Coincidence

In searching online for the image of Rampant Mythical Lion (from the Art Institute's collection) to link to, I came across this piece, which I had not seen before. The form reminded me of some of my current work.

Switching up

Working out a new piece after spending time yesterday at the museum. This is influenced by Rampant Mythical Lion (Vyala), a 8th/9th century sandstone piece from India, Madjya Pradesh or Rajasthan. The piece reminded me how artifact images cross cultures and societies as a similar lion form appeared in an Iranian architectural detail from which I previously drew inspiration and in the Book of Kells from which I have also drawn inspiration in the past.

I don't often start with studies anymore, preferring to work directly with the flow of my materials instead, but I decided to do so on this piece to change up my habits and challenge my entry points into developing work. The first study is more literal than the ultimate piece will be. The second is an initial reduction study. After a few more reduction studies, I'll move to a flow study and then to the piece.

Feeling Wordy Today.

No image coming to mind, just a series of thoughts.

Collage and Review

Fallen off, lately. Tomorrow, I will listen to a grants panel review my latest work. It will be interesting to hear their thoughts, as this is something one often does not get from a group audience. I have to sit silent and just listen, which means it will just be their reaction to the work (and my brief write up, I suppose) rather than to interactive discussion, influenced by back and forth dialogue with me. The intent, to the extent relevant, will by definition have to stand out from the work itself.

So much is and has been collaged that it's interesting to watch a viewer be distracted from the image quality by the fact that the image was collaged from a bunch of different materials that the viewer was not necessarily expecting.
Collaging is it's own way of thinking and piecing together images, first and foremost because the bits ("marks") carry with themselves their own image references to be emphasized and/or deemphasized and second, because in the end pasting bits is quite different physically and emotionally from boldly striking a line across a page with graphite or paint or shaping a clay vessel. While adding bits conceptually does nto stray that far from accumulating dots and other marks, the collaged bits ("marks") are preselected rather than simply made as a collage bit must be collected and/or cut. Applying/adhering/compiling the bits involves the hand but separated from the paper or other surface upon which the pieces are attached/adhered.

Collage like method does get evaluated differently. Perusing the web in a current moment of procrastination, I have started to think more about the issue of whether relelatively mediocre work -- in the sense of the ultimate imagery -- gets a leg up by being done with novel or different means or method. The post it or push pin face is not judged by how amazing a portrait it is, but rather how "amazing" it is that it was made of post-its or push-pins, even if, in the end, the same image painted would be rather innocuous, perhaps in some cases rather badly rendered.

Ancient Images, Artifact

see this site

Looking Back

Periodically, I look back through old images to observe the evolution -- and the elements that are consistent -- in my work. It's one of the best ways of figuring out what's essential. Plus, usually a mix of "of course" moments and "egad, what was I doing" moments. No surprise that most artists cull old work that has not made it out the door. Digital documentation makes it easier to keep a record.

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

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

Hans Haacke -- google search

Tara Donavan -- Google Search

organic, biomorph

Jesus Rafael Soto (Google Images)

linear, horizontal, vertical, semi-penetrable?

Sigh, and more on accumulation/conglomeration.

Sigh. Feeling passed and disconcerted today. A few years ago, I sent out proposals for a fishing line web piece that was about interfering with and framing perception of drawing in space. Unfortunately, the proposals were not successful.

Material World, at MassMoca, features seven artists using accumulation and other strategies with non-art materials to occupy and take over space/environment. Looks like an excellent show, though I probably will not get to Boston to see it.

One of the artists, Tobias Putrih, uses monofilament to occupy the space with finely tuned reflectivity and optics bordering on invisibility. The optics aspect reminded me of a piece I saw by Jesus Rafael Soto ages ago in Paris. The near invisibility of this piece (at least from the photo and description) strikes me as the most intriguing of the work because it's subtle. From the Catalogue link (black and white, unfortunately), most of the artists seems to take over through shear scale -- monumentally and literally occupying the space -- a not so surprising tactic.

One can accumulate any object/set of objects and scale up; one can string anything, including the "strings" themselves. Work through these means and methods has varying degrees of success, from little or none to a lot to arresting to unforgettable, same as any media.

Collecting more notes on Rauschenberg: Elemental Scuptures

From SFMOMA , Untitled (Elemental Sculpture), ca 1953:

I appreciate the juxtaposition of the pointed "screw" and the chained stone, the apparent fragility of a steel object, and the narrative and visual flow of the piece. I also think of Flintstone characters chiseling words on a slab, which is unfair and not all that connected except for the implied chiseling motion, but cannot be helped.
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Rauschenberg included audience interaction as part of the piece, for example, with one piece, inviting audience members to rearrange the pieces of the work (block and stones) into different configurations in "ways that were not interesting." B. Joseph, Random, Robert Rauschenberg and the Neo-Avant-Garde Order, p. 88, 2003. [It's all been done, hasn't it?]

Assemblage and Digression

I did not see and admittedly did not pay much attention to “Unmonumental: The Object in the 21st Century,” show at the New Museum a couple years back. I did not see my work as non-monumental, particularly "object" focused or "assemblage" based in intention, even if I used non-art materials like dry wall, window screen, newspaper, etc.. along with traditional art materials to create elements that were arrayed in spaces.

I cared for what the identity of materials lent to artwork, though I may not always have thought in quite those precise terms. Dry wall has function and connotation and that which it can simulate - broken wall, artifact. I started using it because of that simulated and potential for actual artifact quality, and because it could be dilapidated. I stopped using it because it was too easily dilapidated and difficult to port. Likewise, window screen and newspaper have functions and connotations and that which each can simulate.

Materials can be played with subverted. Whatever material in use (usually a single or confined number of related materials) I explored drawing/painting conventions with the material in space - arrangement of elements into wholes in the context of the physical space/site. I focused less per se on the "objects" that the "drawings" with the materials become, except literally as an artifact of the process and as elements for extending the process.

An artifact is an object, a drawing is an object. Even as it remains drawing based, my work has moving further toward what cannot be denied to be assemblage, even if it came from drawing. Classifications are hard; I'm inclined to try to straddle them and stay in between. One ends up circling back, which has me looking back at "assemblage" historically as an art strategy.

Today, I came across Roberta Smith's NYTimes review of Unmonumental. She writes, among other observations:

• "The thesis here is that assemblage-type sculpture, rampant at the moment, may also be today’s most viable art form. Why? It tends to be low-tech, modest in scale, made with found objects and materials and structured in ways that are fragmented if not actually disintegrating. Its ugly-duckling looks, rough edges, disparate parts and weird juxtapositions help stave off easy art-market absorption while also reflecting our fearful, fractured, materially excessive times back at us."

What happens, then, when "assemblage" doesn't have ugly duckling looks, rough edges, disparate parts, etc. -- none of which have to be part and parcel with assemblage. The assemblage of pieces adds up to an object, solid or fragile, beautiful or ugly, etc., either way, but to a different narrative.

Smith also writes:

• "The main idea here seems to be to make art that looks like art only on careful examination, guided by the assumption that everything, every detail, is intentional and meaningful. The disheveled surfaces may often say Rauschenberg, but Joseph Cornell’s delicate precision is frequently the more useful analogy.

Note, she focuses her characterization as one of guidance on "the assumption" that each detail matters, rather than one in which each detail actually matters or was considered, intentional or meaningful.

Though not using words about what is assumed in seeing art as art, Steven Stern in Frieze, reviewing the same show, seemed to observe no assumed intentionality and deliberateness, other than perhaps packaging and mockery:

• "Industrial fabrication, precious materials, the well-made object – all these were obviously jettisoned. But so too were inherited signifiers of anti-aesthetic value. That is to say, there was no ‘specialness’ conferred by the use of vernacular material: the bits of pop-cultural detritus weren’t glorified as ‘ready-mades’, the adoption of borrowed images didn’t feel like ‘appropriation’. For the artists in the show all this was business as usual, a simple matter of using all the crap that’s around."

• "There is a sense that the New Museum is adopting a similar winking, referential, faux denial: the message ‘This is not a museum’ seems to hover behind their recent moves. Whatever else ‘Unmonumental’ was, it was a canny exercise in marketing, an advertisement for the spirit of the organization. However much one wants to believe in that spirit, it is slightly alarming how slickly they are promoting their unslickness."

Use of "all the crap available" hardly seems an unnatural expansive end point for "intention" defining "ready mades" as art, though not a necessary one, since "intention" would seem to imply a means of selection. Making work out of what is available does not have to denigrate art or amount only to an ironic statement on art or preciousness of art. There are times and frames of mind when I have stopped, looked around, and become acutely aware that every random thing seen looks like "art." Also, what does it mean to feel borrowed: does appropriation have to be selective to feel borrowed or appropriated? Is a "feeling" of borrowing even necessary to appropriation as a strategy?

I've digressed. A use "all the crap" sentiment, however precisely or legitimate, is not what my work is about, as the identity of the materials used matters.

Coming back to assemblage, all the same questions one has for painting, sculpture, and so forth apply: formal or conceptual, traditional or experimental, cohesive or disjunctive.... Installation work is a conglomeration of assemblages, which are a conglomeration of materials, which rely on 2-D and 3-D perceptions and conventions.

The Meaning of Stumbling

Proverb: “A stumble may prevent a fall.” Done a fair bit of industrious stumbling. All must be well, then,

A really awful stumble is when pieces work amazingly well for the artist, and yet, seem unable to catch on with an audience. The artist is left to ponder the disconnect, to dissect it imaginary reason by imaginary reason, fault or no fault based, and to shrug for while.

More pieces/efforts than one cares to count don't work for one reason or another; a few serendipitous pieces come out surprisingly well with less effort than that of all those failures put together, probably because of all those failures. And most "good" work is in between: lots of effort, works.

As for stumbling in distribution -- how easy is that!