Friday, September 26, 2008
No such thing
Two things:
Rothko installation at the Tate Gallery
and
My Valuable Hunting Knife
For some reason blogger wants this to be italicized. Please excuse the urgent-looking type.
My Valuable Hunting Knife is a song with a video by Guided by Voices. In it a number of things are held and displayed. They look like things that would have been hard to part with at one point. They could be things that people fought over. But at some point, such objects fall out of favor.
In the Rothko exhibit it's the opposite. Interpretation has fallen out of favor. There's a fatigue around the spiritual, ineffable artwork. Or maybe, rather, we're more game than ever to talk about things that once had no handles to latch onto. Radical art doesn't give indications about how to respond to it - it's just an experience. Talking about experience leads to questions about existence and that leads to mystery. Now, as a species, we've experienced mystery and Rothko is material stuff. We've had our hands on transient things, but physical constructions of pigment and canvas and wood and metal demand that we square with them as phsyical things that have duration. Maybe we've traded places with art and we're now able to notice how temporary we are; the fleeting nature of technology is an extension of us.
Sunday, September 21, 2008
Incomprehension
Sept 17 at UBC: Dieter Roelstraete discussed the 'thingness' of art as:
"an experience of incomprehension; the defeat of a one-dimensional understanding."
"...the promise of the frustration of desire when accompanied by the desire to know everything."
Dieter Roelstraete began by stating, as a philosopher, he is trained to mistrust things and even treat them with disdain. He declared himself a non-materialistic person. In a room full of art students I wonder if this set him apart. He also made a clear distinction between the use of the word thing and object. Object has its opposite: subject. But thing resists that evasive action. The talk proceeded to address a kind of anxiety in the air, evidenced by the standing room only turn-out, about information overload and a yearning for identification with the hand and what is made by hand. He mentioned critical nostalgia - a longing for contact with objects that have a soul. I wonder how this differs from animism. But I think what he's talking about is the sensation of experience I get when I go into certain pockets in Vancouver especially on Main Street where I see young people typing on typewriters and small, hole-in-the-wall art galleries showing fragile, unmounted drawings as if the last three decades didn't happen. It's not a Luddite stance it's a deadpan insistence on filling time with non-digitized activity. Basically, experiencing life.
The experience of painting - to experience a painting or encounter a painting is different from engaging in critical discourse on painting. Critical discourse on painting is its own activity. But how do we share the experience of art without the handles of being a trustee of art. What would it sound like to talk about painting such as John Brown's painting without referencing art?
I wonder this because there are thresholds that people pass through when they have impulses to make marks or write words that aren't addressed or directed at an audience - then at some point a decision to speak to an uncertain body like the artworld takes shape and the utterances become a kind of dialogue with citizens of a planet of art. Is there a change of citizenship that transpires when people become artists or art critics? Do we insist that difference be asserted when the question of art arises?
How do we inhabit the planet of suffering and mystery without leaving it and making distance or deflecting it with art?
I want to make some kind of film recording of John Brown's painting. I've known him as 'Jack' for about 28 years, since he was a student at University of Guelph. At that time he was showing figurative painting at Carmen Lamanna Gallery on Yonge Street in Toronto. I've followed his work somewhat closely because of interest in the work which has maintained a kind of separate relationship to our being friends.
Today we were talking about the fact that his paintings are viewed by some of his collectors as having a spiritual quality. It's a category that makes me feel like a crescendo has occurred and that discussion henceforth must be hushed. It almost seems as if the work somehow washed something away for the viewer. I'm dissatisfied with that idea because there still remains the work and its thingness. It is not in a transcendent state. It is planet earth. Wood, oil, material - a
sensed object and a result of physical stamina and physical process. But still I wonder why this aura of transcendence attaches to Jack's paintings. I get the sense that his paintings are suffering and yet steadfast. They seem to be enduring our time. And for me they are the patina of a thought process.
I wonder what a person who paints (or writes, etc) would be doing if they didn't know there was this avenue of activity. I don't like to use the word expression because to me it sounds like pumping milk without a baby. And the word create has a similar vulgarity to it. Things have always been here - there is nothing created but rather exchanged and transmogrified. Something that might have existed in another form has been transmogrified by actions and behaviour. Maybe it feels like something was brought to light that would have otherwise unsettled us in the dark.
"an experience of incomprehension; the defeat of a one-dimensional understanding."
"...the promise of the frustration of desire when accompanied by the desire to know everything."
Dieter Roelstraete began by stating, as a philosopher, he is trained to mistrust things and even treat them with disdain. He declared himself a non-materialistic person. In a room full of art students I wonder if this set him apart. He also made a clear distinction between the use of the word thing and object. Object has its opposite: subject. But thing resists that evasive action. The talk proceeded to address a kind of anxiety in the air, evidenced by the standing room only turn-out, about information overload and a yearning for identification with the hand and what is made by hand. He mentioned critical nostalgia - a longing for contact with objects that have a soul. I wonder how this differs from animism. But I think what he's talking about is the sensation of experience I get when I go into certain pockets in Vancouver especially on Main Street where I see young people typing on typewriters and small, hole-in-the-wall art galleries showing fragile, unmounted drawings as if the last three decades didn't happen. It's not a Luddite stance it's a deadpan insistence on filling time with non-digitized activity. Basically, experiencing life.
The experience of painting - to experience a painting or encounter a painting is different from engaging in critical discourse on painting. Critical discourse on painting is its own activity. But how do we share the experience of art without the handles of being a trustee of art. What would it sound like to talk about painting such as John Brown's painting without referencing art?
I wonder this because there are thresholds that people pass through when they have impulses to make marks or write words that aren't addressed or directed at an audience - then at some point a decision to speak to an uncertain body like the artworld takes shape and the utterances become a kind of dialogue with citizens of a planet of art. Is there a change of citizenship that transpires when people become artists or art critics? Do we insist that difference be asserted when the question of art arises?
How do we inhabit the planet of suffering and mystery without leaving it and making distance or deflecting it with art?
I want to make some kind of film recording of John Brown's painting. I've known him as 'Jack' for about 28 years, since he was a student at University of Guelph. At that time he was showing figurative painting at Carmen Lamanna Gallery on Yonge Street in Toronto. I've followed his work somewhat closely because of interest in the work which has maintained a kind of separate relationship to our being friends.
Today we were talking about the fact that his paintings are viewed by some of his collectors as having a spiritual quality. It's a category that makes me feel like a crescendo has occurred and that discussion henceforth must be hushed. It almost seems as if the work somehow washed something away for the viewer. I'm dissatisfied with that idea because there still remains the work and its thingness. It is not in a transcendent state. It is planet earth. Wood, oil, material - a
sensed object and a result of physical stamina and physical process. But still I wonder why this aura of transcendence attaches to Jack's paintings. I get the sense that his paintings are suffering and yet steadfast. They seem to be enduring our time. And for me they are the patina of a thought process.
I wonder what a person who paints (or writes, etc) would be doing if they didn't know there was this avenue of activity. I don't like to use the word expression because to me it sounds like pumping milk without a baby. And the word create has a similar vulgarity to it. Things have always been here - there is nothing created but rather exchanged and transmogrified. Something that might have existed in another form has been transmogrified by actions and behaviour. Maybe it feels like something was brought to light that would have otherwise unsettled us in the dark.
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