Mr. MacCruiskeen, I throw down the Art Gauntlet!

[AhabsOtherLeg]

Ahab

I thought it was well established that Michelangelo drew from male models.

Yeah... It turns out that my highly exciting globbet of gossip (now that I look at the publication date of the book I shamelessly copied it from) was apparently a reasonably well-established and unthrilling bit of theory in the late eighties. Whatever. I still said it here before you did, and that has to count for something.

I'm not a Stuckist by the way, but I do have some sympathy with their views on art... a bit. Not their views of society though. I think Billy Childish is alright. Like him, I accept fully that conceptual art is both the dominant force on the contemporary scene and will continue to be dominant in the future but that doesn't mean I have to think it's all great or anything. Though some of it is great!

I wish I had seen the Caravaggio

Ah, but you didn't, did you? No, you didn't. Only I did. So there.

but I have seen his works that are in the Uffizi, as well as Artemisia Gentileschi's Judith. Take that!

Ach... galleries don't count anyway.

[barracuda]

Artemisia Gentileschi's Judith.

That's a wonderful painting, and one of my favorite subjects, lending itself to such an onionskin of layered meanings. Gentileschi's depiction of herself as Judith and her rapist as Holofernes is brilliant and devastating.

[Joe Hillshoist]

Wow, but that Hughes documentary was obnoxiously racist. It's not at all about his horror faced with the commodification of art, it's about his petty resentments about the deracination of European heritage, and the defiling of Holy Europeanness by non-Europeans. So that the sacred mystery of the Mona Lisa was all of a sudden shattered in 1962 when she visited the US and was gawked at by a million working stiffs.

Robert Hughes is so far up himself he came out the other side. Sorry, Robert Studley Forrest Hughes, so I guess its not all his fault. There's this fucked up place called the North Shore of Sydney and it breeds snobs like few other places on earth.

[barracuda]

I think Mac might enjoy this little article: I'M SICK OF PRETENDING: I DON'T "GET" ART

[vanlose kid]

Leonora Carrington on art (where does it come from?): You're trying to intellectualize something, desperately. And you're wasting your time.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/ ... carrington

check out the video. seriously.

*

[Allegro]

Leonora Carrington on art (where does it come from?): You're trying to intellectualize something, desperately. And you're wasting your time.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/ ... carrington

check out the video. seriously.

*

Thanks, VK. I transcribed these few words spoken by Leonora Carrington in that short documentary. Once I finished typing, though, I realized how much of the interview is missing by not watching Ms. Carrington speak. Best to watch rather than just reading these words on a screen.

When asked by the interviewer, “Where did your art come from?” Ms. Carrington said she didn’t know, since she was the only one in the household who painted and drew. Then, Carrington asked…

• “Why? Are you fixed on heredity? It’s not heredity. It [art] comes from somewhere else. Not from genes. …
  
  “You’re trying to intellectualize something, desperately, and you’re wasting your time. Not a way of understanding. [You’re trying] to make a sort of … mini logic; never understand by that road. [We can understand art] by your own feelings about things. By your feeling about … if you see a painting, for instance, that you like … canvas is an empty space.
  
  “… It’s a visual world. You want to turn things into a kind of intellectual game. It’s not. … The visual world is totally different. … Well, remember what I just said, now. Don’t try and turn it into a game— into a kind of intellectual game. It’s not. It’s a visual world, which is different.
  
  “Visual world is to do with what we see as space, which changes all the time. How do I know to walk— that’s one concept —to this bed and around it without running into it? I’m moving in space. Or, I can have a concept office, I can see it also as an object in space. …”

[vanlose kid]

^^

yeah

[Project Willow]

Thank you for the vid.

Besides Dorothea Tanning, one of my favorites of the surrealists. They both passed away only within the last year or so. Tanning spent her last decade writing.

Leonora Carrington:

Her interest in animal imagery, myth and occult symbolism deepened after she moved to Mexico and entered into a creative partnership with the émigré Spanish artist Remedios Varo. Together the two studied alchemy, the kabbalah and the mytho-historical writings Popol Vuh from what is now Guatemala.

Laberinto, 1991


Temple of The Word, 1954

Dorothea Tanning:


Poppy Hotel, Room 202, 1973


Family Portrait, 1977


Guardian Angels, 1946

[MacCruiskeen]

Now here's a thing - neo-neo-realism:



From the comments:

.....*Crying* What.....the heck....was that?

gamergirl839 1 day ago

^She's one of several people who said it made her cry. When I first watched it I started off laughing, and of course it is funny, but I was close to tears myself by the end. Not sure why, exactly. Anything very well done is moving, especially when it's done very patiently and attentively and skilfully, and then it (almost) inevitably embodies some kind of truth that can't be verbalised and thus talked away.

I showed it to a bunch of people a couple of nights ago, one of whom was Japanese. I said, tritely enough: "It's very Japanese, this." She said, "Yes! But why?" Somebody else said, "The way it combines cuteness and cruelty." But it's no manga, this. (I hate mangas.) It has more in common with seppuku, if anything. The sheer mechanical relentlessness of it.

Yeah, realism. That's why it's also funny. Not for no reason does it end with overpopulation and increasingly pedantic and ruthless micro-management.

- The video was made by Cyriak, who also made the music. (Or you could as easily say that the video illustrates the music. It's all equally crazy-making, i.e., equally realistic.)

[LilyPatToo]

Somehow, I missed this thread, but yesterday I took a shortcut through a shadowy San Francisco alleyway and found myself transfixed by Dorothea Tanning's amazing writhing figures on large canvases hanging in the Gallery Wendi Norris Everything around me was hard and gray and the flesh tones just glowed through the large glass windows. Thought instantly of Project Willow's paintings and drawings and came here to search for the artist's name to see if she's been discussed already. Found this thread and have had a great read--thanks to all who contributed, especially the video of your friend Su, PW. I'm off to look up the gallery's hours so that I can see Tanning's work close-up...

LilyPat

[Project Willow]

Wish I could see it! I might be down your way in May, crossing my fingers.

[Perelandra]

Thank you for this thread everyone, I had forgotten it.

[Hammer of Los]

...

The Leonora Carrington I like a lot.

...

[harry ashburn]

HUH! Paul Simon threw down the Art Garfunkel!

[MacCruiskeen]

Two things from The New Inquiry:

1. A review of Ben Davis’s 9.5 Theses on Art and Class (a book I haven't read):

Creative Tyranny
By ROB HORNING

August 8, 2013

http://thenewinquiry.com/essays/creative-tyranny/

Horning does go on a bit, but he makes some very good points along the way, e.g., about the term "the art world".

2. A review of Malcolm Bull's Anti-Nietzsche (a brilliant and disturbing book):

Reading Like a Loser
By DAVID WINTERS

February 14, 2012

http://thenewinquiry.com/essays/reading-like-a-loser/

ON EDIT: Not unrelated, from today's Guardian:

Cave paintings in Indonesia suggest art came out of Africa

Ghostly hand markings and animals in Sulawesi caves are much older than thought, pushing back probable date for origin of art

Ian Sample, science editor
The Guardian, Wednesday 8 October 2014 17.59 BST

http://www.theguardian.com/science/2014 ... a-sulawesi

(See also: http://www.theguardian.com/science/2012 ... -paintings)

So art -- or rather: something now routinely referred-to as art -- has been a near-universal human activity for at least 40,000 years. But whatever it was then (amongst small egalitarian matriarchal bands of gatherer-hunters), it is now operating in an utterly transformed environment:

Shortly after the release of the Forbes 400, the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development published a report concluding that global social inequality has eclipsed the pre-Great Depression highs during the 1920s, hitting the highest level since the 1870s and 1820s.

The report noted, “income inequality followed a U-shape in most Western European countries and Western offshoots. It declined between the end of the 19th century until about 1970, followed by a rise. In Eastern Europe, communism resulted in strong declines in income inequality, followed by a sharp increase after its disintegration in the 1980s. In other parts of the world (China in particular) income inequality has been on the rise recently.”

[...]

http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2014/10 ... b-o06.html