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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)
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Non-Identical Abstraction Engine (with Jan Tumlir)
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Tag Archives: meaning
Stones #2
…the earth…kept deepening beneath the spades, reckoning only with the diggers’ strength and endurance. Sometimes Voshchev would bend down and pick up a pebble, or other dust that had adhered together, and tuck it away inside his trousers for storage. … Continue reading
Posted in Abstraction and Society, Ethics of Abstraction, Principles of Abstraction
Tagged abstract art, abstraction, emptiness, labor, meaning, nature, the inhuman, time, value
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Details 2
Sometimes I’m amazed at the endless particulars of life, which seem to multiply daily, but then maybe I’m in a state of wonderment at the human capacity to identify the same. All the details. The details of nature are astonishing … Continue reading
Posted in Abstraction and Society, Current Affairs
Tagged abstract art, abstraction, details, feeling, labor, meaning, society, value
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Critical Experiment
Here’s an idea for an amusing artwork in the form of a sociological experiment. Take two groups of curators, and ensure that the members of each group have no opportunity to talk to members of the other group. Maybe this … Continue reading
Tacit Criticism
As pointed out on this blog, the role of criticism is to make the implicit explicit, to explain what doesn’t need to be explained, because the implicit—or call it the tacit—contains the social content that must be questioned. I don’t … Continue reading
Order inside and out
I keep thinking about a quote from Emerson that I’ve used elsewhere on the blog: “I would write on the lintels of the doorpost, Whim. I hope it is somewhat better than whim at last, but we cannot spend the … Continue reading
Abstraction is so over
Bruce Hainley is a critic I have a lot of time for. Oddly, many of my friends don’t understand why. I get where he is coming from, and it’s the right place. If I was in a down mood his … Continue reading
Posted in Current Affairs, Ethics of Abstraction, Uncategorized
Tagged abstract art, abstraction, aesthetics, backstory, meaning, nature, sex, society, subjectivity, value
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Perennially New
An article of 1989 by Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe, called “The Current State of Nonrepresentation,” proves that certain ideas might seem fresh, but are hardly new: “…the task of nonrepresentation [is], typically, one which involves seeing a thing which is, for once, … Continue reading
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
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
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
Unknown
Recently I published a little squib on the British web site Abstract Critical, and Peter Stott, who has contributed to this blog, offered the following comment: “The one thing that can be said about abstract art is that it is … Continue reading
Posted in Conceptualism and Painting, Principles of Abstraction, Uncategorized
Tagged abstract art, abstraction, backstory, knowledge, meaning, value
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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
New again
Emerson has something to say about the appreciation of pictures: “So with pictures; each will bear an emphasis of attention once, which it cannot retain, though we fain would continue to be pleased in that manner. How strongly I have … Continue reading
Posted in American Modernism, Principles of Abstraction, Uncategorized
Tagged abstract art, abstraction, Emerson, emptiness, feeling, form, meaning, Morris Louis, self-reflection, time
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Pulses
Been reading Emerson. He confirms something mentioned more than once on this blog: “Nature hates calculators; her methods are saltatory and impulsive. Man lives by pulses; our organic movements are such; and the chemical and ethereal agents are undulatory and … Continue reading
Posted in American Modernism, Conceptualism and Painting, Principles of Abstraction, Uncategorized
Tagged abstract art, abstraction, Emerson, feeling, Jackson Pollock, meaning, nature, series, sex, time, value
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Time Religious and Artistic
R.B.Kitaj has provoked me to look into a book by A.J.Heschel which happens to be on my library shelf. It’s about the sabbath as a day apart from the noise and strife. That’s how I’ve always thought about my studio—a … Continue reading
Posted in Conceptualism and Painting, Principles of Abstraction, Uncategorized
Tagged abstract art, abstraction, AJHeschel, literature, meaning, RBKitaj, space, time, value
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A Dream
During a day of doubt my faith in abstraction was restored by this Matisse: The forms don’t line up as I like them to do, but they are beautifully piled on top of each other, interlaced and jostling for space. … Continue reading
Posted in Ethics of Abstraction, Principles of Abstraction
Tagged abstract art, abstraction, feeling, literature, Matisse, meaning, titles, value
1 Comment
Conceptual Antagonist
The following remarks by Clement Greenberg, from 1971, give the most astute definition of conceptualism, or at least of the kind of conceptualism worth paying attention to: “…art, put to the strictest test of experience, proves to mean not skillful … Continue reading
Secret meaning
Another theme of Kitaj’s Jewish commentarism is the esoteric. Behind the flat surface lies a depth of meaning—but meaning is not the right word. It’s easy to see how this can work in figurative art, but in abstraction less so. … Continue reading
Posted in Principles of Abstraction, Uncategorized
Tagged abstract art, abstraction, AJHeschel, backstory, form, Jeff Tutt, labor, literature, meaning, value
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Commentary
R.B.Kitaj’s Second Diasporist Manifesto gives a lot of pleasure. He describes himself as kind of Talmudic commentator—of his own painting. Proposition #236 reads: “As a Jew, I am FOR INTERPRETATION…As a post-20th century painter, the very idea of NO COMMMENTARY … 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
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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
Reading Abstraction
In the Kleist series, imagery related to the story, in this case a novella about the famous slave revolt in the West Indies, can’t be ruled out. Robert Wallace, in his discussion of the Moby-Dick works, did very well in … Continue reading
Posted in American Modernism, Principles of Abstraction
Tagged abstract art, abstraction, Frank Stella, Kleist, literature, meaning, titles
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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
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Redefinition
In the previous post I managed to avoid making a definition of abstraction, although I feel the presence of one near. It’s that feeling that should guide us, the pull of the future. Hope to survive long enough to talk … Continue reading
Posted in Principles of Abstraction
Tagged abstract art, abstraction, feeling, figuration, form, illusion, Linsley, meaning, time, titles
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Figures coming through
Ruminating on the later work of Frank Stella has led me to a some new thoughts about what abstraction really is. Most important is to keep a sense of what Richard Shiff described in our recent conversation as the strangeness … Continue reading
Posted in American Modernism, Principles of Abstraction, Uncategorized
Tagged abstract art, abstraction, demons, figuration, form, Frank Stella, illusion, meaning, subjectivity, the inhuman, titles
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Breath
Stella says about his famous smoke ring photographs that “…if they do not stand for the human figure, I do not know what does.” There’s a long tradition in both literature and religion that equates breath with life, and photographed … Continue reading
Posted in American Modernism, Principles of Abstraction
Tagged abstract art, abstraction, breath, feeling, figuration, form, Frank Stella, illusion, literature, meaning, painted reliefs
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Noise
Following from the previous post, as an example of visual noise I would like to present any abstract work by Gerhard Richter. Pictures like this are the high class, supremely tasteful equivalent of stadium rock, a sclerotic form if there … Continue reading
Posted in Abstraction and Society, Principles of Abstraction
Tagged abstract art, abstraction, form, Gerhard Richter, grids, labor, meaning, music, series
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Definition of Abstraction
I’ve never worried my mind about a definition of abstract art, or of what I do, but occasionally have stumbled upon possibles. Just now I came up with what I believe to be a simple and accurate one. Abstraction is … 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
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