Oct 10, 2012 | art history, painting
Socrates had a theory about how we know things exist – I’ve been trying for a while to find a way to explain so it makes sense, but this excerpt from
HistoryforKids.org (not embarrassed:) breaks it down better than I could:
He thought that everything had a sort of ideal form, like the idea of a chair, and then an actual chair was a sort of poor imitation of the ideal chair that exists only in your mind. One of the ways Plato tried to explain his ideas was with the famous metaphor of the cave. He said, Suppose there is a cave, and inside the cave there are some men chained up to a wall, so that they can only see the back wall of the cave and nothing else. These men can’t see anything outside of the cave, or even see each other clearly, but they can see shadows of what is going on outside the cave. Wouldn’t these prisoners come to think that the shadows were real, and that was what things really looked like?
I like to think that art developed alongside this same kind of idea – beginning at creating exact replications of reality for documentation purposes, evolving and evolving into billions of beautiful interpretations until the invention of photography slingshot substantive art into billions of other possibilities, but all the other types – the Untitled’s with no beginning or ending or purpose now have an easy way out with clicks of technology.
A chair started out as just a chair and became interpretations of what a chair looked like – sometimes colorful sometimes abstracted – and then moved into the concept of sitting down, resting and comfort, and now has moved into realms of design, rethinking how we’re able to manipulate the construction of chairs in the first place.
I want to create a series out of this thought, posting artworks that focus on an item or idea and move from the most realistic to the most abstract representations of that thing in art, as we move chronologically. If you think I’m missing a work that belongs in the line – if I leave out your favorite representation of a char for instance – and you want me to add another piece to the post, send it on over!
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Van Gogh Chair, 1888-1889
for more works by Van Gogh, check out the Van Gogh Gallery here🙂 |
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| One and Three Chairs by Joseph Kosuth, 1965
This is another kind of concept along the same lines – how many ways can you represent the same thing? |
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“Kitchen Chair” by KĂĽchenstuhl, 1965
found here
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Man in a Chair, 1983-5
A portrait of Baron Thyssen by Jean-Antoine Watteau
(from the Tate catalogue) found here
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Roy McMakin, paintings with chairs & sculptures of chairs, 2006, installation view
Courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery, New York and James Harris Gallery, Seattle, Photo: Mark Woods
found here
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Rocking Wheel Chair By Mathias Koehler
found in this post with a lot of other cool chairs |
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Oct 8, 2012 | art history, museums, news, The Guggenheim, The Met
This weekend was a busy one. So much art in so little time wears me out, and I’m a firm supporter of the Put-More-Benches-In-Museums Movement, but the ones that the museums actually do have are never at great vantage points anyway. On Saturday we saw the Picasso Black and White exhibit at the Guggenheim and this morning it was the Met’s new Bernini: Sculpting in Clay show. I’m taking a whole class on the latter, which made it cool to actually be able to put all that tuition money to good use.
Picasso Black and White was a whole lot of the same, but not in a bad way – they almost saturate you in his shapes and forms till you feel like you have to shake it off to keep your face from getting out of whack. And although most of it was kept to the two shades listed, there were quite a few works that were colored everything from purple to blue to yellow, to the point where it might have been more appropriate to call it Picasso in Monochrome – although I suppose “black and white” sounds classier.
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Pablo Picasso, The Maids of Honor (Las Meninas, after Velazquez)
August 17, 1957 |
Most of the pieces were profiles of women or girls “seated” or “reclining,” and it was so interesting to see him move from beautiful realist portraits to skewed, geometricized, sexualized ones, as his interpretation of the human form grew into abstract shapes both two and three dimensional. The three dimensional ones were some of my favorite, where the profile was constructed as a grouping of deep shapes, stacked and hanging on top of each other, sometimes with little eyes peeping out from somewhere unexpected and usually an obvious nose protruding.
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| Diego de Velazquez, Las Meninas, c. 1656 |
There were also beautiful renditions of compositions taken from artists that came before him, like “Las Meninas” by Velasquez and the “Rape of the Sabines”story that so many artists have interpreted since Rome’s founding. So many of the pieces looked like the roughest of sketches too, and some were only completed on one half of the canvas. The whole time I couldn’t stop wondering what Picasso would think of this great triumph he’s been built up into; if he’d be proud or embarrassed that all of us were looking at something he made on an unconscious whim that was never intended as a finished product.
They do a pretty good job letting you know that in the exhibit, but it still feels like so much of it is prep work for masterpieces we can’t see.
Bernini: Sculpting in Clay was a whole different universe of art – although both exhibits are heavily idolizing one individual’s contribution to the scene. It could just be because his 17th century time period can’t help but leave him wrapped up in mystery, but I’d choose Bernini over Picasso when it comes to inherent talent. I wish he could’ve lived in a different era though, outside the pope’s reign of power, but maybe then it would’ve turned out much differently and he wouldn’t have had the resources he did to create all that he was able to.
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| Faun teased by putti |
This exhibit is the best you can do without actually going to Rome – on the wall are giant black and white photographs of the massive sculptural programs that actually made it into the palazzos and churches in Rome, out of the bozzetti planning stages on paper and in terracotta before you. The gallery is laid out underground, with two rows of lights above strategically pointed at each glass case containing a little red-brown masterpiece.
The curators did a really great job explaining everything to the viewer. You can see the thought process behind each piece as it develops from sketches to bozzetti to the giant black and white photographs on the walls. Because the sculptures are in the middle and the sketches are hung on the walls, the gallery ends up grouped into little clumps of the same character or type.
The angels that line the back aisle of the exhibit was one of my favorite groupings, since walking through these sculptural pairs that face each other and face you creates the greatest sense of environment, giving you one little glimpse of how it woulda-coulda-shoulda felt to see these pieces in all their finished-product marvelousness in Rome.
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Sep 25, 2012 | news
A new study done over the summer tries to prove that the jargon and language perpetuated in the art world has stepped over a threshold, and become its very own language termed International Art English. It’s still English, but includes a rejection of most nouns and remains limited to a small group of phrases and ideas.
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| Work by Jessica Krause Smith – photo by me:) |
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| Photo courtesy of Rory MacLeod on Flickr |
Alix Rule, a Columbian PhD candidate in Sociology, worked with New York artist David Levine to create the study that’s based on actual data and published by Triple Canopy, an online magazine that facilitates research projects like this outside the usual realms of academia.
A lot of the research is gathered from word counts and comparisons art journals and critiques in addition to collecting and examining 13 years worth of museum press releases and artist newsletters from e-flux, the online institution of the international art world.
IAE has come to be characterized as a mix of spacey terms like “parallel” and “void,” with abstract inconsistencies and prefixes; where words like “real” and “space” are used hundreds of times more often. There’s a distinct rhythm and vocabulary that’s recognizable immediately; it’s described in the study as having “pornographic” tendencies because you know it when you see it.
Words like radically, tension, and autonomy are used to describe art that serves to, functions to or seems to interrogate, transform, or displace something or other.Â
Although it is definitely a distinct subset of English, IAE shouldn’t necessarily be considered as worthy of having it’s very own language, especially given that everything it consists of actually is English, just arranged in a particular way and with similar words and meanings. Writing about art became such a difficult thing to do – attempting to grasp at what’s become an increasingly vague art world where everything is mostly “Untitled” and is open to millions of interpretations on purpose. What do you say about something like that?
Read more about the origins and spread of IAE in my new article on Artsia here!
All quotes come from the Triple Canopy study cited, which you can read in full here.
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