Rauch's figures cannot be seen as individuals, they are more like archetypes or symbols, representative of a mood or action. This dehumanising of the figure seems to capture a particular trend in society, a response to pop arts response to societies shift away from the individual and towards the corporation or brand.
I think we have to be aware of this artistic direction because it is responding to something that is prevalent today, and painting always needs to strive towards being current, this is what keeps it fresh and makes it matter. Although in my own work i would also like to speak of the individual, to remain on the outskirts at least of the european tradition. To mix these symbols of people with people that still exist within their own particular sphere of selfhood. Of course i still stand by the ideology that a painting should react first of all to itself, meaning that every work responds to the rules that are specific to each singular painting, and this means that any one painting may not include both the individual and the symbol, but the idea can be seen as a general rule to follow.
However if the paintings are to include the individual, i think their expressiveness needs to walk a tightrope betwwen finding the self and and losing the ability to communitcate it. So that the person is lost within their immediate environment, they have the capacity to relate, to empathise, yet they don't have the necessary tools around them to do so. This is what i have attempted to achieve with Mary The Queen...
Tuesday 30 October 2007
From Neo Rauch "Neue Rollen"
New Songs! by Wolfgang Buscher
"Where do these pictures come from? And where were they while they were gone? It is a legitimate question because they are back again. And they look the worse for wear, bewildered, and more than a little dangerous, like the late returnees of a prisoner-of-war camp."
Just find this quote funny.
"Where do these pictures come from? And where were they while they were gone? It is a legitimate question because they are back again. And they look the worse for wear, bewildered, and more than a little dangerous, like the late returnees of a prisoner-of-war camp."
Just find this quote funny.
Monday 29 October 2007
is acteon on the run from his own dogs the photoshopped image you did in the recent blog of the figures at the bottom of the photo one on right running away, cos i really liked that image and i love the title. pray do tell, is their a touch of humour in there? i think it works really well that there is, it helps to soften your strict art historical leanings and seriousness. good good.
Its raining men!
Another new sketch for a possible future painting. At first I used repeated forms as I have not sourced enough falling figures yet. Yet I actually think the repetition helps to create rhythms across the surface; as if each figure is a different note and then the arrangement is like composing a song. I like the notion of moving towards something tragic on a sublime level. I seem to be pouring new compositions out at the moment, far far faster then I can paint them, so I now have about 15 on the go. I dont know if this means the ideas are just weak and empty, but at the moment I am trying to not over think it, and allow each picture to give the seed for the next idea. After this period of creation, when these ideas have been knocked out, I will stand back and consider the results. Chacnes are I will think a lot of them are shit, but even that will provide a base to work from and make me question what i am trying to do.
The play between figuration and abstraction continues. Have also just started a series on Autumn in general. Along with the new Danae paintings and my MArsyas series these are moving towards a totally none figurative essence. Where the language of abstraction searchs for representation.
other works like 'drummer:ritual dance', 'Icaroonus, the child and the smoke' 'The Sinner and the child I and II', 'Our Birmingham Rulers', 'Curtis', and 'Acteon on the run from his own dogs' are all moving towards a clearer form of figuration. more characterisation, certain graphic or illustrative elemetns, more solid compositional forms, more explciti narratives and meta narratives and an accidental push towards contemporary fragmentations of meaning.
Friday 26 October 2007
Some new photoshop sketches. Andy, I have taken your advise. Now doing my photoshop sketches quicker, leaving them less resovled. Merely using it to play around with narrative coimposition. The stylistic development should and must happen on the canvas. Thus in the two sketches shown the borrowings have not even been slightly hidden or developed.
The chair in the top images 'Ian Curtis' borrows from a work by Tapies. I would plan to use a more simplified chair in the final piece. The figure on the left in 'Acteaon' borrows from Drouais, the dog comes from Titian and the figure comes from the follwoers in Bacchus and Ariadne. None of these borrowings would necessarily be incorporated in the painting. I just needed to get something in quickly, to record the idea. Thus I am leaving the figurative development open for the painterly process. This is no more than a sketch of an idea. Would be interested in your thoughts, as well as your thoughts on the earlier sketches 'Icaroonus the child and the smoke' and 'Adam and Apollo chase...'
Just had another read of Ode to Autumn and quite like it. Right, I need to go construct a lecture. In a bit.
Thursday 25 October 2007
Ode to Autumn and other poems
Just a few quick ideas I played with today on a walk:
Ode to Autumn
Even the fields have forgotten spring,
Save the birds that peck out the last breath of green
Leaving a sheet of brown, crumbly amnesia.
Those tall trees wave farewell to what was
Whilst their sisters say goodbye to the leaves
Who in turn cry out the past in a rainbow of golden hues.
There is a silence now the songs have gone
And all that’s left is a crackling under feet
Which strolls along to a melancholy rhythm
What was lost when the fields were stripped bare
Except their dignity and a crop of memories
Which fast faded through the soil
The nights begin to soak up the days
Thirsty for a taste of change
They sleep and wait, they sleep and wait, they sleep and wait.
Two Lovers
Where are those two lovers now
No longer on the Urn but in it
When loves forlorn, a creature foul
When was love not enough
To save them from time
And stuff and stuff and stuff
Wingless Cupid
Crow stole Cupids wings and went on a package holiday
Leaving love lost up in the sky.
A bitter little child stalked the ground by night and day
The wingless child searched for exits via dusk
Dropping apples and moments on his way.
Behind him gravity unfurled its tragic seaman
A kiss
Adonis just wanted a kiss, nothing more
Yet in that kiss Icarus’ spirit waited.
But Venus’ sensuous flesh he did adore
And thus his downfall was created.
Ode to Autumn
Even the fields have forgotten spring,
Save the birds that peck out the last breath of green
Leaving a sheet of brown, crumbly amnesia.
Those tall trees wave farewell to what was
Whilst their sisters say goodbye to the leaves
Who in turn cry out the past in a rainbow of golden hues.
There is a silence now the songs have gone
And all that’s left is a crackling under feet
Which strolls along to a melancholy rhythm
What was lost when the fields were stripped bare
Except their dignity and a crop of memories
Which fast faded through the soil
The nights begin to soak up the days
Thirsty for a taste of change
They sleep and wait, they sleep and wait, they sleep and wait.
Two Lovers
Where are those two lovers now
No longer on the Urn but in it
When loves forlorn, a creature foul
When was love not enough
To save them from time
And stuff and stuff and stuff
Wingless Cupid
Crow stole Cupids wings and went on a package holiday
Leaving love lost up in the sky.
A bitter little child stalked the ground by night and day
The wingless child searched for exits via dusk
Dropping apples and moments on his way.
Behind him gravity unfurled its tragic seaman
A kiss
Adonis just wanted a kiss, nothing more
Yet in that kiss Icarus’ spirit waited.
But Venus’ sensuous flesh he did adore
And thus his downfall was created.
Monday 22 October 2007
cheers for the response
Wow, tom i'm gobsmacked, you give my work so much credit and time, i really appreciate it. a lot of what you say is very much how i intend it to be read so that makes me feel like i'm improving somewhere and then there's some things you say which i didn't expect yet seem accurate also and that opens up new avenues. i think painting does need to exist in an uncertain boundary land and that will often give it a surreal flavour although it would be a mistake to read it purely as such, and you've avoided that pitfall so i'm glad.
it is interesting you said that the added canvas makes it feel like a piece is missing as i was contemplating adding a lead to the dog heading of into the empty space to heighten this sense, still unsure what to do about this. i'm anxious that it can be read as an interrogation of relationships, how things come between, a queen has a special interaction with this kind of question, pressures of normal life are accentuated.
and i'm currently in the process of repainting the harpists arm to try and do something else with the paint, to make it seem to have more direction/intention, so you're right about that, although i'm happy with his hair and i think his face should remain crude and simple, its just about on the precipice of shitness, and thats a good place to be i think. that you described him as the crow, i'm really pleased with, and as he is the protagonist then that places him in control of this enclosed environment. a pied piper.
let me know if you decide to come up for the turner shit.
it is interesting you said that the added canvas makes it feel like a piece is missing as i was contemplating adding a lead to the dog heading of into the empty space to heighten this sense, still unsure what to do about this. i'm anxious that it can be read as an interrogation of relationships, how things come between, a queen has a special interaction with this kind of question, pressures of normal life are accentuated.
and i'm currently in the process of repainting the harpists arm to try and do something else with the paint, to make it seem to have more direction/intention, so you're right about that, although i'm happy with his hair and i think his face should remain crude and simple, its just about on the precipice of shitness, and thats a good place to be i think. that you described him as the crow, i'm really pleased with, and as he is the protagonist then that places him in control of this enclosed environment. a pied piper.
let me know if you decide to come up for the turner shit.
Mary...
I started to make some mental notes on the picture. My plan was to work through them in written form and then construct some kind of structured response to the painting. I think this would be a bit artificial; though. The nature of an initial and honest response is more suited to an unstructed, stream of consciousness style of writting. So...firstl;y apologies for the waffle that is too follow. Hopefully, however, it will provide the most transparent form of analysis. The function of the blog is, after all, to help us develop and evolve from criticism and sharing of ideas; not a place to show of our abilities to construct eloquent passages of writting. So here goes...
The first thing I noticed, obvioulsy, was the central characters. I then seemed to go through a process of deconstructing the iconography. As with all your paintings, and most contemporary figurative work, I was aware I was not in the search of specific characters names. This was not about attributing exact stories, the narrative or allegory is obvioulsy more detached than that.
Straight away this makes me aware of a problem in viewing contemporary work. (not a qualatative problem, not a case of better or worse, but a dilemma) In 'traditional' figurative painting we know we are often after a search for narrative or allegory. When the scene seems to be natural, as if it could be taken from real life in terms of construction, as if things fit together, then we tend to read narrative. A story unfolds. When there are purposefull unrealalities, juxtposiitons, impossible interrelations we realise narrative cant be read so easily. What we often see if the painter attempting to convey something less tangible, less visable. This is when we tend to realise they are communicating allegory to us. The visualisation of an intellectual system of thought. By its nature more abstract and so prone to less clear modes of viewing.
Fast forward to the present and are, narration, figuration, image making etc has been fragmented, destroyed, taken to the brink, brought back, reinvented, killed and reborn a million times. The result is a visual landscape and system of vision/sight which is far less coherent, whose boundaries make far less sense. Narration and figuration otday is like a collage of broken parts attempting to coexist in union. It is like Frankensteins Monster. It has similarities to the prototype but cant exist in the same cultural society. (tenuous analogy at best, I know, but its what came to mind so lets stick to it and avoid any pretence to find something more sophisiticated)
So, where does that leave me with your cahracters. The fact I cant locate them in an exact system should not mean I necessarily feel obliged to search for allegory over narrative. Even more so than in historical paintings we seem to pride the intellect of allegory and philosophy over the raw emotions of narration and drama. Yet something about the faceted nature of yours, and contemporary painting in general, tells me that I should not be searching for such clear definition. I go back to Titian poesie. I wonder if in fact modern painting is more like poetry, capable of incompassing all levels of human consciousness, the base levels (eg eroticism) the mean level (narration and drama) and the 'higher levels' (philosophy and spirituality). Whilst I am not saying all of these appear in your work at every stage, I do belivee we should be serching for a mode of viewing and making which realises all these can coexist. That we can fluctuate seemlessly between the various poles and the shadows inbetween. For some reason I feel inclind to call this a meta narrative, but I tihnk that is wrong. Who knows.
I look to your woman and I see a cross between something motherly and regal, monarhcial and domestic. She appears powerful and timeless yet also an individual, warm and comforting. I tihnk this is articulated by her pose more than anything. Her face and characterisation in the features also assist the reading.
The old guy. Well, as suggested I firstly see a wise old man. Its a crude and horrible label but its clearly what he is. He appears sad yet serious. He has a sculptural solidity of form that gives him power.
I soon reaslie that each cahracter can only be defined or make sense by the relationship between the two. Excusing the additional canvas, for the moment, they sit in seperate halves of the central painting and dominated their space. As scuh it is impossible for a conversation not to open up between the two. I see them in oppositon. She looks out at us, she engages, she seems to be one of us, albeit a woman of power and importance. His actions are totally detached from us. He is isolatd, he is locked in the act of playing his instrument.
this dynamic makes me think that she is one of us. She seems to be top of the social hierachy, but from our world all the same. He, however, seems to be from a different realm. A god perhaps, certainly not a mortal. he is too importal, two idealised, two artifical in appearance.
The notion seems to be supported by the spatial plays of the female form. Only her top half seems to exist, as if she has been cut out and paste into this scene. She only just enters the stage, is only just granted a position in the action. yet the position seems less permanent, it appears more tenuous in its attachement, it appears not to be where she belongs. This reinforcfes my idea that she has been transported from our realm, one of us, to this other state. I dont see this as some kind of dream like thing at all. its more subtle than that.
He however, seems to be part of his very surrounding. The relation between him and the floor seems to suggest they are of the same source.
I snap out of it for a whil. I then think about sptial construction. The spliting of the picture plane into three vertical areas, all roughly even, provides the stage setting. It is quiet Davidian in its use of architectural backdrops as compositional devices to stage your narrative. He sits infront of two solid, classcial archways, she is in front of a less clear, a more ambiguous space. This supports some of the above ideas.
She seems silent, lost in though and awaiting our response. She and we become one; perhaps. Maybe im moving towards spice girls lyrics now, Im not sure that is useful. Oh well.
The old boy is, obvioulsy, playing na instrument. IN place of strings there appears to be a vacuum of sorts. I cant quite work it out, but it is intriquing me. It makes me think this is not a literal medoldy. This is not about actual music and its effect. Music seems to be a metaphor here. As if his playing is the planting of a tragic seed. As if he is a protagonist and the instrument is is seed, or the devise which creates and spreads the seeds. REgardless I have the image of some melancholic rhythm and medlody. This makes me think that he is slightly similar to the crow and putti in my work, but a far more complex and sophisiticated incarnation of the crow.
Yet I dont belivee his every action will have a direct conseuqence on the woman. It seems more distant than tha\t. A more kind of lyrical, detached protagonist. I bit like what I am currently trying to do with the drummer boy in a new painting. At this stage I feel I have few answers.
It brings me to a desire to ask new questions.To consider the use of depth, the style and the other iconographi features. The dog like creature is a great addition. I like the vagueness of the type of animal and he is very convinsingly tugging at that shadow. That is brilliant. I also like the way you have come across the addition. It is something oyu have arrived at through need and function not through a desire for originality. It provides an interesting extension. Its inclusion makes us more imagine the space above it as missing than the canvas as added... if that makes sense. It now appears to be a square with a space cut out rather than a vertical retangle with a shape added.
The spatial play is interstesting. There is a flatness created and a frtonality byt the raising of the floor to a more vertical angle. It is very late Cezanne and early Cubism (as influenced by Cezanne)It teases us. Gives the perspectival suggestion of space behind and beyond but then doesnt allow us to go there. It bring us back or keeps our attention on the main plot. It is an interesting little take on two foldness. I like it. As if to stick a further two fingers up at our delight to go beyond the surface you give us a series of windows. Each one teases us to look through and beyond but then is dark or solid. A wall which restricts and blocks entry rather than letting us in. The sign contradicts itself. It is a continuation of what artists like Manet, the Cubists and Tapies (to name three) do.
A have just realised that the additional canvas is brilliant. In adding it it creates, as previously said, a sense of a void above. The coordinates of this void are the exact same as those the other side of the old man in which the woman sits. Thus a play is built up between them. Abscence and prescence, etc etc. It makes her position ieven more tenuous, gives even more a sense that she does not belong. The old boy, however, clearly does. Colouristically he is part of his surroudns. He sits in an upside down T shaped space. The blues of the floor and his robe corrolate and above him that other dark blue seems to provide a counterpoint.
In terms of style, I am finding it hard to say much at all as I am not looking at it in the flesh. I tihnk your use of colour is improving all the time. The orange of the instrument agasint the blue of his robe is excellent. I still think you could push your tonal range further and I still think you could be even more sparing in the use of intense colour. Then I tihnk things will have a new level of theatre and the areas of more saturated colour will truly sing.
Some of the areas of painting look like your best yet. The fabrics are excellent. For some reason I am not convinced, totally, buy the old boys face and hair. But I feel I need to see it in person to make a fair comment. The drawing of it seems exceleltn but the paint itself seems to bother me. No, no... I am not articulating this well. Forget this point untill I see the work. It is all just a small element, the whole... which is far more important, is really working.
Christ... dont feel I have really got anywhere or said anything.I also need some lunch so must dash. Hope a sentence or two amoungst the crap is useful here. If it isnt then apologies. I think this work is very existing. The potential of what is to follow is excellent. i think this makrs your biggest step forward yet, in one work. As a compelted piece, however, I prefer 'Mary and Ethel.' For me that just works. It has an immediacy and the depth that keeps grabbingme, keeps getting me to go back. I tihnk this has more sophisitcation as a whole but 'Mary and Ethel...' feels so right.
The first thing I noticed, obvioulsy, was the central characters. I then seemed to go through a process of deconstructing the iconography. As with all your paintings, and most contemporary figurative work, I was aware I was not in the search of specific characters names. This was not about attributing exact stories, the narrative or allegory is obvioulsy more detached than that.
Straight away this makes me aware of a problem in viewing contemporary work. (not a qualatative problem, not a case of better or worse, but a dilemma) In 'traditional' figurative painting we know we are often after a search for narrative or allegory. When the scene seems to be natural, as if it could be taken from real life in terms of construction, as if things fit together, then we tend to read narrative. A story unfolds. When there are purposefull unrealalities, juxtposiitons, impossible interrelations we realise narrative cant be read so easily. What we often see if the painter attempting to convey something less tangible, less visable. This is when we tend to realise they are communicating allegory to us. The visualisation of an intellectual system of thought. By its nature more abstract and so prone to less clear modes of viewing.
Fast forward to the present and are, narration, figuration, image making etc has been fragmented, destroyed, taken to the brink, brought back, reinvented, killed and reborn a million times. The result is a visual landscape and system of vision/sight which is far less coherent, whose boundaries make far less sense. Narration and figuration otday is like a collage of broken parts attempting to coexist in union. It is like Frankensteins Monster. It has similarities to the prototype but cant exist in the same cultural society. (tenuous analogy at best, I know, but its what came to mind so lets stick to it and avoid any pretence to find something more sophisiticated)
So, where does that leave me with your cahracters. The fact I cant locate them in an exact system should not mean I necessarily feel obliged to search for allegory over narrative. Even more so than in historical paintings we seem to pride the intellect of allegory and philosophy over the raw emotions of narration and drama. Yet something about the faceted nature of yours, and contemporary painting in general, tells me that I should not be searching for such clear definition. I go back to Titian poesie. I wonder if in fact modern painting is more like poetry, capable of incompassing all levels of human consciousness, the base levels (eg eroticism) the mean level (narration and drama) and the 'higher levels' (philosophy and spirituality). Whilst I am not saying all of these appear in your work at every stage, I do belivee we should be serching for a mode of viewing and making which realises all these can coexist. That we can fluctuate seemlessly between the various poles and the shadows inbetween. For some reason I feel inclind to call this a meta narrative, but I tihnk that is wrong. Who knows.
I look to your woman and I see a cross between something motherly and regal, monarhcial and domestic. She appears powerful and timeless yet also an individual, warm and comforting. I tihnk this is articulated by her pose more than anything. Her face and characterisation in the features also assist the reading.
The old guy. Well, as suggested I firstly see a wise old man. Its a crude and horrible label but its clearly what he is. He appears sad yet serious. He has a sculptural solidity of form that gives him power.
I soon reaslie that each cahracter can only be defined or make sense by the relationship between the two. Excusing the additional canvas, for the moment, they sit in seperate halves of the central painting and dominated their space. As scuh it is impossible for a conversation not to open up between the two. I see them in oppositon. She looks out at us, she engages, she seems to be one of us, albeit a woman of power and importance. His actions are totally detached from us. He is isolatd, he is locked in the act of playing his instrument.
this dynamic makes me think that she is one of us. She seems to be top of the social hierachy, but from our world all the same. He, however, seems to be from a different realm. A god perhaps, certainly not a mortal. he is too importal, two idealised, two artifical in appearance.
The notion seems to be supported by the spatial plays of the female form. Only her top half seems to exist, as if she has been cut out and paste into this scene. She only just enters the stage, is only just granted a position in the action. yet the position seems less permanent, it appears more tenuous in its attachement, it appears not to be where she belongs. This reinforcfes my idea that she has been transported from our realm, one of us, to this other state. I dont see this as some kind of dream like thing at all. its more subtle than that.
He however, seems to be part of his very surrounding. The relation between him and the floor seems to suggest they are of the same source.
I snap out of it for a whil. I then think about sptial construction. The spliting of the picture plane into three vertical areas, all roughly even, provides the stage setting. It is quiet Davidian in its use of architectural backdrops as compositional devices to stage your narrative. He sits infront of two solid, classcial archways, she is in front of a less clear, a more ambiguous space. This supports some of the above ideas.
She seems silent, lost in though and awaiting our response. She and we become one; perhaps. Maybe im moving towards spice girls lyrics now, Im not sure that is useful. Oh well.
The old boy is, obvioulsy, playing na instrument. IN place of strings there appears to be a vacuum of sorts. I cant quite work it out, but it is intriquing me. It makes me think this is not a literal medoldy. This is not about actual music and its effect. Music seems to be a metaphor here. As if his playing is the planting of a tragic seed. As if he is a protagonist and the instrument is is seed, or the devise which creates and spreads the seeds. REgardless I have the image of some melancholic rhythm and medlody. This makes me think that he is slightly similar to the crow and putti in my work, but a far more complex and sophisiticated incarnation of the crow.
Yet I dont belivee his every action will have a direct conseuqence on the woman. It seems more distant than tha\t. A more kind of lyrical, detached protagonist. I bit like what I am currently trying to do with the drummer boy in a new painting. At this stage I feel I have few answers.
It brings me to a desire to ask new questions.To consider the use of depth, the style and the other iconographi features. The dog like creature is a great addition. I like the vagueness of the type of animal and he is very convinsingly tugging at that shadow. That is brilliant. I also like the way you have come across the addition. It is something oyu have arrived at through need and function not through a desire for originality. It provides an interesting extension. Its inclusion makes us more imagine the space above it as missing than the canvas as added... if that makes sense. It now appears to be a square with a space cut out rather than a vertical retangle with a shape added.
The spatial play is interstesting. There is a flatness created and a frtonality byt the raising of the floor to a more vertical angle. It is very late Cezanne and early Cubism (as influenced by Cezanne)It teases us. Gives the perspectival suggestion of space behind and beyond but then doesnt allow us to go there. It bring us back or keeps our attention on the main plot. It is an interesting little take on two foldness. I like it. As if to stick a further two fingers up at our delight to go beyond the surface you give us a series of windows. Each one teases us to look through and beyond but then is dark or solid. A wall which restricts and blocks entry rather than letting us in. The sign contradicts itself. It is a continuation of what artists like Manet, the Cubists and Tapies (to name three) do.
A have just realised that the additional canvas is brilliant. In adding it it creates, as previously said, a sense of a void above. The coordinates of this void are the exact same as those the other side of the old man in which the woman sits. Thus a play is built up between them. Abscence and prescence, etc etc. It makes her position ieven more tenuous, gives even more a sense that she does not belong. The old boy, however, clearly does. Colouristically he is part of his surroudns. He sits in an upside down T shaped space. The blues of the floor and his robe corrolate and above him that other dark blue seems to provide a counterpoint.
In terms of style, I am finding it hard to say much at all as I am not looking at it in the flesh. I tihnk your use of colour is improving all the time. The orange of the instrument agasint the blue of his robe is excellent. I still think you could push your tonal range further and I still think you could be even more sparing in the use of intense colour. Then I tihnk things will have a new level of theatre and the areas of more saturated colour will truly sing.
Some of the areas of painting look like your best yet. The fabrics are excellent. For some reason I am not convinced, totally, buy the old boys face and hair. But I feel I need to see it in person to make a fair comment. The drawing of it seems exceleltn but the paint itself seems to bother me. No, no... I am not articulating this well. Forget this point untill I see the work. It is all just a small element, the whole... which is far more important, is really working.
Christ... dont feel I have really got anywhere or said anything.I also need some lunch so must dash. Hope a sentence or two amoungst the crap is useful here. If it isnt then apologies. I think this work is very existing. The potential of what is to follow is excellent. i think this makrs your biggest step forward yet, in one work. As a compelted piece, however, I prefer 'Mary and Ethel.' For me that just works. It has an immediacy and the depth that keeps grabbingme, keeps getting me to go back. I tihnk this has more sophisitcation as a whole but 'Mary and Ethel...' feels so right.
Sunday 21 October 2007
new image added
hi.
i've added new painting so would appreciate an honest appraisal tom. i've only got a cheap photoshop so could you finish off the crop by trimming off the right hand top corner.
i've added new painting so would appreciate an honest appraisal tom. i've only got a cheap photoshop so could you finish off the crop by trimming off the right hand top corner.
Well the square format doesn't really say anything to me, the other 2 seem to have a reason/dynamism. horizontal reaches within the art historical canon and the vertical one i think goes against that in some way. personally i like the horizontal cos i think your painting needs to play very subtly with the conventions of painting and this way seems to be the right balance for this piece, it also has a certain grandeur to it which i like. but the decision is yours.
as for whether the putti should be dropping something, well i'm not gonna answer that. whats your game sunshine, do you want to make the photoshop a great piece of art or the painting? cos if you want it to be the painting then you aint gonna find the answer before you start to paint. the fact that you're mentioning it seems to answer your own question for me, then if your not satisfied with it change it during the process, no amount of procrastinating over what it could contextually mean is going to give you the answer, that comes from a gut feeling, either through experience or an innate sense, kind of like the final piece of a jigsaw has been fitted, then you'll generally find the context/concept is the right one.
oh and the turner prize is held in liverpool this year so perhaps you want to come and see that, its open now and i have not much life so generally i can be free most times.
as for whether the putti should be dropping something, well i'm not gonna answer that. whats your game sunshine, do you want to make the photoshop a great piece of art or the painting? cos if you want it to be the painting then you aint gonna find the answer before you start to paint. the fact that you're mentioning it seems to answer your own question for me, then if your not satisfied with it change it during the process, no amount of procrastinating over what it could contextually mean is going to give you the answer, that comes from a gut feeling, either through experience or an innate sense, kind of like the final piece of a jigsaw has been fitted, then you'll generally find the context/concept is the right one.
oh and the turner prize is held in liverpool this year so perhaps you want to come and see that, its open now and i have not much life so generally i can be free most times.
Friday 19 October 2007
Icaroonus, the child and the smoke.
Sorry to bombard you with sketchs. I have just been workong on another. LIke with the previous two i cant make my mind up about it. Be interested to have your gut reactions.
Compositional worries
Cider man! I need osme advise on which comp to use for the sinner piece you like. The one you saw was obviously square, but here are three options. I wont say anything on them as I want an objective view from you. Can just be a gut reaction. Have uploaded a close up of the putti figure as well. Do you like the idea of him having something dropping form his hand? I thought it gives him a sense of being a protagonist of grand proportions. As if the very dropping of an object will spawn (current fav word I think) a whole world of events.
Have also uploaded the Adam/Apollo reaching for the fruit of Daphne and Eve sketch. See what you think.
When do you think you will have the new picture up? Really keen to see it now.
Thanks for the ideas on the lectures. Much appreciated. I am worried, though, that too many of mine are going to go towards painting. i think I need to make sure I give them a wide understanding of all aspects. Will mull it over during half term. Will probs run some ideas past too.
Right. Im off to get on with some of this painting. Got two new Danae ones on the go which are becoming interesting.
Thursday 18 October 2007
cloudy cider
"you seem to be working with rigour and a clear head"
i'm actually working with flatulance and a cloudy cider.
I think the photoshop looks brill, really unusual construction, if that can become a painting then success is yours. As for ideas on lectures well i suppose how narrative is being confronted in contemporary painting, that way you're dealing with figurative painting so it narrows the field slightly and its something i need to cometo understand so with your giant brain you can help me. also an obvious one but a goody, how the boundaries and stigmafiers of modernism have melted away so that there is now no definition between abstraction and figuration. whole load of artists to choose from here a good one would be daniel richter though, his figures slowly appeared out of a continued study in abstraction. One artist that needs to be looked at when you're talking about contemporary painting is gerhard richter, every painter since has been influenced by him in one way or another, particularly his advocacy of painting anything you want, no boundaries.
i'm actually working with flatulance and a cloudy cider.
I think the photoshop looks brill, really unusual construction, if that can become a painting then success is yours. As for ideas on lectures well i suppose how narrative is being confronted in contemporary painting, that way you're dealing with figurative painting so it narrows the field slightly and its something i need to cometo understand so with your giant brain you can help me. also an obvious one but a goody, how the boundaries and stigmafiers of modernism have melted away so that there is now no definition between abstraction and figuration. whole load of artists to choose from here a good one would be daniel richter though, his figures slowly appeared out of a continued study in abstraction. One artist that needs to be looked at when you're talking about contemporary painting is gerhard richter, every painter since has been influenced by him in one way or another, particularly his advocacy of painting anything you want, no boundaries.
A democracy of sources
I have said for a while that for me it does not matter where my figures, poses, structures, motifs are sources from. I am just as happy to draw from life, lift a pose from an old master, take a newspaper cutting as a starting point etc etc. I have suggested that I don't believe in a hierachy of sourcve material.
For me my sources are not intended to be intellectualised. I think I borrow a pose or subject for genuine interest, not to make some conceptualised comment on the original. Its not the kind of quotation Manet makes of Titian in Olympia. Its more the kind of borrowing of a signifier to place in a new context and to give new signification too. The sign can be destablised.
Having said all this, my sources have tended to be art historical. Quotes from Titian in particular have dominated. I believe this to be due to having been so immersed in his work that relevant poses or potential borrowings come to mind easily. Yet as the process has perpetuated I wondered if my practise if going agasint my theoretical claims.
Finally, today, I have broken the mould. I was flicking through the Time. (I do h ate giving that prick Murdoch money but it is easy to handle and does have very good sports coverage. I go on the logic of varying my paper as I feel a slight twinge of disgust at any one I buy. If I get the Guardian I am worried im on the slippery slope to left wing idealism. If I get the Telegraph I feel like im one corner away from Daily Mail bigotry, tory boy polotics and eventually Nazism. An exaggeration, obvioulsy, and a clear sign of my pathetic identity crisis. Being white, male and middle class really is a struggle these days.) :)
Anyway, whilst browsing the times... the depression of England pitiful perfomrance agaisnt Russia was relieved by an image of Wayne Rooney. It was him in mid air, diving, just after he gave away the penalty. It came attention with the tag line, fallen hero. How true. In an hour he went form being a demi god with his volley to a pantomine villian with his tackle. The media perpetuates the cruel rise and fallen, in exaggerated terms, of our new heroes. No longer Greek mortals engaged in epic battles bu minor celebriteios, sports stars and musicians. Just as the mortals found out, they could so quickly rise to heights and then fall to disaster. Consider Icarus and his rise to the sun, Adonis and his love for Venus... the tragedy was spawned the moment they arrived at this moment. As with Keat's Ode to a ngihtginale, the inevitbale rise is followed by a fall.
All of this goes off on a tangent. The point is that the pose of Rooney is perfect for a new work i have planned. I have wanted to do another ICarus work, with a new composition but needed a new falling figure. I knew I wanted a horizontal falling form, just to open up a new dynamic from that in Icarus II. So hear I have found it.
Now I can take the form of Rooney and remove him from the specifics of his context. Rooney can become Icarus with the slightest nod to irony. The shift is not improtant, the work in no way will be about Rooney. The sources and quotation will be hidden (although revealed here) ONce in a new spatial and aesthetic context its specific meaning will shift. The sense of a fall through air is all that will remain. The sense of a drop from one realm to another, from a height to the floor. All the oither paraphanalia surrounding our contemporary hero can disappear.
The quotation leads me onto a potential reading. As much as the work will not be about Rooney, neither will it be about Icarus. Icarus is not longer an individual, but an embodiment of a generalised ideal. A metaphor for mankinds tragic and desperate reach for perfection and its inevitbale failure. (as Andy pointed out to me, in far better terms) Suddenly it becomes about the human condition, about tendencies within us which bridge the gap from ICarus too Rooney. Relevant and in some ways timless; I think.
Specific narratives are great. They allow us into an intimate world. But I am searching, maybe not reaching, for a kind of narrative which is not constrinaed by the zeitgeist. Whilst my lanague has to be of my own time, we can't avoid that, the message conveyed should hopefully be non specific to location, geographic or historical.
Perhaps this is pretentious, perhaps this is aiming for the unreachable. Perhaps I am destined fall flat on my face in the search. My failure being the closest I get to conveying the essence of Icarus' plight.
Wednesday 17 October 2007
echo of an echo
Andy, many thanks. Some excellent advise. I shall take it on board and plough forwards.
I am truly excited about your new work. It sounds like a brilliant realisation. As you say, one arrived at through an organic and logical process, not the search for gimmicry. True invention and originality always arrives that way, I am sure. It lasts, it holds, it engages, rather than merely providing a chuckle or a raised eyebrow. I can honestly say i cant wait to see the painting. I was so impressed with the most recent work that I have been eagerly awaiting the new batch ever since. I think your making strieds, genuine realisations and movements forward. You seem to be working with rigour and a clear head.
Right. Going to try get a load of painting done on friday. i am really loving the lecturing and tutoring but it does eat away at the time I have to paint. Need to get this whole life balance thing sorted and then I will be fine. I cant see why they cant all be kept going together, and feed into rather than distract from, each other. Time, as always, will eventually tell. At the moment, however, it is bieng surprisingly quiet.
Did you get a chacne to look at the second lefcture? Got a few ideas to run past you for future ones. Really want to tackle the notion of representation today, but it could be too vast. Might need splitting into different genres. Painting, sculpture and other perhaps.
Christ knows. Anyway, must dash. Need sleep and a clear head before delivery of semiotic waffle.
ps Any thoughts on the photoshop sketch of the sinner and putti?
I am truly excited about your new work. It sounds like a brilliant realisation. As you say, one arrived at through an organic and logical process, not the search for gimmicry. True invention and originality always arrives that way, I am sure. It lasts, it holds, it engages, rather than merely providing a chuckle or a raised eyebrow. I can honestly say i cant wait to see the painting. I was so impressed with the most recent work that I have been eagerly awaiting the new batch ever since. I think your making strieds, genuine realisations and movements forward. You seem to be working with rigour and a clear head.
Right. Going to try get a load of painting done on friday. i am really loving the lecturing and tutoring but it does eat away at the time I have to paint. Need to get this whole life balance thing sorted and then I will be fine. I cant see why they cant all be kept going together, and feed into rather than distract from, each other. Time, as always, will eventually tell. At the moment, however, it is bieng surprisingly quiet.
Did you get a chacne to look at the second lefcture? Got a few ideas to run past you for future ones. Really want to tackle the notion of representation today, but it could be too vast. Might need splitting into different genres. Painting, sculpture and other perhaps.
Christ knows. Anyway, must dash. Need sleep and a clear head before delivery of semiotic waffle.
ps Any thoughts on the photoshop sketch of the sinner and putti?
Marsyas response
The idea sounds very interesting Tom but i'm concerned you're over thinking things at such an early stage. they may be too specified for their own good, you should just get on with it and if the painting decides to change or seems to want to go somewhere else then let it, its a mistake to think the title should be marsyas and then work from that, particularly with how i see the making of the painting going, regarding your description of it. i also think its going to be really difficult to articulate the idea successfully, it may be a long hard journey to find those elusive tones and colours which speak accurately of the emotional centre to the idea. i find this one of the trickiest parts of painting and its probably why my work for so long suffered from colour saturation, i'm still miles away in this respect from where i need to be.
Having said all this, i usually like to let an idea sit in my conscious for a while, and stew, dissolve and turn inside out, which i suppose is a way of assessing if it has the necessary critical/conceptual rigour to withstand the onslaught of its violent assension into plastic reality. perhaps this is all you're doing, but you should know the dangers of doing it, the pitfalls you can trip into.
on a different note mary the queen and the sower of seeds is very nearly complete, thank the fuckin lord its been a long one! obviously you haven't seen this yet but one of things i am most happy with is quite a recent moment in its development. i knew it needed something else but i couldn't work out what, until i had the idea that the viewers eye had to be moved more vigorously in a diagonal direction, that could give the piece an extra boost of energy. only the canvas was too full add anything else and all that was in it was necessary so i added an extra smaller canvas to the bottom right and painted a little dog creature with angler fish eyes licking up the shadows. i think this may be one of those epithany moments. it was simply a logical decision with no intention to raise eyebrows, an organic process of addition simply because it was needed. i love that feeling. and i think it could be an interesting way to work which would allow easier transportation of of paintings as well, if i start off with smaller canvas' and add when needed. its a wonderfully unfussy way of keeping a painting alive right to the end.
thats all.
Having said all this, i usually like to let an idea sit in my conscious for a while, and stew, dissolve and turn inside out, which i suppose is a way of assessing if it has the necessary critical/conceptual rigour to withstand the onslaught of its violent assension into plastic reality. perhaps this is all you're doing, but you should know the dangers of doing it, the pitfalls you can trip into.
on a different note mary the queen and the sower of seeds is very nearly complete, thank the fuckin lord its been a long one! obviously you haven't seen this yet but one of things i am most happy with is quite a recent moment in its development. i knew it needed something else but i couldn't work out what, until i had the idea that the viewers eye had to be moved more vigorously in a diagonal direction, that could give the piece an extra boost of energy. only the canvas was too full add anything else and all that was in it was necessary so i added an extra smaller canvas to the bottom right and painted a little dog creature with angler fish eyes licking up the shadows. i think this may be one of those epithany moments. it was simply a logical decision with no intention to raise eyebrows, an organic process of addition simply because it was needed. i love that feeling. and i think it could be an interesting way to work which would allow easier transportation of of paintings as well, if i start off with smaller canvas' and add when needed. its a wonderfully unfussy way of keeping a painting alive right to the end.
thats all.
Tuesday 16 October 2007
ideas in photoshop
I am still not quite sure how I feel about the process of me using photoshop. But regardless of my doubts I continue to find it a useful program to explore pictorial ideas in. I can cut and paste figural elemtns at pace, move them around and play with composition without too much fuss. It provides a kind of drawing with strengths and weaknesses, but useful none the less. I still find it odd that I use a graphic program when I am producing, or hoping to produce, works of a highly painterly nature. There seems to be a dichotomy between design and final output which I cannot fathom.
Besides all this, I have a couple of ideas which are in there very initial stages. I have made no attempt, yet, to even hide the sources of certain quotations. These are nothing more than scribbles, in effect. One is a painting called Adam/Apollo reaching for the fruit of Daphne and Eve. The other is currently looking to confalte a few stories, but is still vague in the specifics. Apart from the obvious refernefce to one of the four sinners- forever lifting his boulder up the hill in hell. The little Bellin child (removed from a Virgin adn child work) seems to be an interest little detached protagonist. Something I am also looking into in a work I am about to start- 'The Drummer and the dancers.'
The second image wont upload for some reason. Computers!!!! grrrrrr
Marsyas
Andy, you blog the other day struck a real note with me. The whole notion of reaching towards goals which are intangible and constnatly changing. I am working on a picture, in design stage, at the moment which I itnhk might deal with the same thing. All I know at this stage is that it is a conflation of (Adam and Eve) and (Apollo and Daphne). I want to capture that sense of the former reaching up, due to the temptation of the female, towards the fruit. A like the potential of fruit as a metaphor of knowledge and lust. I think that plays well. The story of Apollo and Daphne filters in through another angle. Apollo was struck by Cupid and feel for Daphne. She was struck by an arrow which induced repulsion. Cruel? So she ran and he chased. Just as he was about to catch her she turned into a tree. The unreachable and tragic seem crucial to both. I want to get a more general sense of a figure who seems to be moving through time and space and reaching up, not quite grasping, some other abstract form. I will keep you posted.
Right, back to the subject heading. For a while I have wanted to deal with the story of MArsyas in some form. The works by Kapoor and Titian have both inspired me for a while. Coudl there be a more gruesome story of the tragic nature of the mortals challenging the gods, the danger of two realms meeting. I will use this post to explore how certain ideas are sketching themselves out in my head at the early stages. All these things get lost and edited once works get formed, once we are bored of our new creations. I tihnk it is worth jotting them down when first born, even if its means they are vague, unstructured and unattached. For despite these flaws this is the notions at there most raw, and for me, the most exciting. (although incredibly boring for tohers i suspect)
A synopsis of the story is thus: (as I understand it)
Minerva (I think) drops an instrument from heaven (im not two concerned with specifics in this context) Marsyas discovers it. For me this is the seed of tragedy, it is predestined to fuck up from here on in. He plays many a tune. The crux is that this leads to a musical duel between MArsyas and Apollo. Whoever wins can do whatever he wants to the other. No surprise, Apollo, as a god, wins. If this is meant to be a story of vice and virtue then it is about the foolish pursuit of perfection by mankind. Icarus in musical form if you like (although now I just have images of some west end show production in my head) Anyway, as punishment, Apollo orders MArsyas to be flated. This invovles being hung from a tree and then skinned alive. Brutalistic horror.
I know that what I want to find is a non figurative essence of this story. It does not present me with any narrative or figurative moment which I wish to depict. Titian has depicted the flaying with such timeless brilliance that the scene is rendered pointless in any representational language.
I have been tihnking of how the canvas itself, the painting itself could be a substitute for the body of marsyas. The canvas will read as skin, the paint as flesh and the processes I subject it too could replacate the flaying. The historical asosciations between these various referents and references are clear. Paint as paint and paint as flesh is hardly new. Which is why it is potentially such an exciting language to explore.
I know I want the work to play on forms and makrs laid on, in and udner the surface. So these become like a metaphor of the flaying. The problem is the oprganisation of the forms. I want them to be vertical, so they have a figurative resonance. How to order them is sometihng I am not so sure of. Do the verticals go to and through the edge of the picture plane, or break well before (more like a Rothko rectangle). The later will create a sense of floating forms, the former something more solid, landscape like and eternal.
I am going to look to explore a range of ideas on paper. Treating them all a individual autonomous pieces but hopefuilly leading up to a conclusion in canvas form.
The play on various surface values will hopefully have suggestions of time. I want to create a Titian?Tapies like melody between the sefl refferntial time signature and the narrative one. Harmonising those is key. PLus, this muscial mode of viewing, opened up, will fit in nicely with the subjecdt matter.
in terms of music I want to use colour adn surface to create melancholic rhythms across the whole. So the eyes moves around, as if in song... remidning us of the tragic nature of the subject but also the musical root of Marsyas downfall. PLus, this kind of visual meldoy is something which has been fading as my work as progressed ove rthe last few motnhs. SO much else has improved but that has been lost.
I am at the stage where I tihnk the whole conception could become really crude or really sophisiticated. Execution and desciion making are key. It could so easily become a Rothko/Tapies/Graham pastiche. Hopefully independance will be found along the way. I am also aware that as a process, searching for representation in the lanaguage of abstraction also touches on the work of Jdgkin and Brian Graham, and as such I could be destined to fuck up... just as Marsyas did. Hopefully my punishment will be nothing more than self deprecation. I am not quite ready for a flaying. I like my skin firmly attached to my body thank you.
The thing I find most exciting is a complete exploration of surface and its references to time and transicnee. IF I can get my surfaces to deal effectively with such notions then in turn I tihnk I will be close to capturing the essence of Marsyas' story.
The organisation of form will also be important. i want to continue my search for a Poussin like geometry. One which takes us across and through the surface. To generate a spatial two fold play on flatness and depth. I want the figures to pulse, as if the alive, as if Marsyas himself is breathing his last heavy breath. I want them to seem half alive, like a spectre. Again, surely that is exactly what a freshly flayed person is. Sat in a hellish limbo between life and death.
This will also be a chance to play with Crimson, Burnt Umber and Napthal red. I want to get a vibration set up between these various hues. Hopefully I can get them to dance in and out of the high ends shadows and lights. I want this to have a theatre, a drama akin but seperate to Titian 'Flaying of MArsyas' If I can take one step towards any of these waffled aims I will be happy.
Right, back to the subject heading. For a while I have wanted to deal with the story of MArsyas in some form. The works by Kapoor and Titian have both inspired me for a while. Coudl there be a more gruesome story of the tragic nature of the mortals challenging the gods, the danger of two realms meeting. I will use this post to explore how certain ideas are sketching themselves out in my head at the early stages. All these things get lost and edited once works get formed, once we are bored of our new creations. I tihnk it is worth jotting them down when first born, even if its means they are vague, unstructured and unattached. For despite these flaws this is the notions at there most raw, and for me, the most exciting. (although incredibly boring for tohers i suspect)
A synopsis of the story is thus: (as I understand it)
Minerva (I think) drops an instrument from heaven (im not two concerned with specifics in this context) Marsyas discovers it. For me this is the seed of tragedy, it is predestined to fuck up from here on in. He plays many a tune. The crux is that this leads to a musical duel between MArsyas and Apollo. Whoever wins can do whatever he wants to the other. No surprise, Apollo, as a god, wins. If this is meant to be a story of vice and virtue then it is about the foolish pursuit of perfection by mankind. Icarus in musical form if you like (although now I just have images of some west end show production in my head) Anyway, as punishment, Apollo orders MArsyas to be flated. This invovles being hung from a tree and then skinned alive. Brutalistic horror.
I know that what I want to find is a non figurative essence of this story. It does not present me with any narrative or figurative moment which I wish to depict. Titian has depicted the flaying with such timeless brilliance that the scene is rendered pointless in any representational language.
I have been tihnking of how the canvas itself, the painting itself could be a substitute for the body of marsyas. The canvas will read as skin, the paint as flesh and the processes I subject it too could replacate the flaying. The historical asosciations between these various referents and references are clear. Paint as paint and paint as flesh is hardly new. Which is why it is potentially such an exciting language to explore.
I know I want the work to play on forms and makrs laid on, in and udner the surface. So these become like a metaphor of the flaying. The problem is the oprganisation of the forms. I want them to be vertical, so they have a figurative resonance. How to order them is sometihng I am not so sure of. Do the verticals go to and through the edge of the picture plane, or break well before (more like a Rothko rectangle). The later will create a sense of floating forms, the former something more solid, landscape like and eternal.
I am going to look to explore a range of ideas on paper. Treating them all a individual autonomous pieces but hopefuilly leading up to a conclusion in canvas form.
The play on various surface values will hopefully have suggestions of time. I want to create a Titian?Tapies like melody between the sefl refferntial time signature and the narrative one. Harmonising those is key. PLus, this muscial mode of viewing, opened up, will fit in nicely with the subjecdt matter.
in terms of music I want to use colour adn surface to create melancholic rhythms across the whole. So the eyes moves around, as if in song... remidning us of the tragic nature of the subject but also the musical root of Marsyas downfall. PLus, this kind of visual meldoy is something which has been fading as my work as progressed ove rthe last few motnhs. SO much else has improved but that has been lost.
I am at the stage where I tihnk the whole conception could become really crude or really sophisiticated. Execution and desciion making are key. It could so easily become a Rothko/Tapies/Graham pastiche. Hopefully independance will be found along the way. I am also aware that as a process, searching for representation in the lanaguage of abstraction also touches on the work of Jdgkin and Brian Graham, and as such I could be destined to fuck up... just as Marsyas did. Hopefully my punishment will be nothing more than self deprecation. I am not quite ready for a flaying. I like my skin firmly attached to my body thank you.
The thing I find most exciting is a complete exploration of surface and its references to time and transicnee. IF I can get my surfaces to deal effectively with such notions then in turn I tihnk I will be close to capturing the essence of Marsyas' story.
The organisation of form will also be important. i want to continue my search for a Poussin like geometry. One which takes us across and through the surface. To generate a spatial two fold play on flatness and depth. I want the figures to pulse, as if the alive, as if Marsyas himself is breathing his last heavy breath. I want them to seem half alive, like a spectre. Again, surely that is exactly what a freshly flayed person is. Sat in a hellish limbo between life and death.
This will also be a chance to play with Crimson, Burnt Umber and Napthal red. I want to get a vibration set up between these various hues. Hopefully I can get them to dance in and out of the high ends shadows and lights. I want this to have a theatre, a drama akin but seperate to Titian 'Flaying of MArsyas' If I can take one step towards any of these waffled aims I will be happy.
Lecture Two
Warwickshire College: Art Foundation, Contextual studies.
Part One, Lecture Two
Tom de Freston
Semantics- from specifics to metaphysics
A little note on this write up: The write up for lecture one ended up being sprawling and going into too much detail. To make this write up more digestible I will try and reduce it in length; apologies, therefore, for a lack of detailed discussion at the points of greatest interest. In areas this write up will literally be in note form, just to give you something to refer back to. If I had continued with the depth of the first one my writing would have got worse and worse as I could not get it written up quick enough.
As with my last lecture, I shall upload images into the text at a later point. At the moment that is not possible. Hopefully you will remember the images from the lecture so still be able to benefit.
This lecture continues from where the last lecture finishes. Using semantic thought I shall look to demonstrate how true meaning comes from a combined appreciation of a works specific and metaphysical value.
There are other strands of art history which look to combine the Hegelian and Kantian approach, most notably cultural historians such as Panofsky and Wofflin. For Panofsky the discussion is around iconography and subject matter, for Wofflin style. Both follow a scientific mood of enquiry, which they argue moves from the specifics of the discussion to a final search for wider, metaphysical meaning. They are both crucially important scholars who we will try to deal with later in the year.
In regards to this lecture Panofsky makes some interesting observations in his essay ‘The History of Art as a Humanistic Discipline’ (1940).
He describes our problem as:
“What the philosophers call an ‘organic situation’. Two legs without a body cannot walk, and a body without legs cannot walk either, yet a man can walk…the system that makes sense operates as a consistent but elastic organism.”
That is, that we cannot move systematically (although we could argue Panofsky does) from a works visual content to its social, philosophical and ideological values.
At the end of the essay Panofsky talks of the need to balance the skills of the connoisseur and the art historian. That is to look at an objects detail and its wider context, its internal and external frames of reference. He says:
“When we call the connoisseur a laconic art historian and the art historian a loquacious connoisseur, the relation between the art historian and the art theorist may be compared to that between two neighbours who have the right of shooting over the same district, while one of them owns the gun and the other all the ammunition. Both parties would be well advised if they realised the condition of their partnership. It has rightly been said that theory, if not received at the door of an empirical discipline, comes in through the chimney like a ghost and upsets the furniture. But it is not less true that history if not received at the door of a theoretical discipline dealing with the same set of phenomena, creeps into the cellar like a horde of mice and undermines the groundwork.”
What we will consider today is how semiotics opens the door for a specific study of what is seen to reveal wider meaning. I don’t claim this to be a fully successful answer to the problem, and we will even move significantly away from the above mentioned remit. In doing so, however, I am trying to demonstrate that meaning and the methods by which we deconstruct an image cannot be formulaic. There are also certain areas where we go of on a slightly unrelated tangent, because I think they are interesting enough to merit a little wander.
So… semiotics….
Semiotics is a formal science which looks to uncover ideological systems of thought. The French linguist Saussure is generally credited with having formed the theoretical foundations of the discipline. He studied how meaning is ascribed in language. From him a whole French tradition of associated thought has arisen. Names such as Foucault, Derrida and Barthes are amongst the most important.
If all else is forgotten then it is useful to remember that semiotics is the study of signs and how they carry meaning. It is the science of signs. It considers there visual construction but equally their cultural evolution. How they came to hold such value.
Before going into depth I want to point you towards two notions in brief note form.
Barthes essay- Myth Today 1960’s
Equivalence between artefact and content – expresses the need for both
“Less terrorised by the spectre of formalism, historical criticism might have been less sterile, it would have understood that the specific study of forms does not in any way contradict the necessary principle of totality and History. On the contrary: the more a system is specifically defined in its forms, the more amenable it is to historical criticism. To parody a well known saying, I shall say that a little formalism turns one away from History, but that a lot brings one back to it.”
He looks into how objects pass from silence to speech. The notion that there are no eternal meanings in objects; it is always projected onto the object by society.
Considers how form and content being symbiotic- a dialectical relationship- we move from specifics to metaphysics in an organic and elastic process. Not a rigid systematic science.
Death of the Author: Foucault
The author has been given privileged status- the questions asked by connoisseurs: genius, authorship, authenticity, originality, biography
Structuralists deny this-
Admit that: the object is the result of the individual and his personal context
But also believe: Once finished it does not hold or carry any relation to them- once made there control over it has been relinquished.
No longer about intention of the artist- he does not speak to us, the object does.
It’s about the object, and more specifically its relation to the viewer. This is a new, more neutral, visual dynamic.
Semiotics
Semiotics concerns itself with the interrelation of three things; the sign, signifier, signified. It states that a signs meaning is understood through its context; be that a physical, visual, ideological, cultural or historical context.
To understand what these different component parts are we should consider the word tree:
signifier- that which carries the meaning (a word or symbol) TREE- acoustic image
signified- the meaning conveyed- conceptual image. The idea of a TREE
Sign- signifier plus signified. Ie the sign is what we understand by the combination of letters tree. It is the marriage between the carrier of meaning and the meaning carried.
For the word tree is not actually a tree. It is a collection of letters that we have ascribed with that particular meaning. It could be carried by any string of letters; just English language has developed to allow this string of letters to take on that meaning. In theory any signifier can signify anything, the sign is something which is constructed, and it does not already exist. It gains its meaning through its context- spatial, social, visual, and historical.
This lecture will consider semiotics in practise. In the first half ill look at how certain visual signifiers have been accustomed to mean certain things. In the second half how artists have played on the artificial nature of a sign, and have destabilised the signifier from what it signifies. This is a subversion of the norm.
The Vessel
A work of art is like a cup. It can be filled with a range of meaning/liquids, but that meaning and liquid must always fit within the boundaries of the cup. It is not a case of anything goes, but the same object can be filled and emptied of meaning, old and new, and can take on a variety of guises. I shall consider the Mona Lisa as an example of this.
Debate of the Mona LISA
To show the disparity between the sign and its signification. The two are united by context, in this sense the cultural context of our viewing experience.
1) For da vinci- above many things part of his experiments with light, with the destruction of a vision which privileged the hard line. He believed forms and image were made up of light
2) Emptied and filled-
Vasari- already seen how he bastardised objects. Under his doctrine it becomes about the celebration of the importance of line and intellectual design, not the sensations of vision Da Vinci privileged. It takes on new meaning, and this meaning is perhaps the one which has stood the test of time, despite being the one which seems to ignore what is seen.
3) Throughout the history of Western culture the Mona Lisa has taken on a status as a symbol of the high renaissance. Many artists have quoted it or openly parodied it in their work. It appears in new guises all the time. From Duchamp’s version with a moustache, to street graphite with a bazooka in her arms, as the symbol of a detective story and blockbuster movie in The Da Vinci code and in numerous adverts and cartoons; including a version with Lisa Simpson’s head inserted into an image of the painting.
This process of quotation and commentary alters our vision. It makes the Mona Lisa part of our very cultural fabric. It becomes a more detached, generalised, vague symbol of certain values we consider history and the masters attain too. It is Vasari’s doctrine filtered and modernised through the gaze of repetition. She has become a highly diverse actress in our cultural theatre.
4 a and b) The Mona Lisa now hangs in the Louvre. It has again been emptied to fit into some idealistic narrative, and also has found an ironic accidnetla incarnation in recent years.
4a)
The louver is a fascinating place. The first encyclopaedic art collection opened to the general public, as a direct result of the French revolution and Napoleons subsequent rise to power.
In this context, which it is still a part of, it no longer means the same thing as when it was made. It is re-contextualised as the high point of a particular narrative; which traces, loosely, Vasari’s notion of a chronological rise to the height of representation.
Yet the story is told through the window of French imperial power. Most objects the result of the expanding empire, with precious works of art stolen or purchased and then brought back. The Mona Lisa’s very presentation, as the jewel in the crown, represents a symbol of French taste, power, and superiority. A central Italian painting is rehoused in Paris as the master of ceremonies for a particularly French celebration.
4b) yet when we view the Mona Lisa in the Louvre now, the above reading seems to have got quieter, and a far more depressing and empty noise has deafened the silence of the painting.
Consider the following:
Its new display: It has been given its own free standing, high rise wall in the middle of a room. It sits behind a bullet proof sheet of glass. Beyond this is an altarpiece like barrier and the obligatory guards. They stand like the bodyguards of some vacuous, superficial celebrity…which is exactly what the Mona Lisa has become. Behind this barrier are ropes for us to queue within, lining up like sheep’s for a few seconds of admiration of a secularised goddess; her iconic power drawing us in like moths to light or flies to shit.
Beyond the room is the paraphernalia that surrounds the modernisation of the Louvre; where the museum has moved conspicuously towards entertainment over value. In the shop and all around there is a plethora of Mona Lisa related merchandise, pens, notepads, t-shirts, posters, fridge magnets etc. etc. Is this the purest form of Kitsch? The work has become nothing more than the celebratory figure head of a business, merely a part of commerce.
The irony, and its almost funny, is that its celebration leads to a total emptying of original meaning. That which got it to the heights is that which is lost. Its like equivalent of celebrating reaching the top of a mountain by being pushed over the edge.
In this current geographic and cultural context it has become a vacuous symbol of a capitalist societies need to consume and devour empty and quick experiences. The very mechanics of its presentation control the semantics of this new dimension of meaning. Very hard to get beyond or transcend this.
Courbet-‘ Burial at Ornans’
In consider this work I will be touching upon certain approaches mentioned last week. Most notably the Marxist critique offered up by T. J. Clark. We will see how his search for the works original social context seems to ignore the very object he analysis. With a semantic and iconographic discussion of the works visual content and mechanics I will look to move from the internal out to the external. Hoping to imbed a search for the paintings wider social context in the painting itself.
WILL INSERT IMAGES LATER
This huge masterpiece has been excessively written on, but most of the text, in my modest opinion, is spurious. The painting refutes the continual attempts to find specific social and political dimensions. It has continued to frustrate in its refusal to be fully contextualised.
Clark looks to the conditions of the works production and consumption. He looks to Courbet’s associations with politically left minded people, some of whom are active in their views. He then looks to the Salons response to the work, how some of them found it ugly and offensive in its style and execution. Those broad impasto ruffles, that heavy light to dark. It comes to the conclusion that the work is anti bourgeoisie. That is is purposely subversive, purposely looks to unsettle its audience. It is a conclusion made by what surrounds the work, not through a close analysis of the work itself. It is the projection of meaning.
Most commentators refuse to start with the work itself, seemingly ignoring the need to place it in a visual context. When we do this it becomes clear that the work is Davidian in plastic construction, think of ‘the Crowning of Josephine’ and Rembrandtian in handling. This later stylistic observation, when removed from its connection to a Dutch heritage, has mistakenly been used as evidence of political and social subversion. Viewer’s comments that the work was ‘ugly’ and offensive are merely evidence to eyes trained on a different aesthetic. Courbet, well before being a public figure, came from this kind of aesthetic tradition. To suspect he saw a Rembrandtian use of paint and light as ugly is absurd.
Beyond these general observations it is the visual dynamics of the piece which I feel reveal its meaning.
A noticeable difference can be spotted between the circle of mourners in the final painting and the preparatory sketch. In the final painting the second row of figures is no longer lost behind the front row. Courbet has raised the point from which we view, lifting the figures higher than strict perspective rules allow. Tonal contrasts of their costumes are used to frame them, creating a wall of black punctuated by the continued row of fleshy faces and white hats.
In the sketch we view across, like a procession in a frieze. In the painting we are actively engaged in the act of viewing, with the mourners arranged into a processional circle which our eye joins and rotates around. It is a new rhythm which unites the individuals as a whole, a community at one in grief. It reveals the central meaning of the painting, not the individual’s death but the communities’ reaction to it.
This fact is reinforced by the position of the body/coffin. It is placed to the far left, at an oblique angle, only half in frame. This creates a sense of the moment of arrival and the transience of human life. This is what people are waiting for. It about this specific moment before burial, where mourners must very soon make a philosophical decision over what they believe happens to the physical remains.
The specific condition of their mourning is revealed by the apex of the circle of mourners. The point they will all come to rest, is central and directly between the two key men, the priest and the man in a blue suit and socks. They have to make a choice between the two sides the men represent, religious and secular. The space between the men resonates with meaning. Courbet understands the poetics of space- one which not only awaits a body but which asks each viewer and mourner to fill it with meaning.
Such a reading is reaffirmed by the two most prominent iconographical signs. That which pierces the horizontal and that which lays across and below the horizontal.
The cross is the only thing to break the horizon line, so gaining a prominence. In doing so it reasserts its visual sign, the vertical breaking the horizontal, and also its symbolic reference, the transcendence from a profane to sacred a realm.
The grave also reasserts its sign and signification. In reality a grave is hole dug for remains, visually it references the idea, placed on the bottom horizontal and continuing beyond its edge. Symbolically the grave is the place where the body will be placed and rot and in the picture its continuation into nothingness symbolises this.
What we are left with is a kind of mid 19th century philosophy of the funeral, not the last judgement of heaven or hell but the choice of an afterlife or end of life. The need for the community to make their decision. It is about the crisis of meaning and belief in mid nineteenth century France. A work about their communal mourning and freedom and need to choose what they believe. In this sense it relates to both the last judgement and to Christian funeral scenes.
We arrive at the painting as a sign which signifies metaphysical notions. Which captures the spirit of its age. But that very spirit has reveal itself to us through a close analysis of the semiotics of its construction of signs.
The grammar of meaning- the parts relate to the whole and the whole relates to wider meaning.
Space and meaning- signifier of specific meaning
Bann on delaroche- talks about Fried concept of the repetition-structure in European painting
The transition of meaning through pictorial structures
Visual mechanics great certain meanings regardless of iconography
The delivery of the message from left to right
When a horizontal space is clearly split into two realms by a vertical divide.
Bann relates this to the Annunciation
The delivery of a message
The irruption between realms.
A narrative function
From top to bottom
When a vertical space is split in two by a horizontal line
Deposition, Christ from the cross
Icarus
A falling form
The decent from a height to the bottom- an awareness of the divide and the horizontal line at the bottom.
Tragic inevitability.
Meaning controlled by- the treatment of motifs within the spatial coordinates of the rectangular plane.
Drama through space- its geometry and the relation of forms within it. Placed across or either side of a dividing line.
Perfect illustration of such awareness: almost a visual lecture in semantic space
John Hilliard- Cause of Death. 1974.
Conceptual photographer.
systematic analysis of how the camera created meaning
frame- cropping of the image controlled our reading.
The same body lies, supposedly, dead but the space in which it sits is The suggested cause of death is altered by the framing of the work
Caption roots sign to specifics reading- the repressive role of text.
Also helps to root the sign to a specific reading, which otherwise would be more ambiguous. The text represses other readings.
The frame as a symbolic entity- limits what we see, inside, outside, either side.
To frame- a physical and metaphorical notion, both connected.
Think here a little about photography- of on a tangent before returning to space in general.
Photography as honest- the capturing of reality. The photographers claim to be neutral, objective, neurosis to capture and pause reality.
Walter Benjamin- an artefact has an aura and cult value, found through their context and their materiality.
Art in the age of mechanical reproduction- the photo changes this context and physicality. No matter how high the quality.
The sign is similar but its signification changes.
Sociological transformation.
What happens is the platonic reduction. Nothing is saved but something new, and on parallel lines is copied.
A further removal from its purest incarnation.
Difference between photo and reality:
Moving vs still
Transience vs the paused moment
Silence vs noise
2 dimensions vs 3.
the frame vs the continuation off into space on multiple planes.
As constructed as a painting
More of a lie as it more tries to appear as the truth- less transparent in its artificiality.
The medias abuse of this power.
Martin Parr plays on this boundary of myth and reality- the careful selection, the slightly unreal lighting.
His photo of a Cup of Tea (part of a large series of work over a long period of gestation, in one specific British location.
In this case- quintessentially British
Pure reportage?
Recording life
But the manner in which he does, be it repetition, the slightly unnatural light and colour, the frame and cropping.
The humble is raised to the profound.
Specific and singular object to a symbol of a whole nation.
He is aware of the artificiality of it all.
Does it all with a dry wit and knowledge of the limits and mechanics of his medium.
space in general- the construction and composition of an image as central to meaning.
The splitting of the visual plane: opens a dialogue
Will look at David to show how meaning can be found by an appreciation of his use of space
Binary oppositions in a visual format: one space defines the other. Don’t exist or make sense alone.
‘Brutus’- J. L. David 1789
Socio-political interpretation- the anticipation of the revolution?
History in reverse.
Political content of the subject chosen- Brutus ripped sword from Targuin’s body and swore to rid Rome of the monarchy, to form a republic. The oath of Brutus. Shown by Gavin Hamilton and Beufort. Brutus was made consul then found out his sons where in a plot to restore monarchy, condemned them to death. David choices a later moment, the consequence of the actions. David was not a republican at time of making. No sign that David of 1789 was in anyway aware or as aligned to the political left as he would be later. (when he signed forms for the execution of numerous people, just on hearsay of them having royalist allegiances)Things happened very quickly.
Would later be used to symbolise, used as last seen in staging of Voltaires play, Brutus, revolutionary ideas, used as the end visual for play of Brutus. Metaphor of republican salvation against royal tyranny, resonated with events of 1890’s.
Selection of subject also key, which moment in a narrative plot he choices to depict. Various moments he could have shown in both- consider sketches. Gavin Hamilton's work- situate in a current on interest in the story of Horatti. About the human not the inhuman. This is a work about the domestic space, about the family reaction to the death of young men, not the public political sphere.
If we go to the picture such socio-political readings are not there. A semioloigcal analysis of its construction revels an altogether different reading.
What is seen- moment of the sons bodies arriving, the family reaction
Brutus- awareness of Michelangelo- power of figural form to convey emotional state. The corporeal, seen entity, to convey the ethereal meaning. (like a mini flourish of semantics within the whole)
Face in shadow- he is devoid of any emotion
The twisted, contrapossto of body, the bent toes- the show the tension and depression and grief that the face hides. His lack of emotion is a symbol of the inner turmoil.
Women- based on a classical frieze of niobe group.
Between them they provide an image of grief in the round.
Mothers double action- one supports the other reaches out
One child swoons
One covers her eyes
The lady to the right is in such grief it is beyond depiction
Dialogue- between sides.
Jump from one to the other
Female and male domains
They inform each other
The divide- the subject around which this dialogue revolves. The empty chair. The lack of any person a reminder of the lose.
It is a picture about domestic, family grief, nothing to do with wider political dimension.
Sewing basket- centrally placed.
Within this context
(this is again back to basic semantics, the sign gathers meaning from its visual context)
It becomes a potent and melancholic symbol of domestic grief.
The way the knife pierces the fabric
Shows David’s awareness of the ability of mundane objects to take on profound meaning when given the correct context.
What we see is not a work which celebrates a Republican stoic hero having put the state first, but one which is far more complex. It looks to the drama and tragedy of events, it is far more humanistic and sympathetic and melancholic than it is patriotic, jingoistic or bursting with propagandist pride.
Stonebreakers- Courbet. 1860’s
Repeat method to drum into you how meaning can emerge from the image
Much written about the dry accurate material realism- capturing every detail as it was.
Found the workers at side of the road and then asked the to come to his studio
Claim is Courbet is merely capturing those elements of life previously ignored- in this case the lowest facet of the social hierarchy, the bottom rung of the working class.
Showing the back breaking labour without any artificiality
Artificial construction: (high art sources)
Choice- to stop at the road side and ask the men to pose.
Visualising the action and its repetition and strain-
Paused moment- needs a gesture
boy’s leg is lifted onto a rock and his arms and back strain to hold the basket of rocks. mans hammer is paused at the height of its repetitive cycle, just lifted from one hammer blow and just about to descend for another.
Composing- Davidian, his scene from reality, backdrop of a dense rural mound, vertical , flat and shallow stage to set scene and focus drama.
Geometry of organisation- David reveals his structure, Courbet hides his
Each figure in separate halves of the canvas- not gendered realms but age
Emotive significance, causal plot- sense of continuity, that the younger will pass into the older. Tragic certainty.
Not just the depiction of two specific workers, captured in paint.
Hiding their faces - more generalised scene of labour-of repetitiveness, of physical strain - the tragic truth of its perpetual nature.
Martin Parr
Consider his photos of bored couples. They generally use space in a similar way. Each person is, normally, placed in one half of the space. Thus a dialogue is opened up.
Different kind of dialogue
A couple- sit in separate halves.
We expect a direct interaction.
The absence of a presumed presence.
The lack of what we expect subverts the romantic notion of a couple.
Witty, depressing realism.
Transcendental space- here we will consider where space can take on a spiritual dimension.
David- Death of Marat- 1793
Schama- The Power of Art
Spoke eloquently about its continued power, even if beyond that he went into a description of the work as a great lie, as a piece of propaganda.
‘airbrushing the revolution’
“before his Marat… people sighed, sobbed, swooned. It was, and still is, the most potent political fetish ever to have come from the hand of a painter”
“Marat retains the power to startle, move and disturb. Despite everything it stands for, despite its place in the history of great lies, it remains shockingly, lethally beautiful”
He never really revealed how it had such power.
How its very aesthetic generated the iconic and controversial and moving reaction.
Forgot about that in order to place it in context- seems to analyse it entirely as a historical artefact, not for its more eternal aesthetic values. The passion he talks with leaves you frustrated. Does not analyse how it produces the power, stays a mystery. He leaves us floating on the precipice.
I am interested in a phemological study- the realisation of a phenomina, and then a search and deconstruction to see how that phenomina was created. Rather than the conditions of the works function and meaning.
‘Marat at his last breath’
What is happening? the moment directly after he is murdered.
Bauddelaire- above marat a soul spirals.
So true- yet how has David managed to seemingly capture the moment we pass form life to death. Which is so crucial to its enduring power.
The eternalising of the ultimate transient moment. That is what generates our empathy. That is what gives the martyr his Iconic power.
Relation between spaces:
Bottom- full- clues and evidence- tangibly about the visible, living world.
Top- shockingly empty.
Dialogue opened up:
Binary oppositions
The top seems to become a receptacle for a spiritual realm, as opposed to the clearly tangible and corporeal realm below.
Plays against this-
The bottom- so still, motionless- against what we expect, confirms his deadness
The top- proto Rothko
Seems to shimmer and move
In the nothingness there is something
Understands the poetry of space and surface
That the breaking of light across the surface, the void, can so eloquently suggest the unseen.
Tapies- ‘Negre amb linia vermella’ 1963
does the same again- more ambiguous.
Play between something and nothing
Between presence and absence
Delights in the void
The line controls the suggestion of two separate realms
The magic of the corporeal, visible, seeable world and the spiritual unseen other.
The presence of a sign which we can clearly locate to meaning and our realm lets us appreciate the void as containing the unseen, spiritual meaning.
Rothko- continued play of the presence of spiritual meaning through the absence of clearly representational forms. The use of space, the play and vibration of colour and forms suggest an unseen otherness.
Interest in the sublime
Even colour as only generating meaning through relative value:
Hodgkin- keep it quiet
The middle sings due to the relation to the surrounding colours.
Middle, separate elements of bright colour, external mixed to create a muddy hue.
Visual culture like music- notes work due to be part of a system. One is understood and enjoyed due to the other.
Narrative use of space- the empty space itself taking on meaning.
Pictorial narration:
In poetry or narrative:
Stories told over line and time. We move through the temporal, sequential development of the plot. From start to finish.
Painting cannot do this, it only has one moment. When a story revolves around a series of events which follow one another inventive ways need to be created to solve the problem.
Delacroix- The execution of Doge Marino Faliero 1826
Will focus on Delacroix a lot- why?
One of the most sophisticated composers of pictorial narratives and poetry. He does this through a rounded awareness of semantics. Even though he would not have known it by such terms. No better painter of Byron, Shakespeare, Goethe and Scott.
Takes a story form Byron’s poetry. Obviously there we are aware of the context, the past, the event itself. We are told about the moments which lead up to the execution, the execution and the moments after.
Delacroixs solution.
All figures and action around a void in the centre of the picture
Figure lies at the bottom horizontal.
At the top is clearly the arena upon which the execution happened.
Aware that the body has passed from top to bottom- the separation into half suggests this decent
Empty space takes on meaning due to this context
The space has a memory of a series of events- it remembers the fall.
The space becomes witness to the moment after death.
Talks of the past which led to the shown present.
More specifically- the stairs take on semantic value
Stairs- talk of a rise up and a decent down. We are at the moment of decent. The stairs presence reaffirms that this is the final chapter in the scene.
Another example: Delaroche- Death of the Duc de Guise
From left to right we move through space and time
(space as a signifier therefore signifies time- the space time relationship creates the narrative sign)
Remembers the journey towards death
The spatial relation- left to right- registers as a signifier of the passing of time in general.
Callum Innes- monochromes work (large grey lines falling down the canvases in dripping veils)
These works were recently on display in a show of his work at Kettles Yard in Cambridge. If in the area it is a place well worth a visit. Unique and fascinating in equal measure.
He provides a non figurative equivalent to the above narratives- A kind of self referential narrative.
The drips have an eloquence- they are self referential. They talk about their own fall down the surface of the canvas, about the effects of gravity, the liquidity of paint. The drip takes on a whole series of art historical references on top of this.
Speak about the decent across the surface, from top to bottom.
The layering- layers added and layers removed, in a constant play between being and not being, between absence and presence. What is left and what is gone. Will talk about the meaning in layering later.
For now- about the relation between top and bottom- where the paint was applied and where it fell too.
Does not necessarily talk about anything beyond this, but its fairly moving testimony of the passing of time.
Decent, the passing of time and the fall our all pertinent factors of what we shall call the human condition
External space
The image as a stage- often seen as a closed space. All action happening within it.
What about when it refers to unseen, off stage spaces?
Relation between the unseen and the seen
Delaroche- Two Princes
The story- the murder
How fear is conveyed through an unseen other
The light- suggests a presence which is due to arrive, as if this is the moment before the event.
Delacroix
Aware of how the off stage realm can have a multiple array of meanings depending on the context of his subject. So same thing used for different ends.
Narrative presence- In ‘Rebecca and the Wounded Ivanhoe’ The space they look out to seems to be one which contains certain narrative action.
Psychological state- ‘In Tasso in Jail’ The external space seems to talk of his unseen, internal desire to be somewhere, anywhere else. The external space, where he looks, speak of longing and melancholy at the internal space he is trapped within. In two different works by the same artist the same signifier signifies two different things.
In ‘Medea with her children’ it has multiple references.
The presence of a murderous other, who threatens her children
Speaks of her internal fear and dread- takes on both the levels of the previous two.
Delacroix- Massacre of Chios
Semantics of space- to see how he creates a sense that what is seen is merely a fragment of a wider scene.
What happens centrally- the grief of singular figures. We are aware of them as individual and thus sympathise directly, we engage emotively with them.
The edge and the splitting of figures
The sky and the sense of the horizontal
A vertical fragment of a grand panorama of suffering.
Delacroix- The Murder of Bishop Liege 1829
What is a table and what does a table mean?- quite prosaic
Here takes on a dramatic symbolic role- light and central- Rembrandtian light.
Seems to capture the violent and theatrical energy of the upcoming murder.
As if what it is serving us up is drama rather than food- a metaphorical not a literal meaning
Generated through new context- any object can take on any meaning in right circumstance.
Tapies- meaning in the surface
Touches back with last week- use semantics to see the link between the
Kantian- the aesthetic, the thing in itself
Hegelian- the spirit of the age, the sociological context.
The artifice- abstract values- the build up and pull back of a surface.
The context- Franco
Catalan
The destruction of architectural walls a potent reminder of the lives forsaken for the ‘good of the state’
The first, the sign, seems to resonant and signify the second
Each scratch and mark seems filled with a poetic melancholy.
Two time signature- the self referential and the secondary.
The time of the artists visits
The political melody
In viewing it- a harmony between these parts, they seem to harmonise in a hymn to lose and time
Destabilising the sign
Seen how the sign can signify meaning.
Sign - confronted and meaning denied.
The road to this destruction.
Manet- Les Dejeuner sur l’herbe 1860’s
All attempts with Manet attempt to find clear and logical meaning, that is what he set out to destroy.
The collapse of logic- the elements don’t add up to the whole.
Various parts- foreground, middle ground, background- don’t sit comfortably
-The horizon- what it should be- point of ultimate distance- allow us to escape
-What should be the light of air and space is the solid block of a wall.
Cubism
Analytical period- accordinist
Pushed to the limit- the same horizontal and verticals take on different meanings dependant on placement
Towards image and form in one place
Part of the background somewhere else
The manner of the lines is altered though-
background- contradicts is airiness and appears solid and concrete
image and form- takes on a transparency, as if the form has been opened up, as if the sculptural exterior of three dimensions has been challenge and attacked.
The same sign constantly shifting between signification
Braque- still life collage 1912
Faux bois- the signifier
By placing it in different areas of the picture plan what it signifies can be totally different
Bottom- foreground
Sides- background.
Picasso pushes it further- Braque relies on the intervention of line to inform and aid the reading.
Picasso- guitar, glass and sheet music 1913
How we know it’s a guitar
Sound hole- a recessive, black hole.
The sign to signify this is actually its exact opposite- a white disk which is the last layer applied the furthest forward.
Its reads as its exact opposite due to its position between two guitar like sides. That is what informs and controls its reading, to invert its invert its reality for illusion.
Interpretation of work- writers ignore Picassos understanding of semantics
Political- look for deeper meaning by searching for sources
The battle has begun- cutting from a newspaper
La journal
Placed back in original context
Picasso understood that by removing from this context it lost all the original meaning and gained new meaning
La jou- cut on purpose, the work is about play, about a wity exploration of formal elements
The battle- a more personal battle.
Not about some political comment on the Balkan wars, which the original article spoke about.
His battles with Braque in the above mentioned play. Even in the words of the newspaper cutting he outdoes his rival. Showing how a newspaper headline about war can be a self referential joke about their artistic goals.
Duchamp’s Urinal
The most important moment in conceptual art- almost a cliché.
Questions every assumption we have about art- taste, craftsmanship, skill, meaning, morality.
Has taken a ready made object and turned it into art.
The only shift is its context- from gents loos to gallery plinth. His decision is all that converts it.
From an entirely functional to an image lacking any function.
From pragmatics to aesthetics.
Its whole meaning and being is changed by a merely contextual transformation.
Further conceptual explorations in the field
Joseph Kusuth
A visual lecture in semantics and platonic form
Makes us question what a chair actually is
The things which signify a chair, the carrier and conveyer of what we mean by the notion.
Michael Craig Martin
Turns such notions on its head
Oak Tree- glass of water on a shelf.
By calling it an oak tree it puts forward the notion that it therefore is an oak tree.
Is it still a glass but the words oak tree have now been turned into a carrier of that meaning.
Or can it actually now embody, due to its reappraisal, an oak tree.
Its current meaning and association has been totally emptied.
Post modern semiotics- Arturo Herrera
The lacerated image
How it has been destroyed
How it still holds onto figuration
He understands the power of the frame. How it can still carry a reference to figuration despite the destruction of image.
Gender
Tracey emin and Ghada Amer
Sewing and patchwork-
Gender types
Craft based, kitche associations
Subvert the meaning by giving it a new context. Both use the medium to construct images with explicit or personal sexual references. The conflate one sign against another.
Sarah Lucas
A table becomes a body
A kebab and scrambled eggs become a vagina and breasts.
A photo of the above mentioned symbols of the body becomes a face.
Every object subverts its normal reference to symbolise something outside of itself
The things it suggests play witty games on crude, ladish terminology for the female form.
Semantics and its relevance to makers.
Can do what we want with an image and and form
Can randomly play with it without worry about original context
Can consciously take from one place and play on original meaning to create new paraodies and commentaries on a particualr issue
Can use space to control the reading of a work
Can use images to create or contradict a reading.
Can take something from somewhere and use for a totally different purpose.
Part One, Lecture Two
Tom de Freston
Semantics- from specifics to metaphysics
A little note on this write up: The write up for lecture one ended up being sprawling and going into too much detail. To make this write up more digestible I will try and reduce it in length; apologies, therefore, for a lack of detailed discussion at the points of greatest interest. In areas this write up will literally be in note form, just to give you something to refer back to. If I had continued with the depth of the first one my writing would have got worse and worse as I could not get it written up quick enough.
As with my last lecture, I shall upload images into the text at a later point. At the moment that is not possible. Hopefully you will remember the images from the lecture so still be able to benefit.
This lecture continues from where the last lecture finishes. Using semantic thought I shall look to demonstrate how true meaning comes from a combined appreciation of a works specific and metaphysical value.
There are other strands of art history which look to combine the Hegelian and Kantian approach, most notably cultural historians such as Panofsky and Wofflin. For Panofsky the discussion is around iconography and subject matter, for Wofflin style. Both follow a scientific mood of enquiry, which they argue moves from the specifics of the discussion to a final search for wider, metaphysical meaning. They are both crucially important scholars who we will try to deal with later in the year.
In regards to this lecture Panofsky makes some interesting observations in his essay ‘The History of Art as a Humanistic Discipline’ (1940).
He describes our problem as:
“What the philosophers call an ‘organic situation’. Two legs without a body cannot walk, and a body without legs cannot walk either, yet a man can walk…the system that makes sense operates as a consistent but elastic organism.”
That is, that we cannot move systematically (although we could argue Panofsky does) from a works visual content to its social, philosophical and ideological values.
At the end of the essay Panofsky talks of the need to balance the skills of the connoisseur and the art historian. That is to look at an objects detail and its wider context, its internal and external frames of reference. He says:
“When we call the connoisseur a laconic art historian and the art historian a loquacious connoisseur, the relation between the art historian and the art theorist may be compared to that between two neighbours who have the right of shooting over the same district, while one of them owns the gun and the other all the ammunition. Both parties would be well advised if they realised the condition of their partnership. It has rightly been said that theory, if not received at the door of an empirical discipline, comes in through the chimney like a ghost and upsets the furniture. But it is not less true that history if not received at the door of a theoretical discipline dealing with the same set of phenomena, creeps into the cellar like a horde of mice and undermines the groundwork.”
What we will consider today is how semiotics opens the door for a specific study of what is seen to reveal wider meaning. I don’t claim this to be a fully successful answer to the problem, and we will even move significantly away from the above mentioned remit. In doing so, however, I am trying to demonstrate that meaning and the methods by which we deconstruct an image cannot be formulaic. There are also certain areas where we go of on a slightly unrelated tangent, because I think they are interesting enough to merit a little wander.
So… semiotics….
Semiotics is a formal science which looks to uncover ideological systems of thought. The French linguist Saussure is generally credited with having formed the theoretical foundations of the discipline. He studied how meaning is ascribed in language. From him a whole French tradition of associated thought has arisen. Names such as Foucault, Derrida and Barthes are amongst the most important.
If all else is forgotten then it is useful to remember that semiotics is the study of signs and how they carry meaning. It is the science of signs. It considers there visual construction but equally their cultural evolution. How they came to hold such value.
Before going into depth I want to point you towards two notions in brief note form.
Barthes essay- Myth Today 1960’s
Equivalence between artefact and content – expresses the need for both
“Less terrorised by the spectre of formalism, historical criticism might have been less sterile, it would have understood that the specific study of forms does not in any way contradict the necessary principle of totality and History. On the contrary: the more a system is specifically defined in its forms, the more amenable it is to historical criticism. To parody a well known saying, I shall say that a little formalism turns one away from History, but that a lot brings one back to it.”
He looks into how objects pass from silence to speech. The notion that there are no eternal meanings in objects; it is always projected onto the object by society.
Considers how form and content being symbiotic- a dialectical relationship- we move from specifics to metaphysics in an organic and elastic process. Not a rigid systematic science.
Death of the Author: Foucault
The author has been given privileged status- the questions asked by connoisseurs: genius, authorship, authenticity, originality, biography
Structuralists deny this-
Admit that: the object is the result of the individual and his personal context
But also believe: Once finished it does not hold or carry any relation to them- once made there control over it has been relinquished.
No longer about intention of the artist- he does not speak to us, the object does.
It’s about the object, and more specifically its relation to the viewer. This is a new, more neutral, visual dynamic.
Semiotics
Semiotics concerns itself with the interrelation of three things; the sign, signifier, signified. It states that a signs meaning is understood through its context; be that a physical, visual, ideological, cultural or historical context.
To understand what these different component parts are we should consider the word tree:
signifier- that which carries the meaning (a word or symbol) TREE- acoustic image
signified- the meaning conveyed- conceptual image. The idea of a TREE
Sign- signifier plus signified. Ie the sign is what we understand by the combination of letters tree. It is the marriage between the carrier of meaning and the meaning carried.
For the word tree is not actually a tree. It is a collection of letters that we have ascribed with that particular meaning. It could be carried by any string of letters; just English language has developed to allow this string of letters to take on that meaning. In theory any signifier can signify anything, the sign is something which is constructed, and it does not already exist. It gains its meaning through its context- spatial, social, visual, and historical.
This lecture will consider semiotics in practise. In the first half ill look at how certain visual signifiers have been accustomed to mean certain things. In the second half how artists have played on the artificial nature of a sign, and have destabilised the signifier from what it signifies. This is a subversion of the norm.
The Vessel
A work of art is like a cup. It can be filled with a range of meaning/liquids, but that meaning and liquid must always fit within the boundaries of the cup. It is not a case of anything goes, but the same object can be filled and emptied of meaning, old and new, and can take on a variety of guises. I shall consider the Mona Lisa as an example of this.
Debate of the Mona LISA
To show the disparity between the sign and its signification. The two are united by context, in this sense the cultural context of our viewing experience.
1) For da vinci- above many things part of his experiments with light, with the destruction of a vision which privileged the hard line. He believed forms and image were made up of light
2) Emptied and filled-
Vasari- already seen how he bastardised objects. Under his doctrine it becomes about the celebration of the importance of line and intellectual design, not the sensations of vision Da Vinci privileged. It takes on new meaning, and this meaning is perhaps the one which has stood the test of time, despite being the one which seems to ignore what is seen.
3) Throughout the history of Western culture the Mona Lisa has taken on a status as a symbol of the high renaissance. Many artists have quoted it or openly parodied it in their work. It appears in new guises all the time. From Duchamp’s version with a moustache, to street graphite with a bazooka in her arms, as the symbol of a detective story and blockbuster movie in The Da Vinci code and in numerous adverts and cartoons; including a version with Lisa Simpson’s head inserted into an image of the painting.
This process of quotation and commentary alters our vision. It makes the Mona Lisa part of our very cultural fabric. It becomes a more detached, generalised, vague symbol of certain values we consider history and the masters attain too. It is Vasari’s doctrine filtered and modernised through the gaze of repetition. She has become a highly diverse actress in our cultural theatre.
4 a and b) The Mona Lisa now hangs in the Louvre. It has again been emptied to fit into some idealistic narrative, and also has found an ironic accidnetla incarnation in recent years.
4a)
The louver is a fascinating place. The first encyclopaedic art collection opened to the general public, as a direct result of the French revolution and Napoleons subsequent rise to power.
In this context, which it is still a part of, it no longer means the same thing as when it was made. It is re-contextualised as the high point of a particular narrative; which traces, loosely, Vasari’s notion of a chronological rise to the height of representation.
Yet the story is told through the window of French imperial power. Most objects the result of the expanding empire, with precious works of art stolen or purchased and then brought back. The Mona Lisa’s very presentation, as the jewel in the crown, represents a symbol of French taste, power, and superiority. A central Italian painting is rehoused in Paris as the master of ceremonies for a particularly French celebration.
4b) yet when we view the Mona Lisa in the Louvre now, the above reading seems to have got quieter, and a far more depressing and empty noise has deafened the silence of the painting.
Consider the following:
Its new display: It has been given its own free standing, high rise wall in the middle of a room. It sits behind a bullet proof sheet of glass. Beyond this is an altarpiece like barrier and the obligatory guards. They stand like the bodyguards of some vacuous, superficial celebrity…which is exactly what the Mona Lisa has become. Behind this barrier are ropes for us to queue within, lining up like sheep’s for a few seconds of admiration of a secularised goddess; her iconic power drawing us in like moths to light or flies to shit.
Beyond the room is the paraphernalia that surrounds the modernisation of the Louvre; where the museum has moved conspicuously towards entertainment over value. In the shop and all around there is a plethora of Mona Lisa related merchandise, pens, notepads, t-shirts, posters, fridge magnets etc. etc. Is this the purest form of Kitsch? The work has become nothing more than the celebratory figure head of a business, merely a part of commerce.
The irony, and its almost funny, is that its celebration leads to a total emptying of original meaning. That which got it to the heights is that which is lost. Its like equivalent of celebrating reaching the top of a mountain by being pushed over the edge.
In this current geographic and cultural context it has become a vacuous symbol of a capitalist societies need to consume and devour empty and quick experiences. The very mechanics of its presentation control the semantics of this new dimension of meaning. Very hard to get beyond or transcend this.
Courbet-‘ Burial at Ornans’
In consider this work I will be touching upon certain approaches mentioned last week. Most notably the Marxist critique offered up by T. J. Clark. We will see how his search for the works original social context seems to ignore the very object he analysis. With a semantic and iconographic discussion of the works visual content and mechanics I will look to move from the internal out to the external. Hoping to imbed a search for the paintings wider social context in the painting itself.
WILL INSERT IMAGES LATER
This huge masterpiece has been excessively written on, but most of the text, in my modest opinion, is spurious. The painting refutes the continual attempts to find specific social and political dimensions. It has continued to frustrate in its refusal to be fully contextualised.
Clark looks to the conditions of the works production and consumption. He looks to Courbet’s associations with politically left minded people, some of whom are active in their views. He then looks to the Salons response to the work, how some of them found it ugly and offensive in its style and execution. Those broad impasto ruffles, that heavy light to dark. It comes to the conclusion that the work is anti bourgeoisie. That is is purposely subversive, purposely looks to unsettle its audience. It is a conclusion made by what surrounds the work, not through a close analysis of the work itself. It is the projection of meaning.
Most commentators refuse to start with the work itself, seemingly ignoring the need to place it in a visual context. When we do this it becomes clear that the work is Davidian in plastic construction, think of ‘the Crowning of Josephine’ and Rembrandtian in handling. This later stylistic observation, when removed from its connection to a Dutch heritage, has mistakenly been used as evidence of political and social subversion. Viewer’s comments that the work was ‘ugly’ and offensive are merely evidence to eyes trained on a different aesthetic. Courbet, well before being a public figure, came from this kind of aesthetic tradition. To suspect he saw a Rembrandtian use of paint and light as ugly is absurd.
Beyond these general observations it is the visual dynamics of the piece which I feel reveal its meaning.
A noticeable difference can be spotted between the circle of mourners in the final painting and the preparatory sketch. In the final painting the second row of figures is no longer lost behind the front row. Courbet has raised the point from which we view, lifting the figures higher than strict perspective rules allow. Tonal contrasts of their costumes are used to frame them, creating a wall of black punctuated by the continued row of fleshy faces and white hats.
In the sketch we view across, like a procession in a frieze. In the painting we are actively engaged in the act of viewing, with the mourners arranged into a processional circle which our eye joins and rotates around. It is a new rhythm which unites the individuals as a whole, a community at one in grief. It reveals the central meaning of the painting, not the individual’s death but the communities’ reaction to it.
This fact is reinforced by the position of the body/coffin. It is placed to the far left, at an oblique angle, only half in frame. This creates a sense of the moment of arrival and the transience of human life. This is what people are waiting for. It about this specific moment before burial, where mourners must very soon make a philosophical decision over what they believe happens to the physical remains.
The specific condition of their mourning is revealed by the apex of the circle of mourners. The point they will all come to rest, is central and directly between the two key men, the priest and the man in a blue suit and socks. They have to make a choice between the two sides the men represent, religious and secular. The space between the men resonates with meaning. Courbet understands the poetics of space- one which not only awaits a body but which asks each viewer and mourner to fill it with meaning.
Such a reading is reaffirmed by the two most prominent iconographical signs. That which pierces the horizontal and that which lays across and below the horizontal.
The cross is the only thing to break the horizon line, so gaining a prominence. In doing so it reasserts its visual sign, the vertical breaking the horizontal, and also its symbolic reference, the transcendence from a profane to sacred a realm.
The grave also reasserts its sign and signification. In reality a grave is hole dug for remains, visually it references the idea, placed on the bottom horizontal and continuing beyond its edge. Symbolically the grave is the place where the body will be placed and rot and in the picture its continuation into nothingness symbolises this.
What we are left with is a kind of mid 19th century philosophy of the funeral, not the last judgement of heaven or hell but the choice of an afterlife or end of life. The need for the community to make their decision. It is about the crisis of meaning and belief in mid nineteenth century France. A work about their communal mourning and freedom and need to choose what they believe. In this sense it relates to both the last judgement and to Christian funeral scenes.
We arrive at the painting as a sign which signifies metaphysical notions. Which captures the spirit of its age. But that very spirit has reveal itself to us through a close analysis of the semiotics of its construction of signs.
The grammar of meaning- the parts relate to the whole and the whole relates to wider meaning.
Space and meaning- signifier of specific meaning
Bann on delaroche- talks about Fried concept of the repetition-structure in European painting
The transition of meaning through pictorial structures
Visual mechanics great certain meanings regardless of iconography
The delivery of the message from left to right
When a horizontal space is clearly split into two realms by a vertical divide.
Bann relates this to the Annunciation
The delivery of a message
The irruption between realms.
A narrative function
From top to bottom
When a vertical space is split in two by a horizontal line
Deposition, Christ from the cross
Icarus
A falling form
The decent from a height to the bottom- an awareness of the divide and the horizontal line at the bottom.
Tragic inevitability.
Meaning controlled by- the treatment of motifs within the spatial coordinates of the rectangular plane.
Drama through space- its geometry and the relation of forms within it. Placed across or either side of a dividing line.
Perfect illustration of such awareness: almost a visual lecture in semantic space
John Hilliard- Cause of Death. 1974.
Conceptual photographer.
systematic analysis of how the camera created meaning
frame- cropping of the image controlled our reading.
The same body lies, supposedly, dead but the space in which it sits is The suggested cause of death is altered by the framing of the work
Caption roots sign to specifics reading- the repressive role of text.
Also helps to root the sign to a specific reading, which otherwise would be more ambiguous. The text represses other readings.
The frame as a symbolic entity- limits what we see, inside, outside, either side.
To frame- a physical and metaphorical notion, both connected.
Think here a little about photography- of on a tangent before returning to space in general.
Photography as honest- the capturing of reality. The photographers claim to be neutral, objective, neurosis to capture and pause reality.
Walter Benjamin- an artefact has an aura and cult value, found through their context and their materiality.
Art in the age of mechanical reproduction- the photo changes this context and physicality. No matter how high the quality.
The sign is similar but its signification changes.
Sociological transformation.
What happens is the platonic reduction. Nothing is saved but something new, and on parallel lines is copied.
A further removal from its purest incarnation.
Difference between photo and reality:
Moving vs still
Transience vs the paused moment
Silence vs noise
2 dimensions vs 3.
the frame vs the continuation off into space on multiple planes.
As constructed as a painting
More of a lie as it more tries to appear as the truth- less transparent in its artificiality.
The medias abuse of this power.
Martin Parr plays on this boundary of myth and reality- the careful selection, the slightly unreal lighting.
His photo of a Cup of Tea (part of a large series of work over a long period of gestation, in one specific British location.
In this case- quintessentially British
Pure reportage?
Recording life
But the manner in which he does, be it repetition, the slightly unnatural light and colour, the frame and cropping.
The humble is raised to the profound.
Specific and singular object to a symbol of a whole nation.
He is aware of the artificiality of it all.
Does it all with a dry wit and knowledge of the limits and mechanics of his medium.
space in general- the construction and composition of an image as central to meaning.
The splitting of the visual plane: opens a dialogue
Will look at David to show how meaning can be found by an appreciation of his use of space
Binary oppositions in a visual format: one space defines the other. Don’t exist or make sense alone.
‘Brutus’- J. L. David 1789
Socio-political interpretation- the anticipation of the revolution?
History in reverse.
Political content of the subject chosen- Brutus ripped sword from Targuin’s body and swore to rid Rome of the monarchy, to form a republic. The oath of Brutus. Shown by Gavin Hamilton and Beufort. Brutus was made consul then found out his sons where in a plot to restore monarchy, condemned them to death. David choices a later moment, the consequence of the actions. David was not a republican at time of making. No sign that David of 1789 was in anyway aware or as aligned to the political left as he would be later. (when he signed forms for the execution of numerous people, just on hearsay of them having royalist allegiances)Things happened very quickly.
Would later be used to symbolise, used as last seen in staging of Voltaires play, Brutus, revolutionary ideas, used as the end visual for play of Brutus. Metaphor of republican salvation against royal tyranny, resonated with events of 1890’s.
Selection of subject also key, which moment in a narrative plot he choices to depict. Various moments he could have shown in both- consider sketches. Gavin Hamilton's work- situate in a current on interest in the story of Horatti. About the human not the inhuman. This is a work about the domestic space, about the family reaction to the death of young men, not the public political sphere.
If we go to the picture such socio-political readings are not there. A semioloigcal analysis of its construction revels an altogether different reading.
What is seen- moment of the sons bodies arriving, the family reaction
Brutus- awareness of Michelangelo- power of figural form to convey emotional state. The corporeal, seen entity, to convey the ethereal meaning. (like a mini flourish of semantics within the whole)
Face in shadow- he is devoid of any emotion
The twisted, contrapossto of body, the bent toes- the show the tension and depression and grief that the face hides. His lack of emotion is a symbol of the inner turmoil.
Women- based on a classical frieze of niobe group.
Between them they provide an image of grief in the round.
Mothers double action- one supports the other reaches out
One child swoons
One covers her eyes
The lady to the right is in such grief it is beyond depiction
Dialogue- between sides.
Jump from one to the other
Female and male domains
They inform each other
The divide- the subject around which this dialogue revolves. The empty chair. The lack of any person a reminder of the lose.
It is a picture about domestic, family grief, nothing to do with wider political dimension.
Sewing basket- centrally placed.
Within this context
(this is again back to basic semantics, the sign gathers meaning from its visual context)
It becomes a potent and melancholic symbol of domestic grief.
The way the knife pierces the fabric
Shows David’s awareness of the ability of mundane objects to take on profound meaning when given the correct context.
What we see is not a work which celebrates a Republican stoic hero having put the state first, but one which is far more complex. It looks to the drama and tragedy of events, it is far more humanistic and sympathetic and melancholic than it is patriotic, jingoistic or bursting with propagandist pride.
Stonebreakers- Courbet. 1860’s
Repeat method to drum into you how meaning can emerge from the image
Much written about the dry accurate material realism- capturing every detail as it was.
Found the workers at side of the road and then asked the to come to his studio
Claim is Courbet is merely capturing those elements of life previously ignored- in this case the lowest facet of the social hierarchy, the bottom rung of the working class.
Showing the back breaking labour without any artificiality
Artificial construction: (high art sources)
Choice- to stop at the road side and ask the men to pose.
Visualising the action and its repetition and strain-
Paused moment- needs a gesture
boy’s leg is lifted onto a rock and his arms and back strain to hold the basket of rocks. mans hammer is paused at the height of its repetitive cycle, just lifted from one hammer blow and just about to descend for another.
Composing- Davidian, his scene from reality, backdrop of a dense rural mound, vertical , flat and shallow stage to set scene and focus drama.
Geometry of organisation- David reveals his structure, Courbet hides his
Each figure in separate halves of the canvas- not gendered realms but age
Emotive significance, causal plot- sense of continuity, that the younger will pass into the older. Tragic certainty.
Not just the depiction of two specific workers, captured in paint.
Hiding their faces - more generalised scene of labour-of repetitiveness, of physical strain - the tragic truth of its perpetual nature.
Martin Parr
Consider his photos of bored couples. They generally use space in a similar way. Each person is, normally, placed in one half of the space. Thus a dialogue is opened up.
Different kind of dialogue
A couple- sit in separate halves.
We expect a direct interaction.
The absence of a presumed presence.
The lack of what we expect subverts the romantic notion of a couple.
Witty, depressing realism.
Transcendental space- here we will consider where space can take on a spiritual dimension.
David- Death of Marat- 1793
Schama- The Power of Art
Spoke eloquently about its continued power, even if beyond that he went into a description of the work as a great lie, as a piece of propaganda.
‘airbrushing the revolution’
“before his Marat… people sighed, sobbed, swooned. It was, and still is, the most potent political fetish ever to have come from the hand of a painter”
“Marat retains the power to startle, move and disturb. Despite everything it stands for, despite its place in the history of great lies, it remains shockingly, lethally beautiful”
He never really revealed how it had such power.
How its very aesthetic generated the iconic and controversial and moving reaction.
Forgot about that in order to place it in context- seems to analyse it entirely as a historical artefact, not for its more eternal aesthetic values. The passion he talks with leaves you frustrated. Does not analyse how it produces the power, stays a mystery. He leaves us floating on the precipice.
I am interested in a phemological study- the realisation of a phenomina, and then a search and deconstruction to see how that phenomina was created. Rather than the conditions of the works function and meaning.
‘Marat at his last breath’
What is happening? the moment directly after he is murdered.
Bauddelaire- above marat a soul spirals.
So true- yet how has David managed to seemingly capture the moment we pass form life to death. Which is so crucial to its enduring power.
The eternalising of the ultimate transient moment. That is what generates our empathy. That is what gives the martyr his Iconic power.
Relation between spaces:
Bottom- full- clues and evidence- tangibly about the visible, living world.
Top- shockingly empty.
Dialogue opened up:
Binary oppositions
The top seems to become a receptacle for a spiritual realm, as opposed to the clearly tangible and corporeal realm below.
Plays against this-
The bottom- so still, motionless- against what we expect, confirms his deadness
The top- proto Rothko
Seems to shimmer and move
In the nothingness there is something
Understands the poetry of space and surface
That the breaking of light across the surface, the void, can so eloquently suggest the unseen.
Tapies- ‘Negre amb linia vermella’ 1963
does the same again- more ambiguous.
Play between something and nothing
Between presence and absence
Delights in the void
The line controls the suggestion of two separate realms
The magic of the corporeal, visible, seeable world and the spiritual unseen other.
The presence of a sign which we can clearly locate to meaning and our realm lets us appreciate the void as containing the unseen, spiritual meaning.
Rothko- continued play of the presence of spiritual meaning through the absence of clearly representational forms. The use of space, the play and vibration of colour and forms suggest an unseen otherness.
Interest in the sublime
Even colour as only generating meaning through relative value:
Hodgkin- keep it quiet
The middle sings due to the relation to the surrounding colours.
Middle, separate elements of bright colour, external mixed to create a muddy hue.
Visual culture like music- notes work due to be part of a system. One is understood and enjoyed due to the other.
Narrative use of space- the empty space itself taking on meaning.
Pictorial narration:
In poetry or narrative:
Stories told over line and time. We move through the temporal, sequential development of the plot. From start to finish.
Painting cannot do this, it only has one moment. When a story revolves around a series of events which follow one another inventive ways need to be created to solve the problem.
Delacroix- The execution of Doge Marino Faliero 1826
Will focus on Delacroix a lot- why?
One of the most sophisticated composers of pictorial narratives and poetry. He does this through a rounded awareness of semantics. Even though he would not have known it by such terms. No better painter of Byron, Shakespeare, Goethe and Scott.
Takes a story form Byron’s poetry. Obviously there we are aware of the context, the past, the event itself. We are told about the moments which lead up to the execution, the execution and the moments after.
Delacroixs solution.
All figures and action around a void in the centre of the picture
Figure lies at the bottom horizontal.
At the top is clearly the arena upon which the execution happened.
Aware that the body has passed from top to bottom- the separation into half suggests this decent
Empty space takes on meaning due to this context
The space has a memory of a series of events- it remembers the fall.
The space becomes witness to the moment after death.
Talks of the past which led to the shown present.
More specifically- the stairs take on semantic value
Stairs- talk of a rise up and a decent down. We are at the moment of decent. The stairs presence reaffirms that this is the final chapter in the scene.
Another example: Delaroche- Death of the Duc de Guise
From left to right we move through space and time
(space as a signifier therefore signifies time- the space time relationship creates the narrative sign)
Remembers the journey towards death
The spatial relation- left to right- registers as a signifier of the passing of time in general.
Callum Innes- monochromes work (large grey lines falling down the canvases in dripping veils)
These works were recently on display in a show of his work at Kettles Yard in Cambridge. If in the area it is a place well worth a visit. Unique and fascinating in equal measure.
He provides a non figurative equivalent to the above narratives- A kind of self referential narrative.
The drips have an eloquence- they are self referential. They talk about their own fall down the surface of the canvas, about the effects of gravity, the liquidity of paint. The drip takes on a whole series of art historical references on top of this.
Speak about the decent across the surface, from top to bottom.
The layering- layers added and layers removed, in a constant play between being and not being, between absence and presence. What is left and what is gone. Will talk about the meaning in layering later.
For now- about the relation between top and bottom- where the paint was applied and where it fell too.
Does not necessarily talk about anything beyond this, but its fairly moving testimony of the passing of time.
Decent, the passing of time and the fall our all pertinent factors of what we shall call the human condition
External space
The image as a stage- often seen as a closed space. All action happening within it.
What about when it refers to unseen, off stage spaces?
Relation between the unseen and the seen
Delaroche- Two Princes
The story- the murder
How fear is conveyed through an unseen other
The light- suggests a presence which is due to arrive, as if this is the moment before the event.
Delacroix
Aware of how the off stage realm can have a multiple array of meanings depending on the context of his subject. So same thing used for different ends.
Narrative presence- In ‘Rebecca and the Wounded Ivanhoe’ The space they look out to seems to be one which contains certain narrative action.
Psychological state- ‘In Tasso in Jail’ The external space seems to talk of his unseen, internal desire to be somewhere, anywhere else. The external space, where he looks, speak of longing and melancholy at the internal space he is trapped within. In two different works by the same artist the same signifier signifies two different things.
In ‘Medea with her children’ it has multiple references.
The presence of a murderous other, who threatens her children
Speaks of her internal fear and dread- takes on both the levels of the previous two.
Delacroix- Massacre of Chios
Semantics of space- to see how he creates a sense that what is seen is merely a fragment of a wider scene.
What happens centrally- the grief of singular figures. We are aware of them as individual and thus sympathise directly, we engage emotively with them.
The edge and the splitting of figures
The sky and the sense of the horizontal
A vertical fragment of a grand panorama of suffering.
Delacroix- The Murder of Bishop Liege 1829
What is a table and what does a table mean?- quite prosaic
Here takes on a dramatic symbolic role- light and central- Rembrandtian light.
Seems to capture the violent and theatrical energy of the upcoming murder.
As if what it is serving us up is drama rather than food- a metaphorical not a literal meaning
Generated through new context- any object can take on any meaning in right circumstance.
Tapies- meaning in the surface
Touches back with last week- use semantics to see the link between the
Kantian- the aesthetic, the thing in itself
Hegelian- the spirit of the age, the sociological context.
The artifice- abstract values- the build up and pull back of a surface.
The context- Franco
Catalan
The destruction of architectural walls a potent reminder of the lives forsaken for the ‘good of the state’
The first, the sign, seems to resonant and signify the second
Each scratch and mark seems filled with a poetic melancholy.
Two time signature- the self referential and the secondary.
The time of the artists visits
The political melody
In viewing it- a harmony between these parts, they seem to harmonise in a hymn to lose and time
Destabilising the sign
Seen how the sign can signify meaning.
Sign - confronted and meaning denied.
The road to this destruction.
Manet- Les Dejeuner sur l’herbe 1860’s
All attempts with Manet attempt to find clear and logical meaning, that is what he set out to destroy.
The collapse of logic- the elements don’t add up to the whole.
Various parts- foreground, middle ground, background- don’t sit comfortably
-The horizon- what it should be- point of ultimate distance- allow us to escape
-What should be the light of air and space is the solid block of a wall.
Cubism
Analytical period- accordinist
Pushed to the limit- the same horizontal and verticals take on different meanings dependant on placement
Towards image and form in one place
Part of the background somewhere else
The manner of the lines is altered though-
background- contradicts is airiness and appears solid and concrete
image and form- takes on a transparency, as if the form has been opened up, as if the sculptural exterior of three dimensions has been challenge and attacked.
The same sign constantly shifting between signification
Braque- still life collage 1912
Faux bois- the signifier
By placing it in different areas of the picture plan what it signifies can be totally different
Bottom- foreground
Sides- background.
Picasso pushes it further- Braque relies on the intervention of line to inform and aid the reading.
Picasso- guitar, glass and sheet music 1913
How we know it’s a guitar
Sound hole- a recessive, black hole.
The sign to signify this is actually its exact opposite- a white disk which is the last layer applied the furthest forward.
Its reads as its exact opposite due to its position between two guitar like sides. That is what informs and controls its reading, to invert its invert its reality for illusion.
Interpretation of work- writers ignore Picassos understanding of semantics
Political- look for deeper meaning by searching for sources
The battle has begun- cutting from a newspaper
La journal
Placed back in original context
Picasso understood that by removing from this context it lost all the original meaning and gained new meaning
La jou- cut on purpose, the work is about play, about a wity exploration of formal elements
The battle- a more personal battle.
Not about some political comment on the Balkan wars, which the original article spoke about.
His battles with Braque in the above mentioned play. Even in the words of the newspaper cutting he outdoes his rival. Showing how a newspaper headline about war can be a self referential joke about their artistic goals.
Duchamp’s Urinal
The most important moment in conceptual art- almost a cliché.
Questions every assumption we have about art- taste, craftsmanship, skill, meaning, morality.
Has taken a ready made object and turned it into art.
The only shift is its context- from gents loos to gallery plinth. His decision is all that converts it.
From an entirely functional to an image lacking any function.
From pragmatics to aesthetics.
Its whole meaning and being is changed by a merely contextual transformation.
Further conceptual explorations in the field
Joseph Kusuth
A visual lecture in semantics and platonic form
Makes us question what a chair actually is
The things which signify a chair, the carrier and conveyer of what we mean by the notion.
Michael Craig Martin
Turns such notions on its head
Oak Tree- glass of water on a shelf.
By calling it an oak tree it puts forward the notion that it therefore is an oak tree.
Is it still a glass but the words oak tree have now been turned into a carrier of that meaning.
Or can it actually now embody, due to its reappraisal, an oak tree.
Its current meaning and association has been totally emptied.
Post modern semiotics- Arturo Herrera
The lacerated image
How it has been destroyed
How it still holds onto figuration
He understands the power of the frame. How it can still carry a reference to figuration despite the destruction of image.
Gender
Tracey emin and Ghada Amer
Sewing and patchwork-
Gender types
Craft based, kitche associations
Subvert the meaning by giving it a new context. Both use the medium to construct images with explicit or personal sexual references. The conflate one sign against another.
Sarah Lucas
A table becomes a body
A kebab and scrambled eggs become a vagina and breasts.
A photo of the above mentioned symbols of the body becomes a face.
Every object subverts its normal reference to symbolise something outside of itself
The things it suggests play witty games on crude, ladish terminology for the female form.
Semantics and its relevance to makers.
Can do what we want with an image and and form
Can randomly play with it without worry about original context
Can consciously take from one place and play on original meaning to create new paraodies and commentaries on a particualr issue
Can use space to control the reading of a work
Can use images to create or contradict a reading.
Can take something from somewhere and use for a totally different purpose.
Monday 15 October 2007
Lament of the single sock
A room full of sorrow and empty of love
Where the solo sock with no name lay
Divorced from function now sleeping with loathe
His partner had left him with nothing to say.
No foot to fill him with a job to do
Yearning for the smelly of sweaty labour
NO more journeys with his cousin the shoe
Nothing left to say except for...
Where have all the lost socks gone
Leaving us behyind, half dead and alone.
ps am trying to work ways to incirporate your ideas into a future lecture on representation in the 21st century. I may need to pick that mind of yours apart for advise and direction.
Where the solo sock with no name lay
Divorced from function now sleeping with loathe
His partner had left him with nothing to say.
No foot to fill him with a job to do
Yearning for the smelly of sweaty labour
NO more journeys with his cousin the shoe
Nothing left to say except for...
Where have all the lost socks gone
Leaving us behyind, half dead and alone.
ps am trying to work ways to incirporate your ideas into a future lecture on representation in the 21st century. I may need to pick that mind of yours apart for advise and direction.
Bloody Hell
Hegel and Kant in the first lecture. Christ! did any students run out screaming, poor kids, you must've scared them half to death. But seriously, it sounded very interesting, you certainly are strong in this area and linking it to how they may use the knowledge in their own work is perhaps the key thing. have you thought about a lecture in the future which assesses how contemporary painters are using this knowledge. think that would be useful both for the students and for you. Neo rauch and mattias weischer are particularly accessible in this respect.
Sunday 14 October 2007
Lecture One
Warwickshire College: Art Foundation, Contextual studies.
Part One, Lecture One
Tom de Freston
Kant vs Hegel- the insolvable equation?
A Lecture in the nature of value in visual culture
This lecture considers some of the following:
Kant
Hegel
Absolute Value
Relative Value
Canons
Vasari’s Lives of the artists
Greenberg’s Modernism.
Formalism
Representation and abstraction
New Art Histories- the decentralised object
Gender studies- visual gender stereotypes, feminist practical interventions
Imperial studies- primitivism, non western approaches to art
Marxism- T. J. Clark and his disciples
The written word is a cousin of the spoken word, part of the linguistic family but with a different upbringing. As such they allow us to present the same content in a slightly different context. The following text is a write up of the first of my lectures for the Art Foundation course at Warwickshire College. For any student who attended the lecture this should hopefully provide a detailed summary of what we covered. Luckily I am able to eradicate the narcissistic background information which filled the first ten minutes of the actual lecture. Unluckily you get subjected to the limitations of my dyslexic writing.
Before I start I make no pretensions to these write up to be proper essays. They will use loose and chatty language, so hopefully keeping some of the tone of a lecture. I shall not be referencing as I would in an essay. This is designed to be a support mechanism and chance to revise past lectures, not as a comprehensive written piece.
The aim of my lectures:
Before delving into specific content I wish to re-outline a few key aspects of what this first series of lectures aims to achieve.
- Expose you to a mass of imagery.
- Introduce you too a wide range of theories and doctrines regarding visual culture.
- Provide you with a range of methods and tools by which to analysis and deconstruct pictures.
The relevance of the above and contextual studies in general, for a developing practitioner, is often questioned. Yet understanding our historical context and the relevance of the past is a critical aspect of establishing any kind of sophistication in our production. It allows us to understand what objects and images mean, and most importantly teaches us how to see. Ignoring this is like trying to read with one eye shut.
Above anything this is going to be a course in looking. Reading is a crucial feature of our research, but if there is to be a hierarchy then it comes below looking. I still find it ironic that many practitioners will happily spend hours reading whole books on a work of art yet seem to never spend more than a couple of minutes looking at one. There is an imbalance that needs addressing.
This chronic lack of visual attention seems to have been exacerbated by contemporary society. We have become sophisticated consumers of sight; able to devour adverts, signs and imagery in an instant. It is part of a wider acceleration of living pace in Western society. As we have ‘progressed’ we seem to be living life quite literally in the fast lane. Broadband, transport, mobiles and digital television provide a technological microcosm of a social macrocosm.
The transient nature of our environment is not something I am criticising, merely a fact. Yet surely it is worth sometimes interrupting the constant flow of traffic and devoting time to something. I would encourage an active effort to spend longer looking, to learn to see. Give an image time to grow on you, understand the dynamics of vision, and allow the sensation of sight to reveal itself to you. This is not a dreamy eyes romantic notion but about engaging the mind and senses actively. Ten minutes looking at a work of art is worth a few hours reading about it. It is a fundamental part of our development as makers.
Diatribe over, lecture to begin…
Kant vs Hegel- the insolvable equation?
A Lecture on the nature of value in visual culture
The purpose of this lecture is to explore how we value visual culture and the methods by which we formulate these judgements.
When we mention value we should not be confusing it with cost. Cost is an inherently measurable quality. There are clear and logical economical systems by which we can calculate this. If we go into an auction house we are made aware that an objects market value is constructed by a systematic nine point system. Capitalism demands tangible, measurable value.
True value is less tangible and more elusive. It is inherently complex and demands an ontological dispute. That means we have to question an objects very nature of meaning to capture its worth.
This brings us to Kant and Hegel. Who are they? Both are German philosophers who lived during the late 18th and early 19th Century. This was a time in which scientific progress and the development of knowledge and thought made people question the previous hegemony of religious doctrine. Notions such as a singular God or any God at all were challenged. This provided the environment for thinkers like Kant and Hegel to pursue metaphysical enquiries. Metaphysics is the search for that which underlies us all. The conclusions which they came too were virtually in total opposition. Before continuing it should be noted that both these figures research is far more complex and faceted than the crude simplifications and generalisations made in this essay.
Kant’s philosophy places the rational, active human subject at the centre of the cognitive and moral worlds. It is the basis of most existential thought. Logic, he argues, states that we cannot know anything outside of ourselves.
The relevance of such thought for art lies in the notion of ‘the thing in itself’ and that no meaning exists outside of this. It means we see visual culture as having absolute value and intrinsic worth. It proposes that art has or should have total autonomy, not to be determined by any exterior associations but entirely by its aesthetic. He also develops a clear notion of what we understand by beauty and aesthetics.
Hegel’s philosophy can be seen to propose an alternative polemic. Hegel is no more or less complex than Kant, but is far harder to simplify and, therefore, to grasp on a basic level. I shall attempt to articulate what I understand of his relevant thought.
Hegel spoke about the ‘zeitgeist’, which loosely translates as the ‘spirit of the age’. It is a God like all encompassing power, the ethereal, intangible essence which underlies us all. He believed that as we move through space and time the zeitgeist evolves into a continuously more developed form. Hegel proposed that there is a continual dialectical relationship between the unseen spirit and the corporeal world. Thus every object, of a particular time and place, becomes a physical embodiment of the underlying spirit of the age.
By default this means that any notion of absolute value is dismissed. Instead it is argued that there is no such thing as intrinsic worth, rather that everything is relative. For everything is defined and formed by its geographic and historical context. It is not good or bad, just merely is. It proposes that an object’s only value is by association, in the manner in which is provides us with a coded doorway to the zeitgeist.
These two opposing polemics provide the foundations for various approaches to visual culture and history. Removed from their specific philosophical context we can simplify the standpoints to two clear terms.
There are those in believe in the Kantian notion of absolute value. The belief in permanent sets and ideals by which we measure and value art.
Alternatively some follow what could be called a Hegelian path, arguing for relative value. They propose that an object or image is not good or bad, but merely an embodiment of the social, political, philosophical conditions of its creation.
I want to spend the first half of this essay tackling a couple of areas in which the idea of absolute value manifests itself. The later half will look to question this approach and consider a range of methods which espouse relative values. I shall conclude by seeing if the two need to be in opposition.
Absolute Value
Canons
I wish to consider how absolute values are those which underlie the formation and perpetuation of canonical artists. An artistic canon is a body of work and associated ideals which have survived through time and are held in the highest esteem. The artists who make up a canon are those who have survived the test of time, the ‘master’ so to speak.
As a notion is presumes that there are universal and absolute values by which art is judged. Canonical works of art either represent the purest incarnation of these predetermined rules or are celebrated as having contributing towards this high point.
I shall focus on two examples which demonstrate how canons are formed and survive.
Giorgio Vasari
Vasari is often described as the father of Art History. He was a painter, teacher, designer, architect and writer in 16th Century Italy. The ideals he espouses in written form underpin those by which canonical artists have been measured and judged. These are the basis for the common conception of the renaissance, the rebirth of classical values of representation in art throughout Europe; most notably Italy, from the 13th to 16th Century.
These values are articulated in his seminal and crucial text, the Lives of the Artists. It is a three part account, in a biographical format, of the artists who lived in this period. He argues convincingly that there are clear and logical values by which to measure art. Beyond this he sees a linear progression in the development and height of these principles. The three stages of the book show a chronological evolution from rude beginnings to an ultimate high in 16th Century Central Italy. In the first section we come across artists such as Giotto and Cimabue, in the second della Francesco, Massacio and Mantegna. The third section contains those Vasari feels have reached the ultimate peak, Leonardo, Raphael and Michelangelo.
These absolute values can be summarised as the factors which are used to construct a figurative representational work of art (in regards to painting and sculpture at least).
Truth to nature- mimesis
The ability for the artist to construct a convincing illusion of nature is seen as the central facet of good art by Vasari. He sees design (‘desegno’) as the key to this development. Every work should be built on the foundations of a solid and accurate linear design. This is honed by the artist’s development and awareness of human proportions and observational drawing.
It finds a more specific incarnation in portraiture. As a genre which necessitates likeness it is a clear measure of the development of representational skills. If we compare a portrait by Giotto, to one by Mantegna to one by Raphael then we can sees it progression through the stages of his book. Vasari’s argument becomes convincing. From stilted and simplified to a proto photographic figure which seems like a real individual capable of breathing and moving. The increasing sense of personality over reductive idealisation reaches it peak in the 16th Century. Raphael and Titian perhaps represent the high point, whilst Bellini’s famous Doge portrait, in the National Gallery (London) is another wonderful example (his pedantic attention to detail reminds me of a top end digital camera).
WILL INSERT IMAGES LATER
Window onto a world
A painting is a two dimensional plane. The increasing understanding of geometry and perspectives allowed artists to develop its ability to present itself as a window onto another imaginary world. Albertti’s Della Pictura is a crucial text in this field but the evolution is certainly more fragmented than many commentators suggest.
Liens of perspective create a sense of depth. The suggested three dimensional space becomes a stage onto which figures can be placed. Vasari argues that artist’s ability to both create this space and position figures within it progressed naturally. Look to Giotto’s ‘Marriage of the Virgin’ 1305, Massacio’s ‘Tribute Money’ 1424 and Raphael’s ‘Entombment’ 1508. In the first figures are heavily outlined and seen in profile. They seem to almost exist in independent space, not convincingly interacting. They exist on one plane in static poses. In Masaccio’s work poses and drapery are livelier. Figures seem to be set in rather than in front of the constructed space. In Raphael’s work the figures exist in a fluid space, rather than being set into clearly defined planes. The move dynamically throughout the width and depth of the stage and interact convincingly with one and other.
WILL INSERT IMAGES LATER
Selection of the best parts of nature
The notion that an artist can select the best parts of nature is not unique to Vasari. Pliny, in his encyclopaedic account of classical civilisation, spoke about a similar notion. He accounts the story of Zeuxis, who got all the most beautiful women together so he could select their best parts. Vasari elaborates to suggest that in the selction of natures strongest points the artist is capable of transcending the limits of nature and the creations of God. In suggesting this he implies the logical end to the artists rise from mere craftsman to demi-god.
Vasari states that art is to be judged by the artist’s ability to fulfil these criteria. It means that art has a clear set of rules by which value can be measured. Vasari makes it clear that Michelangelo represents the purest incarnation of these rules. Everyone else is valued almost entirely by the manner in which they helped art reach this point. We should not ignore the fact that Vasari is too Michelangleo what Saatchi is to Hirst, his chief apologist. He has direct and indirect personal interest in Michelangelo being celebrated.
If we look to Michelangelo’s Last Judgement (Sistine Chapel, 1508-12) we can see what Vasari meant. Each form being an almost superhuman, proto steroid munching muscle machine. They climb up and over the vast all consuming wall. Within the theatre what we see is almost a grammar of vision. Every part contributes to the awe inspiring, ‘terribiliata’ of the whole. The term sensation, when applied to the YBA’s seems to pale into insignificance against this visual description of the sublime. It is no wonder people felt the very presence of God in this space, you cannot fail to be overwhelmed.
WILL INSERT IMAGES LATER
Consider each independent line. Its value is measured by its ability to accurately describe a particular form, a leg moving through space; as a letter is valued by its contribution to a word. That leg is the valued by the part it plays in the total display of that form. That form is judged by how convincingly it is set in space and interacts within a group of surrounding figures. Like a word in a sentence. That group is thus judged by its dynamic movement in space and its contribution towards the whole, as a sentence is too a paragraph. The ability for this combination of parts to accurately convey the particular subject matter is the final judgement of quality. Just as we judge an essay by the ability of the various parts to articulate a story or argument.
What we are left with is a set of absolute rules. Everything is measurable by these strict guidelines, regardless of time or place. The specifics of its creation are ignored for a continuous set of values. Much literature on representational art, even today, basis itself on these values, they are the corner stones of connoisseurship.
For now we shall leave Vasari, before later returning to consider the validity of such absolute values.
The Modernist Canon
The above mentioned values make the presumption that the artist should be manipulating his materials to disguise themselves as some other form, be it a landscape, a person or a building, in order to depict some grand narrative. The arrival of photography, along with more subtle factors, caused artists working in other mediums to move away from pure representation. As a result a new set of values needed to be formed.
I shall call this the ‘Modernist Canon’. Before elaborating I would like to make a few points about labels and their limitations. On a wider note this is an off tangent diatribe against jargon, which tends to demonstrate a lack of awareness rather than some cultured use of language. The term modernism is a perfect example.
A tangent on terminology…
Modern- try not to use this word to suggest contemporary. It tends loosely to refer to a historical period which, depending on who you speak to, starts somewhere in the 19th Century and ends in the later middle section of the 20th Century. It does not mean art made now, the accurate term for that is contemporary. Even in this historical context the word modern is pretty crap. Far better to use less subjective terms such as dates. It is true that Manet painted ‘Olympia’ in 1863. It is a matter of opinion if the work or this period can be classified as modern.
Modernism/modernism- This word is has almost entirely opposing cultural references depending on context, and to a degree capitalisation. Modernism with a capital M tends to refer to Greenberg’s notion of what Modern art is. We shall be focusing on that in this section. For the sake of this illustrated point it is sufficed to say it is a doctrine which claims art should dissociate it-self entirely form its surroundings. I shall elaborate later.
The other common use of the word modernism is in the Baudellairian sense. Baudellaire is a 19th Century poet and thinker of great energy. Outside of his poetry he wrote extensively and brilliantly on the arts. His article, ‘The Heroism of Modern Life’ is one of the great artistic calls to arms in western history. He demands that painters no longer focus their attention on stories of vice and virtue from the bible, the classics and modern literature. Instead he points out that contemporary life itself should be the artist’s source of subject matter. The bustle of the rising metropolis, train stations, prostitutes, markets, bars and parks. It is a demand for artists to focus their attention on their surroundings. To Greenberg’s closed door it is an open window.
NB As a side point the democratisation of subject matter could be said to be a step towards Greenberg’s total self reflection, as part of a wider move towards internal meaning. We shall tackle that in depth in a later lecture.
The point I am making here is how the same word can mean entirely different things depending on the context. So rather than using such words we should look to describe more clearly what we mean. We might think saying Carravagio is a Baroque artist shows of our knowledge of his stylistic attributes. Instead it shows our attachment to what is an artificial historical construct. These phrases are made by historians to simplify and categorise things. It limits what we see. We would be better to discuss the exact theatricality of Carravagio’s use of lights and darks, the staging of his figures, the drama and exaggeration of the poses. The very attributes we think about when we use a term Baroque, but without the falsity of the baggage. Jargon is lazy and often empty.
Back to Greenberg…
Wake up at the back! We are back onto the main thread of the lecture now.
Greenberg was a mid 20th Century American art critic. I often see Greenberg as the mirror to Vasari. Like his eminent predecessor he articulated a clear progression from one point to another. He looked back to the nineteenth century and saw a state of affairs that demanded art refocus on its independent properties. No longer should it be reliant on supposedly superior art forms like literature. It had to work out would was exclusively its own and focus attention there. The properties he says as independent to painting, for example, are the fact that it involves the spreading of a colour medium on a two dimensional support. The use of paint to pose as something else, or the denial of the flatness for an imagined three dimensional space was dangerous. Its truths should be, he suggested, celebrated, not denied.
Greenberg painted a picture (sorry, could not resist the pun) of a clear rise towards these values. He saw it as starting with Manet, progressing through Cubism and reaching its peak in Pollock and post painterly painting. Pollock is Greenberg’s Michelangelo; the artist whose work encapsulates the purest incarnation of his self reflexive ideals.
In these artists he saw a clear move towards the destruction of image and subject matter; lose of depth and a move towards the surface, the display of the painting as an object and the materiality of the paint being celebrated.
He locates the evolution in the work of artists such as Manet, the Cubism of Picasso and Braque, Abstract Expressionism; in particular Jackon Pollock and eventually it finds its conclusion in the post painterly abstraction of people like Kenneth Noland. This chronology of artists does seem to fit in with his arguments.
WILL INSERT IMAGES LATER
Manet’s ‘Olympia’ of 1863 seems to break from previous models of representation. The lack of sculptural modelling in the figure gives her an air of stark unreality. Courbet was not alone amongst Salon goers in being shocked at her flatness. Half tones had been replaced by a series of sharp lights and darks (surely spawned by his appreciation of a Spanish painterly tradition and Japanese prints) Space and depth are surpassed and the figure seems to consciously sit on and across the two dimensions of the picture plane. In the high Analytical period of Picasso and Braque (1909-11) we see them push objects and form to the point of destruction. Figures are subjected to the faceted of an intrigued network of horizontals, verticals and diagonals. The celebration, we are told, is of formal values over specific image. The lines certainly remembered the frame and thus the two dimensions of the canvas. The objecthood of the painting is celebrated. In Pollock’s celebrated drip paintings we see what appears to be a total lose of subject matter. Gone is the need to rely or imbedded painting in looking like something else. This is paint for its own sake. Drips cover the expanse to create a homogenous whole. The pulsing lines take us over and around the surface in a hypnotic dance, the rhythm of the interlocking lines makes us intimately aware of both the material and the flatness of the painting. By the time we get to Noland even the slight hints towards nature in Pollock have given way to purity of form. The choice of a square is designed to limit any depth. The antithesis of representation is presented in spatial terms. Gone is the attempt to reach beyond the surface with perspective and geometry. This is the completion of a returned journey. The circles echo the frame and colours interact to limit rather than create depth. The work is what it is, it seems to speak of nothing outside of its formal content of colour, line, surface and tone.
Seen in this history, in this context these artists show a move towards a solipsistic closed door on association, art for arts sake. It is a neo platonic ideology.
NB: Neo platonic
In his book ‘The Republic’ Plato condemns the mimetic/representational value of art. The book is written in the format of a discussion between two people, which is highly persuasive. He says the purest form of any object is its conception; the idea of a table for instance is the true table. Once a table is made by a craftsman we are one step removed from its purest truth. It is a copy of its purest form. It is justified as it is functional. When the artist paints that table it becomes a copy of a copy; a lie which has no function other than to lie and please the eye. Plato thus dismisses art.
Greenberg is thus arguing for an art which chases a purer truth. Rather than being a copy of copy an art which tries to get as close to its purest reality as possible; art which does not disguise itself as something else but which presents its materiality back to us.
In place of Vasari’s values a new set of absolutes are formed.
WILL INSERT IMAGES LATER
Paint for its own. sake. In a work by Carravagio paint is celebrated for its ability to disguise itself as form, as some other surface or texture; to be an actor in a play so too speak. In an abstract painting, according to Greenberg, paint speaks about nothing outside of itself. We celebrate its intrinsic formal values; the play of colours against colours, surface, tone and texture. It is a pure aesthetic delight.
Line for its own sake. In the work on the left line is used to describe form. We understand and read it as part of this description, it supposedly has not autonomy. In one of Pollock’s drip paintings line is about line itself. Its decoration across the surface, its rhythm and dynamism celebrated. It needs not describe anything. It has be detached from its representational referent.
Flatness over depth. In the work by Raphael figural proportion and perspective are sued to generate a sense of depth. In Nolands work the frame is referenced by the circular forms, so to remind us of its object hood. Colour and material sit clear on the surface, so denying the illusion of depth and confirming the truth of the paintings two dimensionality.
What Greenberg claims art is focusing on are truly Kantian absolute values. A door shut and bolted on any external association, objects which describe or comment on nothing outside of themselves. It is about what is inside the frame, literally, and nothing else. He argues art is free from previous constrains and has total autonomy.
Such purist and formal views are still prevalent, in theory at least, in many artists today. Ian Davenport, Gary Hume, Callum Innes and Howard Hodgkin are all artists who on the surface appear to continue a celebration of formal qualities. The later of these artists points to the falsity which we shall explore in the second half of this lecture. Whilst association is more elusive it is and always will be there. There is no such thing as absolute value or total lack of exterior reference.
Artificial Histories
The falsity suggest above is what I want to consider, briefly, before progressing onto the ‘Hegellian’ half of our lecture. The doctrine of Vasari and Greenberg has underpinned some of the fundamental Canonical values with which we measure representational and non representational art. Like all literature on a subject with a clear and coherent standpoint we should approach it with interest and cynicism. History is an artificial notion; it is something mankind has invented in order to make sense of the half alive chaos of the past. We construct systems in which we can group and order our past to make sense of it all. This is a necessary and crucial act, but one which is by its nature always a step removed from reality. Real time goes from A to B whilst a historian tries to recreate this route looking back, at best, from B to A.
Both Greenberg and Vasari are inherently biased, in their construction of particular histories, due to their historic and geographic location and allegiances. Vasari was a 16th century Central Italian who was Michelangelo’s chief apologist. Greenberg was an art critic in mid 20th Century America and was one of Pollock’s biggest supporters. Both present the past as something which leads up to a peak in the artwork of the respective heroes, this is no coincidence.
I shall pick two, out of many, case in points to show how they project their ideals onto the artists which precede these ‘peaks’ and so misunderstand their ‘intentions.’
Della Francesco’s Baptism of Christ
vs
Michelangelo’s ‘Last Judgement- Sistine Chapel’
WILL INSERT IMAGES LATER
Vasari only credits Della Francesco for his contribution towards the development of perspective and geometry. The only value he credits his with is relative, for his part in the evolution towards Michelgelo’s peak. If judging him by the eternal absolute values which the Last Judgement displays then he supposedly falls short; lacking the drama and the dynamic excess of movement through space. Yet is this what he was attempting to achieve? We need to look towards subject matter.
The last judgement is a moment of epic drama. So the language Michelangelo uses is highly appropriate. The serpentine spread of individual and collective forms up and across the canvas in a swirling energy captures the melodrama of the moment perfectly. Form and style unite perfectly with subject.
Della Francesco’s Baptism of Christ is a picture of entirely different subject matter. This is a story and scenes of quiet pray, equally as holy but necessarily understand and calm. Everything the artist does supports this. The energy and dynamism of Michelangelo would be misplaced here. Geometry is consciously used to restrict rather than create movement. The curve of the arch is continued within the frame to act as a stabilising of the composition. The dove sits in the centre of the imaginary circle thus created. Christ stands central and the work as a whole has a symmetry. All these devices purposefully limit movement, inducing a calm, solid and eternal spirituality. With a very different language to Michelangelo but with equal sophistication Della Francesco unites form and style to subject matter.
Cubism and abstraction- another lie
WILL INSERT IMAGES LATER
As previously described, Greenberg puts forward the notion that Cubism is part of a clear and inextricable move to abstraction. Alfred Barr (first director of MOMA) constructed a famous diagram which supports this notion. Cubism is one of many ‘movements’ which is shown to fit into a clear and systematically rise to abstraction. Formalists argued that Analytical Cubism only just held back from pure abstraction because they still felt that art had to in some way be derived from and connect back to a particular image or form.
I would argue that the work of Picasso and Braque around 1911, whilst aesthetically close to abstraction is not in any way concerned with abstraction. In fact it does quite the opposite. From 1907-1914 Picasso and Braque explored and developed new ways to represent image and form. In the analytical period they moved from the faceting of a forms surface to the breaking of the closed form. From here a figure or still life could be subject to a punish abstraction by a matrix of lines. At its height their analytical work only just holds onto its attachment to an image. We can only just make out a figure and its action amongst the mass of lines which decorate the surface. The crucial fact is we still can. At this point they were hanging over the edge, capable of descending into the abyss of abstraction without a tiny push. Crucially they changed direction. They turned to collage and what would be known as the synthetic period. The construction of an image from abstract elements rather than the destruction of an image towards abstract elements. What this reveals is that they are not interested in abstraction but in the power of representation. They are interested in stretching the power of the image to breaking point, to show how little we need to recognise a particular image. To ignore this visual fact and place them as part of a rise to abstraction is foolish and misinformed.
Museums
At this stage I was going to look into Museums and how they control meaning and perpetuate false narratives. I did not have time to cover this in the lecture, however, so will miss it out here. I feel it is a significant enough area of research to perhaps dedicate a whole (or perhaps half) lecture two later in the year. The Louvre and the Moma are two particular prisons of meaning I would like to look at.
Whilst, as shown above, doubts were raised about the narratives; we had to wait a while until any alternative vision of the past was offered. Before considering these new approaches it is worth summarising the first half of the lecture.
We have looked at how Canonical values support Kantian notions of aesthetic judgment. They provide sets of absolute rules by which we can measure art. As such there is good and bad art and History seems to have its highs and lows. We are able to judge the work of art in purely visual and formal terms. In this system the connoisseur rules, making opinions and value judgements on what can be seen alone.
A Hegelian Approach to value.
Locating a particular moment in which society changed its approach is precarious and simplistic. It can certainly be stated, however, that a series of critical events throughout the 1960’s provided the foundations for a sector of society to re-evaluate the way it was both constructed and operates. This is not a lecture in history, so the need to go into any depth on the specifics of these events is limited. Needless to say, however, that Western approaches to gender, race and class were challenged more thoroughly than ever before, due to the weight of actual political and social action. The call for change had come out of the library and lecture halls and into the streets, quite literally.
What was seen was a society who’s who system and beliefs were constructed on false, myopic and bankrupt notions. The paradigm, which had survived untouched, was in need of a seismic shift. Whether that shift has or will ever happen is a question of social and political scholars. In this instance all we are concerned about is the new field of inquiry it opened up in the field of visual culture.
The greatest impact has been in the manner in which are is judged. For these new scholars no longer is it central and it is anything but absolute, autonomous and free of association to the world outside its ‘frame’. Art was now judged in relative terms, in how it came from, comments on and relates to other doctrines. Gender studies, sociological thought and ethnic studies all began to ask new probing questions. Art was a tool for these other disciplines and its value was judged by what it tells us about them.
Feminism/Gender Studies
Most people today have little time for feminism. This is perhaps why many people who come from that discipline prefer the term gender studies. Feminism has got to much baggage, people have a naïve image of it in there head so dismiss it unfairly. The change of name might initially appear to be nothing more than pussy footing political correctness. In this instance, however, it is necessary as it provides a more neutral entrance to a vital area of enquiry.
Whatever preconceptions we have about gender studies tend to be unfair. It is a complex, diverse and faceted field of research. It is without incredibly worthwhile and more importantly relevant. For every piece of related literature which says one thing there is a dissenting voice coming from another angle. So to dismiss it and its contributors as a singular and tired voice is ludicrous. There still exist bizarre and troubling gender perceptions within our society; from the ideological to the more tangible effects on the everyday.
As previous stated, however, this is not a lecture in social science, gender studies, philosophy or any other similar doctrine. So rather than focus on the literature I want to see the kinds of questions it has raised and interventions it has made to visual culture itself. I want to take specific case studies and focus our attention on those works, but with the enquiry being directed by questions of gender.
Gender and form
“The Florentine ideal of beauty has found its exemplary expression in statues of proudly erect David’s, the Venetian in paintings of recumbent Venuses”
Panofsky’s statement about the differences between Venetian and Florentine Renaissance art are in many ways simplistic and open to discussion but they point to an interesting notion. Florentine art, the Vasarian ideal, was equated with design, with plastic firmness and drawn line and on a more general level with being explicably masculine. Veneitian art on the contrary is put forward as being about the act of painting (colorito, the verb to colour, not colour itself) about the sensuous and beautiful, in simple terms the female. It is interesting to see that critics aligned form and style with a specific gender. The artists seemingly did as well, with those drawn to a certain aesthetic seeming to also focus on the related gender.
If we compare Michelangelo’s ‘David’ to Titian’s ‘Venus of Urbino’ then we see the ultimate incarnation and evidence of Panofskys argument. Whilst the statement make generalisations about artists it is certainly accurate in its revelations about certain formal attachments society has given to male and female types.
WILL INSERT IMAGES LATER
Look around the National gallery and see how many of the women are both nude and reclining. The submissive horizontal line, echoing landscape and nature; calm and accepting and seemingly focused on beauty over action.
In comparison look to Michelangelo’s David, a classic male type in art. Like most he is erect, phallic, powerful, vertical and celebrating some athletic and muscular victory over evil.
The types exist, like it or not. To an even greater degree the vertical as a symbol seems to be exclusively male and the horizontal female. Look to any city at the iconic buildings, normally tall and erect, displaying their verticality. Generally they celebrate the power and dominance of a patriarchal society. The type which is described by Panofsky has survived through time in many forms.
In response we need to question the very modes by which society has come to attach certain ideals, and visuals, to each of the sexes. Is this correct? Should this survive? Should this be challenged and subverted? Is it, as Freud would perhaps suggest, a part of our psychosexual make up?
The role of women in art
Linda Nochlin was one of the first people to realise a mammoth imbalance in the role of women in art. She noticed that women, generally nude, seemed to fill most of the canvases in our historical galleries. Conversely, however, almost all the pictures were made by man not women. In art history the man has been privileged with the label of master and genius and the woman merely allowed to be subjected to the gaze of said genius. Such pictures even seem exclusively made for a male spectator.
Before Nochlin, however, artists like Manet were starting to create work which questioned the role of the female inside the canvas. We shall look at an example of this in his ‘Olympia’ 1863. Remember that this is the same work Greenberg talked about in entirely formal terms. His discussion revolved around its flatness and its contribution towards the rise of abstraction. Its subject matter and content, the role of the female, were not questions he asked; a gender study does. In looking at the same work from these two standpoints we can appreciate how doctrines which celebrate absolute value and those which celebrate relative value approach and discover very different things about a visual.
WILL INSERT IMAGES LATER
A few years before painting ‘Olympia’ (1863) Manet did a copy of Titian’s ‘Venus of Urbino’ (1538). If we needed any more conclusive proof that the later work explicitly quotes the former than this is it. Quotations in art are not rare, and often they don’t mean anything. An artist may borrow a pose of a figure because he sees the potential in it for some other end, outside of its original context. In this instance its original use does not matter, as it is not making any kind of commentary or opening up any discussion with its source. It would not matter if it came from a newspaper of a masterpiece. In ‘Olympia’ its relation to ‘Venus of Urbino’ is so clear that a comparison of the two is crucial to a discovery of what Manet was challenging.
Compare the two nudes poses and faces. From a submissive come to bed dreamy hazy eyed glance to a confrontational, aggressive glare. From a reclining, smooth, welcoming, flowing, beautiful awaiting nude to an upright, flat, stark and self confident pose. From a women ready and willing to welcome the man to one who is self assured and in control.
What about the sleeping dog as compared to the wide awake cat. Think ichnographically. What does the cute little dog suggest? Loyalty? That the person who has arrived is not a stranger? If so then what about the cat? Fear? Aggression for the visitor? Even a possible sexual dimension. Manet was fully aware of the visual pun, which does not get lost in translation, between a pussy and female genitally.
What the comparison suggests is a very different relationship between the figure and the implied visitor/spectator in front of the bed/canvas. For Titian it seems to be a relationship between two consenting individuals who know and are familiar. A goddess and a mortal in a utopian world, a husband and wife? Whatever the case, this seems to be a scene of love and beauty. For Manet the suggestion is of a sexual encounter between strangers. The servant presenting a gift which seems to support a prostitute client relationship.
What about he hands. In Titian’s work she seems to be masturbating, so submissive as to be preparing for the arrival of the man. Manet women, instead, presents a blocked door too desire.
What this tells us about changing roles of women in art is pretty clear. Suddenly hey have more freedom, more authority. Still subjected to live inside the frame, but no longer the sleep and suppliant recipient in singular terms. They have a certain, if peculiar, amount of independence.
If interested in a wider discussion of this painting in this sense go to T. J. Clarke. He has written about fifty very good pages on it.
Flesh and Paint
I shall not dwell on this area of the lecture, as we will be having a series of talks later in the year on the materiality and meaning of paint itself. If you remember I made the link between a history of painterly painters and there general tendency to paint and delight in the female flesh. Da kooning stated that flesh is the reason oil paint was invented. When we look from Titian, to Rubens, to Velasquez, Delacroix, Manet, Freud, Saville and beyond the argument is persuasive.
For each of these artists a correlation and joint delight seems to be had in paint itself and flesh itself. The way paint can be pulled and stretched over a surface akin to the way we might take a sensuous delight in flesh and skin. The very visceral, malleable properties of both has a seductive and sexual quality which seems to unite them.
As I say, I shall expand upon the relevance of such a thought in later lectures.
The returned Gaze
Picasso’s ‘Les Demoiselles d’Avignon’ 1907
vs
Inges ‘Turkish Bath’ 1860’s
WILL INSERT IMAGES LATER
The comparison between these two works is between types, rather than specifics. Ingres’ Turkish bath represents a type which was consistent in most art prior to the 20th century. A group of nude bathing women who we, as the spectator, can look in on. WE look as voyeurs, secretly, with them unaware of our gaze and unable to return it. The relationship is hierarchical and one dimensional.
Picasso violently challenges this. All five of his nude women confront us with aggression. The figure on the right has her back to us but also looks out at us. It’s as if her head has been ripped of its axis and turned around 180 degrees to face us; a violent act to disturb and remind us of the confrontation. The returned gaze is given extra edge but the way we no longer have sinuous curving lines but sharp geometric edges slicing through the picture plane. There is also no place to hide, to horizon to disappear of into. One point perspective gives way to a shallow picture plane which assaults our eyes from every angle. No longer sensuous naturalistic colour, instead bold clashes of pinks and blues. From beauty to brutality.
All of which makes a mockery of the mass of early literature on this work. The rise of formalist thought (so the kind of thing we looked at in the first half of the lecture with Greenberg) created an environment where this work was disguised in purely formal terms. It deconstruction and attack on previous ways of seeing, its use of line and colour. It contribution to Cubism and hence abstraction. All the formal observations are valid and true, but there is a function to the formal and style, it is not the pictures meaning or value. The style gives the subject matter its edge, its attack, its brutality. This subject matter cannot be ignored. Five whores looking out at us and confronting us. Our privileged detached positioned destroyed. A phallic like table piercing the divide of the bottom horizontal. The line which separates is now pierced by a bridge which unites and unsettles. The way in which said table pierces a collection of fruit merely emphasizes the sexual nature of the piece. All of these questions are central to the works discussion, yet were ignored for so long.
This painting is not a closed door. It is not autonomous. It cannot just be judge on its aesthetic and on its formal content. We need to make connections, association, to see how these internal things relate to external less tangible and invisible notions. We need to remarry form to content.
Art and centre fold
Much of the discussion to this point has shown up the value systems of the female body in Western art. A natural continuation of this idea sees many of these supposed masterpieces as nothing more than centre folds disguised as high art. A soft core pornography veiled in craft for the titillation of rich and monarchical patrons. Titian’s poesie, and particular his Danae (painted for Phillip II of Spain in the 1550’s) is a classic example of a work that has been cast of as a centre fold of sorts. I shall focus some attention on it too hopefully show how an approach which dismisses this and similar works as pornography is limited and false.
One of two poles of extremism is a reading which sees the work as singularly erotic. This reductive analysis sees the display of female flesh, and its seductive effect, as the end of interpretation. Documentation of letters sent between Phillip and Titian, discussing the desire to see females form multiple angles, is used by Hope to argue for an interpretation of the series as one of soft core pornography hidden under the veil of high art methods.
The Danae painting sent to Phillip before 1554, most likely the Danae with Nurse in the Prado, is generally considered to be one of the most frankly erotic of all Titians paintings. The marginally less erotic Farensse Danae was described, by a contemporary, as making the Venus of Urbino look like a Thetian Nun in comparison.
The painting is certainly highly erotic:
The sulphurous flesh, shimmering and vibrating. The suggestively spread legs, the painting hand on the inner thigh to ease Jove’s entry, the desire filled gaze, the use of light as a metaphor for both Jove’s arrival and a celestial orgasm,
the thematic contrapposto between the nurses old age and Danae’s naked beauty. All elements which stir the sense of the viewer just as they had those of Jove.
Eroticism and pornography are two very different things, however. Pornography is surely always singularly erotic. A pornographic image will never reach beyond this base animalistic level. Surely eroticism can be involved but merely be the start of interpretation.
In Danae the eroticism seems to be what starts both the internal and external involvement. The eroticism is what draws us into Dane’s realm, just as it had drawn in Jove. It is the device which is central to the narrative plot and also to our emotive involvement in the plot. Rather than objective distance the eroticism pulls us in, collapses the gap between the painted and real realm and allows us to be intimately involved in the dynamics of the dramatic moment.
A reading which search for pornography seems myopically reductive. In another strand of research there are those who search for high minded allegorical readings. They see the work as containing and pointing towards deep moral codes. This seems an expansive reading too far, the projection of intellectual reason onto the work. One seems to look at too superficial a level, the other to think at too high a level. Rather than pornography and philosophy is there not a phrase to cover both ends of the interpretive spectrum; ‘poetry.’ In light of the fact Titian called this work (and the series of which it was a part) ‘poesie’ (painted poetry as such) this suggestion seems plausible. For poetry is the art form which can take in all elements of life, from the erotic to the intellectual without contradiction. To limit a reading to one or the other is to miss the subtlety and depth of Titian’s vision.
Female practical interventions
The new approaches to art history raised by gender studies also demanded that artists, and women in particular, find new ways of working, new values, to reclaiming fine art for themselves. To challenge previous assumptions and to form new value judgements. We did not get much time to go into this in the lecture, so I have written this up very much in note form with a few names of people you might want to look into. Much of this work reclaims the female body and makes it, at times quite literally, a site of discussion.
Sarah Lucas- the play on witty puns. Her table where the Kebab stands in place of her sex and two scrambled eggs represent her breasts. Humour and reference to a crude ladish culture see her make commentaries on sexual identify in the last 20th Century.
Orlan- This French artist is fascinated with the way we feel the need to conform to certain images of beauty. She is an extreme but interest practitioner. She has undergone plastic surgery many times as aprt of her art work. Her body becomes the stage, the gallery and the canvas of theoretical and ideological discussion. She has bizarre and odd changes made to question the way in which society makes us behave and look. A cheek made excessively large, part of the face moved or changed shape to almost alien proportions. She is prepared to manipulate and deform her body to communicate her message.
Cindy Sherman- documents work in photographic form dresses up in various roles, challenges assumption and presumption of female types.
Saville- challenges gender and body image types, using the nature and medium of paint, its fleshy qualities and turns it on its head. Gargantuan, succulent and repulsive, like objects on a plinth
Emin- He stitch work is of particular interest. She takes something with clear gender association, the twee, the craft like, the mother making patch work quilts. She constructs similar things but then puts images and phrases which are both personal and graphic on them. She thus turns the medium back in on itself, subverting our presumptions and challenging social and sexual associations. We shall look at Emin more and how the sexual, the personal and gender types are central to her work. Her ‘My Bed’ and her Tent are both very interesting pieces which deal with issues perhaps first raised by feminist literature. No other artist seems to so blatantly put her personal life and sexuality at the centre of her work.
We shall look into a more extensive list of female artists who challenge these notions at a later date. It is worth a whole lecture.
Pollock – another view part one
We previously saw how Pollock represents the pinnacle of Greenbergs formalism- a work of abstraction which comments on nothing outside of itself. I wish to demonstrate, however, how it is possible to read certain associations into his work. The supposed closed door can be opened.
Harold Rosenberg- INSERT QUOTE. (I will upload this quote later)
Rosenberg talks about the canvas becoming a stage, presenting itself to one painter after another as a theatrical space in which to act. He positions the process of painting at the centre of interpretation. The object, thus, becomes merely a record of the artists performance. I want to take this notion as the foundation for a new look at Pollock’s drip paintings.
Namuth photos
The famous photos of Pollock in action reveal the physicality of his act. The canvas lay bare across the floor, the painter dancing from side to side, splattering his house hold paints across the entire surface with a vigour and energy not previously seen. Consider the muscularity, the energy, the masculinity of the whole performance. As if he is saying, I am Jackson Pollock, this is me, and this is my performance.
When we consider the psychosexual potential of the performance, of the act, of the material and the final object, certain connections present themselves to us. His brush in his had seems merely an extension of his arm. He uses it to project his ego, his manhood, in visual form. It thus seems to become a metaphorical extension of his penis. The splatter of paint on a skin of canvas? We have already seen the sensuous sexual potential of paint as a medium, and in this context the paint seems to take on that role. The dripping and splattering over a surface, the very arrogance of it all seems to be like a self satisfied continuous ejaculation.
Tenuous? The projection of sexual meaning? Perhaps. But what I want to demonstrate is how when we come from another angle, when we take another discipline of way of thinking we open up the work to new areas of value. It no longer is a work just about paint, no longer is it singular or closed in associations. It has the potential for greater depth and variety, regardless of whether we think this particular reading is valid. (As a note I am still looking for the excellent essay which first proposed such a reading to me. If I find it I shall upload it as it put the point across far better than I do, with more subtlety, sophistication and conviction.
Marxism
Marxism is a strand of theoretical and political practice derived from the work of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. A strand is perhaps an inaccurate word for a foundation of ideals which has given birth to a theoretical metropolis of action and thought. Its validity, effects and importance in all walks of life, both positive and negative, is not something we need to consider here. What we need to focus our attention on is the doors opened by Marxism for a critique of visual culture and the foundations of our value judgments.
Hausser is normally cited as the first social art historian. It is T. J. Clark, however, who has had the biggest impact and influence on our perception of meaning and value. Clark is a fantastically brilliant writer, able to captivate and convince in the articulation of new and complex ideas.
Clarke sees art as having no absolute value. It’s meaning its relation to its socio political context. The two for him, as for Hegel, are symbiotic. We can only understand the art by placing it back in this context. What he looks to do is rediscover the conditions of its production and consumption. That being the situation and environment in which it was created and also in which it was received.
We will address certain specific aspects of his approach in the second lecture on semiotics. For now I wish to go of on a tangent and apply his approach to the YBA’s. I want to demonstrate the type of questions it causes to ask and the kind of findings made. The search for and discovery of meaning being very different to anything else we have come across.
The film Live Forever documents the parallel rise of British culture and New Labour in the 1990’s. Its cultural focus is on music but some attention is given to the new wave of art coming out of Britain, Hirst et al.
What it does is demonstrate an analysis of culture similar to Clark. We don’t judge the music or the art on its own terms. It is not about he formal elements, be in form and colour or melody and rhythm. It is about the socio political context in which they were breed. It is an ideological form of research. Rather than autonomous culture is judged in relative terms.
The film recaptures the new sense of freedom and energy in British culture. Artists like Hirst started to become independent, to organize shows in random warehouses and take control. In music Britpop saw an explosion of exciting pop music, first suggested by the Stone Roses but epitomized by Oasis. The energy of their debut album, ‘definitely maybe’ seemed to capture the mood of a nation. A collection of songs about wanting to escape the constraints of the city, to start a band, become famous and get wasted along the way. There was a freshness and sense of excitement surrounding it all. It felt like something special was happening. As if the ‘constraints’ of a country still ‘paralyzed’ by Thatcherism was finally raising to the new millennium with genuine purpose.
The film equates the cultural rise with that of New Labour. A sense of change, the sense of a freshness and energy that Tony Blair and his party seemed to embody. Believe it or not now, many people felt a real sense of optimism.
The most direct comparison made is between Oasis’s release of ‘Be Here Now’ and New Labour being elected to power, both in 1997. In both cases the expectations were incredibly high. Records were broken all over the place, from No. 10 Downing street to HMV. What followed was a huge sense of disappointment, a realization that the reality did not live up to the hype. The quick selling album in history also became the most returned album in history. In fans heads it would confirm Oasis as the greatest thing in music since that Beatles shaped loaf of sliced bread. In reality it was a collection of overblown songs written by a band spending far too long sniff lines of coke instead of making music. The disappointment of New Labour was not as immediate but had a sense of symmetry about it. Broken promises, an obsession with statistics, change which brought about more bureaucracy but not greater quality, a leader concerned with a place in history and the Iraq war.
Opinions on or details of these various points is not important. What is important is an appreciation of the methodology. It judges and discusses the work in regards to its socio political context. The Irony, I feel, is that the work itself, be it the artwork or music, seems to be forgotten. It seems to be harnessed as a tool for some other agenda. The specifics are left behind as larger ideological issues are given priority.
Jackson Pollock
Again I have purposely picked Pollock’s drip paintings to discuss. This is no coincidence having already discussed him in formal terms and with regards to gender issues. I want to address him from a Marxist point of view to reassert the notion of the art object as a container of multiple, rather than singular, meaning. Also to demonstrate how the same object can be measured and valued in such different ways and with such different results.
Clark sees Pollock’s work as the cultural dimension of America’s cold war effort. Without going into depth I want to see how this idea works. Clark compares Pollock’s work with that being produced in Russia. There lots of the produce is state controlled; propagandist images to reinforce a particular image of the country and the people. Clark says that Pollock’s drip painting represent the very different social system of America. The freedom is has which allows him to make mammoth paintings which just display lines of paint splattered over the surface conveys the freedom and independence of American citizens. The sheer scale of the work reminds us of American power, so often displayed through sheer size.
In this discussion we form a measure of value by what the work tells us about this very particular moment in history. The notion that it is a physical embodiment of the zeitgeist seems to come through, as if through this work we can find a theoretical portal to the ideological landscape of a very particular time and place. The irony is obvious. A work which is supposedly about nothing outside of its, which has total autonomy, has become totally valued in relative terms. Its intrinsic worth has disappeared as it becomes a functional tool in the search for wider meaning.
Non Western approaches to art
A host of scholars find fault with previous approaches to visual culture on the grounds of the implication of eternal singular values. This reveals itself in the manner in which Western society had felt comfortable with a system which judged non western work by our own values. Central to this discussion is the notion of Primitivism.
Primitivism
Primitivism is one half of a binary opposition. Certain notions only have meaning due to their relation to an opposing notion. We cannot understand what up is without have a concept of down, the same goes with past/future, male/female, in/out and so on. The opposite of the primitive is the civilised. We see our society as the civilised present. This presumes that we have evolved from rude beginnings. It is a social strand of Darwinian thought. It suggests that over time and through history we have not just change but improved, as if gradually moving towards a purer state. One of the places this is supposedly revealed is in culture.
The notion of Primitivism comes to light in objects such as African masks. Imperial expansion took French and British empires to new and unknown places. In Africa as we spread we pillaged any object of interest. A whole host of masks made there way back to our museums. There they were all categorised as one.
We judged the masks by our own absolute values. As such we saw them as fitting in with the crude and naive production of our ancient ancestors. Look at Picasso’s reference to them in his 1907 Les Demoisselles d’Avignon. In his assault on classical values the African mask is the very symbol of a base point in our cultural past.
By judging them like this we presume that we have progressed from A to B but that African culture has remained still, stuck in some edenic moment in time. It’s a patronising belief that they will follow the same clear linear path, searching for similar goals, but have not yet been sophisticated enough to do so.
What it ignores is the fact that non western cultures have formed equally as sophisticated but very different sets of values by which to judge art. To understand the true value of such objects we need to relocate them in their original cultural context.
Take, for instance, Aboriginal paintings. Many of them appear to be non representational, what we would call abstract. They have been collected and discussed in the same terms we discussed Pollock in the first half of the lecture; the use of line, the creation and placing of form, the decoration of surface, patterning and all other formal aspects. Judging them by our own criteria is to misunderstand the work. For the Aborigines they often have specific and multi layered r4epresentaional meaning. They may tell stories or sets of beliefs in code forms which can only be revealed when passed from elders to younger generations. They might speak of ritual dances, of dream like states or certain complex belief systems. They are anything but abstract; they are some of the most complex and faceted containers of meaning in visual culture.
Concluding points
We have looked at various and contradictory approaches to find value in visual culture. Some which believe in absolute value and some in relative value. If the two are two exist in union we have to except that a work of art is like a container. It can be filled and emptied with a range of liquids/meaning without contradiction. The container will always stay the same, and it will define and control our reading of a work.
At the end of the lecture I showed you three diagrams. (will draw and upload these) One showed a Kantian approach, the isolate object. The belief that nothing exists outside of the aesthetic and all value can be understood by what is seen. The second diagram showed a series of other doctrines at the centre of our discussion. From here a mass of lines spread, one of which went to the art object. It was to suggest the notion that the object has been decentralised, and is not only valued by its ability to informa dn tell us about the centralised doctrine.
The former fails as it ignores clear associations that do exit in art. The later fails as the work of art seems to have been virtually forgotten. One looks blinded and myopically at the detail and the other seems to forget what is at it’s feet in search for the great meaning on the horizon.
If we are two find true value we need to marry the two. The object needs to be re-centralised but an acceptance need to be made that it has profound and important associations to many other disciplines, that it cannot be divorced from these connections. We must constantly fluctuate between what is seen and what is known, the specific and the general. Only then can we hope to form any sense, however vague or elusive, of true value.
(I apologise now for the gradual lose of quality in the writing. I went into far to much depth and thus this write up has taken far to long, so I have had to rush it to an extent. In future I shall provide briefer write ups but of a higher standard in writing.. hopefully.)
Part One, Lecture One
Tom de Freston
Kant vs Hegel- the insolvable equation?
A Lecture in the nature of value in visual culture
This lecture considers some of the following:
Kant
Hegel
Absolute Value
Relative Value
Canons
Vasari’s Lives of the artists
Greenberg’s Modernism.
Formalism
Representation and abstraction
New Art Histories- the decentralised object
Gender studies- visual gender stereotypes, feminist practical interventions
Imperial studies- primitivism, non western approaches to art
Marxism- T. J. Clark and his disciples
The written word is a cousin of the spoken word, part of the linguistic family but with a different upbringing. As such they allow us to present the same content in a slightly different context. The following text is a write up of the first of my lectures for the Art Foundation course at Warwickshire College. For any student who attended the lecture this should hopefully provide a detailed summary of what we covered. Luckily I am able to eradicate the narcissistic background information which filled the first ten minutes of the actual lecture. Unluckily you get subjected to the limitations of my dyslexic writing.
Before I start I make no pretensions to these write up to be proper essays. They will use loose and chatty language, so hopefully keeping some of the tone of a lecture. I shall not be referencing as I would in an essay. This is designed to be a support mechanism and chance to revise past lectures, not as a comprehensive written piece.
The aim of my lectures:
Before delving into specific content I wish to re-outline a few key aspects of what this first series of lectures aims to achieve.
- Expose you to a mass of imagery.
- Introduce you too a wide range of theories and doctrines regarding visual culture.
- Provide you with a range of methods and tools by which to analysis and deconstruct pictures.
The relevance of the above and contextual studies in general, for a developing practitioner, is often questioned. Yet understanding our historical context and the relevance of the past is a critical aspect of establishing any kind of sophistication in our production. It allows us to understand what objects and images mean, and most importantly teaches us how to see. Ignoring this is like trying to read with one eye shut.
Above anything this is going to be a course in looking. Reading is a crucial feature of our research, but if there is to be a hierarchy then it comes below looking. I still find it ironic that many practitioners will happily spend hours reading whole books on a work of art yet seem to never spend more than a couple of minutes looking at one. There is an imbalance that needs addressing.
This chronic lack of visual attention seems to have been exacerbated by contemporary society. We have become sophisticated consumers of sight; able to devour adverts, signs and imagery in an instant. It is part of a wider acceleration of living pace in Western society. As we have ‘progressed’ we seem to be living life quite literally in the fast lane. Broadband, transport, mobiles and digital television provide a technological microcosm of a social macrocosm.
The transient nature of our environment is not something I am criticising, merely a fact. Yet surely it is worth sometimes interrupting the constant flow of traffic and devoting time to something. I would encourage an active effort to spend longer looking, to learn to see. Give an image time to grow on you, understand the dynamics of vision, and allow the sensation of sight to reveal itself to you. This is not a dreamy eyes romantic notion but about engaging the mind and senses actively. Ten minutes looking at a work of art is worth a few hours reading about it. It is a fundamental part of our development as makers.
Diatribe over, lecture to begin…
Kant vs Hegel- the insolvable equation?
A Lecture on the nature of value in visual culture
The purpose of this lecture is to explore how we value visual culture and the methods by which we formulate these judgements.
When we mention value we should not be confusing it with cost. Cost is an inherently measurable quality. There are clear and logical economical systems by which we can calculate this. If we go into an auction house we are made aware that an objects market value is constructed by a systematic nine point system. Capitalism demands tangible, measurable value.
True value is less tangible and more elusive. It is inherently complex and demands an ontological dispute. That means we have to question an objects very nature of meaning to capture its worth.
This brings us to Kant and Hegel. Who are they? Both are German philosophers who lived during the late 18th and early 19th Century. This was a time in which scientific progress and the development of knowledge and thought made people question the previous hegemony of religious doctrine. Notions such as a singular God or any God at all were challenged. This provided the environment for thinkers like Kant and Hegel to pursue metaphysical enquiries. Metaphysics is the search for that which underlies us all. The conclusions which they came too were virtually in total opposition. Before continuing it should be noted that both these figures research is far more complex and faceted than the crude simplifications and generalisations made in this essay.
Kant’s philosophy places the rational, active human subject at the centre of the cognitive and moral worlds. It is the basis of most existential thought. Logic, he argues, states that we cannot know anything outside of ourselves.
The relevance of such thought for art lies in the notion of ‘the thing in itself’ and that no meaning exists outside of this. It means we see visual culture as having absolute value and intrinsic worth. It proposes that art has or should have total autonomy, not to be determined by any exterior associations but entirely by its aesthetic. He also develops a clear notion of what we understand by beauty and aesthetics.
Hegel’s philosophy can be seen to propose an alternative polemic. Hegel is no more or less complex than Kant, but is far harder to simplify and, therefore, to grasp on a basic level. I shall attempt to articulate what I understand of his relevant thought.
Hegel spoke about the ‘zeitgeist’, which loosely translates as the ‘spirit of the age’. It is a God like all encompassing power, the ethereal, intangible essence which underlies us all. He believed that as we move through space and time the zeitgeist evolves into a continuously more developed form. Hegel proposed that there is a continual dialectical relationship between the unseen spirit and the corporeal world. Thus every object, of a particular time and place, becomes a physical embodiment of the underlying spirit of the age.
By default this means that any notion of absolute value is dismissed. Instead it is argued that there is no such thing as intrinsic worth, rather that everything is relative. For everything is defined and formed by its geographic and historical context. It is not good or bad, just merely is. It proposes that an object’s only value is by association, in the manner in which is provides us with a coded doorway to the zeitgeist.
These two opposing polemics provide the foundations for various approaches to visual culture and history. Removed from their specific philosophical context we can simplify the standpoints to two clear terms.
There are those in believe in the Kantian notion of absolute value. The belief in permanent sets and ideals by which we measure and value art.
Alternatively some follow what could be called a Hegelian path, arguing for relative value. They propose that an object or image is not good or bad, but merely an embodiment of the social, political, philosophical conditions of its creation.
I want to spend the first half of this essay tackling a couple of areas in which the idea of absolute value manifests itself. The later half will look to question this approach and consider a range of methods which espouse relative values. I shall conclude by seeing if the two need to be in opposition.
Absolute Value
Canons
I wish to consider how absolute values are those which underlie the formation and perpetuation of canonical artists. An artistic canon is a body of work and associated ideals which have survived through time and are held in the highest esteem. The artists who make up a canon are those who have survived the test of time, the ‘master’ so to speak.
As a notion is presumes that there are universal and absolute values by which art is judged. Canonical works of art either represent the purest incarnation of these predetermined rules or are celebrated as having contributing towards this high point.
I shall focus on two examples which demonstrate how canons are formed and survive.
Giorgio Vasari
Vasari is often described as the father of Art History. He was a painter, teacher, designer, architect and writer in 16th Century Italy. The ideals he espouses in written form underpin those by which canonical artists have been measured and judged. These are the basis for the common conception of the renaissance, the rebirth of classical values of representation in art throughout Europe; most notably Italy, from the 13th to 16th Century.
These values are articulated in his seminal and crucial text, the Lives of the Artists. It is a three part account, in a biographical format, of the artists who lived in this period. He argues convincingly that there are clear and logical values by which to measure art. Beyond this he sees a linear progression in the development and height of these principles. The three stages of the book show a chronological evolution from rude beginnings to an ultimate high in 16th Century Central Italy. In the first section we come across artists such as Giotto and Cimabue, in the second della Francesco, Massacio and Mantegna. The third section contains those Vasari feels have reached the ultimate peak, Leonardo, Raphael and Michelangelo.
These absolute values can be summarised as the factors which are used to construct a figurative representational work of art (in regards to painting and sculpture at least).
Truth to nature- mimesis
The ability for the artist to construct a convincing illusion of nature is seen as the central facet of good art by Vasari. He sees design (‘desegno’) as the key to this development. Every work should be built on the foundations of a solid and accurate linear design. This is honed by the artist’s development and awareness of human proportions and observational drawing.
It finds a more specific incarnation in portraiture. As a genre which necessitates likeness it is a clear measure of the development of representational skills. If we compare a portrait by Giotto, to one by Mantegna to one by Raphael then we can sees it progression through the stages of his book. Vasari’s argument becomes convincing. From stilted and simplified to a proto photographic figure which seems like a real individual capable of breathing and moving. The increasing sense of personality over reductive idealisation reaches it peak in the 16th Century. Raphael and Titian perhaps represent the high point, whilst Bellini’s famous Doge portrait, in the National Gallery (London) is another wonderful example (his pedantic attention to detail reminds me of a top end digital camera).
WILL INSERT IMAGES LATER
Window onto a world
A painting is a two dimensional plane. The increasing understanding of geometry and perspectives allowed artists to develop its ability to present itself as a window onto another imaginary world. Albertti’s Della Pictura is a crucial text in this field but the evolution is certainly more fragmented than many commentators suggest.
Liens of perspective create a sense of depth. The suggested three dimensional space becomes a stage onto which figures can be placed. Vasari argues that artist’s ability to both create this space and position figures within it progressed naturally. Look to Giotto’s ‘Marriage of the Virgin’ 1305, Massacio’s ‘Tribute Money’ 1424 and Raphael’s ‘Entombment’ 1508. In the first figures are heavily outlined and seen in profile. They seem to almost exist in independent space, not convincingly interacting. They exist on one plane in static poses. In Masaccio’s work poses and drapery are livelier. Figures seem to be set in rather than in front of the constructed space. In Raphael’s work the figures exist in a fluid space, rather than being set into clearly defined planes. The move dynamically throughout the width and depth of the stage and interact convincingly with one and other.
WILL INSERT IMAGES LATER
Selection of the best parts of nature
The notion that an artist can select the best parts of nature is not unique to Vasari. Pliny, in his encyclopaedic account of classical civilisation, spoke about a similar notion. He accounts the story of Zeuxis, who got all the most beautiful women together so he could select their best parts. Vasari elaborates to suggest that in the selction of natures strongest points the artist is capable of transcending the limits of nature and the creations of God. In suggesting this he implies the logical end to the artists rise from mere craftsman to demi-god.
Vasari states that art is to be judged by the artist’s ability to fulfil these criteria. It means that art has a clear set of rules by which value can be measured. Vasari makes it clear that Michelangelo represents the purest incarnation of these rules. Everyone else is valued almost entirely by the manner in which they helped art reach this point. We should not ignore the fact that Vasari is too Michelangleo what Saatchi is to Hirst, his chief apologist. He has direct and indirect personal interest in Michelangelo being celebrated.
If we look to Michelangelo’s Last Judgement (Sistine Chapel, 1508-12) we can see what Vasari meant. Each form being an almost superhuman, proto steroid munching muscle machine. They climb up and over the vast all consuming wall. Within the theatre what we see is almost a grammar of vision. Every part contributes to the awe inspiring, ‘terribiliata’ of the whole. The term sensation, when applied to the YBA’s seems to pale into insignificance against this visual description of the sublime. It is no wonder people felt the very presence of God in this space, you cannot fail to be overwhelmed.
WILL INSERT IMAGES LATER
Consider each independent line. Its value is measured by its ability to accurately describe a particular form, a leg moving through space; as a letter is valued by its contribution to a word. That leg is the valued by the part it plays in the total display of that form. That form is judged by how convincingly it is set in space and interacts within a group of surrounding figures. Like a word in a sentence. That group is thus judged by its dynamic movement in space and its contribution towards the whole, as a sentence is too a paragraph. The ability for this combination of parts to accurately convey the particular subject matter is the final judgement of quality. Just as we judge an essay by the ability of the various parts to articulate a story or argument.
What we are left with is a set of absolute rules. Everything is measurable by these strict guidelines, regardless of time or place. The specifics of its creation are ignored for a continuous set of values. Much literature on representational art, even today, basis itself on these values, they are the corner stones of connoisseurship.
For now we shall leave Vasari, before later returning to consider the validity of such absolute values.
The Modernist Canon
The above mentioned values make the presumption that the artist should be manipulating his materials to disguise themselves as some other form, be it a landscape, a person or a building, in order to depict some grand narrative. The arrival of photography, along with more subtle factors, caused artists working in other mediums to move away from pure representation. As a result a new set of values needed to be formed.
I shall call this the ‘Modernist Canon’. Before elaborating I would like to make a few points about labels and their limitations. On a wider note this is an off tangent diatribe against jargon, which tends to demonstrate a lack of awareness rather than some cultured use of language. The term modernism is a perfect example.
A tangent on terminology…
Modern- try not to use this word to suggest contemporary. It tends loosely to refer to a historical period which, depending on who you speak to, starts somewhere in the 19th Century and ends in the later middle section of the 20th Century. It does not mean art made now, the accurate term for that is contemporary. Even in this historical context the word modern is pretty crap. Far better to use less subjective terms such as dates. It is true that Manet painted ‘Olympia’ in 1863. It is a matter of opinion if the work or this period can be classified as modern.
Modernism/modernism- This word is has almost entirely opposing cultural references depending on context, and to a degree capitalisation. Modernism with a capital M tends to refer to Greenberg’s notion of what Modern art is. We shall be focusing on that in this section. For the sake of this illustrated point it is sufficed to say it is a doctrine which claims art should dissociate it-self entirely form its surroundings. I shall elaborate later.
The other common use of the word modernism is in the Baudellairian sense. Baudellaire is a 19th Century poet and thinker of great energy. Outside of his poetry he wrote extensively and brilliantly on the arts. His article, ‘The Heroism of Modern Life’ is one of the great artistic calls to arms in western history. He demands that painters no longer focus their attention on stories of vice and virtue from the bible, the classics and modern literature. Instead he points out that contemporary life itself should be the artist’s source of subject matter. The bustle of the rising metropolis, train stations, prostitutes, markets, bars and parks. It is a demand for artists to focus their attention on their surroundings. To Greenberg’s closed door it is an open window.
NB As a side point the democratisation of subject matter could be said to be a step towards Greenberg’s total self reflection, as part of a wider move towards internal meaning. We shall tackle that in depth in a later lecture.
The point I am making here is how the same word can mean entirely different things depending on the context. So rather than using such words we should look to describe more clearly what we mean. We might think saying Carravagio is a Baroque artist shows of our knowledge of his stylistic attributes. Instead it shows our attachment to what is an artificial historical construct. These phrases are made by historians to simplify and categorise things. It limits what we see. We would be better to discuss the exact theatricality of Carravagio’s use of lights and darks, the staging of his figures, the drama and exaggeration of the poses. The very attributes we think about when we use a term Baroque, but without the falsity of the baggage. Jargon is lazy and often empty.
Back to Greenberg…
Wake up at the back! We are back onto the main thread of the lecture now.
Greenberg was a mid 20th Century American art critic. I often see Greenberg as the mirror to Vasari. Like his eminent predecessor he articulated a clear progression from one point to another. He looked back to the nineteenth century and saw a state of affairs that demanded art refocus on its independent properties. No longer should it be reliant on supposedly superior art forms like literature. It had to work out would was exclusively its own and focus attention there. The properties he says as independent to painting, for example, are the fact that it involves the spreading of a colour medium on a two dimensional support. The use of paint to pose as something else, or the denial of the flatness for an imagined three dimensional space was dangerous. Its truths should be, he suggested, celebrated, not denied.
Greenberg painted a picture (sorry, could not resist the pun) of a clear rise towards these values. He saw it as starting with Manet, progressing through Cubism and reaching its peak in Pollock and post painterly painting. Pollock is Greenberg’s Michelangelo; the artist whose work encapsulates the purest incarnation of his self reflexive ideals.
In these artists he saw a clear move towards the destruction of image and subject matter; lose of depth and a move towards the surface, the display of the painting as an object and the materiality of the paint being celebrated.
He locates the evolution in the work of artists such as Manet, the Cubism of Picasso and Braque, Abstract Expressionism; in particular Jackon Pollock and eventually it finds its conclusion in the post painterly abstraction of people like Kenneth Noland. This chronology of artists does seem to fit in with his arguments.
WILL INSERT IMAGES LATER
Manet’s ‘Olympia’ of 1863 seems to break from previous models of representation. The lack of sculptural modelling in the figure gives her an air of stark unreality. Courbet was not alone amongst Salon goers in being shocked at her flatness. Half tones had been replaced by a series of sharp lights and darks (surely spawned by his appreciation of a Spanish painterly tradition and Japanese prints) Space and depth are surpassed and the figure seems to consciously sit on and across the two dimensions of the picture plane. In the high Analytical period of Picasso and Braque (1909-11) we see them push objects and form to the point of destruction. Figures are subjected to the faceted of an intrigued network of horizontals, verticals and diagonals. The celebration, we are told, is of formal values over specific image. The lines certainly remembered the frame and thus the two dimensions of the canvas. The objecthood of the painting is celebrated. In Pollock’s celebrated drip paintings we see what appears to be a total lose of subject matter. Gone is the need to rely or imbedded painting in looking like something else. This is paint for its own sake. Drips cover the expanse to create a homogenous whole. The pulsing lines take us over and around the surface in a hypnotic dance, the rhythm of the interlocking lines makes us intimately aware of both the material and the flatness of the painting. By the time we get to Noland even the slight hints towards nature in Pollock have given way to purity of form. The choice of a square is designed to limit any depth. The antithesis of representation is presented in spatial terms. Gone is the attempt to reach beyond the surface with perspective and geometry. This is the completion of a returned journey. The circles echo the frame and colours interact to limit rather than create depth. The work is what it is, it seems to speak of nothing outside of its formal content of colour, line, surface and tone.
Seen in this history, in this context these artists show a move towards a solipsistic closed door on association, art for arts sake. It is a neo platonic ideology.
NB: Neo platonic
In his book ‘The Republic’ Plato condemns the mimetic/representational value of art. The book is written in the format of a discussion between two people, which is highly persuasive. He says the purest form of any object is its conception; the idea of a table for instance is the true table. Once a table is made by a craftsman we are one step removed from its purest truth. It is a copy of its purest form. It is justified as it is functional. When the artist paints that table it becomes a copy of a copy; a lie which has no function other than to lie and please the eye. Plato thus dismisses art.
Greenberg is thus arguing for an art which chases a purer truth. Rather than being a copy of copy an art which tries to get as close to its purest reality as possible; art which does not disguise itself as something else but which presents its materiality back to us.
In place of Vasari’s values a new set of absolutes are formed.
WILL INSERT IMAGES LATER
Paint for its own. sake. In a work by Carravagio paint is celebrated for its ability to disguise itself as form, as some other surface or texture; to be an actor in a play so too speak. In an abstract painting, according to Greenberg, paint speaks about nothing outside of itself. We celebrate its intrinsic formal values; the play of colours against colours, surface, tone and texture. It is a pure aesthetic delight.
Line for its own sake. In the work on the left line is used to describe form. We understand and read it as part of this description, it supposedly has not autonomy. In one of Pollock’s drip paintings line is about line itself. Its decoration across the surface, its rhythm and dynamism celebrated. It needs not describe anything. It has be detached from its representational referent.
Flatness over depth. In the work by Raphael figural proportion and perspective are sued to generate a sense of depth. In Nolands work the frame is referenced by the circular forms, so to remind us of its object hood. Colour and material sit clear on the surface, so denying the illusion of depth and confirming the truth of the paintings two dimensionality.
What Greenberg claims art is focusing on are truly Kantian absolute values. A door shut and bolted on any external association, objects which describe or comment on nothing outside of themselves. It is about what is inside the frame, literally, and nothing else. He argues art is free from previous constrains and has total autonomy.
Such purist and formal views are still prevalent, in theory at least, in many artists today. Ian Davenport, Gary Hume, Callum Innes and Howard Hodgkin are all artists who on the surface appear to continue a celebration of formal qualities. The later of these artists points to the falsity which we shall explore in the second half of this lecture. Whilst association is more elusive it is and always will be there. There is no such thing as absolute value or total lack of exterior reference.
Artificial Histories
The falsity suggest above is what I want to consider, briefly, before progressing onto the ‘Hegellian’ half of our lecture. The doctrine of Vasari and Greenberg has underpinned some of the fundamental Canonical values with which we measure representational and non representational art. Like all literature on a subject with a clear and coherent standpoint we should approach it with interest and cynicism. History is an artificial notion; it is something mankind has invented in order to make sense of the half alive chaos of the past. We construct systems in which we can group and order our past to make sense of it all. This is a necessary and crucial act, but one which is by its nature always a step removed from reality. Real time goes from A to B whilst a historian tries to recreate this route looking back, at best, from B to A.
Both Greenberg and Vasari are inherently biased, in their construction of particular histories, due to their historic and geographic location and allegiances. Vasari was a 16th century Central Italian who was Michelangelo’s chief apologist. Greenberg was an art critic in mid 20th Century America and was one of Pollock’s biggest supporters. Both present the past as something which leads up to a peak in the artwork of the respective heroes, this is no coincidence.
I shall pick two, out of many, case in points to show how they project their ideals onto the artists which precede these ‘peaks’ and so misunderstand their ‘intentions.’
Della Francesco’s Baptism of Christ
vs
Michelangelo’s ‘Last Judgement- Sistine Chapel’
WILL INSERT IMAGES LATER
Vasari only credits Della Francesco for his contribution towards the development of perspective and geometry. The only value he credits his with is relative, for his part in the evolution towards Michelgelo’s peak. If judging him by the eternal absolute values which the Last Judgement displays then he supposedly falls short; lacking the drama and the dynamic excess of movement through space. Yet is this what he was attempting to achieve? We need to look towards subject matter.
The last judgement is a moment of epic drama. So the language Michelangelo uses is highly appropriate. The serpentine spread of individual and collective forms up and across the canvas in a swirling energy captures the melodrama of the moment perfectly. Form and style unite perfectly with subject.
Della Francesco’s Baptism of Christ is a picture of entirely different subject matter. This is a story and scenes of quiet pray, equally as holy but necessarily understand and calm. Everything the artist does supports this. The energy and dynamism of Michelangelo would be misplaced here. Geometry is consciously used to restrict rather than create movement. The curve of the arch is continued within the frame to act as a stabilising of the composition. The dove sits in the centre of the imaginary circle thus created. Christ stands central and the work as a whole has a symmetry. All these devices purposefully limit movement, inducing a calm, solid and eternal spirituality. With a very different language to Michelangelo but with equal sophistication Della Francesco unites form and style to subject matter.
Cubism and abstraction- another lie
WILL INSERT IMAGES LATER
As previously described, Greenberg puts forward the notion that Cubism is part of a clear and inextricable move to abstraction. Alfred Barr (first director of MOMA) constructed a famous diagram which supports this notion. Cubism is one of many ‘movements’ which is shown to fit into a clear and systematically rise to abstraction. Formalists argued that Analytical Cubism only just held back from pure abstraction because they still felt that art had to in some way be derived from and connect back to a particular image or form.
I would argue that the work of Picasso and Braque around 1911, whilst aesthetically close to abstraction is not in any way concerned with abstraction. In fact it does quite the opposite. From 1907-1914 Picasso and Braque explored and developed new ways to represent image and form. In the analytical period they moved from the faceting of a forms surface to the breaking of the closed form. From here a figure or still life could be subject to a punish abstraction by a matrix of lines. At its height their analytical work only just holds onto its attachment to an image. We can only just make out a figure and its action amongst the mass of lines which decorate the surface. The crucial fact is we still can. At this point they were hanging over the edge, capable of descending into the abyss of abstraction without a tiny push. Crucially they changed direction. They turned to collage and what would be known as the synthetic period. The construction of an image from abstract elements rather than the destruction of an image towards abstract elements. What this reveals is that they are not interested in abstraction but in the power of representation. They are interested in stretching the power of the image to breaking point, to show how little we need to recognise a particular image. To ignore this visual fact and place them as part of a rise to abstraction is foolish and misinformed.
Museums
At this stage I was going to look into Museums and how they control meaning and perpetuate false narratives. I did not have time to cover this in the lecture, however, so will miss it out here. I feel it is a significant enough area of research to perhaps dedicate a whole (or perhaps half) lecture two later in the year. The Louvre and the Moma are two particular prisons of meaning I would like to look at.
Whilst, as shown above, doubts were raised about the narratives; we had to wait a while until any alternative vision of the past was offered. Before considering these new approaches it is worth summarising the first half of the lecture.
We have looked at how Canonical values support Kantian notions of aesthetic judgment. They provide sets of absolute rules by which we can measure art. As such there is good and bad art and History seems to have its highs and lows. We are able to judge the work of art in purely visual and formal terms. In this system the connoisseur rules, making opinions and value judgements on what can be seen alone.
A Hegelian Approach to value.
Locating a particular moment in which society changed its approach is precarious and simplistic. It can certainly be stated, however, that a series of critical events throughout the 1960’s provided the foundations for a sector of society to re-evaluate the way it was both constructed and operates. This is not a lecture in history, so the need to go into any depth on the specifics of these events is limited. Needless to say, however, that Western approaches to gender, race and class were challenged more thoroughly than ever before, due to the weight of actual political and social action. The call for change had come out of the library and lecture halls and into the streets, quite literally.
What was seen was a society who’s who system and beliefs were constructed on false, myopic and bankrupt notions. The paradigm, which had survived untouched, was in need of a seismic shift. Whether that shift has or will ever happen is a question of social and political scholars. In this instance all we are concerned about is the new field of inquiry it opened up in the field of visual culture.
The greatest impact has been in the manner in which are is judged. For these new scholars no longer is it central and it is anything but absolute, autonomous and free of association to the world outside its ‘frame’. Art was now judged in relative terms, in how it came from, comments on and relates to other doctrines. Gender studies, sociological thought and ethnic studies all began to ask new probing questions. Art was a tool for these other disciplines and its value was judged by what it tells us about them.
Feminism/Gender Studies
Most people today have little time for feminism. This is perhaps why many people who come from that discipline prefer the term gender studies. Feminism has got to much baggage, people have a naïve image of it in there head so dismiss it unfairly. The change of name might initially appear to be nothing more than pussy footing political correctness. In this instance, however, it is necessary as it provides a more neutral entrance to a vital area of enquiry.
Whatever preconceptions we have about gender studies tend to be unfair. It is a complex, diverse and faceted field of research. It is without incredibly worthwhile and more importantly relevant. For every piece of related literature which says one thing there is a dissenting voice coming from another angle. So to dismiss it and its contributors as a singular and tired voice is ludicrous. There still exist bizarre and troubling gender perceptions within our society; from the ideological to the more tangible effects on the everyday.
As previous stated, however, this is not a lecture in social science, gender studies, philosophy or any other similar doctrine. So rather than focus on the literature I want to see the kinds of questions it has raised and interventions it has made to visual culture itself. I want to take specific case studies and focus our attention on those works, but with the enquiry being directed by questions of gender.
Gender and form
“The Florentine ideal of beauty has found its exemplary expression in statues of proudly erect David’s, the Venetian in paintings of recumbent Venuses”
Panofsky’s statement about the differences between Venetian and Florentine Renaissance art are in many ways simplistic and open to discussion but they point to an interesting notion. Florentine art, the Vasarian ideal, was equated with design, with plastic firmness and drawn line and on a more general level with being explicably masculine. Veneitian art on the contrary is put forward as being about the act of painting (colorito, the verb to colour, not colour itself) about the sensuous and beautiful, in simple terms the female. It is interesting to see that critics aligned form and style with a specific gender. The artists seemingly did as well, with those drawn to a certain aesthetic seeming to also focus on the related gender.
If we compare Michelangelo’s ‘David’ to Titian’s ‘Venus of Urbino’ then we see the ultimate incarnation and evidence of Panofskys argument. Whilst the statement make generalisations about artists it is certainly accurate in its revelations about certain formal attachments society has given to male and female types.
WILL INSERT IMAGES LATER
Look around the National gallery and see how many of the women are both nude and reclining. The submissive horizontal line, echoing landscape and nature; calm and accepting and seemingly focused on beauty over action.
In comparison look to Michelangelo’s David, a classic male type in art. Like most he is erect, phallic, powerful, vertical and celebrating some athletic and muscular victory over evil.
The types exist, like it or not. To an even greater degree the vertical as a symbol seems to be exclusively male and the horizontal female. Look to any city at the iconic buildings, normally tall and erect, displaying their verticality. Generally they celebrate the power and dominance of a patriarchal society. The type which is described by Panofsky has survived through time in many forms.
In response we need to question the very modes by which society has come to attach certain ideals, and visuals, to each of the sexes. Is this correct? Should this survive? Should this be challenged and subverted? Is it, as Freud would perhaps suggest, a part of our psychosexual make up?
The role of women in art
Linda Nochlin was one of the first people to realise a mammoth imbalance in the role of women in art. She noticed that women, generally nude, seemed to fill most of the canvases in our historical galleries. Conversely, however, almost all the pictures were made by man not women. In art history the man has been privileged with the label of master and genius and the woman merely allowed to be subjected to the gaze of said genius. Such pictures even seem exclusively made for a male spectator.
Before Nochlin, however, artists like Manet were starting to create work which questioned the role of the female inside the canvas. We shall look at an example of this in his ‘Olympia’ 1863. Remember that this is the same work Greenberg talked about in entirely formal terms. His discussion revolved around its flatness and its contribution towards the rise of abstraction. Its subject matter and content, the role of the female, were not questions he asked; a gender study does. In looking at the same work from these two standpoints we can appreciate how doctrines which celebrate absolute value and those which celebrate relative value approach and discover very different things about a visual.
WILL INSERT IMAGES LATER
A few years before painting ‘Olympia’ (1863) Manet did a copy of Titian’s ‘Venus of Urbino’ (1538). If we needed any more conclusive proof that the later work explicitly quotes the former than this is it. Quotations in art are not rare, and often they don’t mean anything. An artist may borrow a pose of a figure because he sees the potential in it for some other end, outside of its original context. In this instance its original use does not matter, as it is not making any kind of commentary or opening up any discussion with its source. It would not matter if it came from a newspaper of a masterpiece. In ‘Olympia’ its relation to ‘Venus of Urbino’ is so clear that a comparison of the two is crucial to a discovery of what Manet was challenging.
Compare the two nudes poses and faces. From a submissive come to bed dreamy hazy eyed glance to a confrontational, aggressive glare. From a reclining, smooth, welcoming, flowing, beautiful awaiting nude to an upright, flat, stark and self confident pose. From a women ready and willing to welcome the man to one who is self assured and in control.
What about the sleeping dog as compared to the wide awake cat. Think ichnographically. What does the cute little dog suggest? Loyalty? That the person who has arrived is not a stranger? If so then what about the cat? Fear? Aggression for the visitor? Even a possible sexual dimension. Manet was fully aware of the visual pun, which does not get lost in translation, between a pussy and female genitally.
What the comparison suggests is a very different relationship between the figure and the implied visitor/spectator in front of the bed/canvas. For Titian it seems to be a relationship between two consenting individuals who know and are familiar. A goddess and a mortal in a utopian world, a husband and wife? Whatever the case, this seems to be a scene of love and beauty. For Manet the suggestion is of a sexual encounter between strangers. The servant presenting a gift which seems to support a prostitute client relationship.
What about he hands. In Titian’s work she seems to be masturbating, so submissive as to be preparing for the arrival of the man. Manet women, instead, presents a blocked door too desire.
What this tells us about changing roles of women in art is pretty clear. Suddenly hey have more freedom, more authority. Still subjected to live inside the frame, but no longer the sleep and suppliant recipient in singular terms. They have a certain, if peculiar, amount of independence.
If interested in a wider discussion of this painting in this sense go to T. J. Clarke. He has written about fifty very good pages on it.
Flesh and Paint
I shall not dwell on this area of the lecture, as we will be having a series of talks later in the year on the materiality and meaning of paint itself. If you remember I made the link between a history of painterly painters and there general tendency to paint and delight in the female flesh. Da kooning stated that flesh is the reason oil paint was invented. When we look from Titian, to Rubens, to Velasquez, Delacroix, Manet, Freud, Saville and beyond the argument is persuasive.
For each of these artists a correlation and joint delight seems to be had in paint itself and flesh itself. The way paint can be pulled and stretched over a surface akin to the way we might take a sensuous delight in flesh and skin. The very visceral, malleable properties of both has a seductive and sexual quality which seems to unite them.
As I say, I shall expand upon the relevance of such a thought in later lectures.
The returned Gaze
Picasso’s ‘Les Demoiselles d’Avignon’ 1907
vs
Inges ‘Turkish Bath’ 1860’s
WILL INSERT IMAGES LATER
The comparison between these two works is between types, rather than specifics. Ingres’ Turkish bath represents a type which was consistent in most art prior to the 20th century. A group of nude bathing women who we, as the spectator, can look in on. WE look as voyeurs, secretly, with them unaware of our gaze and unable to return it. The relationship is hierarchical and one dimensional.
Picasso violently challenges this. All five of his nude women confront us with aggression. The figure on the right has her back to us but also looks out at us. It’s as if her head has been ripped of its axis and turned around 180 degrees to face us; a violent act to disturb and remind us of the confrontation. The returned gaze is given extra edge but the way we no longer have sinuous curving lines but sharp geometric edges slicing through the picture plane. There is also no place to hide, to horizon to disappear of into. One point perspective gives way to a shallow picture plane which assaults our eyes from every angle. No longer sensuous naturalistic colour, instead bold clashes of pinks and blues. From beauty to brutality.
All of which makes a mockery of the mass of early literature on this work. The rise of formalist thought (so the kind of thing we looked at in the first half of the lecture with Greenberg) created an environment where this work was disguised in purely formal terms. It deconstruction and attack on previous ways of seeing, its use of line and colour. It contribution to Cubism and hence abstraction. All the formal observations are valid and true, but there is a function to the formal and style, it is not the pictures meaning or value. The style gives the subject matter its edge, its attack, its brutality. This subject matter cannot be ignored. Five whores looking out at us and confronting us. Our privileged detached positioned destroyed. A phallic like table piercing the divide of the bottom horizontal. The line which separates is now pierced by a bridge which unites and unsettles. The way in which said table pierces a collection of fruit merely emphasizes the sexual nature of the piece. All of these questions are central to the works discussion, yet were ignored for so long.
This painting is not a closed door. It is not autonomous. It cannot just be judge on its aesthetic and on its formal content. We need to make connections, association, to see how these internal things relate to external less tangible and invisible notions. We need to remarry form to content.
Art and centre fold
Much of the discussion to this point has shown up the value systems of the female body in Western art. A natural continuation of this idea sees many of these supposed masterpieces as nothing more than centre folds disguised as high art. A soft core pornography veiled in craft for the titillation of rich and monarchical patrons. Titian’s poesie, and particular his Danae (painted for Phillip II of Spain in the 1550’s) is a classic example of a work that has been cast of as a centre fold of sorts. I shall focus some attention on it too hopefully show how an approach which dismisses this and similar works as pornography is limited and false.
One of two poles of extremism is a reading which sees the work as singularly erotic. This reductive analysis sees the display of female flesh, and its seductive effect, as the end of interpretation. Documentation of letters sent between Phillip and Titian, discussing the desire to see females form multiple angles, is used by Hope to argue for an interpretation of the series as one of soft core pornography hidden under the veil of high art methods.
The Danae painting sent to Phillip before 1554, most likely the Danae with Nurse in the Prado, is generally considered to be one of the most frankly erotic of all Titians paintings. The marginally less erotic Farensse Danae was described, by a contemporary, as making the Venus of Urbino look like a Thetian Nun in comparison.
The painting is certainly highly erotic:
The sulphurous flesh, shimmering and vibrating. The suggestively spread legs, the painting hand on the inner thigh to ease Jove’s entry, the desire filled gaze, the use of light as a metaphor for both Jove’s arrival and a celestial orgasm,
the thematic contrapposto between the nurses old age and Danae’s naked beauty. All elements which stir the sense of the viewer just as they had those of Jove.
Eroticism and pornography are two very different things, however. Pornography is surely always singularly erotic. A pornographic image will never reach beyond this base animalistic level. Surely eroticism can be involved but merely be the start of interpretation.
In Danae the eroticism seems to be what starts both the internal and external involvement. The eroticism is what draws us into Dane’s realm, just as it had drawn in Jove. It is the device which is central to the narrative plot and also to our emotive involvement in the plot. Rather than objective distance the eroticism pulls us in, collapses the gap between the painted and real realm and allows us to be intimately involved in the dynamics of the dramatic moment.
A reading which search for pornography seems myopically reductive. In another strand of research there are those who search for high minded allegorical readings. They see the work as containing and pointing towards deep moral codes. This seems an expansive reading too far, the projection of intellectual reason onto the work. One seems to look at too superficial a level, the other to think at too high a level. Rather than pornography and philosophy is there not a phrase to cover both ends of the interpretive spectrum; ‘poetry.’ In light of the fact Titian called this work (and the series of which it was a part) ‘poesie’ (painted poetry as such) this suggestion seems plausible. For poetry is the art form which can take in all elements of life, from the erotic to the intellectual without contradiction. To limit a reading to one or the other is to miss the subtlety and depth of Titian’s vision.
Female practical interventions
The new approaches to art history raised by gender studies also demanded that artists, and women in particular, find new ways of working, new values, to reclaiming fine art for themselves. To challenge previous assumptions and to form new value judgements. We did not get much time to go into this in the lecture, so I have written this up very much in note form with a few names of people you might want to look into. Much of this work reclaims the female body and makes it, at times quite literally, a site of discussion.
Sarah Lucas- the play on witty puns. Her table where the Kebab stands in place of her sex and two scrambled eggs represent her breasts. Humour and reference to a crude ladish culture see her make commentaries on sexual identify in the last 20th Century.
Orlan- This French artist is fascinated with the way we feel the need to conform to certain images of beauty. She is an extreme but interest practitioner. She has undergone plastic surgery many times as aprt of her art work. Her body becomes the stage, the gallery and the canvas of theoretical and ideological discussion. She has bizarre and odd changes made to question the way in which society makes us behave and look. A cheek made excessively large, part of the face moved or changed shape to almost alien proportions. She is prepared to manipulate and deform her body to communicate her message.
Cindy Sherman- documents work in photographic form dresses up in various roles, challenges assumption and presumption of female types.
Saville- challenges gender and body image types, using the nature and medium of paint, its fleshy qualities and turns it on its head. Gargantuan, succulent and repulsive, like objects on a plinth
Emin- He stitch work is of particular interest. She takes something with clear gender association, the twee, the craft like, the mother making patch work quilts. She constructs similar things but then puts images and phrases which are both personal and graphic on them. She thus turns the medium back in on itself, subverting our presumptions and challenging social and sexual associations. We shall look at Emin more and how the sexual, the personal and gender types are central to her work. Her ‘My Bed’ and her Tent are both very interesting pieces which deal with issues perhaps first raised by feminist literature. No other artist seems to so blatantly put her personal life and sexuality at the centre of her work.
We shall look into a more extensive list of female artists who challenge these notions at a later date. It is worth a whole lecture.
Pollock – another view part one
We previously saw how Pollock represents the pinnacle of Greenbergs formalism- a work of abstraction which comments on nothing outside of itself. I wish to demonstrate, however, how it is possible to read certain associations into his work. The supposed closed door can be opened.
Harold Rosenberg- INSERT QUOTE. (I will upload this quote later)
Rosenberg talks about the canvas becoming a stage, presenting itself to one painter after another as a theatrical space in which to act. He positions the process of painting at the centre of interpretation. The object, thus, becomes merely a record of the artists performance. I want to take this notion as the foundation for a new look at Pollock’s drip paintings.
Namuth photos
The famous photos of Pollock in action reveal the physicality of his act. The canvas lay bare across the floor, the painter dancing from side to side, splattering his house hold paints across the entire surface with a vigour and energy not previously seen. Consider the muscularity, the energy, the masculinity of the whole performance. As if he is saying, I am Jackson Pollock, this is me, and this is my performance.
When we consider the psychosexual potential of the performance, of the act, of the material and the final object, certain connections present themselves to us. His brush in his had seems merely an extension of his arm. He uses it to project his ego, his manhood, in visual form. It thus seems to become a metaphorical extension of his penis. The splatter of paint on a skin of canvas? We have already seen the sensuous sexual potential of paint as a medium, and in this context the paint seems to take on that role. The dripping and splattering over a surface, the very arrogance of it all seems to be like a self satisfied continuous ejaculation.
Tenuous? The projection of sexual meaning? Perhaps. But what I want to demonstrate is how when we come from another angle, when we take another discipline of way of thinking we open up the work to new areas of value. It no longer is a work just about paint, no longer is it singular or closed in associations. It has the potential for greater depth and variety, regardless of whether we think this particular reading is valid. (As a note I am still looking for the excellent essay which first proposed such a reading to me. If I find it I shall upload it as it put the point across far better than I do, with more subtlety, sophistication and conviction.
Marxism
Marxism is a strand of theoretical and political practice derived from the work of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. A strand is perhaps an inaccurate word for a foundation of ideals which has given birth to a theoretical metropolis of action and thought. Its validity, effects and importance in all walks of life, both positive and negative, is not something we need to consider here. What we need to focus our attention on is the doors opened by Marxism for a critique of visual culture and the foundations of our value judgments.
Hausser is normally cited as the first social art historian. It is T. J. Clark, however, who has had the biggest impact and influence on our perception of meaning and value. Clark is a fantastically brilliant writer, able to captivate and convince in the articulation of new and complex ideas.
Clarke sees art as having no absolute value. It’s meaning its relation to its socio political context. The two for him, as for Hegel, are symbiotic. We can only understand the art by placing it back in this context. What he looks to do is rediscover the conditions of its production and consumption. That being the situation and environment in which it was created and also in which it was received.
We will address certain specific aspects of his approach in the second lecture on semiotics. For now I wish to go of on a tangent and apply his approach to the YBA’s. I want to demonstrate the type of questions it causes to ask and the kind of findings made. The search for and discovery of meaning being very different to anything else we have come across.
The film Live Forever documents the parallel rise of British culture and New Labour in the 1990’s. Its cultural focus is on music but some attention is given to the new wave of art coming out of Britain, Hirst et al.
What it does is demonstrate an analysis of culture similar to Clark. We don’t judge the music or the art on its own terms. It is not about he formal elements, be in form and colour or melody and rhythm. It is about the socio political context in which they were breed. It is an ideological form of research. Rather than autonomous culture is judged in relative terms.
The film recaptures the new sense of freedom and energy in British culture. Artists like Hirst started to become independent, to organize shows in random warehouses and take control. In music Britpop saw an explosion of exciting pop music, first suggested by the Stone Roses but epitomized by Oasis. The energy of their debut album, ‘definitely maybe’ seemed to capture the mood of a nation. A collection of songs about wanting to escape the constraints of the city, to start a band, become famous and get wasted along the way. There was a freshness and sense of excitement surrounding it all. It felt like something special was happening. As if the ‘constraints’ of a country still ‘paralyzed’ by Thatcherism was finally raising to the new millennium with genuine purpose.
The film equates the cultural rise with that of New Labour. A sense of change, the sense of a freshness and energy that Tony Blair and his party seemed to embody. Believe it or not now, many people felt a real sense of optimism.
The most direct comparison made is between Oasis’s release of ‘Be Here Now’ and New Labour being elected to power, both in 1997. In both cases the expectations were incredibly high. Records were broken all over the place, from No. 10 Downing street to HMV. What followed was a huge sense of disappointment, a realization that the reality did not live up to the hype. The quick selling album in history also became the most returned album in history. In fans heads it would confirm Oasis as the greatest thing in music since that Beatles shaped loaf of sliced bread. In reality it was a collection of overblown songs written by a band spending far too long sniff lines of coke instead of making music. The disappointment of New Labour was not as immediate but had a sense of symmetry about it. Broken promises, an obsession with statistics, change which brought about more bureaucracy but not greater quality, a leader concerned with a place in history and the Iraq war.
Opinions on or details of these various points is not important. What is important is an appreciation of the methodology. It judges and discusses the work in regards to its socio political context. The Irony, I feel, is that the work itself, be it the artwork or music, seems to be forgotten. It seems to be harnessed as a tool for some other agenda. The specifics are left behind as larger ideological issues are given priority.
Jackson Pollock
Again I have purposely picked Pollock’s drip paintings to discuss. This is no coincidence having already discussed him in formal terms and with regards to gender issues. I want to address him from a Marxist point of view to reassert the notion of the art object as a container of multiple, rather than singular, meaning. Also to demonstrate how the same object can be measured and valued in such different ways and with such different results.
Clark sees Pollock’s work as the cultural dimension of America’s cold war effort. Without going into depth I want to see how this idea works. Clark compares Pollock’s work with that being produced in Russia. There lots of the produce is state controlled; propagandist images to reinforce a particular image of the country and the people. Clark says that Pollock’s drip painting represent the very different social system of America. The freedom is has which allows him to make mammoth paintings which just display lines of paint splattered over the surface conveys the freedom and independence of American citizens. The sheer scale of the work reminds us of American power, so often displayed through sheer size.
In this discussion we form a measure of value by what the work tells us about this very particular moment in history. The notion that it is a physical embodiment of the zeitgeist seems to come through, as if through this work we can find a theoretical portal to the ideological landscape of a very particular time and place. The irony is obvious. A work which is supposedly about nothing outside of its, which has total autonomy, has become totally valued in relative terms. Its intrinsic worth has disappeared as it becomes a functional tool in the search for wider meaning.
Non Western approaches to art
A host of scholars find fault with previous approaches to visual culture on the grounds of the implication of eternal singular values. This reveals itself in the manner in which Western society had felt comfortable with a system which judged non western work by our own values. Central to this discussion is the notion of Primitivism.
Primitivism
Primitivism is one half of a binary opposition. Certain notions only have meaning due to their relation to an opposing notion. We cannot understand what up is without have a concept of down, the same goes with past/future, male/female, in/out and so on. The opposite of the primitive is the civilised. We see our society as the civilised present. This presumes that we have evolved from rude beginnings. It is a social strand of Darwinian thought. It suggests that over time and through history we have not just change but improved, as if gradually moving towards a purer state. One of the places this is supposedly revealed is in culture.
The notion of Primitivism comes to light in objects such as African masks. Imperial expansion took French and British empires to new and unknown places. In Africa as we spread we pillaged any object of interest. A whole host of masks made there way back to our museums. There they were all categorised as one.
We judged the masks by our own absolute values. As such we saw them as fitting in with the crude and naive production of our ancient ancestors. Look at Picasso’s reference to them in his 1907 Les Demoisselles d’Avignon. In his assault on classical values the African mask is the very symbol of a base point in our cultural past.
By judging them like this we presume that we have progressed from A to B but that African culture has remained still, stuck in some edenic moment in time. It’s a patronising belief that they will follow the same clear linear path, searching for similar goals, but have not yet been sophisticated enough to do so.
What it ignores is the fact that non western cultures have formed equally as sophisticated but very different sets of values by which to judge art. To understand the true value of such objects we need to relocate them in their original cultural context.
Take, for instance, Aboriginal paintings. Many of them appear to be non representational, what we would call abstract. They have been collected and discussed in the same terms we discussed Pollock in the first half of the lecture; the use of line, the creation and placing of form, the decoration of surface, patterning and all other formal aspects. Judging them by our own criteria is to misunderstand the work. For the Aborigines they often have specific and multi layered r4epresentaional meaning. They may tell stories or sets of beliefs in code forms which can only be revealed when passed from elders to younger generations. They might speak of ritual dances, of dream like states or certain complex belief systems. They are anything but abstract; they are some of the most complex and faceted containers of meaning in visual culture.
Concluding points
We have looked at various and contradictory approaches to find value in visual culture. Some which believe in absolute value and some in relative value. If the two are two exist in union we have to except that a work of art is like a container. It can be filled and emptied with a range of liquids/meaning without contradiction. The container will always stay the same, and it will define and control our reading of a work.
At the end of the lecture I showed you three diagrams. (will draw and upload these) One showed a Kantian approach, the isolate object. The belief that nothing exists outside of the aesthetic and all value can be understood by what is seen. The second diagram showed a series of other doctrines at the centre of our discussion. From here a mass of lines spread, one of which went to the art object. It was to suggest the notion that the object has been decentralised, and is not only valued by its ability to informa dn tell us about the centralised doctrine.
The former fails as it ignores clear associations that do exit in art. The later fails as the work of art seems to have been virtually forgotten. One looks blinded and myopically at the detail and the other seems to forget what is at it’s feet in search for the great meaning on the horizon.
If we are two find true value we need to marry the two. The object needs to be re-centralised but an acceptance need to be made that it has profound and important associations to many other disciplines, that it cannot be divorced from these connections. We must constantly fluctuate between what is seen and what is known, the specific and the general. Only then can we hope to form any sense, however vague or elusive, of true value.
(I apologise now for the gradual lose of quality in the writing. I went into far to much depth and thus this write up has taken far to long, so I have had to rush it to an extent. In future I shall provide briefer write ups but of a higher standard in writing.. hopefully.)
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
