I keep attributing a sly wit to painter's posts. Is this a comment on last night's drunken posts and what the lofts of Willamsburg look like this morning?I think this image is supposed to be redeemed by the beauty of art and paint. But what is so beautiful or redemptive about either?
There was one thing called 'The Lesson'- Heaven pity me, that I ever saw it! Listen- can you fancy a squatting circle of nameless dog-like things in a churchyard teaching a small child how to feed like themselves? The price of a changeling, I suppose- you know the old myth about how the weird people leave their spawn in cradles in exchange for the human babes they steal. Pickman was showing what happens to those stolen babes- how they grow up- and then I began to see a hideous relationship in the faces of the human and non-human figures. He was, in all his gradations of morbidity between the frankly non-human and the degradedly human, establishing a sardonic linkage and evolution. The dog-things were developed from mortals!
uhhh. My apologies for the messy posts yesterday painter. Whatever I had last night wasn't good for my painting either. Promise to stay away from the drink.
I see that affinity with the figure kissing the bottom edge -- it works here but no so in the clemente. A ripe apple about to fall off of the canvas by it's own painterly weight. Cant help but think this is from where early cezanne might've sprung had he the courage to do it.
Yes Zip....you said it well. Some can and most just can't do it!! The angle and the tippy feeling are amazing. ..and the colors, his painting and and.... he's in my top 5! The middle dark spot holds it down so well.
Foucalt's original concept of the gaze referred to power relations and was later particularized into (rigid) gender relations by feminist film critics. Sometimes find the original concept more useful. Isn't this more classist than sexist? A nightmare of tenement living and emotional poverty made by someone with a famous last name? I think he could afford nicer sheets. Influenced by Watteau but Watteau is spooky with being soulless.
Bacon bothers me less because he depicted himself and his lovers. These are freaks not objects of desire. Desire might bother me less. Men or women is not an issue for me so I brought up Foucalt's earlier concept of the gaze. The issue for me is class, detachment and the fantasy of emotional poverty and decay associated with squalor.
Bacon painted the people in his life... and LF paints the people in his life...so he says. Just different focus. Maybe he's after some sort of "truth" even though it's an ugly one.
People have delineated two categories of the gaze. fetishistic and sadistic. Aren't there more than two categories?I really like fetish imagery and think many art objects are fetish objects. Sadistic imagery could be valid depending on the reason. But what about a sociopathic gaze. Sorry Cha for me these are ax murderer paintings. I don't mean that as a moral statement. Art is not right or wrong. But it stops me cold. Sorry if I am shutting down the conversation. I want to open it up. Are there more than two gazes? Where is Chucky?
Kelli it's good that we all react differently . As you say, there's no wrong and right... just much art and hopefully a lot of reactions! I'm not sure about why I like AND don't like his pics...at the same time. I'd hang a Bacon on my wall before LF. [but I do have a 2006 calendar on my wall ...all LF pics!]
There's at least one more -- of a kind of optical model -- that Barthes describes, sometimes, as a "shimmer" (the neutral).
I thought of "shimmer" when someone pages back referred to Freud's Gardens. Lacan I think sensed it when describing the Arago(sp?) phenomenon about seeing somthing only when looking at something else. A non-form.
" ...the Neutral is the shimmer: that whose aspect, perhaps whose meaning, is subtly modified according the angle of the subject's gaze..." -barthes, translated by krauss.
what does that have to do with this painting...? well, it could very well be that this painting was made with total absence of ideology... a manifestation of the neutral.
For me, these remain academic "studio" paintings, despite LF's obvious powers to paint form. They don't feel transformed. I never understood the reverence in which so many painters hold Freud; actually, his earlier stuff intrigues me so much more than this image.
"the fantasy of emotional poverty and decay associated with squalor."
"Nostalgia for the mud"
or "nostalgie pour la boue"
What about photographers that show their white trash homes as objet d'art to wealthy patrons? Humanity or sublimated anger? Who cares? I dont, but I like white trash TV. THose people are so ignorant, all they want to do is waste their lives doing drugs.
Havent read anything of sociological substance other than buzzwords. But its nostalgie pour la boue is a nice term for it. Gotta do my homework some year.
Lucian Freud I do think ppl of that g3n3r@ti0n are still dealing with Nazi style total-war warfare on some level, in a way that people in my, younger generation, are dealing with the continuation of the industrial revolution -videogamewarfare - the move from an agrarian society to man-machine interface mindfuck culture (how many tools do you know how to use? My generation learned to program VCRs, whereas Lucian Freud probably cant. Hes an anachronism, and thats the fantasy of our pastoral past - the fantasy of mud and painting - which is not a fantasy but a way to keep in touch with our so far unevolved all to human selves.
One thing about paitning is its immediacy - people allways talk of presence or warmth in painting - paint=fat. Thats true, I do feel it, and you dont get that with video. But with video you get illumination, which is like fire, which is like the campfire - or walking through dappled sunlit woods.
People sleeping on the fire escape, passed out drunks as local color...oh how romantic, this city.
If I were a French poet I would write paeons to the hallucinatory terrain like some deranged flanneur whith a yen for pate or street meat, whatever falls uder the baselisk-like eye of the beholder. Oh to approach the world as if one was merely a spectator out for an evening stroll in the last rays of the empire!
I googled this bit of rubbish. It uses words like exacerbated, cognitive dissonance, numisphere (awesome!) and is patently Neo-Marxist, I think.
"At this point, the metaphor of the castle—introduced by the Manifesto—takes on an added luster, or perhaps a baleful gleam. The Nizari Ismailis (the so-called "Assassins") structured their polity around a network of remote castles, most of which were inaccessible to every medieval military tactic—even prolonged siege, since they were supplied with their own gardens and water. Each high castle typically protected a fertile valley and was therefore self-sufficient—but full communication and even economic activity could take place within the network thanks to the "porosity" of medieval borders. And thanks to the policy of assassination or threatened assassinations, kings and religious authorities hesitated to interfere. This went on for centuries."
Screw you all! This is an amazing painting. Especially in person. All in all, Freud is a hands-down amazing painting with a whole lotta perseverence and work ethic.
Can't we all just once get lost in the beauty of a mark of a certain combination of colours side by side?
I realize that might seem a little passe for us hardened cynics(I include myself) but I am in still into going into small raptures in front of some amazing, unique brushwork. Voila.
Oh, and I forgot to mention, I do believe that Leigh Bowery was intended to be the third figure in this painting, but following his death he was painted out and replaced with one of Freud's whippets. This from an interview in the catalogue his recent retrospective in Venice last summer. Quite a heart-stopping show.
Mr P.. I don't think that the brushstoke quality has any more impact than the subject matter. They're as powerful as each other. LF wants to disturb us... he's not into pretty wrapping paper designs. His vision of reality isn't "nice" ................. but what on earth are those two women up to?!
Peeps thanks for peeping up but I mentioned above having sympathy for earlier interpretations of the gaze and think there are multiple forms of both an objectifying and identifying gaze. Feminist film criticism coined what we think of as the male gaze and while it is a perfectly valid concept in relation to mass market Hollywood product specifically films from the conservative 1950's I object to the haphazard application of this thinking in relation to art history. In some periods the male nude was primary, in others the female nude, in the Middle Ages neither. Also a great deal of art history was made by gay men and specifically depicts eroticism which has little to do with power relations between men and women. And it's hilarious what we have done with a concept we owe to Foucault who was a gay men who enjoyed SM and consensual power relations. Presuming an active male narrative gaze and a passive female subject in all cases essentializes gender and creates a heteronormative version of the painting tradition which is not even accurate. That being said it is partly although not wholly a valid way to look at Freud. Your name makes me think of marshmallow peeps!
The problem with limiting the discusson of the gaze (i.e. 'the male gaze') is that forces the use of that term back to the realm of hegelian dialictic. Something foucault was not a fan of. He was an interpreter. Like Nietzsche, like barthes. My point is that there is a great deal of usefulness in discussing the gaze outside the realm of film theory and Foucauldian power relations (not to say that the above application isn't useful).. Besides -- Foucault borrowed the termfrom Sartre, as did everyone else.
"Presuming an active male narrative gaze and a passive female subject in all cases essentializes gender and creates a heteronormative version of the painting tradition which is not even accurate."
Thus there even more of a need to to expand the definition of the gaze beyond gender politics.
Mr Peeps Laura Mulvey is dated. Writing before I was born. Just trying to splinter up the tired polemic that seems to show up every time the female body is depicted. Nothing is that simple least of all art. Leigh Bowery bless him was living proof.
kelli, I appreciate your attempt of trying to disassociate painting from the polemic of old-school gender politics.. I think that that was what you were attempting, when you asked for another definition of the gaze. I think that associating the gaze as in the case of polemics (read, hegalian as in the battle of opposites) is the problem. People can't see a world in which there is not a battle of opponent-against-opponent, least of all, the art world. Sartre's gaze was a rumination, not a battle-cry.
"there is a great deal of usefulness in discussing the gaze outside the realm of film theory and Foucauldian power relations"
Either you mean
Inside, not outside -
OR
what are we going to talk about now?
I dont know much about foucault other than we live in some sort of totalizing mind fuck panopticon.
But I got an idea Shame? Good one huh? What I mean by shame is -
this whole gaze thing is more where than when. But both for me, on the subway, anyways.
When: never look. Where: look at their Shoes.
people hate the fixed inpropriate, but vacant gaze. Its weird when you realize youve been looking at one thing on the train for a while longer than is appropriate. YOu are supposed to close your eyes so people know you are tired and not crazy. But I like to keep them open because I want to catch terrorists.
One time I was the only person on the train (or the elevator) and I was standing LOOKING AT BUT NOT SEEING a poster-maybe an ad for a school (its a great trick). SO someone tell me to move. Very paranoid moment.
Im ready to drive this taxi all the way to Cybill Shepherds house.
The gaze in relation to heat rays? I got one, do you? Pure heat.
Im interested in how someone could/would commit to the faustian bargain of becoming an expert on the taxonomy of the myriad interpretations of Foulcault, in all their manifestations.
Ideally the interpretations are the authors own thoughts - new ideas.
But to read anything - what if the thing doesnt have any answers (new ideas) either? Semantic blockage man. Watching some mind artist feather their neurons around the void is the fucking worst! Or the best. We might hope to see the worst.
Maybe the gaze is a a ZERO SUM GAME. Maybe it doesnt exist unless it sees you. Frightened? DOnt think. Feel. Gazibo.
Jpeg I could have gone with Jessica Benjamin's attack an the psychoanalytic underpinning of this thinking or Judith Butler's attempt to remove the lack from the realm of biologism and equate it insead with the melancholy of all disenfranchised people but it is simpler to stick with the queer reading of art history. There is a little church outside of Naples with the smuttiest sculpture I have ever seen. A naked fisherman caught in a net. The sculptor first carved the net and then maneuvered the chisel througfh the openings to carve the boy. I realize someone wrote the check, someone always writes the check. But I doubt it was the reason he spent hours maneuvering the chisel in the tiny spaces. There is no desire or feeling in this Freud or I would defend it. It's just pushing some very tired buttons I don't even believe in.
Kelli your spot on with the pomo critique. Freud paints men, dogs, plants, as well and if you look at his work on a whole everyone(thing) gets the same, how do you say it,'gaze'.
For me Lucian Freud is a great painter. He does not always make it, I mean sometimes a painting seems unresolved or the proportions are off. But this is what makes his work so interesting, at least one of the aspects of his work, his ability to be so honest in his work.
There is nothing to hide, its all there, the model, the painter, his struggle with painting.
Kelli, I'm cold-hearted, too, quite possibly. I see the figure as a compacted mass of paint painted flesh, pushed and packed into form, of the grotesque (overweight), transformed into the beautiful (a successfully painted image). For me the figure seated behind appears more vulnerable--and another stereotype/fetish. LF says something about 'how they happen to be', or something like that. Maybe the cold calculating is fairer, a more tender touch, than we think.
From the Tate calendar ...Freud once said of his human sitters: "I'm interested, really interested in them as animals." He believed that the sitter possessed secrets that must be prised out: " the subject must be kept under closest observation: if this is done, day and night, the subject- he, she or it- will eventually reveal the all without which selection itself is not possible"
"His outfits are so asymmetrical, blinding, and large that they are better described as costumes. He was the epitome of contradiction and boundary erasure."
which makes the poses in this vulnerable nude state really interesting
This is interesting, Lacan was a psychiatrist, and his theories, which are used in a lot of post-modern theory classes are considered out of date in the Psychiatric community.
So my question is why do we still use 1960's based theories to have define art?
Some decent questions Pdog. I question the way some psychoanalytic concepts particurally the misogynistic underpinnings of Freud are accepted as gospel and applied to art history. Not that I'm Tom Cruise or anything.
Well Lacan comes out of Freud, we have to remember that Freud was born in the 19 century, and that frames his view points.
I don't think he is gospel, as Psychiatry has evolved since, but he is the one of the first to understand and study our sub-consciousness as underlying affect on our make up.
My question is not about Psychiatry per say, but how the theories came to define how art theory is framed.
Why are we reading Lacan, Foulcault,Derrida, and all the existentialist?
Its interesting reading and it does do you good to expand your mind, other than that what does it have to do with making art?
I was chuckling cuz the discussion above, while being interesting, had little to do with 'pomo' let alone psychiatry. Lacan didn't have the power to describe drugs let alone subscribe them.
pdog, where'd you get the idea that any of the points posed a 'critique' of postmodernism anyway? What part of pomo did you think was being criticized?
if lacan = freud then you = you granddad. Which is to say it's an absurd notion to over simplify lineage to a matter of equality.
The figures above, in their very different ways, within their disciplines, challenged, somewhat, the notion of structure, and how ideas were formed within structure. In different ways, they tried to challenge the older notions of systemizaton, most notably, of the Hegelian kind, which modeled a forward march of the avant garde towards the end of history.
This posed questions to any activity that involved thinking, not just art. It punched new holes and opportunities in the reading of art history. As to whether or not they would have anything to do with your making art -- don't worry. You don't have to read them.
I was not commenting on what was being said, I was commenting on how it seems to me that there is(are) a lot of art history classes that are using the above writers as a base for teaching theory in context to art making.
I was just asking if people thought it was necessary at all, and[or]if it was more of a reflection of a generation of professors who are teaching now. Is it useful in creating work in or by which to frame your education.
I read a lot of this stuff, found it interesting as did most of my fellow grad students, but at the end of the day only 1 person really did theory based work, and that work was lame.
I understand how some of these writers challenged the notion of structure, hierarchy and power, but I was just wondering if people who make art really think about this stuff, or is it just an intellectual exercise.
It is many things for many people. Theory based art sucks. So so generalizatons. They were just a bunch of thinkers. That's all. Read 'em, or dont.
I have a personal interest in what seems to be (or have been) a project of some... Both krauss and barthes seemed to offer or promote a new alternative to think about creativity. One that veers away from the Greek (apollonian), materialistic, systemic way that this art world has inherited by way of western culture.
Why do MFA programs still require Theses? Because the systems we've inherited by way of teaching and doing art still rely on a pseudo-scientific methodology that is so fucking arrogant and tiresome. Artists statements are arrogant. Thesis deveopment is arrogant. Hegel still reigns over the artworld.
Certain thinkers posed a way of thinking about culture that is more mutable, less deterministic, less pointed, and thus less arrogant. More field-like. More playful, less discreet, less categorizable.
Or here's a good one. Every once in a while, an artist recalls, in conversation: "...oh when I became a 'formed' artist".. or "...that's when I became a "formed' artist..." And in my head I'm like: "a fucking what artist? As opposed to 'formless'? Who's telling these people that they arent artists until Skowhegan or Yale shits them out into the great white bowl?" Form is overrated, and is a overly priveledged term.
jpeg your one smart cookie. You have just said what I have been trying to say so well.
I waisted hours doing assigments for a class on this stuff. It took me away from the studio, it made you think like what the hell is this, if you questioned it, one professor made you feel like you were stupid, or your work would benifit from "medicine" of post modern thoery.
Hence the statement fully formed as an artist.
I was only shooting for things much lower, trying to be a painter.
Why does everyone insist that the fat woman is grotesque? How narrow minded.
I think the thinner reading woman is hungry, and is reading about something luxurious and private, which is represented by the fleshy nude. The dog is dreaming of soft striped mattresses.
The larger woman is the projection of the unbridled thoughts of the smaller woman focused on her story. The dog is the animal brain at rest and stands for the absence of judgement or scorn.
no but seriously, aristotelian might be a better word. I was only thinking apollo-light-form, etc. But it runs into the problem that Dionysus reminds me of way too many parties in my BFA dayz. And so, aristotelian logic will suffice, as a descriptor of category-logic. As opposed to, say, inductive logic.
Although LF's student work leaves me cold, I love the tight, obsessive work in his early career...neurotic form, neurotic content. I have seen several shows featuring his recent work, and about 1 in 10 have a quirkiness or vulnerability that raises tham far above the academic quality of the rest.
His real technical distinction is how he lets the oil paint dry quite a bit before pushing it around again with his brush, something that "luscious painters" normally avoid, resulting in a kind of constipated, sludgy surface.
Lucian Freud is a genius and the main reason why I paint. I think he's one of the most important artists working today and as a Londoner he makes me immensely proud. I've seen Freud's paintings up close and personal (before they're shipped off to the states) and they really defy belief - he isn't really that interested in what the sitters are like but depicts how they happen to be. I think he did the best portrait of our 'lovely' queen Elizabeth - even with all that wealth you can't help but notice what an old she really is and he captured that brilliantly.
My tutors at uni want me to stop looking at Freud as an influence but I'm not gonna take any notice - as I googled their own work and it's really shite - plus Freud is a master at what he does. I hope to be as good as he is one day and be able to still be creating great work at over 80 years of age.
Freud will always be important to me as it was because I was given a book of his paintings when I was 16 and I realised then and there that I wanted to paint like him. Before that book art was a hobby I was good at - I hadn't even painted before - afterwards painting became my passion - it still is. Freud rules!!
77 comments:
I keep attributing a sly wit to painter's posts. Is this a comment on last night's drunken posts and what the lofts of Willamsburg look like this morning?I think this image is supposed to be redeemed by the beauty of art and paint. But what is so beautiful or redemptive about either?
You know, it takes profound art and profound insight into Nature to turn out stuff like Lucian Freud's. Any magazine-cover hack can splash paint around wildly and call it a nightmare or a Witches' Sabbath or a portrait of the devil, but only a great painter can make such a thing really scare or ring true. That's because only a real artist knows the actual anatomy of the terrible or the physiology of fear- the exact sort of lines and proportions that connect up with latent instincts or hereditary memories of fright, and the proper colour contrasts and lighting effects to stir the dormant sense of strangeness. I don't have to tell you why a Fuseli really brings a shiver while a cheap ghost-story frontispiece merely makes us laugh. There's something those fellows catch- beyond life- that they're able to make us catch for a second. Doré had it. Sime has it. Angarola of Chicago has it. And Lucian Freud had it as no man ever had it before or- I hope to Heaven- ever will again.
There was one thing called 'The Lesson'- Heaven pity me, that I ever saw it! Listen- can you fancy a squatting circle of nameless dog-like things in a churchyard teaching a small child how to feed like themselves? The price of a changeling, I suppose- you know the old myth about how the weird people leave their spawn in cradles in exchange for the human babes they steal. Pickman was showing what happens to those stolen babes- how they grow up- and then I began to see a hideous relationship in the faces of the human and non-human figures. He was, in all his gradations of morbidity between the frankly non-human and the degradedly human, establishing a sardonic linkage and evolution. The dog-things were developed from mortals!
van gogh
Toulouse lautrec (fake)
I dont know, just nature morte, gyre and gymbal in the wabey graby. Deregulement de tous les sense avec l'absynthe or a gataeu chocolate. Merde.
morning after nightmare!!
uhhh. My apologies for the messy posts yesterday painter.
Whatever I had last night wasn't good for my painting either.
Promise to stay away from the drink.
I see that affinity with the figure kissing the bottom
edge -- it works here but no so in the clemente.
A ripe apple about to fall off of the canvas by it's
own painterly weight. Cant help but think this
is from where early cezanne might've sprung had
he the courage to do it.
jpeg I thought your posts were funny. I'm glad you are OK.
Is this what a male fears? It offends me, but I guess I should be fascinated. I'm just tired.
Show me the anatomy of love. I'm interested, really.
Yes Zip....you said it well. Some can and most just can't do it!!
The angle and the tippy feeling are amazing. ..and the colors, his painting and and.... he's in my top 5! The middle dark spot holds it down so well.
there are no witches, just old women
Foucalt's original concept of the gaze referred to power relations and was later particularized into (rigid) gender relations by feminist film critics. Sometimes find the original concept more useful. Isn't this more classist than sexist? A nightmare of tenement living and emotional poverty made by someone with a famous last name? I think he could afford nicer sheets. Influenced by Watteau but Watteau is spooky with being soulless.
would it make a difference if the women were men?
Bacon bothers me less because he depicted himself and his lovers. These are freaks not objects of desire. Desire might bother me less. Men or women is not an issue for me so I brought up Foucalt's earlier concept of the gaze. The issue for me is class, detachment and the fantasy of emotional poverty and decay associated with squalor.
Bacon painted the people in his life... and LF paints the people in his life...so he says. Just different focus.
Maybe he's after some sort of "truth" even though it's an ugly one.
People have delineated two categories of the gaze. fetishistic and sadistic. Aren't there more than two categories?I really like fetish imagery and think many art objects are fetish objects. Sadistic imagery could be valid depending on the reason. But what about a sociopathic gaze. Sorry Cha for me these are ax murderer paintings. I don't mean that as a moral statement. Art is not right or wrong. But it stops me cold.
Sorry if I am shutting down the conversation. I want to open it up. Are there more than two gazes?
Where is Chucky?
wow! who slipped a camera in here - well.. he was quite tight with one of my fav. liegh bowery!
"I found him perfectly beautiful,"
Kelli it's good that we all react differently . As you say, there's no wrong and right... just much art and hopefully a lot of reactions! I'm not sure about why I like AND don't like his pics...at the same time. I'd hang a Bacon on my wall before LF.
[but I do have a 2006 calendar on my wall ...all LF pics!]
There's at least one more -- of a kind of optical
model -- that Barthes describes, sometimes,
as a "shimmer" (the neutral).
I thought of "shimmer" when someone pages
back referred to Freud's Gardens. Lacan I think
sensed it when describing the Arago(sp?) phenomenon
about seeing somthing only when looking at
something else. A non-form.
" ...the Neutral is the shimmer: that whose aspect,
perhaps whose meaning, is subtly modified
according the angle of the subject's gaze..."
-barthes, translated by krauss.
what does that have to do with this painting...?
well, it could very well be that this painting
was made with total absence of ideology...
a manifestation of the neutral.
A 'distributed', formless gaze.
For me, these remain academic "studio" paintings, despite LF's obvious powers to paint form. They don't feel transformed. I never understood the reverence in which so many painters hold Freud; actually, his earlier stuff intrigues me so much more than this image.
http://www.uco.es/~ca1lamag/imagenes/muchachaconrosa.JPG
...painted around the same time 'no-where'!:)
Evening in the Studio - indeed.
"the fantasy of emotional poverty and decay associated with squalor."
"Nostalgia for the mud"
or "nostalgie pour la boue"
What about photographers that show their white trash homes as objet d'art to wealthy patrons? Humanity or sublimated anger? Who cares?
I dont, but I like white trash TV. THose people are so ignorant, all they want to do is waste their lives doing drugs.
Havent read anything of sociological substance other than buzzwords. But its nostalgie pour la boue is a nice term for it. Gotta do my homework some year.
Lucian Freud I do think ppl of that g3n3r@ti0n are still dealing with Nazi style total-war warfare on some level, in a way that people in my, younger generation, are dealing with the continuation of the industrial revolution -videogamewarfare - the move from an agrarian society to man-machine interface mindfuck culture (how many tools do you know how to use? My generation learned to program VCRs, whereas Lucian Freud probably cant. Hes an anachronism, and thats the fantasy of our pastoral past - the fantasy of mud and painting - which is not a fantasy but a way to keep in touch with our so far unevolved all to human selves.
One thing about paitning is its immediacy - people allways talk of presence or warmth in painting - paint=fat. Thats true, I do feel it, and you dont get that with video.
But with video you get illumination, which is like fire, which is like the campfire - or walking through dappled sunlit woods.
People sleeping on the fire escape, passed out drunks as local color...oh how romantic, this city.
If I were a French poet I would write paeons to the hallucinatory terrain like some deranged flanneur whith a yen for pate or street meat, whatever falls uder the baselisk-like eye of the beholder. Oh to approach the world as if one was merely a spectator out for an evening stroll in the last rays of the empire!
I googled this bit of rubbish. It uses words like exacerbated, cognitive dissonance, numisphere (awesome!) and is patently Neo-Marxist, I think.
"At this point, the metaphor of the castle—introduced by the Manifesto—takes on an added luster, or perhaps a baleful gleam. The Nizari Ismailis (the so-called "Assassins") structured their polity around a network of remote castles, most of which were inaccessible to every medieval military tactic—even prolonged siege, since they were supplied with their own gardens and water. Each high castle typically protected a fertile valley and was therefore self-sufficient—but full communication and even economic activity could take place within the network thanks to the "porosity" of medieval borders. And thanks to the policy of assassination or threatened assassinations, kings and religious authorities hesitated to interfere. This went on for centuries."
Ware the borders!
jpg critic - its called faerie gold -bulshit.
jd - me too.
here LF student work - a lot tighter brushwork and some surrealism. AWESOME!
miller highlife isnt so bad. Going to switch to the keg beer.
Hit me with your mal stick!
Das ist gut, c'est fantastique
Whateva, whateva, I do what I want!
Screw you all! This is an amazing painting. Especially in person.
All in all, Freud is a hands-down amazing painting with a whole lotta perseverence and work ethic.
Can't we all just once get lost in the beauty of a mark of a certain combination of colours side by side?
I realize that might seem a little passe for us hardened cynics(I include myself) but I am in still into going into small raptures in front of some amazing, unique brushwork. Voila.
Oh, and I forgot to mention, I do believe that Leigh Bowery was intended to be the third figure in this painting, but following his death he was painted out and replaced with one of Freud's whippets. This from an interview in the catalogue his recent retrospective in Venice last summer. Quite a heart-stopping show.
Mr P.. I don't think that the brushstoke quality has any more impact than the subject matter. They're as powerful as each other.
LF wants to disturb us... he's not into pretty wrapping paper designs. His vision of reality isn't "nice" ................. but what on earth are those two women up to?!
Peeps thanks for peeping up but I mentioned above having sympathy for earlier interpretations of the gaze and think there are multiple forms of both an objectifying and identifying gaze. Feminist film criticism coined what we think of as the male gaze and while it is a perfectly valid concept in relation to mass market Hollywood product specifically films from the conservative 1950's I object to the haphazard application of this thinking in relation to art history. In some periods the male nude was primary, in others the female nude, in the Middle Ages neither. Also a great deal of art history was made by gay men and specifically depicts eroticism which has little to do with power relations between men and women. And it's hilarious what we have done with a concept we owe to Foucault who was a gay men who enjoyed SM and consensual power relations. Presuming an active male narrative gaze and a passive female subject in all cases essentializes gender and creates a heteronormative version of the painting tradition which is not even accurate.
That being said it is partly although not wholly a valid way to look at Freud. Your name makes me think of marshmallow peeps!
And Francis Bacon painted "a bit of the other" ( British slang for rough trade) and maybe this is just the Other.
I don't think theres room for Leigh Bowrey on that bed, tumbleweed.
Anyway. I think one viewers fear is another viewers pain. So be it.
Liegh is amazing he never got his, my life for 5 mins with the wo/man.
The problem with limiting the discusson
of the gaze (i.e. 'the male gaze') is that
forces the use of that term back to the
realm of hegelian dialictic. Something
foucault was not a fan of. He was an
interpreter. Like Nietzsche, like barthes.
My point is that there is a great deal
of usefulness in discussing the gaze
outside the realm of film theory and
Foucauldian power relations (not to
say that the above application isn't
useful).. Besides -- Foucault borrowed
the termfrom Sartre, as did everyone else.
I do and agree with you, Kelli when you said:
"Presuming an active male narrative gaze and a passive female subject in all cases essentializes gender and creates a heteronormative version of the painting tradition which is not even accurate."
Thus there even more of a need to to expand
the definition of the gaze beyond gender politics.
Lucian Freud lives and works in London
London? Oh shit.. Did I say Barthes, I meant Bell.
Foucault-- Fry. Sorry for the confusion. Forget all I said.
Mr Peeps Laura Mulvey is dated. Writing before I was born. Just trying to splinter up the tired polemic that seems to show up every time the female body is depicted. Nothing is that simple least of all art. Leigh Bowery bless him was living proof.
kelli, I appreciate your attempt of trying
to disassociate painting from the polemic
of old-school gender politics.. I think that
that was what you were attempting, when
you asked for another definition of the gaze.
I think that associating the gaze as in the case
of polemics (read, hegalian as in the battle of opposites)
is the problem. People can't see a world in which
there is not a battle of opponent-against-opponent,
least of all, the art world. Sartre's gaze was a
rumination, not a battle-cry.
"there is a great deal
of usefulness in discussing the gaze
outside the realm of film theory and
Foucauldian power relations"
Either you mean
Inside, not outside -
OR
what are we going to talk about now?
I dont know much about foucault other than we live in some sort of totalizing mind fuck panopticon.
But I got an idea
Shame? Good one huh? What I mean by shame is -
this whole gaze thing is more where than when. But both for me, on the subway, anyways.
When: never look.
Where: look at their Shoes.
people hate the fixed inpropriate, but vacant gaze. Its weird when you realize youve been looking at one thing on the train for a while longer than is appropriate. YOu are supposed to close your eyes so people know you are tired and not crazy. But I like to keep them open because I want to catch terrorists.
One time I was the only person on the train (or the elevator) and I was standing LOOKING AT BUT NOT SEEING a poster-maybe an ad for a school (its a great trick). SO someone tell me to move. Very paranoid moment.
Im ready to drive this taxi all the way to Cybill Shepherds house.
The gaze in relation to heat rays? I got one, do you? Pure heat.
Im interested in how someone could/would commit to the faustian bargain of becoming an expert on the taxonomy of the myriad interpretations of Foulcault, in all their manifestations.
Ideally the interpretations are the authors own thoughts - new ideas.
But to read anything - what if the thing doesnt have any answers (new ideas) either? Semantic blockage man. Watching some mind artist feather their neurons around the void is the fucking worst! Or the best. We might hope to see the worst.
Maybe the gaze is a a ZERO SUM GAME. Maybe it doesnt exist unless it sees you.
Frightened? DOnt think. Feel. Gazibo.
No joke.
You are the master of the blind field.
You know like the kine horror flicks do.
hey Lobsang, got any tea?
by the way z. I got some fools-gold-lamé.
Kine. One hit and you're gone. But you
can go all night on it. I hear you can paint on it.
Slick man.
Jpeg I could have gone with Jessica Benjamin's attack an the psychoanalytic underpinning of this thinking or Judith Butler's attempt to remove the lack from the realm of biologism and equate it insead with the melancholy of all disenfranchised people but it is simpler to stick with the queer reading of art history. There is a little church outside of Naples with the smuttiest sculpture I have ever seen. A naked fisherman caught in a net. The sculptor first carved the net and then maneuvered the chisel througfh the openings to carve the boy. I realize someone wrote the check, someone always writes the check. But I doubt it was the reason he spent hours maneuvering the chisel in the tiny spaces. There is no desire or feeling in this Freud or I would defend it. It's just pushing some very tired buttons I don't even believe in.
Zip you took it to the next level. The evil eye.
Thanks for the image of that chisel, Kelli!
I'll have to seek it out. You guys are brilliant.
I get ya.
Stay gold, ponyboy, stay gold.,
by the way...
fairie gold is as real as you want it to be, baby.
Next topic:
Was ponyboy androgynous,
OR merely indecicive
(?)
" no desire or feeling in this Freud".... Kelli, I think it's the detachment that I like... [hmmmm that does seem odd!]
Niven says: "That's the ugliest woman I've ever seen."
Other man replies: "That's my wife."
Niven: "I meant the other one."
Other man: "That's my daughter."
Niven: "I didn't say it."
It's true Brent WE called this woman grotesquely large. We were talking about Leigh Bowery, also a big person, and never called him grotesque.
Kelli your spot on with the pomo critique.
Freud paints men, dogs, plants, as well and if you look at his work on a whole everyone(thing) gets the same, how do you say it,'gaze'.
For me Lucian Freud is a great painter. He does not always make it, I mean sometimes a painting seems unresolved or the proportions are off. But this is what makes his work so interesting, at least one of the aspects of his work, his ability to be so honest in his work.
There is nothing to hide, its all there, the model, the painter, his struggle with painting.
Kelli, I'm cold-hearted, too, quite possibly. I see the figure as a compacted mass of paint painted flesh, pushed and packed into form, of the grotesque (overweight), transformed into the beautiful (a successfully painted image).
For me the figure seated behind appears more vulnerable--and another stereotype/fetish.
LF says something about 'how they happen to be', or something like that. Maybe the cold calculating is fairer, a more tender touch, than we think.
From the Tate calendar ...Freud once said of his human sitters: "I'm interested, really interested in them as animals." He believed that the sitter possessed secrets that must be prised out: " the subject must be kept under closest observation: if this is done, day and night, the subject- he, she or it- will eventually reveal the all without which selection itself is not possible"
i think it is useful to consider 4 leigh bowery:
"His outfits are so asymmetrical, blinding, and large that they are better described as costumes. He was the epitome of contradiction and boundary erasure."
which makes the poses in this vulnerable nude state really interesting
what's pomo?
vaughn bode and who?
frank frazettaaaaaaaaaaa
http://streetsaresayingthings.com/sgallery/displayimage.php?album=search&cat=0&pos=1
pomo=post modern theory
This is interesting, Lacan was a psychiatrist, and his theories, which are used in a lot of post-modern theory classes are considered out of date in the Psychiatric community.
So my question is why do we still use 1960's based theories to have define art?
Why do we need post-moden theory at all.
Are we not beyond this?
Is pomo out dated, and out of touch?
Some decent questions Pdog. I question the way some psychoanalytic concepts particurally the misogynistic underpinnings of Freud are accepted as gospel and applied to art history. Not that I'm Tom Cruise or anything.
Well Lacan comes out of Freud, we have to remember that Freud was born in the 19 century, and that frames his view points.
I don't think he is gospel, as Psychiatry
has evolved since, but he is the one of the first to understand and study our sub-consciousness as underlying affect on our make up.
My question is not about Psychiatry per say, but how the theories came to define how art theory is framed.
Why are we reading Lacan, Foulcault,Derrida, and all the existentialist?
Its interesting reading and it does do you good to expand your mind, other than that what does it have to do with making art?
dude I was being facetious.
I was chuckling cuz the discussion above,
while being interesting, had little to
do with 'pomo' let alone psychiatry.
Lacan didn't have the power to describe
drugs let alone subscribe them.
pdog, where'd you get the idea that
any of the points posed a 'critique' of
postmodernism anyway? What part
of pomo did you think was being
criticized?
if lacan = freud then you = you granddad.
Which is to say it's an absurd notion to
over simplify lineage to a matter of equality.
The figures above, in their very different
ways, within their disciplines, challenged,
somewhat, the notion of structure, and
how ideas were formed within structure.
In different ways, they tried to challenge
the older notions of systemizaton, most
notably, of the Hegelian kind, which
modeled a forward march of the avant
garde towards the end of history.
This posed questions to any activity that
involved thinking, not just art. It punched
new holes and opportunities in the reading
of art history. As to whether or not they
would have anything to do with your making
art -- don't worry. You don't have to read them.
I think you misunderstand me.
I was not commenting on what was being said, I was commenting on how it seems to me that there is(are) a lot of art history classes that are using the above writers as a base for teaching theory in context to art making.
I was just asking if people thought it was necessary at all, and[or]if it was more of a reflection of a generation of professors who are teaching now. Is it useful in creating work in or by which to frame your education.
I read a lot of this stuff, found it interesting as did most of my fellow grad students, but at the end of the day only 1 person really did theory based work, and that work was lame.
I understand how some of these writers challenged the notion of structure, hierarchy and power, but I was just wondering if people who make art really think about this stuff, or is it just an intellectual exercise.
It is many things for many people.
Theory based art sucks.
So so generalizatons. They were
just a bunch of thinkers. That's all.
Read 'em, or dont.
I have a personal interest in what seems
to be (or have been) a project of some...
Both krauss and barthes seemed to offer
or promote a new alternative to think about creativity.
One that veers away from the Greek (apollonian),
materialistic, systemic way that this art world
has inherited by way of western culture.
Why do MFA programs still require Theses?
Because the systems we've inherited by
way of teaching and doing art still rely
on a pseudo-scientific methodology
that is so fucking arrogant and tiresome.
Artists statements are arrogant. Thesis
deveopment is arrogant. Hegel still reigns
over the artworld.
Certain thinkers posed a way of thinking
about culture that is more mutable, less
deterministic, less pointed, and thus
less arrogant. More field-like. More
playful, less discreet, less categorizable.
Or here's a good one. Every once in a while,
an artist recalls, in conversation: "...oh when
I became a 'formed' artist".. or "...that's when
I became a "formed' artist..." And in my head
I'm like: "a fucking what artist? As opposed to
'formless'? Who's telling these people that
they arent artists until Skowhegan or Yale
shits them out into the great white bowl?"
Form is overrated, and is a overly priveledged term.
jpeg your one smart cookie.
You have just said what I have been trying to say so well.
I waisted hours doing assigments for a class on this stuff. It took me away from the studio, it made you think like what the hell is this, if you questioned it, one professor made you feel like you were stupid, or your work would benifit from "medicine" of post modern thoery.
Hence the statement fully formed as an artist.
I was only shooting for things much lower, trying to be a painter.
rock on.
cuz theses = feces.
and trying to be a painter
should be valuable enough as a life-long process of arrival.
jeez jpeg...ever heard of Dionysus?
Why does everyone insist that the fat woman is grotesque? How narrow minded.
I think the thinner reading woman is hungry, and is reading about something luxurious and private, which is represented by the fleshy nude. The dog is dreaming of soft striped mattresses.
The larger woman is the projection of the unbridled thoughts of the smaller woman focused on her story. The dog is the animal brain at rest and stands for the absence of judgement or scorn.
The wine bar?
no but seriously, aristotelian might
be a better word. I was only thinking
apollo-light-form, etc. But it runs into
the problem that Dionysus reminds me
of way too many parties in my BFA dayz.
And so, aristotelian logic will suffice,
as a descriptor of category-logic. As
opposed to, say, inductive logic.
Although LF's student work leaves me cold, I love the tight, obsessive work in his early career...neurotic form, neurotic content. I have seen several shows featuring his recent work, and about 1 in 10 have a quirkiness or vulnerability that raises tham far above the academic quality of the rest.
His real technical distinction is how he lets the oil paint dry quite a bit before pushing it around again with his brush, something that "luscious painters" normally avoid, resulting in a kind of constipated, sludgy surface.
Lucian Freud is a genius and the main reason why I paint. I think he's one of the most important artists working today and as a Londoner he makes me immensely proud. I've seen Freud's paintings up close and personal (before they're shipped off to the states) and they really defy belief - he isn't really that interested in what the sitters are like but depicts how they happen to be. I think he did the best portrait of our 'lovely' queen Elizabeth - even with all that wealth you can't help but notice what an old she really is and he captured that brilliantly.
My tutors at uni want me to stop looking at Freud as an influence but I'm not gonna take any notice - as I googled their own work and it's really shite - plus Freud is a master at what he does. I hope to be as good as he is one day and be able to still be creating great work at over 80 years of age.
Freud will always be important to me as it was because I was given a book of his paintings when I was 16 and I realised then and there that I wanted to paint like him. Before that book art was a hobby I was good at - I hadn't even painted before - afterwards painting became my passion - it still is. Freud rules!!
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