10/03/2006

Olav Christopher Jenssen

55 comments:

Painter said...

Olav Christopher Jenssen @
Tracy Williams, Ltd.
313 West 4 Street
New York, NY 10014

Michael Cross said...

More good examples of his work at www.abgsc.com/templates/gzArtistPage.aspx?id=35

I understand schools are not going to teach cursive handwriting much longer, and some have already stopped. Will gestural abstraction become even more rare? Seriously.

arebours said...

I dunno,that D'Nealian was Orwellian 4 me-

no-where-man said...

can/should Art be "taught" like cursive handwriting?

youth--less said...

Only if they stop teaching drawing--or have they?

You should have seen my grandfather's penmanship--Palmer method--beautiful

Ca. Calligraphy Summit

kelli said...

People used to really like Cy Twombley and his name never comes up anymore. When did print and cursive become separate writing styles I wonder?

no-where-man said...

it was my understanding the Cy was less about the aesthetic elements that can be 'taught' and more about pictorial language, - 'roman bathroom' graffiti,

zipthwung said...

great band

Who hasnt traced contours? Anyone? Beuler?

youth--less said...

I like this painting. Grown up Pee-Chee art. And I dont mean that as a bad thing.

zipthwung said...

yeah thats good. Scale is important - I think a lot of people think large=money=good.

Sure is tough to make art now that the excitement of ab-ex has cooled off. WHat generation are we on anyways?

zipthwung said...

That jpg makes this painting look mannered.

I remember pee chee art was all about "subverting" the images. Who did it best. At first I copied the whole baseball bat as spiked club thing. Then I just drew shit. Lots of peopel did heavy metal logo stuff - I thought that was imitation so I didnt do it.

zipthwung said...

Digital Scrapbooking...coming to a suburb near you.

instant artist 1

Sven said...

closeuup where was the pee chee thing from?

zipthwung said...

"When you're down on the lower levels of the pyramid you will be on either one side or the other. But when you get to the top, the points all come together, and there the eye of God opens."

-J.C.

youth--less said...

I meant that I like this painting by Olav because it has that doodly feeling--like doodling on your Pee-Chee in school. There are lots of drawings and paintings that I call "Pee-Chee", especially over on this coast.

I realize that some people didnt have pee-Chees. In my schools everyone did. They are a tacky old brand of binder. You can google.

poppy said...

it is weird to think of a school teaching this as a language.. like the how to make a jackson pollock books..
i think it is weirder that a school would think of it as a language in this way and then go as far to decide it isn't relevant.. oh it isn't? These marks don't belong in art? thanks.. what do i make then Mr. Art teacher? where's the manual?

no-where-man said...

how is "line poetry" arrived at?

"Sometimes we drug ourself with dreams of new ideas. The head will save us. THe brain alone will set us free. But there are no new ideas waiting in the wings to save us as women, as human. THere are only old and forgotten ones, new combinations, extrapolations and recognitions from within ourselves - along with renewed corage to try them out."

- Andre Lorde, "Poetry is not a Luxury"

poppy said...

nice,...nwm
evolution is a funny process

Anonymous said...

Perky Jerky Heart

Dive Into Another Language., Get Skilled! Come Out ON Top!
International School for Accounting

You-just-got-to-get-it-out-of-your-head that this is or ever was a universal language.

What we have here is a language writing over surfaces supported in this case by a structure ( paper, whatever, what's it on zip), overriding and enterprising (The meaning of art?). Na!

The meaning of art is outside the language cage.

I like the poetry bit.
I wish we could just all walk round like babbling birds, chirpy.
But that's just not the animal kingdom!

cha said...

the blacked out bit feels like censorship..........I want to see what's underneath.

no-where-man said...

"crossed out?" like a basquiat tech?

"painted a calculated incoherence"

Mayer

oh ttg, know know more then most we are a flocking and chirpy flock;)

zipthwung said...

Nobel Prize winner (the nobel prize means "hot shit" f.y.i.) Pablo Neruda had a crazy love of common things. But I don't. Your meaning is not my meaning. You are a foreigner in my forest. NO TREES! You sneer. Fuck fuck fuck you.

Art is not poetry. Art is a stainless arthritic claw that cuts off your sex parts every morning. Art is a decaying tentacle that disembowls you as a vengefull tapeworm to your sleep. Art is a space flower that replaces your SELF with a emotionless hybrid performing its meaningless little rituals - rituals who's only meaning is perpetuation of the species. Art is not beauty, and neither is it truth. A speak and spell of death. A last phone call to the void. No holliday in the sun, just a napalm beach head packed with class whores and wannabees. Art is a field of denatured opium poppies suckling at their own teats. Empty form following bureaucratic function. Taxonomies of taxonomy. A thousand plateau shit cake rimmed with carbuncular pissicles.
Nomadic thoughts draining into oceans of bile.

I am a lowly shit, I drink urine and suck blood. That is my art. WHo among you can beat that?

zipthwung said...

Pitty the quisling warriors of valhalla, for they shall be speared anew and red shirted each morn!

Sven said...

omg zip is really Otto Muehl ? wow



zzzzzzzz not for nothin closeuup your link was better than this painting

kelli said...

I agreed Cooky but did not want to admit to not knowing what Pee-Chee is. It's a good name for a pet, almost as good as Cat-illac.

zipthwung said...

the form


Football=bomb
Baton=stick of dynamite
Tennis racket=machine gun

Add ace bandages, casts, stitches, helmets, skulls and spikes.

Those are the rules.

zipthwung said...

Thats how you did it pre columbine anyway.

no-where-man said...

i may be trashed but it seems like if you scroll down all these jpegs share a compositional thead.

context killed the repositional star.

JD said...

This stuff looks kind of interesting; I'll have to go see it in person. Clear color, seeming relatively unburdened by the weight of abstraction's history, yet not anachronistic in feel. Thanks for posting, Painter.

JD said...

P.S. Most of you people seem trashed, and your posts are frankly boring to read.

Come back, smart interesting mature people!!

no-where-man said...

k. will take a postin break.

look forward to the thrills and chills.

JD said...

Yawn, are you using "40" as an insult? That's dull.

jpegCritic said...

kelli, western cursive actually developed out of commercial interests, though there has always been handwriting. Speed / showmanship meant $$ for 17th cent handwriting-manual producers...thus our cursive. Cursive destroyed the attention to the forms established by the greeks and the early romans -- that of the letter and it's relationship to proportions of the human body.

But another beauty evolved out of cursive.

Perhaps an aesthetic can be formed out of blackberry thumbwriting.
Who knows.

our Emoticons for instance, are what flourishes were
to the scribners... mundane now, but who knows where
our keyboard-lexicon will take us.

As to the above --
yeah it's interesting in a pee chee kind of way.

All in all, Jenssen is pretty virtuosic.
Fascile. Great pictures.. like Dow..
Masterful, ho hum.
but not as daring as oehlen.

I like, as with Oehlen, when i feel
that the creator has some moment,
at least *some* moment of pause,
when he or she says to themselves
'i don't know what the fuck i'm doing'...
And when that comes off in a beautiful
painting, I'm awestruck.

Remember the italian -- ciao fonesca (sp?)?
Jenssen seems like that. Or him.... almost too good,
in an academic sort of way, having no sense of
risk, yet having every sense of artistic control
with respect to picturemaking and markmaking.

jpegCritic said...

oh and um i'm trashed, so don't mind me, btw.

kelli said...

Thanks Jpeg I was curious, It seems strangely Cartesian to have print vs. cursive when some alphabets like Arabic are inherently cursive. Secretly I'm glad print (except signatures) is winning out. It is more my thing.

Anonymous said...

Gees, this guy has it all: compositional slightness, erasure--the line-o-figurative narrative, generally summed up as a cohesion. The bits you wish you could get under but can't, well, we're used to spoon fed--and I agree, totally, how annoying that something is held back , built over, though not left out!
JD you are a honey, sweet.

The cursive was tandem fantastic.

kelli said...

Perhaps it is fair to say this painting did not get a fair shake. I tried to find artist's statements or something but could only find this: Born in Norway, 1954, has lived various places including Berlin.

youth--less said...

the evolution of writing accding to dean

zipthwung said...

Dean is a smart person. I am just a barbarian.

kelli said...

Hey thanks NoWhere. I wish we could talk more about this (writing) in relation to the painting. Cursive, automatic writing as an artistic method. Some people say Victor Hugo started it.

http://www.mishabittleston.com/artists/victor_hugo/images/victor_hugo-octopus_with_the_initials_V_H.jpg

youth--less said...

that's what we were talking about kelli

kelli said...

Closeuup: Maybe we should tie the discussion into the image more. JD kind of had a point. But if this guy is Norwegian at least he probably won't read it. (and at least it's not one of the hatefests).

youth--less said...

The image sparked the discussion. Thats enough for me. I like the free association

JD had nothing interesting to say about this painting so he took a dump an everyone. Tho sometimes JD makes insightful remarks.

kelli said...

I don't think the conversation should be restricted by a small group of people who know each other personally, build up each other's work in hyperbole and trash everyone else. They have their own blogs for that. And I like the humor and tangents. But if somebody made something and put it out into the world it deserves to be really looked at. At least this one wasn't hateful.

youth--less said...

Just let everyone say what they want. Why all the "correction" of others? If there's something you feel is unsaid-then say it. You guys are unsporting.

JD said...

I'm a she, not a he. Also, I had absolutely brilliant things to say about this painting; what do you mean!

My point was not to restrict or censor peoples' comments; rather, I think some peoples' complete free-association can get VERY dull and can stray too far from the topics at hand.

youth--less said...

I dont.

zipthwung said...

Les Mis was on tv once and I was enthralled. GOing to prison for stealing a loaf of bread? Ive been tracing the contours of that one for a long time.

kelli said...

Like his automatic drawings and the Hunchback. Know you hate Gaitskill Zip but I think Two Girls is based on the hunchback. She admits to liking the book.

zipthwung said...

I dont hate gaitskill - more the genre of EMO (Chick lit and musik) - emotional porn - if you are going to go cornball go all the way - like notre dame or elephant man.

kelli said...

Still deformed monster turned into overweight woman and ascetic priest turned into hipster boy. Hipsters are righteous about their faith. Too perfect. I guess the damsel in distress is still the same hence the chick lit.

Anonymous said...

Yeah, right, that was jpegcritic blowing off in a trashed state--nice!

Jennsen while very much, um, cursive also plays with the position / expectation of things -- so they start where we don't expect them. I would also move to suggest they play deeper into the asymmetric of behave, NON-EUCLIDEAN, without needing to print out some pure geometric proof of it--but it's in there.
I too think he's pretty cool, peeps!

no-where-man said...

i wonder if they had this talk with the advent of the pen... it has progressed - to websites - with images, and video - and html, web cams, chatrooms, online gaming, my space - have you heard of the "vlogosphere"

but i always had TERRIBLE penmenship.

Anonymous said...

The Sea Breaks Things Down to a common 'ship', no-where-man! There are ships.
Jump ship and there is the sea!
What you do in the sea, well, I don't know, if a ship passes by!
A ship builder builds on land. Instantly there is a problem there, when you thing about it.

Another way, you can say, things never get build in the place where they will eventually go!

There is always this resistance, and disposition.

no-where-man said...

"Life is a game, boy."

opps missed agian.