art
Bunshaft, Hirshorn, Washington DC Lori Gordon
12:25 pm
DC’s Hirshorn museum recently released plans to create a new meeting space that fills its courtyard and mushrooms above the roof. What’s fascinating about this is that it’s a balloon. Literally. A big blue one. To be blown up in May and October of each year to provide a temporary space for concerts, performing arts, and films. The New York Times loves the idea, the Washington Post is iffy. DC is often set on edge by these kinds of things (remember how the Corcoran trashed plans for an ultra-modern Frank Ghery addition a few years ago?). “What will the tourists think?” The Washington Post sums up their worries:
…if a precedent is established to build temporary structures so as to have greater aesthetic freedom (and less bureaucratic interference), then they may well proliferate, with further impact on the look and design of the city.
I suppose DC has a smaller footprint and a more consistent architectural style (Neo-classical/Beaux-Arts) than many other cities, but a little spice would liven it up. Though they’ve already tried “spice” with the Hirshorn’s architecture — the building is often called “Bunshaft’s oversize toilet seat”. Apparently they are still acclimating to Gordon Bunshaft’s 1974-designed building.
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Art and Politics
Andre Lhote, artist, Cubism Lori Gordon
2:14 am
La Danse au bar (Gypsy Bar), Andre Lhote
One of the novelist-bloggers that I follow, Christina Baker Kline, posted a quote by Andre Lhote (1923) that to me gets at the heart of writing (because that’s the craft, or some would argue art, that I know best):
The essence of art is sensitivity. How does one retain the freshness of sensitivity? Answer: By working without worry, freely. How does one work freely? By possessing a technique which permits one to work spontaneously: it is necessary, therefore, to possess the elements of this technique. Meditation in front of the works of the masters puts one in possession of the eternal rules of art. Once these rules are learned there is nothing left but to know how to apply them to one’s own temperament.
Funny how a French sculptor and painter who worked in modernist styles including Fauvism and Cubism and was part of a group of revolutionaries including Marcel Duchamp, Francis Picabia and Jacques Villon, and writers somehow have the same world view. Bridging art and writing… It just shows that concepts and the words to describe those concepts are timeless…
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art
Lori Gordon
9:32 am
Last week I was on business travel to DC to check in with colleagues and meet with clients. It essentially entailed one long strategy meeting where two people fell asleep, and lots of planes, trains, and automobiles.
As this time required sitting in one long strategy meeting, I jumped out of my seat at the breaks to explore. Usually I walk the halls to check out the corporate art (because other than bland carpet, there is really nothing else to stare at), and sometimes I walk away from some huge installation or work on paper thinking wow, that was pretty off-the-wall/odd/bizarrely-chosen. WHY did they choose that particular piece?
But worse, is when there’s NO art. And this was such a case.
I was in a slick, new, fabulously designed, glossy-floored government building in Arlington, and one would expect there was art. Some sort of art. Something. Anything. But along those long, sinuous halls was… nothing! Nada! A few miles away, my company’s headquarters has tons of art, seemingly in every nook and cranny, the cafeteria, outside each elevator – commissioned art, employee art (including the winners of photography contests that are extremely competitive), and just great random pieces that provide that visual pickup you need during the day.
Some research on corporate art shows that the government may not be the number one consumer of art:
“We define a corporate art client in our field mainly as a hospitality account” explains Tony Barrett, director of sales for Bentley Publishing Group in Walnut Creek, CA. “That is, someone who supplies art to hotels, vacation properties, restaurants, corporate offices and healthcare facilities.” These are all venues that are in constant need of artwork, often with rotating collections that change several times a year.”
So I suppose that makes sense. I guess. Restaurants, hotels want to create a mood, a synergy, a personal connection with the client that will lure them back. Does the government have no similar incentive?
So on this trip I was disappointed. Perhaps the architecture was enough, because it was a beautiful building (er, compound, as every government building is now a sprawling monolith, even in downtown Arlington). Next time I’ll have to ask the taxi to weave through downtown and stop off at the Philips gallery (Man Ray is there now!). Or National Geographic headquarters (the Terra Cotta Warriors are there now!).
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On Literature and art
concept, Istanbul, museum, Orhan Pamuk, Turkey, write Lori Gordon
10:32 am
One of my favorite authors, Orhan Pamuk, has a new book hot off the presses The Museum of Innocence. To complement the book, he is opening a museum. I’m not positive, but this seems the first time such a thing has been done. Here’s a description from the UK’s Guardian:
The Museum of Innocence… contains a locator map for his museum, and a free entrance ticket. The actual museum, in an Ottoman-style house along a stretch of antique shops in hilly Cukurcuma, will hold Istanbul ephemera that Pamuk gathered for inspiration while writing his Proustian … epic of lost love. … He told me his “museum of the everyday”, which holds everything from ferry tickets and women’s hair clips to a quince grinder, would have a display for each of the novel’s 83 chapters.’
Pamuk describes the relationship of the museum and novel: “The museum is not an illustration of the novel and the novel is not an explanation of the museum. They are two representations of one single story perhaps.”
Pamuk’s other literary ventures have been laced with art, including My Name Is Red, which details the murder of a miniaturist painter in the Ottoman Empire. And I thought his breathtaking descriptions of Istanbul in his memoir Istanbul (which details his life growing up in the Turkish city) were poetic and extremely visual, like landscapes launching off of the pages into your lap. Also, according to the New York Review of Books, “As a young man, his great hope was to become a painter, and he started, he notes wryly, by producing imitations of Monet and Sisley and Pissarro…” It seems Pamuk turned from copying the masters to absorbing himself in the awe of everyday people and life and painted a verbal canvas.
I’m thinking Turkey might be the country we indulge ourselves in next summer, and if so, this is one museum I’m not going to miss!
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art
Gauguin, recession Lori Gordon
10:29 pm
There is the Temple (Parahi te marae), 1892
I visited the Gauguin exhibit at the Cleveland Museum of Art today, and in this whirlwind trip through the exhibit (every one of our family members seemed to be on a very different schedule, needing to be three places at once), I was able to latch on to bits and pieces of the audio tour. I was struck by how one’s profession can really turn on a dime, just as Gauguin’s did. Apparently, it wasn’t until 1882, after a stock market crash and recession rendered Gauguin without a job as a broker, that Gauguin decided to abandon the business world to pursue life as an artist full-time.
I wonder, after this recent stock market downturn (which has, though, over the last few months climbed up nicely), how many people in the finance industry turned from their jobs to embrace their inner artiste? I know that when the going gets tough for me at work, I get out my paints and just paint away. It’s REALLY bad art that appears on my canvas. Really. No, really, it is. But that’s okay. It’s therapeutic, and somehow just fleshing out whatever pops into my head (sort of as a physical manifestation of my inner thoughts) gets me over the hump.
Perhaps the big banks and people on the Street should have invested in an easel, modeling clay, or signed up for an Intro to Glassblowing class.
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art
Lori Gordon
6:34 am
Hungarian National Gallery, 2009
Sometimes when I research ideas to write about in this blog, I’m overwhelmed by the interesting thoughts, analyses, and nuggets of light I find. Art bloggers can launch such deep thoughts! Below are a few I found this morning that I’d love to explore more fully. Good stuff. (I’m also inspired by random travel pics, like that to the left.)
- From Art 21: In a recent interview in the New Yorker, artist-of-the-moment Urs Fischer said something about how art and memory work together… something about the experience of art not being confined to the present-tense experience of being in a gallery, looking at a thing. Part of art’s test is in its retention in the mind, how it returns and why.
- From Artworld Salon: Stefan Leijnen and Liane Gabora, researchers at the University of British Columbia, Canada, point out that too much creativity may not be a good thing. Their argument boils down to this: Innovation–creativity–is necessary to introduce new ideas. But for any innovation to take root, it must also be copied. Society depends not just on creators but also on followers. If everyone invented and no one imitated, we wouldn’t advance through innovation.
- From the Guardian: The new Vincent van Gogh – The Letters: The Complete Illustrated and Annotated Edition reminds us [that] his ambition as a painter depended on words to give it focus and direction. Writing in 1888 to Theo from Arles, he says: “I saw a magnificent and very strange effect this evening. A very large boat laden with coal on the Rhône, moored at the quay. Seen from above it was all glistening and wet from a shower; the water was a white yellow and clouded pearl-grey, the sky lilac and an orange strip in the west, the town violet. On the boat, small workmen, blue and dirty white, were coming and going. Carrying the cargo ashore. It was pure Hokusai. It was too late to do it, but one day, when this coal-boat comes back, it’ll have to be tackled.” The language here is more than just the counterpart to a picture. It is actually a step in the process towards the picture. It’s a different kind of proof of Van Gogh’s practicality – and of the way that practicality is often linked to something like exhilaration.
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art
artist, exhibition, France, Gauguin, yellow Lori Gordon
9:57 pm
I felt very cultural this weekend: on Sunday I went to see the symphony AND spent time at the Gauguin exhibit at the Cleveland Museum of Art. And I put the finishing touches on my rockin’ gingerbread house entry for the Cleveland Botanical Garden’s annual gingerbread show (which is actually a fantastical Museum of Contemporary Art made out of gingerbread). Whew!
This was my second trip to see the Gauguin show (first take I wrote about here), and I’m sure I’ll go back several more times before it leaves in January. But my impressions (Take II) were more complex (delightedly!) than the first round.
I’m not sure what other artists are so “self reflecting” — that is, in newer paintings, they physically paint in/allude to previous works — but Gauguin surely is a master. His motifs are bathers, pitchers, the color yellow, the white Brittany hats. I mentioned this in my previous blog, but it was even more apparent to me at Take II.
Gaugin’s use of yellow, particularly in his later years in Tahiti, is prolific. Perhaps it started in Arles with his Yellow House days with van Gogh and transcended time. The show’s catalog states that at first Gauguin claimed credit for van Gogh’s adoption of yellow as a favorite color. But ultimately the opposite was true: Gauguin embraced yellow after being impressed by van Gogh’s yellow-on-yellow paintings of sunflowers. And Gauguin used canary yellow paper for a series of zincographs (medium where an artist draws directly on a metal plate with a black crayon) that chronicled Gauguin’s early career and travels to Martinique, Brittany, and Arles and reiterated his motifs. (Interestingly, the CMA owns a complete set of the zincographs, which is rare, because Gauguin only made an edition of 30.) The zincographs were a watershed in Gaugin’s work: the motifs are resemblant of Claude Monet’s grainstacks and Jasper Johns’ stenciled number paintings.
I also noticed that Gaugin has a tendency to paint mid-pose — he captures a boy fixing his shoe, and blossoms just beggining to bud (rather than in full glory). I was struck by his interest in the non-interesting stages of hum drum daily life. But capturing these humdrum moments makes the viewer stop, go back, and look again. It’s inspiring that the humdrum can, in fact, be interesting.
And he disdained pointilism!
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Art and Politics
exhibition, France, Gauguin, museum Lori Gordon
9:01 am
The Cleveland Museum of Art is hosting “Gauguin: Paris 1889″, featuring a recreation of the “radical independent exhibition that Gauguin organized (and shamelessly self-promoted) on the grounds of the 1889 Exposition Universelle in Paris”.
It was unbelievable.
The exhibition is only exhibiting in two places — Cleveland and Amsterdam – hence the CMA’s insanely awesome marketing: “The man shunned civilization. (So it’s only appropriate that he’s making just one US stop.)”.
What struck me about this exhibit is Gauguin’s sensitivity to the people he saw and painted, much moreso than Van Gogh (and they lived in Arles together, painting for several months). Although I think that Van Gogh’s portraits and subjects are richer, more intense, electrifying, I think that Gauguin had a better way conveying people and their moods, and well, the reality of their lives. In this exhibition, the innocense and movement in his subjects (specifically his primary subject matters in this exhibition, which were the Breton girls dancing and the woman with red hair in the waves) is arresting, and I have thought about these anonymous people over and over again since I saw the exhibit last weekend. And so they are striking in a different way than Van Gogh’s studies.
In this exhibit, Gauguin’s oils, chalks, sculptures, and wood carvings all run central to two themes: his life in Brittany and life in Tahiti. And he keeps dabbing a brilliant red/orange to make a tiny splash on each composition (a single carnation on each of the Brittony girls ‘dresses; the vibrant red hair on the girl in the waves). We walk through daily life in Brittany — largely seen through children’s eyes, and the series aptly named “Voipini Suite: Joys of Brittany” – but we also see very deep, intellectual themes running through, particularly with the violent green waves and the woman thrust in them. Her body takes up the entire picture, so that the viewer feels almost caught up in the waves with her. In the end, when he was in Tahiti, he created a self-portrait with his face very dark (disturbance, insecurity), and in far in the background, off to the sides, are a small white cloth (indicating the white Brittany hats of the women and children there) and a red swath of paint (indicating the woman’s vibrant red hair). In this exhibition, Gauguin came full circle with his themes and his work.
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Art and Politics
Lori Gordon
10:25 pm
“The Map as Art,” a new book edited by Katharine Harmon from Princeton Architectural Press, describes how artists draw on the rich landscape of maps for inspiration. Since I have a degree in Urban Geography, this is an especially interesting topic for me (though my career didn’t exactly follow that path!). While I haven’t read this book, just the reviews and descriptions of it prompt lots of thoughts.
First, the overview:
In a series of chapters—Conflict and Sorrow, Global Reckoning, Personal Terrain, Inner Visions, etc.—the book shows how artists use the map as a tool to investigate identity, political allegiance, economy, the environment. The publisher has a great discussion of why artists would choose maps as inspiration:
[Maps] lead to different destinations: places turned upside down or inside out, territories riddled with marks understood only by their maker, realms connected more to the interior mind than to the exterior world. These are the places of artists’ maps, that happy combination of information and illusion that flourishes in basement studios and downtown galleries alike.
In my classes at the University of Maryland, we studied digital cartography, primarily creating remote sensing images. These were comprised of heat sensitive coloration showing variation in weather patterns, land use, and population. I suppose I struggle with this type of cartography as being art because these images are automatically generated; I wasn’t placing broad swaths of green or blue where I was inclined to do so. The computers are in charge. However, I think that The Map As Art would argue that the value of this map to the artist is that it offers new ranges of color or a means of conceptually interpreting a physical object (which is what artists often do).
Above is an image of another way that artists can use maps: by literally cutting them up to craft a work on paper. From Katharine Harmon, the book’s editor: “[In Fiona's Wave, 2005] Matthew Cusick creates outsized collaged paintings from fragments of atlases and school geography books published between 1872 and 1945, a time of much mapping and remapping.”
It’s interesting that just as cartographers try to capture movement and change of a culture, environment, and even politics, this seems to be the very thesis of many artists as well.
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Art and Politics
Lori Gordon
2:53 pm
Oil, Edward Burtynsky
Looking at a photograph of thousands of tires doesn’t really compel me to think hard and stare long at the composition, the light, the perspective. Until I read the title. “OIL”. Now it grabs me emotionally because it makes a political/social/environmental statement. Interesting how context (sometimes positioned by words) can change our appreciation of something.
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Art and Politics
concept, distortion, Kandinsky, Modigliani, Russia Lori Gordon
4:20 am
Elongation, distorted hands, feet, necks. This is the single-most characteristic that I look for and admire in works. If it’s stretched, pressed, enlarged, or diminished beyond its normal state, I love it. And for this, I cannot get enough of Modigliani.
Those necks! Those eyes!
Less obvious is the use of elongation in Caravaggio’s The Supper at Emmaus. The elongated right hand of the disciple sitting at the table draws the viewer in to the painting.
And distortion can portray a sense of the grotesque, the humor, the abstraction of a figure or scene. I especially like the abstraction in Eastern European art, particularly Russian art, like Kandinsky, which inspired some of those in the surrealist movement.
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art
Lori Gordon
12:50 pm
On my way out of the French embassy in DC a few weeks ago (I took part in an annual embassy tour), I picked up “France magazine No. 90″ from a gorgeous ($$$) breakfront in the marbled lobby. Just one of many marketing tools in Washington, one would think that a magazine such as this would focus on a country’s economic entrees. But no this one. The French embassy’s magazine focuses on “the best of culture, travel, and art de vivre.”
But now that I think about this, how better to push your economy by playing the hand that you are dealt… and France has been blessed with great art and great beauty over the centuries (rather than technical or commercial innovation). This is, after all, how everyone views France, so I agree, French embassy, show it off to the nth degree!
The magazine’s feature articles include:
- Arles Goes Gehry
- The Art of Christian Boltanski
- Artisanal Beer
Fabulous. The graphics-infused magazine is a tromp through high-end stores in Paris, all aflurry with radical new designs in furniture. And exposes on small towns in France feature, guess what? The art. This tiny town has X-number of theaters, X-number of galleries, X-number of artists-in-residence. And the article on artisanal beers — who would think art would come into play with beer? — is complete with an Art Nouveau poster of a drinking hall by Alphonse Mucha, created in 1897. The article on the tiny town of Arles makes the case that it could become the next Bilbao as Frank Gehry is “sketching its future.”
French embassy, I’m sold! I’m on the first plane to Arles. Or pretty much to ANY tiny town in France, for that matter, as I would surely be surrounded by art.
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Art and Politics
Lori Gordon
8:13 pm
Slate has a fabulous article out “Mona Linda? Nah. How About Mona Lisa?” that discusses the origins of an artwork’s name. Who decides what to call an old painting?
The article reveals that until the 17th century, artists rarely chose names for their works, choosing instead general, non-specific names like “Profile of a Young Woman”.
It’s a wonder how these pieces were referenced and recognized with 100% veracity, especially when there were so many drawings or sketches made prior to the actual oil, that were also sold across the market?
What was most fascinating to me, however, is that Dutchman Johannes Vermeer, one of the most celebrated artists of all time (and who has recently had a resurgence with a few of his works traveling in the US, as well as the bestseller by Tracy Chevalier a few years ago “The Girl With the Pearl Earring”) also blazed another trail by being one of the first artists to bestow a conceptual title on one of his works:
Vermeer painted a self-portrait called The Art of Painting. He never sold the piece, keeping it in his home until his death in 1675. Historians believe Vermeer himself named the work because his widow identified it by the moniker very shortly after his death.
Also how many names can the ”Mona Lisa” have? Perhaps squabbling art historians all wanted to lay a claim to history with a new name.
16th-century art historian Giorgio Vasari, considered by many to be the first art historian, is the man who identified the sitter for Leonardo’s most famous painting as Florentine aristocrat Lisa del Giocondo. This hypothesis gave rise to the popular name Mona Lisa in England and the United States. Many French and Italian critics, however, refer to the work as La Joconde or La Gioconda, respectively, referring to the sitter’s family name. (Interestingly, these phrases translate loosely into English as “the one who smiles.”) Prior to Vasari, the painting had been called A Certain Florentine Lady or A Courtesan in a Gauze Veil.
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Art and Politics
Art/Art History, concept, construction Lori Gordon
6:56 am
The evolution of how art is produced (the conception and construction) usually tells of a stark difference between the paleolithic age and today. Art in the paleolithic age was perhaps relegated to those with free time on their hands, which was hard to come by, given the hard lifestyle of hunting and gathering. And given this time crunch, there wasn’t much time to play with ideas, to think about new or inventive ways to conceive and produce art. This is perhaps the polar opposite of today’s art. I would agree with this New York Times article that ”What is important today is not technical skill, but skill in playing inventively with ideas.”
For example, Damien Hirst’s “Medicine Cabinet” installations are a twist on an artistic representation of a common, everyday thing. He didn’t sit down with barbed wire and a soldering mask and get to work. His “people” do that. It’s his mind and inventiveness that are the commodities.
Now, it’s true that the majority of artists don’t have minions to go about crafting some visionary’s dreams. But, in some cases, so goes the current state of conceptual art.
So how long has the idea of conceptual art been around? Can we find it in the paleolithic age? Maybe in a very primitive way the seeds of conceptual art were starting even back then.
Researchers looking at stone age tools have declared that some – hand axes, for instance — were not used solely for the act of hunting and gathering; that they were prized as art objects to be admired. For example, hand axes had a high rate of manufacture (above what they’d need to butcher animals), often have no signs of wear, some were too big for use, and some were decorated with “expensive” materials and exquisite workmanship.
Someone had to conceive the idea that it was important for these fancy hand axes to be made and that they would then be admired by perhaps a big group of people, so despite their limited resources, they still chose to create art for themselves. Much of it was probably done for ritualistic purposes, but even so, the concept of reinventing something useful for aesthetics was in play even in the stone age, even for “primitive” man.
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Art and Politics and art
concept, modern, sculpture, traditional Lori Gordon
8:19 pm
A recent article by Edward Sozanski, art critic for the Philadelphia Inquirer, caught my attention because it firmly dissects new categories of art from old. Digital art from portraiture, etc. In “The Satisfactions of ‘Slow’ Material Art” he first talks about the “old” type of art, or what he calls “material art”:
Material art can be two- or three-dimensional, although … its allure is strongest with media that are worked with the hands or with tools.
And then he correlates “material art” with “slow art”:
[Material arts] are splendid examples of what I like to call “slow art,” not only because they take time to make, but also because they require time to absorb and understand. The longer one looks – and this process can involve years, as it has for me – the more one is able to appreciate both the formal ingenuity and seductiveness of the compositions and the perceptual dualities they generate.
He then refers to ceramicist William Daley’s opening talk at his exhibition of ceramic vessels where he asked people to do something with his pieces that could not be done with newer media.
He invited people to touch and caress his pieces, normally strictly verboten in museums and galleries. What better way to connect with the material than to stroke its surface?
However, I do have a slight rub with this. He is espousing more traditional art forms, however, he breaks traditional norms of the museum by allowing people to touch his pieces which is “normally strictly verboten”. Hmm. We need to find peace between the warring new and old paradigms.
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art
architectural, concept, write Lori Gordon
5:32 am
On the group-hosted writing blog Murderati, Toni McGee Causey has written a MUST READ article “Positive and Negative Spaces” that absolutely knocked my socks off (and, judging by the comments at the end of the blog, much of the blogging world’s too). She refers to a book 101 Things I Learned in Architecture School recommended by literary agent Janet Reid, and says that
“the entire book… has as much to do with writing and living as it does architecture. And I hadn’t expected to have a startling revelation about my own life.”
In her critique, Toni posits that we dwell in positive spaces (think about your house where you dwell and do all of your cooking, living, spend most of your time) and and move through negative spaces (a street intersection that facilitates the quick itinerant movement of people).
And from there, she rocks out the article, comparing and contrasting life in negative and positive space. And wow, it’s an incredibly interesting ride. Here’s one (ok, three) snippets that I’ll leave you with:
When I thought about [positive and negative space] in relation to writing, I had a twofold appreciation for the term. First off, just the physical aspect of the page—the words and paragraphs create positive space and the white space around it is the negative space. If you pick up any manuscript and it’s filled with long, dense paragraph after paragraph, it feels cluttered and heavy, weighted and overwrought, even before you’ve read a single word. A reader brings with her the expectation of balance, and you need white space to achieve that balance. Too much white space, though, feels bereft of weight, of value, of deeper meaning, and so it’s the writer’s job not only to craft the words, but to pay attention to the space those words take up on the page.
Positive spaces are almost always preferred by people for lingering and social interaction. Negative spaces tend to promote movement rather than dwelling in place.
I’ve had people hand me novels in the past for critique and they spend a couple of chapters (or more) “building the world” – telling the reading about the political and economic machinations which have brought this world into being, into the state we find it in at this moment in time. It’s a huge mistake to do this. For one thing, the story hasn’t started yet until the characters are moving through that world and experience conflict within it. For another, the writer isn’t trusting the reader to extrapolate the positive and negative spaces from a select few examples.
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art
literary fiction, verbal, write Lori Gordon
7:18 am
Degrees of Freedom book reading
Last night I held a book reading of Degrees of Freedom at Visible Voice books in Tremont, Ohio. It was lots of fun, conversation ran the gamut (what’s the difference between creativity and craft? does one trump the other in terms of importance? how does applying musical techniques to your writing improve it? can skills or techniques learned in different arts — music, performance art, architecture — transfer?)
Recently, on literary agent Rachel Gardner’s blog, Heather Goodman wrote an excellent post “Finding Your Voice” on how to utilize musical techniques to improve writing.
As a musician, understanding the idea of voice in writing came to me via music. Just as composers and performers have unique sounds, so do writers. Faulkner favored wordy sentences, intricate descriptions, and heady emotions while Hemingway preferred a stark style. You have a favorite author for a reason. The way she unfolds a story and character resonates with you. This goes beyond conquering the rules of the craft–using active verbs, avoiding words like just and immediately, and showing instead of telling. Voice is one of the hardest things to develop as a writer, but it’s also the most important aspect. It makes the story uniquely yours.
She also provides several techniques to strengthen her musical composition that she transferred to her writing.
1. Mimic other authors. In composition classes, we wrote Baroque counterpoint and fugue, Classical sonata forms, and Debussy-like floating chords. The intention wasn’t to be Bach, Beethoven, or Brahms but to play with different forms and styles in order to understand them. Then we gave them our own twist.
2. Write stream of consciousness. In one of my composition classes, I wrote what seemed to me too sentimental. But the instructor recognized something with its lyrical, idyllic, and playful qualities that reflected my style.
These techniques can, of course, be applied to performance art, visual arts, etc. AND they are fun!
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Art history and art
Brazil, contemporary, cultural, modern, Mondrian, Rio de Janeiro Lori Gordon
9:02 am
Metaesquema No. 237
When we learned that Rio d Janeiro had edged out Chicago and others for the title of host of the 2016 summer olympics, I flew straight to the computer (who am I kidding, I read the press release on the computer; I’m always ON the computer) and looked up the museums central to Brazil’s cultural climate.
What I found was a world that I’ve only marginally explored. I’m guilty of looking internally to US-focused art and artists, and to Western Europe as well. But South America and Latin America often get the short end of the stick. From Mexico, we have Diego Rivera and his muse and probably better half, Frieda, and others. But what other master artists are lurking behind their shadows, just to the south?
Brazil’s contemporary arts scene is alive, and it’s traveling all over the globe. I researched one Brazilian artist just to get a taste. Hélio Oiticica is showing atMuseum of Modern Art, LACMA, Houston’s Museum of Fine Arts, and overseas at Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, and in Zurich at the Daros Exhibitions. He was an essential part of the geometric abstraction period between 1930s and the 1970s in Buenos Aires, São Paulo, and Rio de Janeiro. His Metaesquemas series (shown above) is composed of squares and rectangles, showing influences of Piet Mondrian.
An exhibition at the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona provided a great overview of his life and outlook:
Born in Rio de Janeiro in 1937, Oiticica began to study art in his home city where he formed links with Lygia Clark and Lygia Pape’s Neo-concrete Group and participated in the Frente Group. From the outset, his work was geared towards condemning the living conditions and the political situation affecting Brazil… Oiticica posited that for artistic production to be ethical, it must be activated by its audience. In the late sixties and early seventies, Oiticica began creating architectural environments he called Penetrables and tent/cape/banner works he named Parangolés. Both the Penetrables and Parangolés were made to be inhabited, examined, worn, even hidden in; they are environmental structures, experienced by the participant.
After receiving a Guggenheim Fellowship, Oiticica moved to New York where he lived from 1970 to 1978. He began to make films influenced by the cinema of Jack Smith and Andy Warhol and the popular culture of the United States. He undertook a series of projects under the umbrella title Quasi-Cinemas. Some of these were Super 8 films, but most of them were “projection-performances.” In 1973, as part of the Quasi-Cinemas, he made the series Block Experiments in Cosmococa, Program in Progress. The Cosmococas are composed of slide projections, environments, soundtracks, and instructions.
Hélio Oiticica died in Rio de Janeiro in 1980 aged 43.
http://www.artcyclopedia.com/nationalities/Brazilian.html
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art
Arles, artist, book, France, letters, Van Gogh, write Lori Gordon
7:04 am
Ahh. Starry Night will always be my favorite. And maybe the Yellow House too — both the painting and the book. If you haven’t read “The Yellow House” which is about Van Gogh’s and Gauguin’s nine months in Arles together, it’s an easy read and a gem!
But the “breaking” news is that Amsterdam’s Van Gogh Museum is out with a compendium of Van Gogh’s letters. Chock full of illuminating thoughts on his life, the letters are surely to entice Hollywood into a movie, right?
Shedding new light on the Arles painter:
In Lust for Life, Van Gogh is presented as writing his letters as a highly-strung personality, slapping his words onto paper in great emotion. This did happen, but only occasionally, usually when it involved a family row. In contrast, reading through the 2,180 pages of the new edition of the letters shows that the artist was highly focused. True, he was an obsessive in one sense, in his dedication to developing as an artist, but the letters are usually carefully (and sometimes beautifully) written, normally with a clear purpose in mind.
The Letters also reminds us that Van Gogh approached his painting in a similar fashion. He did not throw his paint on the canvas in a burst of emotion, but considered carefully the effects he was striving to achieve. This comes through clearly in the stream of comments that he made to his brother Theo and his artist friends, in describing the pictures he was completing.
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