans, I pulled a dollar out of my jeans.
A fella said "Hold it, that'll be three hundred dollars".
Well a feather could've knocked me down,
I mean, I knew this was a high priced town.
But this was getting hard to take, I said "What the hell do you get for steak?"
He looked surprised, said "It isn't just a can of beans, It's a work of art".
Now I see what the poor man means,
He's proud of that little can of beans.
I didn't hear what else he said, I had my eyes on a loaf of bread.
"White bread four-hundred dollars; Three for a thousand"
Well just about then a crowd came in,
And pickin's must've been pretty slim.
Because in just a minute, or three, or four,
They'd cleaned out that whole grocery store.
They bought brooms,
Fought over watermelons,
One fella put down a pickle. Said " I don't know much about art,
But I know what I like".
Well as I stood there wonderin' why,
Two little fellas came cruising by.
Little tight suits, little black ties,
One of them looked at me and said " My how rustic, I bid a thousand".
I said "I beg your pardon?"
"It speaks, I bid five thousand!"
So here I stand in a Superman suit,
And everybody says I'm cute.
I tried to tell them but they would not see,
So they hang their hats and coats on me.
Well a job's a job.
Still if I had my preference, I'd rather be Batman.
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Zlatko Waterman
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Nice response, tinkerjack.
I don't know what this compulsion is that non-artists have to "define" art and speak about its "real" purpose. Whatever it is, they don't seem to be able to get rid of it.
Some of them even want to make art "objective" instead of what it is: a multi-cross between dreaming, intoxication and masturbation.
Why did Picasso develop Cubism? To convey a "moral" idea?
http://www.saint-andre.com/thoughts/hugo-rand.html
No. As Maurice Denis ( a prominent critic who WAS also an artist . . .) says, it is a "passionate equivalent"-- it doesn 't "objectify" anything:
(paste)
Quotes from Maurice Denis--
Remember that a painting - before it is a battle horse, a nude model, or some anecdote - is essentially a flat surface covered with colours assembled in a certain order.
There were apples painted in pale green and bright red on a ground of emerald green leaves. It is all colour. One might say it was a Cezanne.
We learned from Gauguin that every work of art is a transposition, a caricature, a passionate equivalent of a sensation which has been experienced. He freed us from all restraints which the idea of copying naturally placed on our painter's instincts.
(Denis' paintings)
http://www.artunframed.com/maurice_denis.htm
I don't know what this compulsion is that non-artists have to "define" art and speak about its "real" purpose. Whatever it is, they don't seem to be able to get rid of it.
Some of them even want to make art "objective" instead of what it is: a multi-cross between dreaming, intoxication and masturbation.
Why did Picasso develop Cubism? To convey a "moral" idea?
http://www.saint-andre.com/thoughts/hugo-rand.html
No. As Maurice Denis ( a prominent critic who WAS also an artist . . .) says, it is a "passionate equivalent"-- it doesn 't "objectify" anything:
(paste)
Quotes from Maurice Denis--
Remember that a painting - before it is a battle horse, a nude model, or some anecdote - is essentially a flat surface covered with colours assembled in a certain order.
There were apples painted in pale green and bright red on a ground of emerald green leaves. It is all colour. One might say it was a Cezanne.
We learned from Gauguin that every work of art is a transposition, a caricature, a passionate equivalent of a sensation which has been experienced. He freed us from all restraints which the idea of copying naturally placed on our painter's instincts.
(Denis' paintings)
http://www.artunframed.com/maurice_denis.htm
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tinkerjack
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- Joined: May 20th, 2005, 7:27 pm
- Location: a graveyard in Poland if I was lucky
First Draft
I still have not finished it yet but this part struck me as funny.
Not to get off on a ramble about Novels, but I kind of liked her novels. Maybe my favorite bit was when John Galt made the sign of the sacred dollar.
I been thinking about my experience as a metaphor, just cut and paste the meaningless random moments of my life story into a homage to my family. Not to ramble again but I liked Salinger novels too. Maybe Franey and Zooey the best. That Glass family floored me.
Z I am not trying to be evasive, you know what an ignorant child I am about Art. I just know what I like. A couple of yours say with me like eidetic images, jimboloco’s too. Avatars, I got a bunch of those in my head too, GA for one, and abstroint for another.
done with out for now perfessor, but I still reccomend two aspirin before reading.
I like this bit too
Art is a metaphor for mystery to someone like me.
I still have not finished it yet but this part struck me as funny.
I like this bitThe first clue that Rand's estimation of Hugo may be misguided is that she proclaims him to be "the greatest novelist in world literature". Since I hold Hugo's novels in high esteem, I would not necessarily disagree with the sentiment that they are some of the finest ever written. However, it is anachronistic, not to mention false to Hugo's own self-definition, to call him a novelist; for, despite the fact that he wrote seven novels (two of which are commonly thought of as classics), Hugo's main literary activity was the writing of verse, and he considered himself first and foremost not a novelist but a poet.
http://www.saint-andre.com/thoughts/hugo-rand.htmlHugo, in his own poetic way, recognizes this fact. In his book William Shakespeare, which contains his most sustained reflections on the nature of art and especially literature, Hugo argues that "the poet is necessarily at once poet, historian, and philosopher" (II.1.i). And in the Post-Script to My Life, he observes:
It is needful that there be in the poet a philosopher, yet also something more. He who is lacking in this celestial quality, the dream, is a philosopher only. (§2)
What is this "something more"? It is "the secretion of the ideal" (William Shakespare, II.5.ii), the celestial quality of the dream — and "man is virtually made up of dreams" (Love in Prison, §5). Yet although "the human mind has a greater need of the ideal even than of the real" (William Shakespeare, II.5.ii), the true challenge of art is to "generate the real in the ideal" (William Shakespeare, I.2.ii, §1). So in art there is no opposition between the real and the ideal, between the thought and the dream. For "the ideal is nothing but the culmination of logic" (Les Misérables, V.1.xx) and thus "poetry contains philosophy as the soul contains reason" (Post-Script to My Life, §12).
Hugo pays homage to philosophy and reason, but he knows there is more to life than reason: there is passion, there is wisdom, there is friendship, there is love. According to Hugo, these are the spark and the fire of life, and it is the sacred purpose of poetry to capture that fire, concentrate it to a white heat, and shower an exhalation of light upon the human soul
I
The distinction is not unimportant, especially when one considers that Rand admitted she was "not an admirer of poetry" (quoted in Torres and Kamhi, What Art Is, 354) and when one realizes that out of an entire volume devoted to "a philosophy of literature" (The Romantic Manifesto) Rand wrote only twenty-one words about poetry.
Ayn Rand was a novelist, so naturally enough she argued that "a novel is the major literary form" (The Romantic Manifesto, 81). Homer, Dante, and Shakespeare would be surprised to hear it. Indeed her argument could make sense only in quite recent times, since it was only around 1900 that the novel supplanted the poem as the leading form of literature (a development which followed on the demise, round about 1800, of narrative and dramatic poetry in favor of the prose novel). Rand's argument is revealing (The Romantic Manifesto, 81):
A novel is the major literary form — in respect to its scope, its inexhaustible potentiality, its almost unlimited freedom (including the freedom from physical limitations of the kind that restrict a stage play) and, most importantly, in respect to the fact that a novel is a purely literary form of art which does not require the intermediary of the performing arts to achieve its ultimate effect.
Not to get off on a ramble about Novels, but I kind of liked her novels. Maybe my favorite bit was when John Galt made the sign of the sacred dollar.
That is nice, so phenomenological for me, Husserlian.Remember that a painting - before it is a battle horse, a nude model, or some anecdote - is essentially a flat surface covered with colours assembled in a certain order.
I been thinking about my experience as a metaphor, just cut and paste the meaningless random moments of my life story into a homage to my family. Not to ramble again but I liked Salinger novels too. Maybe Franey and Zooey the best. That Glass family floored me.
Z I am not trying to be evasive, you know what an ignorant child I am about Art. I just know what I like. A couple of yours say with me like eidetic images, jimboloco’s too. Avatars, I got a bunch of those in my head too, GA for one, and abstroint for another.
done with out for now perfessor, but I still reccomend two aspirin before reading.
I like this bit too
Second, art has nothing to do with feeling, or emotion, or anything else human (or animal or vegetable or mineral).
Art is a metaphor for mystery to someone like me.
Z-ko,
people, artists or not, feel the need to 'define' art and other concepts b/c occasionly someone comes up with an interesting spin like this:
art has nothing to do with emotion? nothing to do with the human y the animal or the vegetable or the mineral? sounds like a Bob Dylan remark, 'it's got nothin to do with nothin' or somethin like that. actually, i think art has to do with everything, and certainly with all these things. art exists.
people, artists or not, feel the need to 'define' art and other concepts b/c occasionly someone comes up with an interesting spin like this:
Marks,Some of them even want to make art "objective" instead of what it is: a multi-cross between dreaming, intoxication and masturbation.
art has nothing to do with emotion? nothing to do with the human y the animal or the vegetable or the mineral? sounds like a Bob Dylan remark, 'it's got nothin to do with nothin' or somethin like that. actually, i think art has to do with everything, and certainly with all these things. art exists.
I don't think 'Therefore, I am.' Therefore, I am.
do,
this is a great and interesting article thanks for the post.
this para. is best:
i am not sure why the author thinks that he has a "case against art" whatever that might be. and his nostalgia for a nonalienated primordial union with Being strikes me as an illusion, and hence the notion of the fall of man from nature's grace is mythic also.
this is a great and interesting article thanks for the post.
this para. is best:
Both painter and poet have always wanted to reach the silence behind and within art and language, leaving the question of whether the individual, in adopting these modes of expression, didn't settle for far too little. Though Bergson tried to approach the goal of thought without symbols, such a breakthrough seems impossible outside our active undoing of all the layers of alienation. In the extremity of revolutionary situations, immediate communication has bloomed, if briefly.
i am not sure why the author thinks that he has a "case against art" whatever that might be. and his nostalgia for a nonalienated primordial union with Being strikes me as an illusion, and hence the notion of the fall of man from nature's grace is mythic also.
I don't think 'Therefore, I am.' Therefore, I am.
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Zlatko Waterman
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tinkerjack
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- Joined: May 20th, 2005, 7:27 pm
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we have a moment before we fall from grace. just at that moment we come slidding out of that tunnel to this world, slippery slimey bloody little poliwogs. Just then we are in a natural state as we will ever be in this best of all objective fact worlds. Than acculturation begins. We are at the peak of our powers at that moment, we can speak every language know to man, if we could only remember our baby talk.hence the notion of the fall of man from nature's grace is mythic also.
Bergson I think was Husserl's teacher or visa versa?
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