Posts tagged art

I recently gave a talk where I made the case that art is important precisely because it is "unuseful." What I should have said more clearly is that as unuseful as it is, art is also essential. This address by Karl Paulnack to the parents of incoming students at Boston Conservatory is must reading for anyone who cares about music, art, or culture. (It has been burning up the Internet, but I can't find a canonical version, so I've linked to one that, unlike most of the versions online, does not incorrectly say that it was given to the students themselves.)

art, changing the world, education, music

Andy

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One of the most profound musical compositions of all time is the Quartet for the End of Time written by French composer Olivier Messiaen in 1940. Messiaen was 31 years old when France entered the war against Nazi Germany. He was captured by the Germans in June of 1940, sent across Germany in a cattle car and imprisoned in a concentration camp.

He was fortunate to find a sympathetic prison guard who gave him paper and a place to compose. There were three other musicians in the camp, a cellist, a violinist, and a clarinetist, and Messiaen wrote his quartet with these specific players in mind. It was performed in January 1941 for four thousand prisoners and guards in the prison camp. Today it is one of the most famous masterworks in the repertoire.

Given what we have since learned about life in the concentration camps, why would anyone in his right mind waste time and energy writing or playing music? There was barely enough energy on a good day to find food and water, to avoid a beating, to stay warm, to escape torture—why would anyone bother with music? And yet—from the camps, we have poetry, we have music, we have visual art; it wasn’t just this one fanatic Messiaen; many, many people created art. Why? Well, in a place where people are only focused on survival, on the bare necessities, the obvious conclusion is that art must be, somehow, essential for life. The camps were without money, without hope, without commerce, without recreation, without basic respect, but they were not without art. Art is part of survival; art is part of the human spirit, an unquenchable expression of who we are. Art is one of the ways in which we say, “I am alive, and my life has meaning.”

Say what you will about Andrew Wyeth, he introduced at least one ten-year-old to seriously looking at art. At my request, my parents framed a print of Wyeth's "Faraway" and it hung over my bed for many years. Today I am more intrigued and moved by Wyeth's watercolors than his every-brown-blade-of-grass realism, but who knows—without that accessible and yet mysterious painting, I might not have started noticing what artists like Wyeth made of our world. RIP.

art, childhood, painting

Andy

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I suspect that once the shouting dies down, Wyeth’s oeuvre will undergo at least a partial revaluation, and that it will center on his watercolors. Like so many other American artists who came to prominence between the end of the 19th century and the emergence of Abstract Expressionism, Wyeth profited greatly from the immediacy of watercolor, an on-the-spot medium that does not allow for second thoughts: What you paint is what you get. It forced him to be free. To look at a watercolor like “Benjamin’s House,” which hangs in San Francisco’s de Young Museum, is to see what Wyeth meant when he claimed that “I honestly consider myself to be an abstractionist.” All narrative content has been stripped out of this bare, washy winter scene, leaving only the essentials: a wall, a window, a handful of branches. The result is a masterly little glimpse of the visible world, executed with self-effacing virtuosity.

Inspired in part by reading Gandhi, Martin Luther King, and Nelson Mandela, an artist has created a fruitful long-term creative partnership with the residents of an inner-city neighborhood in North Philadelphia.

art, gardens and cities, horizons of the possible, mosaic, pennsylvania, poverty, public space, sculpture

Nate

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Twenty years later, this area is still poor, with high unemployment but hope can be found at the Village of Arts and Humanities.  That’s what the small art park has grown into—a tangible symbol of renewal that covers more than 120 formerly abandoned lots with murals, sculpture gardens, mosaics, flowers, community gardens, playgrounds, performance spaces, basketball courts, art studios, even a tree farm. 

“The entire community seems to take part in the use of the spaces,” writes Kathleen McCarthy, who nominated the Village for Project for Public Space’s authoritative list of the world’s Great Public Spaces. “As we walked down the street, trying to find one of the parks, a man walking beside us directed us to the Park, and told us the history of it and the wonderful artist, Lily Yeh who started the park. He spoke with pride that this was a part of his community. We sat on the benches made of smashed tile and mirror, making wonderful curves and places to sit. Across from us, women sat and smiled, waved. Children ran over and asked us to hide them during a game of hide-and-seek…. I’ve never felt more welcomed in an unfamiliar place.”

Scanning this article's headline, I thought it might be outlining the triumph of art-appreciation over art-consumption, though the study makes clear that visitors and collectors are both consumers, getting different, if parallel satisfactions from art.

art, consumption, cultural worlds, museums

Nate

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The experience of purchasing art shares much in common with viewing it in exhibits, according to a new study in the Journal of Consumer Research. Author Yu Chen (Oakland University) shows that visiting a gallery can provide many of the same benefits as buying a painting….

The author found that art collectors and visitors to galleries and museums share many desires and values, including otherness, sociality, philanthropy, spirituality, aesthetics, and novelty. How collectors differ from visitors is in their desire for a long-term intimate relationship with the artworks. Visitors want to avoid repetition and dullness, and like the experience of sharing art communally.

Chen also found that the experiences of both art purchasers and art viewers do not always correspond with their expectations. “This contradiction implies that desire and illusions, more than value and perceptions, are the driving forces behind consumption,” writes Chen.

Though he's now more known for his earnest interpretations of old-school political posters, designer Shepard Fairey first, of course, gained noteriety with his ironic/absurdist interpretations of authoritarian propaganda, with his Obey Giant viral campaign. Ironic and cool, in a particularly American sense that I both find attractive and uncomfortable, kind of the way I feel about ironic t-shirts after travelling in Africa and seeing them everywhere, courtesy bales of donated and resold used American clothing (shirt on a kid begging from me at the bus depot in Vilankulos, Mozambique: "There's only one thing to make for dinner: Reservations!"). The more I learn, the more I wonder about the effort we put into being connoisseurs of manufactured irony. There's real stuff out there that's so much more amazing.

africa, art, cultural worlds, horizons of the possible, irony, mozambique, nigeria, posters, propaganda, wonder

Nate

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Side 1
Alowo Majaiye
Aiye Laba Ohun Gbogbo
Rora
Gba Mi Lowo Ota
Ma Di Oni Kanra
Ile Baba MI

Side 2
Miliki
Pepeiye Bimo
Maje Nyo Aiye Wa
Baiye Nsata

One of these days I really must read Walter Benjamin's essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction." Till then, here's a short piece by Lawrence Weschler, about his 25 years of discussions with two of Los Angeles' most significant artists, Robert Irwin and David Hockney—who have never met, but always seem to want to talk about the other when Weschler drops by for a chat.

art, california, horizons of the possible, photography

Nate

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“I mean,” Hockney continued, “I’ve observed his progress, though at times that was by no means easy, and for the longest time I felt that his position on the photographing of his work”—a flat prohibition, as it happens (which is one of the principal reasons he was so much less well known among the public at large)—“was pretty preposterous, and somewhat fetishistic.” Irwin for his part accounted for that absolutist injunction by arguing that a photograph could capture everything that the work was not about (which is to say its image) and nothing that it was about (which is to say its presence), so why bother?

Hockney paused and took a drag on a cigarette before going on to confound me entirely: “The thing is,” he now said, “with time I’ve come to see that Irwin was right about that ban on photographing his work; I wish I’d imposed a similar ban regarding my own from the outset.” (This from an artist whose work was more photographed and more ubiquitously visible in the world than that of just about anybody else, with the possible exception of Andy Warhol!) “I mean, no one can come upon one of my paintings in a museum, say, and simply see it; instead they see the poster in their college dorm or the dentist’s office or the jacket on the book they are reading, all sorts of second-rate mediations getting in the way of experiencing the work as if from scratch.”

Artistic echoes of a primordial cultural project gone awry, but to this day remembered, resonant, and perhaps—in the beauty both of our varied tongues and non-disastrous buildings—redeemed.

architecture, art, babel, europe, museums, painting, primordial stories

Nate

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The Tower of Babel is a vision of architecture as anthill madness. As the British Museum’s exhibition Babylon: Myth and Reality reveals, Brueghel is not the only artist driven to imagine this fabulous building. Towers of Babel proliferate in this show, be they painted with miniaturist precision or exploding in apocalyptic doom; there’s even one made of shoes, in a 2001 painting by Michael Lassel. Martin van Heemskerk’s, however, is square, in keeping with old sources he studied, but his attempt to visualise what the tower was “really” like does not stop him showing its top smashed apart by divine lightning. In an anonymous Dutch painting—one of a series that riff on Brueghel—the city that surrounds the tower is on fire, the summit of the hubristic edifice menaced by an eerie light coming through the storm clouds. Perhaps the strangest is by Athanasius Kircher, a 17th-century scholar whose light, airy spiral looks prophetically modern, like a blueprint for a skyscraper.