Replies: 32 Comments
on Thursday, February 28th, walt said
Brad, you bring back a memory that is perhaps an interesting point. I remember being able to recognize those who got it and those who didn't...those who we called 'plastic'. I felt, at least it seemed, to be fairly clear at the time. Having watched some of my old friends grow older I'm not so sure anymore but there was that cultural (sub-cultural) identity that seemed to make things very clear.
I think there is a similar thing going on today within the arts...maybe on a number of sub-cultural levels...a lot of it a reaction to what a newer generation thinks is useless, or perverted, or generic, passe. I think every generation has opted for some aspect of this sort of mindset. But for the most part there was always a certain amount of quality still built into the output...whether it was painting, music, poetry or graphic design. What bothers me about what I see around me is the lack of quality, not so much the mindset or content of the art.
on Thursday, February 28th, Brad Michael Moore said
Bob are you trying to sell something - or do you have a portfolio here - well, good luck with your business...
on Thursday, February 28th, Brad Michael Moore said
Those were the days - a time of independent radio stations who played the important stuff of times a'changing - back in a day when only the hip-minded had longhair, and peace sign decals on their bumpers... Within the next ten years everyone started wearing long hair as it became more socially accepted and you could no longer recognize a brother by his rag. The eight tracks were the big deal there for a while - they played stereo and one half of an album played to the end of the tape - where the play head would then flip and play the other direction and the other side of the LP - each side taking up 1/2 of the 1/4 inch tapes width. That was really cool - 7 or 8 years later we got our Commodore 64's and brought our freak flags in for good.
on Thursday, February 28th, Bob said
As with the Big Bang, an infinite array of possibilities of light and color, in matter and space, and in mind and canvas.
on Wednesday, February 27th, walt said
I vaguely remember hearing about "The Texas International (Peace) Pop Festival." I certainly remember 8 tracks, and weren't there also 4 tracks or 6 tracks at one time before cassettes? At one time I had an 8 track car stereo player hooked up to an old scale model train transformer with a couple of bare speakers in my bedroom. I remember playing Jimi Hendrix and Jefferson Airplane until the tape got all stretched and warped.
on Sunday, February 24th, BradMM said
Walt,
Before, "My Last Trip to Tulsa," I made it to, "The Texas International (Peace) Pop Festival," several weeks after Woodstock, and Joni Mitchell sang her freshly penned, "Woodstock," on stage with Crosby, Stills, and Nash. I had purchased her first album, "Songs to a Seagull," on an Eight-Track cartridge before cassettes a year or so before! Now, back to the garden...
on Saturday, February 23rd, walt said
Brad, what you said reminded me of the words from Joni Mitchell's Woodstock (an event we both missed, she because of a previous committment and me because I couldn't get a ride out of Tulsa...and so we never met).
Goes something like this:
"We are stardust, we are golden.
We are part of the Devil's bargain.
And we've got to get ourselves back to the garden."
on Saturday, February 23rd, Brad Michael Moore said
Walt, I like the idea of green art - operating without batteries...
Jose', I think, if we compare ourselves to the universal ideas of creation - well, Earth may be less than a single grain of sand on such a grand scale - but, every grain in the hourglass had its moment at the threshold. It takes so many pieces of a clock to get it ticking. Our creativity will surely give up to the pangs of gravity if we do not keep it in motion. As long as we stay creatively active, in our mind's eye, we have our place in the universe. We continue to be a part of the ignitability of the matter/energy stream Walt speaks of. Nothing is forever but energy, and black holes that swallow matter. Being a part of two out of the three will suit me fine - for in the time of being - we are, and that is more likely the truest nature we exercise... It is a curious idea to consider – now its time to turn the video back on!
on Friday, February 22nd, walt said
Jose, you're so right. But you know me...I'm always interested in how things work.
on Friday, February 22nd, marjan said
Josey! ;)
What a beautiful compliment. Isn't that what most of it is about? I was walking along the streets of London and thinking 'there is a person who paints beautiful colours with great gentleness' and he now sees his own water-hydrants.;) And my 'Bubbles' and 'Scream'.
Very funny, because Peter Atkins the chemistry chappy is so far away from Chopra...;)
Universe in one iris of one Jose...
on Friday, February 22nd, jose said
Sorry to post twice in a row. Marjan, loved the two poems. BTW, I came across a beautiful fire-hydrant last week while walking around the old town, she'd just been to the stylist, shiny bright red, stretching out her new chrome hands for me to see. A nice surprise.
on Friday, February 22nd, jose said
Marjan, Walty, mirrors tend to reflect ourselves so basicly what this theory does is just point at how things happen, it adds nothing [from what I understood] to the more pressing matter on how one might change what looks back at us. We go looking for validation armed with the empathy tools that best suit what we wish to find. I thought that would somehow explain the Hirst bit, Marjan. Interesting, also, how you meant the Chemistry chappy and I ended up finding him plus an artist who's philosophy is so close to mine... Deepak Chopra has focused on that one and I'm sure science will wrap it up in no time as well - coincidences! As for musical instruments, I always loved drums but never managed to find myself behind a set though, I had piano lessons that drove me close to madness because I was too young to understand the connection between what the teacher was trying to extract from me and music, maybe it was a language thingy, I was struggling to learn english back then. I'm definitely going to check ubu.com later this afternoon.
on Thursday, February 21st, marjan said
Walty .Correction:
Neuroarthistory: From Aristotle and Pliny to Baxandall and Zeki by J Onians
(There is a pretty bit about a dolphin...)
on Thursday, February 21st, marjan said
In that case, Walty, his book is out, Professor John Onions, if you can't get it out there, let me know....
What worries me though that it explains your fiend Hirst and Reality TV and other 'empathy junkies'and that this will be taken as sole criterion (because of funding....)
I used to play the flute. It's one of the things I do miss doing. Playing with my flute and my flute replying....
on Thursday, February 21st, walt said
Mirror Neurons are more interesting as relating to the arts. They have to do with how mimicry (the studies are so far mostly with monkeys) have to do with empathy...how we sense what someone else feels, knows, behaves...here there seems to be a direct connection to the arts.
On another note did someone say drums? I love drums...and flutes...I love flutes too!
on Thursday, February 21st, marjan said
Josey, I meant Peter Atkins the Chemistry chappy with the whole universe and none of it. (Thought it sort of fitted in with your universe out of one eye...)
Funding. Pah. I've given up. and that ageism bit is just too much idiocy.
that drums bit : on ubu.com, there are the most delicious lectures "Comment vivre ensemble" by Barthes about 'ideorrhythmie'. 'Would love to read what you think of them....It's a whole new deliciously confirmed world...;)
on Thursday, February 21st, Ellen said
Jose- I think it is up to those who care enough to spend the time & energy to carry on in art & in other areas of civilization. Today, so much has lost meaning because it is a fast-forward world. Sacrificing art/meaning to keep pace must be decided from one's own inner self.
on Thursday, February 21st, jose said
Marjan, Peter Atkins the Professor or the artist? Both sound interesting, but I liked the artist's work very much. Reading about motor neurons can be interesting but then we don't need to read about them we know how to use them, that's why we're artists: we're the guinea-pigs they'd love to have in the laboratory... could be an interesting collaboration if, as you say, the artist could keep his independence, but the funding carries it’s weight.
Sure I could do a course on the internet, but that’s not really the point is it? I can learn a lot in many places but when an art institution sets up a workshop and limits participation to a certain age it’s not merely keeping you away from the course it is also keeping you away from the dynamics that could arise from the contacts that are to be made in such an environment and the credibility. I know, I know, it comes with strings, and the need for credibility belies a certain insecurity, but to think that you are passé at 35 sounds ludicrous to me.
Helen, isn’t it weird how modern-day rituals have lost all meaning, people wanting to be part of tribes and yet dancing to their own drums just about sums it up. But they don’t care about the incongruence because they do it just for show and there’ll always be a sucker on that beach who will fall for the antics. Its pretty much the same in art.
on Thursday, February 21st, Ellen said
Jose- I just returned from Sarisota, Fla. to read your blog. An interesting corellation: I was visiting my 101-year-old step-father-in-law who has made it to that age by living his life to the fullest. He worked at one job for more than 65 years, loving it, and is a devoted family man. Hard work and gratification over many years. A fascinating contrast occured. Each evening, people gather on the beach to watch the (often) spectacular sunset. If it is not magnificent they complain, not wanting to wait for the next day's sunset. On Sundays, there is a tribal dance on the beach, celebrating the sunset, replete with drums. There were "regular" looking people dancing wildly in the waning light. Dancing to their own drum, as it were, in the moment. I was really blown away by the juxtaposition of one loooong lived life as compared with two or three hours of instant gratification.
on Wednesday, February 20th, marjan said
Walty
Sadly, I somewhat agree, but refuse to for health and safety reasons! ;)
(Sad thing is that most of the collaborativ work between science and art is stipulated and financed by the same primitive tosh and hence more installations and 'physics saw' music and the usual piffle.)
Actually, I think I got it wrong. It was mirror motor neurons. It isn't really that new really. As far as I could gather it simply confirmed loads of bits about instant identification which lots of artists, novelists, composers etc had figured out, but now has the scientific stamp of statistical approval. The people to watch out for though are Ramachandran, Zekir,Patel and the one Jose mentioned Antonio Tomasio (sp?). (You can find them on video google) There is exciting stuff on www.thesciencenetwork.org. Would be fun if Josy could do his video with Peter Atkins! ;)
on Wednesday, February 20th, walt said
Hmmm...mirror-neurons eh? Had to look them up. Interesting. Why ARE new discoveries with their corresponding ideas in science so much more interesting than new ideas in art these days?
on Wednesday, February 20th, marjan said
Walty and Josey! (to everyone else: only I'm allowed to do that, 'coz I iZ speZiAll, OK?;) Just joking around...)
Walty, hehe
Don't give them any ideas; they'll have dying species plants growing next. Remember edible macrobiotic art and the rest of 'planned obsolescence'?
Bonzia art DVDs coming up. You too can help the environment by watching bonzai grow by participating in the growth and evolution of hundreds of years by focusing on the plant with your very own energy. For visualisation effects and verbal communication with the bonzai cosmos of infinity , please read instruction manual....
Josey, I hear you hear you hear you. You are supposed to have popped it at the neuroplastic age redundancy.
You know, as much as so much has turned for the worse in the past 30 years, there is still a community of people who are fed up with the nonsense and better still, it's a growing community, who e.g. just don't have a telly anymore. ((I don't know about your video course, but you can do loads of them online...))
Btw, there is a wonderful biography on DVD by Schamoni of Hundertwasser.
on Wednesday, February 20th, jose said
Spot on Mark, but then again it's only a certain type of thinking that they are adverse to: the one that doesn't let them stay within the cozy loop that gives meaning to their pre-fab lives. I don't say this out of bitterness but more like sadness. That's a great sales-pitch Walt! Do you know what revolts me most about what you just said there, Marjan, it's that when we try to get into workshops or courses on these new-frontier things we discover that there is an age-limit for participation. We are welcome as curious by-standers but when it comes to getting on to the wagon, if you should so feel inclined, you have to be under 35 [just happened recently with a video workshop I had wanted to join at The Gulbenkian Foundation in Lisbon]. Learning, so it would seem, is only fostered by the State until such an age, what kind of message does that send out?
on Wednesday, February 20th, walt said
Marjan, I think you are right. If a collector was really smart they would be buying up paintings like crazy right now...and sculpture which outlast technology by millenia... low maintenance with no working parts to go wrong. What a concept. No loss of energy once created. Wow, it's the NEW GREEN product!
on Wednesday, February 20th, marjan said
Hello Valerie
Just to comment further about the situation in the UK. I went to a lecture about mirror-neurons in Art last night - nearly fell off my chair several times. Basically, we're going to have more installations and videos flicking around.
In the UK you simply cannot get funding unless you comply with identity politics, audience participation targets and now it is obvious to me, the easiest recognizable mirror neurons jumping around (any media propanda will do) and know how to be psychic and predict how many people will benefit from your work, including whatever the fashionable bits in 'positive discrimination' are.
The fact that an observer already is participating by subjective interpretation doesn't occur to these people and they are all in it together. It's like the invasion of the body snatchers....
This is the time to snap up really good antiques.
on Wednesday, February 20th, Mark said
Instant gradification. Art, at least painting, sculpture and other forms don't always do that. That is why so many pay little or no attention to art. On must think to enjoy art, to many do not like to think but rather like to be told. Other media have replaced art, movies, TV, video games, they have the attention, not a non-moving hang on the wall and hardly notice painting. It may one day change and people will wake up and think there is more to seeing then just what I am told to see, maybe. In the mean time we just (must) keep on doing what we do, trying to get others to see, to think, to feel. Difficult, yes, but well worth it.
on Wednesday, February 20th, jose said
Valerie, the conceptual movement turned me into a reactionary as well, I didn't and don't want to march to that drum or the ones that have taken over since. Maybe its a good thing after all not to be living in NYC, London or Berlin, if I were I’d definitely be closer to 'boring old fart' than 'hip'. Having lived in all three I remember how you either strove to the one or fell into the other and how awkward it was just to Be. In our western world-view we only seem to acknowledge those two extremes, and the so-called elite equates progress to shock and the bringing down of all and any values that are left. In so doing what we call the West and its culture comes across to me increasingly like a re-visitation of the myth of Daedalus. I wonder if Gauguin and other less known artists such as Roerich and Spies felt the same in their time – I’m certain Hundertwasser did. Probably nothing has changed and nothing ever will, and it is in the very nature of the labyrinth that it so remain. In any event, as long as we get to hear news from distant parts, as in your posts from Dubai, we get a sense that there still is ample space between those two extremes for much to happen.
on Tuesday, February 19th, valerie said
Paragraph four did it for me! The conclusion of 'empty aesthetics' just about sums it up. I think part of the problem was the longevity of the 'conceptual' especlaly in the UK. It dragged smugly on long after it was provoking any thought jsut because it could! Since then I have completely lost track of what is the art and what is the market and which is determining which. Platforms for exploring or challenging this perhaps predictably do not seem to exist so its probably easier to keep yr head down and avoid rocking the precarious boat!
on Tuesday, February 19th, jose said
I really can’t take much credit for the video playing backwards part, Walt, I’ve seen it used to great effect before. But while I was writing this one it felt like a good way to make the point I was trying to make. For some reason I like works that swallow us whole and would like to believe that one day I might get a shot at one myself, but it sure ain’t easy… but then again, it probably wouldn’t grip us this way if it were, would it?
on Monday, February 18th, walt said
Contrary to contemporary opinion nothing created by a human being is in itself a new thing entirely but based on the reality in which we all live, breath and operate our senses. It is such a simple understanding. One might make an original work...but that work is not separate from the world of things and ideas from which it is created...only that it is focused through one set of eyes, one mind, one pair of hands. Just like matter is created from energy ,and energy is converted back from matter, art is created from life. And the question is not that life is in turn created from art but that art represents life...Art is the act of life operating on reality...or what it thinks it knows of reality...art is the living.
I was infatuated, Jose, by the idea of the video playing backwards. I restart work all the time scraping or rubbing away the marks previously made to begin again perhaps at some point along the way or all the way back to the beginning. But it doesn't have the same effect as the video in reverse. No. In a few scrapes its is gone, or gone but for the ghost of the beginnings. But the video...the painting being sucked back into the black hole of the artists soul, so to speak, is telling. Suppose we all stopped there! What would there be to talk about?
There is that place when an artist resists the piling up of brush strokes, all so pretty and vibrant, often so frivolously laid down to distract (more is less) from what is missing, then makes the bolder mark that carries so much emotion, volition and determination. At that place something very human begins...something very powerful. At the moment the hesitant tickling stops the courageous momentum begins.
on Monday, February 18th, jose said
'Aye, but there's the rub...' Brad, there's so much distracting debris out there that it's getting harder to stay attuned. The echoes keep getting fainter and fainter and easier to discard and those who insist on staying tuned pass for lunatics. Maybe we’re living through the last few ‘inches’ of expansion before the universe starts to breathe in and returns all of this back into a black hole. For us mere mortals it may seem irrelevant, we’ll be long gone before that ever happens, but will the creative endeavours of our children’s children have any significance or meaning, or will they face even greater obstacles than the one’s we put up with? How will the creative impulse of Man measure against the forces the universe will set in place once it has reached it’s peak and stops to create? This is all very theoretical, I know, probably even futile and meaningless… I don’t even worry about it but I find it fascinating: Do we really believe that we are so special as a species that our creative spark is, or can ever become, free or independent of that initial spark?
on Monday, February 18th, Brad Michael Moore said
Jose',
And you said: "...and the artist takes a step back; his arm briskly leaving the point of what had been first contact; and ponders what was about to become the next step."
That is the decisive moment, first contact. Sometimes there is magic in those first strokes and efforts of creativity - sometimes the magic might not reveal itself until thousands of actions later. Creating art is like a bullfight. You pay attention to your work and your skills will take care of you. If you allow your mind, and attention, to become distracted by the crowd - then they will see the blood they came to see. If you stay attuned to your concentration - the crowd will relish in your courage... I would rather allow you my courage any day over my blood.
Imagine a film projected on a screen. An artist, a painter, toils away at his latest canvas, the camera follows the strokes of the brush in close-up and pans-out to encompass his hand, then his arm and finally his whole body dancing around as he works. It is at this point that we understand that the action proceeds in reverse: the gestures undo what was done, the paint flows back into the brush, and the artist takes a step back; his arm briskly leaving the point of what had been first contact; and ponders what was about to become the next step. We see intensity in the artist’s expression and the camera homes-in on one of his eyes and dives deep inside.
