Philip Guston on art #3

There are so many things in the world - in the cities - so much to see. Does art need to represent this variety and contribute to its proliferation? Can art be free? The difficulties begin when you understand what it is that the soul will not permit the hand to make.

Philip Guston on art #2

          Tony Tuckson 1973 (Australia)
I do not think of modern art as Modern Art. The problem started long ago, 
and the question is:
Can there be any art at all? 
Maybe this is the content of modern art.

Philip Guston

George Seurat, la Normandie

When the great Philip Guston speaks, I listen.

"Everyone destroys marvelous paintings. Five years ago you wiped out what you are about to start tomorrow. 

Where do you put form? It will move around, bellow out and shrink, and sometimes it winds up where it was in the first place. But at the end it feels different, and it had to make the voyage. I am a moralist and cannot accept what has not be paid for, or a form that has not been lived through.

Frustration is one of the great things in art; satisfaction is nothing."

(from an article which appeared in Art News Annual, XXXI. It is based on noted for a lecture the artist gave at the New York Studio School in 1965.)

Lecture on Something, John Cage

Coming back to Eickhart, for the sake by the way of a brilliant conclusion, a tonic and dominant emphatic conclusion to this talk about something and nothing and how they need each other to keep going, as Eickhart says, "Earth (that is to say something) 'has no escape from heaven" (that is no-thing) "flee she up or flee she down heaven still invades her, energizing her, fructifying her, whether for her weal or for her woe.

from John Cage's talk Lecture on Something delivered at the "Club" NYC in February, 1951.

Ai WeiWei, and the problem of the vase starring Tony Shafrazi!

One of these jars by Wei-Wei was smashed to the floor by an artist in Miami at the recently opened Pérez Museum. He (the perpetrator) spoke with a reporter for the New York Times. His grief, he claimed, was “for all the local artists in Miami that have never been shown in museums here.” "Miami’s museums and galleries", he said, “have spent so many millions now on international artists,” without, in his view giving any attention to local talent.

“It’s the same political situation over and over again,” he told the newspaper. “I’ve been here for 30 years and it’s always the same.”

I will not mention his name so as not to add to his celebrity but to break a $1,000,000 vase by the leading contemporary Chinese artist Ai WeiWei is more than just chutzpah, as they say in New York. He goes even further and says, “I saw this as a provocation by Ai Weiwei, the artist/protester/vandalizer told the Miami New Times, "to join him in an act of performance protest,” Chutzpah, indeed!

(He was referring to WeiWei's famous work entitled  “Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn,”  wherein WeiWei destroys a priceless Han urn, "to make a point about valuation of art and everyday objects as well as the fragility of cultural objects".

Its an interesting theory but it usually plays out to be more a move to generate publicity for the author of the defacement in question. Think of Tony Shafrazi, who in 1974, took a can of red paint and sprayed Picasso's infamous Guernica with large lettering: "KILL THE LIES ALL". Grabbed later by a MOMA guard he shouted: "Call the curator, I am an artist".

He was, of course, arrested but he did get off with a slap on the wrist. This is the new American paradigm, (but soon to be world-wide, if it isn't already). Shafrazy is now a wealthy gallery owner, and also a heavyweight on the Contemporary Art scene.

And, this latest act of defacement will feed conversations at dinner parties from London to Los Angeles, (briefly maybe) but it's the discussion which nobody wants to have:

'What is it really worth: this thing called CONTEMPORARY ART?' 

While all the big guys (and gals) play musical chairs, it's under the table where one finds the elephant in the room.

Speaking of all these vases, it's made me think of this one from a recent post. If it was broken in this fashion my heart would have been shattered.

for Joyce

Before dying
The very last email
Is sent.

Forrest Bess

I am wild about these images. I am only a little familiar with his work, having seen a show many years ago. At that time I remember being so flummoxed by the paintings that I really was thrown off balance. I found them strangely beautiful, and do today even more. Isn't that really what art is for? Isn't it to show us something coherent and yet strange at the same time? I imagine that this painter is in possession of the necessary artistic means (writers call this craft) to take the viewer somewhere mysterious in ourselves. What that is, or where, I cannot say.

I am re-reading Stanley Fish's book How to Write a Sentence. I often read what writers say about  their craft because what they are after is what I am after in painting. And, of course, I don't mean airport books. Writers write about the craft of writing, but painters rarely write about the craft of painting because they are not writers. There are great exceptions: Delacroix, Van Gogh, (I have read both) Motherwell, Klee (which I haven't read) among others. But painters paint, they don't usually write about the experience. And, if they do, I am always cautious. 

From Stanley Fish who writes:

-sentences... are discrete instances of what Walter Pater sought in art, experiences of brilliant intensity that promise "nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass and simply for those moments' sake -

Who could describe art more succinctly? 

Fish cites another wonderful example of craft at its best:

'Almost anyone can read with pleasure the sentence in which John Updike tells us what it was like to see Ted Williams hit a home run in his last at bat in Fenway Park on September 28, 1960:

  

It was in the books while it was still in the sky.

How can one make paintings like this?

creative types

Dive

DIVE | 5x5 from Mario Lopes on Vimeo.

Buddha

Where there's Buddha,
There's people

And flies.

(merci Issa pour l'idée)

25 seconds of time

Gone Too Soon: The Complexity of Time from Tamara Benitez on Vimeo.

great books #4 (Where the Heart Beats by Kay Larson)

This is a good read for anyone interested in one of the greatest cultural shifts in America of the last half century. I confess that I still don't know what to make of Cage. What I mean by that is that I haven't completely emotionally connected with his music or his art work. That said, he still fascinates me because of his relentless quest into the inner world of creativity, his searching beneath the subterranean world of an America of indescribable material achievements during this period. Of course, he knew 'everyone', a host of characters who were also exploring this terrain under the radar of popular culture. What was his legacy? I guess I'll know more when I finish this enjoyable book. 

More to be revealed.

Jenny Bell, Australian painter

I have seen Jenny Bell's painting here and there over the past few years and they have stayed in my memory. (These are awful reproductions as it is difficult to find any with a decent sized resolution on the web)

These things remind me of certain works by Milton Avery. He, too, seemed obsessed with the subtly of Nature in the landscape. And, he possessed enough talent to compress it into a delicate abstraction in a most modernist sensibility. Jenny Bell has a wonderful sense of color which depicts the Australian landscape with a graphic truth. These are painter's paintings, and I mean by that, that she takes the risk of failure. She does not make pretty images for the public. She loves painting more than she loves Nature which is the way I believe it should be for an artist. I would like to see them in real life. I especially love the larger painting of the barn (in snow?) which has the clearest resolution. It is a sublime image.

Dan McCarthy (untitled facepot #25)

So, wasting I don't know how much because I didn't pay attention on a recent Art Forum Magazine I felt like a sucker. There was little content inside (what was I expecting after all?) and it left me feeling cheap and empty. I did however fall on this facepot, as it is called, by the artist Dan McCarthy in between a million pages of advertisements. Somehow, it summed up for me the state of modern man as hapless bystander.

More will be revealed.

bush

Afternoon rain-
Smell of semen 
In the bush.

erect!

Erect-
An old man envies
The bamboo shoot.

Sidney Nolan (Ned Kelly series)

A month ago I went to Canberra to see the National Gallery of Australia. It is an oversized building which does not lend itself to exhibitions, and I thought it badly organized as well. The closest comparison would be the Musée d'Orsay, which of course was a re-configured train station. And given its restraints, it is a far more successful museum than this elephantine building in Canberra. However, I only want to share images of Sidney Nolan, not offer a critique of the National Gallery of Australia itself. 

Sidney Nolan (1917-1992) Born in Melbourne, he lived and worked there until 1952 when he moved to London where he eventually settled. He was a prolific artist and a painter who has grown in my esteem over the past few years. Here is a series of paintings around the theme of Ned Kelly who holds an iconic stature here in Australia. I like that he seems to pull technique from anywhere, and everything. Without prejudice he arrived at a kind of personnel expression which defies category. In fact there is something in his expressive faces which remind me of Piero della Francesca curiously enough. Its a kind of scratchy obsession which penetrates past an academic training.

photograph by Nolan of a desiccated horse during a draught.

Half hidden

Half full
Half seen-
Frustrated moon.

l'air de rien #187 (Mal's toy store, Taree, NSW )

mal from cloudsandsea on Vimeo.

treasure hunt!

TREASURE (03.00) from Oliver Murray on Vimeo.

Joyce Cary (Art and Reality)

 1998

'Art has its immense power for good and evil because it deals always with fundamental passions and reactions common to all humanity. Even its simplest forms, a single phrase of music, a color pattern, it can give a shock of pleasure which makes life valuable. For that enjoyment has no relation with appetite or self-satisfaction. It is something freely given, a good, a grace, belonging simply to existence, to reality itself. For that minute, the meaning of existence is this special pleasure, the emotion of beauty.'

Chapter XXXI Good and Evil

painting and architecture #3 (Charles Gwathmey)

I think constraints are very important. They're positive, because they allow you to work off something.

Charles Gwathmey (1938 - 2009)

l'air de rien #186 (Ugo Rondinone)

New Project 1 from cloudsandsea on Vimeo.

Painting Architecture and #2 (Frei Otto)

Many people notice that computers have their limits. I've nothing against them, but my experience with materials and form I can touch has taken me a good deal further. 

Frei Otto (1925 - )

I made this drawing in Morocco about 6 years ago and it took maybe less than a minute to get down. I made hundreds of drawings on my trips there but only a few were 'right' enough to be saved. When I looked at this drawing after returning to France many weeks later I was jolted by what I was looking at. For it seems that I had seen death during one of my drawing sessions and it looked back at me.

Only my hand could have made this spontaneous image. It could not have been 'made' any other way than by fingers which had been practicing for years alongside my eyes. I write this because its with regret that I see the computer has somehow become our 'third appendage'. And, a computer cannot make the the 'necessary mistakes' from which an authentic art work is born. It lacks the fundamental element know as intuition.

Jeff Koons, successful artist

Jeff Koons on Balloon Dog from SandenWolff on Vimeo.

"Art does not happen inside objects, it happens inside the viewer. Objects are just transponders…." 

Thus, in this nice little video Jeff Koons clarifies his ideas about art, and to be fair, he articulates them well. This is a thought provoking piece which raises the great perennial question: What is art?

What happens 'inside the viewers' is a very post-modernist approach to this age-old question and it is important but it cannot be more than half as valid as what happens in the object itself as they make a perfect whole. Where there is art, what happens in the art work happens also inside the viewer, but the reverse is equally true: what happens in the viewer happens only if it has happened in the object, otherwise, it is just a sentimentality and thus consequently out of the realm of any meaningful art.

These are two parts to the whole experience between artist and viewer, and when one fails it drags down the other and vice/versa. 

But, this is my own person view of course.

Regardless, Koons surfs the zeitgeist wave of the 21st century.

l'air de rien #185 (land of the rising sun)

happy new year
l'air de rien #185 (land of the rising sun) from cloudsandsea on Vimeo.