Clinging to the clutter

One of my strategies for motivating myself out of chaos of any kind is viewing a mental image of a very orderly homepage. I have no idea where it came from, but it has been with me since at least 2003 when I was walking the Camino between Borges and Leon in northern Spain. On this monotonous stretch of straight road (and fields into the horizons on both sides) I kept getting this mental picture of a nice laid web page which I should make when I came home. The content was of no importance and it never materialized but still I get this feeling of hope when I visualize it. I guess feeling life being chaotic we - I - long for order (margins, lists, headlines, hierarchies, nice images with nice small sentences below, good looking fonts etc.). Looking around my office I know I need to clean up. I'm clinging to clutter not intentional but because every single piece is nice or pretty or important. On my computer desk top there is a million things from the net I just had to download because I would never come back to the place I saw it. It’s all the important articles about all the interesting topics. They could be part of my mental homepage, as sub pages with links to the front page. I get a really good feeling thinking about it. I'm serious.

John Berger's Ways of Seeing

"The following is an except from John Berger's Ways of Seeing, put out by the British Broadcasting Corporation in 1972. It is considered an early and very accessable work of postmodernism."

One may remember or forget these messages but briefly one takes them in, and for a moment they stimulate the imagination by way of either memory or expectation. The publicity image belongs to the moment. We see it as we turn a page, as we turn a corner, as a vehicle passes us. Or we see it on a television screen while waiting for the commercial break to end. Publicity images also belong to the moment in the sense that they must be continually renewed and made up-to-date. Yet they never speak of the present. Often they refer to the past and always they speak of the future.
We are now so accustomed to being addressed by these images that we scarcely notice their total impact. A person may notice a particular image or piece of information because it corresponds to some particular interest he has. But we accept the total system of publicity images as we accept an element of climate. For example, the fact that these images belong to the moment but speak of the future produces a strange effect which has become so familiar that we scarcely notice it. Usually it is we who pass the image - walking, travelling, turning a page; on the TV screen it is somewhat different but even then we are theoretically the active agent - we can look away, turn down the sound, make some coffee. Yet despite this, one has the impression that publicity images are continually passing us, like express trains on their way to some distant terminus. We are static; they are dynamic - until the newspaper is thrown away, the television program continues or the paster is posted over. Continue

Looking at words and eating cake

Knowing art starts with looking, not reading, that might be or probably is, my problem. I love reading. I like looking and want to love it. Liking it is like looking at a cake and not eating it, or looking at somebody else eat it, and the somebody even know the ingredients, some of them even know how to make it, the cake. 

Bertel Thorvaldsen

Thorvaldsen was a super star Danish sculptor in the first part of the ninteenth century. Art historians today agree as far as I can see that he was overrated in his own time. He was not only an artist but became one of the most important symbols in the building of the modern national Danish state. Today the Thorvaldsen Museum is still one of the largest museums in Copenhagen. I guess his position is secured by the history of the country but how is he viewed today in Denmark and abroad? If he was overrated then, why are there still such a big museum in Copenhagen dedicated to his art (and his art collection)? Can the national hero and the national historical aspect keep the museum alive? I guess there must be som kind of art value back to justfy the museum.

The museum itself has become in a positive sense a museum, as most of the rooms stills looks like they did in the ninteenth century. Is this a strategic choice? The letters to and from Thorvaldsen are all  available online in an impressive database. Why? There are greater artists and greater historical figures then Thorvaldsen in Denmark, but non of them have such a great building or this level of online presence.

Even the English Wikipedia article about Thorvaldsen tells the argument that he was more pure classical then Canova, but the art of Canova is still subject to exhibitions around Europe and I am not sure this is the case with Thorvaldsen. So he migh be more pure classical and less artistically interesting today.

Electrical Walk by Christina Kubisch

Wundergrund Music Festival is on in Copenhagen [about] and the long established German sound artist Christina Kubisch's Electrical Walk can be walked in Copenhagen during the festival. You pick up special kinds of headphone (looking BIG and über retro) which detect the city's electro magnetic radiations as sound structures. I kind of looked forward to more variation as most sounds sounded like electrical motors. The most fun part was listening to sounds while riding the train: Differendt bubbling sounds. We did not pass the game arcade in Tivoli (that would probably be great too).  A positive thing was the slowing down and using the city in a new way. Well known streets and shops opened up with new details.  

Is it all about pace?

In what degree is contemporary art formed by the idea about a fast paced society? Not many people (art consumers, lovers, buyers) have or takes time to look longer on a piece of art then the longing for instant gratification makes possible. Is this selling out on the part of the artists? Or is it the same restlessness working in the artists too? Are we all paced up?

In the beginning of November there will be held a conferance in Copenhagen about the role of the art museums in modern times. Earlier the museum conserved history while today the main thing is the contemporary exhibition. The collections collecting dust and becomes a problem.

What is art? Is it all a question about the rule of pace?


The event in Copenhagen:

The Museum and Its Staging of Contemporary Art 

November 6-7, 2009

Venues: Arken Museum of Modern Art, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art

The role of the art museum has changed drastically during the past decades. So has the role of contemporary art within the art museum. Once institutions for preserving and producing knowledge for eternity, museums increasingly become arenas for experience and events of the moment. The interest in contemporary art towards re-uniting art and life in ‘micro utopian’ models, such as proposed by Nicolas Bourriaud, makes art works perform in ways not incomparable to the workings of the entertainment industry. The shared tendency between museums and contemporary art towards staging and performing ephemeral events and experiences changes the fundamental functions of the museum within a broader cultural context and might indeed change the very role of art in society as well.

Staring into Amnesia 2 (2008): Private collection / Courtesy of Boers-Li Gallery and ArtShortCut by Qiu Anxiong

Ruskin on Turner's Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying – Typhoon Coming On

Click on the picture for larger size.

It is a sunset on the Atlantic after prolonged storm; but the storm is partially lulled, and the torn and streaming rain clouds are moving in scarlet lines to lose themselves in the hollow of the night. The whole surface of the sea included in the picture is divided into two ridges of enormous swell, not high, nor local, but a low, broad heaving of the whole ocean, like the lifting of its bosom by deep-drawn breath after the torture of the storm. Between these two ridges, the fire of the sunset falls along the trough of the sea, dyeing it with an awful but glorious light, the intense and lurid splendour which burns like gold and bathes like blood. Along this fiery path and valley, the tossing waves by which the swell of the sea is restlessly divided, lift themselves in dark, indefinite, fantastic forms, each casting a faint and ghastly shadow behind it along the illumined foam. They do not rise everywhere, but three or four together in wild groups, fitfully and furiously, as the under strength of the swell compels or permits them; leaving between them treacherous spaces of level and whirling water, now lighted with green and lamp-like fire, now flashing back the gold of the declining sun, now fearfully dyed from above with the indistinguishable images of the burning clouds, which fall upon them in flakes of crimson and scarlet, and give to the reckless waves the added motion of their own fiery flying. Purple and blue, the lurid shadows of the hollow breakers are cast upon the mist of the night, which gathers cold and low, advancing like the shadow of death upon the guilty ship as it labors amidst the lightning of the sea, its thin masts written upon the sky in lines of blood, girded with condemnation in that fearful hue which signs the sky with horror, and mixes its flaming flood with the sunlight, – and cast far along the desolate heave of the sepulchral waves, incarnadines the multitudinous sea.1

1. John Ruskin, Modern Painters in The Complete Works of John Ruskin (Library Edition), eds. E.T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn (London: George Allen, 1903-1912), 3:571-2.

Full View # 1

Title	Art Market and Connoisseurship: A Closer Look at Paintings by Rembrandt, Rubens and Their Contemporaries Amsterdamse Gouden Eeuw reeks Amsterdam studies in the Dutch golden age Gouden Eeuw Reeks The question of whether seventeenth-century painters such as Rembrandt and Rubens were exclusively responsible for the paintings later sold under their names has caused many a heated debate. Despite the rise of scholarship on the history of the art market, much is still unknown about the ways in which paintings were produced, assessed, priced, and marketed during this period, which leads to several provocative questions: did contemporary connoisseurs expect masters such as Rembrandt to paint works entirely by their own hand? Who was credited with the ability to assess paintings as genuine? The contributors to this engaging collection—Eric Jan Sluijter, Hans Van Miegroet, and Neil De Marchi, among them—trace these issues through the booming art market of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, arriving at fascinating and occasionally unexpected conclusions.
Authors	Anna Tummers, Koenraad Jonckheere
Editors	Anna Tummers, Koenraad Jonckheere
Edition	illustrated
Publisher	Amsterdam University Press, 2009
ISBN	9089640320, 9789089640321
Length	192 pages

Madame Moitessier by Ingres by Robert Rosenblum (twice)

Below are two descriptions by the same writer (Robert Rosenblum (1927-2006)) about the same painting (J.A.D. Ingres’s Madame Moitessier in National Gallery, London). The first description is a complicated guided tour through the picture and the second is concerned with the art historical context. I will be visiting London and the National Gallery in November, so I want to familiarize myself with some of the paintings.

At first, the dense luxury of Second Empire costume and décor dazzles the eye, above all in the cornucopian outburst of printed roses that spills across the silk dress, and then in the compounding of this splendor through the tufted damask of the sofa, the amethyst bracelet, the glimpse of a fan and oriental vase on the Rococo console, the gilded ornament of the mirror frame. Yet ultimately this nouveau riche opulence is subordinated to a strange silence and calm that completely contradict the portrait’s initial assault upon our senses of sight and touch. For one, the mirror image that occupies the upper half of the painting provides a dull and hazy reflection that challenges the vivid clarity of the material world below . . ..Yet this dialogue between a real world and its dreamlike, immaterial reflection is not merely visual; it also involves the personality of the sitter . . .. A pampered creature of flesh as plump and cushioned as the sofa beneath her, she nevertheless becomes an enigmatic presence . . . a modern oracle presiding in the padded comfort of a mid-nineteenth-century drawing room. Her right hand, as pliable as a starfish, is posed weightlessly against her cheek and temple, as if enforcing her uncommon powers of wisdom and concentration; and her eyes, compressed forward with the total volume of the head, appear to observe us both directly and obliquely. And to enrich even more this aura of a tangible yet remote being, Ingres has cast her reflection in pure profile, a ghostly sibyl who gazes as sightlessly as a marble statue into an invisible world.1

[V]iewed through the lenses of period style, Ingres's portrait . . . make[s] us wallow in a plum-pudding richness of textures, materials, patterns that aspire to an airless density. Mme. Moitessier, of course, is a model of cool propriety in her wealthy Paris interior, and her posture alludes to classical prototypes; but she and Ingres clearly revel in her sumptuous inventory of possessions: the gilt console, the tufted damask sofa, the Chinese vase, the peacock-feathered fan, the bracelets and brooch with their enormous gems, and above all the full cascade of the rose-patterned silk dress with its embellishments of fringes and ribbons. But Ingres . . . transcends the Second Empire period look through his own genius, which here ennobles the sitter not only with the abstract, yet sensual linear circuits that command the undulant shapes of fingers, shoulders, and arms, but through an adaptation of the common antique pose of contemplative head-on-hand.2

The painting can be studied in detail with zoom and other tools on The National Gallery's excellent home page: http://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/jean-auguste-dominique-ingres-madame-moitessier.

1 Robert Rosenblum, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1967), 164.

2 Robert Rosenblum and H.W. Janson, 19th-Century Art, rev. ed (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson/Prentice Hall, 2005), 249-50.

Henrich Wölfflin - PRINCIPLES OF ART HISTORY

The most important chapter of this important book is on limited preview on Google Books. Only the half last page is not there (page 40). According to Munsterberg the main contribution to the history of art from Wölfflin was his idea about "linear" versus "painterly". Read all about it (click on "Google Books" on bottom left to get it out of the blog):

Visual descriptions

Writing about art by Marjorie Munsterberg is an eye opener for me. She writes about the different ways of writing about art. It will be easier for me to see what the writers intention are when I know these categories (yes, I am a REAL beginner).

First there are the visual descriptions when the writer tries to write what he sees. There are two ways of doing this. Munsterberg, please:

Ekphrasis

One particular kind of visual description is also the oldest type of writing about art in the West. Called ekphrasis, it was created by the Greeks. The goal of this literary form is to make the reader envision the thing described as if it were physically present. In many cases, however, the subject never actually existed, making the ekphrastic description a demonstration of both the creative imagination and the skill of the writer. For most readers of famous Greek and Latin texts, it did not matter whether the subject was actual or imagined. The texts were studied to form habits of thinking and writing, not as art historical evidence.

Formal Analysis

Formal analysis is a specific type of visual description. Unlike ekphrasis, it is not meant to evoke the work in the reader’s mind. Instead it is an explanation of visual structure, of the ways in which certain visual elements have been arranged and function within a composition. Strictly speaking, subject is not considered and neither is historical or cultural context. The purest formal analysis is limited to what the viewer sees. Because it explains how the eye is led through a work, this kind of description provides a solid foundation for other types of analysis. It is always a useful exercise, even when it is not intended as an end in itself.

Munsterbergs book can be read on the net or bougth from Amazon for only $10.

Product Description from Amazon:

Writing About Art was written as the text for a course of the same name required of all art majors at The City College of New York. The book explains the different approaches college students encounter in undergraduate art history classes. Each chapter outlines the characteristics of one type of visual or historical analysis and briefly explains its history and development. Passages by well-known art historians provide examples of each method. Sample essays by students are accompanied by extensive explanations of suggested revisions. The book also includes a step-by-step guide to researching art historical topics and a section about correctly citing sources.

Slow Art

Yesterday, I listen to BBC's program The Strand ("a daily half-hour programme highlighting the best of what's going in the arts") and they talked about slow art. Well, actually they did not talk about it but about the problem of todays use of art. For example going to Louvre and looking at a million things in two hours or listening to track 3 of some record on your iPod. This one guy had written a book called something like "A thousand records you should listen to before you die". I never liked these books telling me I am mortal and the concept is kind of wearisome (hurry, you might die tomorrow), but the writes intention was the opposite and I agreed with him: With so much music (with so many track 3's on the pod) it is very difficult to really listen to music these days. We are just scrolling around and give the sound bites points. If you instead listen to three different records of the same piece you will not only get the whole thing but variations about it. There will be something more ("more" in a qualitative sense) in that experience.

The other guest in the studio had been travelling to art in far away places (I think it might be him making a book about slow art) and talked about it. If you pay with energy, if you work for it, the experience of the art will be greater, but the possible disappointment could be greater too (how disappointed will you be if track 3 is bad? A bit irritated while going to track 4 or next album or next artist, maybe?). If you invest in the art the payoff will be greater. I think that's true. If you look at 50 paintings or more in a museum you will not even get a clear picture of the subjects. Strange thing no museums have question this part of their work. Why not have five pictures exhibitions? I guess there would be a problem if the exhibition had more then five or ten visitors at a time. But this should be a topic, at least in my blog.

I wonder how much of modern art is made to accomodate the fast modern culture? Would it change if the public changed into slow mood?

Sometimes I feel as if I have a whirling postcard rack in my head.

Grayson Perry

Reading about art

When reading about something most narratives keeps the reader in the know about who says what. This is exposition, this is controversial, this is not, this is my own view, this is generally acnowledged and so on. But as far as I can see writings about art is different. I guess it expect you to know what is generally acnowledged, but still. These narratives are often pretty pictures framed with facts producing wonderfull visions in my head. But is this a real amalgam not possible to deconstruct? Is it possible to say this is the writers personal experience and this is something objective? Of course artists og critics are educated in these matters and by practice have a hightened perception. But if there is something a person sees because he has learnded to look a certain way, is he then aware of this? If he is, then should he make a narrative note about this being s certain way? And if he is not, should he make a note about this being his personal experience? And would any such note be of help to the reader?

I'm not about telling anyone to write differently about art, that would be stupid indeed. But I want to get, if not a clear picture, then a better feel for what is what in a text about art. I will collect several introductory texts about the same art work.