my art
Rado Vleugel
expanded my Art Site with more paintings and some quotes of my thoughts.
The Rado Vleugel Art site has also a new URL.
Come visit my Art Site to see the paintings and sign my guestbook :
http://www.angelcities.com/members/radov/
Greetings;
Rado Vleugel
kin...@hfwork1.tn.tudelft.nl
> Come visit my Art Site to see the paintings and sign my guestbook :
> http://www.angelcities.com/members/radov/
I'd love too... but only if you can fix it so it doesn't
crash my browser. Showing me a few pictures using some
basic HTML shoudn't be too tricky.
#Paul
rado_v...@my-deja.com
All my friends don't have any problem to access my site.
Maybe you can download the latest Netscape or Explorer browser.
Cheers,
Rado
Sent via Deja.com http://www.deja.com/
Before you buy.
brandon...@my-deja.com
kin...@hfwork1.tn.tudelft.nl
> cythera wrote:
>> http://www.angelcities.com/members/radov/swan.html
> I like this one also.
OK, so my browser didn't crash this time. I like swan.html
too, although I prefer the fish one (colors.html).
#Paul
brandon...@my-deja.com
> I don't see what makes them surreal, or surrealistic.
Perhaps we should ask the artist about his painting process.
> Will you and anyone else who cares to, please explain why (for
> instance) the fish painting, or the painting of a girl writing near
> a nebula, is of a surreal or surrealistic nature (or not)?
I can't speak for all of the paintings, but I don't see how the swan
picture can be taken as not being surrealist, unless, of course, it was
conciously premeditated with symbolic meaning, etc. It really is no
different than if I were to collage together the words "A flower
watching a woman kissing a swan."
> I realize that Rado called himself a "surrealist artist" and don't
> know what that means to him.
Will he be willing to share?
> But there are distinct qualities of surreal/istic visual art. Besides
> the juxtaposition of disparate images, what makes an artwork surreal?
No. There are no surrealist quilities that one must accumulate to
become a Surrealist. It is simply about the process in which the art is
created. I have a feeling that Rado uses figure models as a starting
point, but then works from them, he is inspired from them, to create
the surrounding images.
> I've noticed that some critics can't even understand (or explain) the
> images they include in their books.
As a former Art History student I've ran into this many times. I took
several seminar classes on Surrealism is college and I felt like I had
to restate what Surrealism really is to the class and the professor
every class, after they had gotten confused by some critic who hates
Surrealism to begin with.
Dale Houstman
<brandon...@my-deja.com> wrote in message
news:8omll0$ks3$1...@nnrp1.deja.com...
>
> As a former Art History student I've ran into this many times. I took
> several seminar classes on Surrealism is college and I felt like I had
> to restate what Surrealism really is to the class and the professor
> every class, after they had gotten confused by some critic who hates
> Surrealism to begin with.
>
there. There was one professor who had even written a long collage novel of
seeming "surrealist" quailty, but revealed not only his ignorance of but
disdain for surrealism on a daily basis while I was in his class. At one
point he commented that he preferred the "realism" of Dickens, and I went to
some lengths to explain that (1) surrealism is NOT un-realism and that (2)
Dickens is no more a "realist" than Kafka. But these misunderstandings are
to be borne in the main, because the attitude is so prevalent.
dmh
brandon...@my-deja.com
> What I meant is, what are _surreal or surrealistic_ qualities of
> visual art (am I misusing these terms?), and not what are surrealist
> qualities (qualities that indicate the artist has surrealism as her
> or his strange attractor).
Maybe we should ask Nik. No, nevermind that. So basically you could be
asking what are the qualities of psuedo-Surrealism? But, maybe you're
asking what does an art critic consider Surrealist (even tough they are
ignorant to what Surrealism is)?
In my opinion psuedo-Surrealism is an attempt at imitating freedom in a
constrant form (ala Dali). On the appearance you may not notice the
difference, but the motives behind the two are very different and are
divided by one artist's honesty versus another artist's manipulative
tendencies.
Now, what most art critics consider Surreal or Surrealistic draws back
to what the individual art critic knows about Surrealism. An art critic
who is more familiar with Dali or Ernst may never understand why Miro
or Masson are Surrealist. Since Dali, Magritte, and Ernst are the three
most visible Surrealist artists it is no wonder why those who are first
introduced to Surrealist art scratch their head at Miro. I think what
art historians see as being Surreal or Surrealistic stems from the
popularity of the three artists mentioned. Any attempt at imitating
them, like in a music video, is consider Surreal (when its actually
psuedo-Surrealist).
> what most people know about surrealism is certain visual _images_ ...
> and thus tend to get surrealism confused with the "bizarre" image,
> sci-fi/fantasy art which has seemed to grow out of Dali's style, and
> general hallucinogenia.
Exactly.
brandon...@my-deja.com
> What is it in the swan painting's appearance that makes it
> surrealist? (I agree that it is, btw.)
I'm not sure. I guess because I can't imagine it being consciously
produced. I can't pick it a part, at the moment, and say that this
symbolizes that, or exhibit any proof that it was consciously produced.
Maybe the artist is making reference to a myth? In that case it
wouldn't be Surrealist. But, if he was only aware of the images
connection to a myth after it creating, than it would be Surrealist ---
wasn't there a myth about Zues turning into a Swan?
> I'm also wondering what if it were sold and used in an ad? Would it
> still be "surrealist"?
Yes. Unfortunately.
brandon...@my-deja.com
> Hmmm, but what about Max Ernst's "The Virgin Spanking the Christ
> Child before Three Witnesses: Andre Breton, Paul Eluard, and the
> Painter"?
I would say its more Ernst-Dada than anything. Its also, now that I
think about it, possibly an example of detournement.
brandon...@my-deja.com
> Oh, thank you for your help. I had never studied this, and wasn't
> sure what "detournement" means.
I'm new to "detournement" myself, and I'm starting to see it
everywhere. Am I hallucinating?
:)
Oh, here are some old quotes I forgot about dealing with Surrealism and
art. Maybe they will shed some light on the topic we've been discussing:
“The very narrow concept of imitation which art has been given as its
aim is at the roots of the grave misunderstanding that has managed to
perpetuate itself right up to the modern era. In the belief that man is
only capable of reproducing with any degree of felicity the image of
something that moves him, painters have shown themselves far too
conciliatory in their choice of models. The error lay in thinking that
the model could only be selected from the external world, or, less
dogmatically, that the model could legitimately be selected from that
world. Certainly human sensibility is capable of conferring an entirely
unforeseen distinction upon even the most vulgar-looking object; none
the less, to make the magic power of figuration with which certain
people are endowed serve the purpose of preserving and reinforcing what
would exist without them anyway, is to make wretched use of that power.
In fact it constitutes an inexcusable abdication. It is unthinkable, in
any case, at the present state of development of thought structure,
when the external world, in particular, seems increasingly suspect, to
agree to submit any longer to such a sacrifice. In order to respond to
the necessity, upon which all serious minds now agree, for a total
revision of real values, the plastic work of art will either refer to a
purely internal model or will cease to exist” (Breton, Surrealism and
Painting, p. 4).
“In the field of art, a work can be considered surrealist only in
proportion to the efforts the artist has made to encompass the whole
psychophysical field (in which the field of consciousness constitutes
only a very small segment). Freud has demonstrated that at these
unfathomable depths there reigns the absence of contradiction, the
relaxation of emotional tensions due to repression, a lack of the sense
of time, and the replacement of external reality by a psychic reality
obeying the pleasure principle alone. Automatism leads us in a straight
line to this region. The other road available to surrealism to reach
its objective, the stabilizing of dream images in the kind of still-
life deception known as trompe-l’œil (and the very word ‘deception’
betrays the weakness of the process), has been proved by experience to
be far less reliable and even presents very real risks of the traveller
losing his way altogether” (Breton, “Artistic Genesis and Perspective
of Surrealism” in Surrealism and Painting, p. 70).
“True art—--art that does not merely produce variations on ready-made
models but strives to express the inner needs of man and of mankind as
they are today—--cannot be anything other than revolutionary: it must
aspire to a complete and radical reconstruction of society, if only to
free intellectual creation from the chains that bind it and to allow
all mankind to climb those heights that only isolated geniuses have
reached in the past” (Breton, “Manifesto for an Independent
Revolutionary Art,” in Free Rein, p. 30).
“When they first hear about surrealism, many people want to know what
is the criterion by which to decide whether or not a visual work can be
regarded as surrealist. Is it necessary to repeat that this criterion
is not an aesthetic one? Very roughly, we can say that surrealism in
art is limited by ‘realism’ on the one hand, by ‘abstractionism’ on the
other. Nonsurrealist (and in our view regressive in this day and age)
is any work that focuses on the daily spectacle of beings and things,
that is, everything that inheres immediately in the animal, vegetable,
mineral fixtures of our environment even if it should be made visually
unrecognizable by means of ‘distortion.’ The surrealist work of art
resolutely excludes anything that results from simple perception,
whatever intellectual speculation may be grafted onto it in order to
alter its appearance . . . Nonsurrealist also (and, despite its
modernistic pretensions, implying, as we see it, a profound abdication
of human desire on account of its arbitrary reduction to certain needs
of exclusively spatial and ‘musical’ nature) is any work dubbed
nonobjective and nonrepresentational, that is to say, at odds as well
with prior physical perception as with prior mental representation
(which surrealism, while emphasizing the latter, is precisely trying to
reconcile)” (Breton, “Surrealist Comet,” in Free Rein, p. 92-3).
“Centuries from now, any art that takes new paths toward a greater
emancipation of the mind will be Surrealist,” (Breton, Conversations,
p. 238).
“But surrealist painters, who are poets, always think of something
else. The unprecedented is familiar to them, premeditation unknown.
They are aware that the relationships between things fade as soon as
they are established, to give place to other relationships just as
fugitive. They know that no description is adequate, that nothing can
be reproduced literally. They are all animated by the same striving to
liberate the vision, to unite imagination and nature, to consider all
possibilities a reality, to prove to us that no dualism exists between
the imagination and reality, that everything the human spirit can
conceive and create springs from the same vein, is made of the same
matter as his flesh and blood, and the world around him” (Paul
Éluard, “Poetic Evidence” in Herbert Read's Surrealism, p. 175).
Parry
Unless you're being ironic, I disagree. I would say “no.” For example, a
Magritte painting used to sell computers is no longer a surrealist
image; the content of the image becomes less relevant than the fact that
it has been yoked to the task of advertising. On the other side, there
are images in advertising which are surrealist through inadvertence --
like the housewife who fetishizes a cleaning product, and so is an
inadvertent commentary on gender roles, phobic cleanliness, and the
vacuity of the ideal home. (And what’s with that ad with the wife
pouring a pitcher of water on her dinner guests’ chicken?) So I would
say the surrealist value of images can be measured by their capacity to
free us from the cages.
-- Parry
-----= Posted via Newsfeeds.Com, Uncensored Usenet News =-----
http://www.newsfeeds.com - The #1 Newsgroup Service in the World!
-----== Over 80,000 Newsgroups - 16 Different Servers! =-----
kin...@hfwork1.tn.tudelft.nl
> Perhaps we should ask the artist about his painting process.
I was in Brussels yesterday, and went to the Museum of Modern
Art[1] with all the Magritte stuff in it. It's always nice
to see the originals of such things, even if often a good
reproduction in a book is sufficient to get the idea.
Although the "Empire of Light" postcard in the gallery shop
really did little justice to the original. Although probably
saomewhat less violence to the original that the
"Pre-Raphaelite Cats" calendar did to pre-Raphaelites, I
suspect.
Anyway, there were a number of painting by some other guy,
Devaux (or something like that), who I dont seem to have
noticed before. Anyway, at sight they may have been
nominally surrealist, but at least from the ones on show, he
seemed to have been mostly interested in painting nekkid
chix. Still, if it's the _process_ which counts ;-)
#Paul
[1] Or the Musee de Roi Something Something, actually.
rado_v...@my-deja.com
Thanks for your response and advise.
Rado