Wot a load o' rarbish
More de-cutting, more reading, more ideas. An August 17, 2003 Telegraph profile of Damien Hirst (recently in the papers for being worth more or less £400 million) The wot-a-load-of-rubbish scepticism of Joe Public- once mocked as philistinism - is increasingly echoed within the cultural elite. The playwrite Sir Tom Stoppard has been prominent among those asking if the kind of work produced by Hirst and his contemporaries is art on any other basis than the artist's description of it as such.
Strange this does not usually apply to writing. It is rarely claimed some of the pretty basic writing of many thriller writers is art in the writery sense, so why so for art and artists? One reason is because art requires a bit more education that reading does. If you can read complicated enough writing and you read enough of it, you will come to conclusions about what is crafted writing and what is not. That is because of all those things Chomsky said about language, even if he isn't the only one with ideas in that area nowadays
An answer to how Hirst's work is considered art, elsewhere in the profile: Saatchi bought the stuff. I remember being impressed by the notion in some art related book or other that the triangle of art, dealer and buyer is what makes art art. Anything - natural or artifact - could theoretically have valued added to it, and in the world of art frequently does. There is a small set of very rich and talentless Brit Artists who are only so (rich and talentless) because the dealers have made a few bob and the buyers even more. Hirst's shark, if it hasn't rotted to some sort of primordial soup and been chucked out on the quiet, will pass hands for large amounts of money for yonks till eventually no one is interested in buying it. No one who is in the chain is worried about whether the stuff has artisitc merit or not. That is the job of those who stand in front of the creations in galleries and pour over them in coffee table books.::
A small rider added Monday 11 December:
Very often it is the talentless trying for effect which produces so much of the unart. Yet the click of a camera from a master - 1/60 second, the depth of field guessed quickly: an f stop one way or another might ruin it - creates the greatest art imaginable. Yes, the art was in the brain, and it may have taken only a fraction of a second to decide to frame and shoot. Rather like a well-edited movie, a photograph may have been later cropped severely to remove extraneous details to maximise impact. But the photographer knows instinctively where he has to take a rushed shot or lose what he sees: being prepared to take a wider shot in order to get it at just the right moment, and the element of prediction - will a subject move in a certain way, get ready to shoot just in case; will the light fall as one hopes - make for art in a way that any number of slogans scrawled across walls or the inside of tents will never do.
Ogno giorno uomo hombatto une battaglia hontro se stresso.....
Watching the first part of the DVD version of Shooting the Past made me smile with the way they could summon up a photograph, or a series telling a story, on any subject from the jumble that was the archive. Today looking in a thick ring binder folder for something or other, came across a quote I had remembered the gist of but not the exact words. Memory being what it is, it had transmuted itself in my mind into a 'famous quote', when here from the 1997 newspaper article from which it came -, a travel article by actor Simon Callow on a trip to Tuscany, titled Supping with Brandi - it turns out to be some 60 year old Italian chap being philosophical about life.There are languages and there are languages to be philosophical in... Ogno giorno uomo hombatto une battaglia hontro se stresso.....
The given translation was:....every day is a battle with oneself and every day one dies a little and is reborn a little, and one must live in the part of one that is reborn and not in the part that dies.
Brandimarte said that. He lives - or lived, if he is still in the land of the living - in a town called Il Milione, in Tuscany. Deserves some recognition.
The Man who created the black Square
Came across a 24 February 2002 Sunday Telegraph colour mag In the Picture by Andrew Graham Dixon dealing with Eight Red Rectangles (1915) by Kazimir Malevich. Dixon says:In a brief tract published in 1916, he reviled the figurative artists of the past for their banal preoccupation with 'the reflection, as in a mirror, of nature. Like God, the true artist of the future would create forms 'from nothing'. His work would transcend all the art that had gone before by triumphantly achieving a state of 'objectlessness'.
This article is full of fascinating detail about art movements and philosophical underpinnings. There is Malevich's later disillusionment with the 'repressiveness (and aesthetic conservatism) of the Marxist-Leninist state', which echoes the sort of thing that Koestler wrote about post-Hungary. Having read an article or twenty on Lenin in recent months, following a casual re-reading of David Shub's Lenin - particularly the sections on the period leading up to the sealed train journey into Russia and those of his teen years - in an attempt to fill out some gaps in my understanding of the relationship between Trotsky and the others - I can guess Lenin was probably a complete philistine in matters artistic and literary, even if only through expediency and a dogged focus on what he saw to be vital. It does not surprise me the state he was responsible for founding ended up as it did, despite the general hope at the beginning. It is easy to see the common thread running through the early days of a democratic ethos slowly being subjugated to the greater needs of the revolution - namely total control to make sure there was no counter-revolution, which the leaders feared could come from outside or inside. Lenin himself early on, well before he took control of the Party apparatus while to-ing and fro-ing between London and Zurich, decided violence and suppression was the optimum and necessary modus, when other more prominent intellectuals, who he later pushed aside, were more for the old-style democratic socialism.Malevich painted Black Square in 1915, a time which corresponds pretty much to the turmoil in the ex-patriot proto-Bolshevik party. What Lenin or his cronies might have thought about such a painting, if they had had the time to check art, would be interesting to know: one can guess Lenin's position probably remained pretty much the same from youth. He was the sort of person who could devour books at a great pace, but he probably though art or art history secondary or tertiary. Some kind scholar of Lenin will put me right. White on White (1918) and then there was White Square too.
::
And so to a general point about abstract art, debated endlessly over the best part of 100 years. The human brain evolved to create meaning out of sensory data which in itself has no 'meaning' - it is mere sense data till the brain turns it into something usable.Alan W Watts in chapter 2 of Nature, Man and Woman (1958) devoted to its subtitled Science and Nature, discusses the idea of attention requiring selection: ..the simplified units of attention [..] selected from the total field of awareness are what we called things and events, or facts. This does not ordinarily occur to us because we naively suppose that things are what we see in the first place, prior to conscious attention.
He says: ....the eye does not see things [my emphasis], but rather 'the whole of the visual field in all its infinite detail. Things appear to the mind when, by conscious attention, the field is broken down into easily thinkable unities. Yet we consider this an act of discovery.
Eight Red Rectangles is no different in this regard from any other field of view. Any painting is, in any case, part of a greater field of view, though we happen to be able to concentrate enough to make the contents within the frame into a little world of its own, temporarily, before something else, the colour of the wall, movement, noise, or other details such an ambient lighting, removes that a bit like the flip flop in the perceptual illusion which is both two faces and a vase or jug, or the really fascinating concavities which become convexities when turned upside down by making the 'shadow' come from the other side!In TV footage of someone standing in front of the Mona Lisa, say, one of the obvious things is how long the person stands still in front of it. This may be a mere convention in order to indicate one is serious about art, but that aside this Magic Eye image concentration seems how it has to be done to convince ourselves this artifact is a world of its own.Watts:.....the thing called the human body is divided from other things in its environment by the clearly discernable surface of the skin. The point, thoug, is that the skin divides the body from the the rest of the world as one thing from others in thought but not in nature. In nature the skin is as much a joiner as a divider, being, as it were, the bridge whereby the inner organs have contact with air, warth and light.
...
Just because concentrated attention is exclusive, selective and divisive, it is much easier for it to notice differences than unities. Visual attention notices things as figure against a contrasting background, and our thought about such things emphasises the difference between figure and ground. The outline of the figure or the “inline” of the ground divides the two from each other. Yet we do not so easily notice the union or inseparability of figure and ground, or solid and space. This is easily seen when we ask what would become of the figure or the surrounding ground or space. Conversely, we might ask what would become of the surrounding space if unoccupied by any soids. The answer is surely that it would no longer be space, for space is a “surrounding function” and there would be nothing to surround. It is imortant to note that this mutuality or inseparability of figure and ground is not only logical and grammatica; but also sensuous*
His foot note says:The naïve idea that there is first of all empty space and then things filling it underlies the classical problem of how the world comes out of nothing. Now the problem had to be rephrased, “How did something-and-nothing come out of...what?”
There are other less than mystical aspects ( with a nod to the mumblo-jumbo surrounding Malevich) – it's perception stupid! - which come into abstract art which uses geometry. It is now well established that colour is relative. A square of red surrounded by green looks a different colur from when it surrounded by a darker shade of green or another colour.
Pot calling kettle black?
I'm useless at grammar: always was. Intermittently my spelling can be too: often its 'grammer' before I realise it sholud be 'grammar'. Maybe its a question of mood. When I'm feeling at my best, I rarely make mistakes: at less than par a series of the same old mistakes crops up time and again. However, I am not as bad as half of our teachers according to a grammatically correct article in The Sunday Telegraph today. One of the things that stands out for me here is often when someone can't do something very well it is because they seem to have lost the notion that that can't: maybe its another version of the shame thing dissappearing in our society.
Anyone check my its ?
Samuel Butler's, "The Aunt, the Nieces and the Dog"
Found an handwritten note, written June 1996, titled, "On reading Samuel Butler's essay, The Aunt, the Nieces and the Dog, which, on a quick check, looked as if it might form the basis of a new essay here and now. Then, as I read it , I saw the fun bit was:I laughed, so many real gufaws: so that's where Peter Greenaway got his title!
There didn't seem to be much meat in the rest, even if it was toying with the way some types of writer start the day waiting for it to gel in some way and that when it does they feel able to get on, whatever that might involve.
Did not throw it away. It had how the mere pleasure of coming across a pleasing, intriguing title - before reading a word of what lay beneath it - was capable of setting me up for the day. Add to that the rediscovery of my flight of fancy about how a film-maker might have found a way of devising tricky title and, hey presto, rejuvenation of original pleasure.
::
Butler's essay came from
Life, Art and Science, dowloadable at
Project Gutenberg. May have picked up the rather tattered, brown book in my then favourite secondhand bookhop - Scurfield's, now no more as indeed no more is Scurfield, a bit of a poet - because it had something about evolution in it.
This one
How to Make the Best of lifemight be helpful to aspiring writers - young and old - who are not completely convinced they have found their vocation or are feeling a bit sheepish about so much time spent staring out of windows or rooting in box files of scribbled notes, looking for inspiration, when they might be getting on earning living as a shelf stacker at their local Tesco's.
I wish I were what I was when I wished I were what I am
How happy is the moron,
He doesn't give a damn.
I wish I were a moron,
My God, perhaps I am!
p.74 Graffiti 2
from the team who brought you the bestselling Graffiti: The Scrawl of the Wild (Corgi Books)
Destuctiveness is the outcome of unlived life
It would seem that the amount of destructiveness to be found in individuals is proportionate to the amount to which expansiveness of life is curtailed . By this we do not refer to individual frustrations of this or that instinctive desire but to the thwarting of the whole life, the blockage of spontaneity of the growth and expression of man's sensuous, emotional, and intellectual capacities . Life has an inner dynamism of it's own; it tends to grow, to be expressed, to be lived . It seems that if this tendency is thwarted the energy directed towards life undergoes a process of decomposition and changes into energies directed towards destruction . In other words : the drive for life and the drive for destruction are not mutually independent factors but are in a reversed interdependence . The more the drive towards life is thwarted, the stronger is the drive towards destruction ; the more life is realised, the less is the strength of destructiveness . Destuctiveness is the outcome of unlived life .
Erich Fromm
Brighton Rocks
It's a long time ago: sitting on a park bench in summer sun devoured
Brighton Rock in a sitting. Not an uplifting experience: there is no rule that good writing will create positive thoughts or ideas. Now I have been to the place Pinkie sculked about. Travelling broadens the mind: that usually means somewhere more distant than a hundred or so miles from where you life, but it all counts in the end, an accummulative process in which the various threads come together to make some sort of overall sense.
Brighton sparkling in late autumn: a Sunday in early November. The sun warm on our faces, a gentle sea breeze, we walked rapidly along the promenade westwards towards Shoreham. Everybody seemed to be out: little different from the height of summer perhaps. Were they all from there or had they come in from all over, even London - a short hop on th train from King's Cross or even London Bridge. Who could tell? Who cared? They all looked pretty smart and good looking - was it one's mood? - even the gay men in unending pairs, cycling, running, walking seemed fine.
Brighton promenade had me in mind of those pieces of familar , cliched TV footage: Palm Springs, or a beach resort in Southern California, with all those long-legged roller-skating blondes, darkly-tanned, muscle-bound men weight-lifting, black men playing volley ball, sundry others patrolling up and down with the well-known art-deco blocks and palm trees in the background. Certainly bikers and roller-skaters are there along the front at Brighton and they are facilitated by marked out lanes on the broad path and along the edge of the road on the sea side.
TO BE CONTINUED SOON
