-
Recent Posts
Currently Most Read Posts
Recent Comments
- Robert Linsley on Pessimism About Growth
- Francis Lemieux on Pessimism About Growth
- Sharon McCarthy on Edges Early and Late
- Gregg Simpson on Empty Formalism of Education
- Martin Mugar on Those who make
Categories
- Abstraction and Society (196)
- American Modernism (168)
- Conceptualism and Painting (137)
- Current Affairs (84)
- Ethics of Abstraction (138)
- Italian Art (26)
- Latin American Abstraction (9)
- Principles of Abstraction (305)
- Uncategorized (277)
Tags
abstract art abstraction aesthetics autonomy backstory Boris Groys cubism Cézanne drawing emptiness feeling form Frank Stella Gego Gerhard Richter Greenberg grids illusion Jackson Pollock knowledge labor Linsley literature meaning nature Pablo Picasso painted reliefs place R.H.Quaytman Robert Motherwell science self-reflection series sex shaped canvas Shep Steiner Smithson society space subjectivity the inhuman time titles value Willem De Kooning-
Bookstore
-
Art and its Others (with Boris Groys)
Abstraction and Possibility Space (with Andreas Neufert)
Doors:River (with Joseph Drapell and David Moos)
Around the Episcene (with Scott Lyall)
Matrix of Surds (Mike Murphy and Wojciech Oleinik)
Non-Identical Abstraction Engine (with Jan Tumlir)
A CLOUDE OF UNKNOWYNG (Lee Henderson on Sasha Pierce)
Pictures and Picture Proofs (Wojciech Olejnik and James Brown)
On Parts You Can’t See (Polly Apfelbaum and Kelly Jazvac)
Links
Meta
Category Archives: Current Affairs
Energy Shortage?
Jeff Rubin, in a book discussed in the previous post, actually does make a good case for a zero growth or steady state economy. Not that it’s desirable, but that rising energy costs will make it inevitable. And that may … Continue reading
Pessimism About Growth
I’ve been reading a book by Jeff Rubin called The End of Growth. I’m not sure that artists should celebrate the emergence of a steady state economy, and also not sure that predictions about the same are accurate. The merit … Continue reading
Posted in Abstraction and Society, Current Affairs
Tagged abstract art, abstraction, history, knowledge, labor, society
2 Comments
Politics of Blogging
John Kelsey’s article in last September’s Artforum, with its criticisms of digital networking, combined with some comments from my friend Scott Lyall, provoked me to take a step back and ask what it is I’m doing here. This post is … Continue reading
Experience
This blog has quoted Emerson’s great essay, “Experience,” more than once. Here’s Benjamin on the same topic: “Most people have no wish to learn by experience. Moreover, their convictions prevent them from doing so.” How true. That is the truth … Continue reading
The Price of Greatness
Readers of this blog will know that I am a great admirer of the work of Frank Stella. It seems I’m in a minority. I was talking to a friend who calls him the Leroy Neiman of contemporary art, and … Continue reading
Empty Formalism of Education
In an earlier post I implied that university training has not improved contemporary art. Robert Hullot-Kentor reminds me of how profoundly hostile to art the university is: “Ideas make us think; we think ideas. They are what are urgent in … Continue reading
Learning down
This blog has occasionally commented on current affairs, particularly as to the role of technology in the economy. I think this is relevant to art, not least because the most overused word today (or one of them) is creativity. What … Continue reading
Posted in Abstraction and Society, Current Affairs, Uncategorized
Tagged abstract art, abstraction, knowledge, labor, science, self-reflection, society, value
Leave a comment
Fear
Again Emerson provides a vivid perspective on contemporary America: “All infractions of love and equity in our social relations are speedily punished. They are punished by fear…..Fear is an instructor of great sagacity and the herald of all revolutions. One … Continue reading
Posted in Abstraction and Society, Current Affairs
Tagged abstract art, abstraction, Emerson, feeling, self-reflection, society, time
Leave a comment
Those who make
As Harold Bloom has pointed out, Emerson is the ancestor of all American motivational speakers and aspirational gurus. Tony Robbins and his ilk are Emerson’s progeny, and if self-reliance has become an ideology then it has to be reinvented, or … Continue reading
The Machine
Another quote from the memoirs of Tapies strikes a chord. He talks about his first show in New York: “The shock I felt in that world was fabulous. Despite all I could have known or imagined about the American people … Continue reading
Posted in Abstraction and Society, Current Affairs, Uncategorized
Tagged abstract art, abstraction, Antoni Tapies, society, subjectivity, value
Leave a comment
An abstract landscape
“Among the beds without flowers and the chipped cupids, the gnawing of actuality seemed for the moment silenced. In this place which had been left without meaning it seemed easier to feel meaning where there was perhaps none.” Anthony Powell
Laura Owens
The recent Artforum interview with Laura Owens is very interesting. Her new paintings are good, and in fact resemble Stella’s work in concrete ways. She has an inclusive approach to technique, is involved with printmaking, uses illusionistic shadows and frames … Continue reading
Concise Manet
Manet: “Concision in art is a necessity as well as an elegance; a man who is concise makes you think, a verbose man bores you.” This is why I am bored by global conceptualism, not to be verbose about it.
Pragmatic Matisse
When artists talk about art they are usually more down to earth and concrete than theorists or critics. But even most artists get vague and wooly when they leave technique and try to express essences. Matisse was exemplary in his … Continue reading
A Finite Existence
As counterpoint to the concept of the Anthropocene, or rather to the way it is currently being used by artists and soft intellectuals, it is useful to consider John Leslie’s thoughts about human extinction. He has given a lot of … Continue reading
Posted in Abstraction and Society, Current Affairs
Tagged abstract art, abstraction, knowledge, nature, society, the inhuman, time, value
Leave a comment
Sublime Delusion
Scientists have recently proposed that the current geological era should be called the Anthropocene because of the enormous impact of human activity on the biosphere. This seems to be a reasonable idea, but when the art world gets hold of … Continue reading
Posted in Abstraction and Society, Current Affairs, Ethics of Abstraction
Tagged abstract art, abstraction, nature, society, the inhuman, totality
Leave a comment
Layers of Time
The Long Now Foundation, which aims to encourage longer term thinking, publishes an image of time in parallel layers, very similar to something I laid out in an earlier post. Artists and art lovers know that art can stop the … Continue reading
Posted in Abstraction and Society, Current Affairs, Principles of Abstraction
Tagged abstract art, abstraction, nature, society, time
Leave a comment
First and Only
Human history is so short that it is full of things that have happened for the first and only time, yet for the last couple of hundred years at least in the West, and for much longer in China, the … Continue reading
How Hummingbird?
Yesterday I saw a show by Patrick Howlett. It fit well with my recent thoughts on Stella because Howlett’s work is also distinguished by sheer pictorial invention. Abstraction should not mean but be, to paraquote a famous poet. The largest … Continue reading
Posted in Current Affairs, Principles of Abstraction
Tagged abstract art, abstraction, drawing, feeling, line, meaning, Pablo Picasso, Patrick Howlett, Paul Klee
Leave a comment
Questionable or Not
On the British web site abstract critical there is more debate about Frank Stella. I’m on his side but most aren’t. Much of the criticism seems to be based on a perception that the work does not hold together formally—the … Continue reading
Art More Intelligent Than Me
I’m always saying that my pictures are smarter than me, that they teach me what to do. In an old interview in the Brooklyn Rail Robert Hullot-Kentor says it well: “If art—when art is art—understands us better than we can … Continue reading
Destruction of Culture
Read yesterday morning about the burning of thousand year old books in Timbuktu by fanatic Islamists. When I heard about the Mali rebellion I immediately thought about the libraries of Timbuktu, and remembered what the Taliban did to the giant … Continue reading
Posted in Abstraction and Society, Current Affairs
Tagged abstract art, abstraction, literature, society, time
Leave a comment
Slightly Overwhelming
I’m pretty familiar with the illustrations in Robert Wallace’s book on the Moby Dick series, but when I see the actual pieces don’t usually recognize them. There’s something about the size and detail and rawness of the works that stuns … Continue reading
No Progress Made
I thought I’d better amplify something I said in the preceding post, about art as an agent of enlightenment—the latter meaning freedom from myth. When art definitively became a secular religion, just before the turn of the twentieth century, it … Continue reading
Posted in Abstraction and Society, Conceptualism and Painting, Current Affairs
Tagged abstract art, abstraction, backstory, Boris Groys, demons, meaning, society, value
Leave a comment
Missed Critique
In the very important article “On the Curatorship,” from his book Art Power, Boris Groys discusses the iconoclastic power of criticism, and he says: “Contemporary iconoclasm, of course, can and should be aimed primarily not at religious icons but at … Continue reading
Painting Off
Today one often hears painters whine about the supposed marginal status of their favorite medium in the art world. In 1991 Stella offered the following words of comfort: “Because we accept so readily the idea of the manageable whole or … Continue reading
Artists and Scientists
Like many, I read the popular books written by scientists because I genuinely want to learn about the world. Lee Smolin, Leonard Susskind, Brian Greene are some of the physicists I’ve followed, a few of whom I’ve met. In the … Continue reading
Posted in Abstraction and Society, Current Affairs
Tagged abstract art, abstraction, knowledge, Linsley, meaning, science, value
Leave a comment
Chance and Possibility
According to Stephen Jay Gould, the usual mode of human enlightenment “…is…not by global creep forward, inch by subsequent inch, but rather in rushes or whooshes, usually following the removal of some impediment, or the discovery of some facilitating device, … Continue reading
Posted in Abstraction and Society, Conceptualism and Painting, Current Affairs
Tagged abstract art, abstraction, evolution, knowledge, nature, science, society
Leave a comment
Science and Aesthetics
From Walter Benjamin: The place occupied in Goethe’s writings by his scientific studies is the one which in lesser artists is commonly reserved for aesthetics. This aspect of Goethe’s work can be appreciated only when one realizes that, unlike almost … Continue reading
Ink-jet Paintings
In the September Artforum Wolfgang Tillmans waxes rhapsodical about ink-jet technology. He observes that many works shown as paintings today are ink-jets. There is no problem with this that I can see, in fact I was making them in 1997, … Continue reading
Posted in Abstraction and Society, Current Affairs, Principles of Abstraction
Tagged abstract art, abstraction, automatism, form, Linsley, nature, subjectivity, technology, the inhuman, time, value
Leave a comment