Whistler and Degas

When I was 19 my awesome design teacher Pat Autenrieth told my slack-jawed, worn-down class after two hours of fruitless mandatory critique that the most insightful thing to say is sometimes the first stupid thing that pops into mind. I've found that to be REALLY true, especially if you can phrase it to sound thoughtful. And the reverse is true, too: I say something I believe to be majestically insightful, but once I've said it I realize how simple and stupid it is. Here's one that happened today:

While reading about Whistler and his 'impressionist' paintings of the 1880-90s and seeing the illustrations of his work alongside Degas', Millais', Monet's, and Cezanne's, I began thinking of the atmosphere or, literally, the overtones in each style: how Whistler's work looked brooding and the skin of the paintings were so ethereal and fragile that the style indicated the impermanence of the physical world. Millais and Monet, with their bright, thick impasto paintings, seemed so solid, confident and innocently factual. Cezanne had that same objective daytime certainty about his late work but the thinness of the paint also seemed to hint at deeper thought. Degas' paintings had a dark side to their mood, too; though the paint was applied thickly and with confidence in certain key spots, much of the canvas remained covered with gauzy layers of notation-type brushstrokes. Then I realized that the entire basis of my deep thoughts about this work was that a) Degas and Whistler painted lighter color over dark backgrounds, thus they seemed brooding and spiritual while Millais, Monet, and Cezanne painted dark over light or at least obscured their backgrounds with thick paint, therefore they seemed physical, empirical, simple. And b) thin, sketchy paint seems to imply thought, whereas thick paint seems to imply physicality, either because it's sculptural, and therefore physical, or because it's (in my opinion) more classically masculine.

This second point is funny to me because, according to (I think!) Waldemar Januszczak in Techniques of the Great Masters of Art when describing the birth of Impressionsim, the old French Academy pushed painting in the direction of drawing, reasoning that drawing represented an intellectual transaction suitable to an artist (who had, just the century before, begun to be seen as a gentleman instead of an artisan), while bright color, thick paint, and painterliness were linked with craftsmanship and the lower classes of muralists and folk artists. That is, in part, why so many academic paintings of the mid- and late-19th century were so monochromatic, dark, thinly painted, and oddly unrealistic (as in having a staged or imaginary appearance). The painter was encouraged to draw, then paint an underpainting as if it were a drawing: in brown-black, shading and building up shadow, only adding color at the end. And things could look unrealistic because certain things, such as trees, naked ladies, and facial features had well-known idealized conventions and, as Plato reckoned, the ideal of something is truer and more worthy than its unintellectual concrete manifestation. I scoffed at these assumptions with postmodern narrow-mindedness then years later, in a moment of being quite impressed with myself and my big brain, I thought exactly the same thing. (It's worth noting that I learned more about Impressionist art history from this book on technique than I did from any art historical sources. It's a shame that art historians who aren't also artists are missing such a big part of the picture).

I can't make any sweeping judgments here, and I'm still arguing with myself on this one, but it seems that nowadays the prestige of drawing versus painting has switched. After the great action-painting Modernist superstars like Pollock and de Kooning, artistic and intellectual maturity was redefined as being a bit of a painter-barbarian. At the same time, meditative painters like Rothko were celebrated as creators of monumental work on canvas. Now, painting and all the painterliness it entails has been irrevocably identified as a sort of monument to Culture. These artists also produced fantastic drawings and etchings, but those just seem to be surfacing in books and exhibitions this past decade. Many artists now seem to use drawing to achieve a primitive look, calling upon modern society's associations of drawing with comic books, children's art, and crudeness (for example, the wonderful and poetic Daniel Johnston). It is still seen as a more direct notation of the mind than painting, I think, but the main difference between this 19th century French attitude toward drawing and that of today's post-Freud culture is that they assumed that the product of an unfettered mind would be intellectual and ideal; today, the general assumption is that the unguarded mind is perverted and crude.

Here are some accounts of Whistler's newfangled techniques from the website of traditional still-life painter Paul Raymond Seaton (who also has some great tips for how to paint, along with a funny section called "woe is me!" where Millais taints that great PreRaphaelite classic among teenage lit-nerds, "Ophelia," by describing the flies, annoying swans, wild roaming bull and "no tresspassing" rules that were a pain in the ass while he painted on location at the stream.) http://users.breathe.com/paulseaton/pages/tips&tricks1.htm

"The canvas had a grey preparation made with black and white mixed with turpentine. He did not use a palette,but had a table near him on which he mixed the tones he was going to use. This was a very important part of his practice; before actually painting his picture he mixed with great care a quantity of the tones he would require.... He had a mixture of oil and turpentine in a saucer standing on the table. Using this as a medium, he covered thinly the whole canvas with these prepared tones, using house-painters' brushes for the surfaces, and drawing lines with round hogshair brushes nearly a yard long.... His object was to cover the whole canvas at one painting- either the first or the hundredth. ...When a thing was incomplete he did not try to patch it; he did it all over again and again and again-till it was finished-or wrecked, as often happened, from the sitter getting tired, or growing up or growing old. ...He would put the mixtures in little gallipots of water round the table that served as a palette, so that he could depend upon taking up the same tone another day." [From "The Art of Portrait Painting" by John Collier,Cassel & Co,London,about 1910(?)]

And because it's worth knowing, here's how John Singer Sargent painted (taken from the same site):

He drew with his brush, beginning with the shadows, and gradually evolving his figure from the background by means of large, loose volumes of shadow, half-tones and light, regardless of features or refinements of form, finally bringing the masses of light and shade closer together, and thus assembling the figure. He painted with large brushes and a full palette, using oil and turpentine freely as a medium. ..."Always use a full brush and a larger one than necessary," John told Frederick Sumner Platt, the collector and amateur painter in August 1890. "Paint with long sweeps, avoiding spots and dots ('little dabs'). Never think of other painters' pictures ... but follow your own choice of colors with exact fidelity to nature." ...He painted briskly, covering a lot of ground. ...Details, he was convinced, would take care of themselves. He once advised a student: "Do not concentrate so much on the features. Paint the head. The features are only like spots on an apple." [From 'John Singer Sargent' by Stanley Olsen,B&J,London,1989]

Cool Graffiti Animation

http://www.blublu.org/sito/video/muto.htm

Wow, this is so cool! I don't want to think about how much work this took.

"Proust Was a Neuroscientist," says a neuroscientist.

I'm right in the middle of Proust Was a Neuroscientist, by Jonah Lehrer, and it's good timing too because I just read an Art in America article called "Science & Art I" which plays off of Lehrer nicely (more about that in another post). Proust examines the work of writers Proust, Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, George Elliot, Walt Whitman, painter Paul Cezanne, composer Igor Stravinsky and chef Escoffier through the eye of a neuroscientist and points out how, according to Lehrer, their work anticipated recent discoveries in neuroscience by decades. Yeah... there are a TON of problems with this premise, and even though I'm just itching to slam every aspect of the book on this blog, I admit that the whole reason I'm so worked up about it is that Proust is a highly original (not to say unprecedented), enthusiastic, and very weird project. The book was recommended to me through a scientist who is so smart it's hard to believe I actually know her, but I had it in for Lehrer before I even started. I was most recently subjected to the influence of art upon science, and vice verse, through the psychadelic musings of boys at college parties who try to impress freshmen girls with their deep thoughts and artistic passion. So what else can art + science do besides get you laid? According to Lehrer, they are two building blocks for examining our experience; and explaining WHY reality feels the way it does (the realm of science) must begin with an in-depth investigation of how reality actually feels (the realm of art). My problem with this attitude (which is, in itself, a correct, useful assumption) is the linear, scientific thinking of the author, as if every human endeavor is a step-by-step process to get from A to B, and every step that takes us closer to B is progress, and therefore morally better and truer than every step that came before. Every artist, every era has its own opinions but in my view art runs in circles; it regurgitates, zigzags, spins its wheels. Alernately art paves the way for science; it is science; it uses science, it mimics science, it rejects science. And this is possible, not only because art is such a patchwork of different motives and practices, but because science is as well. Humanity and nature are made absolutely the way they are; but art and science are both roundabout, imperfect ways that humanity came up with to deal with an absolute nature. Argue with me if you want (please do) but I don't think there IS a point A or B.

Some critics were upset that Lehrer viewed the arts only in terms of how they have informed science, arguing that this devalues the arts and misses the point of art. I don't see any problem with it, though; sifting through art history with a scientific filter is really no different than the Guerilla Girls' rewriting of art history from a type of feminist perspective or the Freudian reinterpretation of art (whose heyday is not yet over outside of Acadaemia).

Lehrer obviously knows that he's cherry-picking from a vast universe of possible meaning, right? I mean, he's a smart guy... he has to know there are no clear and simple answers or conclusions when it comes to art. Until you arrive at the essay on Cezanne, where he sums up artistic progress: "This is why the impressionists feel modern, while Delacroix and Ingres and Bouguereau do not: they realized the painter did not simply have a subject that he or she was duty bound to represent. The painter was an artist, and artists had ideas that they were compelled to express." (gee, if only Delacroix had had ideas and realized he were an artist). Or, "Cezanne invented postimpressionism because the impressionists simply weren't strange enough." Lehrer continuously uses the word "invent," giving a very false impression of one man suddenly creating a whole, complete modernism, or a complete whatever, by himself. He also repeatedly refers to Cezanne's paintings as "abstract," then in the next sentence marvels at how the subject is so recognizable and accurate. The way he tramples the language of art criticism and art history is remarkably similar to the way artists steal and misuse scientific language: describing a process in terms of evolution; glancing quickly over an article describing an article that explains the theory of relativity, then translating it with poetic license; and, most irritatingly, replacing useful descriptors like, "diligent," "two-sided," "multifaceted" or "lively," with psychiatric terms such as "O.C.D.," "bipolar," "schizophrenic," or "A.D.D." (notice how they always use the cool mental illnesses; no one ever gets up to defend their stuff in crit, points to their trendily primitive drawing, and says, "it's an almost mentally retarded kind of gesture.")

What's more, Lehrer always writes about the painters who are one step ahead in the "progress" of painting in a positive light while the painters who are "behind" are belittled. So he brushes aside Delacroix, Bouguereau (understandable) and Ingres to make way for the "motley group of young [Impressionists who] decided to rebel." They "invented the idea of painterly abstraction. ...They had broken with the staid traditions of academic realism." But once the art historical narrative progresses to Cezanne superceding the Impressionists Lehrer derides the "pretty paintings of Renoir and Degas" and as Cezanne was "freeing the artist from the strict limits of verisimilitude, impressionism was destined to go places those water lilies could never have imagined."

It wasn't always this way. When I first opened Proust and began the essay on Walt Whitman and how mind/emotion/spirit and body are one and how emotions arise from the body as well as mind, I was completely enchanted. Maybe, looking back, it's because I don't know a lot about literature beyond geekily enthusiastic participation in English class; I like it and I can really get into it, but when it comes to really getting the hard stuff, I have to have it completely spelled out for me in an attractive way for it to really click. And Lehrer spelled out Leaves of Grass in a very attractive way. He obviously knows more about literature than visual art; he doesn't speak with blind reverance of writing books as the making of a miracle of independant genius, like he does with Cezanne. His Whitman essay is more a play of ideas from multiple disciplines than a struggle to simply understand and explain the work at hand. He seems comfortable enough to tease his subjects a little, to play with ideas, which make the essays on the writers (so far I've only read the ones on Whitman, Elliot, and Proust) very enjoyable. I never knew that Whitman was a nurse in a Civil War hospital who was involved with the discovery of phantom limb sensation in amputees (a biographical detail that enlightens the poetic/neuroscientific link). Here the entire premise of reexamining literature through modern neuroscience works at its best; I saw Whitman's work in a new light. When I read his work and his biographical blurb in the histories of literature he is always pigeonholed; his work, chosen selectively alongside Melville and Twain, is used as a tool leading the way to a broader understanding of transcendentalism and sexuality of his time. I've never seen it with any other emphasis until Proust.

People are complaining left and right about his tenuous connections between literature and neuroscience in his essays on Elliot and Woolf; how he has fit their round peg of art into the square hole of his personal scientific theory (sorry, I couldn't come up with another metaphor). But seriously, what art critic or historian doesn't lift what they like from the pages or canvas and hold it to the light of whatever personal ideas they may concoct? Honestly, I can't comment on these essays because I don't know the work of Woolf and Elliot very well. But this book will definitely make me run out and read their work; I'm already reading Woolf's Orlando and enjoying it. Lehrer's biography for Elliot was particularly absorbing; rarely do I read about a woman artist who is described with relish as admirably ugly or more than a sponge for the male intellect of their time.

All in all, I guess... I'm glad I'm reading this book. Lehrer has raised both my awareness and my blood pressure.

Graffiti in Galleries

This past weekend notorious graffiti artist Ishmael enjoyed exposure at Kulture Klash 3 and his solo show opening at Eye Level Art in Charleston. This is his first show as a gallery artist working on canvas instead of illegal graffiti art as well as a major point of departure from recognizable graffiti to sinewy abstract forms that look, to me, to be inspired more by current graphic design than anything else. I thought the two influences, graffiti and commercial design, were interesting: two outside art forms, one delegitimized by money and commerce, the other deligitimized by lack thereof, both a form of branding and reinvention of oneself, both covering the outside world and signifying some sort of ownership over that small section of street. It seems natural that the two should meet in a gallery-- the traditional fault line between lands of Haves and Have-Nots.

In addition to artists like Keith Haring and Bansky, I'm reminded of a similar show by a notorious (and recently released from jail) graffiti artist and art student at the Corcoran who goes by "Borf," in Washington, DC., in 2006. It was a similar point of departure, from illegal art to big pop-punk canvases in a gallery. So was he selling out, or what? As a fellow art student at the time I thought so, but then again selling in a gallery was my eventual goal, too, so what does that make me? And of course I was happy for him because he was putting his reputation to use and getting, more or less, his "big break." But money definitely took the edge off his work. The undeniably raw, daring, desperate and authentic aspect of graffiti on the streets disappears once the work is in a gallery, no matter how much the artists and dealers try to preserve it.

So what's left? At both shows I saw intense dedication to craft, either through labyrinthine swirls of shape or immaculately detailed stencil work; brilliant color and strong graphic impact; sophisticated symbolism; political dissent; homage to the artist's community; and a sense of the artist's life as a mythic story complete with obscured origins, remembrance, and a prophecy of rebirth. Interesting, too, was the way the artist's sincerity shone through.

In my opinion, the currency of postmodernity is irony; is a work offensive, or ironically offensive? primitive or ironically so? traditional or merely quoting tradition in an ironic context? In effect, is it hopelessly old-fashioned and completely sincere, or has it broken through to a postmodern time, enlightened through obscurity and emboldened by doubt? I don't want to condemn this trend, in fact I think irony is a brilliant way of dealing with a post-Vietnam, post-Clement Greenberg, post-Joseph McCarthy world in which every inherited ideology must be regarded with doubt. But as all major trends are, it is limiting. Great masters of doubt like Richard Prince and Damien Hirst may be enjoying a zeitgeist, but plenty of artists still feel, deep-down, a starry-eyed belief in Genius, a modernist hope for the Universal Experience, a romantic quest for Truth.

In Borf's and Ishmael's work, as well as many graffiti artists, I get a different sense of the dynamic unity of pure sincerity with acrid anger. I wouldn't really classify either artist's work as angry work because they're full of symbols of hope and of secret worlds existing outside of reality that hint to me of religion and spirituality. But this straightforward human quality is always wrapped up in angry political dissent, bitter laughter at the betrayal of authority and society at large, and defiance that helps sincerity survive in reality. I think it's a really interesting contrast to the Art World's esteem of irony, one that will enable this work to hold its own in a contemporary gallery.

And what does a collector buy when they buy this work? Obviously, they're buying something they don't have; in a sense, I think many people buy an attitude or experience that their life doesn't afford them as a way of participating in and supporting a movement or a way of life they admire but cannot experience. So in this case, in addition to buying a very beautiful and sincere piece of work, they've bought into the defiance, subversiveness, and energy that undermines the very status that someone who can afford this art likely enjoys. It's an uneasy alliance, but maybe one with unexpected and worthwhile outcomes.

Welcome to Post-

Welcome to Post- , a blog about contemporary art from an artist's perspective. I have no regional focus here and I am interested in connecting art with the world where it exists. I am a young artist I write about what is happening now and what is new, but this blog is to step back, slow down and consider why the moment matters.