Miro

I wish I was in New York to see the Miro show -- Joan Miro: Painting and Anti-Painting 1927-1937. Alas, I have to settle for the online exhibition.

I prefer to think of this work as anti-then-existing-painting conventions or expectations, rather than anti-painting.

Mixing Historical and Contemporary Art

Ed Winkleman's blog had an entry on trends in "contemporary art", focused on systematic connecting of dots vis a vis the massive information and content management system/database we collectively are creating through individual contributions to web resources.

I'll focus on one trend he pointed out -- "the growing interest in mixing historical with contemporary art or older historical works with more recent historical works" in exhibition -- for which he saw positive motivation -- "any dismissal of linear time seems of urgent interest ... to present a more accurate overall picture of the works' significance or, as .... to 'draw connections.'"

We can always draw new connections and reinvent interpretations of old work, but is that all that is happening? All art can be placed someplace within a few generalized rubrics that cross time. Overall, basic themes (life, death, renewal, sex, war, etc) connect human existence across time (and would manifest in art even in the face of outright denial of the relevance of these themes to art), and formal aspects/hierarchies (e.g., focus on articulating space verses flatness) seem to move in an out of favor, from different motivations, in historical timelines, as filtered and re-filtered through history.

Perhaps, rather than dismissal of linear time, there is today by some an underlying desire to recapture the apparent simplicity of linear time or an effort to connect to apparently less plural times when art practice and artwork seemed less all over the place at any given point in history, even while outwardly denying linearity.

Perhaps there is an attempt to short circuit relevance through time as a marker of significance -- a desire to lend the credence of the historical work, a credence gained through the passage of time with the passage of time being one credential that contemporary art by definition cannot itself claim, and the credence of history to a contemporary practice that, ironically, for a considerable time focused on tearing down past icons and historical relevance. Or perhaps it's merely an effort to predict the significance of contemporary work across time. How is it a more accurate picture of a current work's significance to connect it to a work 100 or 500 or 1000 years earlier that bore no influence on the creation of the work, especially following a period of time in between the works that focused on deconstructing and disputing the validity/value of the historical work, other perhaps, than to manifest the disconnect -- ironic or fact -- or concede some level of invalidity in the deconstruction?

I'm probably missing something here. All work created in it's own time is contemporary to that time and a historical marker for a later time to consider.

Intention and Interpretation

Intention verses interpretation -- both can work.

A painter painted and exhibited diptychs and triptychs of interiors, scenes and still lifes to varying degrees toward or away from representation -- the direction depending on whether one starts with the most classically representational (looks like what it is) or the more loose, deconstructed abstraction in the different views of the same subject.

A reviewer seemed to focus, with some despair on a stance that the work appeared in the reviewer's eye to take in relation to critical theory, particularly deconstruction and tropes of deconstruction a la conceptualism and painting, which was not the thing that the artist, according to the artist, was tackling. The artist, to paraphrase, was trying to "depicting (sic) simultaneous aspects of how people experience", giving pause to feeling "one continuous field of experience" as opposed to a clear delineation between being inside and outside of oneself, trying to get at something that he believed was ultimately "invisible." The paintings could be considered and analyzed with the reviewer's approach; biases effect our interpretations. But the paintings also worked the way the artist intended -- in my view because of the interplay between deconstruction and reconstruction as the eye moves from one depicted state to another. This perceived relay between reconstruction and deconstruction, form and un-form, is my interpretation, of course, and perhaps not what the artist intended.

Strong work operates on multiple levels, whether or not all the levels originally are intended, and I like that deconstruction, a trope sometimes employed to relegate painting to irrelevance, contrarily could bolster the reconstructive, meditative, and transformative potential of painting.

Time lines

We can view and consider modern art, at least early modern art of cubism, surrealism, Bauhaus, etc., at some distance, with a backward glance, not being in or too near its moment. The distance perhaps feels less with Dada, since conceptualism connects to Duchamp’s Dada.

We are 145 years after Manet's Olympia (which many say ushered in modern art), 100 or so years after Cubism, 60 or so years after Pollack began action painting.

Manet's Olympia, 1863
Cezanne's Mt. Victoire, 1897-1898
Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, 1907
Braque's Houses at L'Estaque L'Estaque, 1908
Malevich's White on White, 1918
Piet Mondrian, Composition with Yellow, Blue, and Red, 1921
Jackson Pollack's Cathedral, 1947
Ad Reinhardt's Black Painting(s),1960-67

For comparison, Botticelli's Birth of Venus was 50 years after Van Ecyk's Arnolfini Portrait (advent of oil painting), Da Vinci's Mona Lisa was 70 years after the Arnolfini Portrait, and Rembrandt's Night Watch was a little over 200 years after the Arnolfini Portrait and somewhat more than the same number of years before Manet's Olympia (220 years).

Van Eyck's The Arnolfini Portrait 1434
Botticelli's Birth of Venus, 1486
Da Vinci's Mona Lisa, 1503–1506
Raphael's School at Athens, 1509-1510
Bruegel's The Tower of Babel (1563)
Parmigianino's Madonna with the Long Neck, 1534-40
Caravaggio's The Calling of Saint Matthew, 1599-1600
Rembrandt's The Night Watch, 1642

Old Found Art

A wikipedia snippet about a controversial ancient human figurine, Venus of Tan-Tan, discovered in Morocco and claimed to date back to between 500,000 and 300,000 BCE, made me think of how old an idea it likely is to turn a found object (a rock) into an artistic expression (a figure).

According to the wiki entry, the Venus of Tan Tan figurine may have been created by natural geological processes but bears evidence of having been painted. If so, it may have been a found object that resembled a figure enough to be picked up and altered with paint to highlight the resemblance. Of course, it may not have been: the wiki entry also notes that the figurine appears to exhibit traces of human tool work.

Perhaps romanticism runs amok, or I just like the contrast between what's alive and what's not: I'm left supposing that the first object of art was made upon spotting resemblance between a natural inanimate form found on the ground and an animate form, perhaps even the self, and in that moment, having the identity of the inanimate form change. It's also possible that original appreciation was more abstract, the same way we have our eyes and/or our imaginations tickled and captured by cracks and pocks in the ground, though I wonder whether we've been schooled to appreciate random compositions.

Making art from a found object per se may not have deserve accolades as "original" when it came into vogue in the 20th century except that the found objects themselves were also manmade, which carried issues of whether use of the objects in art denies or does not deny the prior functional identities of the objects. Also, to the extent that such art made with found objects denies animation, modern and contemporary art made with found objects differs from finding resemblance between a rock and a human form.

Long Term Engagement

While web surfing, I came across the pages for MOMA's color chart exhibition earlier this year. The MOMA exhibition did not focus so much on the delights of playing with color interaction, but rather focused on conceptual approaches that see colors as standardized -- colors as ready made cloaks.

Among the artists included, Niele Torono has, since the 60s, systematically "painted" by pressing a painted laded No. 50 brush onto surfaces (e.g. walls, etc) to make monochromatic imprints repeatedly at perpendicular 30 centimeter intervals, using pre-existing variations in architectural context and added variations in framing context (meaning the dimensions and placement of the pictorial box) to produce a surprisingly wide variety of work. The volume and range is more interesting to me than is any particular piece.

The MOMA site includes a video interview, in which Torono's speaks about the subtle variations in the brush shaped marks -- no two marks are exactly alike. The marks are individually produced, so the hand remains involved, albeit heavily constrained by the systemic approach. But because the paint application is so limited, the works for me end up being about the alteration of context, and not so much about painting. It would be incredibly difficult, impossible actually, for me to constrain my forms that much for more than a few explorations. I need to come at contextual inquiries from both directions -- varying forms within context and varying contexts around forms.

I wonder how many artists starting out today will be exploring the same processes, systems, or conceptual idea thirty years from now. Apparent originality or ironic appropriation/referential regressions are in vogue. But there is another option, which Torono has adopted -- long term, in depth exploration and engagement -- as did Cezanne and others.

Reflections on Identity

If art is the expression of the self, or of the self in relation to others/the world, it's automatically about identity. Some art practices can be seen as placing this in tension, subverting it, or trying to suppress it into irrelevance.

Appropriation takes that which has been conceived by or made by another. However, appropriation imparts the new relationship of the appropriator to the appropriated idea, image, etc., reflecting identity -- although perhaps confused or heavily borrowed identity.

Anonymity over authorship separates other external aspects of the artist's identity from the work. Even if not specifically identifiable to a particular name/person, identity remains reflected in the work -- but much less so with rigid conventions.

The contemporary practice/convention of situating the conceptual underpinning of an artwork within taking a position in relation to the rubric of critical theory or illustrating theory binds the context for reflecting identity and the scope of identity that is reflected -- more so if critical theory should tend toward inflexibility. Fostering reexamination broadens the space in which to reflect identity.