Tuesday, March 22, 2011
What Makes a Good Work of Art...
Matthew Higgs, director of White Columns in New York, on what makes a good work of art: "It's not about innovation for innovation's sake or the ambition to be novel or unique. All good art gives us an opportunity for a different relationship to time... It's usually about an individual's radically idiosyncratic interpretation of the world. We're inherently fascinated by work like that because we're inherently fascinated by other people."
And Now
I am reading Seven Days in the Art World by Sarah Thornton, and I'm on the Turner Prize chapter. She's interviewing 2006 Turner Prize nominee Tomma Abts, and I'm amazed by this artist's mysteriousness. She won't speak about artist influences, she won't disclose her German name book (which she uses to choose the titles of her paintings), she refuses to answer questions such as "were you raised on a commune?" and she believes "Painting is so visual that it is very difficult to say things that won't compromise it." She doesn't believe artists should explain themselves.
Not to mention she makes about 8 paintings a year. She'll spend sometimes 5 years on them and makes sure enough time will pass in between each working-session. Taken from a description of Abts on the Tate Britain website, "Abts describes the finished works as ‘a concentrate of the many paintings underneath’, each functioning as an autonomous object revealing the visible traces of its construction." She also uses no source material, no preconceived notions of what any painting will look like in the end. But here is her interview; it's really quite strange and fascinating how she goes about art-making.
http://www.tate.org.uk/britain/turnerprize/2006/tommaabts.htm
Not to mention she makes about 8 paintings a year. She'll spend sometimes 5 years on them and makes sure enough time will pass in between each working-session. Taken from a description of Abts on the Tate Britain website, "Abts describes the finished works as ‘a concentrate of the many paintings underneath’, each functioning as an autonomous object revealing the visible traces of its construction." She also uses no source material, no preconceived notions of what any painting will look like in the end. But here is her interview; it's really quite strange and fascinating how she goes about art-making.
http://www.tate.org.uk/britain/turnerprize/2006/tommaabts.htm
Tempermanence: I miss you
...is the title of my senior thesis paper/senior project.
Painting is difficult. I have my senior group show to hang tomorrow, and wrote a mini-statement to go along with it (and am mainly posting it here so I don't lose it in the future)
Painting is difficult. I have my senior group show to hang tomorrow, and wrote a mini-statement to go along with it (and am mainly posting it here so I don't lose it in the future)
The concept of permanence has been one of primary concern in my life and work since I have been dealing with losses of various calibers since I can remember. Half of the pieces on my wall were from a course in which I painted the same image - a photograph from a family vacation of me and family friends - all semester. Within these paintings, I investigated the photograph and the various emotional impacts I could suggest with the use of color and materials.
The other half of the pieces I have shown are based on memories and the idea of the "memorial": a thing that can (or is meant to) somehow embody a person's dedication or achievements. I am interested in how much weight and truth an object or a photograph can hold in terms of expressing the life or death of a person/relationship.
Tuesday, March 15, 2011
Susana Heller - Studio Visit
My senior seminar class visited the studio of artist Susana Heller in Greenpoint, NY last week. Her studio was in this old warehouse building right near McCarren Park; it was really beautiful. Susana herself was this energetic, skinny woman who spoke about her work and life with sincerity and deep passion. Her demeanor was very personable and informal - she was eager to expose her process and her thoughts in her work, including the story behind her most recent pieces, which involved her husband's near death hospitalization. I have found that many established artists, mostly those represented by large galleries (such as Judith Linhares) will conceal much of the thought behind their work, in an effort to maintain the mysteriousness that exists, to keep the viewers guessing and inquiring rather than put all of the information out on the table. This is a conflict that I have within my own work as an artist - how much do I tell you, be it with words or with paint?
Aside from her paintings of her husband, she had been in her studio location in 2001 during the 9/11 attack and painted from the chaos and destruction of the city which followed. She also considers herself an avid walker; she walks all over the cities, and is fascinated with the movement, the people, the energy of New York City, so she draws and paints about this affect on her.
Susana doesn't have a website but some of her work from a show is displayed on the Olga Korper Gallery website here: http://olgakorpergallery.com/artists.html
Aside from her paintings of her husband, she had been in her studio location in 2001 during the 9/11 attack and painted from the chaos and destruction of the city which followed. She also considers herself an avid walker; she walks all over the cities, and is fascinated with the movement, the people, the energy of New York City, so she draws and paints about this affect on her.
Susana doesn't have a website but some of her work from a show is displayed on the Olga Korper Gallery website here: http://olgakorpergallery.com/artists.html
Thursday, March 10, 2011
Junior Photo Show Review - SUNY Purchase
After reading a Brooklyn Rail interview, whilst the heat is off in the VA, I decided to descend the 2 flights of stairs into the basement, and review the Junior Photo Show. For those unaware, I'm a painter without much knowledge of the technical aspects of photography; I feel I can critique painting quite thoroughly, after hundreds of critique hours in college, but photography interests me in its own place in the visual arts as well as aesthetically. Many students were in this show, so I chose to thoroughly critique on aspects that I feel most pertinent to what I typically deal with in painting and the visual arts in general.
A few trends were noted throughout the show while writing about each artist individually, the most dominant being the photographing of the American family in the home - the drab, emotionless suburban interior. Artists that I deemed to be partaking in this sort of theme included Trisha Keeler, Rebecca Iasillo, Ashley Gallo, Ellisa Keller, Brittany Colson, and Molly Doherty-Vinicor (though in hers, figures were mainly absent - it seemed that the remnants of the family on their "home" were the focus of the pieces.) Katie Corcoran's pieces seemed to be portraying the family or at least an interaction of friends in their spaces as well, though used outdoor as well as indoor environments to place them in.
The body as landscape was another subject I noted in a few pieces. The pieces of Kellyann Petry evoked this thought, as her close-ups of the figure expressed the liveliness of skin in its most "real" way. The three vertical pieces done by Kate McCormick felt as though they were dealing with this as well - though her figures seemed to be expressing the life that exists inside a body, with a level of uncomfortability present in them.
The presentation of a number of pieces in the show really appealed to me as well. I believe photography has many options as far as presentation goes - maybe more so than painting (or at least more than have already been explored). Peter Zervas had presented two archival pigment prints on foamcore. This allowed the photographs to lean more towards being objects to me rather than "pictures." I saw these also as film stills, snapshots of a moving film which were then printed as photographs. If this is a correct evaluation of the process (or if not), it made me curious as to what photography is when it is OF a video; I compared the two visual mediums, the portrayal of time they each exhibit.
Colleen Logan presented a small piece of glass with 25 tiny "thumbnail" photographs behind it, placed neatly in a grid. The images seemed to catalog a sick woman's hospital stay. The grid and similarity in size of photographs evoked the passage of time and changing states of mind that occurred in the hospital room at that time.
Rita Baunok presented small photographs matted very precisely behind glass. One was of a strange, obscured urban or wasteland scene, and the other a close-up of a dictionary page with the definition of seclusion. The juxtaposition of these two very different subjects together creates an unusual but curious investigation of place and definition of place. Another artist who used glass to her aesthetic advantage was Katelyn Menard - glass as frame, together as object.
Catherin Gaston used a Fuji Film Instant camera - something I have seen a few times recently in my social life - seemingly to document the life of an adolescent. The use of this instant film conjures up thoughts of time-specific events and casual documentation.
Caroline Schub and Michael "Shibby" Lambert exhibited pieces which affected me strictly in terms of their content and aesthetic in the content. Schub's portrayed scenes which had unusual placement of objects - likely constructed by the artist (at least from what I gathered) - which obscured our view and made us unable to fully see what seemed to be the subject of the piece. The center photograph of a stuffed coyote or some sort of dog which had a telescope blocking its face seemed the most quirky, beautiful, and lonely to me. Lambert's pieces displayed 3 scenes which were reminiscent of construction/destruction, but hardly exhibited any real indications of this. About 15% of each piece was the focus of the photograph - light flooding onto mulch, dirt or rocks from within the "crevice" of the hill created by the earth. To me, this read as the destruction of land by the construction of something commercial (maybe a road, building) but did so in such an elegant and beautiful way that the aesthetic still remained most significant. Joseph Maguire also seemed to be talking about the man-made in the landscape, the human affect on existing earth.
Process in art is always a consideration of mine when making or critiquing. The layering that Dave Medina uses in his pieces is one of interest to me - the juxtaposition of a person and a place makes for a direct interaction between them and their environment.
Other artists with pieces in the show included James DiMauro, who seemed to present place as abstraction, Steven Paradise, Serena Shkreli, Alexander Krauss, Hannah Tashkovich, Britney Chiacchiaro, Skylar Blum, Hannah Browning, Christina "Tin Tin" Muller, Blathana Zimmerman, and Jes Walsh.
A few trends were noted throughout the show while writing about each artist individually, the most dominant being the photographing of the American family in the home - the drab, emotionless suburban interior. Artists that I deemed to be partaking in this sort of theme included Trisha Keeler, Rebecca Iasillo, Ashley Gallo, Ellisa Keller, Brittany Colson, and Molly Doherty-Vinicor (though in hers, figures were mainly absent - it seemed that the remnants of the family on their "home" were the focus of the pieces.) Katie Corcoran's pieces seemed to be portraying the family or at least an interaction of friends in their spaces as well, though used outdoor as well as indoor environments to place them in.
The body as landscape was another subject I noted in a few pieces. The pieces of Kellyann Petry evoked this thought, as her close-ups of the figure expressed the liveliness of skin in its most "real" way. The three vertical pieces done by Kate McCormick felt as though they were dealing with this as well - though her figures seemed to be expressing the life that exists inside a body, with a level of uncomfortability present in them.
The presentation of a number of pieces in the show really appealed to me as well. I believe photography has many options as far as presentation goes - maybe more so than painting (or at least more than have already been explored). Peter Zervas had presented two archival pigment prints on foamcore. This allowed the photographs to lean more towards being objects to me rather than "pictures." I saw these also as film stills, snapshots of a moving film which were then printed as photographs. If this is a correct evaluation of the process (or if not), it made me curious as to what photography is when it is OF a video; I compared the two visual mediums, the portrayal of time they each exhibit.
Colleen Logan presented a small piece of glass with 25 tiny "thumbnail" photographs behind it, placed neatly in a grid. The images seemed to catalog a sick woman's hospital stay. The grid and similarity in size of photographs evoked the passage of time and changing states of mind that occurred in the hospital room at that time.
Rita Baunok presented small photographs matted very precisely behind glass. One was of a strange, obscured urban or wasteland scene, and the other a close-up of a dictionary page with the definition of seclusion. The juxtaposition of these two very different subjects together creates an unusual but curious investigation of place and definition of place. Another artist who used glass to her aesthetic advantage was Katelyn Menard - glass as frame, together as object.
Catherin Gaston used a Fuji Film Instant camera - something I have seen a few times recently in my social life - seemingly to document the life of an adolescent. The use of this instant film conjures up thoughts of time-specific events and casual documentation.
Caroline Schub and Michael "Shibby" Lambert exhibited pieces which affected me strictly in terms of their content and aesthetic in the content. Schub's portrayed scenes which had unusual placement of objects - likely constructed by the artist (at least from what I gathered) - which obscured our view and made us unable to fully see what seemed to be the subject of the piece. The center photograph of a stuffed coyote or some sort of dog which had a telescope blocking its face seemed the most quirky, beautiful, and lonely to me. Lambert's pieces displayed 3 scenes which were reminiscent of construction/destruction, but hardly exhibited any real indications of this. About 15% of each piece was the focus of the photograph - light flooding onto mulch, dirt or rocks from within the "crevice" of the hill created by the earth. To me, this read as the destruction of land by the construction of something commercial (maybe a road, building) but did so in such an elegant and beautiful way that the aesthetic still remained most significant. Joseph Maguire also seemed to be talking about the man-made in the landscape, the human affect on existing earth.
Process in art is always a consideration of mine when making or critiquing. The layering that Dave Medina uses in his pieces is one of interest to me - the juxtaposition of a person and a place makes for a direct interaction between them and their environment.
Other artists with pieces in the show included James DiMauro, who seemed to present place as abstraction, Steven Paradise, Serena Shkreli, Alexander Krauss, Hannah Tashkovich, Britney Chiacchiaro, Skylar Blum, Hannah Browning, Christina "Tin Tin" Muller, Blathana Zimmerman, and Jes Walsh.
Tuesday, March 1, 2011
"Side Effects" by Adam Phillips
This article, "On Not Making it Up: The Varieties of Creative Experience" from Side Effects may not have been entirely as earth-shattering as some other pieces of literature, particularly philosophical or psychological, I have filtered in the past, but quite so raised many interests and concerns in my mind as not only a painter but a being. Phillips compares the theory analyses, creative experience varieties, and notions of the self all believed by the minds of such intellectuals as Sartre, William James, and of course Freud.
Conclusively, the philosophers/psychologists analyzed in this text all seem to break creative (or maybe non-creative) individuals down into two groups - those involved with self-promotion and those involved with self-surrender. Self-promoters make creative work based on their own self - their knowledge of their own self (be this the most true assessment of oneself or the "making-up" of one's history is also in question) - they are the Prometheans, the modellers, the auto-biographers, the ones who believe their own life is worth telling. They strive to "create" something that (they believe) is not already in existence. That is their "creative experience." And then there are the midwives, the carvers: those who strive to discover what already exists; they experience the world as a stone block with which to carve into, to extract and simply represent their "creative experience." They are separated from their own stories, they are not afraid of the horrors of the past, they are objective in their art-making (to what degree, I am skeptical) and "midwife" an object from its (mundane?) position in the world into a "creative" endeavor, project, art-piece, whathaveyou.
Freud believes that to be creative one must balance the lives of these two selves. In my view, to be only Promethean is to be self-centered and blind, to be only a carver is to be without subjectivity, without oneself in an artwork. I believe, in conjunction with this reading, that many minimalist artists may be the second, the midwife - take Donald Judd for example (in his art-making alone, I do not know about his personal life.)
Is one more credible than the other? Does the balance that Freud suggests result in the optimal state of creativity to exhibit as an artist, as a self-aware individual?
Conclusively, the philosophers/psychologists analyzed in this text all seem to break creative (or maybe non-creative) individuals down into two groups - those involved with self-promotion and those involved with self-surrender. Self-promoters make creative work based on their own self - their knowledge of their own self (be this the most true assessment of oneself or the "making-up" of one's history is also in question) - they are the Prometheans, the modellers, the auto-biographers, the ones who believe their own life is worth telling. They strive to "create" something that (they believe) is not already in existence. That is their "creative experience." And then there are the midwives, the carvers: those who strive to discover what already exists; they experience the world as a stone block with which to carve into, to extract and simply represent their "creative experience." They are separated from their own stories, they are not afraid of the horrors of the past, they are objective in their art-making (to what degree, I am skeptical) and "midwife" an object from its (mundane?) position in the world into a "creative" endeavor, project, art-piece, whathaveyou.
Freud believes that to be creative one must balance the lives of these two selves. In my view, to be only Promethean is to be self-centered and blind, to be only a carver is to be without subjectivity, without oneself in an artwork. I believe, in conjunction with this reading, that many minimalist artists may be the second, the midwife - take Donald Judd for example (in his art-making alone, I do not know about his personal life.)
Is one more credible than the other? Does the balance that Freud suggests result in the optimal state of creativity to exhibit as an artist, as a self-aware individual?
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