Results tagged “art” from Eccentric Eclectica

A new exhibition of paintings and drawings by Guillermo Kuitca, the Argentinian artist, just opened at the Walker Art Center this weekend. I went in to view the exhibition and see the artist interviewed by Olga Viso and Douglas Dreishpoon, two of the curators for the show.

There were a couple of works that caught my attention as I wandered through the gallery before the discussion. In the first gallery there is a smaller canvas that has a large black polyhedra with lighter round ink impressions surrounding. The contrast between the ink impressions and the solid black creates a vivid sense of depth to the solid outline, almost as though the black outline suggests something beyond the canvas, a sense of depth. Upon reading the plaque I discovered that the solid black outline was inspired by a building plan and the round ink impressions come from a ball being bounced upon the canvas.

In the second gallery there is another ghostly piece, this time of a bed painted upon a dark black/blue background. Beds were a common leitmotif in many of Kuitca’s works but this one had the most immediate aesthetic reaction for me. It’s a similar visual effect to the first plan and ball painting; there is a sense of the background receding beyond the surface and the lighter colored bed floating above the canvas.

In the final gallery I was most impressed by the capstone piece, Everything, one of a series of paintings of maps made on mattresses. From afar the picture is an abstract collection of lines; when near the labels of the map appear and the viewer feels a connection to an actual place. In conversation Kuitca said that he often chose for his source material maps that he had no personal connection, with the consciousness in the back of his mind that these maps had a significance for someone that he might never meet but still existed elsewhere in the world.

Kuitca is an unimposing presence in person. He is middle aged with thinning hair that was shaved down almost to his skull, dressed in the de riguer style of the academic/artist of a suitcoat over a button down shirt. There were a couple of interesting themes that came up during the conversation: memory and forgetting, drawing processes, the corrosive power of water, and the canvas as a stage.

Dreishpoon opened by talking about a trove of 3000 drawings that Kuitca rediscovered during the process of creating the exhibition. Most of the drawings were made during 1978-79 before Kuitca moved to his first independent studio. He stored most of the drawings and forgot about them, to the point where he said, in later interviews, that he wasn’t a drawer. Even artists forget about the previous activity or compartmentalize aspects of previous work. At least Kuitca didn’t go so far as Barnett Newman and destroy his early work.

32 Seating Plans is a series work from the exhibition that is more interesting after hearing the method of production. Kuitca downloads the seating plans from opera theaters around the world, alters them in Photoshop, prints them on photo paper, and then puts the prints into shallow pans of water. In the water the inks release from the paper and float free, creating abstract patterns that still retain an indication of their source. The water has a corrosive effect upon the printing.

When discussing one of his early paintings, El Mar Dulce (1986), Kuitca talked about his internal efforts to escape the idea of painting. He didn’t believe that painting had much to say, but he was still a painter, so he had to reinterpret his own canvas as a stage, imagining a bed at the foot of the stage and the actions that preceded the picture, creating a sense of drama where none appeared visually.

It is always a pleasure to listen to artists or authors, creators of any kind, speak or talk about their own work. Beforehand the work is just another object, afterwards the passion and effort that goes into creating is revealed. I’m reminded of how I felt when I first saw Samuel Delany and Giyatri Spivak speaking at an academic conference. I was abashed to see the raw emotion and passion behind literary criticism, and from there any intellectual endeavor. Perhaps this is one reason why the academic conference or the special exhibition will not disappear.

I’ve been reading To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf this summer. It is a wonderful and brilliant piece of art, part of the high modernist literary flowering from the first half of the twentieth century. The style reminds me of Henry James in many places, but with a smoother syntax. The link to James is the focus on internal dialogue, the thoughts that go on inside each of us when we think about our family; Woolf takes that idea and develops it to a fever pitch. Parts of the book are so good it is almost painful to read.

Which brings me to the emotional reaction to a work of art that I want to write about. It is not a pure reaction to the emotion conveyed by the work, instead it is a meta-reaction to the craft and form of the work that makes me feel as though nothing could ever be written to improve upon this masterpiece. I think of it as a form of despair or depression mostly because I’m comparing my own paltry artistic efforts to this greatness that is standing right in front of me. Even if the passage of writing I’m reading is meant to convey a happy emotion I’m still thinking about the style and the pinnacle of achievement that has been reached by Ms. Woolf or any other artist.

I talked about this a bit with my friend Chris on Wednesday and he described a similar experience reading If On a Winter’s Night by Italo Calvino. I’ve never finished that Calvino book but I’m not surprised at the reaction to his work as well as Woolf’s. The two of them are some of the best writers of the past 100 years.

There are times when I’ve felt a similar emotion with other, non-literary works of art. Some of the paintings by Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollack, or Claude Monet have had a similar effect upon me. It seems to happen less often with music, perhaps because I don’t play music as much as I write or paint. Part of this despair depends on my knowing just enough about how difficult it is to achieve such a successful work of art. If I don’t know much about making music then it’s harder for me to judge when someone is truly performing or working at the epitome of their field.

Mention of the word field makes me think that this despairing feeling could be applied beyond art to other endeavors where one meets or encounters people working at the very edges of the accomplishable. But one still has to have enough experience and background to be able to recognize success.

Nina Simon the author of The Participatory Museum and the Museum 2.0 weblog was in the Twin Cities this week to promote her book at an event hosted by the Walker Art Center. I was already at the Walker to give a public tour and decided to stick around and listen to what Nina had to say which was a good decision.

Simon spoke for half an hour about her work on encouraging participation by museum goers. I enjoyed her pragmatic, design-centric approach to the problems of encouraging participation and collaboration which showed off her engineering background.

She said that the typical museum is visitor agnostic. It is designed to give the same information to a 10-year old and someone with a Ph.D. The labels on the exhibits are the same for both visitors. But does this really make sense, especially in a world where technology and design are capable of so much more?

Simon advocates for three transformations of the museum:

1. From destinations into places for everyday use.
2. From trusted sources of information into trusted hosts for social experiences.
3. From places for seeing and exploring into places for making and doing.

Why don’t maker workshops and hackerspaces take place at science museums? Do the directors of the museums realize that these groups exist? Do the hackers bother to ask the museums for space or support? What about stitch and bitch groups who meet in coffee houses? Why shouldn’t they meet in a museum (or a library)?

I think the most important thing that Simon talked about was the reminder that “to participate socially you have to invite individually.” I can see this having significant repercussions for computer supported collaborative work, open science, and almost any commons based project that is taken up. My own experience from running book clubs, experimental courses, attending conferences, and more verifies her admonition.

She elaborated on all three of her transformations with examples drawn from various museums and libraries across the nation. Simon emphasized the need for design to interact with and respond to the community. An idea that works at one museum may not work at another if the infrastructure and the maintenance costs are not taken into account. If the Worcester City Gallery gets visitors to vote on their favorite paintings the success may be due to the ongoing responsiveness of the museum staff as much as the novelty of using voting to get visitor feedback.

I also liked her overall point that design constraints are sometimes useful. If you give the audience a completely blank page you may be disappointed by the lack of response. But if you constrain their activity in a useful manner you may be surprised by how much feedback you receive. Sometimes people need a seed from which to grow their participation.

I wanted to like the new version of The Prisoner on AMC but so far it’s been a failure.

A big part of the problem is the absence of Patrick McGoohan. He was the key to the success of the original series and Caviezel is an inadequate replacement. What made McGoohan so good was his anger and a sense of danger. You really felt like he wanted to destroy the whole village if he didn’t escape. Caviezel is upset but never really angry, he yells a bit but it doesn’t feel genuine. McGoohan’s anger was always on the knife edge of erupting in unexpected ways.

And consider the opening credit scenes. In the 1960s series McGoohan stalked down the hall and sped away in his sports car through the streets of London. In the 2000s series we get intercut visuals of Caviezel spraypainting “resign” across the windows of his office and blurry surveillance video. The former reeks of danger, risk, and spy games a la James Bond. The latter is corporate, the panopticon.

Perhaps it’s an indication of how spying has changed in our imaginations as well as reality. The glory days of the spy were the height of the Cold War; when the enemy was well-defined and the game had rules as portrayed in the works of Ian Fleming, John LeCarre, Alistair MacLean. McGoohan even played a role in a film of a McLean novel - Ice Station Zebra.

Today spying is pervasive. The city of London is constantly monitored by CCTV. No one is followed by a “tail”, instead it’s just recorded on video. We’re living in the Foucauldian panopticon where everyone is being watched. Spying and data-mining are a way of life, hidden beneath every thing we do in the West. It is the water we swim in. During the Cold War we could at least pretend that we were fighting for something else, fighting against the reds to be a free economy, fighting against becoming a number. Today the fight is mostly over. We’re all numbers now and either don’t know it or are resigned to it.

Perhaps that’s why the remake of The Prisoner feels so empty. This time around it’s less about finding the truth, if it’s really out there, then doing our time in purgatory.

Is Twitter or any kind of technology killing poetry? That was the argument I listened to yesterday afternoon at a local Meetup group.

I shake my head, silently, every time these arguments come up because they capture something real about our crazy modern life but also leave so much behind.

To me poetry is just another form of technology - a linguistic one - which we use to communicate with each other. Before the invention of the printing press poetry was one of the most reliable ways to communicate information over long distances because it was an aid to memory. Evidence: the troubadours described by James Burke in The Day the Universe Changed, Ong’s work on oral and written cultures, Yates and the cathedral of memory. Without poetry we’d know even less about the past than we do.

Poetry gives us a sense of presence, reminding us to pay attention to the world around us. But the present of the world is a “buzzing blooming confusion,” according to William James. Poetry does not give us direct access to this confusion, instead it distills that confusion into a unified work of art that gives the impression of spontaneity.

Technology provides certain affordances for poetry. How different would e.e. cummings poetry be without the invention of the typewriter? Will current or future poets write visual poems as easily or fluently as cummings now that the typewriter is disappearing from our normal lives? Consider the relation between the length of most lyric poetry and the size of the usual book page.

The core truth behind the fear of Twitter is real. There is a missing connection at the heart of modern life. Technology, if it plays a major role in this change, affects us by distancing us from interactions with the world. According to Albert Borgmann’s device paradigm, technology acts as solely as a means to an end. So Twitter is a means to gossiping with friends, marketing yourself for a job, or increasing the celebrity of Ashton Kutcher. Poetry, through the distillation of experience, is an end.

A final irony - we all learned about the event through Meetup, a technology of world wide web.

Is there such a thing as an immoral work of art?

I attended a panel on this topic last weekend at Diversicon and have been thinking about the question since then. Opinion among the panelists and the audiences was divided, some clearly thought that a movie or a story could be immoral, others were less sure. There is not an obvious intuitive response to this question.

The major example on the panel was the film Seven Pounds, starring Will Smith. The moderator and a few others objected to the main character, an aeronautical engineer from MIT, deliberately killing himself in order to donate his organs to other people. They argued that Tim/Smith could have done more good by keeping his job and potentially saving hundreds or thousands of lives instead of killing himself and helping only the few who received transplants.

From the perspective of utilitarian ethics I don’t think this objection makes a whole lot of sense. From the description it appears that Tim, the main character, has saved or at least improved the lives of seven people. But we don’t know anything about his past behavior, whether his work in engineering has helped to save lives or not. Nor can we predict the impact of any potential work he might do in the future. The idea that Tim might help the world more by staying alive is a supposition. From a utilitarian perspective it seems clear that Tim made the correct choice, his actions provide more happiness for more people.

There are a lot of different threads behind the reaction of some people to this movie. There is a strain of technological optimism that someone like an aeronautical engineer from MIT has more to give to the world than just his body parts. What if the main character had not been an engineer? How about a lawyer or a homeless person? There is also a strong belief in the efficacy of the individual, and a parallel feeling that no depression at the loss of a love one is so bad that one can’t persevere. It is the traditional American message to just buck up and get on with life despite whatever tragedies we encounter. When someone fails to return to the ring after being knocked-out it shows the weakness of their character instead of any corruption with the system.

More to come on the evaluation of art in moral and other terms.

I mentioned a recent study about stress and poverty earlier today. In summary, there appears to be a link between allostatic load (a psychological and physiological measure of stress) and average performance with working memory tests.

So how could we respond to this?

Drake Bennett has a story at the Boston Globe about teaching emotional intelligence. Since Daniel Goleman published Emotional Intelligence in 1995 there has been a growing chorus of educational researchers and reformers calling for emotional education. To me these seem like two things that were meant to come together. If stress is partly about managing emotion then learning how to do that better seems like it would be a very good thing.

The RULER curriculum is tailored to different age groups, but in general it involves dozens of sessions: workshops in which students discuss feelings they are having or interview each other about their emotions, role-playing exercises in which they act out different emotions or are presented with emotionally charged situations, then have to work through how to defuse them. There is an emphasis on learning a richer vocabulary to describe emotions, the idea being that students better able to express how they feel will be both more conscious of their feelings and less likely to be misunderstood by others. And there are Ekman-like courses in basic facial expression recognition - many kids, Brackett says, confuse surprise and fear.

One of the central tools of Brackett’s system is something he calls the “mood meter,” a 2-by-2 chart on which kids can plot their subjective state along with their energy level. Brackett argues that doing so allows kids to better understand what they’re feeling and even why. High energy and positive is excited, low energy and positive is relaxed; low energy and negative is sad or depressed, high energy and negative is agitated or angry. A more fine-grained, systematic understanding about what emotions are, Brackett argues, is a key step in learning how to anticipate and control them.

Brackett and his colleagues have started a consulting firm on Emotionally Intelligent Schools

Over at Greater Good magazine Karin Evans has an article on Arts and Smarts. Is there a connection between intelligence and art education? The studies aren’t ironclad but they do seem suggestive of a positive connection between the two.

I particularly liked the following quote from a book called Studio Thinking.

Working in high school art classes, they found that arts programs teach a specific set of thinking skills rarely addressed elsewhere in the school curriculum—what they call “studio habits of mind.” One key habit was “learning to engage and persist,” meaning that the arts teach students how to learn from mistakes and press ahead, how to commit and follow through. “Students need to find problems of interest and work with them deeply over sustained periods of time,” write Hetland and Winner.

"Studio Thinking: The Real Benefits of Visual Arts Education" (Lois Hetland, Ellen Winner, Shirley Veenema, Kimberly M. Sheridan)

1. People will laugh at me? Not the people I respect; they haven’t yet and they’re not going to start now.
2. Someone has done it before? Honey, it’s all been done before. Nothing’s really original. Not Homer or Shakespeare and certainly not you. Get over yourself.
3. I have nothing to say? An irrelevant fear. We all have something to say. Plus, you’re panicking too soon. If the dancers don’t walk out on you, chances are the audience won’t either.
4. I will upset someone I love? … The best you can do is remind yourself that you’re a good person with good intentions. You’re trying to create unity, not discord. See the curtain call. See the people standing up. Hear the crowd roaring.
5. Once executed, the idea will never be as good as it is in my mind? Toughen up. Leon Battista Alberti, a fifteenth-century architectural theorist, said, “Errors accumulate in the sketch and compound in the model.” But better an imperfect dome in Florence than cathedrals in the clouds.

From

"The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life" (Twyla Tharp)

A long and interesting discussion about art and interpretation at last nights Understanding Philosophy Meetup. We started with Susan Sontag’s essay “Against Interpretation” and went from there. One of the issues that came up was the potential for harm caused by art or interpretation.

Since Plato philosophers and critics have acknowledged that art can be dangerous. For Plato this was a major reason to banish poets from the republic; art could only distract us from real world of truth and forms. Sontag thinks this fear of distraction is foolish and wants to push us closer to a direct experience of art. For her the danger is the interpreter who erects barriers between the audience and the art, too much interpretation and the erotics of art is lost. I don’t believe Plato’s account that art takes us away from the truth, so I’ll assume that art doesn’t harm us.

But consider the harms of interpretation in more detail. There seem to be at least three cases of harm that interpretation may lead to.

1. Interpretation may harm the status of a work of art as a work of art. Suppose a novel is hailed as a masterpiece of modernist fiction by 20th century critics, but future critics, in say the 22nd century, decide that it is not worth discussing. Is the work still an artwork in that future time? Accepting the power of interpretation may mean that what is art changes over time. The particular time frame, future or past, is not important to this example because all you need is a long enough period of time for interpretations and canons to change.
2. Interpretations may harm the viewer of an art object by giving him or her a mistaken or incorrect understanding of the artwork. The idea here is that there are some interpretations of an artwork that are better than other interpretations. In particular the intention of the artist needs to be given some weight. Consider an artist who paints a picture, enters the picture into a contest, wins the contest, and then finds out that the picture was hung upside down. Surely we want to say that a mistake was made, something went wrong, the experience of the artwork for the audience was different than expected or intended. Is this mistake enough to alter the status of an artwork to a non-artwork?
3. Interpretation may harm the ability of a viewer to appreciate or experience the work of art. Someone who reads about A Streetcar Named Desire as an allegory of the conflict between a brutish barbarism in our culture and the delicacy of Western civilization before they see the play for themselves loses something in the experience. “The modern style of interpretation excavates, and as it excavates, destroys; it digs ‘behind’ the text, to find a sub-text which is the true one.” Sontag cites Freudian and Marxist interpretations as particular examples of harmful interpretations.

I think that Sontag’s major goal is to reject the third type of interpretation. The first is never really mentioned, but may be dealt with elsewhere in her work, and the second is mixed together with her objection to the third. For Sontag the possibility of a correct interpretation, or gradations of correct interpretations, seems questionable. She is more worried about the totalizing dangers of interpretation, for example Freudianism, than privileging any intentions the artist may have.

I don’t think there is any real harm to the viewer of an artwork from interpretation. First of all, interpretation is always already occurring when we encounter a work of art so why worry about it if we can’t escape it. Sontag says “The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means. In place of a hermeneutics of art we need an erotics of art.” I’m not sure what this could possibly mean, perhaps I need to read more of her criticism to understand it. This feels like some type of foundationalism, that art would be pure art if we could just get close enough to it, just tear through the curtains of interpretation and experience.

Furthermore, I think that interpretation may actually be a benefit to the audience, may reveal something someone had not considered before. Interpretation slows us down and forces us to pay attention to the artwork that is in front of us. I think that Sontag is not asking us to abandon interpretation but to recognize its limits. A Freudian reading of Streetcar is not correct or incorrect, harmful or safe. It is merely one, among many, possible interpretations, an addition to our potential understanding of the play. Our stance toward an artwork should include an awareness of the cloud of interpretations that surround it. The more we know about these interpretations the more we can appreciate the work of art.

The problem with my reading of Sontag is that it requires a very sophisticated education about art, and possibly even philosophy. The harm question fails to mention the spectrum of abilities that an audience has when it approaches art. I think it is much more likely that a naive art viewer would be harmed by an implausible interpretation than an expert. At the same time the expert can become overconfident and bogged down in overinterpretation to such an extent that a Sontagian encounter with the sensual experience of the artwork may be useful. Sometimes we need to just step back and ask ourselves “What do we see/hear/read here?”

To me the second and third harms can be ameliorated or easily dealt with. I just don’t think that the third holds much weight as I’ve tried to demonstrate because the totalizing danger of interpretation is no longer a live possibility. In part we can thank Sontag for this change. The second harm of mistaken interpretations can be addressed by further discussion and education. Where this leaves the intention of the artist/author I will leave alone for now. The final harm is one that most art philosophy and criticism rarely mentions or even deals with. There is a lot of discussion about the process of canon formation in literary theory, and numerous examples of artistic recovery where a previously forgotten artist or artwork is dug up from the past and reassessed by new standards. Are these changes actually harmful to art in any way? This will require more thought.

Some notes on Dieter Roth for a Walker Art Center tour.

Roth was born in Hannover, Germany in 1930 and he died in 1998 in Basel, Switzerland, at the age of 68. During WW2 he moved to Switzerland to avoid the war while his family remained in Germany. After the war his family moved to Bern where Roth began studying commercial illustration.

Roth was a very talented illustrator. During the 1970s he produced a number of books that were based on ambidexterous drawings he would do in a very rapid style. Most of his early art was painting and drawings that were heavily influenced by op-art and constructivism. He also began working on books very early in his career, a habit which continued throughout his life and had a significant effect on other artists.

In 1960 Roth met Jean Tinguely, a Swiss sculptor, who was well-known for Homage to New York, a self-destructing sculpture that had been installed at MoMA. Roth was also influenced by the Fluxus movement during the 1960s. The result was a set of artworks that took a decisive turn toward conceptualism.

He began making biodegradeable art, especially with foodstuffs. He would place a piece of sausage between papers, and over time the grease from the sausage would spread out to create a sunrise. Or he would nail pieces of food to a board, cover it with yogurt and plaster and then let the food decay. The decay became part of the artwork. Roth continued to use foodstuffs in his art throughout the rest of his career. In 1970 an exhibit in America, called Staple Cheese (A Race), was installed. It consisted of 37 suitcases filled with cheese and left to rot in the gallery.

Roth was an obsessive collector and many of his works depend on the massive accumulation of detail. “Flat Time” was a yearlong collection of every flat piece of paper, food, and other ephmera that Roth encountered during the mid-1970s. He put them all into 600 binders which were shelved in a gallery where visitors could examine them. He took 36,000 photographs of every building in Reykavik, Iceland and then displayed them in a gallery with multiple slide projectors. Near the end of his life he videotaped everything he did - the result was a piece called “Solo Scenes,” video fragments of two years of his life displayed on 130 monitors.

Tonbild, Sound Picture, is a perfect example of this aesthetic of accumulation. The work is an assemblage of material from his studio that was accumulated over 13 years.

“When I was young I wanted to become a real artist,” Mr. Roth once reflected. “Then I started doing something I felt wasn’t real art, and it was through this that I became a well-known artist.”

Barnett Newman was born in 1905 and died in 1970. When he was 40, at the end of World War 2, he destroyed all of his earlier artwork and began to develop a new visual language to express his hopes and fears for humanity. He strove for an art that was Sublime and “which through symbols will catch the basic truth of life which is its sense of tragedy.”

By 1948 he had developed a mature style of large fields of monochromatic colors interrupted by narrow bands, called zips, of different colors. The zips were created by masking a portion of the canvas with tape. Many of his painting using this style were very large - monumental in scale - sometimes 20 feet high or wide.

Newman is often grouped with a subset of abstract expressionist painters known as color-field painters or post-painterly abstraction. Other prominent members of this group are Mark Rothko, Clyfford Still, Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland, and Helen Frankenthaler. The color field painters emphasized the visual properties of colors over the other elements of art like line, shape, or form. Critics grouped these painters together because of their tendency to apply color in large fields, in contrast to other “gestural” abstract expressionists like Jackson Pollack.

I was initially attracted to this painting, “The Third,” because of it’s title. What was Newman hoping to convey with this title? Where did it come from?

I discovered that a lot of titles for Newman’s paintings come from Biblical or Jewish sources, such as Adam, Eve, Abraham, Voice of Fire, Onement. “The Third” may refer to the Jewish mystical belief that separates the Sefirot into three aspects, man, woman, and child.

I interpret the Third as referring to the viewer who is looking at the painting. The two yellow zips on either side of the painting leave room for the viewer as the third side of triangle, and push our perception deeper into the central orange area.

Newman had large ambitions and grand intentions for his painting. He wanted to convey a sense of the sublime and powerful emotion through his work.

Newman’s work is surprisingly controversial. In 1990 the National Gallery of Canada purchased Voice of Fire, a large Newman canvas, for $1.8 million dollars. The purchase became a major focus of controversy about public funds paid for pointless abstract art and generated a slew of editorials, commentary, and cartoons decrying the poor state of modern art. In 1997 a man slashed a Newman canvas in an Amsterdam museum. The same man had been arrested for slashing another Newman canvas ten years earlier. In 1982 a student in Germany did the same thing to another Newman painting. The German student stated that he had been afraid of the painting, that it was a perversion of the German flag, that purchasing the work with public funds was irresponsible, and that artists earn too much money.

Newman’s work has clearly had an emotional impact on some of its viewers. Whether it succeeds in capturing the sublime or demonstrating the tragic nature of human life is up to you.

The above was written for a group of Walker Art Center tour guides.