What Modernism Did for Painting
Marilyn
accepted yet but the following quote tries to explain what
Modernism did for painting.
From the catalogue to Maury Baden's "A Choreography of the Ordinary"
Baden is a sculptor. It is written by Robert Hollot-Kentor.
"The challenge to the allusion of aestheitc autonomy in the 1st
part of this century to any claim that illusion can be meaningful
in itself, and by implication to the illusion that anything,
stone and character, included, survives death, not only undermined
the capacity for concentration it caused sudden sometimes progressive
disgorning of the aesthetic process, the whole of its contents.
(ref: "Aesthetic Theory," Theodor Adorno & Walter Benjamin)
This can be seen for instance in the way that painting was pulled
into sculpture's gravitational orbit, as in the reversal of
Cezanne's much thought about fruit [painted from wax models].
The canvas finally burst under the literal weight it had come to bear.
Not least of which tumbled out were all the miseries and frights of
history, the dumb cruelties, tortures, and humiliations stored up in art,
The day-in-day-out of it, the display of women, the traumas that
art once re-enacted and mollified, all were sent packing, to walk the
streets on their own, factually, no longer as memory of what occurred,
but as the occurences, the acts, the traumas themselves
CAPABLE OF BEING PHOTOGRAPHED. [my emphasis]."
When I read that paragraph, I can see the pages of my art history
books turning. It marks for me the transition to modernism in painting.
It frees painting to be itself, and to be poetic.
Marilyn
John Haber
Hollot-Kentor's argument interesting and strange it is that one
naturally thinks the opposite must be true. A break with illusion is,
after all, also a kind of striving after esthetic autonomy. Reality
goes out the perspectival window, one can argue. And that was exactly
the critical party line about Modernism for a long while.
I like his reversal, although I wonder if he's playing with words a
bit, moving from break with an artistic practice (illusion) to break
with art as intrinsic value. And I don't buy assimilating painting
into sculpture. First thing to go is sculpture's autonomy as object
of contemplation by an unmoved viewer out in ideal land. Can there be
some interest involved here? He's writing about a sculptor, some time
after Minimalism made sculpture kinda suspect for a lot of us.
He's interesting because he's showing how an operation like
Modernism's self-destructs. It's just as its reliance on estheticism,
as the traditional critics had it, means that Romanticism
self-destructed in those years. It helps explain why Analytic Cubism
led so naturally to collage. Or why the ordinariness of modern art
objects connect simultaneously to their presence in real life and the
revolt (apparently hopeless for us three-quarters of a century after
the Frankfurt school) against art's commercial "aura."
-- John (jha...@haberarts.com)
Marilyn
You may not buy that painting became more sculptural after modernism
but there is a lot of evidence that it did.
Have you seen Frank Stella's sculptural paintings?
Just to name one.
Marilyn
Kay Kane
Marilyn wrote in message <36F306...@bc.ca>...
another reason) and didn't have a clue. When I read your post, another
sculptural painter came to mind - Leger. Yes!
Kay
peter nelson
Marilyn wrote in message <36F176...@bc.ca>...
I see generations of English teachers turning over in
their graves. It's an excellent example of really bad
writing. I'm not entirely sure that some of the "sentences"
in it actually ARE sentences.
It may really be true that locked up inside the heads
of some of these art philosophers are actual truths
and insights. But they'll take them to their graves if
they don't learn how to write simple expository
English.
I suspect that the majority are simply following the old
adage, "If you can't impress them with brilliance,
baffle them with bullshit."
>It frees painting to be itself, and to be poetic.
And what does it mean for a painting to "be itself"?
What else can a painting be, if not itself? How do
you tell a painting which is "itself" from one which is
not "itself"?
---peter
Kay Kane
peter nelson wrote in message <7d1asi$hjk$1...@antiochus.ultra.net>...
You really don't understand that, do you? You are serious?
>>It frees painting to be itself, and to be poetic.
>
>And what does it mean for a painting to "be itself"?
>What else can a painting be, if not itself? How do
>you tell a painting which is "itself" from one which is
>not "itself"?
>---peter
>
A painting can be ABOUT the paint surface. It can be about color, form,
texture... It doesn't have to be ABOUT something in our lives such as a
person, a still-life, a landscape. See?
Kay
>
>
>
>
Marilyn
>
> And what does it mean for a painting to "be itself"?
> What else can a painting be, if not itself? How do
> you tell a painting which is "itself" from one which is
> not "itself"?
>
> ---peter
That quote is perfectly fine English grammar to me.
The sentences all have subjects & verbs.
The subject matter, however, seems to be beyond your ken.
You may be completely unable to read anything but
the type of 'journaleze' which you quoted from CNN.
Your writing is so eloquent and grammatical, especially
when you use words like "bullshit."
Marilyn
br...@wralaw.com
jh...@columbia.edu wrote:
> That's really neat. Thanks for posting it! Part of what makes
> Hollot-Kentor's argument interesting and strange it is that one
> naturally thinks the opposite must be true. A break with illusion is,
> after all, also a kind of striving after esthetic autonomy.
Representation(what you mean by illusion) is free if the artist
wants it to be. The art movements are counter autonomy, as is
the idea of art itself, being a word that defines
a group of people who are artists and things that are art.
Unless the auto/self is the totality,
> Reality
> goes out the perspectival window, one can argue. And that was exactly
> the critical party line about Modernism for a long while.
Modernism never existed
> I like his reversal, although I wonder if he's playing with words a
> bit, moving from break with an artistic practice (illusion) to break
> with art as intrinsic value. And I don't buy assimilating painting
> into sculpture. First thing to go is sculpture's autonomy as object
> of contemplation by an unmoved viewer out in ideal land. Can there be
> some interest involved here? He's writing about a sculptor, some time
> after Minimalism made sculpture kinda suspect for a lot of us.
Minimalism may not be sculpture at all.
> He's interesting because he's showing how an operation like
> Modernism's self-destructs. It's just as its reliance on estheticism,
> as the traditional critics had it, means that Romanticism
> self-destructed in those years. It helps explain why Analytic Cubism
> led so naturally to collage.
Scissors and Glue and Braque created collage, as well as plenty of Media.
>r why the ordinariness of modern art
> objects connect simultaneously to their presence in real life and the
> revolt (apparently hopeless for us three-quarters of a century after
> the Frankfurt school) against art's commercial "aura."
> -- John (jha...@haberarts.com)
Bryn Ayers
-----------== Posted via Deja News, The Discussion Network ==----------
http://www.dejanews.com/ Search, Read, Discuss, or Start Your Own
mdeli
<pne...@ultranet.com> wrote:
>>From the catalogue to Maury Baden's "A Choreography of the Ordinary"
>>Baden is a sculptor. It is written by Robert Hollot-Kentor.
>>
>>"The challenge to the allusion of aestheitc autonomy in the 1st
>>part of this century to any claim that illusion can be meaningful
>>in itself, and by implication to the illusion that anything,
>>stone and character, included, survives death, not only undermined
>>the capacity for concentration it caused sudden sometimes progressive
>>disgorning of the aesthetic process, the whole of its contents.
>>(ref: "Aesthetic Theory," Theodor Adorno & Walter Benjamin)
>>This can be seen for instance in the way that painting was pulled
>>into sculpture's gravitational orbit, as in the reversal of
>>Cezanne's much thought about fruit [painted from wax models].
>>The canvas finally burst under the literal weight it had come to bear.
snip
>I see generations of English teachers turning over in
>their graves. It's an excellent example of really bad
>writing. I'm not entirely sure that some of the "sentences"
>in it actually ARE sentences.
Get to know the rules of Artspeak. English is something different.
>I suspect that the majority are simply following the old
>adage, "If you can't impress them with brilliance,
>baffle them with bullshit."
Careful, the artzy fartzies here are going to call you bitter.
>>It frees painting to be itself, and to be poetic.
>
>And what does it mean for a painting to "be itself"?
>What else can a painting be, if not itself? How do
>you tell a painting which is "itself" from one which is
>not "itself"?
This is hardly the place for sensible questions; unless you want a
stupid answer,
Mani DeLi
...no skill no art
A Skeptical View of Modern Art was updated Jan.16,99
check out my new book, new work, new comments at:.
http://www.interlog.com/~hugod/
peter nelson
>>>There isn't a particular definition of Modernism which I have
>>>accepted yet but the following quote tries to explain what
>>>Modernism did for painting.
>>>
>>>Baden is a sculptor. It is written by Robert Hollot-Kentor.
>>>
>>>"The challenge to the allusion of aestheitc autonomy in the 1st
>>>part of this century to any claim that illusion can be meaningful
>>>in itself, and by implication to the illusion that anything,
>>>stone and character, included, survives death, not only undermined
>>>the capacity for concentration it caused sudden sometimes progressive
>>>disgorning of the aesthetic process, the whole of its contents.
>>>(ref: "Aesthetic Theory," Theodor Adorno & Walter Benjamin)
>>>This can be seen for instance in the way that painting was pulled
>>>into sculpture's gravitational orbit, as in the reversal of
>>>Cezanne's much thought about fruit [painted from wax models].
>>>The canvas finally burst under the literal weight it had come to bear.
>>>history, the dumb cruelties, tortures, and humiliations stored up in art,
>>>The day-in-day-out of it, the display of women, the traumas that
>>>art once re-enacted and mollified, all were sent packing, to walk the
>>>streets on their own, factually, no longer as memory of what occurred,
>>>but as the occurences, the acts, the traumas themselves
>>>CAPABLE OF BEING PHOTOGRAPHED. [my emphasis]."
>>>
>>>When I read that paragraph, I can see the pages of my art history
>>>books turning.
>>
>>their graves. It's an excellent example of really bad
>>writing. I'm not entirely sure that some of the "sentences"
>>in it actually ARE sentences.
>>
>>of some of these art philosophers are actual truths
>>and insights. But they'll take them to their graves if
>>they don't learn how to write simple expository
>>English.
>>
>>adage, "If you can't impress them with brilliance,
>>baffle them with bullshit."
>
Yes. And I scored 740 on my Verbal SAT and 720 on my
English Comp's.
>>>It frees painting to be itself, and to be poetic.
>>
>>And what does it mean for a painting to "be itself"?
>>What else can a painting be, if not itself? How do
>>you tell a painting which is "itself" from one which is
>>not "itself"?
>>---peter
>>
>A painting can be ABOUT the paint surface. It can be about color, form,
>texture... It doesn't have to be ABOUT something in our lives such as a
>person, a still-life, a landscape. See?
No. In what way does this make a painting "itself" or "not itself"?
I can write a book about an actual event in someone's life;
I can write a book about a completely fictional event; I can
write a book about *writing books*; or I can write a book which
is completely self-referential ("You are reading a book. Now you
are reading the second sentence in the book", etc). Are these
all not books? What else can they be but books? In what
way is any one of these books not "itself"?
---peter
peter nelson
>That quote is perfectly fine English grammar to me.
>The sentences all have subjects & verbs.
There is more to proper English than subjects and verbs. There
are, for example, commas. The first sentence cannot be parsed
with its existing complement of commas. It either needs fewer commas
or more, or it needs them in different places. And anyway, what
is "the allusion of aesthetic autonomy". Who or what is alluding to
"aesthetic autonomy"?
And what do you call the collection of words ending in "stored up in art,"?
Is that which follows supposed to be a new sentence?
>The subject matter, however, seems to be beyond your ken.
>You may be completely unable to read anything but
>the type of 'journaleze' which you quoted from CNN.
>
>Your writing is so eloquent and grammatical, especially
>when you use words like "bullshit."
There's nothing wrong with "bullshit", and the quote in which it was
employed was highly relevant. Whatever the comentator was
trying to say could have easily been said in fewer, and simpler, words.
I've been reading art-crit long enough to realize that most of these
writers go out of their way to use long, complex, run-on sentences
and obscure vocabulary ("disgorning", for instance) in an effort
to convince readers that they are intellectuals.
Did photography change painting? Of course. It freed artists
from a need to be so literal and forced them to reconsider
their role as the chief interpreters and recorders of events
and institutions. Impressionism, abstract expressionism, etc,
would never have happened if not for photography.
---peter
John Haber
>Frank Stella's paintings?
It's true: the drive to exclude sculptural values, such as depth and
modeling, led him over time to incorporate them. Similarly, analytic
cubism ended up with a kind of backward pictorial space, all but
spilling out onto the viewer, so the next step was collage.
Conversely, sculpture got a lot more "painterly," in the traditional
sense of the term. It got gestural, runny, like still-limp clay. It
came off its pedestal with Brancusi. Or at least incorporated the
pedestal into the work. It couldn't compete with a Rothko for totemic
significance or a Rauschenberg for literal reality, so it vanished
into the "space" of Minimalism.
Only to return again in the last decade or two once the art world had
thoroughly gotten used to not worrying about the terms any longer.
You know, Postmodernism and all that.
I'm not buying that sculpture became a model. (No pun intended.)
Painting and sculpture became things to destroy and perfect at the
same time. A wonderful burden.
I feel really retro in liking Stella a lot still. Especially the
black paintings, though, oddly enough. I used to buy his line that
each stage got him further in a theoretical advance, but his last
lectures sounded so self-serving, and the work pays a price
emotionally for the joy of its play-school look and construction. I
still love them, but I don't remember them the same way.
John (jha...@haberarts.com)
John Haber
sculpture "itself." What seemed like a formal proof after Greenberg
now doesn't this long after Pop Art, and what tried to substitute
political and artistic necessity for expression has quaint overtones
of Existential authenticity instead.
But I don't have any trouble seeing the term as useful in getting to
the ideology behind some exceptional modern art. And I agree with
Kay: I can't seriously think you're baffled by this. It might be
derivative, but it's not even remotely a candidate for obscurantism.
Besides, what's more obscurantist than your casual putdown? It sure
defeats the point of clear writing -- an appeal to reasoned
discussion.
I'm in fact sick and tired of the put-downs of academic jargon. If
you enter a dialog, you sometimes have to adjust your ear. We don't
make fun of the Renaissance for its artistic vocabulary, because it's
historical. (BTW, see Summers, "Michelangelo and the Language of
Art.") But anything that departs from the inanity of common sense
seems ripe for a putdown.
And it's not even essential for great minds to be the best stylists:
it's more like a miracle when it occurs.
John (jha...@haberarts.com)
John Haber
Thanks so much. That solves it totally.
John (jha...@haberarts.com)
peter nelson
John Haber wrote in message <36f659ec...@news.cc.columbia.edu>...
>By now I find it harder and harder to buy the rhetoric of painting or
>sculpture "itself." What seemed like a formal proof after Greenberg
>now doesn't this long after Pop Art, and what tried to substitute
>political and artistic necessity for expression has quaint overtones
>of Existential authenticity instead.
>
>But I don't have any trouble seeing the term as useful in getting to
>the ideology behind some exceptional modern art. And I agree with
>Kay: I can't seriously think you're baffled by this.
I'm baffled because some parts of it don't parse, and the parts
which do parse could have been stated in far simpler terms.
>
It might be
>derivative, but it's not even remotely a candidate for obscurantism.
>Besides, what's more obscurantist than your casual putdown? It sure
>defeats the point of clear writing -- an appeal to reasoned
>discussion.
>
>I'm in fact sick and tired of the put-downs of academic jargon.
I'm not putting down academic jargon as a class. I'm
specifically putting down the provided example. It is
BAD ENGLISH, as I detailed to one of the other posters.
> If you enter a dialog, you sometimes have to adjust your ear. We don't
>make fun of the Renaissance for its artistic vocabulary, because it's
>historical.
But if someone today were to write about art in Latin we
*would* make fun of it. My point is that there is little which
that can be said about art which cannot be expressed in simple
English. The reason why some academic disciplines need to use
obscure technical jargon is because they deal with concepts
(e.g., the strong force, the weak force, quarks, etc, in physics,
adenosine triphosphate in physiology) which simply have no
analogues in ordinary day-to-day experience.
Art is a product of the same historical and cultural forces we
experience daily, and of the mental life of the artist as a human
being, an identity we all share. We can discuss these in plain
language.
To the extent that artists reconceived of the role of painting
aftre the the invention of photography, this process happened
out in the open in ways which can be discussed in simple English.
> But anything that departs from the inanity of common sense
>seems ripe for a putdown.
And so can common sense, apparently, from your choice of
"inanity" to describe it. But the fact that anything can "seem
ripe for a putdown" doesn't mean that some things don't deserve
to be put down. Fatuous academics who dress up simple
concepts in arcane language in order to convince us that they
are offering some new insight are trying to pull the wool over
people's eyes in order to justify their elevated status.
---peter
Marilyn
Basically I interpret from your objections here that you
do not like what modernism did for painting because
you think that might reflect negatively on the genre of work
you have chosen for yourself. This is only an assumption.
I don't think it does, pluralism thrives today.
There is nothing wrong with using a visual language to
discuss visual art.
Here is an example of your own writing which leads me
to my assumption above:
"To the extent that artists reconceived of the role of painting
aftre the the invention of photography, this process happened
out in the open in ways which can be discussed in simple English."
"reconceived of the role of painting" ???
Marilyn
Marilyn
Collage goes back to Schwitters and I think that predates
cubism but I don't have my references handy. Do you?
Marilyn
peter nelson
>Basically I interpret from your objections here that you
>do not like what modernism did for painting because
>you think that might reflect negatively on the genre of work
>you have chosen for yourself.
I comment on poor grammar and the lack of clear,
expository writing and you conclude that my real objection
is about modernism in painting? Does the term
"non sequitur" mean anything to you?
For the record I'm very fond of the various styles
of art which emerged following the development of
photography. Although it's not personally what I
prefer to create, the majority of the art that I own
is modern or later.
>This is only an assumption.
But it's an utterly baseless one. You're a product of
the intellectully-bankrupt set of values which says that
any idea is as good as any other one, regardless of
how well-founded it is. Don't make a kid actually
justify his assumptions because it might damage
his fragile little esteem. I see this all the time on the
Internet. Someone tosses out an utterly ridiculous
claim and when challenged on it they say "it's just my
opinion" or "it's just my assumption", as though somehow
that means it's OK to be baseless.
>I don't think it does, pluralism thrives today.
So what?
>
>There is nothing wrong with using a visual language to
>discuss visual art.
You didn't give an example of a "visual language", you gave
an example of a textual one. Visual languages are
graphical.
>Here is an example of your own writing which leads me
>to my assumption above:
>
>"To the extent that artists reconceived of the role of painting
>aftre the the invention of photography, this process happened
>out in the open in ways which can be discussed in simple English."
>
>"reconceived of the role of painting" ???
To reconceive is to develop a new conception. The
Impressionists and others in the mid-late 19th century
developed new concepts about the role of painting.
---peter
emat...@tomatoweb.com
gotts...@my-dejanews.com
> >>It frees painting to be itself, and to be poetic.
> >
> >And what does it mean for a painting to "be itself"?
> >What else can a painting be, if not itself? How do
> >you tell a painting which is "itself" from one which is
> >not "itself"?
> >---peter
> >
> A painting can be ABOUT the paint surface. It can be about color, form,
> texture... It doesn't have to be ABOUT something in our lives such as a
> person, a still-life, a landscape. See?
It seems that art doesn't have to be about the real world, about feelings,
about concepts, ideas, stories - all it needs to do is create an image that
brings forth some aesthetic sensation. This aesthetic sensation need not be
pleasurable, harmonious, skillfully crafted either - it can be an outrageous
eye-sore for all one cares. In fact, the more pleasurable and harmonious it
is, the less "interesting" it becomes, and thus feelings of aesthetic
pleasure are to be condemned as simple or superficial, as opposed to complex,
noble feelings of disgust or outrage.
I will stop ranting for a moment to consider what I think to be one of the
important issues being raised here, albeit implicitly:
"Is illusionism one of the cornerstones of fine art - and if so, why?"
So far as I can tell, Peter's comments suggest that he considers illusionism
to be a fundamental requisite of fine art - whereas Kay believes it to be
non-essential.
Now, with regards to illusionism, one might argue that such art is superior
due to its ability to express a multiplicity of concepts on one surface - in
short, it is multi-dimensional art. The work can be appreciated for its
colour harmonies, its spacial composition, distribution of light and dark
masses, as well as for its treatment of the subject, etc. This is to be
contrasted with non-representational art which while it possesses the first
three qualities, would indeed seem to lack the latter one. Both paintings can
be marvels of composition, but only the illusionistic one can "tell a story"
out of the context of the artist's statement. In both realistic and abstract
painting, a diagonal 'line' can signify force, action, movement - but only in
a realistic painting can this 'line' carry certain psychological content -
for example, the 'line' refered to may not be an explicit one - it could be
one suggested by the motion of elements within the picture - for example, the
movement of the crowd in a Crucifixion scene. In an abstract painting we are
treated to the same movements, and maybe even the same colours - but only in
the illusionistic work do we also experience added psychological content,
being the expression on the faces of the crowd, the Romans, Christ, etc. -
the stance of their bodies, the weapons in their hands (and what they are
doing with them), etc. So while both genres convey aesthetic information, it
is the realistic painting which is more layered and therefore, some might
argue, more truly intellectual. The Crucifixion example is one of many
possible ones. I will not tax your patience with an exhaustive list of
subject matter.
Regards,
Iian Neill.
gotts...@my-dejanews.com
> >
> > And what does it mean for a painting to "be itself"?
> > What else can a painting be, if not itself? How do
> > you tell a painting which is "itself" from one which is
> > not "itself"?
> >
> > ---peter
>
> The sentences all have subjects & verbs.
> You may be completely unable to read anything but
> the type of 'journaleze' which you quoted from CNN.
>
> Your writing is so eloquent and grammatical, especially
> when you use words like "bullshit."
Translation: "I know you are, but what am I?"
John Haber
>obscure technical jargon is because they deal with concepts
>(e.g., the strong force, the weak force, quarks, etc, in physics,
>adenosine triphosphate in physiology) which simply have no
>analogues in ordinary day-to-day experience.
Not really, and there you're getting at my real background, physics.
Most of it, from unfamiliar words like torque and vector to the
language of equations, stemmed from describing the familiar in more
revealing ways. At other times, it works by attempting to give a more
precise meaning to words used loosely, such as momentum.
Philosophy has always reserved the same freedoms. One could take, not
entirely frivolously, as a definition of philosophy the marvellous
book title of J. L. Austin's, "How to Do Things with Words."
This took place from day one. Plato repeatedly asked what we mean by
a word. Aristotle created terms in classifying causes. And it
continued to the modern age. Heidegger or Kant reads so badly in no
small part because he's attempting something remarkable: to work
slowly enough so that he can define his terms one by one. Freud,
unlike them a master stylist who can make one feel he's addressing
them in plain words in the comfort of his study, nonetheless presents
much the same problem to readers.
Almost always in the end, a philosopher's creations must be examined
in order to cast them aside. I include not just the words of a
tedious obscurantist like our German friends, but also key terms of
the plain-English, analytic school, such as "synthetic" and
"analytic." That may suggest the whole thing was hokum, but in fact
it means that thinking in and through language is part of how ideas
come to fruition.
But the analogy to science tells only part of why we must read and
re-read. The better one writes, the more words tell, and so the more
a debate with them becomes a difficult task of reading, just as in
poetry. We can argue whether Nietzche meant proto-Nazi arrogance or
humanistic sense of responsibility by "the will to power," but we do
so with the respect we accord to a poet.
Art criticism has to broaden one's understanding, by suggesting a rich
content in meanings, assumptions, history, and visual evidence one
might normally overlook. So it has to take the same freedoms as
philosophy, unless it wants merely to flatter greeting-card judgments
or let people know what to do with a free afternoon .
Indeed, it's more like your concept of physics than even philosophy.
After all, philosophy is about life, and we all live, but describing
the visual in words means much the same transposition as from
subatomic mysteries to familiar waves and particles.
Moreover, life can be lived according to some pretty bizarre dogmas,
but at least we all are living. Artists reflect the earthshaking
movements that take art from century to century. Philosophy might
wish to see through psychobabble, but no student of Surrealism can
discard it.
I mentioned that an entire book explicate Renaissance vocabulary. It
decidedly does NOT approach the vocabulary as an accident like that of
ancient Rome speaking Latin, as you put it. That is, it does more
than translate words before throwing them aside. It insists on their
pertinance if one is to take great artists seriously.
My point about common sense is that it definitely does not take art
seriously enough unless it, too, is subject to skepticism, love, and
attention. The words we throw around as if we knew what they meant
very much are a kind of jargon. Authenticity, realism, or expression:
they all prejudice, perhaps adversely, what we think and even what we
see.
We have to approach texts with the same interest we approach art. As
I implied, maybe more so with text. After all, one who paints badly
is a bad painter. One who writes poorly might have some incredible
ideas.
People who discard the last century of modern art as a hoax stopped
making an effort to SEE. Have you stopped making an effort yourself?
I have no doubt that you are responding to a real text, not academic
writing in general. But your RHETORIC doesn't respond.
Kay and I find that text flawed but clear as can be. We see it as
so-so writing burdened by mid-century critical assumptions about "art
itself." I want to laugh at that kind of vocabulary, but I can't even
laugh in good faith unless I recognize it wasn't plucked out of thin
air. Are you really unable to read it, or have you stopped caring
enough to read it?
John (www.haberarts.com)
John Haber
>Who or what is alluding to "aesthetic autonomy"? And what
>do you call the collection of words ending in "stored up in art,"?
>Is that which follows supposed to be a new sentence?
I can't be sure if you're being deliberately or thoughtlessly unseeing
here. You can't seriously be criticizing the prose for Marilyn's typo
of "allusion" for "illlusion" or, later, of a comma for a period. The
latter is obvious enough if only from the capital letter that
follows.)
I trust you find your comments meaningful, despite the comma preceding
a question mark or the inconsistent placement of double quotes above.
Of at least I shall flatter you that I can attribute meaning to them.
As for pain and suffering being "stored up in art," surely this is a
metaphor in common use by everyone, o ye defender of common sense.
And it's a revealing metaphor. We talk of meaing "in" a work (as well
as "of") because we sense the importance of its physical nature in
creating meaning, because we respond to works in some of the ways we
respond to people, because our experience of the work is as temporal
as our experience of a drama....
Well, you decide which alternative is true. To answer it would end
philosophical debates over the meaning of "expression" and the limited
validity of art's "presence." Still, they're things worth answering.
Marx and Nietzche, two stylists worth admiring, said that it's worth
looking past the truth of something to the motives behind enunciating
it. I go along with Marilyn in wondering if you're not blinding
yourself and us in order to push a professional agenda.
John (www.haberarts.com)
John Haber
Nope, I'm at the office. I'll try to check later. These things, like
abstraction, get re-discovered often. Another reason to distrust the
thought of painting creating sculpture. And I suspect Schwitters
despised sculpture as much as painting.
BTW, I should have said that Stella's just, well, Stella. I feel the
transition to sculptural elements in Ryman's development, when he adds
those cute little metal wall mountings. But I don't in Marden, say,
or ... damn, who am I thinking of? The one who has mat painted,
joined canvases with black, almost chalk-like arcs across them and
touching the edges?
Anyhow, and that's just a more or less united movement. There's more
painters out there.
John (www.haberarts.com)
peter nelson
John Haber wrote in message <36f7cc35...@news.cc.columbia.edu>...
>>The reason why some academic disciplines need to use
>>obscure technical jargon is because they deal with concepts
>>(e.g., the strong force, the weak force, quarks, etc, in physics,
>>adenosine triphosphate in physiology) which simply have no
>>analogues in ordinary day-to-day experience.
>
>Not really, and there you're getting at my real background, physics.
>Most of it, from unfamiliar words like torque and vector to the
>language of equations, stemmed from describing the familiar in more
>revealing ways. At other times, it works by attempting to give a more
>precise meaning to words used loosely, such as momentum.
Well, OK, that's a better clarification. But my point is
physics and other sciences use specialized terms because
they need to since common language doesn't have the
precision required to talk about those things adequately.
But art isn't precise to begin with. It's not a science. It's
not as though there is a more precise way to describe
some emotional state or psychological motivation expressed
by some work of art, only everyday language is inadequate.
>Philosophy has always reserved the same freedoms.
Yes, but the difference is in philosophy it's futile. New
philosophies come and go but it's not as though philosophy
(in the sense of aesthetic philosophy, ethics, social philosophy,
etc) has *ADVANCED* the way science has. Philosophers
are still debating the same issues they were thousands of
years ago - they are no closer to arriving at a consensus
or being able to demonstrate the correctness or incorrectness
of a position. The only exception to this is what used to be
called "natural philosophy" and is now called science. And
that's because in science they were able to draw a clear
connection between their words and things which exist
objectively in the real world.
>This took place from day one. Plato repeatedly asked what we mean by
>a word. Aristotle created terms in classifying causes. And it
>continued to the modern age. Heidegger or Kant reads so badly in no
>small part because he's attempting something remarkable: to work
>slowly enough so that he can define his terms one by one. Freud,
>unlike them a master stylist who can make one feel he's addressing
>them in plain words in the comfort of his study, nonetheless presents
>much the same problem to readers.
>
>Almost always in the end, a philosopher's creations must be examined
>in order to cast them aside.
But what are these "creations"? The physicist invites examination
of his theoretical creations because the real-world creations based on
these demonstrably WORK. I became interested in science when,
as a child, I became interested in radio and got my ham license. I
could talk to other hams all over the world from my bedroom when I
was 15. As a result of that I did not have to take it on faith that physics
described something real.
> I include not just the words of a tedious obscurantist like our German
> friends, but also key terms of the plain-English, analytic school, such
> as "synthetic" and "analytic." That may suggest the whole thing was
>hokum, but in fact it means that thinking in and through language is
>part of how ideas come to fruition.
I'm not denying that. What I'm saying is that everyday words are
adequate to describe everyday phenomena. If, as in the case of
physics, using non-everyday words yields a greater or finer or
more precise understanding of everyday phenomena then those
who use such words should be able to demonstrate that they
actually HAVE such a better understanding. But if this finer
understanding has no real-world significance then why should
anyone study it?
>But the analogy to science tells only part of why we must read and
>re-read. The better one writes, the more words tell, and so the more
>a debate with them becomes a difficult task of reading, just as in
>poetry. We can argue whether Nietzche meant proto-Nazi arrogance or
>humanistic sense of responsibility by "the will to power," but we do
>so with the respect we accord to a poet.
But there's no point in such an argument. Nietzche is dead. (says God)
So he can't settle it. So it's pointless speculation. You can read his
writings with the assumption of proto-NAZI arrogance and interpret
it one way; you can read them without that assumption and interpret
it differently. Every college philosophy student did this as an undergrad,
including yours truly. You can do this sort of exercise with any writer or
poet. Assumptions can be assigned which change the entire meaning
of any text. When I was a kid my favorite act of adolescent rebellion/
vandalism was to put quote marks around selected words in
schoolbooks.
But there's no sense in which it can be said that the result is any
greater "understanding" of a text - just another interpretation.
True understanding of the meaning or significance of any art will
always just be speculation. Or as Monet said, ""Everyone discusses
(my work) and pretends to understand, as if it were necessary to
understand, when it is simply necessary to love."
>Art criticism has to broaden one's understanding, by suggesting a rich
>content in meanings, assumptions, history, and visual evidence one
>might normally overlook.
But there's no need to express these in jargon. The jargon implies
a more precise understanding than actually exists. The historical,
religious, familial, economic, and other circumstances in which an
artist paints can be expressed in straighforward terms. Most
biographies are not written in jargon but they are useful for understanding
what was going on in an artists life and world. I collect diaries and
letters of 19th century people (ordinary people, not famous ones)
because history is my hobby and find this to be an excellent way
to get inside people's heads but there's not a word of jargon.
. . .
>We have to approach texts with the same interest we approach art. As
>I implied, maybe more so with text. After all, one who paints badly
>is a bad painter. One who writes poorly might have some incredible
>ideas.
So might the painter. The American artist Robert Williams said
"My heart conceives of a broom; I end up painting a mop; and all
my audience smells is the bucket." That's exactly why I said that
unless these people learn to write better they will end up taking
their ideas to the grave with them because if youcan't express
your ideas it doesn't matter WHAT the medium is.
>People who discard the last century of modern art as a hoax stopped
>making an effort to SEE.
Some art is a hoax; some is sincere; some is good; some is bad.
Sturgeon's Law applies here as well as anywhere. I'm not "mdeli".
But I do think that much modern art admits poseurs too easily. And
so does much modern art criticism.
---peter
peter nelson
John Haber wrote in message <36f7d530...@news.cc.columbia.edu>...
>>> And anyway, what is "the allusion of aesthetic autonomy".
>>Who or what is alluding to "aesthetic autonomy"? And what
>>do you call the collection of words ending in "stored up in art,"?
>>Is that which follows supposed to be a new sentence?
>
>I can't be sure if you're being deliberately or thoughtlessly unseeing
>here. You can't seriously be criticizing the prose for Marilyn's typo
>of "allusion" for "illlusion" or, later, of a comma for a period. The
>latter is obvious enough if only from the capital letter that
>follows.)
I had no idea it was a typo. "Allusion" is a real word so I took
it at its face value and tried to figure out what was being
alluded to. "Allusion" is a term used fequently in ArtSpeak
so this was a reasonable assumption. I make typos all the
time but they're usually things like "teh" for "the".
>As for pain and suffering being "stored up in art," surely this is a
>metaphor in common use by everyone, o ye defender of common sense.
I wasn't questioning its meaning. I was saying I couldn't parse it
so there was no hope of finding its meaning.
. . .
>Marx and Nietzche, two stylists worth admiring, said that it's worth
>looking past the truth of something to the motives behind enunciating
>it. I go along with Marilyn in wondering if you're not blinding
>yourself and us in order to push a professional agenda.
A "professional" agenda? And what would that be? I work
in cardiac imaging so unless you want to promote some
metaphor such as "let's look deep into Nietzche's heart and
see what he meant by that" I'm afraid I have no idea what you're
talking about.
My "agenda" is to throw into doubt the idea that dense, obscure
jargon can actually shed any genuine light on works of art which
simple language and historical or biographical information cannot.
I agree that contextual information helps interpret art. Knowing
about Shostakovitch's run-in's with the Stalinist authorities
explains a great deal about his music; his choice of certain
motifs, etc. Knowing that a certain painter was poor and
could not afford certain pigments or supports, or knowing that
he had a certain viewpoint about industrialization or that he had
a brother who worked in a factory, or that he was a member of a
certain cult which attached great significance to certain numbers
is useful and interesting.
---peter
Ariane
On Sat, 20 Mar 1999, peter nelson wrote:
> I see generations of English teachers turning over in
> their graves. It's an excellent example of really bad
> writing. I'm not entirely sure that some of the "sentences"
> in it actually ARE sentences.
>
> It may really be true that locked up inside the heads
> of some of these art philosophers are actual truths
> and insights. But they'll take them to their graves if
> they don't learn how to write simple expository
> English.
=== Adorno wasn't english oh anglocentric one.
> I suspect that the majority are simply following the old
> adage, "If you can't impress them with brilliance,
> baffle them with bullshit."
>
> >It frees painting to be itself, and to be poetic.
>
> And what does it mean for a painting to "be itself"?
> What else can a painting be, if not itself?
Uhhh, an addendum to an art theory?
> How do
> you tell a painting which is "itself" from one which is
> not "itself"?
> ---peter
When no theories or academic strictures yet apply. When creativity simply
outstrips is context and forces the latter to catch up and bound it again.
ciao, A.
Ariane
> books turning. It marks for me the transition to modernism in painting.
> It frees painting to be itself, and to be poetic.
>
> Marilyn
>
=== Very provocative (and timely). Merci bien Marilyn.
Ariane
On Sun, 21 Mar 1999 br...@wralaw.com wrote:
> Representation(what you mean by illusion) is free if the artist
> wants it to be. The art movements are counter autonomy, as is
> the idea of art itself, being a word that defines
> a group of people who are artists and things that are art.
> Unless the auto/self is the totality,
== You're missing the dialectic which inheres in many artists' ongoing
conversation with art history.....
> > Reality
> > goes out the perspectival window, one can argue. And that was exactly
> > the critical party line about Modernism for a long while.
>
> Modernism never existed
== Neither did the holocaust (some say). Both statements are ahistorical
illusions.
> > I like his reversal, although I wonder if he's playing with words a
> > bit, moving from break with an artistic practice (illusion) to break
> > with art as intrinsic value. And I don't buy assimilating painting
> > into sculpture. First thing to go is sculpture's autonomy as object
> > of contemplation by an unmoved viewer out in ideal land. Can there be
> > some interest involved here? He's writing about a sculptor, some time
> > after Minimalism made sculpture kinda suspect for a lot of us.
>
> Minimalism may not be sculpture at all.
()
> > He's interesting because he's showing how an operation like
> > Modernism's self-destructs. It's just as its reliance on estheticism,
> > as the traditional critics had it, means that Romanticism
> > self-destructed in those years. It helps explain why Analytic Cubism
> > led so naturally to collage.
=== Really, Romanticism has done nothing but evolve and it therefore only
looks like it has `destructed'. As long as there are people, there will
be romanticist sentiments and expressions. And Modernism, as an art
movement, has been assimilated into art history, that is, is has become a
form of romanticist orthodoxy, much like PoMo is now a conceptualist
orthodoxy, and the pendulum is ready to swing again (which makes it a
particularly exciting time to be an artist)!
> Scissors and Glue and Braque created collage, as well as plenty of Media.
=== Your somewhat fashionable cynicism belies the truth of Picasso and
Braque's adventures of 1909 -> .
> >r why the ordinariness of modern art
> > objects connect simultaneously to their presence in real life and the
> > revolt (apparently hopeless for us three-quarters of a century after
> > the Frankfurt school) against art's commercial "aura."
>
> > -- John (jha...@haberarts.com)
>
>
> Bryn Ayers
>
adieu, A.
Ariane
On Mon, 22 Mar 1999, peter nelson wrote:
> I can write a book about an actual event in someone's life;
> I can write a book about a completely fictional event; I can
> write a book about *writing books*; or I can write a book which
> is completely self-referential ("You are reading a book. Now you
> are reading the second sentence in the book", etc). Are these
> all not books? What else can they be but books? In what
> way is any one of these books not "itself"?
>
> ---peter
When the act of `writing' or `reading' becomes so laden with implicit
cultural super-structure that writing and reading become predictable
social excercises and the `boundaries' of both solidify as it were into
what we take as cultural norms or the limits of acceptability in writing
and reading, to use your example. The easiest way to break these
boundaries, that is, to be iconoclastic, is to refer to sex or violence,
such as we see on contemporary TV (and on the internet). This
faux-iconoclasm is cute and all but when someone actually and genuinely
steps up and breaks down these inherited cultural parameters, here with
reference to painting now, we can see how an artist frees a painting to
`be itself' once more. It amounts to a stripping away of inherited
cultural super-structure that makes an art form dull and predictable (like
TV).
a la prochaine
A.
Ariane
On Mon, 22 Mar 1999, peter nelson wrote:
(snip)
> But if someone today were to write about art in Latin we
> *would* make fun of it. My point is that there is little which
> that can be said about art which cannot be expressed in simple
> English.
But there's much about art which can only be left unsaid. Whether you use
simple English or complex Spanish. And furthermore, what can be said
about art often requires that we press language into the service of
capturing often complex and polyvalent emotions and impressions. Simple
english often lacks the precision necessary to communicate this
polyvalence.
> The reason why some academic disciplines need to use
> obscure technical jargon is because they deal with concepts
> (e.g., the strong force, the weak force, quarks, etc, in physics,
> adenosine triphosphate in physiology) which simply have no
> analogues in ordinary day-to-day experience.
>
> Art is a product of the same historical and cultural forces we
> experience daily,
> and of the mental life of the artist as a human
> being, an identity we all share. We can discuss these in plain
> language.
Sure, but we can't assume to do these complex topics justice with our
`plain' language.
(snip)
> And so can common sense, apparently, from your choice of
> "inanity" to describe it. But the fact that anything can "seem
> ripe for a putdown" doesn't mean that some things don't deserve
> to be put down. Fatuous academics who dress up simple
> concepts in arcane language in order to convince us that they
> are offering some new insight are trying to pull the wool over
> people's eyes in order to justify their elevated status.
Yes! I couldn't agree more. But lets not put a ban on complex concepts
because of this; and because of the fact the language, even at it's most
complex, subtly nuanced, or simple, is often a most inadequate tool to
capture our emotions and thought both accurately and adequately.
> ---peter
a la prochaine,
A.
Ariane
On Sun, 21 Mar 1999, mdeli wrote:
(snip)
> >I suspect that the majority are simply following the old
> >adage, "If you can't impress them with brilliance,
> >baffle them with bullshit."
>
> Careful, the artzy fartzies here are going to call you bitter.
=== Cynicism is its own reward.
> >>It frees painting to be itself, and to be poetic.
> >
> >And what does it mean for a painting to "be itself"?
> >What else can a painting be, if not itself? How do
> >you tell a painting which is "itself" from one which is
> >not "itself"?
=== And what about poetic? That's part of the point as well.
> (Mani sputtered)
> This is hardly the place for sensible questions; unless you want a
> stupid answer,
=== Well with you on-line Mani, we'll always be sure to reach our
quota of stupid answers....
> Mani DeLi
> ...no skill, no art, no problem!
Ariane
On Tue, 23 Mar 1999, John Haber wrote:
> >The reason why some academic disciplines need to use
> >obscure technical jargon is because they deal with concepts
> >(e.g., the strong force, the weak force, quarks, etc, in physics,
> >adenosine triphosphate in physiology) which simply have no
> >analogues in ordinary day-to-day experience.
>
> Not really, and there you're getting at my real background, physics.
> Most of it, from unfamiliar words like torque and vector to the
> language of equations, stemmed from describing the familiar in more
> revealing ways. At other times, it works by attempting to give a more
> precise meaning to words used loosely, such as momentum.
>
> Philosophy has always reserved the same freedoms. One could take, not
> entirely frivolously, as a definition of philosophy the marvellous
> book title of J. L. Austin's, "How to Do Things with Words."
> This took place from day one. Plato repeatedly asked what we mean by
> a word. Aristotle created terms in classifying causes. And it
> continued to the modern age. Heidegger or Kant reads so badly in no
> small part because he's attempting something remarkable: to work
> slowly enough so that he can define his terms one by one. Freud,
> unlike them a master stylist who can make one feel he's addressing
> them in plain words in the comfort of his study, nonetheless presents
> much the same problem to readers.
>
> Almost always in the end, a philosopher's creations must be examined
> in order to cast them aside.
Voila! Well said.
> I include not just the words of a
> tedious obscurantist like our German friends, but also key terms of
> the plain-English, analytic school,
As tedious if not moreso because of their work's comparative irrelevance
to life (the point of philosophy after all!!)
> such as "synthetic" and
> "analytic." That may suggest the whole thing was hokum, but in fact
> it means that thinking in and through language is part of how ideas
> come to fruition.
>
> But the analogy to science tells only part of why we must read and
> re-read. The better one writes, the more words tell, and so the more
> a debate with them becomes a difficult task of reading, just as in
> poetry. We can argue whether Nietzche meant proto-Nazi arrogance or
> humanistic sense of responsibility by "the will to power," but we do
> so with the respect we accord to a poet.
Thus spake Zarathustra!
> Art criticism has to broaden one's understanding, by suggesting a rich
> content in meanings, assumptions, history, and visual evidence one
> might normally overlook. So it has to take the same freedoms as
> philosophy, unless it wants merely to flatter greeting-card judgments
> or let people know what to do with a free afternoon .
Yes, ideally. But there are also many baseless pretentions which are
found to hide behind the `nobility' of the project of genuine enquiry;
which you expound so well here. And the discovery of these can lead to a
sort of cynicism with the whole project: "All art criticism & philosophy
sucks" (assuming that its just not sour grapes for being excluded through
the inability to comprehend, like our friend on this ng). And perhaps it
is also true that one then begins to despise that which generates deep
reflection in them (or in art criticism: namely, modern art. Anyway....
> Indeed, it's more like your concept of physics than even philosophy.
> After all, philosophy is about life, and we all live,
(Unfortunately, some philosophy occupies itself primarily with numbers
and grammar however).
> but describing
> the visual in words means much the same transposition as from
> subatomic mysteries to familiar waves and particles.
>
> Moreover, life can be lived according to some pretty bizarre dogmas,
> but at least we all are living. Artists reflect the earthshaking
> movements that take art from century to century. Philosophy might
> wish to see through psychobabble, but no student of Surrealism can
> discard it.
!
> I mentioned that an entire book explicate Renaissance vocabulary. It
> decidedly does NOT approach the vocabulary as an accident like that of
> ancient Rome speaking Latin, as you put it. That is, it does more
> than translate words before throwing them aside. It insists on their
> pertinance if one is to take great artists seriously.
>
> My point about common sense is that it definitely does not take art
> seriously enough unless it, too, is subject to skepticism, love, and
> attention. The words we throw around as if we knew what they meant
> very much are a kind of jargon. Authenticity, realism, or expression:
> they all prejudice, perhaps adversely, what we think and even what we
> see.
Cultural conditioning. See Clifford Geertz' "Common sense as a cultural
system," in his book `Local Knowledge' 1983. He raises some relevant and
interesting points.
> We have to approach texts with the same interest we approach art. As
> I implied, maybe more so with text. After all, one who paints badly
> is a bad painter. One who writes poorly might have some incredible
> ideas.
(snip)
Thanks for the interesting and informative tirade John.
a la prochaine
A.
Ariane
On Tue, 23 Mar 1999, John Haber wrote:
> >Collage goes back to Schwitters and I think that predates
> .cubism but I don't have my references handy. Do you?
>
> Nope, I'm at the office. I'll try to check later. These things, like
> abstraction, get re-discovered often. Another reason to distrust the
> thought of painting creating sculpture. And I suspect Schwitters
> despised sculpture as much as painting.
But Modernist painting did re-explore sculpture, and African art had much
to do with this. Sculpture and primitivism are intimately bound, so as to
almost become one, and this union of sculpture and primitivism, in turn,
gave birth to modern art as we know it. What's interesting is that the
sculptural elements of modernist painting seem to obscure the
turn toward primitivism, while the primitivist elements of modern painting
do the same to the latter's attempt to explore 3 dimensional space less
traditionally.
In any case, this is why modernism is not "dead". Not in any sense of the
word. For all its proclamations, PoMo is simply continuing within the
context of the lifespan of our `modern' art and civilization.
But these are just my opinions after all.......
> BTW, I should have said that Stella's just, well, Stella. I feel the
> transition to sculptural elements in Ryman's development, when he adds
> those cute little metal wall mountings. But I don't in Marden, say,
> or ... damn, who am I thinking of? The one who has mat painted,
> joined canvases with black, almost chalk-like arcs across them and
> touching the edges?
>
> Anyhow, and that's just a more or less united movement. There's more
> painters out there.
>
> John (www.haberarts.com)
au revoir,
A.
mdeli
<pne...@ultranet.com> wrote:
>
>John Haber wrote in message <36f7d530...@news.cc.columbia.edu>...
large snip
>>Marx and Nietzche, two stylists worth admiring, said that it's worth
>>looking past the truth of something to the motives behind enunciating
>>it. I go along with Marilyn in wondering if you're not blinding
>>yourself and us in order to push a professional agenda.
>
>A "professional" agenda? And what would that be? I work
>in cardiac imaging so unless you want to promote some
>metaphor such as "let's look deep into Nietzche's heart and
>see what he meant by that" I'm afraid I have no idea what you're
>talking about.
---Neither does he but he does it at length.
>My "agenda" is to throw into doubt the idea that dense, obscure
>jargon can actually shed any genuine light on works of art which
>simple language and historical or biographical information cannot.
---To good an idea for the Artspeakers here.
>I agree that contextual information helps interpret art. Knowing
>about Shostakovitch's run-in's with the Stalinist authorities
>explains a great deal about his music; his choice of certain
>motifs, etc.
snip
If a piece of artwork has merit, contextual information my be of
secondary interest. If something claims merit solely on this basis,
its probably bullshit.
Artzy fartzies thrive on contextual information because they can talk
about it endlessly. They rarely mention the qualities of merit in an
artwork.
Mani DeLi
...no skill no art
A Skeptical View of Modern Art was updated Jan.16,99
check out my new book, new work, new comments at:.
http://www.interlog.com/~hugod/
mdeli
>>The reason why some academic disciplines need to use
>>obscure technical jargon is because they deal with concepts
>>(e.g., the strong force, the weak force, quarks, etc, in physics,
>>adenosine triphosphate in physiology) which simply have no
>>analogues in ordinary day-to-day experience.
--It can and has been explained to some degree. Furthermore Scientists
generally agree on what their words describe and what concepts mean.
Artspeak and PoMo jargon enjoys no such agreement. (check the PoMo
FAQ)
snip
>This took place from day one. Plato repeatedly asked what we mean by
>a word. Aristotle created terms in classifying causes. And it
>continued to the modern age.
You are begging the question.
>Almost always in the end, a philosopher's creations must be examined
>in order to cast them aside. I include not just the words of a
>tedious obscurantist like our German friends, but also key terms of
>the plain-English, analytic school, such as "synthetic" and
>"analytic." That may suggest the whole thing was hokum, but in fact
>it means that thinking in and through language is part of how ideas
>come to fruition.
Weighing the concept comes first. If the first premise is wrong than
what follows is wrong whether or not you look into its obscurity.
>
>But the analogy to science tells only part of why we must read and
>re-read. The better one writes, the more words tell, and so the more
>a debate with them becomes a difficult task of reading, just as in
>poetry.
More or less words, nonsense is still nonsense.
> We can argue whether Nietzche meant proto-Nazi arrogance or
>humanistic sense of responsibility by "the will to power," but we do
>so with the respect we accord to a poet.
Speak for yourself. Like all Pomos you confuse reality with
aesthetics.
>
>Art criticism has to broaden one's understanding, by suggesting a rich
>content in meanings, assumptions, history, and visual evidence one
>might normally overlook.
It generally fails at this. That's why past criticism remains
generally unread. Most art criticism is just fashionable babble.
> So it has to take the same freedoms as
>philosophy, unless it wants merely to flatter greeting-card judgments
>or let people know what to do with a free afternoon .
>
>Indeed, it's more like your concept of physics than even philosophy.
>After all, philosophy is about life, and we all live, but describing
>the visual in words means much the same transposition as from
>subatomic mysteries to familiar waves and particles.
Nonsense
>Moreover, life can be lived according to some pretty bizarre dogmas,
>but at least we all are living.
Brilliant conclusion.
> Artists reflect the earthshaking
>movements that take art from century to century. Philosophy might
>wish to see through psychobabble, but no student of Surrealism can
>discard it.
What "earth shaking" movement did Vermeer reflect? Bet he can't
answer the question.
>I mentioned that an entire book explicate Renaissance vocabulary. It
>decidedly does NOT approach the vocabulary as an accident like that of
>ancient Rome speaking Latin, as you put it. That is, it does more
>than translate words before throwing them aside. It insists on their
>pertinance if one is to take great artists seriously.
?
>We have to approach texts with the same interest we approach art.
We don't, because the visual arts are to a large degree immediately
perceivable while words are not.
> As
>I implied, maybe more so with text. After all, one who paints badly
>is a bad painter. One who writes poorly might have some incredible
>ideas.
Judging the worth of ideas is different from judging aesthetic
quality..
>
>People who discard the last century of modern art as a hoax stopped
>making an effort to SEE.
People who discard most of the artwork of this century and the last
and confine themselves to seeing little more than what curators and
critics feed them have made no effort whatever.
> Have you stopped making an effort yourself?
Haber, don't patronize your reader. Your logic is bad but you can do
better than that.
>I have no doubt that you are responding to a real text, not academic
>writing in general. But your RHETORIC doesn't respond.
>
>Kay and I find that text flawed but clear as can be. We see it as
>so-so writing burdened by mid-century critical assumptions about "art
>itself." I want to laugh at that kind of vocabulary, but I can't even
>laugh in good faith unless I recognize it wasn't plucked out of thin
>air. Are you really unable to read it, or have you stopped caring
>enough to read it?
If writing has a faulty basic premise delving further is usually a
waste of time.
Marilyn
> >
> >
>
> === Very provocative (and timely). Merci bien Marilyn.
"The canvas literally burst under the weight it had come to bear."
I like that sentence, it brings with it so much imagery, all those
monumental paintings. And Modernism says, no more, no more, please
no more...
That poem about the muse, is it your own?
adieu,
Marilyn
Ariane
On Tue, 23 Mar 1999, Marilyn wrote:
> > === Very provocative (and timely). Merci bien Marilyn.
>
>
> "The canvas literally burst under the weight it had come to bear."
>
> I like that sentence, it brings with it so much imagery, all those
> monumental paintings. And Modernism says, no more, no more, please
> no more...
>
> That poem about the muse, is it your own?
>
> adieu,
> Marilyn
Is this not a forum for writing after all?
avec bonheur,
A.
br...@wralaw.com
jh...@columbia.edu wrote:
> >The reason why some academic disciplines need to use
> >obscure technical jargon is because they deal with concepts
> >(e.g., the strong force, the weak force, quarks, etc, in physics,
> >adenosine triphosphate in physiology) which simply have no
> >analogues in ordinary day-to-day experience.
Yes,
> Not really, and there you're getting at my real background, physics.
> Most of it, from unfamiliar words like torque and vector to the
> language of equations, stemmed from describing the familiar in more
> revealing ways.
Hence the familiar lap-dog is called a quark(very revealing)?
> At other times, it works by attempting to give a more
> precise meaning to words used loosely, such as momentum.
Momentum may have come from science, what is the difference
between force, momentum, and energy?
> Philosophy has always reserved the same freedoms.
As you implied above for science philosophy will make up obscure
terms(by greek roots) in order to clarify their issues. For the
most part the obscure terms in artworld-speak are variables.
> One could take, not
> entirely frivolously, as a definition of philosophy the marvellous
> book title of J. L. Austin's, "How to Do Things with Words."
Philosophy, philo (knowledge) sophia (love) I think(??????)
Philology study of knowledge(used by pomo in place of love)
> This took place from day one. Plato repeatedly asked what we mean by
> a word. Aristotle created terms in classifying causes. And it
> continued to the modern age. Heidegger or Kant reads so badly in no
> small part because he's attempting something remarkable:
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Well write me an art critique, (you remark on it hence it is remarkable)
> I include not just the words of a
> tedious obscurantist like our German friends,
directly from philosophy, fallacty ad obscurantum,
> but also key terms of
> the plain-English, analytic school, such as "synthetic" and
> "analytic." That may suggest the whole thing was hokum, but in fact
> it means that thinking in and through language is part of how ideas
> come to fruition.
If postmodernism is right -this path leads to ambiguity, its brand
of garble is a prime example, -doing its job.
> But the analogy to science tells only part of why we must read and
> re-read. The better one writes, the more words tell,
As a Fan of Faulkner, Artists remain a mystery to themselves. No
critic ever explains them, at best it is interesting reaction and
speculation, at worst it is prejudicial dismissal. Completely
incomprehensible garble is harmless except for the money scams
they are related too.
> Art criticism has to broaden one's understanding,
Art criticism has become redundant, and inconprehensible. It must
stand alone as complexe analogy poetry that says more about the
writers willingness to trip out (weak pshychedelics) style and see
such magical things as the figuers beneath the drips in Pollacks
painting. Or fill the (Zen/Dull duality) lack of art minimalism
with prosthetic meaning. (not to say the Zen/Dull duality is not
enough)
> by suggesting a rich
> content in meanings, assumptions, history, and visual evidence one
> might normally overlook.
> So it has to take the same freedoms as
> philosophy, unless it wants merely to flatter greeting-card judgments
> or let people know what to do with a free afternoon .
We are on the slippery slope to kitsch? I don't buy threats of
'greeting card' vs. incomprehensible. Since you were on the subject
of science, it occurs to me that no physicist has gotten anywhere
without being able to explain his ultimate theories in semi laymans
terms. Case in point Einsteins Relativity (with the train and twin
examples), or Hawkings black hole Radiation, each of these physicists
understood their theories well enough to give a common analogy to
every day events.
> Indeed, it's more like your concept of physics than even philosophy.
> After all, philosophy is about life, and we all live, but describing
> the visual in words means much the same transposition as from
> subatomic mysteries to familiar waves and particles.
> People who discard the last century of modern art as a hoax stopped
> making an effort to SEE.
Some of them are hoaxes
> ve you stopped making an effort yourself?
> I have no doubt that you are responding to a real text, not academic
> writing in general. But your RHETORIC doesn't respond.
> Kay and I find that text flawed but clear as can be. We see it as
> so-so writing burdened by mid-century critical assumptions about "art
> itself." I want to laugh at that kind of vocabulary, but I can't even
> laugh in good faith unless I recognize it wasn't plucked out of thin
> air. Are you really unable to read it, or have you stopped caring
> enough to read it?
John (www.haberarts.com)
Bryn Ayers
zi...@interport.net
Dear Marilyn:
I am afraid I don't think this quote has nothing to do with modernism
and a lot to do with a postmodernist critic and a very large and
obfuscating vocabulary. Do you sit thereand tell me you knew what the
word "disgorning" meant? I don't.
Let me start with the beiggning of the first sentence. "The challenge
to the allusion of aesthetic autonomy - now the word ALLUSION requires
a prepostion TO. one alludes to something. This author alludes to
nothing. . Could he/she have meant ILLUSION?
I will continue on that basis. If that was the right word he then
uses the word illusion immediately thereafter in a way totally
differrent from the first usage. So we are left very confused about
what the word illusion means anywhere in that long sentence. But the
word "ALLUSION" makes no sense either. Now here is another phrase
left over from Finnegan's wake : "anything, stone and character,
included survives Death". Well it means does stone or character
survive death. Well stone surely survives death, unless some one
blows it up or chisels it to pieces. And character should be shown in
the life history of the person, and if that person did any art work it
should show in that. So what does that mean -we are in there all the
time for real with Chuang Tzu not knowing whether we are a man
dreaming he is a butterfly or a butterfly dreaming he is a man?
Actually I like that an awful lot more than your writers dreadful
prose and hifalutin difficult toi parse or understand language. It is
even worse when I do understand it.
Whom does he believe felt that nothing would survive after death?
Brancusi, Braque, Klee, Malevich, Mondrian? None of them believed
this. Where were tha active working artists who were modernists and
believed this?
During modernism, for whom did the canvas burst? All of the artists
who were painters painted on canvas and kept on doing so four decades
and decades.
If you are talkingpost modernist that still is untrue. Many of them
work with traditional media in painting and inscultpure. It may sound
nice to you, but does it really make sense?
Does this paragraph below mean that artists had not responded to
misery, fright of history, dumb cruelty, torture and humiliations?
That in fact art was doing it to people?
What about the Raft of the Medusa, Goyas Disastros de Guerra? The
madmen of Baron Gros late years?, Ensor, Van Gogh, Aretemisia
Gentileschi? And do you think that is what all ofthe great Christian
painters from Berlinghiero Berlinghieri through Cimabue to Giotto to
Duccio the Lorenzetti, Simone Martine, Sassetta were about? They were
infliting all trhe evils of the world on their viewers?
This is a piece of text which reads as badly as the Republican
platform. It also treats art as an autonomous activity which in
itself and out of any context inflicted damage on people. I thought
that was a no, no! It has to be seen in its cultural context. By the
way, I as an intelligent modernist have always felt that to be true.
Despite whatever is special about art, it has to be seen in its full
context. And I am not unusual in having believed this for some 45
years.
Seen that way, isn;t it a wonder that people like Goya, lackeys to
autocratic Kings should have been able to produce suich a body of
human and suffering work?
Marilyn. Never paint a flower painting again. You will be adding to
the buden of the ordinary man or woman who ses it. They will be hut
by the facility you have and they don't.
Gabriel
>Not least of which tumbled out were all the miseries and frights of
>history, the dumb cruelties, tortures, and humiliations stored up in art,
>The days death.-in-day-out of it, the display of women, the traumas that
>art once re-enacted and mollified, all were sent packing, to walk the
>streets on their own, factually, no longer as memory of what occurred,
>but as the oakes no sense either!
On Thu, 18 Mar 1999 13:54:29 -0800, Marilyn <m...@bc.ca> wrote:
>There isn't a particular definition of Modernism which I have
>accepted yet but the following quote tries to explain what
>Modernism did for painting.
>
>From the catalogue to Maury Baden's "A Choreography of the Ordinary"
>Baden is a sculptor. It is written by Robert Hollot-Kentor.
>
>"The challenge to the allusion of aestheitc autonomy in the 1st
>part of this century to any claim that illusion can be meaningful
>in itself, and by implication to the illusion that anything,
>stone and character, included, survives death, not only undermined
>the capacity for concentration it caused sudden sometimes progressive
>disgorning of the aesthetic process, the whole of its contents.
>(ref: "Aesthetic Theory," Theodor Adorno & Walter Benjamin)
>This can be seen for instance in the way that painting was pulled
>into sculpture's gravitational orbit, as in the reversal of
>Cezanne's much thought about fruit [painted from wax models].
>The canvas finally burst under the literal weight it had come to bear.
>Not least of which tumbled out were all the miseries and frights of
>history, the dumb cruelties, tortures, and humiliations stored up in art,
>The days death.-in-day-out of it, the display of women, the traumas that
>art once re-enacted and mollified, all were sent packing, to walk the
>streets on their own, factually, no longer as memory of what occurred,
>but as the oakes no sense either!
Marilyn
>
> Dear Marilyn:
>
> I am afraid I don't think this quote has nothing to do with modernism
> and a lot to do with a postmodernist critic and a very large and
> obfuscating vocabulary. Do you sit thereand tell me you knew what the
> word "disgorning" meant? I don't.
>
The word was 'disgorging' a typo. Of course you never make them
so you wouldn't recognize one. Taken in the context of the quote
it can be easily understood.
There was nothing said in the quote that was not common
knowledge and uncontroversial for most artists.
So you don't agree, that's fine. Have you got a better
description of what modernism did for painting in two or
three sentences?
Marilyn
Studio120
>>Plato repeatedly asked what we mean by
>>a word. Aristotle created terms in classifying causes. And it
>>continued to the modern age.
Mani wrote:
>You are begging the question.
Don't you think it's more accurate to say that the question is being reframed?
Or even recontextualized?
Haber wrote:
>> thinking in and through language is part of how ideas
>>come to fruition.
Mani wrote:
>Weighing the concept comes first. If the first premise is wrong than
>what follows is wrong whether or not you look into its obscurity.
"Weighing" the concept cannot happen outside of the structure and the
connotation(s) of the vocabulary. You might as well be arguing the chicken and
the egg question here.
Haber wrote:
>> The better one writes, the more words tell, and so the more
>>a debate with them becomes a difficult task of reading, just as in
>>poetry.
Mani wrote:
>More or less words, nonsense is still nonsense.
The point is that writing done well is worth reading more than once. Failure
on the part of the reader to be able to interpret on the first reading doesn't
necessarily mean that what's written is invalid or "nonsense".
Haber wrote:
>>but we do
>>so with the respect we accord to a poet.
Mani wrote:
>Speak for yourself. Like all Pomos you confuse reality with
>aesthetics.
What is your definition of aesthetics here? This is a non-statement without
more context.
Haber wrote
>>After all, philosophy is about life, and we all live, but describing
>>the visual in words means much the same transposition as from
>>subatomic mysteries to familiar waves and particles.
Mani wrote:
>Nonsense
Oh, I don't know, it sounds as good as anything else. The parallel between the
mysteries of the universe and our attempts to understand and explain them was
made.
Haber wrote:
>>at least we all are living.
Mani wrote:
>Brilliant conclusion.
Condescending, rude, petty, and above all non-responsive. Got anything better?
Mani, really, don't you have anything more substantive?
Haber wrote:
>>We have to approach texts with the same interest we approach art.
Mani wrote:
>We don't, because the visual arts are to a large degree immediately
>perceivable while words are not.
The visual arts vocabulary can be just as imperceivable as the written one, it
depends on the user. Now look who's begging the question.
Finally, Mani wrote:
>Judging the worth of ideas is different from judging aesthetic
>quality..
Wow! I don't think that you can separate ideation and aesthetics in a work of
art. They are interlocked through artistic intention (the individual),
cultural expectation (society), and visual vocabulary (language).
Regards,
Kevin Conlon
Studio 120
2201 Bull Street, #309
Savannah, GA 31401
br...@wralaw.com
Ariane <da_l...@alcor.concordia.ca> wrote:
> On Sun, 21 Mar 1999 br...@wralaw.com wrote: -Me
> > > Reality
> > > goes out the perspectival window, one can argue. And that was exactly
> > > the critical party line about Modernism for a long while.
> > Modernism never existed
> == Neither did the holocaust (some say). Both statements are ahistorical
> illusions.
Post-Holocaustism or PostHolocaust? (ism=belief in) It occurs to
me that the philosophia of PoModernism, over asserts modernism(,) as
a monolith. Hence there is no singular Modernism, while we can
historically refer to an arbritary but usefull time-frame as Modern,
Modernism(the belief in it) is more an invention of PostModernism(which
fails to believe in PostModernism since it is not yet defined).
PostModernism itself appears to be a strange historical trick to
define an arbitrary but usefull time-frame, before and during its
inception, "writing history in the present, rather than the future
present when it has become history." Its up to future historians
to play along. It(history) is now more than ever a Game, since
Karmic postmodernists did not before go after history...
> > > I like his reversal, although I wonder if he's playing with words a
> > > bit, moving from break with an artistic practice (illusion) to break
> > > with art as intrinsic value. And I don't buy assimilating painting
> > > into sculpture. First thing to go is sculpture's autonomy as object
> > > of contemplation by an unmoved viewer out in ideal land. Can there be
> > > some interest involved here? He's writing about a sculptor, some time
> > > after Minimalism made sculpture kinda suspect for a lot of us.
> > Minimalism may not be sculpture at all.
> ()
Pure Punishment!
> > > He's interesting because he's showing how an operation like
> > > Modernism's self-destructs. It's just as its reliance on estheticism,
> > > as the traditional critics had it, means that Romanticism
> > > self-destructed in those years. It helps explain why Analytic Cubism
> > > led so naturally to collage.
> === Really, Romanticism has done nothing but evolve and it therefore only
> looks like it has `destructed'. As long as there are people, there will
> be romanticist sentiments and expressions. And Modernism, as an art
> movement, has been assimilated into art history, that is, is has become a
> form of romanticist orthodoxy, much like PoMo is now a conceptualist
> orthodoxy, and the pendulum is ready to swing again (which makes it a
> particularly exciting time to be an artist)!
> > Scissors and Glue and Braque created collage, as well as plenty of Media.
> === Your somewhat fashionable cynicism belies the truth of Picasso and
> Braque's adventures of 1909 -> .
It's not cynicism, things happen because of what is there.
Is the Zen/Dull duality of Minimalism Cynicism?
> > >r why the ordinariness of modern art
> > > objects connect simultaneously to their presence in real life and the
> > > revolt (apparently hopeless for us three-quarters of a century after
> > > the Frankfurt school) against art's commercial "aura."
> > > -- John (jha...@haberarts.com)
> > Bryn Ayers
> adieu, A.
Bryn Ayers
br...@wralaw.com
> Thanks so much. That solves it totally.
Exactly! Now what is sculpture?
> John (jha...@haberarts.com)
br...@wralaw.com
Marilyn <m...@bc.ca> wrote:
> zi...@interport.net wrote:
> There was nothing said in the quote that was not common
> knowledge and uncontroversial for most artists.
> So you don't agree, that's fine. Have you got a better
> description of what modernism did for painting in two or
> three sentences?
Augment+=#, It is what painters did for "Modern", Or if you
want what painters did for modernism. The past now is what will
the past do for the future.
Reinvent#@! Modernism (the belief in Modern) is a PoMo invention,
The Universe of beliefs held during the arbitrary time-frame
historians call Modern are neither monolithic nor reducible
> Marilyn
peter nelson
Studio120 wrote in message <19990324071039...@ng-fc1.aol.com>...
>Haber wrote:
>
>>>Plato repeatedly asked what we mean by
>>>a word. Aristotle created terms in classifying causes. And it
>>>continued to the modern age.
>
>Mani wrote:
>
>>You are begging the question.
>
>Don't you think it's more accurate to say that the question is being
reframed?
>Or even recontextualized?
Either way, it's being evaded.
>>Weighing the concept comes first. If the first premise is wrong than
>>what follows is wrong whether or not you look into its obscurity.
>
>"Weighing" the concept cannot happen outside of the structure and the
>connotation(s) of the vocabulary. You might as well be arguing the chicken
and
>the egg question here.
Which is why speakers need to proceed from well-defined terms.
The sciences deal with this by referring to physical phenomena.
An electron is an electron and a kilogram is a kilogram regardless
of how you say it. If ArtSpeak philosophers cannot achieve this
then they cannot make clear statements about anything. The
fact that some words have shifting meanings because of
externalities like culture and context only reinforces my claim
that ArtSpeak cannot communicate anything nontrivial.
>The point is that writing done well is worth reading more than once.
The example given was not "writing done well".
>What is your definition of aesthetics here? This is a non-statement
without
>more context.
All you need to know about aesthetics is that it's subjective.
. . .
>>We don't, because the visual arts are to a large degree immediately
>>perceivable while words are not.
>
>The visual arts vocabulary can be just as imperceivable as the written one,
it
>depends on the user. Now look who's begging the question.
You are assuming that there IS a "visual arts vocabulary". But
unlike writers, most visual artists do not proceed from an existing
"vocabulary" and then create their paintings from it, and even
those formalists who do do not generally create a "dictionary"
for their vocabulary so any attempt to learn this "vocabulary"
is futile.
If I want to read Hemingway I first begin by studying English.
If I want to know more about Hemingway's use of certain themes
or ideas I can read any of several biographies of him. To
learn even more I can study the history of the first half of
the 20th century. NONE of these enterprises require learning
any obscure jargon or entering into some high priesthood
of academic LitCrit.
---peter
dr.j.
On Wed, 24 Mar 1999 br...@wralaw.com wrote:
> > One could take, not
> > entirely frivolously, as a definition of philosophy the marvellous
> > book title of J. L. Austin's, "How to Do Things with Words."
>
> Philosophy, philo (knowledge) sophia (love) I think(??????)
Right.
> Philology study of knowledge(used by pomo in place of love)
Same root - philo, (love), coupled with Logos (order, knowledge).
Philology is the love of knowledge, which, by cultural predisposition
occurred through the study of texts, esp. Greek and Roman, back in the
Middle Ages.
> Art criticism has become redundant, and inconprehensible.
Only to those who lack the ability to comprehend it. By this logic, you
would go to Portugal and tell the Portuguese that they're all spewing
redundant non-sense and they're simply faking communication and putting on
airs......too bad your maths and sciences aren't enough to make one
truly intelligent. Those who don't like discussing art, are those who
CAN'T! And that's the bottom line.
adieu, A.
peter nelson
>On Mon, 22 Mar 1999, peter nelson wrote:
>
>(snip)
>
>> But if someone today were to write about art in Latin we
>> *would* make fun of it. My point is that there is little which
>> that can be said about art which cannot be expressed in simple
>> English.
>
>But there's much about art which can only be left unsaid.
Agreed.
. . .
> And furthermore, what can be said about art often requires that we
> press language into the service of capturing often complex and
> polyvalent emotions and impressions.
But then how do you know you are actually saying anything
about the art or artist? I agree you can TRY to do this; I agree
you might have the URGE to do this. What I question is whether
at the end of the day practictioners of this approach are actually
yielding any better understanding of their subject than could be
achieved by more mundane means such as . . .
1. look at the art.
2. read a biography of the artist, study the history of his time, etc
3. look at the art.
4. study painting, tools, materials, techniques, etc
5. look at the art.
. . . lather, rinse, repeat.
>> Art is a product of the same historical and cultural forces we
>> experience daily,
>> and of the mental life of the artist as a human
>> being, an identity we all share. We can discuss these in plain
>> language.
>
>Sure, but we can't assume to do these complex topics justice with our
>`plain' language.
I have no evidence that the complex language does any better.
The question is till: how do you know that you are actually describing
anything real with this jargon?
---peter
Marilyn
and then describe the painting or sculpture in simple mundane phrases,
like:
"Peter, I think your work is very nice. The painting is good.
The animals are pretty beautiful. Have a nice day."
Marilyn
Marilyn
> > > entirely frivolously, as a definition of philosophy the marvellous
> > > book title of J. L. Austin's, "How to Do Things with Words."
> >
> > Philosophy, philo (knowledge) sophia (love) I think(??????)
>
WRONG.
sophia: " Sophia, Wisdom; and Wisdom was female.
from: "The White Goddess" page 157, by Robert Graves.
and for an example of an English sentence, Peter,
check your own post concerning style.
Not good.
Marilyn
peter nelson
>On Mon, 22 Mar 1999, peter nelson wrote:
>
>> I can write a book about an actual event in someone's life;
>> I can write a book about a completely fictional event; I can
>> write a book about *writing books*; or I can write a book which
>> is completely self-referential ("You are reading a book. Now you
>> are reading the second sentence in the book", etc). Are these
>> all not books? What else can they be but books? In what
>> way is any one of these books not "itself"?
>>
>> ---peter
>
>When the act of `writing' or `reading' becomes so laden with implicit
>cultural super-structure that writing and reading become predictable
>social excercises and the `boundaries' of both solidify as it were into
>what we take as cultural norms or the limits of acceptability in writing
>and reading, to use your example.
If someone takes a mystery genre novel to a beach to read while sunning,
she is engaging in a predictable social exercise repeated by millions
of people every summer. The story in the book itself is also constrained
by the traditions of that genre.
But the book is still itself; it's still a book. The fact that it fits
into
a socially-defined context doesn't change that. Nor does it
take some arcane academic language to talk about. Things can
perform many roles. In my studio I have a vinyl carpet pad so I
can more easily roll my office chair between desk, easel, and
work-table, which would otherwise be difficult because of the
carpeting. But it also serves to protect the carpet from spilled
paint. Likewise the book performs many roles. One of them
might be so the woman doesn't have to talk to her boring husband
about the stock market. Another might be to impress some friend
who's into paperback mysteries. Etc.
> The easiest way to break
these
>boundaries, that is, to be iconoclastic, is to refer to sex or violence,
>such as we see on contemporary TV (and on the internet). This
>faux-iconoclasm is cute
WHAT faux-iconoclasm? And how does "referring" to sex and violence
achieve this? And what's cute about it?
> and all but when someone actually and genuinely
>steps up and breaks down these inherited cultural parameters, here with
>reference to painting now, we can see how an artist frees a painting to
>`be itself' once more. It amounts to a stripping away of inherited
>cultural super-structure that makes an art form dull and predictable (like
>TV).
This last part makes no apparent sense but if you can explain it I'm
sure I can translate it into simple English.
I agree that TV is predictably dull; that's why I don't watch it. But I
have the same reaction to much modern art. Mark Rothko's work
from the 1950's, on, is dull and predictable in much the same way
as TV is. There are variations between the paintings, just as
there are between sitcoms or TV news, but the variations are minor
and not very interesting. Just as TV sitcoms are about people
who have little in common with real people, so it's hard to connect
with them emotionally, so too is it hard to connect emotionally
with the colors and simple geometric shapes of Rothko's paintings.
Being iconoclastic, itself, doesn't make something very interesting
after the first raised eyebrow. Karen Finley used to smear her nude body
with chocolate and swear on stage, but after you've seen one naked,
cursing, chocolate-covered woman believe me, you've seen them all.
Whereas a skilled artist can create compelling beauty from a similar
subject. My wife and I bought a silkscreen of a nude swimmer
swimming amongst all kinds of fishes and seaweed. Her wide hips
and long flowing hair and her graceful motion are surprisingly captured
in a chocolate brown ink. We find it quite compelling.
---peter
John Haber
Remember the two-panel Elizabeth Murray with jagged edges that looked
like they'd almost fit, as if the painting had just exploded? I
think it's my fave of hers.
John (www.haberarts.com)
doug L.
> Reinvent#@! Modernism (the belief in Modern) is a PoMo invention,
> The Universe of beliefs held during the arbitrary time-frame
> historians call Modern are neither monolithic nor reducible
>
Okay. Now how is that workable? - doug lauber
doug L.
>
> When I read that paragraph, I can see the pages of my art history
> books turning. It marks for me the transition to modernism in painting.
> It frees painting to be itself, and to be poetic.
>
> Marilyn
Modernism simply deconstructed the preceeding art.
This resulted in a new language, a new vocabulary
which satisfied a general thirst for a refreshing
originality. I find PoMo to be more interesting, because
it's happenin', still evolving. - doug lauber
peter nelson
dr.j. wrote in message ...
>> Art criticism has become redundant, and inconprehensible.
>
>Only to those who lack the ability to comprehend it. By this logic, you
>would go to Portugal and tell the Portuguese that they're all spewing
>redundant non-sense and they're simply faking communication and putting on
>airs......
Bad analogy. They demonstrably communicate something
real. I can go to a restaurant in Lisbon and order in Portuguese
and what will arrive is what I ordered. I can book a flight or
exchange money or ask for the men's room and I will not
be surprised by the results. I should also point out that
many Portuguese can aslo speak English and have no
difficulty translating Portuguese into plain, non-jargony
English.
What evidence can you offer that ArtSpeak describes anything
real?
And if your analogy is accurate you should have no difficulty
translating it into simple English.
>too bad your maths and sciences aren't enough to make one
>truly intelligent. Those who don't like discussing art, are those who
>CAN'T! And that's the bottom line.
Saying so doesn't make it so. What evidence can you offer that
ArtSpeak results in any new insights about art that would not be
possible in simple English?
---peter
peter nelson
>On Tue, 23 Mar 1999 14:48:58 -0500, "peter nelson"
>If a piece of artwork has merit, contextual information my be of
>secondary interest. If something claims merit solely on this basis,
>its probably bullshit.
>
>Artzy fartzies thrive on contextual information because they can talk
>about it endlessly. They rarely mention the qualities of merit in an
>artwork.
Yes, I noticed this. Curious about what all the fuss is over
Rothko I borrowed a book from the library about him recently.
Almost the entire book was context - examples of other
(generally much better) works of art, discussions of other
things happening in the culture in the 50's and 60's, and
plates of Rothko's art. But almost NOTHING about the
paintings themselves or why he paints this way or what
we're supposed to get out of them. When I look at a Rothko
I always say to myself, "So what?" "What do people see in this?"
"I could paint this but I'd be embarassed." I was hoping the
book would answer at least the first two questions, but after
reading it I think I already knew the answers.
---peter
John Haber
there's a lot of garbage out there in philosophy, criticism, and
cultural studies. I've been myself on a god-awful streak of picking
up books that sound like they'll be on cool topics, and then I find
knee-jerk language or language hiding bad thinking. It's so boring
and hard to finish.
It's sometimes even worse when you know there's value in it, too. W.
V. O. Quine wrote an influential essay ("Two Dogmas of Empiricism")
that literally changed my life. It took apart this hope of logically
building up the universe from simple facts and self-evident
definitions. It puts one in the position of seeing simple truths and
the whole world so intertwined that the world never lets go. But then
I never finished much of his writing, with all those mathematical
symbols.
I'm sure you know I just wanted to caution one on the turn Peter was
taking (and his rhetoric). At the very least, one shouldn't leap from
suspicions about a writer's metaphors to calling his English wrong.
But it's more than that. One who knows how much bad expression is
tied up with bad thinking is exactly the sort who should love words
enough to cherish the unexpected.
When I was studying theoretical physics, I had this gorgeous feeling
of privilege, that I was learning ways to express things that none of
my friends would ever know, and yet it was a peek at the reality all
around them. I've felt that unexpected release into the familiar
again over and over in life, with words and in front of art. Can it
be difficult? Sure.
I started this note by complaining about academic jargon for its
overfamiliarity. It loses the ability to communicate and to allow
thought around the time it loses the ability to surprise. Orwell's
newspeak was like that, and it's language as a lie. "Common sense"
descriptions of art and life can do much the same damage.
I love that final line of the Tractatus: "Whereof we cannot speak,
thereof we must pass over in silence." It's been read as
hyperlogical: don't talk about nonsense like feelings. And it does
mean that, which is one reason Wittgenstein repudiated his early work.
But he also meant it to cherish silence. Maybe a little the way you
do.
Clear, simple writing can tell us when to shut up. Difficult writing
can point out gaps in the order of things, the silences, we didn't
notice before. It can spin out the polymorphic play of new words and
new silences. "Common sense" in Peter's sens, like Mani's certainty
about art, is more likely to stand for filling the silences and then
covering over the seams.
John (www.haberarts.com)
peter nelson
Ariane wrote in message ...
>
>
>> I see generations of English teachers turning over in
>> their graves. It's an excellent example of really bad
>> writing. I'm not entirely sure that some of the "sentences"
>> in it actually ARE sentences.
>>
>> It may really be true that locked up inside the heads
>> of some of these art philosophers are actual truths
>> and insights. But they'll take them to their graves if
>> they don't learn how to write simple expository
>> English.
>
>
>=== Adorno wasn't english oh anglocentric one.
I'm not a brain surgeon so you don't see me trying
to perform brain surgery. If I did I'd be judged by
the result. Likewise, above. If he doesn't know
how to speak English perhaps he shouldn't try.
But if he tries then I should judge him by the result.
>> And what does it mean for a painting to "be itself"?
>> What else can a painting be, if not itself?
>
>Uhhh, an addendum to an art theory?
>
>> How do
>> you tell a painting which is "itself" from one which is
>> not "itself"?
>
>> ---peter
>
>When no theories or academic strictures yet apply.
This is not a sentence. Are you also not an English speaker?
> When creativity simply
>outstrips is context and forces the latter to catch up and bound it again.
This is an even worse sentence. And you still didn't answer the
question. (I'm starting to develop a theory that the real problem
with ArtSpeak is that its proponents simply don't know HOW
to write in English)
Perhaps you should cite some examples to answer the question.
I suggest choosing two paintings, visible on the web so we can all
see and discuss them, and identify one which is "itself" and one
which is not.
---peter
peter nelson
>> What I question is
whether
>> at the end of the day practictioners of this approach are actually
>> yielding any better understanding of their subject than could be
>> achieved by more mundane means such as . . .
>>
>> 1. look at the art.
>> 2. read a biography of the artist, study the history of his time, etc
>> 3. look at the art.
>> 4. study painting, tools, materials, techniques, etc
>> 5. look at the art.
>> . . . lather, rinse, repeat.
. . .
>> I have no evidence that the complex language does any better.
>> The question is till: how do you know that you are actually describing
>> anything real with this jargon?
>
>and then describe the painting or sculpture in simple mundane phrases,
>like:
>
>"Peter, I think your work is very nice. The painting is good.
>The animals are pretty beautiful. Have a nice day."
Now you're just being silly. I agree that many works or art cannot
be understood in any greater depth than the experience of
just looking at them. There are others where the use of certain
themes, motifs, materials, etc can be better understood by
historical or biographical information about the artist. There
are others still where the art itself influenced historical or
other events of the day. But ALL of this can be discussed
in plain English.
---peter
John Haber
>the turn toward primitivism, while the primitivist elements of modern
>painting do the same to the latter's attempt to explore 3 dimensional
>space less traditionally.
Speaking of difficulty, you've packed a lot in there, and it's quite
rewarding. I'm going to reread it a few more times. Can't explain
why, but it reminds me of Derrida's playing around with the "frame" of
painting.
>In any case, this is why modernism is not "dead". Not in any sense
>of the word. For all its proclamations, PoMo is simply continuing within
>the context of the lifespan of our `modern' art and civilization.
I like that, too. I'm going to get arrogant again and quote myself
(on a show of "Abstract Painting Since 1970," at Snug Harbor, New York
City):
"Put me out of my misery!
"Postmodernism is starting to sound dangerously like modern medicine,
only without hope of assisted suicide. Painting is dead; SoHo is dead;
abstraction is dead; American art is dead. Or they will be, any minute
now -- right?
"For decade after decade, the death announcements keep on coming.
With Robert Hughes, they have even made it to prime-time TV. And still
the painful case of modern art drags on. An underrated show of
contemporary abstraction demonstrates why: in painting at its best,
nothing is ever resolved."
John (www.haberarts.com)
John Haber
Peter, you wrote:
>If I want to read Hemingway I first begin by studying English.
That very much reflect the problem I'm talking about. I'd have said
that to learn English, one might read Hemingway.
John (www.haberarts.com)
John Haber
incomprehensible. One must write clearly and well, or it's not going
to make sufficient sense. Only that's no excuse for disdaining
rereading.
The rest of your post appears to be concerned that I talk about good
criticism rather than display it. I don't think the thread was crying
out for a digression to an analysis of some particular painting from
me. I'd point to my own writing elsewhere, but why? I wasn't setting
myself up as master of the universe, and I'm not.
We were talking about the fatuous dismissal of a specific passage that
a few of us found kind of nice -- and where such a dismissal leads
one.
For myself, I am not a relativist, and I try hard not to be difficult.
Apparently, I succeed enough to get into a drag-out argument.
I want to be in the tradition that's almost died, in between TV
critics and scholars. It doesn't always work, maybe never, but I'm
really qualified at best to be an explainer. I uploaded an essay in
praise of deconstructive accounts of van Eyck, and I did my best to
turn readers on to the stuff without using deconstructive jargon
myself. Certainly I won't assuming anyone knew anything beforehand.
And hey, it sure beats grunting about how inane those academic morons
are.
John (www.haberarts.com)
peter nelson
John Haber wrote in message <36f93fbf...@news.cc.columbia.edu>...
>I started this note by complaining about academic jargon for its
>overfamiliarity. It loses the ability to communicate and to allow
>thought around the time it loses the ability to surprise.
Surprise is achieved by what it says, not by dense,
incomprehensible language. Moreover, to surprise
the most people it has to be comprehended by the most
people.
>
Orwell's
>newspeak was like that, and it's language as a lie. "Common sense"
>descriptions of art and life can do much the same damage.
Orwell's Newspeak was the deliberate twisting of commonsense
words to distort their meanings. Clinton's comments about "not
having sex" with that woman, Ms Lewinsky, are a good example.
>Clear, simple writing can tell us when to shut up. Difficult writing
>can point out gaps in the order of things, the silences, we didn't
>notice before. It can spin out the polymorphic play of new words and
>new silences. "Common sense" in Peter's sens, like Mani's certainty
>about art, is more likely to stand for filling the silences and then
>covering over the seams.
Just saying this doesn't make it true. I have repeatedly asked for
some shred of evidence that the "difficult language" yields some
higher and finer understanding. But every analogy that has
been proposed (physics, Portuguese) is easily shown to be
a poor analogy, since in those cases it is always clear that
the use of the language yields genuine understanding and
communication.
You say that difficult writing "points out gaps in the order of
things" but once pointed out, why don't you tell us what some
of these gaps are? Physics used dense language to discover
electron tunneling, but having done so it was able to apply
this to devices we can use in the real, mundane world. Ditto
with atomic bombs. The language is only used to make
the discovery - once made it can be shown to all.
If you can't do so then it suggests that the dense language
is only used to construct an artificial world; it can make discoveries
about things in that little world. There are certain branches
of mathematics like that - fantastic discoveries are made
which can only be understood by other theoretical mathematicians
and which have little bearing on the real world. Another example
of this might be SimCity and similar PC games. But I suspect
that both of my analogies fail because both computers and
mathematics are more rigidly formal, i.e., they use terms and
definitions far more internally-consistently than your artistic
and philosophical language. I suspect that the artifical worlds
your language creates are more like simulations written in poetry
instead of a formal language. It's an interesting idea - a
simulation and modeling language consisting entirely of
poetry - an MIT Humanities student could probably build a
thesis around it.
When I was in college people kept talking about the great insights
they had when they were high, but they could never quite explain
what was so great about them when they got straight again. I
had the same experience.- the lyrics to some song seemed
INCREDIBLY profound when I was high, but when I listened again
later I was, like, "so what?". I suspect this dense jargon exerts a
similar impact on the brains of its users - it creates a state of altered
consciousness that makes things SEEM very profound.
---peter
John Haber
>incomprehensible language.
I don't have a problem with that. Well put, in fact. So why not try
to enter the discussion Marilyn initiated about what the passage says?
John (jha...@haberarts.com)
mdeli
Ariane wrote:
>When the act of `writing' or `reading' becomes so laden with implicit
>cultural super-structure that writing and reading become predictable
>social excercises and the `boundaries' of both solidify as it were into
>what we take as cultural norms or the limits of acceptability in writing
>and reading, to use your example.
Nice run on sentence.
> The easiest way to break these
>boundaries, that is, to be iconoclastic, is to refer to sex or violence,
>such as we see on contemporary TV (and on the internet). This
>faux-iconoclasm is cute and all but when someone actually and genuinely
>steps up and breaks down these inherited cultural parameters, here with
>reference to painting now, we can see how an artist frees a painting to
>`be itself' once more. It amounts to a stripping away of inherited
>cultural super-structure that makes an art form dull and predictable (like
>TV).
Artspeak rule 2: Always use 200 words where 20 will suffice.
Mani DeLi
...no skill no art
A Skeptical View of Modern Art was updated Jan.16,99
check out my new book, new work, new comments at:.
http://www.interlog.com/~hugod/
mdeli
>
>On Sun, 21 Mar 1999 br...@wralaw.com wrote:
>> Scissors and Glue and Braque created collage, as well as plenty of Media.
>
>=== Your somewhat fashionable cynicism belies the truth of Picasso and
>Braque's adventures of 1909 -> .
"The truth of Picasso?"
Sounds like a religious tract.
Is there a truth of Norman Rockwell?
What 1909 adventures?
mdeli
I presume you find no faults with the major points of my criticism,
which you failed to quote, namely:
Haber Wrote
>>>People who discard the last century of modern art as a hoax stopped
>>>making an effort to SEE.
People who discard most of the artwork of this century and the last
and confine themselves to seeing little more than what curators and
critics feed them have made no effort whatever.
Haber wrote
>>> Have you stopped making an effort yourself?
Haber, don't patronize your reader. Your logic is bad but you can do
better than that.
Haber wrote
>>> Artists reflect the earthshaking
>>>movements that take art from century to century. Philosophy might
>>>wish to see through psychobabble, but no student of Surrealism can
>>>discard it.
What "earth shaking" movement did Vermeer reflect? Bet he can't
answer the question.
Your critique begins here:
>Haber wrote:
>
>>>Plato repeatedly asked what we mean by
>>>a word. Aristotle created terms in classifying causes. And it
>>>continued to the modern age.
>
>Mani wrote:
>
>>You are begging the question.
>
>Don't you think it's more accurate to say that the question is being reframed?
>Or even recontextualized?
No.
>Haber wrote:
>
>>> thinking in and through language is part of how ideas
>>>come to fruition.
>
>Mani wrote:
>
>>Weighing the concept comes first. If the first premise is wrong than
>>what follows is wrong whether or not you look into its obscurity.
>
>"Weighing" the concept cannot happen outside of the structure and the
>connotation(s) of the vocabulary. You might as well be arguing the chicken and
>the egg question here.
>
This is definitely begging the question. If someone wrote a long wordy
treatise claiming to prove that arithmetic is wrong because 2+2=5,
would you read it?
>Haber wrote:
>
>>> The better one writes, the more words tell, and so the more
>>>a debate with them becomes a difficult task of reading, just as in
>>>poetry.
>
>Mani wrote:
>
>>More or less words, nonsense is still nonsense.
>
>The point is that writing done well is worth reading more than once. Failure
>on the part of the reader to be able to interpret on the first reading doesn't
>necessarily mean that what's written is invalid or "nonsense".
>
I repeat: More or less words, nonsense is still nonsense. If you have
anything sensible to say about it refute the point. I didn't mention
validity.
>Haber wrote:
>
>>>but we do
>>>so with the respect we accord to a poet.
>
>Mani wrote:
>
>>Speak for yourself. Like all PoMos you confuse reality with
>>aesthetics.
>
>What is your definition of aesthetics here? This is a non-statement without
>more context.
I wrote my reasons for this in former messages on the subject.
>Haber wrote
>
>>>After all, philosophy is about life, and we all live, but describing
>>>the visual in words means much the same transposition as from
>>>subatomic mysteries to familiar waves and particles.
>
>Mani wrote:
>
>>Nonsense
>
>Oh, I don't know, it sounds as good as anything else. The parallel between the
>mysteries of the universe and our attempts to understand and explain them was
>made.
Glad you liked it.
>Haber wrote:
>
>>>at least we all are living.
>
>Mani wrote:
>
>>Brilliant conclusion.
>
>Condescending, rude, petty, and above all non-responsive. Got anything better?
> Mani, really, don't you have anything more substantive?
>
I presume you find Haber's statement to the point, unobvious and
brilliant.
>Haber wrote:
>
>>>We have to approach texts with the same interest we approach art.
>
>Mani wrote:
>
>>We don't, because the visual arts are to a large degree immediately
>>perceivable while words are not.
>
>The visual arts vocabulary can be just as imperceivable as the written one, it
>depends on the user. Now look who's begging the question.
There is no such thing as a "visual arts vocabulary." Its a critical
fantasy which allows writers to go on and on.
>Finally, Mani wrote:
>
>>Judging the worth of ideas is different from judging aesthetic
>>quality..
>
>Wow! I don't think that you can separate ideation and aesthetics in a work of
>art. They are interlocked through artistic intention (the individual),
>cultural expectation (society), and visual vocabulary (language).
What counts in an artwork is quality and technique. These are the real
factors in what makes it visually attractive. The rest is more often
than not, pure and very unnecessary speculation.
Ariane
On Wed, 24 Mar 1999, mdeli wrote:
> Ariane gets my vote for today's Artspeak
>
> Ariane wrote:
> >When the act of `writing' or `reading' becomes so laden with implicit
> >cultural super-structure that writing and reading become predictable
> >social excercises and the `boundaries' of both solidify as it were into
> >what we take as cultural norms or the limits of acceptability in writing
> >and reading, to use your example.
>
> Nice run on sentence.
>
> > The easiest way to break these
> >boundaries, that is, to be iconoclastic, is to refer to sex or violence,
> >such as we see on contemporary TV (and on the internet). This
> >faux-iconoclasm is cute and all but when someone actually and genuinely
> >steps up and breaks down these inherited cultural parameters, here with
> >reference to painting now, we can see how an artist frees a painting to
> >`be itself' once more. It amounts to a stripping away of inherited
> >cultural super-structure that makes an art form dull and predictable (like
> >TV).
>
> Artspeak rule 2: Always use 200 words where 20 will suffice.
>
> Mani DeLi
> ...no skill and no art
Can you understand it Mani? Just curious.
adieu, A.
Ariane
On Wed, 24 Mar 1999, peter nelson wrote:
>
> >(snip)
> >
> >> But if someone today were to write about art in Latin we
> >> *would* make fun of it. My point is that there is little which
> >> that can be said about art which cannot be expressed in simple
> >> English.
> >
> Ariane wrote in message ...
> >But there's much about art which can only be left unsaid.
>
> Agreed.
> . . .
>
> > And furthermore, what can be said about art often requires that we
> > press language into the service of capturing often complex and
> > polyvalent emotions and impressions.
>
> But then how do you know you are actually saying anything
> about the art or artist?
Well, there's the crux of the issue. When we are describing physical
things like the art or the artist, physically.....than we have no problems
with using simple language. But subjectivity is an `objective' fact. And
thats where language become woefully inadequate as a communication device.
Hey, that's why we have art in the first place!
> I agree you can TRY to do this; I agree
> you might have the URGE to do this. What I question is whether
> at the end of the day practictioners of this approach are actually
> yielding any better understanding of their subject than could be
> achieved by more mundane means such as . . .
>
> 1. look at the art.
> 2. read a biography of the artist, study the history of his time, etc
> 3. look at the art.
> 4. study painting, tools, materials, techniques, etc
> 5. look at the art.
> . . . lather, rinse, repeat.
I agree. But understanding subjectivity. That's the key, and that's the
problem. All those high priests of the technical forget that art engages
the subjective.....and that's why art is notoriously hard to talk about.
> >> Art is a product of the same historical and cultural forces we
> >> experience daily,
> >> and of the mental life of the artist as a human
> >> being, an identity we all share. We can discuss these in plain
> >> language.
> >
> >Sure, but we can't assume to do these complex topics justice with our
> >`plain' language.
>
> I have no evidence that the complex language does any better.
Well, it tries to `pick up the slack' through metaphor, inventing terms,
etc.. Now, I'm the last one to coronate the art scholar, but at the same
time, language can becaome an art form in its own right. And since
telepathy never really caught on (at least not on a mass level) we're
stuck stringing these words together to try and communicate sophisticated
feelings and impressions. Simple language only simplifies things, not a
good idea when you're dealing with a sophisticated complex of thought,
emotion, impression, and aesthetics (or what have you).
> The question is till: how do you know that you are actually describing
> anything real with this jargon?
When the person you're talking to goes "oh yeah, I see what you're saying"
and proceeds to have a meaningful discussion with you. When communication
is achieved, you know you're relating a shared reality at any rate.
> ---peter
a la prochaine,
A.
Ariane
=== Philo is love, Sophia is the goddess wisdom. The love of wisdom is
philosophy. Allegedly.
adieu, A.
Ariane
=== Unless of course PoMo is just the latest phase of Modernist art which
then means that we have to go back to 1907 to see the point of departure
for our current `PoMo evolution'. In that case, Modern art can be said to
be still evolving, and PoMo is its latest phase.
adieu, A.
Ariane
On Wed, 24 Mar 1999, peter nelson wrote:
> >On Mon, 22 Mar 1999, peter nelson wrote:
> >
> >> I can write a book about an actual event in someone's life;
> >> I can write a book about a completely fictional event; I can
> >> write a book about *writing books*; or I can write a book which
> >> is completely self-referential ("You are reading a book. Now you
> >> are reading the second sentence in the book", etc). Are these
> >> all not books? What else can they be but books? In what
> >> way is any one of these books not "itself"?
> >>
> >> ---peter
> >
> Ariane wrote in message ...
> >=== When the act of `writing' or `reading' becomes so laden with implicit
> >cultural super-structure that writing and reading become predictable
> >social excercises and the `boundaries' of both solidify as it were
> into >what we take as cultural norms or the limits of acceptability in
> writing >and reading, to use your example.
>
> If someone takes a mystery genre novel to a beach to read while sunning,
> she is engaging in a predictable social exercise repeated by millions
> of people every summer. The story in the book itself is also constrained
> by the traditions of that genre.
=== And when genre itself become solid. Impermeable, immovable. So laden
with the weight of history that art becomes an exercise in genre or worse,
mere technical prowess? This is the condition of European painting in
1907 (so I believe). Painting needed to be freed from the noose of
culture and context. And the only one who can do that is an autonomous
individual. That's why Bereger's book on Picasso was so pathetic (but I
won't get into that here).
> But the book is still itself; it's still a book.
=== Physically, yes. (Shades of our genetic debate?)
> The fact that it fits
> into
> a socially-defined context doesn't change that.
=== Of course it does. It changes what the book contains and that's more
to the point.
> Nor does it
> take some arcane academic language to talk about.
=== Well, if its academic language which bothers you then why are we
talking about the liberation of painting in fin-de-siecle Paris?
> Things can
> perform many roles. In my studio I have a vinyl carpet pad so I
> can more easily roll my office chair between desk, easel, and
> work-table, which would otherwise be difficult because of the
> carpeting. But it also serves to protect the carpet from spilled
> paint. Likewise the book performs many roles. One of them
> might be so the woman doesn't have to talk to her boring husband
> about the stock market. Another might be to impress some friend
> who's into paperback mysteries. Etc.
=== Peter, cap the turps and open the window!!!
> === The easiest way to break these >boundaries, that is, to be
> iconoclastic, is to refer to sex or violence, >such as we see on
> contemporary TV (and on the internet). This >faux-iconoclasm is cute
>
> WHAT faux-iconoclasm? And how does "referring" to sex and violence
> achieve this? And what's cute about it?
=== Simple ways to pretend to break down cultural taboos. It's cute
because its essentially futile and amounts to posturing with no real
content. Like that David O'BrightOne's comments on homosexuality.
Juvenile stupidity.
> >...and all but when someone actually and genuinely >steps up and breaks
> down these inherited cultural parameters, here with >reference to
> painting now, we can see how an artist frees a painting to >`be
> itself' once more. It amounts to a stripping away of inherited
> >cultural super-structure that makes an art form dull and predictable
> (like >TV).
>
> This last part makes no apparent sense but if you can explain it I'm
> sure I can translate it into simple English.
=== Aha! I knew it! People who hate `ArtSpeak' can't understand it! Do
you hate Portuguese too? (Just a theory I have). Anyway:
:When an artist breaks down the excessive cultural baggage stifling an art
form, (painting in this case)
:The artist frees the painting FROM the cultural expectations of what
painting SHOULD be,
:and painting becomes `fresh,' re-vitalized, once more just a painting.
(But this assumes that you understand the role that high society had in
defining art in fin-de-siecle Paris which, I'm assuming you do.)
> I agree that TV is predictably dull; that's why I don't watch it. But I
> have the same reaction to much modern art. Mark Rothko's work
> from the 1950's, on, is dull and predictable in much the same way
> as TV is.
Yes but you can't slam ALL of modern art for that. This could be
symptomatic of your dislike for American art only. Or perhaps for post
WWII American art. And so on, the finer your gradations of knowledge, the
subtler and more nuanced your appreciation becomes. That's why our "no
skill no art" friend is so transparent.
> There are variations between the paintings, just as
> there are between sitcoms or TV news, but the variations are minor
> and not very interesting. Just as TV sitcoms are about people
> who have little in common with real people, so it's hard to connect
> with them emotionally, so too is it hard to connect emotionally
> with the colors and simple geometric shapes of Rothko's paintings.
Well, yes and no. I don't like abstract expressionism as a rule either
but, depending on my mood, depending on the day, I can attempt to find out
what others saw in Rothko by looking at his work. Appreciation also can
be intellectual, and not only emotional....
> Being iconoclastic, itself, doesn't make something very interesting
> after the first raised eyebrow.
Sure, but it clears the way for creativity, and this is important to
artists and art-making. That's why Picasso's "Desmoiselles d'Avignon" is
more an imoportant work than it is a prodigious technical orgy. But when
people can't relate works to other works then:
a) they underestimate the knowledge of the artist in question
b) they can't see why the work was created and what it was created to
accomplish
> Karen Finley used to smear her nude body
> with chocolate and swear on stage, but after you've seen one naked,
> cursing, chocolate-covered woman believe me, you've seen them all.
(!) All of them??
> Whereas a skilled artist can create compelling beauty from a similar
> subject.
Beauty is often thrown into question by artists....
> My wife and I bought a silkscreen of a nude swimmer
> swimming amongst all kinds of fishes and seaweed. Her wide hips
> and long flowing hair and her graceful motion are surprisingly captured
> in a chocolate brown ink. We find it quite compelling.
Could that be some kind of subconscious longing for Karen Finley??
> ---peter
adieu, A.
Ariane
On Wed, 24 Mar 1999, peter nelson wrote:
> >> Art criticism has become redundant, and inconprehensible.
> >
> >Only to those who lack the ability to comprehend it. By this logic, you
> >would go to Portugal and tell the Portuguese that they're all spewing
> >redundant non-sense and they're simply faking communication and putting on
> >airs......
>
> Bad analogy. They demonstrably communicate something
> real. I can go to a restaurant in Lisbon and order in Portuguese
> and what will arrive is what I ordered. I can book a flight or
> exchange money or ask for the men's room and I will not
> be surprised by the results. I should also point out that
> many Portuguese can aslo speak English and have no
> difficulty translating Portuguese into plain, non-jargony
> English.
=== Sure, but nonetheless, a translation is never as good as the original,
and meaning always gets defaced in the process. Anyway, people aren't
simply bs'ing their way through communicating about art. Like anything,
philosophizing is a craft and requires that you hone your mind to
partake.....in this sense it is exclusive, like painting, and it requires
that one prctice and work at it before one can "get" it. Here's something
for you to consider:
Bring me any Postmodern, or modernist `ArtSpeak' in either French or
English, and I will translate it for you into "simple" french or english,
as you wish. And it'll only cost you 20$ a paragraph!!!
It's an exclusive language that takes time to learn, like anything. It's
just that unlike painting, everyone can speak, so maybe it hurts a little
more to be snubbed....
(snip form another post)
> >too bad your maths and sciences aren't enough to make one
> >truly intelligent. Those who don't like discussing art, are those who
> >CAN'T! And that's the bottom line.
>
> Saying so doesn't make it so. What evidence can you offer that
> ArtSpeak results in any new insights about art that would not be
> possible in simple English?
Because French art scholars don't speak and write in english! Simple or
otherwise....
adieu, A.
>
> ---peter
Ariane
On Wed, 24 Mar 1999, peter nelson wrote:
> >On Sat, 20 Mar 1999, peter nelson wrote:
> >
> >> I see generations of English teachers turning over in
> >> their graves. It's an excellent example of really bad
> >> writing. I'm not entirely sure that some of the "sentences"
> >> in it actually ARE sentences.
> >>
> >> It may really be true that locked up inside the heads
> >> of some of these art philosophers are actual truths
> >> and insights. But they'll take them to their graves if
> >> they don't learn how to write simple expository
> >> English.
> >
> >
>
> Ariane wrote in message ...
> >
> >=== Adorno wasn't english oh anglocentric one.
>
> I'm not a brain surgeon so you don't see me trying
> to perform brain surgery. If I did I'd be judged by
> the result. Likewise, above. If he doesn't know
> how to speak English perhaps he shouldn't try.
> But if he tries then I should judge him by the result.
=== HE'S not speaking english. His work is being translated by those who
feel that anglophones should do the work it takes to understand him.
Translation is difficult, I do it for a paycheque. Some things don't
translate into english, some things are too nuanced to be transposed into
english, etc, etc. English does have it's limitations Peter, as do all
languages.
> >> And what does it mean for a painting to "be itself"?
> >> What else can a painting be, if not itself?
> >
> >Uhhh, an addendum to an art theory?
> >
> >> How do
> >> you tell a painting which is "itself" from one which is
> >> not "itself"?
=== That's a good question. You'd first have to become historically and
theoretically aware in order to judge.....
> >When no theories or academic strictures yet apply.
>
> This is not a sentence. Are you also not an English speaker?
==== It still makes sense Peter......try again.
=== When creativity simply outstrips is context and forces the latter to
catch up and bound it again.......(A painting is `itself', rather than
being `not itself').
> This is an even worse sentence.
Well I was hoping you'd get the answer to your question but.....I'm
finished trying to "educate" you.....
> And you still didn't answer the
> question. (I'm starting to develop a theory that the real problem
> with ArtSpeak is that its proponents simply don't know HOW
> to write in English)
No, you just can't understand anything beyond Cro-Magnon english
apparently. Contemplate the relationship between creativity and culture.
Then come back to that sentence, five years hence, and read it again.
> Perhaps you should cite some examples to answer the question.
> I suggest choosing two paintings, visible on the web so we can all
> see and discuss them, and identify one which is "itself" and one
> which is not.
>
> ---peter
=== Sorry, I don't do the web-art thing. I find web artists to be rather
like web-interlocutors......
a bientot, A.
Ariane
On Wed, 24 Mar 1999, peter nelson wrote:
>
> John Haber wrote in message <36f93fbf...@news.cc.columbia.edu>...
>
> >I started this note by complaining about academic jargon for its
> >overfamiliarity. It loses the ability to communicate and to allow
> >thought around the time it loses the ability to surprise.
>
> Surprise is achieved by what it says, not by dense,
> incomprehensible language. Moreover, to surprise
> the most people it has to be comprehended by the most
> people.
(snip)
=== Peter, communication is a dialogic process (a two-way process). If
you find meaning to perform a kind of `glissage' (to elude your
grasp), then perhaps some form of narcissistic praxis is necessary to get
at the root of the matter.....(look in the mirror). You can't always
blame the speaker for your inability to understand the spoken.
au revoir, A.
Ariane
On Wed, 24 Mar 1999, John Haber wrote:
> >Surprise is achieved by what it says, not by dense,
> >incomprehensible language.
>
> I don't have a problem with that. Well put, in fact. So why not try
> to enter the discussion Marilyn initiated about what the passage says?
>
> John (jha...@haberarts.com)
=== Voila! All this yammering on by those who object to modernism is but
an attempt to sidetrack an otherwise intelligent and quite relevant
posting by Marilyn. We'll come down from our ivory towers of ArtSpeak and
prepare a brochure for the detractors..........ok?
a bientot,
A.
Ariane
On Wed, 24 Mar 1999, mdeli wrote:
> Ariane Picassoholic wrote:
> >
> >On Sun, 21 Mar 1999 br...@wralaw.com wrote:
> >> Scissors and Glue and Braque created collage, as well as plenty of Media.
> >
> >=== Your somewhat fashionable cynicism belies the truth of Picasso and
> >Braque's adventures of 1909 -> .
>
> "The truth of Picasso?"
=== Yes, what he actually produced in 1909, that's the unarguable truth of
Picasso for that year.........
> Sounds like a religious tract.
===Perhaps......to you.
> Is there a truth of Norman Rockwell?
=== His work.
> What 1909 adventures?
=== Go to Paris' Musee Picasso and see them for yourself.
> Mani DeLi ...no skill and no art
adieu, A.
Kay Kane
peter nelson wrote in message <7dbgq3$fpa$1...@antiochus.ultra.net>...
>
>Ariane wrote in message ...
>>
>>On Sat, 20 Mar 1999, peter nelson wrote:
>>
>>> I see generations of English teachers turning over in
>>> their graves. It's an excellent example of really bad
>>> writing. I'm not entirely sure that some of the "sentences"
>>> in it actually ARE sentences.
>>>
>>> It may really be true that locked up inside the heads
>>> of some of these art philosophers are actual truths
>>> and insights. But they'll take them to their graves if
>>> they don't learn how to write simple expository
>>> English.
>>
>>
>>=== Adorno wasn't english oh anglocentric one.
>
>I'm not a brain surgeon so you don't see me trying
>to perform brain surgery. If I did I'd be judged by
>the result. Likewise, above. If he doesn't know
>how to speak English perhaps he shouldn't try.
>But if he tries then I should judge him by the result.
>
>
>>> What else can a painting be, if not itself?
>>
>>Uhhh, an addendum to an art theory?
>>
>>> How do
>>> you tell a painting which is "itself" from one which is
>>> not "itself"?
>>
>>
>>When no theories or academic strictures yet apply.
>
>This is not a sentence. Are you also not an English speaker?
>
>>outstrips is context and forces the latter to catch up and bound it again.
>
>question. (I'm starting to develop a theory that the real problem
>with ArtSpeak is that its proponents simply don't know HOW
>to write in English)
>
>I suggest choosing two paintings, visible on the web so we can all
>see and discuss them, and identify one which is "itself" and one
>which is not.
>
>---peter
>
and furious.
Kay
Ariane
On Wed, 24 Mar 1999 br...@wralaw.com wrote:
> Ariane <da_l...@alcor.concordia.ca> wrote:
> > On Sun, 21 Mar 1999 br...@wralaw.com wrote: -Me
> > > > Reality
> > > > goes out the perspectival window, one can argue. And that was exactly
> > > > the critical party line about Modernism for a long while.
>
> > > Modernism never existed
>
> > == Neither did the holocaust (some say). Both statements are ahistorical
> > illusions.
>
> Post-Holocaustism or PostHolocaust? (ism=belief in) It occurs to
> me that the philosophia of PoModernism, over asserts modernism(,) as
> a monolith.
=== Sure, take that up with PoMo theorists. For the rest of us, Modernism
exists as the intellectual and artistic culture of modern civilization.
> Hence there is no singular Modernism, while we can
> historically refer to an arbritary but usefull time-frame as Modern,
> Modernism(the belief in it) is more an invention of PostModernism(which
> fails to believe in PostModernism since it is not yet defined).
=== No, not really. Modernity, modernism, whatever is not a PoMo
invention. It is an attempt to describe our current civilization.
> PostModernism itself appears to be a strange historical trick to
> define an arbitrary but usefull time-frame, before and during its
> inception, "writing history in the present, rather than the future
> present when it has become history." Its up to future historians
> to play along.
=== They won't.
> It(history) is now more than ever a Game, since
> Karmic postmodernists did not before go after history...
>
> > > > I like his reversal, although I wonder if he's playing with words a
> > > > bit, moving from break with an artistic practice (illusion) to break
> > > > with art as intrinsic value. And I don't buy assimilating painting
> > > > into sculpture. First thing to go is sculpture's autonomy as object
> > > > of contemplation by an unmoved viewer out in ideal land. Can there be
> > > > some interest involved here? He's writing about a sculptor, some time
> > > > after Minimalism made sculpture kinda suspect for a lot of us.
>
> > > Minimalism may not be sculpture at all.
>
> > ()
>
> Pure Punishment!
> > > > He's interesting because he's showing how an operation like
> > > > Modernism's self-destructs. It's just as its reliance on estheticism,
> > > > as the traditional critics had it, means that Romanticism
> > > > self-destructed in those years. It helps explain why Analytic Cubism
> > > > led so naturally to collage.
>
> > === Really, Romanticism has done nothing but evolve and it therefore only
> > looks like it has `destructed'. As long as there are people, there will
> > be romanticist sentiments and expressions. And Modernism, as an art
> > movement, has been assimilated into art history, that is, is has become a
> > form of romanticist orthodoxy, much like PoMo is now a conceptualist
> > orthodoxy, and the pendulum is ready to swing again (which makes it a
> > particularly exciting time to be an artist)!
>
> > > Scissors and Glue and Braque created collage, as well as plenty of Media.
>
> > === Your somewhat fashionable cynicism belies the truth of Picasso and
> > Braque's adventures of 1909 -> .
>
> It's not cynicism, things happen because of what is there.
But what is there includes an artist.....in a context. And then all your
favourite propriety categories become somewhat superfluous (useless).
> Is the Zen/Dull duality of Minimalism Cynicism?
=== Is this your version of "ArtSpeak"?
(snip)
adieu, A.
Marilyn
>
> >"The canvas literally burst under the weight it had come to bear."
>
> Remember the two-panel Elizabeth Murray with jagged edges that looked
> like they'd almost fit, as if the painting had just exploded? I
> think it's my fave of hers.
>
> John (www.haberarts.com)
Bravo!
M.
Marilyn
>
> >
> >
> > When I read that paragraph, I can see the pages of my art history
> > books turning. It marks for me the transition to modernism in painting.
> > It frees painting to be itself, and to be poetic.
> >
> > Marilyn
>
> Modernism simply deconstructed the preceeding art.
> This resulted in a new language, a new vocabulary
> which satisfied a general thirst for a refreshing
> originality. I find PoMo to be more interesting, because
> it's happenin', still evolving. - doug lauber
I agree. But pomo didn't wipe out mo, they exist together,
one feeding the other. Maybe they will soon cannibalize each
other and we will enter a new period.
Try to discuss the latest postmodern art you have seen and
appreciated on this newsgroup. Ha!
What clearly defines postmodern art to me and my colleagues here,
is the use of materials.
M.
Marilyn
> overfamiliarity. It loses the ability to communicate and to allow
> newspeak was like that, and it's language as a lie. "Common sense"
> descriptions of art and life can do much the same damage.
>
> thereof we must pass over in silence." It's been read as
> hyperlogical: don't talk about nonsense like feelings. And it does
> mean that, which is one reason Wittgenstein repudiated his early work.
> But he also meant it to cherish silence. Maybe a little the way you
> do.
>
> can point out gaps in the order of things, the silences, we didn't
> notice before. It can spin out the polymorphic play of new words and
> new silences. "Common sense" in Peter's sens, like Mani's certainty
> about art, is more likely to stand for filling the silences and then
> covering over the seams.
>
Your post reminded me of a period when I worked in an intensive
care unit of a major hospital. We were in touch with reality alright.
The mortality rate was 40%. We knew a world unknown to most people
out there, and although it was excruciating, it seemed a kind of
privilege. When I met those nurses/doctors out in the "real" world,
we felt very close to one another.
We never discussed what went on in that other place we inhabited
together. Instead we shared its silence.
Marilyn
Marilyn
When people debate from an entrenched position there is no
persuasion possible.
M.
Ariane
> John Haber wrote:
> >
> > >"The canvas literally burst under the weight it had come to bear."
=== Culturally speaking perhaps. But I'm not about to be deprived of my
turn to take up brush and palette. So much for culture......
a la prochaine,
A.
Ariane
On Thu, 25 Mar 1999 emat...@tomatoweb.com wrote:
> Ariane wrote:
> >
> >
> > On Mon, 22 Mar 1999, peter nelson wrote:
> >
> > > I can write a book about an actual event in someone's life;
> > > I can write a book about a completely fictional event; I can
> > > write a book about *writing books*; or I can write a book which
> > > is completely self-referential ("You are reading a book. Now you
> > > are reading the second sentence in the book", etc). Are these
> > > all not books? What else can they be but books? In what
> > > way is any one of these books not "itself"?
> > >
> > > ---peter
> >
> > When the act of `writing' or `reading' becomes so laden with implicit
> > cultural super-structure that writing and reading become predictable
> > social excercises and the `boundaries' of both solidify as it were into
> > what we take as cultural norms or the limits of acceptability in writing
> > and reading, to use your example. The easiest way to break these
> > boundaries, that is, to be iconoclastic, is to refer to sex or violence,
> > such as we see on contemporary TV (and on the internet). This
> > faux-iconoclasm is cute and all but when someone actually and genuinely
> > steps up and breaks down these inherited cultural parameters, here with
> > reference to painting now, we can see how an artist frees a painting to
> > `be itself' once more. It amounts to a stripping away of inherited
> > cultural super-structure that makes an art form dull and predictable (like
> > TV).
> >
> > a la prochaine
> >
> > A.
> >
>
> Ariane, you naughty Marxist you. The emancipation of the prolatariat
> is achieved by stripping away the inherited cultural
> superstructure...eh? Glad to have ou on our side for a change.
>
> Comrade Erik
=== What? A Marxist? Well, I live in a social democracy and I support
this, but that's centralist politics and not really far left socialism
(although from your perspective I might have fallen off the left side of
the left-right continuum).
The emancipation of the painting is achieved by stripping away the
inherited cultural `super-structure,' (including economics in this case
since it is all reducible to painting from this perspective), which
surrounds and threatens to destroy painting itself as a vital form of
living expression. A living artist become iconoclast. An adventurer,
searching for new forms, and new modes of painted expression. To me this
is where Modernism was born. This is where painting was freed to be
`itself' and to be poetic once more.
And no I'm not a marxist. Sorry comrade.
a la prochaine,
A.
doug L.
Ariane wrote:
> On Wed, 24 Mar 1999, doug L. wrote:
>
> > >
> > >
> > > When I read that paragraph, I can see the pages of my art history
> > > books turning. It marks for me the transition to modernism in painting.
> > > It frees painting to be itself, and to be poetic.
> > >
> > > Marilyn
> >
> > Modernism simply deconstructed the preceeding art.
> > This resulted in a new language, a new vocabulary
> > which satisfied a general thirst for a refreshing
> > originality. I find PoMo to be more interesting, because
> > it's happenin', still evolving. - doug lauber
> >
>
> === Unless of course PoMo is just the latest phase of Modernist art which
> then means that we have to go back to 1907 to see the point of departure
> for our current `PoMo evolution'. In that case, Modern art can be said to
> be still evolving, and PoMo is its latest phase.
>
> adieu, A.
When I look at modern art, I see deconstruction.
Post modern is extreme re- construction, using
diverse disparate elements. They have little in common.
Post Mo is always refering to some other genre, some
other era, always recombing elements.
Modern was much more focused on narrowing it's
formal vocabulary. - doug
doug L.
Marilyn wrote:
> doug L. wrote:
> >
> > >
> > >
> > > When I read that paragraph, I can see the pages of my art history
> > > books turning. It marks for me the transition to modernism in painting.
> > > It frees painting to be itself, and to be poetic.
> > >
> > > Marilyn
> >
> > Modernism simply deconstructed the preceeding art.
> > This resulted in a new language, a new vocabulary
> > which satisfied a general thirst for a refreshing
> > originality. I find PoMo to be more interesting, because
> > it's happenin', still evolving. - doug lauber
>
> I agree. But pomo didn't wipe out mo, they exist together,
> one feeding the other. Maybe they will soon cannibalize each
> other and we will enter a new period.
>
> Try to discuss the latest postmodern art you have seen and
> appreciated on this newsgroup. Ha!
>
> What clearly defines postmodern art to me and my colleagues here,
> is the use of materials.
>
> M.
Inventive use of new materials is pursued solely for
stylistic reasons, to mark one's territory, to create
a separate entity in the art market/social arena.
Look at the initial phase of PoMo. Paintings, oil
on canvas- nothing unique or groundbreaking in
terms of materials. Yet...postmodern, because of
its references, its self- consciousness, its awareness
of all the other strategies, other cultures, other isms.
- doug
emat...@tomatoweb.com
"dr.j." <da_l...@alcor.concordia.ca> wrote:
>
>
> On Wed, 24 Mar 1999 br...@wralaw.com wrote:
>
> > > One could take, not
> > > entirely frivolously, as a definition of philosophy the marvellous
> > > book title of J. L. Austin's, "How to Do Things with Words."
> >
> > Philosophy, philo (knowledge) sophia (love) I think(??????)
>
> Right.
>
>
> Same root - philo, (love), coupled with Logos (order, knowledge).
> Philology is the love of knowledge, which, by cultural predisposition
> occurred through the study of texts, esp. Greek and Roman, back in the
> Middle Ages.
>
> > Art criticism has become redundant, and inconprehensible.
>
> Only to those who lack the ability to comprehend it. By this logic, you
> would go to Portugal and tell the Portuguese that they're all spewing
> redundant non-sense and they're simply faking communication and putting on
> truly intelligent. Those who don't like discussing art, are those who
> CAN'T! And that's the bottom line.
>
>
>
Hear Ye! Hear Ye! (pounds shoe on podium)
Erik Mattila
-----------== Posted via Deja News, The Discussion Network ==----------
http://www.dejanews.com/ Search, Read, Discuss, or Start Your Own
emat...@tomatoweb.com
Comrade Erik
>
-----------== Posted via Deja News, The Discussion Network ==----------
Studio120
>>Don't you think it's more accurate to say that the question is being
>reframed?
>>Or even recontextualized?
You wrote:
>No.
Okay, well why not? My point was that the connotations and context for words
change over time as language and culture evolves. We have to continue to find
for ourselves the definitions we assign and reassign - I think that's what
Haber was asserting and why he brought Plato into the discussion.
This is reiterated by the following. I wrote:
>>"Weighing" the concept cannot happen outside of the structure and the
>>connotation(s) of the vocabulary. You might as well be arguing the >>chicken
and the egg question here.
You wrote:
>This is definitely begging the question. If someone wrote a long wordy
>treatise claiming to prove that arithmetic is wrong because 2+2=5,
>would you read it?
First of all, you're assuming that, because the (unsaid) expression 2+2=4
carries with it a relative degree of mathematical certainty and permanence, I
would be uninterested in anything that proposed differently. Well, you'd be
wrong. I must add that I find it amusing that your world is such a simple one.
It must be very convenient to know everything and have all the answers.
Secondly, your mathematical equation just proved my previous point regarding
"meaning". If someone could prove that the meaning of two had a different
value that what we currently assign it, isn't it possible that 2+2=5? Of
course, this requires a leap of imagination and . . . oh sorry, I forgot who I
was talking to!
I continued:
>>The point is that writing done well is worth reading more than once.
>>Failure on the part of the reader to be able to interpret on the first
>>reading doesn't necessarily mean that what's written is invalid or
>>"nonsense".
You wrote:
>I repeat: More or less words, nonsense is still nonsense. If you have
>anything sensible to say about it refute the point. I didn't mention
>validity.
Again, it must be nice to know all the answers and to be able to sniff out
nonsense (or bullshit). More importantly it's *so* nice of you to give us the
benefit of your infinite wisdom. Has it ever occurred to you that perhaps
there might be, just maybe, a degree of subjectivity involved here? Just
because you have the patience of a four year old when it comes to reading
anything that smacks of art criticism, doesn't mean the rest of us can't enjoy
it.
>>Haber wrote
>>
>>>>After all, philosophy is about life, and we all live, but describing
>>>>the visual in words means much the same transposition as from
>>>>subatomic mysteries to familiar waves and particles.
>>
>>Mani wrote:
>>
>>>Nonsense
>>
>>Oh, I don't know, it sounds as good as anything else. The parallel >>between
the mysteries of the universe and our attempts to understand >>and explain them
was made.
>Glad you liked it.
Ahem, I er, well, I was actually complimenting Haber's metaphor, not your
rather abrupt dismissal of it.
>>Haber wrote:
>>
>>>>at least we all are living.
>>
>>Mani wrote:
>>
>>>Brilliant conclusion.
>>
I wrote:
>>Condescending, rude, petty, and above all non-responsive. Got >>anything
better? Mani, really, don't you have anything more >>substantive?
>>
You responded:
>I presume you find Haber's statement to the point, unobvious and
>brilliant.
>
Well, no it's perhaps rather obvious that we are living to some degree, and it
was, more or less, a continuation of his previous thought. But I found your
response to be just as I said: Condescending and rude. Careful, or you may be
guilty of the same sort of exclusionary tactics you want to brand the critics
with. Gee, I'd hate for you to get a reputation like that!
I wrote:
>>The visual arts vocabulary can be just as imperceivable as the written >>one,
it depends on the user. Now look who's begging the question.
>
>There is no such thing as a "visual arts vocabulary." Its a critical
>fantasy which allows writers to go on and on.
>
Of all the things I've ever seen you write, this has got to be the stupidest
goddamn thing you've ever put on this NewsGroup. Mani, have you looked at your
own artwork? I have! I've visited your webpage and I've got to say that if
anyone has developed a visual vocabulary, it's you. Unfortunately it's not
even your own: you've appropriated the stuff of dreams, fantasy, and a whole
lot of Dali to boot. (How's that for being direct?)
I wrote:
>>Wow! I don't think that you can separate ideation and aesthetics in a >>work
of art. They are interlocked through artistic intention (the >>individual),
cultural expectation (society), and visual vocabulary >>(language).
>
>What counts in an artwork is quality and technique. These are the real
>factors in what makes it visually attractive. The rest is more often
>than not, pure and very unnecessary speculation.
Oh yes, I forgot, you know all the answers . . . including what is "visually
attractive"! We don't have to worry about it anymore, folks, Mani's got it all
worked out and if we just make stuff like he says, we'll all be fine! Mani,
get off of your didactic high horse quit bashing intellectualism in general and
critics in particular just 'cause ya can't keep up!
Regards,
Kevin Conlon
Studio 120
2201 Bull Street, #309
Savannah, GA 31401
br...@wralaw.com
"dr.j." <da_l...@alcor.concordia.ca> wrote:
> On Wed, 24 Mar 1999 br...@wralaw.com wrote:
> > Philosophy, philo (knowledge) sophia (love) I think(??????)
> Right.
> > Philology study of knowledge(used by pomo in place of love)
> Same root - philo, (love), coupled with Logos (order, knowledge).
Thank you...
> > Art criticism has become redundant, and inconprehensible.
> Only to those who lack the ability to comprehend it. By this logic, you
> would go to Portugal and tell the Portuguese that they're all spewing
> redundant non-sense and they're simply faking communication and putting on
> airs...
Are they?
> Those who don't like discussing art, are those who
> CAN'T! And that's the bottom line.
Wow, Spoken like Deli would about 'art creation'! Now lets weigh
the equation,
Deli
No skill no art,
Ariane
No artjargon no intelligence,
Bryn
No science no complete art
Where do we go from here?
<An Apollo guise>
Why would the assesement that the type writting I find in say
'Art in America' is largely overtly meaningless(pomo) mean that
I have some scientific agenda, or that I don't like to discuss art?
As far as my artspeak goes mine is just fine, in classes I would
say that I had some of the best(if not the best). The deterioration
comes from the belief in and outside of artschool that a natural
cynical reaction to this sort of stuff is to become a bullshitter.
And that all works of art need a verbal justification, and that a
bad work of art can be pumped up in meaning, by claiming intent.
Certainly some of what is said is justified but the style of writting
has become a competition for writters to make the art.
Take a hit of good acid and sit in front of a deteriorating and
cracked rock face. An accurate description of what "you" felt
can be a template to any reaction to any reasonable 'ruin' work
of art. While the reaction is real the fact remains that the
rock didn't mean for you to really have that reaction, it is your
own. Many critics(?) writting style seems to emulate this well, -
no offense should be taken. It is irrelevant what I am reading
I generally take it with a grain of salt. The competition for
profound ambiguity amoungst the present post-dithyrambic critic
is emmulation just as much art is- say a new expressionist painting
for example. Emmulating Greenburgs reaction to Rothko is hardly
an accurate description of a new work of art.
> adieu, A.
Bryn Ayers
br...@wralaw.com
Ariane <da_l...@alcor.concordia.ca> wrote:
> > Ariane wrote:
> > >When the act of `writing' or `reading' becomes so laden with implicit
> > >cultural super-structure that writing and reading become predictable
> > >social excercises and the `boundaries' of both solidify as it were into
> > >what we take as cultural norms or the limits of acceptability in writing
> > >and reading, to use your example.
> > > The easiest way to break these
> > >boundaries, that is, to be iconoclastic, is to refer to sex or violence,
> > >such as we see on contemporary TV (and on the internet). This
> > >faux-iconoclasm is cute and all but when someone actually and genuinely
> > >steps up and breaks down these inherited cultural parameters, here with
> > >reference to painting now, we can see how an artist frees a painting to
> > >`be itself' once more. It amounts to a stripping away of inherited
> > >cultural super-structure that makes an art form dull and predictable (like
> > >TV).
> adieu, A.
? Isn't this nesting interpretation? If an artwork, say a painting
for instance, is an attempt to interpret a dream, isn't there a
chance that esthetic interpretation in writing may increase the
complexity and theirfore(stat) distance from the original -perhaphs
simple Idea.
br...@wralaw.com
Ariane <da_l...@alcor.concordia.ca> wrote:
>
> > Is the Zen/Dull duality of Minimalism Cynicism?
> === Is this your version of "ArtSpeak"?
It is what I said. My artspeak casts a dream spell that leads to
the Black Hole of doubt, the archimedian nightmare, the thunderbirds
nest, this is where Doa Jones is, being reborn as we artspeak.
If you followed our thread on the transcendialect and FOAM, you
would see that at the end she was being the rational one, trying
to be logical. At the end PostModern collapsed under its own
weight being swallowed up by Zen and the profound ambiguity of
Dao, hence her name Dao - a premonition of the downfall of
PostModernism, now we just have to waite thirty years to watch it
happen in the real world.
The End<>
> (snip)
> adieu, A.
Marilyn
That may be at one level. I like to believe there is a deeper
motive to the choice of materials. Like maybe we are running
out of them? With this choice the artist tries to make the viewer
conscious of that fact. The more successful artist does it in
a subtle way. If the work sells better, or at all, that's just wine
with the repast.
Marilyn
pragmatic till I die.
Ariane
> > > > When I read that paragraph, I can see the pages of my art history
> > > > books turning. It marks for me the transition to modernism in painting.
> > > > It frees painting to be itself, and to be poetic.
> > > >
> > > > Marilyn
> > >
> > On Wed, 24 Mar 1999, doug L. wrote:
> > > Modernism simply deconstructed the preceeding art.
> > > This resulted in a new language, a new vocabulary
> > > which satisfied a general thirst for a refreshing
> > > originality. I find PoMo to be more interesting, because
> > > it's happenin', still evolving. - doug lauber
> > >
> Ariane wrote:
> >
> > === Unless of course PoMo is just the latest phase of Modernist art which
> > then means that we have to go back to 1907 to see the point of departure
> > for our current `PoMo evolution'. In that case, Modern art can be said to
> > be still evolving, and PoMo is its latest phase.
> >
> > adieu, A.
>
> When I look at modern art, I see deconstruction.
> Post modern is extreme re- construction, using
> diverse disparate elements. They have little in common.
=== 20th century Modernist art, literature and philosophy was essentially
characterized by `extreme re-construction' using divers and disparate
elements....I wouldn't really look to PoMo literature for any useful or
accurate definition of `modernism'.....As is clear from the content of
PoMo discourse, this latest phase of modernity is primarily concerned with
power, politics, hegemony, and self-definition.......Very narrow sets of
concerns indeed. Modern art is about freedom and creativity in my
opinion......it is celebratory to the point of Dionysiac frenzy.....PoMo
art is about propaganda, is itself propaganda, under the guise of freedom.
That is how I see it at any rate.....
> Post Mo is always refering to some other genre, some
> other era, always recombing elements.
=== As was modernist art, literature, philosophy....there is no new era in
the late 20th century, modernist culture has been assimilated
and is currently being used as a means of control......
> Modern was much more focused on narrowing it's
> formal vocabulary. - doug
=== Perhaps in the sciences, or in anglo-American philosophical circles,
but this was not true for the cultural developments on the continent, and
that is the heart of modernist culture......
a la prochaine, A.
peter nelson
>On Wed, 24 Mar 1999, peter nelson wrote:
>
>>
>> John Haber wrote in message <36f93fbf...@news.cc.columbia.edu>...
>>
>> >I started this note by complaining about academic jargon for its
>> >overfamiliarity. It loses the ability to communicate and to allow
>> >thought around the time it loses the ability to surprise.
>>
>> Surprise is achieved by what it says, not by dense,
>> incomprehensible language. Moreover, to surprise
>> the most people it has to be comprehended by the most
>> people.
>
>(snip)
>
>=== Peter, communication is a dialogic process (a two-way process).
Nonsense. If this were true then the minute an author, poet, scientist
or artist dies his works would no longer be able to communicate
with us because two-wau dialog would no longer be possible.
> If you find meaning to perform a kind of `glissage' (to elude your
>grasp), then perhaps some form of narcissistic praxis is necessary to get
>at the root of the matter.....(look in the mirror). You can't always
>blame the speaker for your inability to understand the spoken.
No, but in the supplied examples I cam
---peter
peter nelson
>
>On Wed, 24 Mar 1999, peter nelson wrote:
>
>> >
>
>> >Only to those who lack the ability to comprehend it. By this logic, you
>> >would go to Portugal and tell the Portuguese that they're all spewing
>> >redundant non-sense and they're simply faking communication and putting
on
>>
>> Bad analogy. They demonstrably communicate something
>> real. I can go to a restaurant in Lisbon and order in Portuguese
>> and what will arrive is what I ordered. I can book a flight or
>> exchange money or ask for the men's room and I will not
>> be surprised by the results. I should also point out that
>> many Portuguese can aslo speak English and have no
>> difficulty translating Portuguese into plain, non-jargony
>> English.
>
>=== Sure, but nonetheless, a translation is never as good as the original,
>and meaning always gets defaced in the process.
Not always. And in any case the point still stands that it
can be objectively demonstrated, as I indicated above, that
people speaking in Portuguese ARE actually communicating about
something REAL. That was the point - you chose a bad analogy.
> Anyway, people aren't simply bs'ing their way through
> communicating about art. Like anything, philosophizing is
> a craft and requires that you hone your mind to partake.
But you have provided no evidence that this is true in the case
of ArtSpeak. My bottom-line point still remains unaddressed.
In EVERY other endeavor in which people employ a specialized
language or jargon to communicate it can be demonstrated
that REAL, nontrivial communication is taking place about
REAL things and that if specialized jargon is used it serves the
purpose of advancing actual understanding. I don't have to
learn Portuguese to be satisfied that they are really communicating.
I don't have to learn physics or network protocols to be demonstrated
their discoveries.
I contend that ArtSpeak, LitCrit, and similar activities violate this.
I contend that either they are speaking gibberish to ape real
academic disciplines which really require specialized jargon,
OR if actual insights and discoveries are being made, they are of
no real-world relevance, else they could be shown in real-world
terms. Going back to physics: atomic bombs, cardiac ultrasound
machines, etc represent the fruits of their use of jargon. You
don't need to learn the jargon to experience their use. You only
need to learn the jargon if you want to understand how they figured
it out. The TRUTH of their result is self-evident by the image of your
beating heart on the machine, or the devastation of Nagasaki, and
thus requires no jargon.
....in this sense it is exclusive, like painting, and it requires
>that one prctice and work at it before one can "get" it.
Another nonsequitur. One can appreciate (though not
necessarily like) the Mona Lisa or the Houses of Parliament
or Nude Descending a Staircase without learning ArtSpeak.
Ultimately a piece of art has to stand on its own. One can
gain interesting background information about a painting
by studying the artist's biography, the times he lived in, etc,
but this requires no specialized jargon, nor does it "improve"
the painting to know what the artist was "trying" to say. He
either succeeded in saying it in the work or he didn't.
---peter
peter nelson
Ariane wrote in message ...
>>
>
>
>> Agreed.
>> > And furthermore, what can be said about art often requires that we
>> > press language into the service of capturing often complex and
>> > polyvalent emotions and impressions.
>>
>> But then how do you know you are actually saying anything
>> about the art or artist?
>
>Well, there's the crux of the issue. When we are describing physical
>things like the art or the artist, physically.....than we have no problems
>with using simple language. But subjectivity is an `objective' fact. And
>thats where language become woefully inadequate as a communication device.
>Hey, that's why we have art in the first place!
You didn't answer the question. If common language is woefully
inadequate and so you create a specialized language how do you
know your specialized language gets you any closer to describing
anything real or nontrivial about the art?
>> I agree you can TRY to do this; I agree
>> you might have the URGE to do this. What I question is whether
>> at the end of the day practictioners of this approach are actually
>> yielding any better understanding of their subject than could be
>> achieved by more mundane means such as . . .
>>
>> 1. look at the art.
>> 2. read a biography of the artist, study the history of his time, etc
>> 3. look at the art.
>> 4. study painting, tools, materials, techniques, etc
>> 5. look at the art.
>> . . . lather, rinse, repeat.
>
>
>I agree. But understanding subjectivity. That's the key, and that's the
>problem. All those high priests of the technical forget that art engages
>the subjective.....and that's why art is notoriously hard to talk about.
Again, I don't disagree that it's hard to talk about. What I question
is whether run-on sentences and obscure jargon improve the situation.
I think they make it worse. But if you think they make it better then
what is your evidence?
. . .
>> >Sure, but we can't assume to do these complex topics justice with our
>> >`plain' language.
>>
>> I have no evidence that the complex language does any better.
>
>Well, it tries to `pick up the slack' through metaphor, inventing terms,
>etc..
I agree that it "tries to". I'm asking for evidence that it succeeds.
> Now, I'm the last one to coronate the art scholar, but at the same
>time, language can becaome an art form in its own right.
Of course - literature, poetry.
>
And since
>telepathy never really caught on (at least not on a mass level) we're
>stuck stringing these words together to try and communicate sophisticated
>feelings and impressions. Simple language only simplifies things, not a
>good idea when you're dealing with a sophisticated complex of thought,
>emotion, impression, and aesthetics (or what have you).
I DISAGREE that simple language simplifies things!!!! Most of the
greatest works of Western literature use simple language and
you don't have to be a scholar to read them! Ditto with historical
works.
>> The question is till: how do you know that you are actually describing
>> anything real with this jargon?
>
>When the person you're talking to goes "oh yeah, I see what you're saying"
>and proceeds to have a meaningful discussion with you. When communication
>is achieved, you know you're relating a shared reality at any rate.
Yes, but anyone can create a private language. Star Trek fans go about
these days talking to each other in Klingon. This doesn't show that
the specialized language makes possible any important new insight.
---peter
peter nelson
>> === The easiest way to break these >boundaries, that is, to be
>> iconoclastic, is to refer to sex or violence, >such as we see on
>> contemporary TV (and on the internet). This >faux-iconoclasm is cute
>>
>> WHAT faux-iconoclasm? And how does "referring" to sex and violence
>> achieve this? And what's cute about it?
>
>=== Simple ways to pretend to break down cultural taboos. It's cute
>because its essentially futile and amounts to posturing with no real
>content. Like that David O'BrightOne's comments on homosexuality.
>Juvenile stupidity.
Luckily I have no idea who David O'BrightOne is. But talking of
"cultural taboos" is oversimplifying. It's not as though something
is either taboo or it isn't. For some people maybe even *saying*
"homosexual" is a taboo. For others being homosexual is not
taboo.
>:When an artist breaks down the excessive cultural baggage stifling an art
>form, (painting in this case)
>
>:The artist frees the painting FROM the cultural expectations of what
>painting SHOULD be,
One problem is that if the cultural expectation is that paintings
should communicate something to us about ourselves, about
what it means to be human, about the natural world, about
spirituality, about justice, etc, or, for that matter, that it should
communicate at all, then by "freeing" itself it runs the risk of
making itself irrelevant.
On the other hand, it does NOT succeed in "just being a
painting", either, because it will then be seen as a "statement"
or a posture by the painter. It can never stand on its own unless
the artist never shows it to anyone. The very INSTANT the painter
shows his work to even one other person he has made his
art into a social enterprise. It will be described and interpreted
in cultural terms.
>
>:and painting becomes `fresh,' re-vitalized, once more just a painting.
>Yes but you can't slam ALL of modern art for that.
Where do I do that? My house is filled with orginal art (no, not
mine!) and almost all of it is some kind of modern. My house
itself is modern art - it's a very unusual contemporary design
custom-designed in 1981.
. . .
> Appreciation also can be intellectual, and not only emotional....
I suppose it depends on what we mean by "appreciation". My wife
is a pianist and sometimes gets the idea to play some modern
piece. After one such exercise I said "I don't get it" and she showed
me the mathematical relations of the notes on the score. So now
I undertood it intellectually but it didn't make it sound more like
music.
---peter
Ariane
On Thu, 25 Mar 1999 br...@wralaw.com wrote:
> Ariane <da_l...@alcor.concordia.ca> wrote:
> > > Ariane wrote:
> > > >When the act of `writing' or `reading' becomes so laden with implicit
> > > >cultural super-structure that writing and reading become predictable
> > > >social excercises and the `boundaries' of both solidify as it were into
> > > >what we take as cultural norms or the limits of acceptability in writing
> > > >and reading, to use your example.
> > > > The easiest way to break these > > >boundaries, that is, to be
> iconoclastic, is to refer to sex or violence, > > >such as we see on
> contemporary TV (and on the internet). This > > >faux-iconoclasm is
> cute and all but when someone actually and genuinely > > >steps up and
> breaks down these inherited cultural parameters, here with > >
> >reference to painting now, we can see how an artist frees a painting
> to > > >`be itself' once more. It amounts to a stripping away of
> inherited > > >cultural super-structure that makes an art form dull
> and predictable (like > > >TV).
>
> > adieu, A.
> ? Isn't this nesting interpretation?
=== nesting interpretation?
> If an artwork, say a painting
> for instance, is an attempt to interpret a dream, isn't there a
> chance that esthetic interpretation in writing may increase the
> complexity and theirfore(stat) distance from the original -perhaphs
> simple Idea.
=== Aesthetic interpretation in writing doesn't do much more than
stand on its own as a `derivative' art form. It's goal is not to
`capture' a dream but to breathe new life into it. At least in my
opinion. Theory may serve to `capture' (captivate) art-makers though, and
therefore their art. Then iconoclasm is most desirable.....
> Bryn Ayers
A.