Posts Tagged ‘modern art’
“All familiar things can open into strange worlds”*…
A thoughtful consideration of a modern master…
In the summer of 1953, after a stint in the army, Jasper Johns, aged 23, moved back to New York City. There, a few months later, he met Robert Rauschenberg. Their artistic and romantic partnership would last until 1961; the company they kept included John Cage and Merce Cunningham. In this heady atmosphere, Johns chose, in autumn 1954, to destroy all his prior work, and to begin the paintings that made his name when they were shown four years later: flags, targets and numbers crafted in encaustic (pigment mixed in hot wax) with collage (often mere newspaper) on canvas…
Johns made an exceptional entrance in early 1958: his first show at the new Leo Castelli Gallery nearly sold out, with three paintings immediately purchased by MoMA, and one piece appearing on the cover of ARTnews. Then 27, he had sized up the New York art world precisely, dominated as it then was by the formalist model of ‘modernist painting’ used by Clement Greenberg to champion Abstract Expressionism, and deftly deflected its discourse towards what Leo Steinberg would term ‘other criteria’.
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In a studied phrase Johns spoke of his position as one of ‘shunning statement’. This suggests an aversion to polemics, political as well as artistic, that goes beyond temperament, a fatigue with the heated ideologies of the period (the Korean conflict, the McCarthy hearings, the Cold War). And Johns did muffle his subjects along with his gestures; his large White Flag (1955) is literally whited out. Might this intimate a ‘painting degree zero’ in line with the ‘writing degree zero’ posed by Roland Barthes against Sartrean commitment at around this time? ‘I can’t imagine my work being used to accomplish anything socially,’ Johns said. This is less negation than neutrality à la Barthes, for whom ‘the neutral’ was a way to baffle conceptual binaries, to undo ideological oppositions, to mess with ‘the paradigm’…
On the occasion of the Whitney’s (@whitneymuseum) show (through February 13) “Jasper Johns: Mind/Mirror,” Hal Foster‘s “Which red is the real red?,” from @LRB.
* Jasper Johns
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As we look closely, we might spare a thought for Francis Picabia (Francis-Marie Martinez de Picabia); he died on this date in 1953. A French avant-garde painter, poet and typographist, Picabia experimented with Impressionism and Pointillism before becoming a Cubist. He then became one of the early major figures of the Dada movement in the United States and in France, and was later briefly associated with Surrealism.
See his work at the record of a major retrospective hung at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 2017 on their web site.
“Send me a postcard”*…
Ellsworth Kelly was a major figure in American modern art. A painter, sculptor, and printmaker associated with hard-edge painting and Color Field painting, he was a leading Minimalist. But as Hyperallergic reminds us, he also worked in– on, with– postcards…
From the late 1940s to 2005, Ellsworth Kelly produced some 400 photo-based works using ordinary, mass-market postcards as the substrate. Handfuls of these gems of the art of collage are tucked into various Kelly monographs and other books; Ellsworth Kelly: Postcards, at the Tang Museum through November 28, assembles 150 of them, and the accompanying catalogue includes dozens more. The spirit of playful improvisation is up front in these works, their range of figural and genre references experimental in spirit, their facture seemingly unlabored (sometimes downright scrappy). Delightful in themselves, they compel reconsideration of the late, great artist’s more austere, visually refined abstractions with an awareness of both his sense of humor and his sense of place…
An appreciation– and more wonderful examples– at “The Unexpected Humor of Ellsworth Kelly,” from Stephen Maine in @hyperallergic.
* Shocking Blue, “Send Me A Postcard“
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As we contemplate collage, we might send expressive birthday greetings to Benny Andrews; he was born on this date in 1930. An activist and educator, he is primarily remembered as an artist, especially for his expressive, figurative paintings that often incorporated collaged fabric and other material. A minimalist (like Kelly), Andrews was interested not in how much he could paint, but how little.
See more of his work here.
“Chelsea, please let your art speak for itself”*…
The Artspeak Incinerator Project is an interactive video installation created by artist Bill Claps. This video documents the Artspeak Incinerator in action at the MOMA, Guggenheim, Whitney, New Museum, ARTFORUM, Gagosian Gallery, and other locations.
During Armory Arts Week Claps utilized crowdsourcing and a technology interface connected to Twitter to source examples of artspeak from various art fairs, publications, and institutions throughout New York City. The artspeak was translated into Morse code (representing the art world’s distinct coded language) and digitally incinerated while being projecting onto the facades of art institutions throughout the city, releasing it into the atmosphere in a purified state…
email readers click here for video
See more– and more of Claps’ other wonderful work– at his site.
* “Ms. Patuto,” season 3 of Disney Channel’s That’s So Raven
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As we connect with our inner connoisseur, we might send bold birthday greetings to Willem de Kooning; he was born on this date in 1904. After Jackson Pollock, de Kooning was the most prominent and celebrated of the Abstract Expressionist painters, and with his wife, Elaine, Pollock, Rothko, and Kline, was at the core of what has become known as the New York School.
de Kooning has been the subject of reams of artspeak.
de Kooning’s Woman III, 1951-53
de Kooning in his studio, 1961
The benefits of rarefied air…
From inner-city food deserts to car-centric suburbs, aspects of the physical environment are frequently cited as a contributing factor to the rise of obesity in the developed world. However, new research, published earlier this year in the International Journal of Obesity and summarised online at the Public Library of Science (PLOS) blog, Obesity Panacea, found a surprising correlation between elevation and obesity in the United States.
As the paper’s lead author, Dr. Jameson Voss of the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences, points out, mapping obesity prevalence in America reveals distinct, and hitherto unexplained, geographic variations:
Obesity appears most prevalent in the Southeast and Midwest states and less prevalent in the Mountain West. Despite significant research into the environmental determinants of obesity, including the built environment, the explanation for these macrogeographic differences is unclear.
Intriguingly, those areas in which less than a quarter of the population is obese map almost exactly onto the more mountainous regions of the country—the Appalachians, the Rockies, and the Sierra Nevada. And, indeed, after controlling for diet, activity level, smoking, demographics, temperature, and urbanisation, Voss and his colleagues found “a four- to five-fold increase in obesity prevalence at low altitude as compared with the highest altitude category”…
Read the full (and filling) story at Edible Geography.
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As we head for higher ground, we might send playful birthday greetings to Joan Miró i Ferrà; he was born on this date in 1893. A painter, sculptor, and ceramicist, who worked over time as a Fauve, Magic Realist, Surrealist, and Expressionist (and pioneered Color Field painting), Miró had a huge influence on artists in the later Twentieth Century (Frankenthaler, Rothko, Motherwell, and Calder among many others), and on design pioneers like Paul Rand.
“Women and Birds at Sunrise” 1946
Carl Van Vechten’s portrait of Miró
I see you…
Transparency Grenade by Julian Oliver captures network traffic and audio at the site then securely and anonymously streams it to a dedicated server where information is mined.
Via NotCom.
As we “get over it,”* we might recall that it was on this date in 1913 that the Association of American Painters and Sculptors (AAPS) opened The Armory Show– the first exhibition of avant-garde art in the U.S. Among the 1200 works on display there were Cézanne, Van Gogh, and Gauguin. But the work that captured the public’s imagination—and, in some cases, inspired their anger—was more current: the contemporary avant-garde, especially Cubism. Indeed, the paining that became synonymous with the succès de scandale of the Armory Show was Marcel DuChamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 (1912).
In a “review” of the show in Outlook magazine, Theodore Roosevelt, then President of the United States, attempted to be evenhanded: “The exhibitors are quite right as to the need of showing to our people in this manner the art forces which of late have been at work in Europe, forces which cannot be ignored.” But then he went on, “This does not mean that I in the least accept the view that these men take of the European extremists whose pictures are here exhibited.”
DuChamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 (source)
* from Wired, January 26, 1996:
The chief executive officer of Sun Microsystems said Monday that consumer privacy issues are a “red herring.”
“You have zero privacy anyway,” Scott McNealy told a group of reporters and analysts Monday night at an event to launch his company’s new Jini technology. “Get over it.”
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