Im reminded of the intitutional beige pebble finish on national park rest stop building circa 1962. The palette is definitely dateable, 1950-60. Tiki or lounge culture.
but so does sol lewitt own line-spaghetti or does bryce-man win? Conceptually thats a humdinger, because sol lewitt says anyone can do it, but on the other horn, not anyone can sell it for a lot of money.
In the same way, you can change the scale, from macro to micro - its an economic thing. Me, I like stagflation - it keeps the rent low.
But this painting references a time before Jimmy carter - a time before the hand of the artist or the current administration was tarred and feathered as a radical bull whip injection scenario. A time when art was art and the masses had to go on free day.
Pissing and moaning, christ, I dunno, its like a referential jungle out there - sort of roast chestnut traditional.
Sleeping beauty woke up but shes still at Storm king because the princely rental car got towed off the access path. Entitled bitch deserves to heel it.
Little Red riding hood discovered red looks orange in daylight so she took it back to the dollar store, and no one has heard from her since.
martin puryear makes sensitive thickets. I like that mojo. Its safe and an you can block the fire exit with them.
In my secret garden I have a topiary of office supplies. Check out the rolodex tree.
I used to watch PBS mystery theater with my parents. Now its all a mystery. Or maybe its them.
I was watching Fuse, tatoo stories (for the bumpers), and apparently I enjoy tattoo art more than this image, although I do aspire to be upper middle class. Does anyone get sol lewitt tatoos"? that would be like getting caviar at the school cafeteria.
this may be dumb to say, but if this guy continues to repeat and repeat his formula, why does his new show consist of only 5 paintings? I mean, if there is nothing left for him to explore and he has settled, why not churn em out..the question I guess is does his work still sell?...This is a sad roadblock I hope I never run into and ifso I hope to have a sufficient vehicle or bypass..
“There’s a logical progression to all the changes,” Suggs says, “but it can be difficult for people to follow unless they’re paying attention or they’re particularly tolerant of variety. And there isn’t that much tolerance out there for variety, I’ve found. People want to think of artists as trademarks, and that’s really the wisest way to go: to get a good trademark and just stick to it and refine it and go on a gradient and eventually people will pay attention to you for your tenacity. That makes a lot of sense. I never espouse my way of doing it to younger artists, I just say there are basically two kinds of career choices you can make — well, there are many, but two big ones: whether you’re going to take the path of consistency and slow building or you’re going to make a career basically based on inquiry, which is relatively unconstrained. If that is the case, it is unlikely that you’ll be able to stick to one thing.” -Don Suggs
Actually I have a technical question about the work: How does he get those long squiggly lines so even and continuous? I once tried to find out via his former gallery Spare-Only-Wastewater, and they were less than helpful. Would it have killed him to email back a two line reply? I wrote the paper anyway and everyone fell asleep. What goes around comes around. But seriously, what does he use? I figure it's got to be some sort of wheel, maybe?
Old guy that's really funny, because it's such a good question. You can squeeze the stuff straight out of the tube and then pat it down in a continuous movement... so it would be a two step process. I don't know. I hope you find out. And then we will all know, if you post it here...
The stick with one thing vs. inquiry are not really opposites but signposts for a tactical play, a strategy for an argument that when used correctly will enlighten us towards one view. This view would have stacked enough bad to one side and enough good to the other side that it becomes very clear what is good and what is bad. This way we no longer need a position, or a view, we are enlighten of that [ means we no longer need to consider the burden or differences or choice] We know what is good and what is bad, and that is enough, and ample.
My Questions: Why would you want to argue one over the other? Why would you want there to be a good way and a bad way? What does this do for you? Does it solve any problems? Of course the good and the bad are bundled up in a bag of fear, suggesting there is a fear of both 'of inquiry' and to 'a focus'. Because, remember... One is not without the other. What is there to fear, anyway? Fear, I can imagine, is a fear of actually letting go Um, 1. When you let go of things you don't hold on to them. 2. Change happens! all things being constant, constantly in flux/change. 3. You don't have to change your clothes to prove it, though you can. 4. Whatever.
the palette is actually pre 1950. Victorian? 1940's? i don't know.
Peter halley is trapped worse - just ask CF.
boredom is not a virtue. boredom is not a virtue. boredom is not a virtue. boredom is not a virtue. boredom is not a virtue. boredom is not a virtue. boredom is not a virtue. boredom is not a virtue. boredom is not a virtue. boredom is not a virtue. boredom is not a virtue. boredom is not a virtue. boredom is not a virtue. boredom is not a virtue. boredom is not a virtue. boredom is not a virtue. boredom is not a virtue. boredom is not a virtue. boredom is not a virtue. boredom is not a virtue.
Victorian zip, throw in late victorian when the natural look started to thrive. Artists and intellectuals believed gardening stabilized a society in a time of unrest. The government thought that too, so there were all these public gardens amidst open putridity and squalor. I think they came through OK. Here in Japan too, especially in the very busy cities after the bubble, rolling out of one recession into another, one after another, a thriving business was gardening. People had more time and less money. What do you do? Right! Create with color, create a balance no matter how hairy that balance may get, and why not? Too, I notice, in the city here that no matter how small the garden is it is always full of color--small tiny streets, tiny houses, blooming with color. Soothing [?] or just a good balance of hard and soft--liquor.
Good, zip, you do have the answers.
btw You got off easy, only 25x I think that is Victorian too. But I don't think there is any point to that kind of tasking and writing lines.
There's another lesson for art students to learn regarding the one of repetition vs. exploration mentioned above and it can be found reading the interview of Lasker (repetition) in Brooklyn Rail that Concrete Phone linked to above and comparing that to the interview from 2 months ago in the same publication between Bill Jensen (exploration) and Chris Martin http://www.brooklynrail.org/2007/2/art/bill-jensen
Lasker has very little to talk about and Jensen's got real-life experience and experimentation in art as well as life. It's all very clear in the contrasting interviews.
True, Jim, Lasker didn't bring in the ultra-sensitive hallucinogenic quality to the conversation, but also true, too, Chris Martin, who I very much enjoy, who enjoys killing the whole idea of abstraction to bring it back in, decided to focus on something ephemeral, the process of the 'counter anxiety'.
The ephemeris of anxiety and process of achieving its by-pass is too much a textual footnote, and granting leeway to Martin, I don't think he knows what that encompasses, through experience, he who is still quite young. I think what Lasker cunningly did was talk about the paintings that are up at Cheim and Read, and didn't really want to, or didn't need to, go into childhood anxieties (we all had them), or the painting or visual anxieties in the face of the deflation of a minimalist paradigm adding up am pm to a non-visual thought, or to stand up to any other kind of regiment or reaction, because he's too old to play out some reactionary dude. He mentions his stance back when, as if he has to, and the rest he talks about vey practical stuff, pretty well known talk--as if he thinks someone is checking. Lasker was being very upfront, simple to the seat, skipping a lot of details because they were details that he really wants people to get for themselves, or, if not, remain to a degree in the mystery. So Lasker's interview at BR was just that: A small, quick, suffice, attempt to let the reader into some of the problems knowable to the artist, some of the deciding processes and decisions, and left it there for you and we to become aware of them in the work or not.
chris martin is not young and he absolutely knows what hes talking about from experience. I wouldnt say hes playing a reactionary dude either. Ill read the interviews later and compare.
Jensen talks about his early experiences -- why he became an artist. He talks about being afraid to leave the city. He makes connections from his childhood experiences to his work. He talks about his anxieties when painting. The process of starting a painting with an idea and how he comes back to it after sometimes years of working on it.
He talks about the materials in oil painting, the craft, the alchemy.
Right Martin is not young mixing names with ages. Jim I read the interview again and sorry I don't see anything more valuable that Jensen is saying or anything more persuasive to make it more real and concrete with surety that Jensen's way of making art and his experience is any more a valid way than Lasker's. They are just very different interviews focusing on very different things, with painting, very different painting, very different painters. Having said that if you enjoy the idea of struggle, the smell of oil then I'm definitely not going to take that away from you. I personally have no interest in struggle or disabilities because this is planet earth, things move. When they move there is friction. When our heads move there is also friction, against the lightness of it's movements, and the reality of that which it attempts to move, your alchemy. It's all that, and all of us are that. So in art, painting, 'whatever it takes' is just whatever it takes for me. If you want to prop those up who labor a position fine but I still don't think it useful to compare. Personally I like what Lasker had to say because i could then see that in the painting. And I think, 'ah, he knows his limitations', and 'ah, he really does work through them..' however good or bad I think the paintings are. I love it when an artist tells me something about their work and I can see it working in whatever way it works. But that's me. I like to know how something works... go at it, into it until I know. When someone tells me about their idea, then I want to see how that idea is then embodied in the work, not how the idea carries the work. I guess you call that alchemy. I call it autonomous.
Anyway, that's as far as I can go without knowing a little more, so adieu, and if you are a painter, best there, here, I suspect, we're tied up in Language....;)
But in jpeg at least, the stuff looks tired. Maybe Lasker needs to go Geo for a while. He could still be the quivery guy, but like quivery Mondrian or Albers. He could be the Donald Baechler of Mondrians, or the Mondrian of Donald Baechlers, but like ‘straight’.
I read that old guy, a very clean read, is that yours? ... And the narrative that he talks about in that interview, don't forget, which I think is very clever. With this painting you have the base which zip described best. You have two Easter Island totems [head shapes] one within the other, resting on that base of patches of squiggle lines. The white shape, which I'm not sure what physical plane it is sitting on in relation to the other areas of paint, faces the more spatial draw, the interweaving and looping line. The space is a trick and stand-alone, the whole painting space is a trick though via the different attendees and variation of that the painting becomes very disjointed with each area contained and insular. Though when we look at any one area of manipulation we can see that elsewhere under a different guise. The inside facing right head is plain as with the upper part which is very much the illusion of background [because it is the top and we read that as receding]. The bottom foreground of manic lines can also be found in the darker, larger, left facing head or shape. The wire of paint reads dimensional but not three dimensional, but more just suggestive, similar as cap says ‘Brice is in there somewhere’. If we run this area flat you can see similar shapes that make up the heads, also in the Italian patio rendition at the bottom, which is so overdone as foreground. By incongruent means the sequestered comes together by wry manors, conceits, and false expectations. This is the narrative that doesn't lead anywhere, but is the narrative of the picture, Lasker’s painting picture narrative. Anyway, the roots of the four poplar trees are interesting as they just dig down into the synthetic soil. Nothing means anything in the end. It’s painting and its narrative. it's tricky, as it is tacky, at that.
So whats the deal with making unassuming art. I understand being self effacing as a branding deal as well as a social adapative strategy.
ANd yet theres a sort of pretention attached to the whole project, an impermeable layer of NO which negates or privileges the low key aspect and turns it into a game of us vs them. Is that the intent? The tension between those allowed to be unassuming (the owners/masters) and those who must be assuming and thus in need of unassuming (the audience/servant).
But what if you were allready unassuming and didn't need to assum anything?
Isnt viewing a show like that like lucy setting up the punt over and over again for Charlie Brown?
I think so. And yet the conversation manages to piddle along like the rio bravo in a drought.
Surely a river runs through these?
Carnegie Libraries Lawn Dead Spots Armatures Isamu Nagutchi Henry Moore Blood and Soil Nuclear winter Playing with your feces
Concrete: Sorry to be so slow - elections can be distracting! I've slept it off now and yeah, the piece is mine, an updated and mercifully briefer version of a paper from 3/4 years ago. Easier to point to that than drag it all into a discussion of the example before us. But maybe too academic and flat footed for discussion here? I've no idea where the 'unassuming' thing Zip protests about, arises? Did I miss something? (again) Looking at the example again - more seriously - I think there's something astray about the scale of the scribble - it gets too tight and dull - in a lot of the recent stuff. I think Closeuup said something about strangling his intuition. Intuition seems to have left the building some time ago in this stuff. But there's definitely something stifling about the squiggles in this example. He can make space for them, but the variation on colour/shape/composition isn't enough. It's funny for a guy who is so systematic - it's actually his system that lets him down here.
Gotta agree with the OG. My crack about intuition was a response to this description of his process from the press release:
Lasker's paintings illustrate a collision between intuition and analysis, the subconscious and the premeditated. He first works out ideas for his paintings by freely sketching forms and compositions; these are navigated subconsciously, continuous and unmediated. These drawings are executed at a much smaller scale and often with several variations made before the final composition. The resultant study is then enlarged and copied as the final painting. Now highly conscious of his image, Lasker's scribbles become almost mechanically produced, his wandering line, now with destination, is copied, clarified and contained. As Lasker explains, "I reference the subconscious in a very conscious way. I take something from the subconscious and reprocess it. I go from direct subconscious mark-making to graphic reproduction."
Don't stop thinking about tomorrow Don't stop thinking about tomorrow Don't stop thinking about tomorrow Don't stop thinking about tomorrow Don't stop thinking about tomorrow Don't stop thinking about tomorrow Don't stop thinking about tomorrow Don't stop thinking about tomorrow Don't stop thinking about tomorrow Don't stop thinking about tomorrow etc.
Well Lasker has his way. It's very methodical, remember he's saying 'going from subconscious mark-making to graphic reproduction', so by the time the paint is prepared and ready to go your talking about reproduction, cutting out the middle person. Anyway OG what a good overview over there. The Sol and the dead-end, well I think all great art is a dead end with the end of the artist. I think 'Minimal Pop' has sort of taken off where Sol chose to rest. Closeuup knows their painting no doubt... Zip is the resident academic 'unassuming' is spot on. We have this thing here called 'golden week'. Eating, short travel. It's the end of that.
Concrete: The Sol piece is maybe a bit mean. But well, I enjoy playing the devil, let’s say. Then again I get sick of critics/art historians who treat the artist’s statements as gospel when it comes to deciding on the meaning of the work. This is just passing the buck, frankly (you getting this, Jon Fineberg, while I’m on the drive-by?) Artists are entitled to have their say, sure, but they are not obliged to be a spokesperson and what they say doesn’t necessarily make it so – if you listened to every artist, every work would be a masterpiece, every artist the most important. That’s obviously not true. It’s a two-way street between maker and user and I think it’s just lazy to want the artist to do both, and let the critic/historian file the interview, click on by-line. What you end up with as an art history is this string of incompatible ‘intentions’ that really only point to a flaw in the method. So I’m throwing down a different kind of framework and with the Sol thing it’s largely a pretext for distinguishing between Minimalism and Conceptualism, which so far remains murky, for all the publication, and makes much else murkier, and with the Lasker item, actually trying to get people to look a little harder at the pictures, rather than just accepting this glib view of his stuff as a flippant cynical take on abstraction. It is that as well, but I think they’re missing the point if they just take away that. Abstraction is actually the winner for his brand of painting. Flippancy and cynicism are worthy of abstraction, find useful and striking application by it. I think my view and Lasker’s (of his work) are generally in agreement, for all that, (or intentions or no) but I find most writing on him (Carrier say, The Rocky and Bullwinkel book) disappointing. The German one is probably still the best. Anyway here endeth the sermon. Will I get to the show? I doubt it. But if that crypto-fascist and CIA stooge Sarknazi gets in, it’s going to be a lively old time on Seniors night down at the Beautiful Losers Club. Fetch me my walker someone.
Love on the rocks Aint no surprise Pour me a drink And Ill tell you some lies Got nothing to lose So you just sing the blues all the time
Gave you my heart Gave you my soul You left me alone here With nothing to hold Yesterdays gone Now all I want is a smile
First, they say they want you How they really need you Suddenly you find youre out there Walking in the storm When they know they have you Then they really have you Nothing you can do or say Youve got to leave, just get away We all know the song
You need what you need You can say what you want Not much you can do When the feeling is gone May be blue skies above But its cold when youre loves on the rocks
First, they say they want you How they really need you Suddenly you find youre out there Walking in the storm When they know they have you Then they really have you Nothing you can do or say Youve got to leave, just get away We all know the song
Love on the rocks Aint no surprise Pour me a drink And Ill tell you some lies Yesterdays gone And now all I want is a smile
Well, old guy, artists need to make sense of things even if it's personal. I think generally abstraction is happy dealing with its associative layers of history and fabric. Thus there will always be a narrative, thus a step divorced from some of the earlier explorations that are labeled abstract. I think the Germans use the word 'nonobjective' even to the day to talk about structure and its fabric without even touching the word abstraction. If we are going to consider Sol as a visual artist we have to lunch break and head to the autonomous. This way Sol was able to produce a script that entailed a democratic autonomy within a demographic specificity, though while conceptually based becomes visually apparent, thus fits better into the caption 'non objective', while not all-together non-hierachical in work ethic is less specific in it's literal work-stake/cultural meaning. Koons, in his 'step by step approach' with his later failure pop kaleidoscopes tried to follow in the steps, while stepping it up to a level of control of the modern sweat shop, far harsher than any Warhol system, abandoning the democratic within the demographic [warhol would recruit artists or artist types into his factory to partake] [ inversely think of the chinese factories/ housing quarters that produce our convenient Ipod... Koons was about an autonomous piece of art manufactured under stringent conditions, a completely controlled environment, to produce snippets, disjointed aspects of a cultural/pop fabric, seemingly without hierarchy, leaving us to wonder the meaning of the magnificence of the mastered meaningless residue. This way Koons speaks his time> While Sol, even to the end, managed to stave off such meaning and repercussions via simple means that barely bespoke craft, utilizing a variety of executions that bear little resemblance to the high culture within which it partakes. We could bring in Bridget Riley to all this, re execution and skill... I'm sure you would agree those ends are different with her work and its execution that had little to do with a cultural signifier in manufacture, practice, or connotation.
Somewhere this all feeds back to Lasker, though, I don't know, but that's how this artist poster thinks about it... though probably will think about it differently tomorrow... again, I really can't hold the brain power as I've got to get on with it. But it was enjoyable. cheers Concrete
Yeah well, zip, I'm a lousy articulator typing in this small wacky blue outlined box the size of a.... I don't know how your brain works but mine tends towards the short-circuit. Isn't that how sparks fly? Anyway we'll all be seeing double, triple soon. Lasker built his own problem in that while his execution is as deadpan as say Riley or Sol, Lasker's parody-in-paint leads us to believe that the paint serves some human and thus higher purpose, as if the meaning is in the paint. But there is no meaning, only meaning of what the paint carries or does. Lasker's built-in expectations has it that 'all that paint loaded on a canvas should be doing something', should show a more turbulent f***k history of its trace and mass, that the presentation of his art should be somehow fixed in a realm of chance and mystery, which he intentionally short circuits.
Koons, Riley, LeWitt, Lasker, all use paint via the disinterested method. In Lasker's case it's harder to believe, as with this thread the general consensus is that the work is squeezed of intention, constricted of meaning, and or of possibility.
I mean I always loved Halley's day-go color, it was just the shitty ill considered design a-la prison bar and conduit. And it got worse. But while he hasn't thrown his pomo cloak away his compositions now are cleaner, more in tune with the non- hierarchical non-objective mission, whatever that may be. Now the Day-Glo and the simple armature are unnerving and fun to look at. So now he's an Op-Artist, just as Sol started out a Conceptual Artist he finnishing up closer to an nonobjective one, closer to the European understanding of this, though still the questions don't cease. Check out Jan van Der Ploeg @ this UCLA Hammer site, click and read if you are interested--A dutch artist with all that heavy history...
If you aint into clicking links read this at least, it makes better sense than my flusters above.
A Riley is a Riley, a chunk of sensation, a singular field, an event, an encounter. A Bridget Riley painting is not a depiction. This singularity is peculiar, given that her paintings are made by other hands. From the early 1960s, she has used assistants to manufacture her paintings, after her own production of numerous studies, drawings, variations, diagrams and colour swatch tests, in which every colour relationship is fine-tuned in terms of its hue-value, saturation, its place on the tonal scale, as well as in terms of its opacity, its flow, its gloss or mattness, its maleability as a semi-liquid material. Every single element of every work is premeditated, every painting planned to the last detail. There is a fascinating room of Riley's studies here. However methodical and cold-blooded they are, they are often great drawings - precisely because they have no self-regard or affectation of style. Adrian Searle. Tuesday June 24, 2003 The Guardian
Concrete: I can see the connection with Halley, in lots of ways, but Koons? I don’t see how he is abstract or much interested in painting, for himself at least. Why should Lasker’s painting method be disinterested in paint? The fact that he has this peculiar technique that no-one seems to be able to properly explain, surely points to a real engagement with the medium. Just what he says with it I think varies from work to work, the example here I think a bit dull. But just what is meant by non-objective seems no clearer than abstraction. Is the number 5 an object or an abstraction? Is red an object or an abstraction? The metaphysics here have a long and distinguished history, but nothing rules out an abstraction also having an object - being an abstract object, in fact. The distinction more usefully, might be between the abstract and the concrete, or the general and particular, or individual. Why can’t we say that Riley’s famous rippling wave Op-Art depicts literal or concrete waves? I think Taaffe’s clever take on them as a rippling flag (somewhere on www.philliptaaffe.info) makes just this point. Halley is happy to play on prison cell/ battery cell/Minimalist prison is much the same way. The fact is no matter what you do to an ‘abstract’ or ‘non-objective’ painting, there’s nothing to stop someone else finding a way of linking it back into some level of the concrete. I think that was one of the big themes in NY painting in the early 80s – Ross Bleckner in there as well. It gets called Neo Geo but I think it’s more about this subversion of a supposed ‘purity’ of abstraction. Also – how come you don’t just write your comments in a word doc and then paste them into that crummy little box? Seeing what you’re writing helps with the thinking I find.
Im the malfuntioning. NNot really anonymous. But semi permeable privacy is
Art and A roaring bonfire. To both - you invest thought - bring meaning to it and breathe life in-to it. That is what WE mean when we say "you don't see it". A mirror without glass nor self awareness. Monkeys looking at a stranger who is mirroring their every move, though not nearly so well.
Is it because they withhold sight and meaning from you or because they do not hold meaning back so that you may cross over to see?
Do I deny meaning? Do you reject my denial? Or do you forget I deny meaning and imagine you contest my so called meaning?
The universe has no intrinsic meaning because meaning is man made, and man alone mans the lemonade. Stand AND deliver. Crime AND punishment. Crocket AND Tubbs.
But you know this instrinsicly because you see the drink disappear one by one, and becoming empty, become something else. You.
This is all elemetary philosophical chatter designed to signify that I think, but also that I am fond of my own voice, that I live and through will alone continue to live.
Is Jonathan Lasker fond of his own voice? yes, apparently. And he is going to make a grand gesture, or hopes for the grand gesture, or hopes that by thinking of the grand gesture that he will become the grand gesture, one glass of dry sand in my eye at a time. But not yours, because Jonathan Lasker is not ironic, and is talking to you, who see his work and are not meaning full but see through the bottle to the message of hope enshrined in the days work.
Ah the cool beach, sand AND surf. Time AND Tide. Jesus AND Christ.
Old guy I was just bringing up a few artists who have used paint via the mechanical, that's all, I’m not overly systematic when it comes to talking about artists, Koons' scientific process just as an extreme of abstractedness. Though that process does not differ so much from say Riley, while the results are very different. The difference lay in the purity. Riley’s oeuvre is pure, because it stays simple, any baggage is associative, as you say you can’t stop people going there or making a living off ripples. One goes for maximum control and impact for the sake of art/ image/illusion. The other, Riley, the high-end reproduction serves for the sake of pure finely ‘articulated’ transferred illusion. As Searle says, what you are looking at is an object, whether it be tied to waves, or whatever. The whole painting is this object that we as participators have a reaction with in an attempt to enter. Though there is no where to enter a Bridget Riley. The object/painting is all there at once, and we just keep trying to enter, though we get caught on the surface of a buzzing screen, of which there is no behind, no in front, It’s just there on the surface, of the mind, constantly reconfiguring. Any depth other than that is a pure optical error, created by a glitch in the optimal illusion. We are not bedazzled by the complexity of the structure instead perplexed by the simplicity of it and the experience that such simplicity can deliver. Taaffe I don’t want to go there so I wont. Though surly has something to do with Lasker. Because we don't have to deal with the residue of meaning of paint, or an overly complicated structure, in Riley the reward of the critical application of paint becomes important as much as it is to the service of the visual experience. It’s optical art, a visual experience the best works without quotes, though slippage is undeniable. Laskers visual Transaction is different, it’s about dialog and the material is very much part of that, the fragments setting up a narrative which has inbuilt its own conversation. With suggestiveness towards the literal, paint, and because of its bulk and semi-naturalness, you’ll always get the complaints. That’s all I was trying to make a point of. Abstraction, nonobjective, concrete …it’s delicate. I started that up but can I take it back? Not the place to talk about those things. The little box keeps time at hand.
Zip, these kinds of conversations I usually have through email, and usually with other artists who are working these areas. So it's interesting for me. Generally though we jump around testing each other's ground, kind of like play. Here Old guy seems to be pretty up on these issues so, it's kind of fun, though a little embarrassing for me, because I jump around, much like in email. Apologies if it's getting nauseating. Here's a link from minusspace to Paul Corio's recent blog post You Could Have Knocked Me Over With a Feather @ NO HASSLE AT THE CASTLE In response to the recent ARTFORUM Op ART REVISITED also available online. Everyone knows how to get there. I haven't read it yet! Corio @ no hassle brings up some good points about visuality, if anyone is at all slightly interested.
The whole abstraction/self reference/purity issue is such a big one, has been for so long, it’s not surprising if we make little headway in a thread on Lasker. But no reason not to elbow it in the ribs as we brush past! And who knows what others take from it? It’s not as if we’re here to settle these things – as if we could – but just to trace a few routes in and out of paintings, point out a few landmarks. If this is a blog for painters then obviously the results, if any, matter most in their next pictures, and probably only in some small way. It reminds me of discussion back in art school, where, because everyone was pursuing such divergent paths, discussion of ‘art’ always proceeded by the most circuitous, indirect means – TV, movies, books, music etc, really just making oblique connections – attitudes, moods, trends. But no-one doubted the value of it, because it wasn’t as if there was this rigid process for working anyway – you used stuff as and when it presented itself, in as much as you were aware of it. And it strikes me PaintersNYC works much the same, and is appreciated for it.
No worries concrete I'm only obliquely referencing anything. I do enjoy the travelling as old guy says.
In fact my intended audience was a population of tiny aliens on the lost continent of Mu. Do you like them? Me too.
Op art is dead long live op art. I like that anyone can do it. Like macrame tie-die or quilting. It does suprise me that some are better than others. Design and execution. How can people get pretentious over that? And yet they do. I think its a state of mind. Yesterday, while painting, i dripped paint on the ground. In my mind I was thinking, no it isnt important, and yet it was. How much drip to convey the message that you care, but that you dont't care that much? That its important, but not too important? (paint with your off hand, paint with a stick, paint upside down, none of these are tricks)
What is the socio-political deal with Lasker? In the same way that op-art was poo pooed as a dead end devoid of meaning, so too (in some camps) was the sociological exegisis of formal(ist) painting. Marxists! I'd love to find the time to read Kristeva and Deleuze and Guyatari and all the other big names. But I heard you can still be cool if you don't.
What better explanation for Jonathan Lasker than a conspiracy theory involving the CIA, hedge funders, powerfull but dark interior design interests and a whole lot of blow.
I like that as much as emptying my mind and entering a no story house - mirrors on the ceiling, mirrors on the floor, mirrors on the walls, you aren't here no more.
46 comments:
Jonathan Lasker @
Cheim & Read
547 West 25th Street
New York, New York 10001
He seems to be choking his intuition to death. I don't really want to watch.
Im reminded of the intitutional beige pebble finish on national park rest stop building circa 1962.
The palette is definitely dateable, 1950-60. Tiki or lounge culture.
but so does sol lewitt own line-spaghetti or does bryce-man win? Conceptually thats a humdinger, because sol lewitt says anyone can do it, but on the other horn, not anyone can sell it for a lot of money.
In the same way, you can change the scale, from macro to micro - its an economic thing. Me, I like stagflation - it keeps the rent low.
But this painting references a time before Jimmy carter - a time before the hand of the artist or the current administration was tarred and feathered as a radical bull whip injection scenario. A time when art was art and the masses had to go on free day.
Pissing and moaning, christ, I dunno, its like a referential jungle out there - sort of roast chestnut traditional.
Sleeping beauty woke up but shes still at Storm king because the princely rental car got towed off the access path. Entitled bitch deserves to heel it.
Little Red riding hood discovered red looks orange in daylight so she took it back to the dollar store, and no one has heard from her since.
martin puryear makes sensitive thickets. I like that mojo. Its safe and an you can block the fire exit with them.
In my secret garden I have a topiary of office supplies. Check out the rolodex tree.
I used to watch PBS mystery theater with my parents. Now its all a mystery. Or maybe its them.
I was watching Fuse, tatoo stories (for the bumpers), and apparently I enjoy tattoo art more than this image, although I do aspire to be upper middle class. Does anyone get sol lewitt tatoos"? that would be like getting caviar at the school cafeteria.
spot Waldo the suicide bomber
this may be dumb to say, but if this guy continues to repeat and repeat his formula, why does his new show consist of only 5 paintings? I mean, if there is nothing left for him to explore and he has settled, why not churn em out..the question I guess is does his work still sell?...This is a sad roadblock I hope I never run into and ifso I hope to have a sufficient vehicle or bypass..
“There’s a logical progression to all the changes,” Suggs says, “but it can be difficult for people to follow unless they’re paying attention or they’re particularly tolerant of variety. And there isn’t that much tolerance out there for variety, I’ve found. People want to think of artists as trademarks, and that’s really the wisest way to go: to get a good trademark and just stick to it and refine it and go on a gradient and eventually people will pay attention to you for your tenacity. That makes a lot of sense. I never espouse my way of doing it to younger artists, I just say there are basically two kinds of career choices you can make — well, there are many, but two big ones: whether you’re going to take the path of consistency and slow building or you’re going to make a career basically based on inquiry, which is relatively unconstrained. If that is the case, it is unlikely that you’ll be able to stick to one thing.”
-Don Suggs
just when I am finally receptive to his work,he comes out with the muzak version
Johnny was a rebel once. He don't ride with us no more.
its all popart.
this is pretty much true and it sort of sucks esp. if you're a student and looking for a trademark..
Actually I have a technical question about the work: How does he get those long squiggly lines so even and continuous?
I once tried to find out via his former gallery Spare-Only-Wastewater, and they were less than helpful. Would it have killed him to email back a two line reply?
I wrote the paper anyway and everyone fell asleep.
What goes around comes around.
But seriously, what does he use? I figure it's got to be some sort of wheel, maybe?
Old guy that's really funny, because it's such a good question. You can squeeze the stuff straight out of the tube and then pat it down in a continuous movement... so it would be a two step process. I don't know. I hope you find out. And then we will all know, if you post it here...
KJ has been busy, though took his time.
'...seems to be playing with several different kinds of painting ideas...'
I think he said.
Worth a look and listen!
And at the BR if you haven't read it already.
Jonathan Lasker with John Yau there are a few good snippets in there...
The stick with one thing vs. inquiry are not really opposites but signposts for a tactical play, a strategy for an argument that when used correctly will enlighten us towards one view. This view would have stacked enough bad to one side and enough good to the other side that it becomes very clear what is good and what is bad. This way we no longer need a position, or a view, we are enlighten of that [ means we no longer need to consider the burden or differences or choice] We know what is good and what is bad, and that is enough, and ample.
My Questions:
Why would you want to argue one over the other? Why would you want there to be a good way and a bad way? What does this do for you? Does it solve any problems?
Of course the good and the bad are bundled up in a bag of fear, suggesting there is a fear of both 'of inquiry' and to 'a focus'. Because, remember... One is not without the other. What is there to fear, anyway?
Fear, I can imagine, is a fear of actually letting go
Um,
1. When you let go of things you don't hold on to them.
2. Change happens! all things being constant, constantly in flux/change.
3. You don't have to change your clothes to prove it, though you can.
4. Whatever.
the palette is actually pre 1950. Victorian? 1940's? i don't know.
Peter halley is trapped worse - just ask CF.
boredom is not a virtue. boredom is not a virtue. boredom is not a virtue. boredom is not a virtue. boredom is not a virtue. boredom is not a virtue. boredom is not a virtue. boredom is not a virtue. boredom is not a virtue. boredom is not a virtue. boredom is not a virtue. boredom is not a virtue. boredom is not a virtue. boredom is not a virtue. boredom is not a virtue. boredom is not a virtue.
boredom is not a virtue. boredom is not a virtue. boredom is not a virtue. boredom is not a virtue.
Victorian zip, throw in late victorian when the natural look started to thrive. Artists and intellectuals believed gardening stabilized a society in a time of unrest. The government thought that too, so there were all these public gardens amidst open putridity and squalor. I think they came through OK.
Here in Japan too, especially in the very busy cities after the bubble, rolling out of one recession into another, one after another, a thriving business was gardening. People had more time and less money. What do you do?
Right! Create with color, create a balance no matter how hairy that balance may get, and why not?
Too, I notice, in the city here that no matter how small the garden is it is always full of color--small tiny streets, tiny houses, blooming with color. Soothing [?] or just a good balance of hard and soft--liquor.
Good, zip, you do have the answers.
btw
You got off easy, only 25x
I think that is Victorian too. But I don't think there is any point to that kind of tasking and writing lines.
There's another lesson for art students to learn regarding the one of repetition vs. exploration mentioned above and it can be found reading the interview of Lasker (repetition) in Brooklyn Rail that Concrete Phone linked to above and comparing that to the interview from 2 months ago in the same publication between Bill Jensen (exploration) and Chris Martin http://www.brooklynrail.org/2007/2/art/bill-jensen
Lasker has very little to talk about and Jensen's got real-life experience and experimentation in art as well as life. It's all very clear in the contrasting interviews.
True, Jim, Lasker didn't bring in the ultra-sensitive hallucinogenic quality to the conversation, but also true, too, Chris Martin, who I very much enjoy, who enjoys killing the whole idea of abstraction to bring it back in, decided to focus on something ephemeral, the process of the 'counter anxiety'.
The ephemeris of anxiety and process of achieving its by-pass is too much a textual footnote, and granting leeway to Martin, I don't think he knows what that encompasses, through experience, he who is still quite young.
I think what Lasker cunningly did was talk about the paintings that are up at Cheim and Read, and didn't really want to, or didn't need to, go into childhood anxieties (we all had them), or the painting or visual anxieties in the face of the deflation of a minimalist paradigm adding up am pm to a non-visual thought, or to stand up to any other kind of regiment or reaction, because he's too old to play out some reactionary dude. He mentions his stance back when, as if he has to, and the rest he talks about vey practical stuff, pretty well known talk--as if he thinks someone is checking. Lasker was being very upfront, simple to the seat, skipping a lot of details because they were details that he really wants people to get for themselves, or, if not, remain to a degree in the mystery. So Lasker's interview at BR was just that: A small, quick, suffice, attempt to let the reader into some of the problems knowable to the artist, some of the deciding processes and decisions, and left it there for you and we to become aware of them in the work or not.
This show was just painful
chris martin is not young and he absolutely knows what hes talking about from experience. I wouldnt say hes playing a reactionary dude either. Ill read the interviews later and compare.
Jensen talks about his early experiences -- why he became an artist. He talks about being afraid to leave the city. He makes connections from his childhood experiences to his work. He talks about his anxieties when painting. The process of starting a painting with an idea and how he comes back to it after sometimes years of working on it.
He talks about the materials in oil painting, the craft, the alchemy.
Right Martin is not young mixing names with ages.
Jim I read the interview again and sorry I don't see anything more valuable that Jensen is saying or anything more persuasive to make it more real and concrete with surety that Jensen's way of making art and his experience is any more a valid way than Lasker's. They are just very different interviews focusing on very different things, with painting, very different painting, very different painters.
Having said that if you enjoy the idea of struggle, the smell of oil then I'm definitely not going to take that away from you. I personally have no interest in struggle or disabilities because this is planet earth, things move. When they move there is friction. When our heads move there is also friction, against the lightness of it's movements, and the reality of that which it attempts to move, your alchemy. It's all that, and all of us are that.
So in art, painting, 'whatever it takes' is just whatever it takes for me. If you want to prop those up who labor a position fine but I still don't think it useful to compare.
Personally I like what Lasker had to say because i could then see that in the painting. And I think, 'ah, he knows his limitations', and 'ah, he really does work through them..' however good or bad I think the paintings are.
I love it when an artist tells me something about their work and I can see it working in whatever way it works. But that's me. I like to know how something works... go at it, into it until I know.
When someone tells me about their idea, then I want to see how that idea is then embodied in the work, not how the idea carries the work. I guess you call that alchemy. I call it autonomous.
Anyway, that's as far as I can go without knowing a little more, so adieu,
and if you are a painter, best there,
here, I suspect, we're tied up in
Language....;)
But in jpeg at least, the stuff looks tired. Maybe Lasker needs to go Geo for a while. He could still be the quivery guy, but like quivery Mondrian or Albers. He could be the Donald Baechler of Mondrians, or the Mondrian of Donald Baechlers, but like ‘straight’.
http://www.currentartpics.com/jonathan-lasker/
I read that old guy, a very clean read, is that yours?
... And the narrative that he talks about in that interview, don't forget, which I think is very clever. With this painting you have the base which zip described best. You have two Easter Island totems [head shapes] one within the other, resting on that base of patches of squiggle lines. The white shape, which I'm not sure what physical plane it is sitting on in relation to the other areas of paint, faces the more spatial draw, the interweaving and looping line. The space is a trick and stand-alone, the whole painting space is a trick though via the different attendees and variation of that the painting becomes very disjointed with each area contained and insular. Though when we look at any one area of manipulation we can see that elsewhere under a different guise. The inside facing right head is plain as with the upper part which is very much the illusion of background [because it is the top and we read that as receding]. The bottom foreground of manic lines can also be found in the darker, larger, left facing head or shape. The wire of paint reads dimensional but not three dimensional, but more just suggestive, similar as cap says ‘Brice is in there somewhere’. If we run this area flat you can see similar shapes that make up the heads, also in the Italian patio rendition at the bottom, which is so overdone as foreground. By incongruent means the sequestered comes together by wry manors, conceits, and false expectations. This is the narrative that doesn't lead anywhere, but is the narrative of the picture, Lasker’s painting picture narrative. Anyway, the roots of the four poplar trees are interesting as they just dig down into the synthetic soil. Nothing means anything in the end. It’s painting and its narrative. it's tricky, as it is tacky, at that.
So whats the deal with making unassuming art. I understand being self effacing as a branding deal as well as a social adapative strategy.
ANd yet theres a sort of pretention attached to the whole project, an impermeable layer of NO which negates or privileges the low key aspect and turns it into a game of us vs them. Is that the intent? The tension between those allowed to be unassuming (the owners/masters) and those who must be assuming and thus in need of unassuming (the audience/servant).
But what if you were allready unassuming and didn't need to assum anything?
Isnt viewing a show like that like lucy setting up the punt over and over again for Charlie Brown?
I think so. And yet the conversation manages to piddle along like the rio bravo in a drought.
Surely a river runs through these?
Carnegie Libraries
Lawn Dead Spots
Armatures
Isamu Nagutchi
Henry Moore
Blood and Soil
Nuclear winter
Playing with your feces
God don't you guys ever sleep?
No.
No.
No.
No.
No.
No.No.
No.
No.No.No.No.
No.
No.
No.
No.
No.No.No.No.No.No.
No.No.No.
No.
yes.
No.No.
No.
No.
No.No.No.No.
No.
No.No.No.
yes.
Concrete: Sorry to be so slow - elections can be distracting!
I've slept it off now and yeah, the piece is mine, an updated and mercifully briefer version of a paper from 3/4 years ago. Easier to point to that than drag it all into a discussion of the example before us. But maybe too academic and flat footed for discussion here?
I've no idea where the 'unassuming' thing Zip protests about, arises?
Did I miss something? (again)
Looking at the example again - more seriously - I think there's something astray about the scale of the scribble - it gets too tight and dull - in a lot of the recent stuff. I think Closeuup said something about strangling his intuition. Intuition seems to have left the building some time ago in this stuff. But there's definitely something stifling about the squiggles in this example. He can make space for them, but the variation on colour/shape/composition isn't enough.
It's funny for a guy who is so systematic - it's actually his system that lets him down here.
Gotta agree with the OG. My crack about intuition was a response to this description of his process from the press release:
Lasker's paintings illustrate a collision between intuition and analysis, the subconscious and the premeditated. He first works out ideas for his paintings by freely sketching forms and compositions; these are navigated subconsciously, continuous and unmediated. These drawings are executed at a much smaller scale and often with several variations made before the final composition. The resultant study is then enlarged and copied as the final painting. Now highly conscious of his image, Lasker's scribbles become almost mechanically produced, his wandering line, now with destination, is copied, clarified and contained. As Lasker explains, "I reference the subconscious in a very conscious way. I take something from the subconscious and reprocess it. I go from direct subconscious mark-making to graphic reproduction."
Don't stop thinking about tomorrow
Don't stop thinking about tomorrow
Don't stop thinking about tomorrow
Don't stop thinking about tomorrow
Don't stop thinking about tomorrow
Don't stop thinking about tomorrow
Don't stop thinking about tomorrow
Don't stop thinking about tomorrow
Don't stop thinking about tomorrow
Don't stop thinking about tomorrow
etc.
Well Lasker has his way. It's very methodical, remember he's saying 'going from subconscious mark-making to graphic reproduction', so by the time the paint is prepared and ready to go your talking about reproduction, cutting out the middle person. Anyway OG what a good overview over there. The Sol and the dead-end, well I think all great art is a dead end with the end of the artist. I think 'Minimal Pop' has sort of taken off where Sol chose to rest.
Closeuup knows their painting no doubt...
Zip is the resident academic 'unassuming' is spot on.
We have this thing here called 'golden week'. Eating, short travel. It's the end of that.
if painting doest get you high
you're not using the right medium
happy cinco de mayo
drinking my cane sugar coke--it's mexcellent!
Concrete:
The Sol piece is maybe a bit mean.
But well, I enjoy playing the devil, let’s say.
Then again I get sick of critics/art historians who treat the artist’s statements as gospel when it comes to deciding on the meaning of the work. This is just passing the buck, frankly (you getting this, Jon Fineberg, while I’m on the drive-by?)
Artists are entitled to have their say, sure, but they are not obliged to be a spokesperson and what they say doesn’t necessarily make it so – if you listened to every artist, every work would be a masterpiece, every artist the most important. That’s obviously not true. It’s a two-way street between maker and user and I think it’s just lazy to want the artist to do both, and let the critic/historian file the interview, click on by-line.
What you end up with as an art history is this string of incompatible ‘intentions’ that really only point to a flaw in the method.
So I’m throwing down a different kind of framework and with the Sol thing it’s largely a pretext for distinguishing between Minimalism and Conceptualism, which so far remains murky, for all the publication, and makes much else murkier, and with the Lasker item, actually trying to get people to look a little harder at the pictures, rather than just accepting this glib view of his stuff as a flippant cynical take on abstraction.
It is that as well, but I think they’re missing the point if they just take away that. Abstraction is actually the winner for his brand of painting. Flippancy and cynicism are worthy of abstraction, find useful and striking application by it.
I think my view and Lasker’s (of his work) are generally in agreement, for all that, (or intentions or no) but I find most writing on him (Carrier say, The Rocky and Bullwinkel book) disappointing. The German one is probably still the best.
Anyway here endeth the sermon. Will I get to the show? I doubt it. But if that crypto-fascist and CIA stooge Sarknazi gets in, it’s going to be a lively old time on Seniors night down at the Beautiful Losers Club. Fetch me my walker someone.
Love on the rocks
Aint no surprise
Pour me a drink
And Ill tell you some lies
Got nothing to lose
So you just sing the blues all the time
Gave you my heart
Gave you my soul
You left me alone here
With nothing to hold
Yesterdays gone
Now all I want is a smile
First, they say they want you
How they really need you
Suddenly you find youre out there
Walking in the storm
When they know they have you
Then they really have you
Nothing you can do or say
Youve got to leave, just get away
We all know the song
You need what you need
You can say what you want
Not much you can do
When the feeling is gone
May be blue skies above
But its cold when youre loves on the rocks
First, they say they want you
How they really need you
Suddenly you find youre out there
Walking in the storm
When they know they have you
Then they really have you
Nothing you can do or say
Youve got to leave, just get away
We all know the song
Love on the rocks
Aint no surprise
Pour me a drink
And Ill tell you some lies
Yesterdays gone
And now all I want is a smile
Well, old guy, artists need to make sense of things even if it's personal.
I think generally abstraction is happy dealing with its associative layers of history and fabric. Thus there will always be a narrative, thus a step divorced from some of the earlier explorations that are labeled abstract. I think the Germans use the word 'nonobjective' even to the day to talk about structure and its fabric without even touching the word abstraction. If we are going to consider Sol as a visual artist we have to lunch break and head to the autonomous. This way Sol was able to produce a script that entailed a democratic autonomy within a demographic specificity, though while conceptually based becomes visually apparent, thus fits better into the caption 'non objective', while not all-together non-hierachical in work ethic is less specific in it's literal work-stake/cultural meaning. Koons, in his 'step by step approach' with his later failure pop kaleidoscopes tried to follow in the steps, while stepping it up to a level of control of the modern sweat shop, far harsher than any Warhol system, abandoning the democratic within the demographic [warhol would recruit artists or artist types into his factory to partake] [ inversely think of the chinese factories/ housing quarters that produce our convenient Ipod... Koons was about an autonomous piece of art manufactured under stringent conditions, a completely controlled environment, to produce snippets, disjointed aspects of a cultural/pop fabric, seemingly without hierarchy, leaving us to wonder the meaning of the magnificence of the mastered meaningless residue. This way Koons speaks his time> While Sol, even to the end, managed to stave off such meaning and repercussions via simple means that barely bespoke craft, utilizing a variety of executions that bear little resemblance to the high culture within which it partakes.
We could bring in Bridget Riley to all this, re execution and skill... I'm sure you would agree those ends are different with her work and its execution that had little to do with a cultural signifier in manufacture, practice, or connotation.
Somewhere this all feeds back to Lasker, though, I don't know, but that's how this artist poster thinks about it... though probably will think about it differently tomorrow... again, I really can't hold the brain power as I've got to get on with it. But it was enjoyable.
cheers
Concrete
qwerwerwerw
malffuncvtion
Anyone here believe in the rapture?
Don't adjust you brain, Do adjust your eyes.
Yeah well, zip, I'm a lousy articulator typing in this small wacky blue outlined box the size of a.... I don't know how your brain works but mine tends towards the short-circuit. Isn't that how sparks fly? Anyway we'll all be seeing double, triple soon. Lasker built his own problem in that while his execution is as deadpan as say Riley or Sol, Lasker's parody-in-paint leads us to believe that the paint serves some human and thus higher purpose, as if the meaning is in the paint. But there is no meaning, only meaning of what the paint carries or does. Lasker's built-in expectations has it that 'all that paint loaded on a canvas should be doing something', should show a more turbulent f***k history of its trace and mass, that the presentation of his art should be somehow fixed in a realm of chance and mystery, which he intentionally short circuits.
Koons, Riley, LeWitt, Lasker, all use paint via the disinterested method. In Lasker's case it's harder to believe, as with this thread the general consensus is that the work is squeezed of intention, constricted of meaning, and or of possibility.
I mean I always loved Halley's day-go color, it was just the shitty ill considered design a-la prison bar and conduit. And it got worse. But while he hasn't thrown his pomo cloak away his compositions now are cleaner, more in tune with the non- hierarchical non-objective mission, whatever that may be. Now the Day-Glo and the simple armature are unnerving and fun to look at. So now he's an Op-Artist, just as Sol started out a Conceptual Artist he finnishing up closer to an nonobjective one, closer to the European understanding of this, though still the questions don't cease.
Check out Jan van Der Ploeg @ this UCLA Hammer site, click and read if you are interested--A dutch artist with all that heavy history...
If you aint into clicking links read this at least, it makes better sense than my flusters above.
A Riley is a Riley, a chunk of sensation, a singular field, an event, an encounter. A Bridget Riley painting is not a depiction. This singularity is peculiar, given that her paintings are made by other hands. From the early 1960s, she has used assistants to manufacture her paintings, after her own production of numerous studies, drawings, variations, diagrams and colour swatch tests, in which every colour relationship is fine-tuned in terms of its hue-value, saturation, its place on the tonal scale, as well as in terms of its opacity, its flow, its gloss or mattness, its maleability as a semi-liquid material. Every single element of every work is premeditated, every painting planned to the last detail. There is a fascinating room of Riley's studies here. However methodical and cold-blooded they are, they are often great drawings - precisely because they have no self-regard or affectation of style.
Adrian Searle.
Tuesday June 24, 2003
The Guardian
Concrete: I can see the connection with Halley, in lots of ways, but Koons? I don’t see how he is abstract or much interested in painting, for himself at least.
Why should Lasker’s painting method be disinterested in paint?
The fact that he has this peculiar technique that no-one seems to be able to properly explain, surely points to a real engagement with the medium. Just what he says with it I think varies from work to work, the example here I think a bit dull.
But just what is meant by non-objective seems no clearer than abstraction. Is the number 5 an object or an abstraction? Is red an object or an abstraction? The metaphysics here have a long and distinguished history, but nothing rules out an abstraction also having an object - being an abstract object, in fact.
The distinction more usefully, might be between the abstract and the concrete, or the general and particular, or individual.
Why can’t we say that Riley’s famous rippling wave Op-Art depicts literal or concrete waves? I think Taaffe’s clever take on them as a rippling flag (somewhere on www.philliptaaffe.info) makes just this point.
Halley is happy to play on prison cell/ battery cell/Minimalist prison is much the same way. The fact is no matter what you do to an ‘abstract’ or ‘non-objective’ painting, there’s nothing to stop someone else finding a way of linking it back into some level of the concrete. I think that was one of the big themes in NY painting in the early 80s – Ross Bleckner in there as well. It gets called Neo Geo but I think it’s more about this subversion of a supposed ‘purity’ of abstraction.
Also – how come you don’t just write your comments in a word doc and then paste them into that crummy little box? Seeing what you’re writing helps with the thinking I find.
Im the malfuntioning. NNot really anonymous. But semi permeable privacy is
Art and A roaring bonfire. To both - you invest thought - bring meaning to it and breathe life in-to it. That is what WE mean when we say "you don't see it". A mirror without glass nor self awareness. Monkeys looking at a stranger who is mirroring their every move, though not nearly so well.
Is it because they withhold sight and meaning from you or because they do not hold meaning back so that you may cross over to see?
Do I deny meaning? Do you reject my denial? Or do you forget I deny meaning and imagine you contest my so called meaning?
The universe has no intrinsic meaning because meaning is man made, and man alone mans the lemonade. Stand AND deliver. Crime AND punishment. Crocket AND Tubbs.
But you know this instrinsicly because you see the drink disappear one by one, and becoming empty, become something else. You.
This is all elemetary philosophical chatter designed to signify that I think, but also that I am fond of my own voice, that I live and through will alone continue to live.
Is Jonathan Lasker fond of his own voice? yes, apparently. And he is going to make a grand gesture, or hopes for the grand gesture, or hopes that by thinking of the grand gesture that he will become the grand gesture, one glass of dry sand in my eye at a time. But not yours, because Jonathan Lasker is not ironic, and is talking to you, who see his work and are not meaning full but see through the bottle to the message of hope enshrined in the days work.
Ah the cool beach, sand AND surf. Time AND Tide. Jesus AND Christ.
And The.
And End.
Old guy I was just bringing up a few artists who have used paint via the mechanical, that's all, I’m not overly systematic when it comes to talking about artists, Koons' scientific process just as an extreme of abstractedness. Though that process does not differ so much from say Riley, while the results are very different. The difference lay in the purity. Riley’s oeuvre is pure, because it stays simple, any baggage is associative, as you say you can’t stop people going there or making a living off ripples. One goes for maximum control and impact for the sake of art/ image/illusion. The other, Riley, the high-end reproduction serves for the sake of pure finely ‘articulated’ transferred illusion. As Searle says, what you are looking at is an object, whether it be tied to waves, or whatever. The whole painting is this object that we as participators have a reaction with in an attempt to enter. Though there is no where to enter a Bridget Riley. The object/painting is all there at once, and we just keep trying to enter, though we get caught on the surface of a buzzing screen, of which there is no behind, no in front, It’s just there on the surface, of the mind, constantly reconfiguring. Any depth other than that is a pure optical error, created by a glitch in the optimal illusion. We are not bedazzled by the complexity of the structure instead perplexed by the simplicity of it and the experience that such simplicity can deliver. Taaffe I don’t want to go there so I wont. Though surly has something to do with Lasker.
Because we don't have to deal with the residue of meaning of paint, or an overly complicated structure, in Riley the reward of the critical application of paint becomes important as much as it is to the service of the visual experience. It’s optical art, a visual experience the best works without quotes, though slippage is undeniable.
Laskers visual Transaction is different, it’s about dialog and the material is very much part of that, the fragments setting up a narrative which has inbuilt its own conversation. With suggestiveness towards the literal, paint, and because of its bulk and semi-naturalness, you’ll always get the complaints. That’s all I was trying to make a point of.
Abstraction, nonobjective, concrete …it’s delicate. I started that up but can I take it back? Not the place to talk about those things.
The little box keeps time at hand.
Zip, these kinds of conversations I usually have through email, and usually with other artists who are working these areas. So it's interesting for me. Generally though we jump around testing each other's ground, kind of like play. Here Old guy seems to be pretty up on these issues so, it's kind of fun, though a little embarrassing for me, because I jump around, much like in email. Apologies if it's getting nauseating.
Here's a link from minusspace to Paul Corio's recent blog post You Could Have Knocked Me Over With a Feather @ NO HASSLE AT THE CASTLE In response to the recent ARTFORUM Op ART REVISITED also available online. Everyone knows how to get there. I haven't read it yet!
Corio @ no hassle brings up some good points about visuality, if anyone is at all slightly interested.
The whole abstraction/self reference/purity issue is such a big one, has been for so long, it’s not surprising if we make little headway in a thread on Lasker.
But no reason not to elbow it in the ribs as we brush past!
And who knows what others take from it? It’s not as if we’re here to settle these things – as if we could – but just to trace a few routes in and out of paintings, point out a few landmarks.
If this is a blog for painters then obviously the results, if any, matter most in their next pictures, and probably only in some small way.
It reminds me of discussion back in art school, where, because everyone was pursuing such divergent paths, discussion of ‘art’ always proceeded by the most circuitous, indirect means – TV, movies, books, music etc, really just making oblique connections – attitudes, moods, trends. But no-one doubted the value of it, because it wasn’t as if there was this rigid process for working anyway – you used stuff as and when it presented itself, in as much as you were aware of it. And it strikes me PaintersNYC works much the same, and is appreciated for it.
No worries concrete I'm only obliquely referencing anything. I do enjoy the travelling as old guy says.
In fact my intended audience was a population of tiny aliens on the lost continent of Mu. Do you like them? Me too.
Op art is dead long live op art.
I like that anyone can do it. Like macrame tie-die or quilting.
It does suprise me that some are better than others.
Design and execution.
How can people get pretentious over that? And yet they do. I think its a state of mind. Yesterday, while painting, i dripped paint on the ground. In my mind I was thinking, no it isnt important, and yet it was. How much drip to convey the message that you care, but that you dont't care that much? That its important, but not too important?
(paint with your off hand, paint with a stick, paint upside down, none of these are tricks)
What is the socio-political deal with Lasker?
In the same way that op-art was poo pooed as a dead end devoid of meaning, so too (in some camps) was the sociological exegisis of formal(ist) painting. Marxists!
I'd love to find the time to read Kristeva and Deleuze and Guyatari and all the other big names. But I heard you can still be cool if you don't.
What better explanation for Jonathan Lasker than a conspiracy theory involving the CIA, hedge funders, powerfull but dark interior design interests and a whole lot of blow.
I like that as much as emptying my mind and entering a no story house - mirrors on the ceiling, mirrors on the floor, mirrors on the walls, you aren't here no more.
did anyone see baseball logos,
or was it just me.
reminds me of van gogh, in a way
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