artamaze by Katherine Hilden

http://www.mcachicago.org/exhibitions/now/2011/273

How to Look at Minimalism

artamaze — Sun, 22 Jan 2012 04:22:55 +0000

When you walk into the minimalist show at the Museum of Contemporary Art and you find yourself looking at tiles on the floor, a pile of bricks, a huge piece of paper tacked to the wall with a black rectangle on it, a piece of iron with a tube leaning against it, a broken cabinet painted white, and so forth and you wonder what these things are trying to say to you.

In the movie “Tootsie” Dustin Hoffman is sitting at a bar. He’s in his get-up as a woman. A man sitting nearby stares at him. Hoffman reaches deep into his bass register and snarls, “waddayoulookinat?”

That’s what minimalist art is saying: What are you looking at?

When you are looking at Carl Andre’s thirty-six Zink and Lead tiles on the floor and you are asking yourself “what am I looking at,” your answer is “I’m looking at thirty six metal tiles.” Period.

When you are looking at Tony Conrad’s rectangle on that huge piece of paper and you can’t see anything inside the rectangle, you can step back and enjoy the rectangle. Period.

Richard Tuttle constructed an octagon in 1967 and stretched some purple cotton over it, calling the work “Purple Octagon.” The color has faded in these past three decades, but there it is, hung high on the gallery wall. What is it? It’s some wood with some cloth stretched over it.

There’s a piece in this show of such great value that it’s entirely encased in Plexiglas, the way the Mona Lisa is encased in bulletproof glass at the Louvre. This piece, by Pinky Palermo, is a long thin vertical rectangle with two colors, both ordinary cloth bought cheaply at a store sometime in the 1960’s. I didn’t get a photo of this major work. I remember the colors as hot pink and some drab green, with a seam about three-quarters of the way down, the pink being on top.

What makes this work and others like it “major” is its sheer minimalism, i.e. it’s extreme way of confronting you with “waddayoulookinat .” Minimalist art says, “if you’ve came here to find symbolism, heartfelt expression, passion, meaning—and of course you have, because this is ART—then you can just fuhgeddaboudit. Forget about meaning in art. If you want meaning, go find it in your real life, in reality, in the physicality of the objects that surround you. What you see is what you see, no more.

The minimalist blip happened in the art world in the early 1960’s. What did we have before then? We had Abstract Expressionism. Ah! The artist was a hero, elbow-deep into his existential pain, anguish, angst and despair and dashing paint on his huge canvas. The act of creating was agonistic, a struggle always, and we the viewers of the works empathized with the gestural drips and slashes and felt in the presence of meaning in the making. Well, how long can we have art like that? A couple of decades, thank you. After that, we need to have our retinas and our minds scrubbed so that we don’t become complacent. That’s the modern sensibility. We love the shock of the new. Wakes us up, reminds us that it’s all made up. There’s no “progress” in art, there’s just a new angle every now and then.

Is this tongue-in-cheek? Is this funny? Of course, it’s funny. It full of irony, the way a mind, to be considered adult, has to operate on a current of irony.

Minimalism trashes meaning and the quest for meaning. Ordinary objects, made without any special skill, are now enshrined in museums and are worth millions of dollars. Why? Because they are considered to be art and as such, by definition, have meaning. Oops, didn’t you say that they have no meaning and are not to have meaning projected into them? This impass becomes apparent when you read the wall texts next to these pieces. To compose these paragraphs the curators needed to generate some verbiage. “What are you looking at?” will just not do. This is, after all, an art museum and we do have this notion that art has to do with meaning. And so we get funny flirtations with the quest for meaning, for example, that some object on display offers “thrillingly beautiful and poetic moments of clarity.” Sorry, Mr. Curator, beauty and poetic moments are what minimalism was against, throwing all such attempts into the deception-and-illusion bin.

I would advise you to read the texts on the walls with a sense of humor. You will learn nothing from them. But allow yourself to get irritated by them, the better to see the actual work, the way the chorus in a Greek tragedy acts as a niggling nuisance, the better to help you focus on the pratfalls of the protagonist. If you happen get to the MCA in time to catch a tour, be sure to ask the guide the obvious questions. Let’s not be sanctimonious about this. No wool over the eyes, please, we’re moderns. And, hey, we’re doing minimalism here.

Make a point of walking on Carl Andre’s tiles, as you are encouraged to do, and see if you can “feel the different densities of metal through our feet.” Not in your mukluks ,wedgies and booties, you can’t. Where’s the bench where you take off your shoes so you can go barefoot and “feel the different densities” of the metal? Ask the guard, in a matter-of-fact—a minimalist—tone of voice.

One wall text, titled “Building Blocks” does get to the heart of the matter. It states that the art work “encourages us to look more carefully and thoughtfully at the world around us.” Aye and arrrrgh, ye moderns, reality is all ye got and all ye need to know.

So then I went to the coat check, did the scarf and mittens thing and stomped down the icy steps into a Chicago snow storm, paying attention to the impact of reality—what else is there!—and loving every neutrino passing through my bones.

Rembrandt Didn’t Have Paper Towels

artamaze — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 02:44:18 +0000

I often think about Rembrandt and what he didn’t have. He didn’t have central heating, for example, which is why he depicts himself bundled up all the time. It was cold in Amsterdam much of the year. He also didn’t have electric lighting to extend his work day. He painted by candle light. Imagine that. He was also a printmaker and did that without paper towels. He had assistants, but still, imagine that.

Rembrandt didn’t have paper towels and he didn’t have aquarellable pencils, either. He was a tireless experimenter and I’m sure if had had aquarellable pencils he would have used them.

A few weeks ago in my drawing class I gave a demo on how I use aquarellable pencils. I work on gloss paper, which has two properties: water does not seep in and certain pencils, like china marker and the aquarellable, glide easily on the surface. The aquarellable lines, as the name implies, can be made to bleed with water. I particularly like the feathery effect made with a damp paper towel sweeping over the line or along the line. The pencil is called Stabilo 8046, made in Germany by Schwan; it also has the words “paper, glass, plastic metal” on its side. I use it for the drawings at http://facefame.wordpress.com

One of my students caught the bug and has been working with the Stabilo to great advantage. Shown above is Gabrielle E.’s drapery study from last week’s class. The soft edges and blending effects are created with the sweep of a damp paper towel.

Art materials don’t have to be “classic” or expensive. Forget bona fide art supplies. Draw with a twig, a blade of grass, a shish kabob stick, the end of a used up brush, a paper towel; paint with a housepainter’s brush or a kitchen sponge. Rembrandt used something called a reed pen, which at its finest was made of bamboo, but could also be a homemade tool made of indigenous reeds that grow near rivers and ponds.

The Final Touch

artamaze — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 17:54:17 +0000

This painting is almost finished. Almost. The eye flows nicely through this atmospheric, impressionistic bit of landscape. We’re not stuck on any part and that’s good. The four red blooming dashes in the lower half circle nicely around the middle. Oh, the middle. What’s that there? A red smudge, not as articulated as the four but relating to them by virtue of its color. Ermmm, that doesn’t work, can’t have that in the middle of the painting, such an important focus of the work, and besides it destroys the pattern of “the four.”

Notice that when that red smudge in the middle is subdued, the painting feels resolved.

Elaine C., Untitled, oil on canvas, about 14”x 18”

Honored at Evanston Art Center and Skeleton at Window

artamaze — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 01:26:48 +0000

Once again, a student has made a donation to the Evanston Art Center in my honor. I feel indeed honored and grateful. Turns out, this is a student who studied with me a while ago and then didn’t sign up for the more recent term because of a time conflict, but has become an avid reader of this blog. That’s good, too. I do hope these posts are of some use.

Let me add something from the classroom here.

During our last drawing class in December, we had a model. I often draw along with individual students, and I stroll through the room and quietly point out problems with their drawings, but I also have some quiet time for my own little meditations. I like to look out at the lake, for example. It’s a major presence, always interesting. That day the water was calm and slightly bluer than the pale gray sky that was brushed with a pink haze. Outside, bare trees on one side of the window and on the other, inside, the skeleton. I framed a shot. Nice, I thought, the death of winter is upon us and here we have the skeleton to underline the metaphor. That thought didn’t last long. I caught myself in this cliché. How trite: bare trees, skeleton. So, I zoomed in a little, noticing how the radiator echoed the bone shapes. That’s better, now we’re playing with forms. The forms create a correspondence within the picture frame. This creates a centripetal force in the image and keeps the attention from wandering to verbal references, as in the first frame. So now I’m getting warm. One more frame. I really zoom in. Now the skeleton is barely there (sorry) and the radiator is more rhythmic than functional and it really relates to the bones now. On the top we have a couple of color dashes and in the middle we have—what?—nothing, a black mystery. There’s not enough information to tell us where we are. That’s good. Your mind does not wonder. No narrative, just these peripheral shapes holding your focus.

Seems to me, this last frame gets to the point better than the first frame.

All this took no more than two minutes.

Drawing from Nacho Duato Ballet

artamaze — Tue, 27 Dec 2011 01:35:38 +0000

There’s nothing like drawing from a live model. It’s inspiring and invigorating and you can see the forms clearly. In a pinch, if you feel the urge to draw but can’t get anyone to pose for you (good luck trying to find someone who’s willing and able to sit still these days), you can draw from photos. But photos are so 20^th century.

Instead, I recommend that you draw from YouTube. Name a person, a topic, or an event, and you’ll find it on YouTube. If you want to practice drawing faces, pick one of the thousands of clips of talking heads. Run the video and decide which angle you’ll draw. Stop the frame. Voila. Your model is sitting for you. If you’re in the mood for gesture drawing, find a sport or a ballet. Stop the frame. You can be sure, no model would ever hold these poses. You will get a work out, guaranteed.

Above, a page of studies after a ballet by Nacho Duato, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CkC0hHat_ik

http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2011/nov/21/damien-hirst-tate-modern

Skull Talk, Skullduggery and Damien Hirst

artamaze — Mon, 26 Dec 2011 01:48:19 +0000

I went to the mall.

Last Sunday I drew twelve people at Maggianos at Old Orchard. We were celebrating the first birthday of the first born son of a couple that had flown in from Florida to be with the rest of the family who still lives in the Chicago area. When the gig was done, I packed up, pulled on my self-made hat, wheeled my drawing supplies back to the car and headed for Nordstrom. One of the women at the party had told me, in English instead of the ambient Bosnian, that she worked at Nordstrom’s in Schaumburg, in a department called Narrative. “Narrative” is a word I sometimes use in my drawing class, apprehensively scanning my students’ faces for signs that this literary reference might snatch their minds out of the visual state and plunk them back into the quotidian verbal. (My students are all over-educated readers.) What, I was eager to learn, has the word “narrative” got to do with shopping?

There it was, a whole section of women’s clothing with the word “Narrative” on the wall over the alcove with the three manikins. The urgency to make sense of the word in this context faded at the sight of the manikins’ faces that reminded me of André Carrillo’s caricatures. I made a mental note that I needed to write about this comparison in a future blog and immediately got distracted by another display in an adjacent department, though the sartorial subtleties that justified the expense of putting different names on the walls in such close proximity did not catch my eye.

What caught my eye was the skull. Where am I? What’s the meaning of this skull in the context of shopping for clothes? My mind goes into free-association.

The skull became the central prop in still lifes painted by Dutch artists around 1600. This genre of still life was called “momento mori.” The skull would be surrounded by symbols of cultural achievement, such as books, silver, violins, and other luxurious or pleasurable goods and fragile things like soap bubbles and glassware, to make the statement that none of these will matter at the inevitable moment of death. There are yards and yards of these paintings, all exquisitely executed as if in self-contradiction: making a fine painting really did matter even though you knew it was all ephemeral. Doing something well really does give one pleasure in existing and a baker or brewer might possibly use his money-scheming mind to decipher the meta-text of his life’s narrative at the sight of such a fine work of art, momento mori be damned.

This is what goes through my mind as I’m trying to understand that skull hovering over the clothes rack. What could possibly go through the mind of a marketing expert at Nordstrom as she looks for ways to entice shoppers into buying this merchandise? A light bulb goes off in her brain, “aha, we need a skull there, that’s what we need.” Actually, there were two skulls. So, this was a deliberate statement, a motif for this line of clothing. Could that be? Yes, it could. I moved in closer to examine the craftsmanship in this pricy merchandise and discovered that the “momento mori” was all over this stuff. The seams were raggedy, the fabric was raggedy, the cut was clearly intended to say “I just pulled this out from under my bed, what’re you lookin’ at, go get a life, I have more important things to think about.” Here I’m tempted to add, “like, totally, dude” except these were large sizes.

At this point you’re expecting some insight. Sorry, not yet.

I walked around some more and looked at more banal, poorly crafted artifacts and hyper-illuminated grotesqueries. The skull, the skull. Where else have we seen the skull?

The words “banal, hyper-illuminated and grotesque” just came to me now as I’m writing, but during my puzzled, non-verbal wanderings through the depressed looking crowds of Holiday shoppers, these associations must have been forming in my visual brain because the image that came to my mind was the diamond studded skull that brought Damien Hirst yet another burst of fame and a fist-full of banknotes. I recall, something like a hundred million dollars. Damien Hirst, he of the pickled shark and the decaying cow’s head fame, had hired craftsmen and jewelers to produce a skull cast out of platinum and covered with diamonds.

It will be at the Tate in London next year. Art critics and curators are linking it to the “momento mori” genre.

Here, again, you’re expecting some insight. Not yet, sorry. I’ll keep working on this. It’s the kind of thing that makes you want to give those French guys another reading, you know, Derrida, Foucault, Baudrillard, those unreadable books you threw across the room a few years ago. Even Richard Dawkins has admitted that he can’t make heads or tails of their writings and I suspect it’s not a problem of translations. But I am currently reading “The Moment of Complexity” by Mark C. Taylor and that’s got me thinking, again, about semiotics and the desperate state of images in our time.

One thing is clear. There’s some major messing with our brains going on. And we’re doing the messing. If you spend $68 for a shapeless, tattered t-shirt, you’ve had your brain messed with. If you hold the title of Curator at a major museum and you promote Damien Hirst as an artist, then you are messing with our brains.

Oh, please, everybody, send me your thoughts on this. A tattered scrap of insight will be welcome.

Still life with skull by Peter Claesz, 1597-1660

Left-Right: Seurat’s “La Grande Jatte”

artamaze — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 17:35:39 +0000

Georges Seurat (1859-1891) worked on this his most famous painting for two years. No wonder. It’s ten feet long and consists of dots of paint the size of a pin head. Much of the avant-guard art at the time concerned itself with ocular issues: the interaction of color, optical illusions involving color, retinal aftereffects of various colors.

Artists were radical in their use of color, certainly, but there’s more here than an experiment in color theory. These artists lived in late 19^th century Paris and its civilization was not free of discontents. Drawing from life and street scenes, artists contemplated social stratification and its incongruities. The people in “La Grande Jatte” appear to be isolated, insular in their assigned societal roles. It’s a sunny Sunday afternoon, everybody is out enjoying some rest and leisure , but somehow this image manages to be uncomfortable.

The main character, the woman at the right, appears to be collaged onto the canvas. She and her sliver of a companion occupy a dominant part of the canvas. Seurat lets us know that she is a prostitute. He conveys this information by drawing her with a monkey on a leash, a common prop for prostitutes at that time to attract clientele.

The colors are lovely and we are entranced by the mind-boggling detail of the tip-of-the-brush work.

What else?

When we flip the canvas left-right, it becomes apparent how tormented the social situation is. When the prostitute is on the left, we empathize with her and that’s asking too much of us. She has to be on the right to show how alien and isolated she is. This, in a society where everybody had double standards for women and wives knew what brothels their husbands frequented. But the prostitute was still marginal, a thorn in the side of bourgeois culture, and here she is, the main attraction in this huge, in-your-retina painting. The flipped version of the painting is painful to look at because we feel the character’s isolation all the more and because now the shore line goes down and therefore there’s no hope at all.

Other paintings by Seurat also draw the shore line going from upper left to lower right, and with good reason. Later.

Hubbart Street Dance Chicago—“Walking Mad “

artamaze — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 18:03:30 +0000

“Walking Mad” is choreographed by Johan Inger to Ravel’s Bolero. You know Bolero and now that you’ve been reminded of it you’ve started humming it and you will be humming it til you leave the house to hear Dashing Through the Snow from every street corner, you hear. Bolero starts like a march, like an accompaniment to a Medieval processional straight to hell in a tableau from Hieronymus Bosch and it repeats at ever increasing insistence and volume til it falls apart in blaring discord and exhaustion. It’s usually associated with sexual frenzy. But Johan Inger takes a less lascivious view of the old chestnut. There are pelvises, thighs and groins to relate to and there’s a wall. The dancers interact with a wall. They hit the wall, they are slammed against the wall, they jump at the wall, they hang from the wall, they try to climb the wall; the wall folds, opens and lies down flat and gets walked on. Plenty of frenzy here–sexual, violent and existential.

I saw this performance by Hubbart Street Dance Chicago two months ago. Two months. It was such a knock-out, that I didn’t think I could come up with a drawing associated to it. I watched clips on You Tube of other dance companies performing passages from this piece and kept being overwhelmed. No way could I do justice to this piece, as a concept and as theater. A couple of days ago, on a sunny Sunday afternoon, I just decided to watch the clip again and I started to draw.

The agony I had put myself through for two months was the same as the agony my students experience when they draw from life. It’s the feeling that you can’t do justice to the grandeur and complexity of the model and the model will judge you, implicitly. So, I speak from fresh memory and insight, when I say, that’s not what it’s about. It’s not about the model, it’s about you finding a new perception. Yes, the drawing will refer to the model, but it will not be dominated by the model. The drawing will be something new, will exist in its own right as a new object , never been seen before and full of surprises—most importantly to YOU.

Johan Inger was not paralyzed by the history of Bolero, not by its clichéd currency nor by any torture about what Ravel “really” meant to say. He did not hit a wall. Well, yes, he did and then he put it into the work and worked with it.

We need to get back to this. In the meantime, take a piece of paper and some pencil or marker, whatever is lying around, and draw. Draw something, the celery on the counter, the mug on your desk, the cover you just pulled off your printer.

Inspired by Turner

artamaze — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 23:26:38 +0000

I presented the ideas of Johannes Itten in that class (see previous post) and also the paintings of Turner.

Art historians discuss Turner in connection with the aesthetic of the Sublime, a central idea in Romanticism. The Sublime was opposed to beauty, restraint, balance, harmony. Romantic poets felt tormented by infinite longing and passion that could not be contained. In their debates about form and content , form lost its former respect. The content of turbulent emotion and the newly discovered dark aspects of the psyche—not as sin but as depth and authenticity—were seen to correspond to the awe and terror of natural forces , such as mountains and oceans.

Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775 –1851) is famous for his seascapes, which are most often turbulent and terrifying: burning ships; ship wrecks; drowning, shackled slaves; blazing orange skies. Though he was a member of the Royal Academy, he had to endure much ridicule from his contemporaries who preferred polite, sedate , well-ordered pictures to be mollified by.

Turner also painted landscapes. He hated the color green and painted landscapes while avoiding that color. What is a landscape? We keep coming back to that question in my landscape class. Turner assures us that it’s not about the color green.

I didn’t present the Sublime in class. Just looking at Turner gives you goose bumps and you GET it. Elaine C. again faced a white canvas by putting down color and letting the form follow. This is a small painting, about 12 x 16. If it were 48 x 64, it would pull us into the Romantic Sublime.