The conundrum in art now is that the most bizarre is the most acceptable. The crowd and the Art Industry likes nothing better from their high art than to be shocked and horrified. They are titillated by the rudeness of it, the incomprehensibility. Of course they pretend to be in on it all and barely raise an eyebrow. Ever since their mean jokes on the Impressionists backfired, they are quite happy to be the butt of every joke from every upstart artist who pays the necessary $100,000 requested at the best art schools. The public have learnt their lesson.

But we artists have not. We have become fat and lazy. Ok, thin and lazy. Without any map but our own intuitions, we’ve lost our way. As Dave Chappelle says of his brethren after the acquittal of OJ Simpson, the blacks of America, we’ve celebrated with too much gusto! Now it is embarrassing for an artist to talk of meaning or of restraint. It is taboo to talk of religion, man’s desperate search for meaning, or love, or beauty. It is not so everywhere, but it feels like it is so anywhere that matters.

Because the thing with an in-joke is, that people who aren’t in on it, or have the ambition to create a definition of ‘in’ with them at the very centre will be out to destroy you. And that effort isn’t hard with the kind of art that has become prevalent, because they are a minor anomalous offshoot from the central purpose of art. Or let’s just call it thinking. The purpose of thinking is life and everything in it. It’s about asking the right questions, and crawling painfully and joyously towards answers. Answers which, of course, aren’t there as solids, but only as smoke.

Now I don’t want to give you the impression that I’m speaking out of ignorance. I know what has lead the best artist of the last 100 years such as Duchamp, and Beuys in this direction. I understand that Damian Hirst For the Love of God diamond encrusted skull is saying something funny and important (kind of) about the art world, and the consumer world, which is the world right now. The freedom that art gained when unleashed from the iron collar of Academicism and from the rise of photography had to be explored. But the other day I read that an artist in the 60s (and still working today) made navigational art, or walking art. That is he would walk out in the bush, and make patterns with his walking. I think that’s really cool but I think the notion of art has been expanded enough. It is no longer an important problem to solve. Now what is required is to make art helpful again, concerned with what concerns us as a species.

Art needs to start explaining life to ourselves again. I don’t mean political or ‘-ism’ art! That simplistic shit needs to be burned on sight. I don’t mean to say we should look down on something like performance art. I think performance art is a powerful and appropriate method to make art in the times we live in now. But I want performance art with a purpose. I, for example, love VALIE EXPORT’s walk around a city with a man dressed in suit and dog-collar crawling on his hands and knees. I love that. And that couldn’t have been made a hundred and forty years ago. I also don’t mean we need to dumb down or be simplistic about our art and how it is presented. It is our right to make demands of our public. But make sure that you understand your own art. That’s a higher bar than you think.

Now, I’m not saying we need to be conservative in our methods, only in our meanings. And I’m using the word conservative very carefully. If an artists wants to explore the deep meanings about sin, lust, powerlessness, pleasure, chaos, horror, history behind child rape in their art, then go ahead. My definition of conservatism would encompass that. What it won’t encompass is navel-gazing about what art means, and empty attempts to shock the public (unless it is very new, and significantly thoughtful, which will be a hard task as many, many great minds before you have attempted the same thing).

So here’s to meaningful, humanist, quiet art.

I’m in debt to the great E.H. Gombrich’s book The Story of Art for clarifying how I feel about this issue.

• essay
• art
• new path

Posted 2 years ago

Painting by Van Dyck

I don’t actually remember the name of the museum where I saw this amazing, life changing shit. All German words are the same to me. But it was huge and disappointingly I had to run to Mitte and I couldn’t really take my time with these amazing paintings. The Flemish masters especially will have a huge impact on any set up shots that I do but the older religious works were also affective.

• Ghirlandio had backgrounds of his portraits as sharp as the foreground but by controlling the relative sizes of the fore and background still made the head standout. Great portraits. I have to think about how I can do something similar. I think using photoshop to superimpose the face onto an empty shot of the background may be a very interesting idea.
• The paintings from the middle ages have great technique but what Gombrich says about the Egyptians and their lack of innovation over millennia applies here too. There is very little room of individual differences between the artists. But this was when art was for useful things beyond just aesthetics. When paintings were key ways to tell stories. So often the story triumphs over the aesthetics. Rightly so. Like typefaces are right now.
• Found the plethora of mid-shot portraits actually quite inspiring. It’s nice to have the hands in there and not just the faces. Most of the pictures do not question their subjects at all though and are just a form of hagiography. In modernity one can question the sitter much more, make them look silly, find a deeper self for them through the painting or the photo. Obvious.
• Some of the portraits look like they’ve been painted over another painting. The subject in the back seems to be of a different era (but what would I know), or the perspectives seem dramatically different. Strange.
• Realised that painters never blurred their background for portraits. The idea just didn’t exist. That’s an interesting problem. I guess as they developed they did use black backgrounds (one I saw used green and it looked good) to isolate the subject. But actually having a detailed background to the portraits would be something new and different in this day and age. But it is hard to get I think, I think the super imposition idea may work well. Or getting the D700 and using super high ISOs to get both person and background in focus. But there would be a lot of loss of dynamic range. Boo hoo.
• In very early Italian religious art no one looks at you directly in the portraits. Reminds me of the amazing, amazing Benjamin Rinner portraits that are all over Berlin at the moment. They are close in, black background portraits of people from the Berlin Philharmonic looking so naive that it is shocking. They are amazingly honest portraits and I want to do work similar to that if I can out in the outback with some reflectors instead of lights. Don’t know how to get the back background. Avedon has already done white.
• Klimt’s gold leafing isn’t new. Lots of dark ages paintings used it for the backgrounds to portray holiness. Klimt divorced it from that pretty strongly I guess to use it for more decorative reasons. Had an idea to gold leaf out parts of a photo (maybe the the house in a picture of a house just leaving the background).
• Another thing that made me think of Klimt was the way the dark age painters would mass people together to represent like a chorus. Reifying these people makes them represent a concept. I think Klimt was doing the same thing in his paintings, where life is a collection of people hugging each other. Snap!
• De Georgio Martini had a painting which had wonderfully strange architectural porportions. I think it was from the 16th century. Seemed modern in a way. The scene of a courtyard were scene are scene from the other side of some columns and a low wall. But the columns and low wall take up a lot of room. The wall take up a third of the painting from the bottom. The painting seems squeezed. Then there is a nearly empty courtyard where the tiles go straight up to the river where there are boats. It was nearly surrealist in it’s slight shifting of reality to hint at a dream.
• Seeing the distortion that was used in the past where less important people are dramatically smaller than large people would be a very interesting thing to try these days using photoshop.
• The patterns in the clothes are super modern and very very interesting. Nearly modernist patterns appear on a 14th century ladies. Some awesome sandals were being worn back then too.
• I liked the greys and browns of Lorenzetti.
• Massacchio’s long portraits are an interesting shape and the pictures look good tightly next to each other.
• Miniature portraits in lockets really reminded me of modern day wallet photos. Everything has a lineage. This also reminded me of the amount of photo booths all over Berlin. Such a throwback but people use them all the time when they are drunk.
• Raffael has awesome technique. But everything looks too beautiful? Too idealised?
• The dark portrait lighting is amazing. See Moroni. I may need to buy a light and a big light-box, I think that’s how you do it, with a counter-light on the other side or even a reflector to bounce the main light back. So much mystery is created in these paintings.
• Idea: go back to bangladesh with a dark shaded studio that you can set up on the streets and get people in for portraits.
• I’m so, so interested in portraits at the moment. I can see the history of portraits which go back so far and has had so many practitioners. We can now do extreme detail and of people from the east instead of just the west.
• Later (17th C?) the portraits start losing detail. Don’t like these as much.
• Saw an awesome circular bench downstairs. Could be good for parties to build circular or square benches in the backyard. But too confronting?
• Saw some still lifes of dead animals which was really interesting in light of my night meat photos from Bangladesh. Dead meat is interesting! Lighting is the key thing being explored I guess. I should have done more maybe.
• Love, love the ‘cleanliness’ of van Miereveld and the others. There is such precision of representation. It is an aesthetic fly trap. But although the window is so clear do we care about the subject of the paintings more? That purpose has been lost in the winds of time as these people posing have become insignificant.
• Later European portraits do not have the ‘bite’, the strength of purpose and emotional tautness of the old religious ones. There isn’t that attempt to deify, or to connect to connotations of the transcendental or mad religiosity.
• The floors in the museum was very loud. I took off my shoes and walked around the museum with them under my arm. I made a sculpture before entering the museum. A cubic block 5cm square that had come loose on the footpath. Took some sand and rested the cube on one of it’s corners standing up. Put this in the middle of the footpath with a line bisecting the hole where the cube came from.
• Some of the religious war pictures had a weird mix of bright colours in a heap on the painting. Could come to like them but would take effort. Don’t like them.
• Mellins use of uplighting from the left for the fat guy full length painting was interesting, and different to what any of the others were doing. Gave it a different emotion. I don’t know what that emotion was?
• Caravaggio is funny! He’s irreverent. This is especially so in contrast with all of the serious portraits and religious scenes and war scenes in the room with him. He is also amazingly skilled and observant. The creases on the stomach of the cherub knocking over musical instruments are lovely.
• Whilst I was looking at Caravaggio I had one of my regular urges to tell people what I was thinking and so I wasted my time saying something about Carvaggio to a British dick who didn’t think Caravaggio was humorous. The dick was maybe 30, and very fashionable. Is everyone who dresses well a cunt? So far, yes. But in the end I had this creeping suspicion that the dick may have known more than me and just didn’t let on. Oh life!
• The old painters could create a more interesting street scene. More happened on the streets back then. Our job is harder but in an unexpected way. We don’t have to get the drafting right but the timing. We have to make sure all of the boring complexity of life, cars, strollers, hipsters are out of the background before making the picture.
• Canaletto had some interesting streetscapes at night which I now can’t remember at all. No internet to check. But may have been relevant to my night work.
• Detail took time. They start appearing in the best work. E.g. Backer.
• Flemish. Overwhelmingly black but totally legible. Very, very beautiful, sophisticated. Instantly liked them. May buy a couple.
• I envied the light falling on the black clothing and how much a painter can reveal with his brush that is far more difficult to do with a camera and lights. Although you wouldn’t be able to see it in real life, they painted in the shadow areas the detail that would have been there and this gives the clothes far more depth. Lace work gorgeous. Hands very good. Technically some of the best things I’ve seen.
• The Flems beauty, sophistication comes from the high contrast, high detailed, highly … ‘discrete’ aesthetic they had. Some of the paintings were hyper-realistic. Beyond what was there in the first place. Some are nearly cartoon like in the strength and definition of their lines.
• The white, when used, is a shock and must have been difficult to balance in the paintings.
• Some still lifes but low contrast, dark, not very interesting.
• Maes had a great concept of lighting.
• Not very impressed by de Hooch. Boring contrast. Lack of mood. Flat. Maybe he was one for subtlety and maybe I was moving through too fast at this point.
• Vermeer’s colours in the dark are very good. Very beautiful. He sees what happens to colours in low light. Some of my night work is too low contrasty. Underexposed. The colours have become gray. I see now that the bar for my night photography is going to be very very high. I wonder if the Canon 5DII is actually the right compromise in terms of the high ISO and detail. Is it’s high ISO actually good enough at 3200?
• Sometimes even in one painting a painter will put in an amazing amount of effort into one part an you can see the brush work in other parts are lazier. I’m sure it’s not an aesthetic choice in that period. Not the best painters of course.
• Rembrandt was really rough with lines sometimes. I didn’t know that about him. It is different to what had come before and what was being done around him I think. I was very surprised to see it besides all of the other very detailed, sharp work. But then walking a bit further I could see that he was capable of the most detailed, contrasty work to rival any of them. He had amazing range as a painter. A true great. Sometimes he also placed the subject a bit too far to the left or right, but this was very interesting after the uniform centring of everyone else. You can see a strong intelligence and an artist working and correcting that I couldn’t easily discern in many of the others. Perhaps you need to see a body of work to make a better judgement on this stuff.
• Ruisdael had some good dark landscapes.
• The lighting is so good sometimes. It really shows the subject as three dimensional.
• There were fashionable girls around even at that time and the painters loved to paint them even then.
• I was really inspired by this stuff. The level of detail that some of these painters got to in their large paintings is beyond what is possible with the cameras I can afford. This is something to aim for. You really can’t get a sense of all this from small book reproductions. You have to stand in front of a Van Dyak 4 meter length, 2 meter high painting to get it. It’s fucking impressive.
• De Keyser is good of course but a little obvious. A little boring.
• I have to get a good book (or find one in the library now that I’m poor) on all of these guys. I don’t really know who’s who and I want to see more of their work. Paris is going to be a good place maybe for that.
• I moved through the museum at a different pace. Walk quickly into a room, pick out what’s new, and what I like and walk over to that and then spend some real time looking. Have the confidence to do that. A big museum often becomes repetitive, you need to get out of it what you want to get out of it. What you need.

• review
• flemish
• art

Posted 2 years ago

Photo by Helmut Newton

I was pretty excited to go see Newton and I bought my hard-on along with me. But I lost that pretty quickly as I saw the amount of work he had done which depressed me in its vastness and the quality of his creativity, which was high. Also, still pictures of tits just aren’t that exciting sexually, nothing like a conceptual art action of a pair of tits.

• There was a really slow paced but really exciting video which showed you how he worked with models and he was exacting. He controlled everything. He took a long time to shoot and wore people down into not revealing themselves, but doing exactly what he wanted them to do.
• Idea: don’t let girl piss then take her photos. Even better if she ends up pissing on her clothes. Could be done with a man too. Might cause less controversy.
• There are earthquake indicators or something in all of the museum rooms in Germany.
• Nudity is only one topic. Desire is nigger but has he made it interesting for long enough. Many of his photos are very shallow and the overarching viewpoint is so schizo and so often so adjusted for the purpose of a magazine that he must me considered a minor artist.
• A beautiful girl knows that it is her job to be unattainable. A key apect, or foundational support of her beauty is unattainability. This makes me feel better about the past.
• His personality is disarming. ‘Forceful, but jolly.’ Extremely exacting. No fear. No restraint at all.
• Jodie Foster is the smartest person on earth. Her analysis of Newton is very good. But this is also why he took such a bad photograph of her. He likes simple, big, obvious, womanly, tits, hips, ass, thighs. She’s brains and it didn’t work.
• His wife is pretty awesome. Australian. She helped him a lot and documented his work. Edited his books.
• ‘He doesn’t hear anybody when he is working.’ So he doesn’t hear when someone is telling him he can’t do something. He just keeps on requesting it.
• Coolness is distance. A distance.
• He lived a very very comfortable Parisian life.
• Idea: take fashion photographs with a shit camera but great lighting.
• The bookstore downstairs at the museum was devoted to photography and very comprehensive. It was a little depressing to see s many photographers with books and I have nothing. Also how do you stand out amongst them. I know, by being different. But thinking differently. Most people think that same way. Do I need to isolate myself further?

• review
• helmut newton
• art

Posted 2 years ago

Painting by Andy Warhol

The Berliner Hbf was a pleasant surprise. I didn’t really know what to expect but as I saw the Beuys stuff, and then the rest of the post 60s gang I was overjoyed because this was the art I knew least about and totally coincidentally had the least respect for. Finally here was my chance to look at Warhol in the face and spit on him. It didn’t really work out that way.

• Fluxus. “Art is life. Life is art.” This whole concept and the potential of conceptual, action art done in real life situation has become very interesting to me. The structure of reality is so set, that to break it in it’s reality is a powerful artistic action or event. The other day a guy dropped a chip on the Berlin subway. A chip from McDonalds. They were tourists. Cool, hipster tourists. I was sitting at the back with my bike. I stood up, walked over, and whilst checking my iPhone picked up the chip from the floor and started eating it. I wanted to see the reaction of people. Most turned away. Some laughed. There was a lot of fear around. Something unexpected happened. If this could happen, what else could happen. What else that is more dangerous. This stuff reminds me of the Improvisational theatre guys.
• Joseph Beuys has an entire wing here and it is amazing seeing how innovative he was and the boundaries that he pushed. He was constantly productive, in many medium throughout his time. Constantly thinking new things.
• He actually used video in a way which can compete with the film directors, by breaking the rules. He has one video of him looking scared and hurt and just looking at you with his eyes. It was effective. By learning the rules of a genre an artist has a base to break them and confound expectation in the most effective way. 10 points for obviousness.
• Read a great quote from Nietzche here. I need to read Nietzche again now that I have been thinking and acting in this new way to see if I can see deeper and longer into him.
• Idea: put a clock next to art works counting out the seconds in some gallery.
• I’d never tried to smell an artwork in a museum but I started to here. One of Beuys’ works didn’t smell so good. I didn’t like it.
• I still have so much left to learn. So much left to do. What do I do with all these conceptual ideas? The answer: do them. Work.
• The idea of impermanent art. Art that has to break into action is an excellent one.
• Beuys could draw too. Who’d have thunk it?
• Him putting his pantsuit on a canvas is awesome self explanation. He was so persistently creative.
• Had good, if grotesque, sculptural skill. He makes you wonder how he did such varied work with such apparent ease. A sign of the very best artists.
• His disrespect of everything, including the logistics of transportation was admirable. There were some cheese like granite pieces that must have taken a huge truck each to move. Spectacular. They were pretty shit though. My aesthetics don’t really gel with his at all.
• My urge to act up in a museum is so high. It should be the least quiet place on earth. It’s full of these amazing ideas which makes you want to make your own. A museum should be boisterous.
• The move to acting instead of reacting, or producing instead of consuming is one of the most difficult for people.
• Was there effort involved must be a key question of art.
• It is really difficult to shock an artist. There are beyond most barriers. Are torturers artists?
• Doing art to yourself because that is where it begins and where it ends. See Gunter Brus.
• Volleys are too loud for museums. Good!
• Keller’s dedication is impressive.
• Saw some busts which were intensely observed. Very close attention to detail. I wish I could have touched them. It’s not very hard to imagine that sculpture is the thing whose process would make you the most observant of what the human body actually looks like. Relevant for my photography.
• Kruger is a bit fucking obvious. Ripped tiny kids dresses stuck to distressed, bent metal? Give me a break. But A+ for effort and size.
• Warhol. Conflicted, conflicted, conflicted. The rather banal recontexualisation of our image soaked times is nice sometimes, but not that deep. Yes he is saying that our times are not that deep that culture has become a mainstream thing as opposed to previous ages where it belonged to the learned and cultured but surely he could have done it with more effort? I can’t quite like him, but want to know more. Want to see more of his work.The size of Mao was really impressive and it is pretty. I see after all these pieces why Gursky and other photographers went big. It’s hard to compete otherwise. What process did Warhol use to make his paintings? Did he use helpers? Does it matter? Doesn’t Helmut Newtown use assistants? I liked Newton’s portrait of Warhol. Feels right.
• Franz Gertsch had an amazingly modern subject of two girls getting ready for a night out in a large painting that was painted so photographically that it actually shocked you. Sheer skill, powers of observation, and patience. I wonder if skill and patience can sometimes be an impediment to good thinking in a work. You need to think too.
• What happens to a face when it is so seen. It says more than it says. I’m thinking of Warhol’s Elvis.
• It’s an ugly thing when the imagination has lost touch with a valid, intellectual (even if that is Dionysian) purpose.
• Rauchenberg. Dark and degrading. Don’t like his sense of proportions.
• Thomas Struth is funny. Technically very good.
• The woman urge must be hinted at. What are the details that make you feel like you do? Hair? Face? Movement? Is it all very boring? Is it pornography? Soft core? Gah!
• Baselitz sculpture of woman very good. Chips and red paint. Great size. Great restraint! Ha.
• Why would you make art for a music cover? So millions could see it you dumb ass.

• review
• art

Posted 2 years ago

Drawing by Durer

The Albertina in Vienna is a lifeless showpiece of a mansion that you can tell was made to be lived in by the most boring people on earth. People who were far more interested in being impressive externally than internally. The exhibitions were small but interesting (modernists, naked women, and facsimiles of Austrian art through the ages).

• I moved through the gallery very aggressively. Last day in Vienna and I was a little over the whole decrepit, touristy scene of museums. The girls are not attractive in Vienna. The lack of class in the east European girls was especially distasteful. Pink tshirts with sparkles? Really? And when four of your friends are already wearing them?
• There was one print in the Naked Woman exhibition (I’m sure it was called like the Body and Image or something like that) from Helmut Newton, and at the time I wrote: ‘Newton lacked ideas. Having naked women to shoot makes life easy.’ But this was before I visited the Newton museum in Berlin. Will write about that later. Needless to say that he didn’t lack ideas.
• I liked the thoughtfulness and care of Kandinsky. He spent months on his crazy ideas.
• Jawlensky’s colour impressed me again.
• The way Picasso saw was so interesting. The way he could break reality and make lines not connect where they should but still create a highly coherent picture.
• Thought Chagall was very, very funny with his penis jokes. One picture had a girl lying on a dark blue hillside dreaming. Then off to the top left of the large painting there is a very random vase with bright colours that is supposed to attract the eye. But then off to the top right, in barely visible simple gray lines is a picture of the girl hugging this huge phallic dragon. Very funny. I still don’t like the way his things look, but I like him now.
• Art is a big joke played on society by those who don’t want to participate in the general interests of the masses. You can’t take it all to seriously. It’s just a way to live.
• Margritte. Tackily conceptual.
• Feininger’s The High Shore was very interesting. Nearly cubist.
• I realised that I should have some of the ‘strange’ pictures in my Night Set. It should be a cacophony of reality and unreality. Of the problems and dreams that happen at night and how difficult it is to tell between the two.
• In the last exhibit I was very impressed by some of the realist work by Karl Kuntz. Cartoon-like but amazingly detailed on the weight of light in a scene. Also not afraid to do a shaded dark place with very uneven, nearly oddly heavy light. Too bad these were facsimiles.
• Durer was fucking incredible. Total respect for the patience he had. Need to reproduce in myself.

• review
• art

Posted 2 years ago

On Taking Art Slowly, Michael Kimmelman (link)

Photo by Valerio Mezzanotti

The young women were unusual for stopping. Most of the museum’s visitors passed through the gallery oblivious.

A few game tourists glanced vainly in guidebooks or hopefully at wall labels, as if learning that one or another of these sculptures came from Papua New Guinea or Hawaii or the Archipelago of Santa Cruz, or that a work was three centuries old or maybe four might help them see what was, plain as day, just before them.

Almost nobody, over the course of that hour or two, paused before any object for as long as a full minute. Only a 17th-century wood sculpture of a copulating couple, from San Cristobal in the Solomon Islands, placed near an exit, caused several tourists to point, smile and snap a photo, but without really breaking stride.

A very interesting article by Kimmelman. But you can’t be too harsh on these museum goers, it’s not their fault that the world is now the way it is, and demands a dumb quickness.

The article did make me think of my upcoming trip to Europe. An anachronistic wander through the ancient cultural heart (is NY then the artificial replacement?) of the world. What do I hope to get from it?

I want to see the important works that have come before and I want to see them in their original; with techniques laid bare. In their own aura of authenticity. Things you can’t get from reproductions. I want to steal. I want to see what can be reused in what I’m doing. I want to find the ones that move me, and really think hard about why they do. I don’t care if I don’t end up liking most of them. I’m not there to be judged. I’m there to do the judging.

I miss my books. I miss being able to go through something thoroughly and figure out what other smart people thought about it, what they got from it, and the context they put the piece into. I also want to read up on the lives of the people whose stuff I’m looking at. It’s one of my guilty pleasures.

I also want to meet people and show them what I have been doing. See what they think of my work.

I also want to work. I want to find out what this Europe is all about. What the people are like. I hope my fears aren’t confirmed, that it is all just middle class aspirationalism. I hope it isn’t just a display of the sameness that wealth encourages.

But for that I think I have to look hard and look long.

Click on the link in the title.

PS Also, I’d like to get laid.

• europe
• art
• trip

Posted 2 years ago

Permalink