Makoto Fujimura—an artist I’ve mentioned before—makes an astute point that “art is both in the execution and in the revelation of the extraordinary”:
I’ve heard many people say of contemporary art: “my kids can do that.” I encourage them, then to try it themselves, don’t let kids have all the fun! Try to make drip paintings like Jackson Pollock. Or paint an object with encaustic, layering color upon color, like Johns. Try silk screening images like Warhol. You soon find out that in the ordinary gestures and materials, there are deceptively complicated and sublime twists. Our drips become unnatural and confined, where as Pollock’s drips dance, and form delectable edges that seem to undulate in front of our eyes. Our edges of encaustic strokes become unshapely, because If you try working with wax (as I have tried to in college,) you find out soon enough that it is unforgiving, making it very difficult to create a clean, sharp definition. The melting wax constantly oozes, and moves about, and the colors muddle,. If you are finally able to paint a stripe with bright colors, the stripes would not resonate, in ways that Johns’ Flags do.
And that is to speak only of the method of execution. Johns’ works not only collage materials, but they also synthesize concepts, culture, the zeitgeist of his day. One may be able to copy his technique, but it is impossible to mimic the complex layers of confluences that he is synthesizing as he mixes beeswax and pigments. To Jasper Johns, the medium of his art is not really encaustic, the medium of his art is Time itself.
(Via: Gene Veith)
March 8th, 2010 | 12:37 pm
In other words: “Who are you going to believe, me or your own lying eyes?”
March 8th, 2010 | 12:42 pm
“If you try working with wax (as I have tried to in college,) you find out soon enough that it is unforgiving, making it very difficult to create a clean, sharp definition. The melting wax constantly oozes, and moves about, and the colors muddle…”
This is the reason I let professionals stain my floors and furniture. It is a skill that improves with repitition, the same way my backhand in tennis improves when I work on it (or doesn’t improve when I prefer to smash forehands all the live long day.)
“…is impossible to mimic the complex layers of confluences that he is synthesizing…”
Exactly why should anyone read something like this and NOT think “What gobbledygook.” I hate to be all pragmatic, but there is no such thing as “synthesizing confluences” except in the brains of the truly fevered. But, of course, explanation by subjective gobbledygook is what you get when the object of discussion is as semiotically empty as much of contemporary art is.
March 8th, 2010 | 2:08 pm
Catch Fujimura, Etsuro Sotoo and Fr. Thierry DE ROUCY, Founder of Heart’s Home, in a discussion of Art and the Religious Sense tonight at the American Bible Society in NYC. I don’t think anyone who goes to that will be able to say that Fujimura is “fevered” as is meant by Rich Horton. Here is a link to tonights discussion: http://www.crossroadsculturalcenter.org/events/2010/3/8/the-religious-sense-and-art.html
March 8th, 2010 | 3:14 pm
[...] For those of us who can’t see the art for the trees By Rusty Joe Carter tells us, “No, Your Kid Can’t Paint Like Jackson Pollock”. [...]
March 8th, 2010 | 4:32 pm
I think there is another way people mean the phrase “My kid could do that” because, in a very real way, kids DO that all the time. I think of the article in Smithsonian that pointed out that Pollock’s “Mural” was basically an excuse for hiding his signature in plain sight. It is this “Hey! Look at me!” aspect of contemporary art that people are identifying as being child like, if not childish. The difference is when a child does it it can be excused as the faltering steps of the inexperienced. When an adult artist does it, well, it can come across as little more than a narcissistic look at their favorite subject, themselves. In Pollock’s case he was simply trying to make a name for himself, literally.
March 8th, 2010 | 4:43 pm
“lying eyes” test here,
http://www.illusion-optical.com/Optical-Illusions/LineArrows.php
A quick retort to the ‘my kid could do that’ is the famous Columbus’s famous egg challeng: How do you make an egg stand on end? Like this,
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/22500/22500-h/images/columbus_egg.jpg
Oh, anybody could have done that! Yes? But they didn’t…
‘kim luisi’, the willfully, proudly obtuse can only be cured by themselves, but let’s give the ‘Rich Hortons’ a chance, for form’s sake.
‘Rich Horton’, let’s find out what a confluence is, OK?
http://www.thefreedictionary.com/confluence
The definition, “a place where things merge or flow together” is pretty easy to understand.
Now let’s find out what synthesize means,
http://www.thefreedictionary.com/synthesize
The definition, “To combine so as to form a new, complex product”, is probably the best one for you to work with. Got it yet?
Now, what are those “streams” in Jasper Johns’s art that meet at various confluences? (It’s ok to peek back at the definitions!)
Answer:
1. The wax, mixed with pigments (pigments are colors that artists use!) that Mr. Johns uses as his special kind of paint. It oozes and flows, together and apart, and it’s really hard to control, like, oh gosh, your feelings about some of those contemporary artists!
2. The “concepts, culture, the zeitgeist of his day”.
Do you know that word, ‘zeitgeist’, ‘Rich Horton’? It’s a word from the German and it means ‘spirit of the times’, which is what most everybody is thinking and feeling about life in general at a certain point in time, like right now, 2010, or a while ago, like 1967.
‘Rich Horton’, if your teacher gave you an assignment to make one picture about everything you’ve been thinking and feeling in the last year, about yourself, the economy, your friends, God, our President and Congress, people in other countries, what would you put in it? You can see right away it would take a whole lot of thinking and figuring out, wouldn’t it? How about if you didn’t even have to make a picture, you just had to write it all in 1000 words, that’s hard enough! So you can imagine that Mr. Johns works very hard, very long hours to make his famous pictures, that so many people think are very, very good.
Gee, so in addition to the special, beautiful shapes and lines he makes with his colored, melted wax, Mr. Johns uses that wax–his special paint!–to make pictures of the life all around him, not just where he lived, but what he heard and saw and other people heard and saw and thought and felt about all the things going on in the world, to them, their friends and, gosh millions of other people, famous and ordinary. He shows what he thinks their relationships and influence on one another are. He brings them all together, wax, color, shapes, pictures, stories, feelings and ideas in one picture! What’s the second word we just learned? He synthesizes them! Wow! Isn’t that neat? It’s what artists have been doing almost always, almost everywhere, ever since the first artists!
‘Rich Horton’, you listen to ‘kim luisi’ and go see Mr. Fujimora. Tell him exactly what you think! I’ve seen him before and he’s a really nice, thoughtful, modest man, his response might give a big surprise!
March 8th, 2010 | 7:51 pm
Actually, my field is political philosophy, which has its own tradition of using nonsense terms to mask a lack of meaning (eg. “scientific Marxism,” “politics of difference”, “eternal recurrence”), so my resistence to “persuasion by subjective enthusiasm” is higher than most.
Actually, this all reminds me of the best defense of contemporary art I’ve read, Ortega y Gasset’s essay “The Dehumanization of Art.” Being Ortega, it is of course, a defense of elite privilege against the pernicious, democratic, mediocritizing influence of the masses. For Ortega, when the masses have shown the ability to recognize a beautiful painting, a stirring or lovely melody, a sonorous poem, etc., the only way for the elite to singal their non-mass status is to champion that which isn’t beautiful, stirring or sonorous. Art, in such a view, has a fundamentally political function. It is part of how an aristocracy identifies and defines itself.
Granted, when Ortega was writing he probably had in mind Debussy using discordant or atonal moments for effect in a composition, or the distortions of a cubist painting, but if art is going to be defined by its political/social function, well, then there is no distinction to be made between a Pollock painting or a “sculpture” of a crucifix submerged in urine or a “painting” of the Madonna using the medium of manure. The goal has been achieved, i.e. defining the elite who supposedly find artistic meaning in such material in opposition to the masses who do not.
Contemporary art is built almost entirely along Ortegean lines these days, and as a result it is profoundly alienating. It is sometimes amusing to see the aristocratic qualities of the champions of contemporary art clashing with their egalitarian impulses. They know that most people do not care for it (be “it” atonal music or abstract art or what have you), but the best response they can offer is “People would like it if only they were exposed to it, or weren’t so stupid.” Which is of course impossible, as its raison d’etre is to be disliked.
March 8th, 2010 | 8:41 pm
Just happened to be reading Santayana today on the subject of art: “Nothing is really so poor as art that is interested in itself and not in its subject”, and “there is nothing which so quickly discredits itself as empty rhetoric and dialectic, or poetry that wanders in dim and private worlds”.
March 8th, 2010 | 8:50 pm
Rich, I agree about the dangers of the politicization of art, which in the way it tends to locate the value of art in the intention of the artist, is often a Gnosticized rejection of art’s value in itself.
I would just note that Fujimura does, in fact, say that Pollock’s work has value in itself. He calls attention to the intricately crafted quality of the work itself which denigrators (who are often agenda-driven themselves) often overlook. Whether that judgment is accurate, I lack the credibility to say.
March 8th, 2010 | 10:46 pm
Some of those big Pollocks can be fun to look at. But if I were to view a Pollock that was painted on an off day when he wasn’t well-synthesizing his confluences, I’m not sure I’d be able to tell.
People often like non-objective art for purer reasons than Rich gives. (I wish to add to his excellent point, not contradict it.) It liberates their sense of the possible and gives them a feeling of adventure–in a portable sort of way that narrative content would limit. Many folks were genuinely thrilled to see Christo’s “Gates” in Central Park. It wasn’t just the desire to be cultural insiders. Such reasons will often be highly sentimental, reading into the work good thoughts about peace, happiness and brotherhood. An artist has to love that–it’s so very sweet.
My problem with high modernism is that it required more traditional modes of practice to die in order to inherit the house.
March 9th, 2010 | 12:59 am
T.B.: I am reminded of the pranksters who in the 1980′s “defaced” Richard Serra’s sculpture “Twain” in St. Louis. If you haven’t seen “Twain” it is a rather austere series of large rectangular black metal plates. Our fun loving vandals attached large white spots on them, turning them into dominoes. The powers that be were not amused. Now, the question becomes, was this an example of people participating in the art, or an example of people criticizing it? Given the trivial (or frivolous) object the sculpture was reduced to, I find it hard not to think the latter.
Now, as to what might be called the “open work of art,” a work of art that is “completed” (so to speak) by the viewer/reader/listener (I’m thinking Umberto Eco here), I have to think that must also result in an alienating experience. After all, the way a work will be completed will vary with the mindset every individual brings to it, each distinct and unconnected to every other way the work is completed. My criticism of such an idea is not to enforce a single “approved” interpretation of any work of art, but to point out that a work that allows for an infinite number of meanings must as a result be meaningless.
(I think that may also address the point raised by du Garbandier, though looked at from the other extreme.)
March 9th, 2010 | 8:59 am
Rich, my tongue-in-cheek appreciation for open interpretation was maybe left too open to interpretation. I admire the good nature of the viewers, but not necessarily the manipulation of it.
I don’t see how anyone could deny the many fine (early) achievements of Modernism, but the social tactics, the awful tactics that intensified in the following generations (in inverse proportion to quality), led to the wasteland that is the arts today.
March 9th, 2010 | 9:16 am
Not only did I have the pleasure of attending a discussion by Etsuro Sotoo and Makoto Fujimura last night, but I also had the very great honor of interviewing each of them. Neither artist can be accused of being elitist. In fact, one of Fujimura’s goals is to bring art to the “average joe” by educating him on how to appreciate art and how everyone can appreciate art. Fujimura, like Sotoo, has as goal of art the appreciation of true Beauty; that is, ultimately, an encounter with God. This is very unlike postmodern art today.
Sorry if this post seems to not make much sense…got home late the last few nights.
March 9th, 2010 | 10:02 am
During pre-Kindergarten, my son had a field trip to the National Gallery East Wing, primarily to see “Lavender Mist” by Jackson Pollock. I was a parent chaperone for the trip, another mother was a docent there and explained the work, and the kids were really transfixed by this huge painting. I will never forget one of the little coming up to me and exclaiming “He THREW the paint!” Upon return, they (as a group) did a copy of it, including the tiny orange speck. Theirs was smaller, but it was a pretty uncanny copy, which was subsequently auctioned off at the school scholarship auction. I am not saying this means 4 and 5 year olds could paint like Jackson Pollock, but had the painting under study been “Watson and the Shark” the exercise would not have been so successful.
Links
Blogs
Find Us
Contact