Some Assembly Required

Today was a day I have looked forward to for I don’t even KNOW how long. Happy Birthday Jules! I had a fantastic day making a mess with DAFA friends.

Remember this?

It is now this:

Soooo nice!

The next piece was a commercial fabric, white on white. I painted some squiggles on a screen (in wax), printed on some big blocks of color, let it dry, and then smooshed (why yes, that is the technical term) on some more colors. Gorgeous after a first rinse.

My next favorite: a scrap from a monoprint-gone-wrong, I screen printed with my Valley of Fire glyphs drawn on the screen in glue.

A second print of the same screen on yet another monoprint scrap, I got this one wet when I got home so it would bleed a little.

Other goodies today:

Chartreuse cheese cloth, deep blue & purple batting, and adding layers to some of the pieces from Jane’s class in ’09 and some of the pieces from March and May ’10 dye sessions.

Tomorrow, I spend a few hours in a CT machine for a myelogram, taking a look at what’s up with my C6/C7 fusion that may not have fused properly. Yuck. But I will have good memories of today to carry me through!

In a review of a book I want to read (Alexander’s Duel at Dawn: Heroes, Martyrs, and the Rise of Modern Mathematics – utterly unrelated to the context here of art equaling navel gazing), the columnist wrote:

Wouldn’t it lead to a cloistered, inward-looking profession, making products of interest mostly to its own practitioners? The kind of profession, in other words, that contemporary art is routinely accused of being?

But is he right? Has it changed? Is it wrong? Is it insurmountable? Should it be?

I don’t mean to say that I don’t think it ever happens. There is plenty of evidence showing where self-indulgence waters down the individual piece of art – and it is not found solely in harsh NYT reviews.

What I’m really asking is this: how would you counter the accusation of contemporary art finding its purpose primarily in self-gratification? How might you tear down the idea that contemporary art is even actually seen in this light ‘routinely’?

Should you even care?

I was a smidge offended when I first ran across that paragraph. Now I’m somewhere between smugly proud and indifferent.

If your art is something you do in order to survive – be it emotionally, intellectually or otherwise… if your work is what comes out of you because if you didn’t your head would explode… then of course it is self-gratifying. It is self-preservation. It is self-serving in the way that writing a good novel is indulging the inner fantasies of its author. (You want me to overstep my place and say it is self-indulgent the way ice cream is to the starving man, but I’m not. Because it isn’t. We aren’t talking about that layer of Maslow’s pyramid. Please don’t make me pull out Bonhoeffer and Tillich just to make a point in an effort to justify my own dabblings.)

So look, and move on.

Be moved, or get moving.

Whatever gets to you, man.

“The artists… reacted much more quickly and revolutionized the art…”

In case you don’t have a copy of Kline’s Mathematics for the Nonmathematician at hand, don’t worry. Google shows you the best parts, anyway (scroll to bottom of post). Chapter 10 is where the real magic starts, if you ask me. (Ok, so Ch. 9 has some really interesting bits on math and religion and the study of nature. Actually, read the whole thing. Kline presents the world almost as completely as Erik Larson, deftly pulling in the soc/psy/econ/philo/historical bits and wrapping them all up in something just short of geekly literary chocolate.)

It would be easy for me to spend an hour or so on just the first paragraph. When people roll their eyes at me for being bent out of shape over the second-class treatment of art, art education, and the role of the arts in our everyday lives – I just want to shake them. Don’t think art matters in ‘tough times’? Don’t understand why abstract paintings were ever a big deal? I’d be happy to point you to a reading list. I’ll be over here with crayon.

Now usually, I’m more of an ooh-ahh-er at the magnificent transition from realism to abstraction. Fine. I’ll do something completely rude and quote myself quoting from the web on another blog:

I think the revolutionary nature of abstract art is hard to comprehend these days – because the ‘revolutionary’ changes in our lifetimes have happened so fast, historically speaking. Example: look at a time line of DaVinci to the Wright Brothers to stepping on the moon. Our world changes at warp speed.

This is one of my favorite things in the world, this abstract revolution. It is awe-inspiring when you look at the tens of centuries of representational ‘art’ images in human history from cave drawings to Raphael… and realize that we’ve had less than two centuries of abstract art.

Western art had been, from the Renaissance up to the middle of the 19th century, underpinned by the logic of perspective and an attempt to reproduce an illusion of visible reality.

Hmmm. Underpinned by the logic of perspective and an attempt to reproduce an illusion of visible reality. Underpinned by the logic of perspective and an attempt to reproduce an illusion of visible reality.

(Dear EJ, I told you it was all about the math.)

So let’s talk about this science of perspective (from the Latin verb, ‘to see through’). We’ll take up the secular nature of art, as we move away from mysticism, sometime when you and I can share a glass of wine. Anyhoo… nature was fast becoming an authority all its own. Artists had already struggled with light. Page 215: “To capture the essence of forms, the organization of objects in space, and the structure of space, the artist [da Vinci, et al] decided that he must find the underlying mathematical laws.”

Reality lives in the math.