Saturday, September 23, 2006
Stand back everybody, I'll save the art world!
I felt I was being given a challenge by those in the *conversation* to put my toe in the post-modern pool and try it out. “Just jump in, you’ll get used to it”. There’s a quality of “little pool and big pool”, to continue with the allegory, or “in the arena or in the stands”.
Yea, its fine to just do what you want and the hell with what anybody else wants. Please understand this isn’t a criticism of anyone else. This is only a struggle I’m dealing with. In my “old” abstract work I felt a small nagging feeling there was something else going on. So small, in fact, I managed to ignore it. It wasn’t until now when I look back that I can see it. Also there was the experience of the last 30 or so years of going into galleries and museums and seeing stuff that didn’t register with me at all. And wondering “what are all these people talking about?”
Of course I don’t think I even have to say it, the main meat in the whole enchilada is the high while in the creative act. That’s like the melody (mixing metaphors with wild abandon). The harmony or counterpoint or whatever is this other thing; what’s going on? Do I have anything to contribute? And if everybody is as brainless as they appear, do I have anything to say about that? Or on the other hand should I just climb back into the stands and content myself with my own doodlings? Of course I do that from time to time but the siren call of the “action” calls and I feel drawn in.
Make no mistake; Marcel Duchamp and Andy Warhol are two of my favorite artists. They are far and away some of the best artists of the 20th century, totally ground breaking. But I didn’t see any of the work I was seeing as coming up to anywhere near that par. It was just real bad and real inarticulate. But it continued to be accepted as work on the same level as Warhol and Duchamp. Somebody is fooling themselves.
But to accept that as what’s happening and that’s the way it goes is unacceptable. There are those who will say it’s just a matter of money and politics and a bunch of power brokers manipulating the market and trying to keep the whole thing from getting away from them for there own profit and to hell with the culture. (God, that’s an evil thought!)
I prefer to think that it was a case of a bunch of marginal artists and curators trying to deal with a paradigm shift in our culture and failing. But that’s hard to accept too. That this could go on for 30 odd years and nothing come out of it? Wow! That’s really something! I just have a hard time believing this can go on for much longer.
So that’s setting the stage when Trevor comes along and says “look around you, it’s a whole new world!” So I guess when it comes down to it I think I’m going to save the art world!
Yea, its fine to just do what you want and the hell with what anybody else wants. Please understand this isn’t a criticism of anyone else. This is only a struggle I’m dealing with. In my “old” abstract work I felt a small nagging feeling there was something else going on. So small, in fact, I managed to ignore it. It wasn’t until now when I look back that I can see it. Also there was the experience of the last 30 or so years of going into galleries and museums and seeing stuff that didn’t register with me at all. And wondering “what are all these people talking about?”
Of course I don’t think I even have to say it, the main meat in the whole enchilada is the high while in the creative act. That’s like the melody (mixing metaphors with wild abandon). The harmony or counterpoint or whatever is this other thing; what’s going on? Do I have anything to contribute? And if everybody is as brainless as they appear, do I have anything to say about that? Or on the other hand should I just climb back into the stands and content myself with my own doodlings? Of course I do that from time to time but the siren call of the “action” calls and I feel drawn in.
Make no mistake; Marcel Duchamp and Andy Warhol are two of my favorite artists. They are far and away some of the best artists of the 20th century, totally ground breaking. But I didn’t see any of the work I was seeing as coming up to anywhere near that par. It was just real bad and real inarticulate. But it continued to be accepted as work on the same level as Warhol and Duchamp. Somebody is fooling themselves.
But to accept that as what’s happening and that’s the way it goes is unacceptable. There are those who will say it’s just a matter of money and politics and a bunch of power brokers manipulating the market and trying to keep the whole thing from getting away from them for there own profit and to hell with the culture. (God, that’s an evil thought!)
I prefer to think that it was a case of a bunch of marginal artists and curators trying to deal with a paradigm shift in our culture and failing. But that’s hard to accept too. That this could go on for 30 odd years and nothing come out of it? Wow! That’s really something! I just have a hard time believing this can go on for much longer.
So that’s setting the stage when Trevor comes along and says “look around you, it’s a whole new world!” So I guess when it comes down to it I think I’m going to save the art world!
Comments:
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Hi Pete:
Great work as usual getting the sparks flying. So I'm quoted as saying it's a whole new world? That’s fairly close to the truth. What I’m trying to say is that the whole world is, potentially, synonymous with art. (Seen from space, the planet is the most gorgeous marble imaginable.) Human beings have a great deal to do with enhancing, detracting from, appreciating or evaluating the earth’s beauty -- colors, textures, shapes, lines, but also a great deal more.
With gratitude to and in the context of such “land-art” pioneers as Cristo and Richard Long, I propose something more down-to-earth and practical: Why not bring the artist’s vision to bear on a real place, preserving or restoring what is inherently enchanting about it? Enchantment and wholeness are synonymous; as Keats declared, what is beautiful is also good (or true?). I propose an aesthetics-driven quest for wholeness, one politically governed entity – neighborhood, city, district, county – at a time.
I see this process as being necessarily driven by artists. Art students of the future will also study planning, historic preservation, economics, ecology, architecture -- stuff like that. No more of this ivory tower s..t that separates art from the real world.
How does one begin?
I think your GIS maps-as-art is right on target. GIS is inherently multi-dimensional, as is the art I'm proposing. The artistic challenge is to make GIS art as delicious as were our "Town and Country" or "Leger" murals.
Your “system” is indispensable for achieving this aim. Unfortunately, hard as you try to disseminate it to others, this may be work --using your system toward beauty through "map art." -- that you alone can do. At least, for the time being.
I was thinking last night – in a place like Iraq, where the odds of surviving are so slender, what’s there to lose from turning every visible "surface" into “canvas” for art? The madder and more desperate the situation, the more art should apply.
Cheers,
Trevor
Great work as usual getting the sparks flying. So I'm quoted as saying it's a whole new world? That’s fairly close to the truth. What I’m trying to say is that the whole world is, potentially, synonymous with art. (Seen from space, the planet is the most gorgeous marble imaginable.) Human beings have a great deal to do with enhancing, detracting from, appreciating or evaluating the earth’s beauty -- colors, textures, shapes, lines, but also a great deal more.
With gratitude to and in the context of such “land-art” pioneers as Cristo and Richard Long, I propose something more down-to-earth and practical: Why not bring the artist’s vision to bear on a real place, preserving or restoring what is inherently enchanting about it? Enchantment and wholeness are synonymous; as Keats declared, what is beautiful is also good (or true?). I propose an aesthetics-driven quest for wholeness, one politically governed entity – neighborhood, city, district, county – at a time.
I see this process as being necessarily driven by artists. Art students of the future will also study planning, historic preservation, economics, ecology, architecture -- stuff like that. No more of this ivory tower s..t that separates art from the real world.
How does one begin?
I think your GIS maps-as-art is right on target. GIS is inherently multi-dimensional, as is the art I'm proposing. The artistic challenge is to make GIS art as delicious as were our "Town and Country" or "Leger" murals.
Your “system” is indispensable for achieving this aim. Unfortunately, hard as you try to disseminate it to others, this may be work --using your system toward beauty through "map art." -- that you alone can do. At least, for the time being.
I was thinking last night – in a place like Iraq, where the odds of surviving are so slender, what’s there to lose from turning every visible "surface" into “canvas” for art? The madder and more desperate the situation, the more art should apply.
Cheers,
Trevor
# posted by 
: 3:05 PM
: 3:05 PM
Trevor, Second try made it. As usual I can't make heads or tails of what you say but, in general, your remarks let me see there's another way of seeing things and art isn't isolated in the studio. It's that sensation of unseen horizons made visible I ascribe to you. But no, your specific suggestions make no sense to me. On the other hand, as I once said, your tilting at windmills is, in an odd way, inspiring.
On the GIS front, the more I learn the more I realize I’m at the beginning of a very steep, very long learning curve. When I will be able to turn what I’m learning into art I have no idea. Right now it seems like a long time.
On the GIS front, the more I learn the more I realize I’m at the beginning of a very steep, very long learning curve. When I will be able to turn what I’m learning into art I have no idea. Right now it seems like a long time.
Hi Pete:
I thought there were more or less three points that I tried to make in my original posting. I repeat the three points here, although #3 has pretty much been addressed under 1 and 2.
(1, 2 and 3 seem fairly interchangeable anyhow.) This time I try to be a little clearer, but I certainly don’t mind being held to a yet higher standard of clarity, and will be glad to try again. But let’s see first how this grabs you. Please say what it is exactly that you don’t get.
1. The whole world is, potentially, synonymous with art. (Seen from space, the planet is the most gorgeous marble imaginable.)
When we went to art school, art was seen as something you put in a museum, a gallery, a home, a business -- in some sort of a building or related space. Although that view of art still predominates, some of the crazy stuff you describe – things like spreading a fabric fence over miles of landscape, or creating a huge spiral jetty in a lake, or creating linear walks that repeated footsteps define spatially, etc., have helped to move art away from its former definition of fairly small objects that fit into buildings and toward being much bigger entities. Artists have made great strides in opening the boundaries of art in millions of other ways. This is what conceptual art is about.
Some conceptual art is better than others. I like conceptual art that is beautiful, i.e., work that pays attention to the visual elements that we enjoy in museum art. So there is the potential for boundarylessness (word, sp) in art without forsaking the usual art elements like line, color, texture, shape, etc.
2. Human beings have a great deal to do with enhancing, detracting from, appreciating or evaluating the earth’s beauty -- colors, textures, shapes, lines, but also a great deal more.
For some reason that I can’t fathom, artists with their great visual training and sensibility ignore the urban and natural landscape other than to use them as models for their studio art. They don’t directly help to shape those landscapes, even though they may have strong opinions about them and have the appropriate design tools. Instead, builders, contractors, Public Works Departments – anybody but artists – determine the aesthetics of the built and natural environments. I propose that that be changed.
I won’t propose to say here how that should be changed. I tried to point us in the direction of doing some of that with our public murals, which were designed to fit in with the surrounding architecture. In fact, someone told me that the murals took a space that could not be called architecture and turned it into architecture! The murals were meant to provide ideas, education, and inspiration to the broad mass of the public – whatever portion of it happened to pass by the Fetterly site. It would have made sense for the murals to form a hub at Seafood Plaza – good for the Fetterly too – for pedestrians from the downtown core. Having such an urban trail would have helped the economy, the aesthetics and the general health of downtown Vallejo. We could even have wrapped lightposts along the route with bright colored paper, although there might be hundreds of better ideas. The point is that we, as artists could be changing the appearance of a chunk of the city that is at least two miles long.
That gets into the arena of planning (which supports my point that we should be training a whole generation of artist/planners). Suddenly, everybody on Sonoma Blvd. is involved in art in some way, even if unconsciously. But it’s not just art for its own sake. It’s art that creates a healthier, more whole community. Extrapolating out from one tiny segment of a city, this new “art” can potentially spread across the entire planet. Just imagine an international conference of artists where they discussed how their nations would interact visually (and in other related ways) when viewed from near space. This is not meant to suggest that I have any fixation on doing art from space. I’m just trying to make a point about the potential global scope of art.
Other Notes:
- Thanks to space travel, we can keep a picture of the entire ball of planet Earth in our minds as an image.
- This image has already appeared in countless works of art.
- This image makes it easier to form a concept of the Earth as a single, potentially manageable entity that has great beauty.
3. Why not bring the artist’s vision to bear on a real place, preserving or restoring what is inherently enchanting about it? Enchantment and wholeness are synonymous; as Keats declared, what is beautiful is also good (or true?). I propose an aesthetics-driven quest for wholeness, one politically governed entity – neighborhood, city, district, county – at a time.
I see this process as being necessarily driven by artists. Art students of the future will also study planning, historic preservation, economics, ecology, architecture -- stuff like that. No more of this ivory tower s..t that separates art from the real world.
I think your GIS maps-as-art is right on target. GIS is inherently multi-dimensional, as is the art I'm proposing. The artistic challenge is to make GIS art as delicious as were our "Town and Country" or "Leger" murals.
One can do map art without GIS, but even a vague concept of GIS might help.
Your “system” is indispensable for achieving this aim.
In some cases, public art would be able to deprogram people who are bent on destruction, and divert them into a constructive direction.
Post a Comment
I thought there were more or less three points that I tried to make in my original posting. I repeat the three points here, although #3 has pretty much been addressed under 1 and 2.
(1, 2 and 3 seem fairly interchangeable anyhow.) This time I try to be a little clearer, but I certainly don’t mind being held to a yet higher standard of clarity, and will be glad to try again. But let’s see first how this grabs you. Please say what it is exactly that you don’t get.
1. The whole world is, potentially, synonymous with art. (Seen from space, the planet is the most gorgeous marble imaginable.)
When we went to art school, art was seen as something you put in a museum, a gallery, a home, a business -- in some sort of a building or related space. Although that view of art still predominates, some of the crazy stuff you describe – things like spreading a fabric fence over miles of landscape, or creating a huge spiral jetty in a lake, or creating linear walks that repeated footsteps define spatially, etc., have helped to move art away from its former definition of fairly small objects that fit into buildings and toward being much bigger entities. Artists have made great strides in opening the boundaries of art in millions of other ways. This is what conceptual art is about.
Some conceptual art is better than others. I like conceptual art that is beautiful, i.e., work that pays attention to the visual elements that we enjoy in museum art. So there is the potential for boundarylessness (word, sp) in art without forsaking the usual art elements like line, color, texture, shape, etc.
2. Human beings have a great deal to do with enhancing, detracting from, appreciating or evaluating the earth’s beauty -- colors, textures, shapes, lines, but also a great deal more.
For some reason that I can’t fathom, artists with their great visual training and sensibility ignore the urban and natural landscape other than to use them as models for their studio art. They don’t directly help to shape those landscapes, even though they may have strong opinions about them and have the appropriate design tools. Instead, builders, contractors, Public Works Departments – anybody but artists – determine the aesthetics of the built and natural environments. I propose that that be changed.
I won’t propose to say here how that should be changed. I tried to point us in the direction of doing some of that with our public murals, which were designed to fit in with the surrounding architecture. In fact, someone told me that the murals took a space that could not be called architecture and turned it into architecture! The murals were meant to provide ideas, education, and inspiration to the broad mass of the public – whatever portion of it happened to pass by the Fetterly site. It would have made sense for the murals to form a hub at Seafood Plaza – good for the Fetterly too – for pedestrians from the downtown core. Having such an urban trail would have helped the economy, the aesthetics and the general health of downtown Vallejo. We could even have wrapped lightposts along the route with bright colored paper, although there might be hundreds of better ideas. The point is that we, as artists could be changing the appearance of a chunk of the city that is at least two miles long.
That gets into the arena of planning (which supports my point that we should be training a whole generation of artist/planners). Suddenly, everybody on Sonoma Blvd. is involved in art in some way, even if unconsciously. But it’s not just art for its own sake. It’s art that creates a healthier, more whole community. Extrapolating out from one tiny segment of a city, this new “art” can potentially spread across the entire planet. Just imagine an international conference of artists where they discussed how their nations would interact visually (and in other related ways) when viewed from near space. This is not meant to suggest that I have any fixation on doing art from space. I’m just trying to make a point about the potential global scope of art.
Other Notes:
- Thanks to space travel, we can keep a picture of the entire ball of planet Earth in our minds as an image.
- This image has already appeared in countless works of art.
- This image makes it easier to form a concept of the Earth as a single, potentially manageable entity that has great beauty.
3. Why not bring the artist’s vision to bear on a real place, preserving or restoring what is inherently enchanting about it? Enchantment and wholeness are synonymous; as Keats declared, what is beautiful is also good (or true?). I propose an aesthetics-driven quest for wholeness, one politically governed entity – neighborhood, city, district, county – at a time.
I see this process as being necessarily driven by artists. Art students of the future will also study planning, historic preservation, economics, ecology, architecture -- stuff like that. No more of this ivory tower s..t that separates art from the real world.
I think your GIS maps-as-art is right on target. GIS is inherently multi-dimensional, as is the art I'm proposing. The artistic challenge is to make GIS art as delicious as were our "Town and Country" or "Leger" murals.
One can do map art without GIS, but even a vague concept of GIS might help.
Your “system” is indispensable for achieving this aim.
In some cases, public art would be able to deprogram people who are bent on destruction, and divert them into a constructive direction.
# posted by : 7:45 PM
: 7:45 PM << Home
