Hard Edges
Posted by ben on 08 Oct 2007 at 04:37 pm | Tagged as: responses/reviews
When I opened up my RSS feeds this morning, I was glad to see Karl Benjamin getting some attention in the NYT. I discovered his work through the wonderful exhibition of Benjamin drawings at Lawrence Markey gallery last year (and I hear Markey is in the process of organizing a showing of Benjamin’s paintings as well). Then I noticed that the eagle-eyed Tyler Green caught a couple of problems in the article.
As Tyler points out, the article claims that the term “hard-edge painting” originated in London, when in fact it was first used in LA. I think I see what happened here; the term “hard-edge painting” was coined by LA Times art critic Jules Langsner, who curated and wrote the text for the catalog of the Four Abstract Classicists show that the NYT (and generally, everyone writing about Benjamin) cited. However, “hard-edge” was not in the title of the show until it traveled to London, and the term was later popularized by British art critic Lawrence Alloway. So Jori Finkel (who wrote the NYT article) seems to have assumed that the term originated with Alloway rather than Langsner. But a quick review of the Wikipedia article could have cleared all of this up.
As for Tyler’s more significant assertion that the NYT tends to talk as if the art world revolves around New York (”the movement offered a Californian counterpart to geometric work by Ellsworth Kelly, Frank Stella and the New York Color Field painters”), that’s less justifiable. Four Abstract Classicists was mounted in 1959, the same year that Stella first began to be recognized in New York.
UPDATE: Tyler Green writes to say that John McLaughlin had been showing since 1953 (and had been painting for 15 years before exhibiting), meaning that he was developing his voice well before even Kelly began showing work. I have wondered if Joseph Albers had been a common inspiration to the California hard-edgers and the early New York minimalists, but haven’t been able to determine if McLaughlin, Benjamin, Lorser Feitelson, or Frederick Hammersley were actually aware of Albers’ work. The New Yorkers were clearly aware of his work, considering his involvement with Black Mountain started in 1933.
hooray for lawrence markey!
“Whenever Duchamp needed money, he would either sell one of the Brancusis outright or he would ask Roche to purchase it from him, making no excuse for the profits he certainly realized.
“This commercial aspect of my life made me a living,” he explained to Cabanne. When asked if dealing like this was not in conflict with his attitude about the commercialization of art, Duchamp responded:
No. One must live. It was simply because I didn’t have enough money. One must do something to eat. Eating, always eating, and painting for the sake of painting, are two different things. Both can certainly be done simultaneously, without one destroying the other. And then, I didn’t attach much importance to selling them.” (19)
Indeed, it appears that Duchamp actually gave little thought to how much money he made in these transactions. For him, it was more important that the work be placed with the right buyer. When he traveled to New York to install Brancusi’s shows at the Brummer Gallery in 1926 and 1933, his chief concern was finding a home for Brancusi’s work in important public and private collections of modern art, where the sculpture would be understood and appreciated.
The care with which Duchamp oversaw the placement of Brancusi’s sculpture was in sharp contrast to his attitude toward the work of artists who were already “successfully marketed”
Francis M. Naumann
“HOKUSAI , born in 1760, was a representative artist of the Edo period, but I believe he was at the same time a great thinker whose ideas would be valid today. The elements in the universe he depicts are singular and created with a unique viewpoint; they also have a sense of the cinematic and dynamic. The “36 Views of Fugaku”, which actually shows 46 views of mount Fuji, is especially famous, but I cannot help thinking that the series is a set of self portraits. As one’s vantage point changes so the view of the mountain will also change. Likewise the state of the existence of one human being changes with each passing moment and is truly multi-faceted. This seems to me to be the message, a celebration of human existence. ”
Nana Shiomi
Hana (花, flower): the true Noh performer seeks to cultivate a rarefied relationship with his audience similar to the way that one cultivates flowers. What is notable about hana is that, like a flower, it is meant to be appreciated by any audience, no matter how lofty or how coarse his upbringing. Hana comes in two forms. Individual hana is the beauty of the flower of youth, which passes with time, while “true hana” is the flower of creating and sharing perfect beauty through performance.
Zeami
Furu ike ya
kawazu tobikomu
mizu no oto
Matsuo Bashô: Frog Haiku
http://www.northeastresin.com/uploads/images_products_large/1279.jpg
IT FEELS GOOD
TO SAY WHAT I WANT
IT FEELS GOOD
TO KNOCK THINGS DOWN
IT FEELS GOOD
TO SEE THE DISGUST IN THEIR EYES
IT FEELS GOOD
AND I’M GONNA GO WILD
SPRAY PAINT THE WALLS
I DON’T WANT
TO SEE THE PLAN SUCCEED
THERE WON’T BE ROOM
FOR PEOPLE LIKE ME
MY LIFE IS THEIR DISEASE
IT FEELS GOOD
AND I’M GONNA GO WILD
SPRAY PAINT THE WALLS
IT FEELS GOOD
TO SAY WHAT I WANT
IT FEELS GOOD
TO KNOCK THINGS DOWN
IT FEELS GOOD
TO SEE THE DISGUST IN THEIR EYES
IT FEELS GOOD
AND I’M GONNA GO WILD
SPRAY PAINT THE WALLS
IT FEELS GOOD
AND I’M GONNA GO WILD
Black Flag SPRAY PAINT (THE WALLS) lyrics
“In a New Yorker profile, artist Robert Irwin once recounted an occasion in the 1960s when he drove an East Coast art critic around Los Angeles. Irwin, who participated in the hot rod subculture as early as the late-’40s, made a case for car customizing as art. The kid – he posited – who buys his parts, modifies them, installs them on a vehicle of his choosing, and paints flames on his ride, makes aesthetic choices at every juncture. The critic, who also painted, was having none of it. After stating his case as many ways as he knew how, Irwin silently pulled over to the side of the road. “Get out, Max,” he calmly ordered. Art walks – or drives, in this case – and hidebound critical dogma can find its own way home. At least in L.A.”
New LACMA survey shines with SoCal’s can-do spirit of an earlier era
~ By KIRK SILSBEE ~
“Chelsea’s fate was possibly preordained. What else is to be expected from a neighborhood of garages? There are monuments to car culture everywhere, from the mundane body shops and truck dispatchers to a giant Rolls-Royce hood ornament at Manhattan Motorcars, a Rolls, Porsche and Bentley dealership. There is an ersatz drive-in movie theater, at a place called Dezerland, which can be rented out for parties. There is even a freeway — er, highway.
”Chelsea is the epicenter of the production of fantasy culture,” said Anne-Marie Russell, who works at Mixed Greens, an artist management company whose offices are in the Starrett-Lehigh Building on 27th Street and 11th Avenue. Rebecca Bauer, a co-worker, agreed, saying, ”There’s more and more skinny beautiful women walking around.” And Randy Gladman, another colleague, motioned to a window that looked down onto a rooftop parking lot full of shimmering new Porsches.”
SHAILA K. DEWAN
‘The slum-dwellers are the counterclass to the other emerging class, the so-called “symbolic class” (managers, journalists and PR people, academics, artists and so on) which is also uprooted and perceives itself as directly universal (a New York academic has more in common with a Slovene academic than with blacks in Harlem half a mile from his campus). Is this the new axis of class struggle, or is the “symbolic class” inherently split, so that we can make the emancipatory wager on the coalition between the slum-dwellers and the “progressive” part of the symbolic class? What we should be looking for are the signs of the new forms of social awareness that will emerge from the slum collectives: they will be the seeds of the future’ (Žižek 2006:269)
i’m no expert, but it looks like albers didn’t begin his exploration of ‘hard-edge’ geometric forms until the late forties. the famous ‘homage to the square’ series was started in 1949.
also, note that finkel’s use of the word ‘counterpart’ doesn’t necessarily imply that the new yorkers were forerunners to the californians.
http://www.edroth.com/nonflash/Shopping/clothes/wristband.jpg
also, note that finkel’s use of the word ‘counterpart’ doesn’t necessarily imply that the new yorkers were forerunners to the californians.
I think counterpart does kind of imply ‘response’ or ‘copy’, but even if it doesn’t in this case, it frames the west coast artists in terms of the east coast artists. I guess this could be seen as appropriate, since Frank Stella and Ellsworth Kelly are more well known than John McLaughlin and Karl Benjamin, but perhaps that is because of this sort of writing.
good points.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Mondrian_broadway_boogie-woogie.gif
“The notion of situationism is obviously devised by antisituationists.” -Internationale Situationniste
“Zizek argues that the kind of distance opened up by detournement is the condition of possibility for ideology to operate: by attacking and distancing oneself from the sign-systems of capital, the subject creates a fantasy of transgression that “covers up” his/her actual complicity with capitalism as an overarching system.”
“Generally the most exciting thing for me is the way younger artists, raised on theory, take it for granted and don’t see it as antithetical to art objects. But again, that’s probably my bias. I love performance and all that stuff, but I am primarily interested in what remains after the artist has left the picture, when it is just me and the artwork and the thought embedded therein. Basically my mind works better in front of art than it does just about anywhere else. Relatively speaking.”
Roberta Smith
In his unpublished Seminar Angoisse (1962/63, lesson of December 5 1962), Lacan emphasizes the way the hysteric’s anxiety relates to the fundamental lack in the Other which makes the Other inconsistent/barred: a hysteric perceives the lack in the Other, its impotence, inconsistency, fake, but he is not ready to sacrifice the part of himself that would complete the Other, fill in its lack – this refusal to sacrifice sustains the hysteric’s eternal complaint that the Other will somehow manipulate and exploit him, use him, deprive him of his most precious possession… More precisely, this does not mean that the hysteric disavows his castration: the hysteric (neurotic) does not hold back from his castration (he is not a psychotic or a pervert, i.e. he fully accepts his castration); he merely does not want to “functionalize” it, to put it in the service of the Other, i.e. what he holds back from is “making his castration into what the Other is lacking, that is to say, into something positive that is the guarantee of this function of the Other.” (In contrast to the hysteric, the pervert readily assumes this role of sacrificing himself, i.e. of serving as the object-instrument that fills in the Other’s lack – as Lacan puts it, the pervert “offers himself loyally to the Other’s jouissance”.) The falsity of sacrifice resides in its underlying presupposition, which is that I effectively possess, hold in me, the precious ingredient coveted by the Other and promising to fill in its lack. On a closer view, of course, the hysteric’s refusal appears in all its ambiguity: I refuse to sacrifice the agalma in me BECAUSE THERE IS NOTHING TO SACRIFICE, because I am unable to fill in your lack.
Slavoj Zizek: Death’s Merciless Love
This paper begins by reviewing previous research concerning the external validity of mixed-motive games as models of international conflict, interpersonal behavior, and behavior in large-scale social dilemmas. Two further experiments are then described, both of which cast further doubt upon the usefulness of such games as models of any real-world reference system. The author cites the large number of publications existing in this area, and compares it to the small number of validation attempts, suggesting that such studies are worth carrying out only if a correspondence can be established between behavior in the game nad behavior in an external reference system. Because of the difficulty of establishing such a correspondence, the author suggests redirecting validation attempts away from individual analysis, to focus more on situational variables in games and real-world dilemmas.
“a problem disappears when we take into account (when we ‘stage’) its context of enunciation” (Žižek, 1991a: 145).
I am more interested in the attempt of articulation than the actual enunciation. “Art as Ready made” sounds fine, but it’s just not the way it happened to me.
Francis Alÿs
“he recreates a barrier that exists in physical form, as a series of concrete partitions separating Israelis and Palestinians, and as a separatist symbol, both triumphant and oppressive. Mr. Alÿs takes no political position on this; he merely points it out.”
Holland Cotter
Welcome, youth, who come attended by immortal charioteers and mares which bear you on your journey to our dwelling. For it is no evil fate that has set you to travel on this road, far from the beaten paths of men, but right and justice. It is meet that you learn all things – both the unshakable heart of well-rounded truth and the opinions of mortals in which there is not true belief.
Parmenides
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x30e05_flamin-groovies-72_music
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x13og0_flamin-groovies-slow-death-1972-mar_music
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