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Tag Archives: Smithson
Powers of Art
One can exert oneself and make many sorts of things in a life. One can make artworks, which do nothing, but just are what they are. Or one can build institutions, or social structures or change life for the better—decrease … Continue reading
Posted in Abstraction and Society, Current Affairs, Ethics of Abstraction
Tagged abstract art, abstraction, aesthetics, illusion, meaning, Smithson, society, value
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Abstraction and Time
Always downhill, but never downhearted. Hans Christian Anderson
Time and Place
“If the place is different, the time is different. If the place is the same, time has not changed.” This pithy two part aphorism by Julian Barbour, actually extracted by me from his book, seems at first surprisingly Heraclitan for … Continue reading
Time and the Imagination
Human beings are busy little creatures. They move relatively quickly—building, tearing down, inventing, changing, making. But even the time of human activity is slow compared to the speed of the mind. I saw a recent statistic that there are 60 … Continue reading
Death Artistically Considered
Lest my readers think I’m getting excessively serious, I would like to expand on something from a couple of posts back. Death, strictly speaking, doesn’t exist, meaning that it is an affair only relevant to the living—survivors, perpetrators, legatees etc. … Continue reading
Helen Frankenthaler
I was moved by Anne Wagner’s obituary for Helen Frankenthaler in the April 2012 issue of Artforum. Every artist has to make their own canon, never more than today, when almost all artists are educated by art historians. Frankenthaler belongs … Continue reading
Angelus Novus
If we accept Benjamin’s reading of Klee’s Angelus Novus, that it is moving backwards into the future while watching the increasing pile up of wreckage we call modernity, then it is also looking at us, who are a little further … Continue reading
The Unknown Audience
Some of the things that Scott Lyall brought up two posts back are aspects of the current dialectic of theatricality, which Smithson knew a lot about (in fact more than Michael Fried, who has come to own the concept). This … Continue reading
The eyes
The eyes seemed to look. Were they looking? Perhaps. Other eyes were looking. A Mexican gave the displacement a long, imploring gaze. Even if you cannot look, others will look for you. Art brings sight to a halt, but that … Continue reading
Lost Origin
In his very intelligent comment, David Court asks whether we should consider the artwork as more than the object, and the backstory as a kind of material, like a ground. Of course this is exactly what has happened, but I … Continue reading
Posted in Abstraction and Society, Principles of Abstraction, Uncategorized
Tagged abstract art, abstraction, backstory, knowledge, labor, literature, Non-site, Smithson, society, time
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Emptied of feeling
The work discussed in the previous post gave a good example of how orthogonals enable feeling. But in modern times, one of the advantages of geometry is how it can allow the negation of feeling. That’s an advantage because it’s … Continue reading
An abyss of meaning
Further to the last post, what is described in rather melodramatic terms as an “abyss” could equate to a primal chaos, something that scientists would discuss under the rubric of entropy. Entropy must increase overall, so the original state of … Continue reading
Posted in Abstraction and Society, Principles of Abstraction, Uncategorized
Tagged abstract art, abstraction, emptiness, Smithson, space
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Jack Vance
From Julian Barbour and the block universe to minimalism to the negative social sublime of Smithson and Ai Weiwei, I’ve been wondering about a temporal perspective that denies change, that posits a kind of steady state. Obviously these sources are … Continue reading
Time and Ai Weiwei
I’ve just finished writing a review for the magazine Yishu. It’s a comparison between two recently published books, Ai Weiwei’s blog posts and Gao Minglu’s historical study of the Chinese avant-garde, Total Modernity. I love Ai’s whole attitude. He is … Continue reading
Once only
There’s a lot more to say about time, and a lot that’s important for art, but I would like to talk about my kind of art. I would call it an additive tradition, running from Pollock through Frankenthaler, Louis and … Continue reading
Time and Space
Spent an enjoyable afternoon with Josh Thorpe, an excellent artist with very good ideas about the relative value of experience and theory. He recently published a guide book to Dan Graham’s pavilions, which also contains an interview with the artist. … Continue reading
Drawing in the City
In one of my earlier posts I included a piece by Morellet in what looks like a sculpture park. Theoretically that image encapsulates my views; it shows the human construction of the grid surrounded by the much greater complexity of … Continue reading
Opticality of Sculpture
Shep Steiner has just sent me his chapter on Olitski, and, as usual, his observations are inspiring and very original. He says that Michael Fried has it that Greenberg’s remarks on the opticality of sculpture, referred to in an earlier … Continue reading
Perspectives on Pollock
Last week Shep Steiner sent me his latest piece on Pollock, a chapter of the book he’s working on. As always his work is really great, and it sent me back to Clark, Greenberg and others. I’m grateful to Shep … Continue reading
Out of the container
Our knowledge of the world is like a net, the more closely woven, the more holes it has. Robert Smithson, Non-site, 1967