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Tag Archives: series
Dokoupil
I always felt an affinity with J.G.Dokoupil, confirmed in spades by this interview, which I recommend to everyone. Dokoupil could be called a conceptual painter, and I’m a non-conceptual artist, so we should have a lot in common.
More Preparation
Been reading the memoirs of Antoni Tapies. I find them bland and a little disappointing for an artist of his stature, but here is one interesting observation: “A moment of lucidity will also free the artists from many hours of … Continue reading
Posted in Principles of Abstraction, Uncategorized
Tagged abstract art, abstraction, Antoni Tapies, emptiness, feeling, form, improvisation, series, subjectivity
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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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How to continue
I’ve found that my smaller works tend to have more parts, and more detail. They are more intensive, you might say. The beauty of the larger works is in their ease and simplicity, but just today I looked at some … Continue reading
Posted in Principles of Abstraction
Tagged abstract art, abstraction, feeling, form, Linsley, method, self-reflection, series, technique
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The Series
In my view, Richter’s important contributions to abstraction have been the color charts and something that I call “the edition of unique works.” The latter might be the most important, and I have talked about it on this blog. But … 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
Cutting the book
In his Kleist series Stella hit on a very good way to use literature. For his version of Kleist’s “Betrothal in Santo Domingo” he took six short speeches by five characters in the story and made a piece to embody … Continue reading
Posted in American Modernism, Principles of Abstraction
Tagged abstract art, abstraction, form, Frank Stella, literature, series
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Modes of Abstraction and Styles of Writing
Robert Wallace has shown me that I was mistaken about Stella’s work, as in fact many are. Though at first sight the Moby Dick works seem attractively chaotic, it would be wrong to assume that they have a fundamental arbitrariness, … Continue reading
Posted in American Modernism, Principles of Abstraction, Uncategorized
Tagged abstract art, abstraction, cubism, form, Frank Stella, literature, painted reliefs, series, titles
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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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The Contingent
Another important concept stressed by Stephen Jay Gould, one that is very much relevant to art, is contingency. He is talking about the possible pathways of evolution, but in art we could say that all works begin contingently and move … Continue reading
Inventors of forms
Why abstraction has to be literary in some sense, is, as Stella has also pointed out, because otherwise it may not have enough of the meanings that we care about, that it may be thin, shallow and dessicated. As Wallace … Continue reading
Literary Form
In his book on the Moby Dick series, Robert Wallace explains how Stella builds links between disparate works by repeating elements. What is most interesting is that this is also how the novel is structured; motifs appear at intervals, building … Continue reading
Putting shapes together
I’ve been reading Robert Wallace’s book on Frank Stella’s Moby Dick, and finding it very inspiring and important. More about the book itself later, but right now I want to keep thinking about Stella. Wallace says “he…[sees]…himself primarily as a … Continue reading
Time and the Work
Following from the preceding post, the movement of the work, which usually means the movement from work to work in a series, should resemble in its effects the real movement of time—works eating each other up. For this to happen … Continue reading
Posted in American Modernism, Principles of Abstraction
Tagged abstract art, abstraction, cubism, form, Frank Stella, Pablo Picasso, painted reliefs, series, time
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Art and the Inhuman
Following on from the previous post, the way that paintings overcome the necessary limits of a single work attributable to a single author is through the objectivity of the aesthetic, but this is not well understood today because both viewers … Continue reading
So far
This blog is getting complex, and though I’m glad to be getting comments on older posts I’m also afraid that some good moments will be lost because of the very nature of a blog, which is that it is always … Continue reading
A Constant Unknown
Start from the position that the backstory or critical pre-text, or in fact any of the textual elements of the discursive mode, are ways to make explicit what is unknown (unconscious?), implicit, suggested or unspoken in the work of art, … Continue reading
Tapies
Just an in-between post to acknowledge the passing of Antoni Tapies, a great artist. I first came to appreciate his work a few years ago when I saw a show of his prints in Barcelona. They are in what I … Continue reading
Posted in American Modernism, Current Affairs, Uncategorized
Tagged form, Robert Motherwell, series, subjectivity, Tapies
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The Foundation Pit
“And why are you dying, Mama? From being bourgeois—or from death?” “I got bored,” said the mother, “I’m worn out.” “Because you were born long, long ago, and I wasn’t, ” said the little girl. “I won’t tell anyone when … Continue reading
Posted in Abstraction and Society, Current Affairs, Ethics of Abstraction
Tagged abstract art, abstraction, labor, literature, memory, series, society, subjectivity
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Metaphysics of Origins
Adorno, in my favorite apothegm, observed that “there is no origin but ephemeral life.” The murder of Lorca during the Spanish civil war and Lorca’s elegy to the bullfighter Meijas make up the backstory of Motherwell’s Elegies series, but these … Continue reading
Backstory
On my recent trip to New York I visited Miguel Abreu’s gallery, one of the most important in that city. In fact, it was the only one I had time to visit. The current show crystallized something for me, something … Continue reading
Watery Pinnacle
The best works in the De Kooning show, perhaps the height of his career, were in the second last room, centered around the piece illustrated here. Words like magnificent come to mind. The orchestration of color and of the scale … Continue reading
Reversal
I’m in New York this weekend, and having a number of strong experiences with art. Titles are still in the forefront after I saw Gareth James’ show at Miguel Abreu, but must swerve away from that topic to respond to … Continue reading
Posted in American Modernism, Principles of Abstraction, Uncategorized
Tagged abstract art, abstraction, feeling, Linsley, series, Willem De Kooning
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Book of Creation
I first saw works by Lygia Pape at the Americas Society in New York back in the 90s. They were prints with a Gegoish flavor, but I found out about The Book of Creation from a catalog that I picked … Continue reading
Posted in Latin American Abstraction, Principles of Abstraction, Uncategorized
Tagged abstract art, abstraction, literature, Lygia Pape, meaning, nature, series, titles
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Title as hook
A criticism of Terry Atkinson’s work, and its titles, would start by observing that the object is devalued by being wrapped in a fog of words. Modernist attention to the object is not an avoidance of history, or at least … Continue reading
A literary measure
I’d like to answer the question I asked about Motherwell’s work a few posts back by suggesting that it fails for both reasons; the Elegies series is both too literary and not literary enough. The works are too literary because … Continue reading
Motherwell’s melancholic poetry
Motherwell’s series Elegy to the Spanish Republic, is derived in a very sophisticated way from a poem by Lorca called “Lament for Ignacio Sánchez Mejías,” an account of the death of a bullfighter. Motherwell shows his superiority to the leftist … Continue reading
Series and painting
I still intend to spend some time on Motherwell, because for me he presents important problems about the literary in abstraction, but just today I’ve been reading one of Shep Steiner’s new pieces, this one about Frank Stella. One quote … Continue reading
Formalism, conceptualism and the death of desire
At the conclusion of Thomas Hardy’s novel The Well-Beloved, the hero, a successful sculptor of the Alfred Gilbert type, loses all interest in art in his later years: “On another afternoon they went to the National Gallery, to test his … Continue reading
Pre-conceptualism Part 2
I realized today that some links on this blog were not working, specifically most of the “Paradigms” pages accessible from the menu above and the tags on the right hand side. These problems are solved now, so the tags can … Continue reading
Posted in Conceptualism and Painting, Principles of Abstraction, Uncategorized
Tagged abstract art, abstraction, aesthetics, form, Linsley, literature, series
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