Pic-a-day: Cow

Pic-A-Day: Spiral

Pic-a-day: Primary

Foreground Lines

Interruption (foreground lines)

Pic-a-day: foreground lines

Pic-a-day: doodle variation

Pic-a-day: doodles

Pic-a-day: doodles

Pic-a-day: Doodles

Charles Biederman -- Google Search

painting as sculpture, sculpture as painting, blocks
“a Structurist work is neither painting nor sculpture, but a structural extension of the two.”

Anthropomorphism, Art and Objecthood

(Not Original)

Michael Fried observed:

“[A] kind of latent or hidden naturalism, indeed anthropomorphism, lies at the core of literalist theory and practice," and "We are all literalists most or all of our lives. Presentness is grace." -M. Fried, Art and Objecthood.

As an observer/viewer, I inevitably relate to and see objects in figural terms or see figural relationships in objects, even where effort has been made to deny the figure/relation to the figure; that is, to only mark and see the dot or line or plane.
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Other notes to think about from Art and Objecthood:

Continuum of Illusion and Literalness?

• Relational character of almost all painting & inescapable pictorial illusion
  

• “[W]orking on a single plane in favor or three dimensions... automatically ‘gets rid of the problem of illusionism and of literal space, space in and around mark and colors ... The several limits of painting are no longer present... Actual space is intrinsically more powerful and specific than paint on a flat surface.’”

The whole as a single object, even if comprised of units?

• Literalists “are opposed to sculpture that, like most painting, is ‘made part by part, by addition, composed’ and in which ‘specific elements ... separate from the whole, this setting up relationships within the work.’” (quoting Judd)

• “Judd and Morris assert the value of wholeness, singleness, and indivisibility -- of a work’s being, as nearly as possible, ‘one thing,’ a ‘Specific Object” => Morris through a strong gestalt or unitary type form to avoid divisiveness and Judd via wholeness through repetition of identical units. (The whole as a single object?)
  

• Characterizes “Shape” as controlling and central to Judd and Morris’s Minimal Art: “The shape is the object: at any rate, what secures the wholeness of the object is the singleness of the shape.”

Painting/Pictorial and Object perception as in opposition?

• “What is at stake in this conflict is whether the paintings or objects in question are experienced as paintings or as objects: and what decides the identity as painting is their confronting of the demand that they hold as shapes. Otherwise they are experienced as nothing more than objects. This can be summed up by saying that modernist painting has come to find it imperative that it defeat or suspend its own objecthood and that the crucial factor in this undertaking is shape, but shape that must belong to painting -- it must be pictorial, not, or not merely, literal.” In contrast, “literalist art stakes everything on shape as a given property of objects, if not, indeed as a kind of object in its own right. It aspires... to discover and project objecthood as such.”

• “Whereas in previous art, ‘what is to be had from the work is located strictly within [it]’, the experience of literalist art is of an object in a situation -- one that, virtually by definition, includes the beholder...” (quoting Morris)

Bernd and Hilla Becher -- google search

Summation; object; reference Fried

Pic-a-day: Doodle

Pic-a-day: Lost Mouse

The mouse is lost.

Pic-a-day

Mark Rothko -- google search

How Concrete is the Perceived World?

I once spent a great deal of time drawing from life and from time to time reengage, practice, and hone the eye-mind-hand translation to paper, a connection that was important to learning to see and work with line, color and other relationships, but I had to move beyond, in a sense, away from, life to integrate the connection.

I do not look at objects or scenes while making work or imagine "finished" objects or scenes to relay.

The point of drawing and painting is not necessarily to create "illusion" of objects, devolving to simulation rather than according line, color, etc, each identity and function as spatial agents in the picture plane. There is no need for marks actively to denote or stand in for attributes of a physical object or set of objects.

"Every painter starts with elements - lines, colours, forms - which are essentially abstract in relation to the pictorial experience that can be created with them." - Bridget Riley on Paul Klee

In my view, line, color, etc., when accumulated, create a perceivable object/set of objects, as well as the physical object of the painting or drawing. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say a "line," or "color," etc. is capable of being or acting as an object, or being treated as an object, in relation to another "line" or "color." Labeling lines, color, etc objects is not what an "object" is to most of us -- physical, touchable. One cannot hold a line. Unless it is a physical line. Hence, I turn to a "material" line.

Update: A couple questions came to mind as did some initial consideration ...

• Are objects/elements servile to the rhetoric of the narrative or is the narrative servile to the objects/elements relaying it?
  

The "material" object is being used as a line/form. The fact that it is being used (acted upon or through) suggests servility in the making. So too the particle of graphite or blob of paint used as a line/form on canvas. What of the reception, though?

• Can the object or set of objects stand on its own and refer only to itself?
  

Each object is still an object itself, and when used as a material line/form, it refers beyond itself simultaneously as being itself. Compare the degree to which a painting on canvas can stand on its own and refer only to itself (without scale carrying it to the limits of an observer's range of view) - either itself as an object or its pictorial contents.

Josiah McElheny - google search

reflectivity, object

"That’s a big subject in my work—how ideas are contained in objects, and how the idea and the object can’t be disentangled. My belief is, there is no such thing as the idea or the object. There is only a kind of fusion of the two." - McElheny from Art21.

Judy Pfaff -- google search

the whole space, doodle/curvilinear, painting into sculpture/sculpture into painting