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.

Art and Science

To most people art and science are completely different topics, but in my mind there are similarities.  Both rely heavily on observation and both rely on experimentation.  A difference is science has an obligation to stick to the truth whereas art can fudge reality and make it into what they wish.  I remember BPJ in one of his lectures telling us that we as artists need to lie to our viewers and fool them into thinking that 2D space actually has 3D depth.               Perhaps it is cliche to bring Leonardo da Vinci into a discussion of art and science.  He never wanted to be a painter.  He wanted to be a man of science, he wanted to be a medical doctor.  Unfortunately for him the way Italian society worked at that point in time a male had to have noble lineage on both sides to be a doctor.  Leonardo's father was noble, but his mother was a peasant.  A painting apprenticeship was the best Leonardo's father could do for him.  Really I think it should be stated that history owes Leonardo's father a debt of gratitude.  It would have been easy for him to be a dead beat dad, but he wasn't.  He took him into his household and saw to it he was educated.  I don't know what sort of education he would have received as a peasant.  Although he did not know Latin, which was required in advanced studies.  Anyways his desire to be a medical doctor was what fueled his anatomical studies of cadavers.  He believed his powers of observation he had gained as an artist were better than the rote memorization of misinformation going on in medical training at that time.  His work predates Vesalius, the doctor who first published an observation based anatomy book.  Galen was still the rule of the medical land at that time.  In other words his anatomical drawings were his fuck you to the medical establishment of that time.

Dr. Ionat Zurr and Oron Katts

I did some further digging on ORLAN's harlequin living skin coat project and found that she had worked with the duo of Dr. Ionat Zurr and Oron Katts, the master minds behind SymbioticA.  Dr. Zurr received her doctorate from the University of Western Australia.  Her thesis was "Growing Semi-Living Art" done under the faculty of architecture. The two are pioneers in the field of biology based art.  They are perhaps best known for coming up with Victimless Leather.  The project being to grow a seamless leather jacket.  They based the jacket on a biodegradable polymer, coated it with 3T3 mouse cells, and then overlayed that with human bone cells for added strength.  My understanding is that they are able to combine between different species because there is no immune system.  The work was presented at the MOMA, but it didn't go over particularly well, and they ran into technical issues.

Victimless Leather

  Other projects include their Pig Wings project, where they grew pig bone cells into wing shapes.  They also did a project where they grew frog steaks in their lab/studio, and gave them to exhibition attendees to eat.

                      Pig Wings

Thoughts on Neo Nazis

Years ago when I was working my way through my undergraduate degree I met a neo nazi.  We were both working at the local convention center.  I had no clue until she invited me back to her place.  Shocker of shocker she had a big nazi flag hanging in her room.  She was actually kind of apologetic about it.  She said she joined because she was scared of black people.   Admittedly at this point I should of confronted her then about it, but I was in dumbfounded shock.  Awhile later around Valentine's Day a women's group on campus were selling white and milk chocolate vulva lollipop.  I bought a mix and took them into work.  It was the neo nazi's turn to be shocked.  I let people pick which they wanted.  In hindsight maybe it would have been better if I had presented her with a milk chocolate vulva.  Then again maybe her seeing the supervisor she most liked go gaga over a milk chocolate vulva was worth something too.

Lady Chatterly at the Pump House

This is just an update.  The Lady Chatterly Print did get into the Banned Books exhibit at the Pump House Regional Arts Center.

INTP

I took the Myer Briggs thing last night.  I got INTP.  It said only about 3 percent of the population are this personality type.  Maybe this is a weird place to go with this info, but a few years ago I tried to do the eHarmony thing.  I say try because after I went through the trouble of filling out their personality profile they told me there was not a match for me anywhere in the country.  That being said I was an unmedicated schizophrenic at the time, and they did also say they thought I might be mentally ill.  I wonder how much the INTP thing was a contributing factor, though.  Considering what a small segment are INTPs.

Chine cole for a print about Uncle Joe

I was going to print a woodblock over this.  I kind of liked it how it was though, and this view was corroborated at an art critique.  It is supposed to be a jellyfish.

Bird? Print

I am pretty sure I did this at Marywood, but I do not recall where I was going with it.

I am trying to find a viscosity print by my Dad that he had given me.  It is in my flat file somewhere.  So far I have found some stuff I don't think has been posted before.  For a few years I was very prolific; maybe that is why I am so lazy now.  So some new old stuff here, some much older new stuff on the random beastly undergrad things, and possibly new old things on the naked beast.

                                            I don't think I posted this before.  This was from when I was at Marywood.  I didn't have a camera then, so I was unable to post larger pieces.  I was messing around with doing two colors at once on a lithograph as a single run.

Lady Chatterly Censored

Okay, so I guess I should give my artist statement on this one.  It has been awhile since I read Lady Chatterly's Lover.  This may sound like kind of a weird correlation, but I kind of relate it to the Jewish book The Thirteen Petall
ed Rose.  In particularly the section where the Rabbi explains why people should obey the Sabath and not work.  It is meant to be a reminder that humans are not machines.  It is meant to be a break from our daily routine to remind us that there is more to our identity than what we do for a living and the daily chores we perform.  I think Lady Chatterly's Lover also deals with some of this.  She finds herself stuck in this routine of a sexless marriage, and she is wasting away from it.  She is censored by the whiring cogs of moral protocals and the cultural routine.  She has to, as we all periodically should do, take a look at our life, and decide if we are really happy with the routines it can be so easy to get trapped in.

Preview of Lady Chatterly Censored

Well my photo isn't right side up, I'll figure out how to fix it later.  I got the chine cole done, and I am happy with how it turned out.  Hopefully the printing turns out.  This is for a call The Pump house put out for art based on banned books.  It's due like tomorrow so I have to hustle.

More Diversity in Figure Models

I guess I am being critical of art education lately, but this is what I am thinking about today.  In my mind there is definitely a need for more of diversity in figure models in art education.  In my experience the models were typically thin white women in their 20's.  To some extent this may be a reflection of the people who tend to gravitate towards modeling.  I mean society tends to have a stigma against heavier peope.  I could see how heavier women may not even apply because society has drilled into them that they don't have the body for it.  Speaking as an artist I can think of two instances after college where I was presented with models who deviated from 20 year old thin white women.  Admittedly both instances were more of a struggle to me.  The first was a heavier Native American woman.  The struggle being how to deal with her proportions.  The second model being black; the struggle being getting her skin color right.  I do not think I was the only person struggling.  I heard other artists at that session making comments about her skin color, not negative comments.  It was more of a how do I handle this.  In my mind this is not a good thing.  A person coming out of an art program should have had more exposure to a variety of models.  It will only make stronger artists.

MSDS

It is funny how one thought leads to another.  This is probably my job rubbing off on me, but I have to know how to access the MSDS for the cleaning chemicals we use.  MSDS stands for material safety data sheet.  They tell you possible health concerns about the chemical, and what protective precautions should be taken.

Well I was thinking about how I have never come across MSDS for artist supplies.  I guess in my mind suppliers should have them listed and available for print out on their web sites.  I was looking around in Health Hazards for Artists and it said while manufacturers are required to have a MSDS they are not required to give them to people buying their products.  I am hoping this has changed; my edition of Health Hazards is from 1985.  Perusing Dick Blick's catalog I did see an attempt at a warning system.  I guess I am confused though as to how flake white in one brand of paint has a warning mark, but not in a different brand.  I guess my primary concern is for the person looking to pick up a hobby and assumes it is safe to use without any safety precautions.  I have also heard of art majors eating art supplies before.

Better Science Education for Artists

I will be the first to admit that I did poorly at high school chemistry.  These days though when I think back on my college art classes I find myself wishing that there had been a chemistry class geared towards artists.

After all we handle chemicals as artists.  As a printmaker I have worked with ferric chloride, nitric acid, and dutch mordant (seven parts water to one part hydrochloric acid with a little potassium chlorate)  We were taught some basic saftey stuff, but a little deeper understanding I think would be a good thing.  That being said I think I got more information than what the painters did.  In the one painting class I did take there was no mention of saftey issues with the oil paints we were using.  Even though the cadmium colors are listed as hazardous inorganic pigments.  In fact the painters where I went to graduate school were being pushed to use flake white (i.e. lead white).  They were easily able to bypass this by just having a tube of flake white sitting out.  The professor could not tell that they were actually using the much safer titanium white.  That professor could stand to read A History of Color.  Then maybe she would know that lead white is not only unsafe it is also unstable as a color.  Over time lead white can turn to black, so personally I don't see the point of using it at all.  Unfortunately I have heard of oil painters who have to switch to acrylic because their frequent use of oil paint leads to toxic build up and overload in their system.  Maybe if people had a better understanding of what they are working with and proper saftey precautions this would not be happening.

Edmonia Lewis

In honor of April being women's history month I would like to introduce you all to Edmonia Lewis (1844-1907).  She was part African American and part Native American, but more importantly she was a sculptress.  She lost her parents at an early age, and was brought up by her Native American aunts.  She was allowed to run wild, and when she was eventually sent to a girls' school she was deemed to be to wild for them to handle.





She then went on to Oberlin College.  At any rate she studied art while there, but she did not have an easy go of it.  The college had accepted her, but the community at large had not.  From there she went to Boston to pursue further education in sculpting.  While in Boston she sculpted a bust of Colonel Robert Gould Shaw.  It was the success of this piece that allowed her to move to Rome to continue studies. 



While in Rome Hiram Powers allowed her to work in his studio space.  She focused primarily on African American and Native American subject matter at this point in her life; representing them in neoclassical style.  She was very successful in Rome, and her work fetched high prices.



Perhaps her most famous work was the Death of Cleopatra.