the legacy of jackson pollock
- Pollock’s death as connected with the death of art
- Modern art was ‘slipping’ – dull, repetitious, derivative
- Technical innovations – new materials, great scale, etc.
- “He created some magnificent paintings. But he also destroyed painting.”
- placing absolute value on diaristic gesture – Pollock was in the work (he couldn’t see the whole thing… it was on the floor, etc.)
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Pollock judged his acts, not the painterly outcom(good gestures and bad gestures – not good painting marks and bad painting marks)
- Instability/Resonance between the hands and body that make the marks and the objective markings themselves
- No ‘form’ – where form is biggining middle end, fragmentation, division
- Four sides of pollock – “refusing to accept the artificiality of an “ending”" (interactive works? net-art? time-based works?)
- moving in all directions at once
- individuality and selflessness
- Pollock opens up art to substances of sight, sound, movements, people, odors, touch
- “I’m a painter” replaced by “I’m an artist”
notes on the creation of a total art
- philosophical objectives of discplines
- Renaissance pronounces the birth of more specialism
- Wagner and Bauhaus – total art could not come about this way, as it relies on a ‘master director’
- bypassing ‘art’ and taking nature itself as a point of departure
- “the sensory stuff of ordinary life”
- what makes it art is “how deeply involved we become with elements of the whole and how fresh these elements are”
- not dealing with disciplines, but dealing with whole-senses.
- “a form that is as open and fluid as the shapes of our everyday experience,” without imitating them.
- “only the changing is really enduring and all else is whistling in the dark”
happenings in the new york scene (1961)
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types of happenings
- sophisticated, witty works by theatre people
- zen-like rituals put on by the writers and musicians
- crude, lyrical and spontaneous actions of the painters
- Gutai group in Osaka
- Surrealism, Dada, Mime saltimbanques, medieval mystery plays and processions
- Crucial feature – context – lofs, basements – creating no separation of audience and play
- The habitat of the work gives relationships to the things around it, overall atmosphere, permeating the whole experience.
- Why artist studios do not look like galleries, and why when does everyone is suspicious
- being “on show” suddenly blinds artists to the weakening of their offerings by the gallery
- chance – when something goes “wrong,” something far more “right,” more revelatory, has many times emerged
- impermanence – a premium is placed on the unforseen, the ahistoric, the un-documentable
- “passive in its acceptance of what may be and affirmative in its disregard of security”
- “It has always seemed to me that American creative energy only becomes charged by such a sense of crisis. The real weakness of much vanguard art since 1951 is its complacent assumption that art exists and can be recognised and practiced”
- taste for fads and movements -
- “vanguard artists are given their prizes very quickly instead of being left to their adventure” (could be a critique of the speed of uptake of artists and their work online… that they become ‘known’ too quickly and become ‘dead and famous’)
impurity
- essay about the hard edge and minimalist painting movements
- purity versus impurity as where the aesthetic becomes moral
- Mondrian and destruction of form throuh “interrelated relations” – getting at the polarized forces of the universe
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The principle:
- anything can be the datum of a painting – and can slip from focus into a myriad of changes
- tabula rasa for interpretation of ‘things’ – separation of these things
- a thing and it’s opposite oscillate – like an Necker Cube
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Mondrian also allowed his ‘grids’ to slip off the page – so nothing in the picture is suggestive of a ceasura – the paintings themselves were fragmentary
- depth cues are falsified and emphasized by paint build up against the black lines of a Mondrian
- becoming an un-fixed point in space as a receiver of the work
- Mondrian’s neo-Platonism, Calvinism
- Myron Stout – Untitled No. 3
- confer upon the work a sense of preoccupation – take years to complete
- Purist painting arrests time – as it does not permit spontaneity of execution…
- Pollock’s painting is impure – and is at some point an immediate reference to the action that created it.
- Discussion of Newman, scale and minimalism
the artist as a man of the world
- voltaire – candide – this is the best of all possible worlds, so we had better cultivate our gardens.
- we know more as artists about art history than ever before
- The church and the museum as temple – artists’ relations to institutions
- Epilogue – artists will “have more to do with aisles in supermakets than with the aisles in houses of God”, “more with social psychology than Judeo-Christianity. The astronaut John Glenn may have caught a glimpse of heavenly blue from the porthole of his spaceship, but I have watched the lights of a computer in operation. And they looked like stars.”
happenings are dead (long live the happenings)
- lines between happening and daily life should be kept as fluid and perhaps indiscitinct as possible
- themes should be derived from non-art contexts
- the happening should be dispersed over different and varying locales
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time, closely bound up with things and spaces, should be vairable and independent of the convention of continuity
- “whatever is to happen should do so in its natural time, in contrast to the practice in music of arbitrarily slowing down or accelerating occurrences in keeping with a structural scheme of expressive purpose.”
- In describing the idea that different events (the buying of a fishing pole before Christmas or the laying of the footings for a building) have their own time – “The point is that all occurrences have their own time.”
- the composition of materials should be art-less, and practical
- happenings should be unrehearsed and performed by non-professionals, once only
- there should not and cannot be an audience for the happenings
- “active art, requiring that creation and realization, artwork and appreciator, artwork and life be inseparable”
experimental art
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A.K. reviews art practice ‘movements’ as a discussion of how none of them are really ‘experimental’
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Hard Edge
- conservative mode
- shapes are neo-classical abstractions
- things are juxtaposed, instead of related
- there is a ‘standard currency’ to juxtaposition (1966)
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Op Art
- color theories of pointillism
- Joseph Albers
- Roto Reliefs – retinal fatigue
- the stimuli are well worn – have been used elsewhere
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Abstract Symbolism or Colorfield
- Newman and Rothko – Purism and Symbolist
- Approaches vacancy
- psychic tension caused by prolonged and obsessive use of a single idea minutely varied
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Object Art
- readymades, found objects
- electronics and cigarette lighters
- (perhaps like device art?)
- often make fun of their predecessors’ searches for profound experiences
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Pop Art
- refinements and parodies of mass-reproduction techniques
- pop art derives from popular forms (film, graphic design), which are derived from modern art ideas
- difficult to experiment within because “what they style must always be explicit”
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Assemblage
- eschews consistency
- juxtapositions of not jus the shapes of a whole
- Cubist collage – Dada and Surrealism
- conceived in this way – art is developmental rather than experimental (p. 68)
- modern art is not in fact experimental
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young artists are schooled historically – so it is nearly impossible to do something without it being historicised:
- “it is nearly impossible to make the slightest gesture withouth calling up references that are instatly recognized as history”
- “predictions of things to come are not hte business of prophets and quacks; they approach computability on the basis of the abundance of data made available at every minute to the communications systems”
- developmental artists know what art is
- experimental artists do now – they are interested in the being of art, an extreme position. “the one thing that keeps them from becoming barbers or ranchers is their persistent curiosity about what art might be in addition to what everybody else has made it.”
- separation of cultural attitudes from cultural acts
- Rauchenberg’s all-black and all-white (1951) paintings – showing the void of abstract expressionism as the shadows of the viewer’s figure. all “having to do with art, life, and insight was thrown back at them as their responsibility, not the picture’s.” this shocked people.
- innocence is a modernist fantasy – the return. now innocence is an intellectual invention, not something that can be regained
- “possibility is the most frightening idea of all”
- everything is becoming confused – no one style or form
- “conventional distinctions are not merely inadequate; hey are tiring and fatigue sits well with no artist.”
- “It may be that the only safe conclusion to drwaw is that traditions find their place today alongside nontraditions precisely because no distinctions can be made.” (p. 73)
- experimental artists ask “what is art” everytime they make a piece
- “the goal of their discovery is the more compelling as the outcome of theses means is less and less predictable
- experimenting usually occurs once for an artist, and then value is discovered and the artist continues to mine that value for the rest of their life… or they start again experimenting – requiring erasure of the profession and the ‘assumption of art’
- the painter’s suicide:
- “Let us imagine the suicide of an obscure painter. It is around 1950. He lives in a railroad flat in New York and ispainting large all-black canvases. He covers most of the walls with them, and it is quite dark in his place. Shortly thereafter, he changes to all-white pictures. But he does a curious thing: he proceeeds to seal off each of his rooms with four paintings constructed to just fit their space, edging the final one into position as he moves into the next room. He starts in the bedroom and ends in the kichen (which lets out into the hallway). There he pains the same four white panels but doesn’t leave. He builds a series of such subicles, each within the other, each smaller. He is found dead, sitting in the innermost one.” “Actually the paint er is telling this story to his friends a s a project he has in mind. He sees how attentively they listen to him, and he is satisfied.”
- “The act is tragic because the man could not forget art.”
the education of the un-artist, part I
- non art is more art than Art art
- Nonart – whatever has no yet been accepted as art but has caught an artist’s attention with that possibility in mind.
readings