I saw an exhibition of Bridget Riley’s work in a career retrospective of her work at Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art some five years ago. With what great delight her paintings shimmered, danced and cavorted across the canvas before one’s very eyes, while the waters of the sunlit Harbour did the same through the MCA’s windows! I was reminded of this seeing the current, small exhibition of her work in the Sun-Lit Room at the National Gallery, London. While “sunlit” is an aspirational term in London this week, her paintings, some of them painted directly onto the walls themselves, still dance before our eyes. Robert Melville, writing in the New Statesman in 1970, expressed it best: “No painter, dead or alive, has ever made us more aware of our eyes than Bridget Riley.”
Morton Feldman once said of the paintings of the abstract expressionists that they only perform for you as you leave them. “Not long ago Guston asked some friends, myself among them, to see his recent work at a warehouse. The paintings were like sleeping giants, hardly breathing. As the others were leaving, I turned for a last look, then said to him, “There they are. They’re up.” They were already engulfing the room.” (Feldman, p. 100, cited in Bernard, p. 182) Riley’s paintings are up and dancing before you even enter the room! What pleasure these paintings give, what delight one has just being in their company!
References:
I have posted before about the art of the national treasure who is Ms Riley, here.
Reviews of the NG exhibition here: Hilary Spurling, Maev Kennedy, and Adrian Searle. And images from the Exhibition here.
The image above shows two assistants of Bridget Riley painting her work Arcadia 1 directly onto the wall at the National Gallery. Photograph credit: The National Gallery.
Morton Feldman [1965]: Philip Guston: The last painter. Art News Annual 1966 (Winter 1965).
Jonathan W. Bernard [2002]: Feldman’s painters. pp. 173-215, in: Steven Johnson (Editor): The New York Schools of Music and Visual Arts. New York, NY, USA: Routledge.
Archive for the ‘Art’ Category
Page 5 of 7
Philosophy as a creative art
I quoted poet Don Paterson on what he saw as Shakespeare’s use of the act of poetry-writing to learn what he intended to say in the poem being written. And now, here is poet and philosopher George Santayana writing to William James in the same vein on philosophy:
If philosophy were the attempt to solve a given problem, I should see reason to be discouraged about its success; but it strikes me that it is [page-break] rather an attempt to express a half-undiscovered reality, just as art is, and that two different renderings, if they are expressive, far from cancelling each other add to each other’s value . . . I confess I do not see why we should be so vehemently curious about the absolute truth, which is not to be made or altered by our discovery of it. But philosophy seems to me to be its own reward, and its justification lies in the delight and dignity of the art itself.” [Letter to William James, 1887-12-15, quoted in Kirkwood 1961, pp. 43-44.]
Reference:
M. M. Kirkwood [1961]: Santayana: Saint of the Imagination. Toronto, Canada: University of Toronto Press.
Poetry as process, not product
I have remarked before on the mistake of assessing visual art as product rather than as process, for example, here and here. Today’s Grauniad carries a fascinating article by poet and jazz musician Don Paterson on Shakespeare’s sonnets, which makes the same point about his poetry:
I wanted to say something to counteract the perception of Shakespeare’s compositional method as a kind of lyric soduku, and put in a word for the kind of glorious, messy procedure I’m quite certain it was, whatever the crystalline and symmetrical beauty of the final results. Like most poets, Shakespeare uses the poem as way of working out what he’s thinking, not as a means of reporting that thought. Often he’ll start with nothing more than a hangover, a fever and a bad night spent being tormented by the spectre of his absent lover. Then he’ll use the sonnet as a way of making sense of it all – a way, first, to extract a logic from pain, and then a comfort from that logic, however warped it might be. Form, in other words, allows him to draw some assuagement from the very source of the agony itself.”
Chance would be a fine thing
Music critic Alex Ross discusses John Cage’s music in a recent article in The New Yorker. Ross goes some way before he trips up, using those dreaded – and completely inappropriate – words “randomness” and “chance”:
Later in the forties, he [Cage] laid out “gamuts” – gridlike arrays of preset sounds – trying to go from one to the next without consciously shaping the outcome. He read widely in South Asian and East Asian thought, his readings guided by the young Indian musician Gita Sarabhai and, later, by the Zen scholar Daisetz Suzuki. Sarabhai supplied him with a pivotal formulation of music’s purpose: “to sober and quiet the mind, thus rendering it susceptible to divine influences.” Cage also looked to Meister Eckhart and Thomas Aquinas, finding another motto in Aquinas’s declaration that “art imitates nature in the manner of its operation.”
. . .
In 1951, writing the closing movement of his Concerto for Prepared Piano, he finally let nature run its course, flipping coins and consulting the I Ching to determine which elements of his charts should come next. “Music of Changes,” a forty-three-minute piece of solo piano, was written entirely in this manner, the labor-intensive process consuming most of a year.
As randomness took over, so did noise. “Imaginary Landscape No. 4″ employs twelve radios, whose tuning, [page-break] volume, and tone are governed by chance operations.” [pages 57-58]
That even such a sympathetic, literate, and erudite observer as Alex Ross should misconstrue what Cage was doing with the I Ching as based on chance events is disappointing. But, as I’ve argued before about Cage’s music, the belief that the material world is all there is is so deeply entrenched in contemporary western culture that westerners seem rarely able to conceive of other ways of being. Tossing coins may seem to be a chance operation to someone unversed in eastern philosophy, but was surely not to John Cage.
References:
Alex Ross [2010]: Searching for silence. John Cage’s art of noise. The New Yorker, 4 October 2010, pp. 52-61.
James Pritchett [1993]: The Music of John Cage. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Here are other posts on music and art.
Dynamic geometric abstraction
The Tate Modern Exhibition earlier this year on the art of Theo van Doesburg (1883-1931) and the International Avant-Garde included some sublime art by Bauhaus artist, Ludwig Hirschfeld-Mack (1893-1965).
These installations were computer-generated realizations of his originally-mechanical Farbenlicht-Spiel (Colourlight-Play) of 1921. Hirschfeld-Mack’s concept, shown here, was a machine for producing dynamic images, images which slowly changed their colours and shapes. The images were the projection onto a 2-dimensional surface of regular two-dimensional polygons (triangles, quadrilaterals, circles, ellipses, etc) moving, apparently independently, in planes parallel in the third dimension (the dimension of the projection), i.e., appearing to move closer to or further away from the viewer. As the example below may indicate, the resulting images are sublime. Computer generation of such dynamic images is, of course, considerably easier now than with the mechanical means available to Hirschfeld-Mack.
I have asked before what music is for. I don’t know Hirschfeld-Mack’s intentions. However, from my own experience, I know that watching this work can induce an altered mental state in its viewer, “sobering and quieting the mind, thus rendering it susceptible to divine influences,” in the words of Gita Sarabhai (talking about music). The experience of watching this work is intensely meditative, akin to listening attentively to the slowly-changing music of Morton Feldman (1926-1987).
Hirschfeld-Mack was the only Bauhaus artist to end his career in Australia, a career Helen Webberley describes here. His art is another instance of the flowering of geometric abstraction in art in the first three decades of the 20th century. In the last decades of the 19th century and the early years of the 20th, there was widespread public interest in the ideas which had recently revolutionized the study of geometry in pure mathematics. These ideas – the manifestation of postmodernism in pure mathematics a century before it appeared in other disciplines – first involved the rigorous study of alternatives to Euclidean geometry during the 19th century, a study undertaken when there still considerably ambiguity about the epistemological status of such alternatives, and then the realization (initially by Mario Pieri and David Hilbert in the 1890s) that one could articulate and study formal axiomatic systems for geometry without regard to any possible real-world instantiation of them. Geometry was no longer being studied in order to represent or model the world we live in, but for its own sake, for its inherent mathematical beauty and structure.
At the same time, there was interest – in mathematics and in the wider (European) culture – in additional dimensions of reality. The concept of a “fourth dimension” of space motivated many artists, including Kazimir Malevich and Piet Mondrian; both men sought to represent these new ideas from geometry in their art, and said so explicitly. Similarly, the cubists sought to present an object from all perspectives simultaneously, the futurists to capture the dynanism of machines and the colours of metals, and the constructivists to distill visual art to its essential and abstract forms and colours. Of course, having many times flown over the Netherlands, I have always seen Mondrian’s art as straightforward landscape painting, painting the Dutch countryside from above.
Geometric abstraction reappeared in the art of Brazil in the 1960s, and in so-called minimalist art in the USA and Europe, from the 1960s onwards. Like Hirschfeld-Mack’s work, much of that art is sublime and deeply spiritual. More of that anon.
References:
M Dabrowski [1992]: Malevich and Mondrian: nonobjective form as the expression of the “absolute’”. pp. 145-168, in: GH Roman and VH Marquardt (Editors): The Avant-Garde Frontier: Russia Meets the West, 1910-1930. University Press of Florida, Gainesville, FL, USA.
Gladys Fabre and Doris Wintgens Hotte (Editors), Michael White (Consultant Editor) [2009]: Van Doesburg & the International Avant-Garde. Constructing a New World. London, UK: Tate Publishing.
LD Henderson [1983]: The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art. Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, USA.
David Hilbert [1899]: Grundlagen der Geometrie. pp. 3-92, in: Festschrift zur Feier der Enthullung des Gauss-Weber-Denkmals in Gottingen. Teubner, Leipzig, Germany. Translated by EJ Townsend as: Foundations of Geometry, Open Court, Chicago, IL, USA. 1910.
Mario Pieri [1895]: Sui principi che reggiono la geometria di posizione. Atti della Reale Accademia delle scienze di Torino, 30: 54-108.
Mario Pieri [1897-98]: I principii della geometria di posizione composti in sistema logico deduttivo. Memorie della Reale Accademia delle Scienze di Torino 2, 48: 1-62.
Note: The image shown above is from Ludwig Hirschfeld-Mack: “Farbenlicht-Spiel”, 1921. Photography © Ludwig Hirschfeld-Mack. Szenenfoto Farbenlichtspiel, Rekonstruktion 1999. Corinne Schweizer, Peter Böhm, Ludwig Hirschfeld-Mack.
Hand-mind-eye co-ordination
Last month, I posted some statements by John Berger on drawing. Some of these statements are profound:
A drawing of a tree shows, not a tree, but a tree-being-looked-at. . . . Within the instant of the sight of a tree is established a life-experience.” (page 71)
Berger asserts that we do not draw the objects our eyes seem to look at. Rather, we draw some representation, processed through our mind and through our drawing arm and hand, of that which our minds have seen. And that which our mind has seen is itself a representation (created by mental processing that includes processing by our visual processing apparatus) of what our eyes have seen. Neurologist Oliver Sacks, writing about a blind man who had his sight restored and was unable to understand what he saw, has written movingly about the sophisticated visual processing skills involved in even the simplest acts of seeing, skills which most of us learn as young children (Sacks 1993).
So a drawing of a tree is certainly not itself a tree, and not even a direct, two-dimensional representation of a tree, but a two-dimensional hand-processed manifestation of a visually-processed mental manifestation of a tree. Indeed, perhaps not even always this, as Marion Milner has reminded us: A drawing of a tree is in fact a two-dimensional representation of the process of manifesting through hand-drawing a mental representation of a tree. Is it any wonder, then, that painted trees may look as distinctive and awe-inspiring as those of Caspar David Friedrich (shown above) or Katie Allen?
As it happens, we still know very little, scientifically, about the internal mental representations that our minds have of our bodies. Recent research, by Matthew Longo and Patrick Hazzard, suggests that, on average, our mental representations of our own hands are inaccurate. It would be interesting to see if the same distortions are true of people whose work or avocation requires them to finely-control their hand movements: for example, jewellers, string players, pianists, guitarists, surgeons, snooker-players. Do virtuoso trumpeters, capable of double-, triple- or even quadruple-tonguing, have sophisticated mental representations of their tongues? Do crippled artists who learn to paint holding a brush with their toes or in their mouth acquire sophisticated and more-accurate mental representations of these organs, too? I would expect so.
These thoughts come to mind as I try to imitate the sound of a baroque violin bow by holding a modern bow higher up the bow. By thus changing the position of my hand, my playing changes dramatically, along with my sense of control or power over the bow, as well as the sounds it produces.
Related posts here, here and here.
References:
John Berger [2005]: Berger on Drawing. Edited by Jim Savage. Aghabullogue, Co. Cork, Eire: Occasional Press. Second Edition, 2007.
Matthew Longo and Patrick Haggard [2010]: An implicit body representation underlying human position sense. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, USA, 107: 11727-11732. Available here.
Marion Milner (Joanna Field) [1950]: On Not Being Able to Paint. London, UK: William Heinemann. Second edition, 1957.
Oliver Sacks[1993]: To see and not see. The New Yorker, 10 May 1993.
Art: Katie Allen at Mostyn Gallery, Llandudno
At the fine Mostyn Gallery in Llandudno, Wales, there is currently an exhibition of various contemporary artists, We Have the Mirrors, We Have the Plans/Gennym Ni Mae’r Drychau, Gennym Ni Mae’r Cynlluniau. By far the most interesting works there, and the reason for my visit, are some paintings by Katie Allen.
Allen paints intricate landscapes with acrylics, making use of the key features of these paints: that they are water-resistant when dry, and dry quickly, so can be over-painted on one another. Her paintings involve intricate borders and highlights, each flower and leaf bordered, with little dots of colour inside every one, an effect which must take hours of tedious, careful, mind-numbing (although also possibly spiritually-uplifting) work to produce. A reproduction of her Autumnal Arboretum (2009, Acrylic on Board, 153 x 122 cm) is shown here (courtesy of the artist’s website), although no reproduction can do justice to the intricacy of the actual painted work:
I find Allen’s work reminiscent of that of Peter Doig in its intricate representation of a landscape; I am reminded of paintings such as Doig’s White Canoe (1991), with its detailed lake-surface reflections of scrub and trees. Both are modern-day descendants of the carefully-observed landscapes of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. As with Doig’s work, I feel Allen’s efforts and skill are wasted on representational art. With such facility, intelligent imagination, and obvious energy, she could produce very fine abstractions.
Of course, all art is abstract, even fully representational art, since art is a manifestation of what is in the artist’s mind, of what the artist sees, not what exists in the world outside his or her mind. Clearly what is in Allen’s mind is a distortion – to me, a very attractive and compelling distortion – of the real landscapes that the paintings point to. Despite being representational, her work is much closer to the abstract end of the spectrum than to the realistic, pictorial end. By being very nearly, but not actually, abstract, her work unsettles me. In other words, her methods and technique are highly abstract yet still the paintings point to some real-world landscapes, and these two – the methods and the semantic signified – are in conflict.
How much stronger and more compelling Allen’s work would be if her paintings did not point to anything ostensibly real and external, but were pure abstractions. As with all purely abstract art (for example, music, islamic tilings), the paintings could well still point somewhere, but precisely where would only emerge with the act of painting and the act of viewing. Allowing the meaning of the work to emerge rather than pre-defining it, however, is so contrary to what most of us moderns think artists are doing (that they are communicating a message to us, and that message is pre-existing in themselves) that doing this requires some courage. The strength of Allen’s existing work shows that she has this quality.
POSTSCRIPT (2010-08-23): More on the abstract nature of all art, and the relationship between object, eye, mind, and hand, here.
Reference:
Anon [2010]: We Have the Mirrors, We Have the Plans/Gennym Ni Mae’r Drychau, Gennym Ni Mae’r Cynlluniau. Exhibition Catalog, Mostyn Gallery, Llandudno, Wales. 2010-05-22 to 2010-09-04.
Berger on drawing
Following Bridget Riley on drawing-as-thinking, I have been reading Jim Savage’s fascinating collection of writings by John Berger on the topic of drawing. Although Berger does not say so, he is talking primarily about representational drawing – the drawing of things in the world (whether seen or remembered) or things in some imagined world – not abstract drawing. Some excerpts:
- “For the artist drawing is discovery. And that is not just a slick phrase, it is quite literally true. It is the actual act of drawing that forces the artist to look at the object in front of him, to dissect it in his mind’s eye and put it together again; or, if he is drawing from memory, that forces him to dredge his own mind, to discover the content of his own store of past observations.” (page 3)
- “It is a platitude in the teaching of drawing that the heart of the matter lies in the specific process of looking. A line, an area of tone, is not really important because it records what you have seen, but because of what it will lead you on to see. Following up its logic in order to check its accuracy, you find confirmation or denial in the object itself or in your memory of it. Each confirmation or denial brings you closer to the object, until finally you are, as it were, inside it: the contours you have drawn no longer marking the edge of what you have seen, but the edge of what you have become. Perhaps that sounds needlessly metaphysical. Another way of putting it would be to say that each mark you make on the paper is a stepping-stone from which you proceed to the next, until you have crossed your subject as though it were a river, have put it behind you.” (page 3)
- “A drawing is an autobiographical record of one’s discovery of an event – seen, remembered or imagined.” (page 3)
- “A drawing of a tree shows, not a tree, but a tree-being-looked-at. . . . Within the instant of the sight of a tree is established a life-experience.” (page 71)
- “All genuine art approaches something which is eloquent but which we cannot altogether understand. Eloquent because it touches something fundamental. How do we know? We do not know. We simply recognize.” (page 80)
- “Art cannot be used to explain the mysterious. What art does is to make it easier to notice. Art uncovers the mysterious. And when noticed and uncovered, it becomes more mysterious.” (page 80)
- “The pen with which I’m writing is the one with which I draw. And there are times, like tonight, when it won’t flow and when it demands a bath or a hand moving differently. All drawings are a collaboration, like most circus-acts.” (page 110)
- “where are we, during the act of drawing, in spirit? Where are you at such moments – moments which add up to so many, one might think of them as another life-time? Each pictorial tradition offers a different answer to this query. For instance, the European tradition, since the Renaissance, places the model over there, the draughtsman here, and the paper somewhere in between, within arms reach of the draughtsman, who observes the model and notes down what he has observed on the paper in front of him. The Chinese tradition arranges things differently. Calligraphy, the trace of things, is behind the model and the draughtsman has to search for it, looking through the model. On his paper he then repeats the gestures he has seen calligraphically. For the Paleolithic shaman, drawing inside a cave, it was different again. The model and the drawing surface were in the same place, calling to the draughtsman to come and meet them, and then trace, with his hand on the rock, their presence.” (page 123)
Reference:
John Berger [2005]: Berger on Drawing. Edited by Jim Savage. Aghabullogue, Co. Cork, Eire: Occasional Press. Second Edition, 2007.
I have written more on the relationships between hand and mind and eye and object here.
Concat 2: Art criticism
Here a concatenation of various recent articles on art which have interested me, and a reproduction of International Klein Blue, Yves Klein’s patented colour.
- Peter Schjeldahl [2010]: True Blue: An Yves Klein retrospective. The New Yorker, 2010-06-28, pp. 72-74.
- Calvin Tomkins [2010]: Big Art, Big Money: Julie Mehretu’s “Mural” for Goldman Sachs. The New Yorker, 2010-03-29, pp. 62-69.
- Alex Ross [2010]: Waveforms: The singular Iannis Xenakis. The New Yorker, 2010-03-01, pp. 78-79.
- Peter Schjeldahl [2010]: Way Out West: California minimalism comes to town. The New Yorker, 2010-01-25, pp.76-77.
- Calvin Tomkins [2010]: Lines of Resistance: William Kentridge’s rough magic. The New Yorker, 2010-01-18. pp. 52-59.
At Swim-two-birds
Brian Dillon reviews a British touring exhibition of the art of John Cage, currently at the Baltic Mill Gateshead.
Two quibbles: First, someone who compare’s Cage’s 4′ 33” to a blank gallery wall hasn’t actually listened to the piece. If Dillon had compared it to a glass window in the gallery wall allowing a view of the outside of the gallery, then he would have made some sense. But Cage’s composition is not about silence, or even pure sound, for either of which a blank gallery wall might be an appropriate visual representation. The composition is about ambient sound, and about what sounds count as music in our culture.
Second, Dillon rightly mentions that the procedures used by Cage for musical composition from 1950 onwards (and later for poetry and visual art) were based on the Taoist I Ching. But he wrongly describes these procedures as being based on “the philosophy of chance.” Although widespread, this view is nonsense, accurate neither as to what Cage was doing, nor even as to what he may have thought he was doing. Anyone subscribing to the Taoist philosophy underlying them understands the I Ching procedures as examplifying and manifesting hidden causal mechanisms, not chance. The point of the underlying philosophy is that the random-looking events that result from the procedures express something unique, time-dependent, and personal to the specific person invoking the I Ching at the particular time they invoke it. So, to a Taoist, the resulting music or art is not “chance” or “random” or “aleatoric” at all, but profoundly deterministic, being the necessary consequential expression of deep, synchronistic, spiritual forces. I don’t know if Cage was himself a Taoist (I’m not sure that anyone does), but to an adherent of Taoist philosophy Cage’s own beliefs or attitudes are irrelevant to the workings of these forces. I sense that Cage had sufficient understanding of Taoist and Zen ideas (Zen being the Japanese version of Taoism) to recognize this particular feature: that to an adherent of the philosophy the beliefs of the invoker of the procedures are irrelevant.
In my experience, the idea that the I Ching is a deterministic process is a hard one for many modern westerners to understand, let alone to accept, so entrenched is the prevailing western view that the material realm is all there is. This entrenched view is only historically recent in the west: Isaac Newton, for example, was a believer in the existence of cosmic spiritual forces, and thought he had found the laws which governed their operation. Obversely, many easterners in my experience have difficulty with notions of uncertainty and chance; if all events are subject to hidden causal forces, the concepts of randomness and of alternative possible futures make no sense. My experience here includes making presentations and leading discussions on scenario analyses with senior managers of Asian multinationals.
We are two birds swimming, each circling the pond, warily, neither understanding the other, neither flying away.
References:
Kyle Gann [2010]: No Such Thing as Silence. John Cage’s 4′ 33”. New Haven, CT, USA: Yale University Press.
James Pritchett [1993]: The Music of John Cage. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.