Thoughts from London: On time zones, waves, Richter, and Cubism

I am an hour closer to you now.


I never thought about how Daylight Savings would be different in another country. It makes sense, sure, but I never thought about it. It's weird that for this week only I am only 4 hours away from Ohio, 5 from Illinois. Our time zones are practically buzzing they're getting so close. Being in the future from a past you've always known is a shaky-ground place.


Does Flava Flav care about time zones?


I've been reading a lot, which is good. Not enough to feel like I'm making a difference on the void-in-my brain-representing-all-that-I-don't-know-about-modern-art-history, but the act of reading itself is a nice thing to remember how to do. I have begun a French artist-writer-collector-printer-publisher timeline in post-its on my wall above my desk, hoping to find some kind of sense in these overlapping lives. I've been thinking about waves and movements and wondering if feminist political theory can/does apply to the eternal debate about modernism and postmodernism in art history. That the idea of a wave rising up and sucking everything that came before back into it seems really nice for postmodernism. I like waves, too, because they correspond with life cycles. 

This timeline on my wall reminds me to think about when these 19th and 20th century artists actually started thinking about the world in an adult fashion (probably around age 18-20), and that the contemporaneous context was probably really important to a sense of identity and development. You surface into the world slowly from the depths and the things that make the most sense are the ones nearest your gaze. So, Manet born in 1832 'matures' at 20 in 1852 (opens his studio in Paris in 1856). Then artists and writers like Redon (b.1840) and Mallarmé (b.1842), when they 'mature' at 20 in 1860 and 1862 cannot help but be influenced by Manet's place in the world (e.g. Olympia, above, is 1863). It's an oversimplification, I realize, but one to work with. 

• Stadtbild Paris (Townscape Paris), 1968, 200 cm x 200 cm, Oil on canvas
  
  
  Went to see the Richter show at the Tate Modern last week (although I apparently missed a room). Mixed feelings about it, but I was glad to see so much of his work in one place. As usual the wall texts were disappointing in how much they dumbed-down everything. Richer's movement between monochrome faux-photorealism and garish abstraction is certainly a jarring one. This particular painting, Stadtbild Paris (1968) stood out to me as entirely different from the rest of the exhibition. We've been talking about walking the city (e.g. Paris) as a modernist practice in my course lately, so I was drawn to this bird's eye view depiction of a 'postmodern' Paris. Here Richer is merging his two brains, pulling the photographic monochrome as a layer over his abstract sensibility. It's Richter channeling Johns through the eye of a camera, which I like very much. 

The other Richter component I'm still thinking about is his visual relationship with Marcel Duchamp. I thought the textual justification in the exhibition was a little wishy-washy, but I like the idea, and there's definitely a conversation between this:

L: Gerhard Richter, Ema (Akt auf einer Treppe) [Ema (Nude on a Staircase)], 1966, 200 cm x 130 cm, Oil on canvas 

R: Marcel Duchamp, Nude Descending a Staircase, 1912

 

This 1965 Descending Richter that the Art Institute has shows the fractal play of light and movement a little better, though, I think. But, still, Richter seems to care more about the figure (e.g. reclaiming the nude body and the portrait for painting) than he does about the movement and perception of objects in space. 

Thinking about Cubism a lot lately, too and the very formulaic way it was applied by artists other than Picasso/Braque/Gris in the early 20th century. It seems like most major artists had to make at least one 'Cubist' painting (e.g. this 1914 Reservist of the First Division painting/ collage by Malevich seems very weird for him). Duchamp painted Nude Descending a Staircase in 1912 and then moved on to everything else except painting. What was behind this need to mimic Cubism? Why was it used in such a formulaic way by so many artists, when the intention was anything but formulaic? Is it photography (e.g. the question What images do we make now that photography exists?) or is it collage (e.g. the three-dimensional expansion coupled with the act of reading) that solves the problem of the grounding for Cubism, gives us the framework behind when a 'Cubist' painting works or does not work?

PROJECTIONS: PIPILOTTI RIST, TONY OURSLER, & T.J. CLARK

A few days ago I stopped by the Hayward Gallery in the Southbank Centre to see the new Pipilotti Rist (Swiss, b. 1962) retrospective that opened September 28. Wow. I watched a video installation of hers at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago last month, and really enjoyed the purposeful plush carpeting, bean bag chairs, and low lighting that were part of the experience of her video work. That conceit was used again a number of times in Rist's installations at the Hayward Gallery (which, by the way, managed to make very good use of the space, with tiny cubbyholes to discover and videos projected in very unlikely places: a stall in the women's restroom and the inside of a conch shell). Rist provided cushions (some as stuffed shirts and pants meant to look like cartoonish disembodied people) that forced you down on the floor and on a new visual plane in order to experience and visually interact with the viewers around you. Body (especially the female body) and forcing the viewer to become conscious of body in space and in relation to a projected image plays a huge role in her work. There are lovely video glitches, too, and a use of the machine in unexpected and often startlingly or strangely familiar ways.

(Apparently she's also made a feature-length film, Pepperminta, which looks completely and insanely wonderful). She's represented by Luhring Augustine in New York, and Hauser & Wirth internationally.

Today I've been reading an essay by T. J. Clark today, Modernism, Postmodernism, and Steam (published in October, Vol. 100, Obsolescence, Spring 2002, pp.154-174), in which Clark brought up Tony Oursler (b. 1957, American) and his Robert Morris-influenced projections of faces onto steam (and trees, apparently). The visual connection to Rist—projections into darkness—is clearly there in my mind, and both are equally bizarre image-makers.

Here are some excerpts from Clark's essay that I found to be particularly interesting:

"[...] ghosts that the internet itself dreams up" (156)

"a new form of visuality spreading like a virus through the culture at large — a new machinery of visualization, a tipping of the social balance from a previous regime of the word to a present regime of the image" (161)

"Modernism's motto was the great phrase from the young Marx's critique of Hegel: Modernists believed it was necessary for any art, any Realism, to take the forms of the present deeply inside itself, at the risk of mimicry, almost ventriloquism; but that out of that might come the possibility of critique, of true destabilization — they would 'teach the petrified forms how to dance by singing them their own song.'" (161) [Clark quoting Marx at the end]

"[...] the two great principles that gave modernity its character — on the one hand the reality of the machine's regularity and uniformity, on the other that of a profound social randomness and evacuation. You could say of the purest products of modernism [...] that in them an excess of order interacts with an excess of contingency." (164)

On Malevich's Peasant in the Fields (c. 1928-32), there is "the will to put the fragments back into some sort of order" (172).

"Our present fictions of the now" just happen to be "virtuality and visuality" (174).

Cate Marvin on being a poet.

"I like to think of poets as moving through the world with their minds poised like nets, intent on capturing scraps of language, resonant images. Thinking as a poet means viewing the world as a poem; thus, the poet is prone to existing in real space and time in a most vulnerable manner. This means being super-observant wherever your physical self takes your mind, as it requires being terribly receptive to light, images, movement, conversations between others, oddities many might be inclined to overlook in newspaper headlines, heatedly intimate conflicts overheard in public places, disingenuous directions offered by advertisements and street signs, etc." [From the BOMB Magazine Blog]. 


Cate's website is here.


Read the excellent poems "Fragment of the Head of a Queen" here and "Scenes from the Battle of Us" here.

Film: Two Brothers Brewing (Warrenville, IL)

I liked this neat little documentary about Two Brothers Brewing, a local (to Chicago) craft beer company in Warrenville, Illinois. There are actually two brothers. It's a fun inside look at a brew pub.


The Brothers Brew from Jamie Gallant on Vimeo.

Glenn Brown on language.

You can’t look at anything without the knowledge that other people have looked at it and thought about it. We are made of other people’s opinions whether we like it or not, because we are surrounded by language. That’s what language is—a sharing of ideas that allows us to make up what seem like our own ideas but are in fact just an accumulation of other peoples’ thoughts. The only free will we have is to decide which ideas to agree or disagree with. We exist within language; we can’t escape it.

Glenn Brown

Art in America

April 3, 2009

NYC Wall Street Protests

Here are a few of the more powerful statements I've found on police and protester action in New York City over the last few weeks.

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n+1 Mag: Notes from an Occupation by Astra Taylor and Mark Greif (27 September 2011).

Friday, September 23rd:

Astra: It’s a very youthful event, and perhaps naive in a lot of ways, but I’m happy they’re doing it. That said, I’m always a bit irritated by the incessant emphasis on the youthfulness of the demonstrators, which is a way of infantilizing and dismissing them (silly kids, they’ll grow up and get over this dumb protesting stuff!) and also lets older people off the hook. Shouldn’t we all be out there, railing against the vampire squid? The fact is there are plenty of older people at “Liberty Plaza,” a good number of retirees mingling with the recent graduates. Our society, and the left especially, has this strange idea that young people are the revolutionary vanguard (In his famous “Letter to the New Left” C. Wright Mills made the case that youth had replaced the working class as the “historic agency”; Theodore Roszak calls this shift the “adolescentization of dissent”) but of course, being young, they don’t have all the answers (not that old people do either, obviously).

Sunday, September 25th:

Mark: Nine days is nothing to sneeze at. I know people keep complaining that the occupiers don’t have a platform, but any real deliberative convention takes time, and these folks were strangers nine days ago. The idea of the occupation, to me, is to remind everyone that Wall Street belongs to the City of New York, the banks’ money belongs to the American citizens and people worldwide who have temporarily parked some of it with them (hoping they’ll do some good with it), and the rules they play by ultimately come from us. I wish the NYPD didn’t feel obliged to pen the protesters in away from Wall Street, though, and I hope Burger King on the northwest corner continues to be generous with its bathroom.

     I made it to the General Assembly tonight. Weird for me, after so much suspicion in universities and professional groups, all my life, of order and parliamentary procedure and quick-running meetings, laughed away by saying, “Oh, since the Sixties we’ve forgotten all that stuff!”—to see an efficient assembly managed by kids, democratically, inclusively, and good-humoredly. I wish n+1 meetings ran like this. The left knows more than we think it does, as always. Noam Chomsky had sent a personal message by email. It was predictably long-winded; I wished people would make the “get to your point” sign. I was sitting close to the aisle of waiting speakers and I was surprised to watch participants whom I assumed knew each other well—since they were working together smoothly—whisper to ask each other’s names. They’re the most easygoing bunch I’ve seen at a protest, and the most calmly confident. Very gentle and not rattled by disruptors. Presumably that’s the confidence of nine days. Also the multiple confrontations that they’ve won nonviolently.