Willem de Kooning at the Art Institute

The Art Institute’s exhibit of Willem de Kooning’s drawings closed September 20th.  Since I couldn’t make it to Chicago to see these energetic drawings, I ordered the book Willem de Kooning drawing, Kevin Salatino, ed., including about 250 pages of reproductions.

I want to focus on de Kooning’s blind drawings here. The book has 24 reproductions of his so called “eyes-closed” drawings, done in charcoal on 10×8  paper, around1966.  I am familiar with this approach to drawing and will use my own term,  “blind drawing.”

Our guide through de Kooning’s blind drawings in this scholarly work is Christa Noel Robbins. She is an Associate Professor of twentieth-century art and criticism at the University of Virginia.

Professor Robbins starts her critical essay of de Kooning’s blind drawings by expressing her distress at the artist not being clear on the “gender” detail of some of the figures in these drawings. She says that by “destabilizing gender this way” in his drawn figures, de Kooning fails to consider their “transgender capacity.”

She says she is pleased that in drawing #157 the penis and testicles are clearly drawn.

It’s only safe to assume that the very next drawing, #158,  which shows a vulva between split legs, meets with her approval in that its explicit anatomy can hardly be felt to be “destabilizing.”

All this occurs on the first one-and-a-half pages of Professor Robbins’ essay.

But wait, first she tells us that those clearly drawn penises and vulvas must have been done with eyes open, because not only were the genitals so correctly drawn but they were also correctly placed in the figure—right there in the groin area and not just anywhere, like on the forehead or something. So, Professor Robbins asserts, de Kooning must have cheated. This is, however, a false assertion.  Artists have to figure out how to organize their work all the time.

In the next post I’ll explain how I orient myself on the page when I do my blind drawing. It’s not hard. Just to mention here, that art criticism would be different—and sometimes but rarely is—if/when a critic had learned to draw.

Professor Robbins then goes on to express her dismay over de Kooning’s Woman Series, poor things with those gender issues that the artist just couldn’t work out. I will devote a whole post to these major paintings, which raise questions of how women were portrayed in popular culture in the 1950’s and ‘60s. There’s also the big topic of fame and rivalry.  We’ll get to the great Woman paintings soon.

Back to the blind drawings.  Approaching the closing of her  essay, Professor Robbins gives in to some compassion for the artist.

That de Kooning involved and purposefully disrupted the utility of his own body  in making these works—by, for example, drawing with his eyes closed, with his nondominant hand or with unfamiliar instruments—only adds to the open-ended, indeterminate nature of his work.

Let’s unpack that, starting at the end.

Dear Professor and Art Critic, all creative activity by its nature is open-ended and indeterminate.

Unfamiliar instruments?  Can anybody, even casually acquainted with his work, imagine de Kooning having instruments lying around that would be unfamiliar to him?

The nondominant hand!  Of course, he would grab a pencil or brush with his left hand—any time.  He’s a passionate guy, a painter, an artist to the core and from early childhood on. I can imagine him drawing with toes dipped in gravy.

”Purposefully disrupted the utility of his own body.”  What a stupid, pretentious phrase.

So there, Professor Robbins,  I’ve lost my cool.

But wait, one more thing. Now, at the very end of this essay, with only a little more than a page to go, we get into academic name dropping: Simone de Beauvoir, Franz Fanon, Judith Butler, Merlon-Ponty, Jean-Paul Sartre. Professor Robbins names these thinkers in connection with the topic that opened this essay: gender. Wrapping up an argument by reiterating what you started with in your essay looks rhetorically tidy.  But the substance of an argument has to consist of evidence and logic.

Failing to present an argument, she is wise to resort to empathy:

Looking across de Kooning’s numerous figure drawings and paintings, there are certain moments when the artist himself seemed determined to orient them toward a specific idea of a gendered body—as in those deferred inscriptions of sex in the eyes-closed drawings. But in nearly every case, that orientation is either slow to arrive or interrupted entirely.

Of course, it is.  De Kooning is concentrating on his work, the totality of it, in all its complexity and difficulty. He’s not obsessed with genitals nor is he suffering from gender dysphoria.  If art critics tried to draw, they might get a feeling for how visual concentration takes over your brain.

Dear Professor Robbins, I recommend you try some blind drawing.  Easy. Grab what’s lying around,  ordinary paper and a pen.  Close your eyes. Recalling a painting from, say, the Renaissance, put your pen down and start outlining the body and its drapery. Keep your eyes closed! As you’re pulling the pen over the paper, you’re trying to visualize where you are on the original painting that you’re “reproducing” AND  where your pen is in relation to the space of your paper.  You’ve picked up the pen a couple of times, and you probably put it down again in some spot where you were unsure.  More than twice.  You finally open your eyes.  Hey, not too bad! Doesn’t look much like a Raphael Madonna, but there’s an intensity and energy in the markmaking.  You are fascinated.

That’s good enough, a day’s work, something worth exploring further.

Did you forget something? Of course not.

In her torturous, name-dropping conclusion, Professor Robbins mentions Sartre again, this time with the added information that de Kooning “was known to have read him.”  We should not be surprised that de Kooning read widely and critically. He was a regular at the Cedar Tavern where his friends–the heavy hitters in the NY avant guard–gathered to unwind after a day of questioning and re-arranging the cultural fixtures of literature, poetry, society, theory, art, music, life.

Thanks to all of you!

A book I happen to be reading now is Paul Johnson’s Intellectuals (1988), in which Jean-Paul Sartre is called “a little ball of fur and ink.”  The book made the New York Times Best Seller List.  De Kooning’s Cedar Tavern crowd would have brought it up.  I like to imagine him in such a conversation, the cartoonist in him being tickled and having a good laugh at academic pretentiousness.

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cedar_Tavern

k-hilden.com

artamaze.wordpress.com

facefame.wordpress.com

katherinehilden.wordpress.com

Amy Sherald Paints Gray Skin

 

The title of this New Yorker cover illustration by Amy Sherald is “Trans Forming Liberty.”   Nice word play.

As for this business of painting human skin a dark metallic gray—that’s something we need to think about.

For now, here’s the comment I submitted to The New Yorker. I expect some editing, but we will see.

 

Let’s hope Amy Sherald has African American friends. She will have noticed that the melanin in charge of skin color does not affect the palms.  But she painted the palm of her Trans Forming Liberty  the same gray as that of this young man’s body.  I wish she had reconsidered gray as a skin color after the ghastly painting she did for Michelle Obama in 2018. If Sherald thinks painting human skin a dead gray solves the racial insanity that burdens us, then she will have to paint her European American and Asian American neighbors that same sepulchral gray. She needs counseling, both as an illustrator and as a human.

Sherald has explained that she prefers to render skin tones en grisaille.  What she means is en gris, in gray.  En grisaille is not a color or a shade of gray, but a process of painting. Specifically, it’s a process of underpainting, whereby the artist first renders the whole painting in shades of gray in order to get the values right. Once the painting works in shades of gray, it will be overpainted with colors in the corresponding values. If you neglect to overpaint one section with color, you cannot claim to be working en grisaille. You just didn’t finish the painting.

 

All contents copyright (C) 2010 Katherine Hilden. All rights reserved.:::

http://facefame.wordpress.com

http://katherinehilden.wordpress.com

http://k-hilden.com

Holbein Meets Sharpie

Here’s the final drawing in this 8-page tussle with Holbein’s Court Lady.

Picking up where the last post left off…

I started to draw from memory of the face and from the memory of my previous attempts. You can see that I’m flattening the iris of the far (her right) eye while failing to alienate her left eye, which keeps looking at us.

Next, I drew bigger, in the hope of forcing the issue, as in  let’s figure this out once and for all.  The middle face succeeds in being sad and forlorn, but the eyes look straight at us. The face on the left is close to what we’re aiming at here. Her right eye glares without focus, which is part of the program, but her left eye fixes us with a direct, critical focus.   Alas, the gloom-and-doom of the Court Lady does not come through.

On the right side of the page my Sharpie went for full doom’n’gloom, getting into the mood, by rolling the eyes upward into a sort of rigor mortis.

Despite the energetic drawing quality, what makes this a boring page is that there are THREE heads.  Three objects, evenly sized and spaced, no matter how well drawn, make for a dead composition.  That’s because it’s symmetrical and symmetry is balanced, static and lifeless.

Now here’s a lively page. Again, I worked from memory. It’s the first page where I added a gesture, mind you, with an over-the-shoulder glance.

We don’t know who this Court Lady was. Some think she was a member of Thomas More’s family, the same Thomas More who was beheaded because he objected to the king declaring himself head of the church. Some people think she was Henry’s fifth wife, Catherine Howard, who, after being married for a year,  was  beheaded at the age of  nineteen.

Reviewing my drawings of her, I realize that the subject of women living in fear at Henry VIII’s court got under my skin. You can see that the drawings on these eight pages progress from careful, slow studies of the face to pages of scratchy marks that show a diminished interest in getting a likeness of this person.  The last four pages show this greater emotional engagement  through the markmaking itself, which becomes energetic and rough, showing pushed-up shoulders and clasped hands.

In the last drawing (previously shown at the top of this post), the negative space around the figures is agitated with coarse, scratchy marks that push against the figures and faces. This is a long way from the careful pencil studies that we started with.  When the space around a figure is pulsating with this much urgency, the viewer can’t help sensing that agitation. The whole drawing is engaging on an emotional level so that the accurate likeness of the model becomes less important.

When I started drawing this face, I had no idea this project would become so engrossing.  After eight pages of working with Holbein’s portrait and trying to read this face in the context of her circumstances, I need a rest.

If you’re an art student you’ll be interested in how long this takes. I timed the last page for you: the figures alone, 21 minutes;  after that, maybe a couple of minutes to decide on what comes next and then a few seconds for the markmaking in the negative space. This was a good workout.

 

All contents copyright (C) 2010 Katherine Hilden. All rights reserved.:::

http://facefame.wordpress.com

http://katherinehilden.wordpress.com

http://k-hilden.com

 

 

Holbein on my Brain

About a week ago I finally gave up on giving up on Holbein’s Court Lady.  In May and June I didn’t face her every day, but, let’s say, often.  I consider myself a face person, but I couldn’t—or didn’t want to—get into this face. It’ a bit disturbing, isn’t it. Something is off with those eyes.  But it’s Holbein, so how could he have goofed here. All his other drawings and portraits are anatomically convincing and—given that he worked at the court of off-with-your-head Henry VIII—the likenesses he turned out must have been at least correct, if not downright flattering.

When writers get stuck, they call it a writers’ block and for that the recommendation is to just put something down on paper, a few random words, phrases, nonsense,  anything to soften the fright of that white paper.  As a visual artist, I simply get bored with my self-doubt and, like writers, I grab paper and pencil and scribble. What took you so long! This is the most wonderful thing you can do.  Draw!

You can see that the eyes in the upper three drawings look normal.  They are looking straight at us.  I told you, I’m a face person.   I know how to draw eyes looking left, right and down, but they are always focused on something.  In the bottom three drawings you can tell that the eyes become more and more unfocussed, tired and sad.   Good work! I was beginning to face Holbein’s music: alienated, dissonant.

In this next page, determined to understand what Holbein was doing with those eyes, I got academic and drew diagrams to refresh my understanding of the eye…

…  in an attempt to put the iris/cornea where it normally is: views 1 and 2.  In the 3^rd drawing Holbein seems to have attached it to the top of the eyeball and then left it hanging vertically without conforming to the curvature of the eyeball.

Well. I thought, I’ve done my homework here, so the next drawing should be a piece o’cake.

I reached for my thick 6B Cretacolor lead holder. That thing always loosens me up because  it doesn’t tolerate any fussiness. No outlines, no precision lines. I attacked the face again.  What could go wrong!  I now understand the geometry of Holbein’s eyes and I know how to put that hanging iris/cornea on paper.  Haha.  Here she is, at left,  looking straight at us, in the most convincing expression so far.  She has attitude!  She’s smart, skeptical and–trapped in her social web–more than a little sad.  I like this drawing.  I’ve got my chops back!  Next, on the same page, to the right, I try a very large version of the eyes only and completely lose my way.

How could this happen. I get furious, ready to risk all, and go out on a limb. With a Sharpie S-GEL pen I scribble Holbein himself…

 

 

 

 

 

…from his late self-portrait.

 

 

 

In this self-portrait he also distorts the far eye, his right eye, as in the Court Lady. (It’s a different distortion and I want to get into that in a later post.) For now, the deep black unerasable lines of my Sharpy are flowing   You can see that I gave up on the upper drawing but then, in the drawing below, the pen skated over this face without hesitation or doubt. In no time, probably a minute or two.

That was intense. I turned to reading for a couple of days. Faced the face again yesterday, penciling out three takes on the pensive lady at that bloody court of the mighty king.

That’s page 4 in these studies of the Court Lady. You can see that this is getting somewhere.  The eyes are anatomically off!  Not the same way as the Court Lady’s in the painting, but off.  In this case, that’s progress.  They’re expressive and remote in that woman’s maddening, ineffable gloom.

Another boost to the chops! So, I reached for the unforgiving Sharpie to turn up the heat.  I did four dense pages of drawings, which you’ll find in the next post.

 

 

This kind of contemplation and self-probing is not for everyone.  If you’re an art student, this post is for you.  It’s about doing the work—on paper, in your mind and in your life. You  would be interested in how long this takes. I timed that last page for you: 15 minutes.

 

All contents copyright (C) 2010 Katherine Hilden. All rights reserved.:::

http://facefame.wordpress.com

http://katherinehilden.wordpress.com

http://k-hilden.com

Holbein’s Court Lady

Drawing faces is endlessly fascinating. You can never say “that’s it, got it, now I am a master of the face.”  Well, unless you’re Hans Holbein.

I chose Holbein portraits to work from because he has given us many three-quarter views.  The ¾ angle is probably the most difficult view of the face to draw.  My students are ready for challenges.  This ¾ challenge is the second one.

The first challenge is choosing the drawing tool. Each drawing tool—from pencil to graphite stick, to conte, to China marker, to pen, etc.—offers certain expressive possibilities. But it will cause frustrations if your desired effect is not “in” this particular tool.

Let’s take a thoughtful look at how one student explored five possibilities.

She worked on plain, common stationery paper.  She did not erase.

First, with a sharpened #4 pencil.

Be honest, you admire this. You envy the hand-eye coordination. You are in awe of this level of control and concentration.  The word perfection comes to mind, doesn’t it! Does perfection make you empathize with the person in the drawing? Does precision and dexterity stir up memories or not?

Second drawing. Again with the #4 pencil.

This time it’s not the tip of the graphite that touches the paper, but the side edge, which is wider and not precise.

This has a different effect on you. You’re not thinking perfection, precision, motor control.  Instead, you get emotional.  You feel you’re in a conversation with this person. You’re looking at her face for subtle clues about emotions.

Drawing #3, China Marker.

The image barely has lines. Dark, broad strokes indicate the features. The atmospherics enveloping her head are dark. The mystery is intensely engaging.  (Btw, China Marker on plain paper is a totally unforgiving medium without any chance of erasing, not even lightening up.)

Page #4, China marker again.

Here we’ve cooled down quite a bit.  This is not atmospheric, not moody.  We see strong, deliberate, clear, distinct lines.  The effect is not subtle or emotional at all.  The linear, geometric quality tells us we’ve entered the world of design.

The visual vocabulary here speaks to the rational viewer. This is the language of Modernism. It tells you contradictory things in one stroke of the pencil:  a) this is the likeness of a person, called the subject of the image and b) these are marks on paper and they were made by a person who is called the artist.

But wait, there’s more.

Page #5.  Now it’s all shapes.

The shapes were cut out of black paper and super-white paper, then arranged on the drawing paper and glued down.   If you expect art to faithfully represent reality, i.e. that serious, elegant young woman sitting there, you will be totally turned off. You’ll call yourself a traditionalist. So, if you’re stunned and speechless, you’ll feel cheated and alienated and walk away.

If, however, you’re stunned and speechless AND you feel drawn into the mind that produced this, you’ll get a buzz and you’ll stay with this image for a while.  You discover—or you’re reminded—that you’re a Modernist.

Modernists appeared on the planet almost 200 years ago. Whether that was due to evolution or a revolution remains open. Probably a revolution. Or better yet, a bunch of revolutions, because, you know, Modernism is like firecrackers in the brain…blows your mind.

We’ve been talking about five (there are many more) different ways to draw a face.  We considered only the emotional/rational/critical effects of your tool.  As you can see, it’s not a careless, mindless choice. The tool itself makes certain effects possible—or not. So, that’s the first challenge.

There were two challenges, remember.  We will face the second one next. What was that challenge again?

All contents copyright (C) 2010 Katherine Hilden. All rights reserved.

http://facefame.wordpress.com

http://katherinehilden.wordpress.com

The Imagination Doing It’s Thing

Enough of the banana on my brain, you say. Time to escape from this cerebral work; this sorting, categorizing, labeling—with its ironic distance and its claim to dominance.

Let me escape into visual beauty!

Let me sigh, oh, how beautiful, those were better days–virtuous, heartfelt, and true. What a relief, let me bask in dignity and beauty and all that is tangible.  Let’s get back to reality

 

 

It’s time to visit the Victoria and Albert Museum in South Kensington, London. At the V&A everything that will hit your retina has been categorized as noble, dignified, beautiful, famous, enviable and, possibly, eternal: assertive kings, rosy cheeked queens and their lucky offspring, everybody well fed and in excellent health, regaled in velvet, satin and ermine; crowned and bejeweled; at leisure, always at leisure, and in profound harmony.  Join them, won’t you?

Let’s see how long you can last in a purely visual state without your brain kicking in.

 

Presenting! Beauty!  Ahhhhh. Feast your eyes and give in to being transported to better times .

                         Madame de Pompadour, by Francois Boucher, 1758, oil on canvas, ~23×21 inches.

The wall text tells you that…

…this painting is a fine example of the dominant Rococo style in 18th-century France. It depicts the Marquise de Pompadour who became in 1745 the favourite mistress of King Louis XV. She is portrayed in a garden or edges of woods wearing a sumptuous white silk dress which blends in with the ochre green of the vegetation around. This picture is characterised by the combination of a subtle artificiality and sufficient naturalism, which is a typical feature of the Rococo aesthetic. This painting is a good example of how Boucher was probably made to celebrate and consolidate the Marquise’s new status as well as exalting her renowned beauty.

Let’s think about that.

1) The king had a bunch of mistresses, and this one was his favorite.

2) The portrait combines artificiality and naturalism.

3) The “ochre background” blends with the white dress.

No way, #3.  Granted, Boucher used the same pale ochre color for the highlights in the foliage as in the shadows of the white dress. But that does not amount to “blending.”  The white dress doesn’t “blend” with the dark green background. It’s in sharp contrast with it! So much for that deception. I guess the museum people want you to be in the mood for “blending”—i.e. harmony—which is pleasant and makes you want to come back.

Too late, the brain has kicked in.

Now for #2, artificiality vs. naturalism.  Right you ahhh, as we say in London. Where do we find naturalism? The light on the drapery of the satin is carefully rendered. Check! The flowers and leaves in the background are botanically accurate. Check! So, we have some naturalism in this painting.

Now let’s take a look at that other thing: artificiality!  Allow yourself to squint skeptically: this woman in white is awfully tall.

In art class we measure the height of the model, not in feet and inches, but by “heads.”  You lift your pencil so that the top of the pencil corresponds to the top of the model’s head and you slide your thumb to the chin.  That’s your unit of measure for this figure. If the model is 5’4, she will come out to be seven heads tall.   How many heads tall is Mme de Pompadour?

She is at least twelve heads tall. Count them. (Probably taller: it’s hard to measure a foreshortened femur.)  Who do we know that’s twelve heads tall?

                                                                                        Michael Jordan

 

Now compare their feet.  His feet are big enough to support his height.

Her feet?  Tiny. Impossible. Boucher gave her tiny feet so that they wouldn’t attract attention and ruin his harmonious design.

Since your brain is fully charged now, it dawns on you that this is not a portrait at all.  Boucher was not interested in reality, he was interested in making a pleasing arrangement of colors and shapes. When he presented it to Mme de Pompadour she was pleased. How could she not be! The woman in the painting had roughly her coloring, big eyes, rosy cheeks, tiny feet AND she’s tall.

If you look around in the kings and queens gallery, you’ll notice that they’re all tall people—in the paintings, that is.  In reality, we know, people were shorter then.  Even in our own time, French actresses are only about seven heads tall:  Isabel Huppert 5’2, Jeanne Moreau 5’2, Brigitte Bardot 5’5, Catherine Deneuve 5’5.

In Boucher’s painting, Mme de Pompadour is at least 6’6.  That’s Michael Jordan’s height.

You went to the V&A Museum because you wanted to be dazzled by paintings.  The point of this exercise is to be dazzled—yes! –and at the same time to stay alert.  Keep your head, but not to be cynical. Just stay rational, down-to-earth and curious.  Don’t go to an art museum to escape into some sort of la-la land. The Michael Jorden comparison was intended to help you stay alert.

But what about our #1:  The king had a bunch of mistresses, and this one was his favorite? We don’t use the word mistress anymore. We now use words that don’t romanticize the humiliation of servitude.  We know that the king’s servants lived at Versailles and probably ate better than the prostitutes in town, but it was still work and he summoned them at will. We also know that his wife, the queen, with whom he was obliged to procreate, approved of Mme de Pompadour as the King’s favorite, errmmm, prostitute.

Let your attention toggle back and forth between these historical facts and the visual pleasure of Boucher’s technique. He’s making a fool of you. You know that, right?  Just chuckle a bit.  It’s okay.  The imagination is a piece of work.

All contents copyright (C) 2010 Katherine Hilden. All rights reserved.

http://facefame.wordpress.com

http://katherinehilden.wordpress.com

Conceptual Art

Great, now we have a name for it.  Now I can open a folder and stick a label on it.  Ta-tah! Look at me, I’m smart, I know what I’m talking about: I’m talking about Conceptual Art.

Yes, I have opened a folder.  It’s a folder where I put reflections, observations, insights, questions.  The label allows me to focus on my questions that surround this topic. The physical/electronic folder is nothing compared to the bulging one in my brain, which is more like a cloud.

Whoa, that’s scary, you say, I-don’t-want-a-cloud-I-want-certainty. Sure, we all want some certainly, like what traffic lights mean and all that.

The cloud is a philosophical–open–state of mind.  All art, from way back, as far back in human history as you can go, has come out of this cloud.

The philosophical cloud has to do with words/categories/thought processes/argument.

But, but, you say. It’s not about an argument. It’s about a lousy banana taped to a wall.

Right, the way a word is just a word. Can your brain look at a word and say, that’s just a word?

Try it.  Let your eyes land on any word on this page, like the word “way.”

Now empty your brain, making sure that the word does not link up with any image, feeling or sense of motion.

Stand there and say justaword justaword justaword.

Can’t do it?

Now try a work of art. Can you look at paint on a framed canvas and say, that’s just paint on a canvas?

                   

This gets harder after you’ve seen the title, “Scarab,” because now you’re trying to see the “scarab.”

So you need to stand up and shout JUST PAINT JUST PAINT JUST PAINT!

As soon as you feel stupid doing this, tell yourself that you’re making progress: feeling stupid is progress.  Take a break. Swear a little. Ok, swear a lot.  Then sit still for a couple of minutes.

Time passes.  A week later, say, you go back to her website and glance—just glance—at one of her paintings. It feels different, non-verbal.

Here are more reflections to put into your Conceptual Art folder:

https://rebeccapurdumpaintings.com/

https://artamaze.wordpress.com/2020/10/13/and-now-were-going-to-look-at-pointillism/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cloud_of_Unknowing

Slipping on a Banana Peel

What does the perpetrator, Maurizio Cattelan, call his banana-taped-to-wall?

“Comedian”

If you’re having one of your stupid I’m-so-smart days you’ll say ”awshsh that’s so dumb how can a banana be a comedian.”

But if your brain flashes you a chain of associations: comedian>stand up>jokes>corny>late night>slipping on a banana>hahahaha, then you get it.

https://imgur.com/a/silent-movie-banana-peel-gags-Uzn1n

Chaplin is chomping down a banana and not liking it. His gestures tell us that he’s impatient, he has better things to do, places to go and people to see.  In a flippant gesture he drops the peels over his shoulder and turns to move on. As he takes his next step, his foot lands on the banana peel. He slips and falls. Nobody’s in sight, he can’t blame anybody else. It’s all about him.   Since you identify with him, it’s all about you.

Who’s slipping on the banana here? You’re the one who has to get up, rubbing your sore butt.

And you’re laughing!  What’s so funny?!  It’s funny that YOU, smart you, capable you are doing what? You are losing your balance and you’re falling down. That’s ironic and so you laugh. If you were disabled or on meds that made you dizzy, then falling would be very possible and therefore not ironic and therefore not funny.

Irony is a form of humor. It works with concepts. Irony—as humor in general—is a cerebral function that puts two different frames on a thing and therefore causes a conceptual tension in your brain. You laugh to release the conceptual tension.

Art=banana=Art=banana=Art…

You’re in this conceptual tension because you’re thinking.

You went to a gallery expecting a pleasant, relaxing, inspiring, confirming experience?   Ha! Not so fast.  You’re being challenged!

You’re being challenged to do what?  To think: critically, reflexively and in self-doubt.

It’s called Conceptual Art.

—————————————————————————————————————

For more on the subject of humor:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henri_Bergson

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laughter_(book)

Inside Jokes: Using Humor to Reverse-Engineer the Mind – February 8, 2013   by Matthew M. Hurley, Daniel C. Dennett and Reginald B. Adams Jr.         ISBN-10 : 0262518694     ISBN-13 : ‎978-0262518697

 

 

All contents copyright (C) 2010 Katherine Hilden. All rights reserved.

http://facefame.wordpress.com

http://katherinehilden.wordpress.com

More Banana Peelings

Is this vandalism?

What’s this banana doing here!  Looks like vandalism.

Did Maurizio Cattelan walk into the gallery at Art Basel in Miami, take the banana out of his left pocket, find an empty space on the wall, look over his shoulder, take the tape out of his right pocket and stick the banana to that empty spot?

Wrong movie.  No crime scene. No looking over the shoulder.

Yes, he did the deed. But not by himself.

There was a middleman.  In the art world, that man or woman is called “the curator.”

The curator gets tons of applications from people who want to display their art in the show.  The curator’s job is to pick and choose.

The Art Basel curator said, yes, we’ve got to have the banana in this show.  Perfect.

Was the curator shocked?  No. The curator knows art history.

Let’s see, what flashed through the curator’s mind? All of Modern Art was originally shocking.

In French, épater le (or les) bourgeois  means “to shock the middle class.”   They were shocked by the poetry of Rimbaud and  Baudelaire and by all those new painters: Cezanne, Matisse, Monet, Derain and the rest. Here’s the respectable middle class looking eminently shockable around 1907.

In 1907—about 120 years ago—Matisse exhibited Blue Nude.

…and Picasso showed Les Demoiselles D’Avingnon to his friends; one was shocked and one laughed out loud. It’s now at the MoMA.

When Marcel Duchamp had Nude Descending a Staircase at the Armory Show in NY in 1913, a critic said it showed “an explosion in a shingle factory.”

In 1914 Duchamp bought a bottle rack in a Paris department store and called it art.

In 1916 he bought a urinal in a plumbing store, signed it R. Mutt, called it “Fountain” and exhibited it as art in New York in 1917.  Art museums now exhibit replicas of both the bottle rack and the urinal.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fountain_(Duchamp)

Duchamp exhibited early in the 20th century. Now comes Manzoni in mid century.

In 1961 the Italian artist Piero Manzoni exhibited cans labeled Merda d’artista.  Contents 30 gr net. Freshly preserved. Produced and tinned in May 1961.

Prices at auction have been above $200,000. Maybe the cans contain something else, but they are steel and cannot be x-rayed. So, nobody knows.     https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artist%27s_Shit

In the second half of the 20th century we were definitely done with pretty pictures. If you walked into a gallery and said, that’s beautiful, you gave yourself away as a peasant in overalls, chewing on a blade of grass.  Instead museum goers could expect more varieties of … excretions.

Andres Serrano, Piss Christ, 1987.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piss_Christ

Chris Ofili. Holy Virgin Mary, 1996.  Cow dung on canvas.

https://news.artnet.com/art-world/steve-cohen-chris-ofili-virgin-mary-moma-1269002

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Holy_Virgin_Mary

I recommend that you read these articles. Or skim them, depending on your interest.  Then take a rest.

Now back to the banana:

Imagine a curator considering an application showing a banana taped to a wall. After the history of art in the 20^th century, how shocking can a banana be?  Ha. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comedian_(artwork)

What about the visitors at that Miami show in 2019?  Only people who expect to sigh in front of a “beautiful” painting could be shocked.  Art lovers and seasoned museum goers, however, recognized this banana as Conceptual Art. Scrolling their memory back to Duchamp’s R.Mutt Urinal, they probably smiled and wondered why we’re looking at a banana NOW–A HUNDRED YEARS LATER. 

Maybe they yawned.

 

All contents copyright (C) 2010 Katherine Hilden. All rights reserved.

http://facefame.wordpress.com

http://katherinehilden.wordpress.com

Banana on the Wall

Welcome to my kitchen.  You can see I like primary colors. Red-yellow-blue.  I like to throw in one complementary, here the complementary to red, which is green.  Well, full disclosure, I’m an artist. Visual, primarily.  Notice that the walls and doors are white, white, white.  Now, let’s think, because when we encounter Art, we have to engage our critical thinking skills.  Right.  So, where do we find white walls? Dogmatically white, white by modernist decree, inexcusably white?  Correct. In art galleries.

Welcome to my art gallery. You can see that I have a work of art on the white wall. Actually, in this case, on the kitchen cabinet. You can call that contextualism, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves.  Anyway, this is a famous, possibly great—we’ll have to debate that later—contemporary work of art, called “Comedian.” It was first exhibited at Art Basel Miami Beach in 2019. The artist, Maurizio Cattelan, wanted to make a critical statement and provoke a theoretical discussion about what’s been going on in the practice of contemporary art.

Now, it may be that, as you are reading this, you are tied, gagged and tortured by hostage takers and, therefore, you are unable to behave like the good student you were brought up to be and politely  raise your hand to ask a question because you are confused about the banana in the kitchen which—someone is telling you—has kept its yummy yellow potassium power for six years.

Like so much about contemporary art, your confusion is a sign of two things: 1) you are sane and 2) you are pitiably ignorant about the intricacies of what is generally—and generously—called  today’s art market or art scene.

For your sanity you can thank whatever creation myth you like and also your sensible diet. Eat a banana because potassium is good for you.  Later, in a video clip, we’ll see how a gallery goer saw the banana taped to the wall, thought oh sweet potassium I need that, peeled off the duct tape and chomped down the banana in big bites.

As for the art market, what fun!   We are so lucky!

Just this past week the art market allowed us to witness the definitive scene in its contemporary high drama: the auction at Sotheby’s  of your by now favorite work of art—admit it—called  “Comedian” by Maurizio Cattelan: that banana with duct tape.  The auction was held four days ago, on November 20, at Sotheby’s in New York, culminating in the winning bid of six-point-two million dollars.  For $6,200,000 (plus Sotheby’s commission) the proud, victorious bidder received a banana and a roll of duct tape. And, seriously, a printout of directions on how to use the tape to attach the banana to a wall.

Ask not how the fellow bidders could manage to keep a straight face and refrain from beating each other over their heads with their shoes. Ask rather, how did it come to this.

We can trace the modern and post-modern art conversations back to the middle of the 19^th century.  Let’s do that.  Let’s start by noticing that the word Art has been attached to a great variety of objects.

One of our contemporary artists, David Hockney, has said that most of what’s in art museums is not art at all.  What does he mean by that?  He’s been rich and famous for decades, way beyond the need to provoke attention by outrageous statements.  Is what he said really outrageous?  Yes and no? How can we think about this?

We could start by listing the objects that are displayed in museums: Egyptian mummy cases…ancient Greek sculpture fragments…old coins and helmets…12^th century objects that were adored as the presence of God…portraits of kings and their powdered mistresses…pictures of pots and pans…haystacks and nude women…a bottle rack bought in a hardware store…a piece of cloth splattered with paint.

For the past three thousand years or more people have had conversations about what’s worth looking at and what’s just stuff for everyday use.

Let’s devote the next few posts to listening in on some of those conversations about what’s worth looking at—what Art should be, has been and can be.

But first, back to that banana as real Art.  People have been talking about it for the past six years.  I recommend that everybody now take the time to read some of the reporting and the excellent, witty analysis. I’ll limit myself to just four publications, The Guardian, Vogue,  Hyperallergic, and Wikipedia.

Last week’s auction scene can be seen in these newspaper reports.  Watch the clip from Sotheby’s! Witness the elegant, always proper and professionally refined auctioneer lose  control of his stiff-upper-lip as he dramatically gestures to the fruit on the wall and proclaims:  “The world’s most expensive banana!”

News coverage in The Guardian:

https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2024/nov/07/maurizio-cattelan-duct-taped-banana-artwork-new-york-auction-sale-price-estimate

https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2024/nov/21/maurizio-cattelans-duct-taped-banana-artwork-fetches-us52m-at-new-york-auction

Commentary on Hyperallergic:

https://hyperallergic.com/967962/banana-artwork-sells-for-6-2-million/

https://hyperallergic.com/968513/the-banana-that-made-me-sick-to-my-stomach/

On Wikipedia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comedian_(artwork)#cite_ref-2

In Vogue:

https://www.vogue.com/article/the-120000-art-basel-banana-explained-maurizio-cattelan

… in all its social media glory, indeed.

Does it seem to you that context is everything? We’ll have to unpack that, won’t we!

In the meantime, tape a banana to your kitchen cabinet and notice how your family and friends will start to worry about you, even as you keep shouting it’s ART, you dummies!  

P.S.  If you reread my earlier post about the banana on the wall  you’ll see that it’s not so edgy, more accessible, easier to follow: https://artamaze.wordpress.com/2020/09/20/banana-on-the-wall/

 

All contents copyright (C) 2010 Katherine Hilden. All rights reserved.

http://facefame.wordpress.com

http://katherinehilden.wordpress.com