No one's been pestering me to update...or commenting. So here is a severely delayed week 3 journal:
12 March
Tutorial with Laurence (tutorial sheet in sketchbook)
Check out the GX Gallery 2-28 March
- land and seascapes by Michael Sole. I went to the gallery in the afternoon and was impressed by the size, given the location. From the front, it is a frame shop (note to self), but the gallery goes on for quite a while downstairs, as well as having many smaller paintings crammed onto the walls of the staircase. Sole's paintings were very atmospheric and textural, which did tie in quite well with my photos. The compositions are all very similar between the seascapes, though, which made them seem a bit too redundant with so many hung together. The presentations and colors varied, making them unique, but it appeared a bit too mechanic for my taste.
Presence/absence theory
- cut away negative space in
photos
- mount over sheet music
- add to the photos (drawings, paint, or 3D elements
Hal Foster - Compulsive Beauty de Chirico
David Bachelor – space/color
Presentation – Hannah Sawtell
(manual v. digital, pairs of stock images run through digital programmes with
stock audio – put into a video retouched form, prints presented architecturally,
pairs mounted horizontally, presented as sculpture, presence/absence through
photos mounted away from wall) Aleksandra Domanovic
13 March
I attended the Liechtenstein
exhibition at the Tate, as well as the Rauschenberg textile pieces at the
Gagosian. I enjoyed the simple yet
involved process (and sheer size) of the Liechtenstein. The bold colors, carefully selected and
not overwhelming, allow composition and form to reign. In fact, one piece was a painting of a
massive composition book. I'd never actually even heard of him before....
There were no real paired items, but
one particular tryptic transformed an obvious stylized portrait of a woman into
a Picasso-esque series of lines and geometric shapes.
It could be argued that
Rauschenberg’s 3D textile pieces are focused on line and shape like my photos,
but I did not particularly enjoy the exhibition.
There are more notes on my views in my sketchbook. Not that you can see that here....
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15 March
Duchamp The Bride and the Bachelors at the Barbican
- - compared female anatomy to organic machine-inspired components
- - bride: transformation/desire à icon to John Cage and others
- “ghost” à presence/absence; Parreno’s reflection of artists’ impact
o
ghost of Cage present (and
absent) through 2 Disklaviers playing selected compositions with no player at
the instrument
- Rauschenberg’s “Bride’s Folly” made of found objects painted over,
reminiscent of Schwitters through blocks of color and mixed textures and text
- Duchamp Large Glass
o
Figures resemble instruments
(drum kit, cymbals)
o
Shadows and revlections on
floor imply new shapes/figures, allow viewer to walk through/into work
o
Influenced Johns’s Walkaround Time set pieces
- Performances of music by Cage, Duchamp, Parreno, Behrman
- Duchamp’s Musical Erratum
o
New musical alphabet à
numbers instead of traditional music notation
o
Numbered balls represent
pitches, and are moved through a funnel
- Cage’s Chess Pieces: Piano
score arranged into 8x8 grid, not transcribed until 2002
- Jasper Johns’ Field Painting:
text “Red/Yellow/Blue”, mixed media, found objects
- Shadows of readymade objects throughout exhibition
- Rauschenberg’s Travelogue (collaboration)
o
Set design using fabrics
found in Gagosian exhibition, like stage curtains
o
Cunningham’s choreography was
not announced or described
o
Performers didn’t hear Cage’s
soundtrack until the first performance
§
Australian birdcalls, horse
race results, telephone recordings
- Duchamp The Green Box: 93
sketches and pages of notes for Large
Glass
- Presence/Absence room
o
Duchamp’s life-sized print of
a door, simultaneously opened/closed
o
Cage’s 4’33” score
o
Rauschenberg’s white
paintings
o
Johns’ No: metal word NO suspended above canvas by wire, painted same
color. Blends in, but shadow of NO
stands out boldly
- Rauschenberg traveled around Italy/Africa with Cy Twombly, returned to
make musical (noise-making) sculptures, intended to be shaken, thus completed
by the audience. Chance
sculptures, as each performance is unique
- Chance art and music
o
Duchamp’s Erratum Musical, most of Cage’s works;
dropped string paintings and ensuing works
17 March
de Chiroco’s “Presence/Absence
o
‘This painting brings together
incongruous and unrelated objects: the head of a Classical Greek statue, an
oversized rubber glove, a green ball, and a train shrouded in darkness,
silhouetted against a bright blue sky. By subverting the logical presence of
objects, de Chirico created what he termed "metaphysical" paintings,
representations of what lies "beyond the physical" world. Cloaked in
an atmosphere of anxiety and melancholy, de Chirico's humanoid forms, vacuous
architecture, shadowy passages, and eerily elongated streets evoke the profound
absurdity of a universe torn apart by World War I.’
§
Juxtaposition creates hazy
atmosphere, causing object to lose solidity and standard purpose or
context. They obviously exist, but
are not presented in their normal surroundings, thus eliminating an immediate
connection.
o
“The Museum of Modern Art, MoMA Highlights, New York:
The Museum of Modern Art, revised 2004, originally published 1999
§
"M.
Giorgio de Chirico has just bought a red rubber glove"—so wrote the French
poet Guillaume Apollinaire in July of 1914, noting the purchase because, he
went on to say, he knew the glove's appearance in de Chirico's paintings would
add to their uncanny power. Implying human presence, as a mold of the hand, yet
also inhuman, a clammily limp fragment distinctly unfleshlike in color, the
glove in The Song of Love has an unsettling authority. Why, too,
is this surgical garment pinned to a board or canvas, alongside a plaster head
copied from a classical statue, relic of a noble vanished age? What is the
meaning of the green ball? And what is the whole ensemble doing in the outdoor
setting insinuated by the building and the passing train?’
§
‘Unlikely
meetings among dissimilar objects were to become a strong theme in modern art
(they soon became an explicit goal of the Surrealists), but de Chirico sought
more than surprise: in works like this one, for which Apollinaire used the term
"metaphysical," he wanted to evoke an enduring level of reality
hidden beyond outward appearances. Perhaps this is why he gives us a geometric
form (the spherical ball), a schematic building rather than a specific one, and
inert and partial images of the human body rather than a living, mortal being.’
o ‘the departure from traditional conventions of modeling, color, spatial
construction, not to mention iconography, is most emphatic. It is impossible to imagine that
Apollinaire was blind to the absence of such devices in de Chirico’s work – the
way in which de Chirico’s construction of an irregular, awkward, but still
inhabitable space…’ (p. 6)
o ‘dead voices of the past juxtaposed with the joys and marvels of the
present’ (p. 7) – Apollinaire’s visual poems, autobiographical representations
of something he wants to, but can’t, eliminate from himself, but would regret
eliminating (p. 6)
o ‘“Crépuscule,” modernity is, at the very moment it is affirmed in all
its distinction from the past, ‘frlée par les ombres des morts,’ grazed by the
shadows of the dead…it is neither present nor absent’ (p. 7)
o ‘uncanny hold [of the past] over the present, a relation that exhibits
not an enthusiasm for all that is new and vital, but rather a melancholy for
all that is old and dead – all that is lost to history, inaccessible to the
present, but which nevertheless refuses to leave.’ (p. 7)
o surprise/unease of seeing someone you feel you’ve seen before, but can’t
remember, or being reminded of somewhere else when in a new place for the first
time (p. 7)
o spatial ‘gap between viewer and viewed,’ (p. 9) such as Böcklin’s Prometheus (p. 8)
§ v. di Chirico’s Promethus, which
only partly represents the sea.
Empty buildings signify life, but it’s not visible (absence) (p.8).
§ depicting classical scenes ‘as if they belonged to the same space we do’
(p. 9)
§ gap represents past v. present or history (factual) v. myth (p. 9)
‘…the distant horizon appears only to the left, large
and dark building to hold the statue near to the viewer.’ (p. 14) The full view
is absent, but implied
Camberwell CoA Library: Compulsive
Beauty Hal Foster 709.4091 FOS
Provides
a “deconstructive reading of surrealism “
(according to amazon.com)
Hiroko Imada: Dance/nature through printmaking/lithography
now-7 April RiversideStudios.co.uk
Went to GX Gallery.
More impressed by the space (former foundry, perhaps? 3 small furnaces in the basement) than
the art in it. Most paintings were
by 28-year-old marine artist, Michael Sole. I did enjoy seeing his textural accomplishments with few
colours, but his landscapes, and the majority of the works by other artists,
were not all that thrilling.
Notes taken on Derrida (see Notes.docx)
