I wanted to know

Mary Adam, Little House in the Forest, 2007, collage

A lot of art is at first puzzling and bewildering and like many others I feel stupid and ignorant until I have some sort of handle on it. Science too is full of bewildering things but I'm happy to leave those to the experts, maybe read up on it or maybe not. I know someday there will be an explanation. Art though is different. Unlike science there are no right or wrong answers, it's subjective. But everything has a reason and a genesis and sometimes I want to know what the reason is.

As an artist myself I'm aware how motivation can come from odd places, from deep inside oneself or from some passing fancy, something seen or felt. And this may intertwine with all one’s experiences and skills and an idea may be born, like the tug of the fish in A Room of One’s Own. From there it may gather momentum and take physical form, although there can be long gaps between the idea and the realization of the work. This is a stage in my own learning process, understanding that the idea and the final work may be widely separated in time, during which something has been evolving in the mind of the artist. A small example might be Jackson Pollock’s drip paintings with the canvas laid on the floor, connecting back to his experience of Indian sand paintings in which coloured earths were dribbled onto the ground.

It can be very satisfying to find those connections in art, and my experience has been that usually something can be found that sheds light on the work. I ask myself, why did the artist do that in that way? The question can take one on a walkabout, looking up the artist’s biography, statements they have made, their materials, more of their work, reviews and so on. I tend to do it when I like the work a lot and want very much to understand where it came from.

If after thorough searching no reason is found one might conclude that it was in some way arbitrary. And yet on occasion something has appeared in my work for no apparent reason, and long afterward the reason makes itself known (influences for example). The main problem was not being aware of it in time to include it in a write-up. Because of this I don't see arbitrariness as an issue any more because there's always a reason.

BEFORE reading the Abstract chapter

A page from the book

I'm  reading a book called Frameworks for Modern Art, edited by Jason Gaiger, published by Yale University Press and the Open University. It's an academic text and it's not easy reading, but I hope to learn from it. I'm about to start Chapter 3 which is called "Abstract art: reading Barnett Newman's Eve." I've never studied Barnett Newman's work before so this could be a good introduction. Eve is a huge flat red painting with a narrow strip of darker red down one side. I confess I'm on the sceptical side, not about abstract art in general, which needs no defense, but rather about Newman's paintings, which seem to me rather featureless. Will reading the chapter change my mind? I should have some idea in about a week, watch this space.

Related post: AFTER reading the Abstract chapter

Art in Theory 2

A couple more snippets from Art in Theory.

August Endell (1871-1925) gets the nod because he turned out to be right:

"For they can clearly see, that we are not only at the beginning of a new stylistic phase, but at the same time on the threshold of the development of a completely new Art. An Art with forms which signify nothing, represent nothing, and remind us of nothing, which arouse our souls as deeply and strongly as music has always been able to do." (published in 1898)

-- page 59

August Macke (1887-1914), idealism showing through:

"The joys, the sorrows of man, of nations, lie behind the inscriptions, paintings, temples, cathedrals, and masks, behind the musical compositions, stage spectacles, and dances. If they are not there. if form becomes empty and groundless, then there is no art." (published in 1912)

-- page 95

Art in Theory 1

Just got this from Amazon a couple of days ago and I'm pleasantly surprised. I read a book by Harrison and Wood from the library some years ago and my personal verdict was "No." So it took a long time to get around to buying this, and the scale was finally tipped by a recommendation from an OCA friend. I looked at it in dismay, paged through the Contents (18 pages) and wondered how to tackle it. Dip in here and there? Or begin at the beginning? I could never read it all, but eventually I decided to begin at the beginning with a flexible approach, skipping without guilt anything that's too boring or tedious or incomprehensible.

The book, 1248 pages, consists of extracts of texts on art theory. It's similar to and complements Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art (1945 to the mid 1990s) but it covers a broader time frame (1900 to 2000). I'm pleasantly surprised because there are so many painters here and lots of interesting stuff that I haven't seen before. There are many theorists and philosophers as well of course, especially later in the century. As I plod through it, I'll post the odd quote here and there.

This one comes from an essay by Maurice Denis published in 1909:

"We affirm that the emotions or states of the soul provoked by some spectacle, create in the artistic imagination signs or plastic equivalents capable of reproducing these emotions or states of the soul without the need to create a copy of the initial spectacle; that each state of our sensibility must correspond to an objective harmony capable of being thus translated."

-- page 48.

Essays by art critics and art historians

Art of the Twentieth Century: A Reader, edited by Jason Gaiger and Paul Wood.

From the blurb on the back cover:

"Art of the Twentieth Century: A Reader is a collection of writings by critics and art historians on the major themes and debates that have animated the practice and interpretation of art over the last hundred years. [. . . ] Key themes and topics include: canonical modernism and the questioning of the principles of modernism; the role of the avant-garde; photography in art; the pivotal moment of the late 1960s; the shift from modernism to postmodernism; gender and the performance of identity; and the globalisation of art. Art of the Twentieth Century: A Reader is a free-standing volume that will be of interest to the general reader and student alike. It is also a companion volume to the Open University art-history course of the same name. Jason Gaiger and Paul Wood are both lecturers in art history at the Open University."

I've only read a couple of the essays so far, so this is a first impression rather than a review, but it seems like a worthwhile purchase. A point in its favour is that the essays are directly about visual art topics, and the topics covered would not generally be found in art history textbooks, or at least not in as much depth. This makes the book more relevant to the visual artist than "cultural studies" texts which tend to be more about philosophy, aesthetics and political theory.

Even so, I have a level of caution about writings by critics and art historians, who are often not themselves artists and who may or may not have a sufficient grasp of the practical issues that affect the making of art. But I'll be keeping an open mind and am looking forward to reading Clive Bell and Roger Fry, who I've been hearing about for years; also John Szarkowski's extract from his renowned book, The Photographer's Eye, and Jeff Wall's essay, Marks of Indifference. Some of the essays I've read before (e.g. Greenberg's The Pasted Paper Revolution, and Meyer Schapiro's The Nature of Abstract Art). Others such as Craig Owens are new to me, surprises in store, I hope. Only time will tell.

I couldn't wait, however, to read Paul Smith's long essay, called "How a Cubist Painting Holds Together", commissioned specially for this book and written in 2002. Would my own analysis of cubism survive this carefully researched academic paper? I read it with trepidation, more than twenty-five pages consisting partly of detailed analysis of specific cubist paintings and partly of explanations of the science of how we see. On reaching the end I hadn't come across anything, fact or opinion, that flat-out contradicted my findings, which was a major relief. In fact, when Smith notes in the last paragraph the cubist painting's "refusal to solidify into a static image, even though it is otherwise coherent", that "coherence" is consistent with my view.

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