Contemporary Art

Contemporary Art is the art going on right now; I think most people get confused and think it is Modern.  Anyways there are people still doing more formalist based art, but there has been a push back away from formalism.  The idea is now the thing of most importance to avant-garde artists.  Damien Hirst for example does no physical work to produce his art.  He has ideas, which he pays other artists to execute.  ORLAN whom I have written about before has stated that the idea is the most important thing to her in her work.  I would also say that there is something of a trend away from ownership, and more of an emphasis upon the experience.  After all you can not own ORLAN's face.  I am also thinking in particular of the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei and his art installation Kui Hua Zi.  In Kui Hua Zi he buried the floor of the Tate Modern Art Gallery in London with sunflower seeds.  Initially art patrons could walk on them and bury themselves in them if they wished.  The installation was meant to be a commentary on China's mass production of products done for Western countries.

Modern Art

This is a big topic to cover in one post.  Before I go anywhere though, years ago a guy I went to college with upon his graduation put out a reading list of books for artists.  One of those books was Bluebeard by Kurt Vonnegut.  Bluebeard is about a geriatric abstract artist who did hit it big.  He hit millionaire status from sales of his work, but the glue he had used crumbled and all of his work fell apart.  So he is left with money, but no real legacy.  There is a lot going on in this book, but I am going to sum it up as a warning to artists not to take themselves too seriously.  I want that thought firmly implanted.                                                                                                
   I am writing this in response to youtube videos where contestants play "kid art or modern art."  I may seem to contradict myself from the previous paragraph, but in my mind these videos are symptomatic of a bigger problem, a lack of intellectual curiosity.  To me these videos say "I don't understand this.  I can't be bothered to understand this.  It must be garbage because I don't understand it.  I will make fun of it and dismiss it."  Now as said art should not be taken too seriously, but anti-intellectualism does lead to things like the anti-vaccine movement or the flat earth people.  These videos are also demeaning towards children.  Yes, some artists were trying to mimic children's art because they recognized a vitality before the science got there.  Little kids who are learning to walk can create fractal patterns.  It is the only time in a typical human life when we can do this.  So yes little kid art is special.


Art is a many headed hydra.  Anymore I like to think of it as being like the Room of Requirements in Harry Potter.  It can be anything the artist wants it to be.  There are lots of different kinds of art and lots of different kinds of artists.  Add to that the different areas of art criticism/philosophy, this is the branch that helps to process what the art is about.  To some extent art criticism could be looked at as political agendas in art.  The branch that tends to hold the most sway is formalism.  In formalism the appearance and composition of the piece is all that matters.  Hardcore formalists chuck idea content out the window.  In my undergraduate experience of art form and content were given equal importance, and we were encouraged to write about our art to help shore up our ideas.  In grad school two of the professors on my review panel were formalists, and they did not appreciate that I was writing about the art I was making.  I remember one of them told me that when he was younger he was more content oriented and out to show off how smart he was, but then he realized he didn't have to prove that.  The most important and controversial art critic of the 20th century, Clement Greenberg, was a formalist.  He had strict ideas for what painting and sculpture  should be.  The most famous example is his notion that color should not be used in sculpture.  The sculptor Henri Moore pretty much only produced white sculpture.  He did do some in color, but unfortunately he gave them to Greenberg, who painted them white.  Anyways that is what formalism is.  There are also avenues of critical thought in feminism, and actually even for science.  It does take work, but I would recomend reading multiple sources to better understand modern art because people do have their biases.  A formalist will focus on compostion, whereas post modernists will look more toward content and context of work.


To begin with Modern Art is typically defined as stretching time span of 1860-1970.  So I don't think the people who malign Modern Art even realize that the Impressionists are included in the scope of Modern Art as is Vincent van Gogh.  People tend these artists, or at least I see their work reproduced on lots of various items in catalogs.  Covering the full scope of Modern Art would probably be to time consuming for this post, so I am going to talk about the two artists I most often hear maligned: Pablo Picasso and Jackson Pollock.      

  A formalist professor thoughts on Picasso (if I am remembering what he said correctly) was that he was using compositions from the Renaissance, getting rid of the true to life rendering.  In the book Colliding Worlds Miller lays out more of the social context.  The intellectuals at that time were fascinated by the fourth dimension and trying to figure out what it was.  Mystical significance was even placed on it.  Some believed it was G-d's dimension, and only G-d could see all four.  Picasso had a book by the mathematician Poincare he was studying.  Incidently Einstein was studying the same book, and it helped him produce the theory of relativity.  Picasso did not understand the math, but it had lots of geometric drawings which he studied.  He took the line about not being able to draw four dimensions as a personal challenge.  This was his inspiration for Desmoiselles d'Avignon.  Incidently Einstein ruled that the fourth dimension is time.  This is why I said reading multiple sources is a must.     


                                                                           
 Jackson Pollock was a force of nature in art, literally.  I have written elsewhere about how Pollock so far has been the only human adult capable of producing fractal patterns, but things could have turned out very differently if Clement Greenberg had not taken an interest in him.  Pollock was Greenberg's ideal painter.  His paintings were non representational, they were flat, and lots of color.  Greenberg did not just recommend Pollock to potential buyers.  Remember that the Cold War was going on, and that extended into the art world as well.  So he was promoting Pollock and the other American Abstract Expressionists as American champions against Russia.  He even conferred on them god-like power.  He said that artists who do non representational work were creating ex nihilo (creation from nothing) a godly attribute, not a human one.  Greenberg's argument was really the artists finally making a retort going all the way back to Plato.  Plato summed up his estimation of visual artists in an analogy about a bed.  The best bed was G-d's bed, the second best bed was the one the carpenter made in imitation, the worst bed was the artist's rendering because you could not sleep in that bed.  It took a long time, but Daguerre's invention of photography freed artists from the chore of realistic rendering.  Remember what I said in the beginning about the book Bluebeard, this is where that comes in.  I have never seen or heard any data to this effect, but I would speculate that this is when the price of art really sky rocketed.  Inflation would have to be taken into account, but I wonder how what an Impressionist artist got for a painting would compare to what American Abstract Expressionists got for theirs.

Thoughts on the Feminine Mystique

Okay so this isn't art related, but I thought I would talk about it.  Years ago I tried to read the Feminine Mystique it was going good until I hit the section on the 1950's.  It seemed like the author was presenting a stereotype to me; it didn't fit with either one of my grandmothers.  The FM presented women of the 50's as bored housewives who ate nutritionally fortified chalk to keep their hourglass figures.                      Well to begin with my grandma on Dad's side had a bit of a very human wild streak and bad luck with men.  For awhile anyway she was a single mother and a far cry from the bored stay at home woman.  She had a teaching certificate, so she did teach for awhile.  She also worked for awhile as an accountant, which is how she came to own and run a chicken-egg farm.  She had been keeping books for the original owner who decided to get out of it and gave her the business.  After she died I guess the city of Janesville dedicated a tree or bench to her in one of the parks.  As an older woman I can think of one example where she tried to help a woman out of a domestic abuse situation.                                                                  My grandma on my Mom's side is very much a fighter.  To her Dad's credit he did not tell her "Good girls don't fight!"  Instead he laid down some ground rules.  If she was fighting in defense of herself, or family, or someone who needed help that was fine.  If she was bullying or starting fights then she would get in trouble.  His other rule was that if she was going to fight she had to win.  Unfortunately he was gored to death by a bull he was helping another farmer transport.  Things went to pieces.  Fast forward a bit she ended up getting pregnant before she finished high school, but she refused to allow them to remove her from school.  She was determined to get her degree.  I believe protocols then and to some extent still are to get the pregnant girls out of sight.  She did get her degree and she was also valedictorian.  She did marry grandpa, but she was still a working woman.  She ended up going back to school to be a machinist.  She got to work on the engines of the Navy's wolf class submarines.                                                    So neither one fits the FM idea of 50's women.  Kind of a side thought is that I have always felt fortunate to be alive at the time I am for lots of reasons.  One reason in particular though sex ed was part of my education.  I can't help but wonder how things would have been different for my grandmas if safe sex would have been taught then.  This is something the religious right likes to go after, but lets be honest it is a myth that this stuff did not happen in the past.  Abstinence classes are bullshit, and organizations like Planned Parenthood are important services, and no they do not just do abortions.

Flattening

Maybe my understanding of flattening in schizophrenia is off.  My understanding of it is kind of a lack of emotion where the person does not get happy excited or as much to the opposite extreme.  I think it is typically described as a symptom, but I think it is more of a way of coping.  Again I am not sure if this counts for flattening, but I do better when I keep things as even keel as possible.  At first the emotional upheaval can be terrible to deal with.  I have found that my reaction matters because to some extent they mirror me and my reaction.  If I take their bate and respond all crazy they get worse.  Wants and desires will also mess a person up.  In my experience they would use them against me, so I do better when I let some of that go and focus on what is within my easy reach.

The Things I do for Work

I pick up a lot in the hospital on weekends.  One of the bad things about this is my normal shift is 4pm-12:30am Mon.-Fri.  If I want the overtime though I have to pick up first shift.  I suppose this all sounds very boring, but to do it I have to not take my schiz meds.  The most aggravating side effect is how long they make me sleep.  I have been doing pretty good lately, normally every few months I would end up talking to them.  It has been kind of a long stretch without them.  This year I have done better with sticking to two days of cardio a week.  I think maybe that has helped.  I am having dim voices right now, though.  If it was during the week I would for sure take my meds, but I have to get up early for work.  They aren't at a level where I feel compelled to talk to them.  This is mild compared to where it can be.  At its worst fully unmedicated extreme it can also include smell hallucinations and sensations as well.  I haven't had the smell one a lot.  Early on they told me they had replaced the water coming out of my shower with bleach.  When I turned it on I could smell bleach, which is weird because I don't use bleach at home.  Maybe it was just power of suggestion.  The sensation thing they were trying to express the level of control they had over me by telling me where I would be experiencing pain.  Not sure if power of suggestion, or just aches and pains my brain latched onto.  It seemed like visual hallucination were more linked to reading.  Remember one time leaving paranoid line of questioning about soy in resident doctors lounge.  At the time I was delighted to see a reply on the paper.  I read it once, and then I read it a little later and the handwriting seemed to have changed as well as the message. A year or two later I am medicated and cleaning my apartment when I find it, and there was no reply whatsoever on it.

Laughing Venus on the Naked Beast

As I have said before I don't like cluttering the Naked Beast with words. I thought I would talk about the Laughing Venus.  I don't know if the drawing fully conveys this, but she is an older model (I think 40's).  I liked the idea of getting away from teenage Venuses and portraying her as a mature woman.  I exhibited this at a Greenbay Street Studio exhibit.  It was paired with Herpes and HIV.  I did not plan this with one of the artists, but Lisa Lenarz had a video on a loop of a closeup of mouths kissing.  So my stuff went next to that.