Outside the Lines

thesmartset.com | By Morgan Meis

It is like the message above Dante's Gates of Hell. Abandon all hope, ye who enter here. Except that we are not entering hell, we are entering an exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. The message at the Gates of MoMA is in the form of a question. It asks, "Must we not then renounce the object altogether, throw it to the winds and instead lay bare the purely abstract?" The writer of the message is neither God nor Satan. He was a human being, and from Russia. His name was Wassily Kandinsky. 

The attempt to answer Kandinsky's question led to a transformation in painting the implications of which are still being felt today. The transformation was Abstraction. Painters, just a few years prior to Kandinsky, happily portrayed human beings and animals and landscapes and historical events. After Kandinsky, pure forms and shapes and colors took over the canvas. This was a shocking and more or less unprecedented development. It took the art world by storm and carried the oft-bewildered public along with it.

The current show at MoMA, “Inventing Abstraction: 1910-1925,” tracks the developments in painting over those 15 tumultuous years. The question that lingers behind the show is: “Why did they do it?” The answer is to be found on the canvases, and also in the writings and comments that are left behind by many of the early pioneers in abstract painting. Abstract painting was an attempt to paint the Absolute. Kazimir Malevich, the Russian Suprematist painter and early practitioner and theorist of abstract painting proclaimed, "I have broken the blue boundary of color limits, come out into the white; beside me comrade-pilots swim in this infinity." The majority of early abstract painters felt a version of Malevich's glee. They were getting rid of the constraints of figurative painting. They were moving past false appearances and entering the domain of Truth. Painting in the abstract was a way of painting the true reality of the world, the real essences that are obscured in our everyday perception. Robert Delaunay, another pioneer in abstract painting, said that, "Direct observation of the luminous essence of nature is for me indispensable." Read More...

 

Image "Landscape with Rain" Vasily Kandinshy(1913)

When Artists And Corporations Get Along

fastcodesign.com | By Kyle Vanhemert

Typically, when an artist’s work deals explicitly with one corporation or another, some sort of social critique is involved. And if not intended, it’s presumed to be involved anyway. So the two sides often regard each other with suspicion, if not outright hostility, and you’d think that would be the case with Brendan O’Connell, a painter, and Walmart, the supermarket leviathan whose shelves often serve as his subjects. But as Susan Orlean writes in this week’s New Yorker, that’s not quite the case.

After reviewing O’Connell’s works, which are often investigations of light and color and pattern as they exist, say, in an eight-foot stretch of neatly ordered cereal boxes, Walmart decided that they were not indictments of retail, but rather celebrations of it: Read More...

An Exhibition Celebrating The Harshness, And Honesty, Of Bruce Nauman

fastcodesign.com | By Kelsey Campbell-Dollaghan

If dozens of armchair cultural critics and bloggers are to be believed, we’re living in an era of overwhelming niceness--of online “likes,” insipidly positive reviews, and feel-good folksy aesthetics. It’s not a cultural climate that lends itself to the work of Bruce Nauman, who is known as much for harshness as for his sincerity. Yet that’s what makes Mindfuck, a new exhibition of Nauman’s work in London, so incredibly refreshing. In other words, fuck your niceness. It’s boring.

At Hauser & Wirth, curator Philip Larratt-Smith has pulled a smattering of pieces from nearly every era of Nauman’s career, characterized by an amazing diversity of mediums and messages. There are plenty of neon signs (probably his most recognizable works), including Sex and Death/Double 69 (1985) and Run From Fear/Fun From Rear (1972), one of Nauman’s biting word plays. There are also jolting large-scale works like the disturbing Carousel from 1988, in which dismembered animal carcasses are dragged around a rotating motor (Nauman orders the polyurethane molds, usually used by taxidermists as a base for an animal’s skin, online). Larratt-Smith describes the show as examining the “mind-body” divide and Nauman’s ability to “tap into the deep structure of the human unconscious.” Viewing these pieces, he says, “approximates a state of trauma, equivalent to the conversion symptoms of the hysteric, to the utterances of the psychotic, to the repetition compulsion tied to the death drive, to the reprimands of the superego, to good and bad internal objects, and to the logic of dreams.” Read More..

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Game Theory: A Playwright on the Art of Video Games

artbeat.blogs.nytimes.com | By Lucy Prebble | Image Courtset of Sony Computer Entertainment Amer, via Associated Press 'A scene from Journey'

So it’s the end of 2012, and it feels like gaming is pushing through its creative adolescence. There are glimpses of what it might become. Thus, for games to take their rightful place among other creative works it’s important to ask what they do that other forms cannot.

For me, there’s a sort of identification with your character that other media will never be able to replicate. A game makes a player its subject, while the tyranny of the director’s point of view in film and the author’s withholding of detail in fiction both place the viewer as an observer in the world. Of course, in film and fiction emotions are elicited and characters inspire empathy, but the viewer recognizes  she is following a protagonist that is “not me.” The bridge of empathy comes from the audience bringing their own life experience to the narrative. Gaming can break down that division between revealer and observer, through making the player complicit in and responsible for the choices made. This allows a sense of one single, unseparated narrative, one emotional journey. It is the difference between being told something and coming to realize it yourself.

The finest example this year may be Journey, the follow-up to Thatgamecompany’s gorgeous Flower. It is an almost transcendental experience. Though designed as more of a meditation than a competition, it shows what gaming is capable of. Journey allows the player to move through a set of landscapes profound in their audio and visual beauty with no instruction, but with the momentum, disorientation and hope that emerge from any journey in life. The game captures the emotional experience through play. The choice of subject matter and its rendering would be impossible to translate to film, music or literature, coming as close to game-as-artistic-experience as I have ever known. Read More...

 

The secrets of Cézanne

the-tls.co.uk | By Julian Barnes

Cézanne had his first one-man show in 1895, at the age of fifty-six. His dealer, Ambroise Vollard, put the “Bathers at Rest” of 1876–7 in the window of his shop, safely knowing that it would cause offence. He also suggested that his client make a lithograph of the painting. Cézanne produced a sizeable work, known as “Large Bathers”, and heightened some of the impressions with watercolour. In 1905, Picasso bought one and took it off to his studio. Two years later, its secrets fed into “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon”. Cézanne’s influence on Georges Braque was just as clear, and openly admitted. “The discovery of his work overturned everything”, Braque said in old age. “I had to rethink everything. There was a battle to be fought against much of what we knew, what we had tended to respect, admire, or love. In Cézanne’s works we should see not only a new pictorial construction but also – too often forgotten – a new moral suggestion of space.”

Artists are greedy to learn and art is self-devouring; the handover from the nineteenth to the twentieth century was swiftly done. As was the handover from one kind of artist to another. Cézanne was an obscure figure even when famous; he was secretive, frugal, unacquisitive; he would often go missing for weeks on end; his emotional life, such as it was, remained deeply private and protected; and he had no interest in what the world called success. Braque was a dandy with a chauffeur; while Picasso single-handedly embodied the twentieth century’s ideal of an artist – public, political, rich, successful in all the meanings of the word, camera-loving and concupiscent. And if Cézanne might have thought Picasso’s life vulgar – in the sense that it detracted from the time, and the human integrity, required to make art – how austere and high-minded Picasso would come to seem compared to the most “successful” artists of the twenty-first century, flogging their endless versions of the same idea to know-nothing billionaires. Read More...

Roll Over Beethoven

bookforum.com | By Eric Banks

In 1948, his first year of teaching at Black Mountain College, John Cage gave a lecture on Erik Satie, at the time a little-known French composer. To make his point about Satie’s significance, Cage weighed him against a composer who needed no introduction. “Beethoven was in error,” he said, “and his influence, which has been as extensive as it is lamentable, has been deadening to the art of music.” All that could be said of the German composer is that his legacy was to “practically shipwreck the art on an island of decadence.” In Indeterminacy, Cage recounted Satie’s remark that “what was needed was a music without any sauerkraut in it,” and “that the reason Beethoven was so well known was that he had a good publicity manager.” For his apostasy Cage not only alienated several friends among the Black Mountain music faculty but inspired, at least if the anecdotes can be believed, a number of students to torch their Beethoven records.

Satie was correct in at least one respect: Beethoven never lacked for good publicity. Three years after the premiere of the Symphony in C Minor, op. 67, aka Beethoven’s Fifth, on a bitterly cold December evening in Vienna in 1808, the phenomenally gifted composer, critic, and writer E. T. A. Hoffmann reviewed the work for the most influential music journal in the world, the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung. In a remarkably far-reaching work of criticism based on a close reading of the score—it is not clear whether he had actually heard the symphony performed—Hoffmann not only used the occasion to argue for the superiority of instrumental music among the arts, but crowned Beethoven as the cap of all that music could attain. In doing so, he made the Fifth Symphony synonymous with Romantic genius, both a model of and model for, the very quality Clifford Geertz found universal to religions. And what made the Fifth able to shoulder such greatness, as Hoffmann took pains to describe, was a foundation shockingly elemental in its simplicity: a “principle idea that consists of only two measures, and that, in the course of what follows, continually reappears in many different forms. In the second measure a fermata, then a repetition of this idea a tone lower, and again a fermata." Read More...

Notes and noise

economist.com | From the Print Edition | Image Courtsey of The Art Archive

“IS MUSIC such a serious business?” So asked Franz Joseph, the Austrian emperor, at the end of the 19th century after a performance of new music in Vienna. “I always thought”, he continued, “it was meant to make people happy.”

Contrary to expectation, interest in classical music (the happy or serious kind) may be on the up. A recent YouGov poll optimistically found that, in Britain, those under 25 were as keen to learn about it as those over 55. In China, between 30m and 100m children are learning to play the piano or the violin. The Sichuan Conservatory in Chengdu alone is said to have more than 14,000 students.

However, classical music composed during the 20th century still has a reputation for being too difficult, too serious and too perplexing. Experimenting with atonality, microtonality, electronic distortion of sound and the role of chance: the developments favoured by the more innovative 20th-century composers do not make for easy listening. In concert-hall programmes and orchestral schedules in Britain and America works by Arnold Schoenberg, Bernd Alois Zimmermann and Gyorgy Ligeti are almost always sandwiched between better-known and loved pieces by Beethoven or Brahms. It is as if an evening of 20th-century composition, even by a famous name, still needs its spoonful of sugar. Read More...

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Paul Klee’s Colorful Trail in Italy

nytimes.com | By Roderick Conway Morris | Image Courtsey of San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

ROME — Four avant-garde painters — Chagall, Klee, Kokoschka and Picasso — were given prominence in 1948 in the first Venice Biennale following the Second World War and were described in the event’s catalog as artists “who had defended, in dark moments, cultural freedom in western Europe.”

The Venice Biennale continued to play a role in posthumously bringing Klee’s work to international public attention in two subsequent editions. In 1950, 17 of his pieces from the 1910-14 period were exhibited in a show at the German Pavilion of the Blaue Reiter group of Munich, and in 1954, 53 of his works from 1915 to 1940 (the year of his death) were exhibited in a solo retrospective.

Klee visited Italy six times but, whereas his trips to Tunisia and Egypt are regularly cited as important events in his development as an artist, his excursions to the Italian peninsula and Sicily have received little attention. This theme is now examined in “Paul Klee and Italy,” an exhibition of 45 of the artist’s works at the National Gallery of Modern Art in Rome, researched and curated by Tulliola Sparagni and Mariastella Margozzi.

Klee was born near Bern, Switzerland, to a German music-teacher father and a Swiss singer mother in 1879. His first instincts were to follow his parents into a musical career but on leaving school in 1898 he decided to train as a draftsman and artist in Munich. Read More...

 

Snow Becomes A Canvas For Intricate, Temporary Art Works

fastcodesign.com | By Jordan Kushins | Image Courtsey of Simon Beck

For Simon Beck, snow is where his heart is. He has an uncanny knack for creating intricate designs in a fresh fall, and has been creating stunning large-scale, ground-bound art works since he started with a five-pointed star back in 2004. He’s subsequently developed increasingly complex designs while simultaneously refining his process (he claims his background/day job as an orienteering mapmaker doesn’t give him much insight, but it certainly couldn’t hurt).

Each motif measures almost 500 feet in diameter and takes about 10 hours to complete. He uses a handheld orienteering compass to establish the setting, determines distances with measuring tape or counting his paces, then creates curves with a clothes line attached to an anchor at the center. Depending on the location, Beck will shake up his strategy; for a site close to home, he’ll do a daytime session, head inside for a meal, then complete the rest at night, while with more remote sites he’ll bring along provisions and try to finish everything in one extended jaunt. “I do not stop work while I am eating, but instead reserve a section that is not demanding in order to reduce the danger of sucking food into my lungs,” he tells Co.Design.

His latest collection of temporary graphics were delayed a bit longer than usual into the season due to uncooperative weather. Once there was a break in the inclement elements in December, however, Beck was out there trudging through the unblemished expanse of smooth frost near his apartment in Les Arcs, a ski resort in the French Alps. Mother Nature unleashed an “absurd amount” of the white stuff, he says. “It’s a struggle to get through it at all!” When I got in touch with the winter maestro for this post, I mentioned that I hope he had a nice holiday and new year. His reponse? “I don’t have holidays--I spend the whole of my life on holiday!” Which is, of course, awesome. Read More...

Art Organizations Say Social Media Plays a Major Role in Operations

mashable.com | Kate Freeman 

Nearly 1,300 art organizations said the Internet has played a major role in today's art world — from expanding audiences, finding new artists and art appreciators, and even broadening the definition of art itself.

The study was conducted by Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project. The organizations surveyed have all received funds from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) in recent years.

Seventy-seven percent of respondents agreed with the statement that the Internet has "played a major role in broadening the boundaries of what it considered art." Read More...