inspiration

Last week, I wrote about session 1, with Dr. Patricia Briggs, from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. It was about expressionism, abstractionism, the progression towards minimalism. This session, she continued to move forward in time to help us understand contemporary art. I took many more notes. Again, all mistakes below are mine.

Dr. Briggs started with putting forth Donald Judd as a great example of minimalism. His work shows the minimalist view that art is about expression, not self-expression. It’s a radical outside of human-ness. She again talked about Duchamp, where his art was not of the artist’s touch and hand. She gave the example of in his welded pieces, he gave a welder instruction on construction.

She referenced again action painting like Pollock and Gutai, where painting is about a trace of performance. This happened at about the same time as performance art got big. At the Walker, there are some Yves Klein body prints — naked female torsos printed onto paper. This is art that is an outcome of an activity.

Now, the aesthetic and anti-aesthetic tradition have been opposing each other in the 20th century. The anti-aesthetic tradition is Dada, conceptualism, sometimes surrealism (which can have a foot in both camps). Dada is the anti-art, that the beauty shown, if any, is convulsive beauty, the beauty of the abject, decay, beauty that hurts. Dada includes making collages as art — something common now, but not then. Making art of trash (found objects/modified found objects), art that goes out to the masses using low art, popular art such as mass media, photography. The function is to uncover those things that you usually don’t think about.

Dr. Briggs talked about Raushenberg, who was influenced by Duchamp — and Merce Cunningham (dance choreographer who felt that dance should be more real than artificial ballet) and John Cage (a pianist who would sit at a piano and let the sound of the audience be the piece). Raushenberg painted a field of white, and the shadow you cast over the piece became part of it. And if it got dirty, an assistant repainted it. Rauschenberg had a piece that was erasing a piece of art that de Kooning drew. She said it took him weeks to erase, that this was a collaboration between the artists, and that de Kooning drew something that would be hard to erase. He progresses to assemblages (vs. collages); her example was Bed, made up of his quilt and pillow, altered. The canvas is a flat tabletop, you put stuff on it, and the viewer processes it.

Neo-Dada uses expressionist paintbrush strokes, sometimes puts it next to collages, found objects, junk. These expressionist paintbrush strokes are ironic, not expressionist. Warhol was next on the neo-Dada agenda, about his appropriation of images to create art of the world. She talked about his Marilyn Monroe images — they’re not about Marilyn, they’re about how the Hollywood machine makes puppets out of people, objectifying people. Dr. Briggs said what’s brilliant about Warhol is that we like to look at it, unlike many other Dada and neo-Dada artists.

Using multiple texts is very post-modern. There’s no difference between high art and advertising. Multiple objects are pulled together, not necessarily to make a narrative. Many post-modern artists appropriate images from many contexts. Sherrie Levine is the apex of this, where she literally photographs other photographs, other paintings, and puts her name on it. This is commentary on originality (there is nothing new under the sun), authority of ownership, a very post-modern thought. To post-modern artists, the author is dead, all speaking is quotation, you can’t own an idea. Other issues explored by post-modern artists is exploration of the body, and not pretty poses. It’s a shift to art that doesn’t show the human body as a beautiful aesthetic, but physically clumsy things with vulnerabilities and openings. Racial identity is another theme explored, art about people who don’t have a voice.

At the Walker (the location of the next and last session), there is a lot of minimalism. This is not where you go to find craft, beauty, to find something that makes you feel good. Dr. Briggs is going to show us some of her favorite works. I’ll let you know what they are….

Session 3

Tonight, I attended the first of 3 sessions taught by Patricia Briggs, PhD, Associate Professor of Liberal Arts at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. The subtitle of the series is “Understanding contemporary art.”

I have no art history background, no art education. Dr. Briggs gives an enjoyable, accessible lecture, and I learned a great deal. Any errors below are mine.

She started with a discussion of the history of the Walker Art Museum, which will be the location of the last meeting (she trains docents for the Walker). It was a private collection in a home, then established in 1927 as the first public art gallery in the Upper Midwest. In 1944, a new building and a new focus came together in the wake of MoMA, to recreate the Walker as a museum of modern art. An addition in 2005 adds an architecturally postmodern wing to the modern building.

Dr. Briggs started with a discussion of the function of art. Before literacy, it was propaganda for the church and state. At the rise of the merchant class in the 17th century, different types of art emerged — landscapes, still lifes.

In the late 19th century, art moved away from narrative to art that is doing something else — expressive, abstraction; to colors and lines that don’t mimic nature. Think the brush strokes and colors of Van Gogh. These serve to suggest something, or make you feel something.

On to the early 20th century came the rise of conceptual and philosophical exploration such as Duchamp or Magritte. Think surrealism or Dada. Why is the picture and word of a pipe, a pipe? How do we know that words and signs make meaning? These conceptualists were creating a new audience for art, not entertaining, but art that was meant to make you think. The expressionists and abstractionists were one group at this time, and these conceptualists were in another.

Dr. Briggs said that Duchamp was the most important artist of the 20th century, that in the Dada shadow of WWI, he thumbed his nose at art as bourgeois, that art should be political or shocking, and incite people to think, to challenge them. Art is transforming meaning. He was the beginning of post-modernism, bringing life and art together. Duchamp spoke to a different audience; art of the formalist abstract expressionist tradition viewed art and life as separate, not for politics, not for commerce, not dirtied by life.

The Modern view is that arts’ function is to produce discourse, dialog, discussion of ideas and feelings.

Dr. Briggs went on to discuss abstractionism, usually associated with expressionism, often thought to be the natural progression of art. She showed us examples of paintings by various artists such as Gauguin, Van Gogh, where the paintings became flatter (less depth of field). She described expressionism as a way of painting, where color, shapes, and forms were more important than the subject matter. The progression was away from naturalism towards abstractionism.

She termed Kandinsky as a different type of Expressionist, a major shift to just abstract forms with no narrative. This is art that is meant to speak to emotions, like music it is intended to wash over you. Pure abstraction, no form.

In the 1920’s, Mondrian had a philosophical outlook, that if you surrounded people by soothing, calming art, we’d be a better people and a better world. Art should produce an effect.

Her example of pure abstraction was Hans Hoffman. Hans Hoffman! His work is what I loomed here. Now I know a bit more about him, more than what I read in the Smithsonian blog entry that interested me in his work. Dr. Briggs had a high school art teacher that introduced her to Hans Hoffman. Her description of his work is “form is plastic.” There is push and pull, blurry vs hard edges. Shapes and forms are supposed to dance in front of you, enliven, be plastic. She finds every one of his works “exciting.”

She went on to talk about Color Field painters, those painters who make monstrous, mural-sized paintings of one (or very few) colors. Big blocks of colors. These are meant to create an environment for you. You place yourself in front of one of these big paintings, and it can take you somewhere.

Okay, so if the progression of painting is towards flat monochrome paintings, is painting dead? Are we done? Now, we’re on to Minimalism, a new direction. There is no intended connection with spirit, or emotion. It is painting as an object, not a metaphor for anything. This is form as pure object. Ad Reinhardt was one of her examples of this — he painted black canvas after black canvas. A painting is a painting. That’s it.

Minimalism makes us self-conscious, it doesn’t say anything, it’s just a thing. It talks about the space you’re in, calls to us in a different physical way. These massive minimalist paintings or sculptures? They are intended to be the only thing in the room. There is no evidence of the artist’s hand. This is conceptual art.

Another progression was to formal abstraction. This can be like performance art, a record of the moving body — i.e., Pollock. Art and life together. Art as a stage for the moving body.

And, that was the end of this session. I’m an exuberant note taker. Can you tell?! I’ll write more next week, after the next session.

Session 2

Session 3

Katherine and I went to the Minneapolis Institute of Arts this past weekend to see Art in Bloom. This is when florists from around the metro area create hundreds (?) of floral arrangements based on an item in the permanent collection. It’s a wonderful museum, with a very broad collection. I probably visit at least 4 times/year — I’m very grateful to have this free museum nearby where I can periodically just go, browse, and enjoy.

Art in Bloom is held annually for one weekend, Thursday through Sunday. The place is packed, there’s special events, and parking can be challenging. Below are some pictures that I took of the event. No captions; if I took the time to take notes at the museum and then caption, I might not ever blog about it, so enjoy!

I ducked in to look at some beadwork. A tribe native to Minnesota is the Anishinaabe (Ojibwe). Here’s some pieces owned by the museum.

And as I was leaving, they were inflating a duck in the park in front of the old, main entrance. Don’t ask me why!

I’m getting closer to figuring out what I want to do with the rest of the warp. I’m pretty sure I want to do a version of the Hoffman painting I already did — narrower and taller (so I’ll add to the top). I’m going to have to mess even more with his painting, as I’m almost out of the red, and have so few of the dark green transparent beads that I could actually count them, if I wanted to.

I like how the greens group together, I want to leave them as they are. The contrast of the light value of the yellow and the dark value of the darkest green I want to leave as well. So, I think I’m going to transpose the blue and red, giving this a blue background with some small patches of red. I have another dark transparent French green, but it’s a bluer green — which may actually be better, with the increased amount of blue in the painting.

I think I’m going to remove the painting from behind the current painting, continue it to increase the height by about 3/4″, and then cut it to the width I want. I’ll just have to remember to transpose the red and the blue.

For the rest of the width of the warp, I’m going to make the bracelet I want as well.

I fell in love with the cover of Aleutian Sparrow, a book by Newbery-winning author, Karen Hesse. The book is historical fiction, based on the invasion of the Aleutian Islands by the Japanese navy in 1942. The cover is a wonderful woodcut by Evon Zerbetz, an Alaskan artist.

I will use beads inspired by the colors in the woodcut.

In my feed reader not too long ago, I admired a bracelet by Kashaya. I like how it’s somewhat abstract, interesting both when you see the entire length, or just the curve on the top of your wrist. She generously provides the peyote pattern here.

In Photoshop Elements, I replaced colors to get something close to the colors I want, to make it easier to follow her pattern.

The center of the flower will be the transparent aqua. The opaque aqua will be the ring just inside the center of the flower and the outer petals. The inner petals will be the medium green, and the background the lightest green.

I will resize the image so that it is the length that fits my wrist — which is almost exactly the height of the second version of Hoffman’s painting, and the width is narrow enough to fit next to the painting. Then I’ll tape the bracelet and the painting images to a piece of paper, again situated so that I can loom right over the paper, doing paint-by-numbers with two separate pieces simultaneously.

That’s my idea today, anyway.

What’s the image that I’m doing, and how did I choose it? One of the feeds in my feed reader is Eye Level, done by the Smithsonian American Art Museum. February 29th’s post was of Hans Hoffman. Hoffman was born in Germany, came to the United States, and was an important influence in Color Field painting.

I liked the painting shown in the blog, Fermented Soil, and wanted to see more. I clicked on a link in the entry, and it took me to Technorati tags for the artist, and in another blog, found Autumn Gold. Chris Abraham had been to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and wanted help identifying this painting that he loved.

Someone helped him out, and provided the NGA’s information on the painting, image below courtesy of the National Gallery of Art.

I printed it out with no resizing or editing, and decided to do it as is. My printer, which has seemed to print color out as I expected in the past, made the colors richer and deeper. Well okay then. I like that too! So, the orange is now a rich orange-red, and the other colors are more intense too. I took a Sharpie and outlined the shapes, deciding where I wanted the edges of the colors to be when they are more blended in the painting. I don’t have all the colors in the size 10 French and Italian beads, so I’m substituting. It will definitely be Hans Hofmann’s painting, but probably only recognizable to those who know his work well.