After the announcement of the packers’ choice a week ago of television handyman Scott Cam, judges have narrowed the list of some 787 Archibald hopefuls down to just 35 finalists--sans Scott. With an annoucement only days away, now is a good time to head over to the Archibald Prize website and make your pick.
Thanks to Lauren over at the Australian Art Forum for the heads-up.
There can be no representation without a subject and there can be no abstraction without representation. All semantics aside, you cannot abstract nothing because the word nothing is just an illogicality created to explain the absence of everything. Contrary to popular belief you cannot find nothing. Nothing is, quite literally the absence of existence. Nothing is hell. As Picasso said "There is no abstract art. You must always start with something."
Art is the creation of something and by birth is invested with representation--it exists. That existence may be entirely representational in that a cup not only represents a cup but is also a cup. Alternatively, representation might be abstracted to varying degrees even to the extent where it may require expert decoding in order to establish a connection with it.
The catch-22 of abstract expressionism is that aesthetically it can border on the banal and can disconnect viewers rather than engage them. This fine line between aestheticism and visual banality is for good reason so that people are not distracted by the aesthetics of the piece but instead engage with its deeper premise.
So, in that respect, abstraction still needs to ensure that the subject of original representation is capable of being accessed. That doesn’t mean that this needs to be represented in the art itself. With the use of metonymy this might be alluded to in the picture’s title or may even require decoding by an expert. Even Mark Rothko insisted that art cannot exist without subject matter and that "[t]here is no such thing as good painting about nothing."
In other words people cannot be expected to ponder the invisible question! The question even if abstracted must still be capable of grasping. In limited circumstances some artists deny access to any semblance of original representation and in the process the art’s abstraction is completely extinguished. When artist’s deny people the opportunity to even connect with the subject of their art it is literally rendered anti-expressionist. Even worse is the tendency to feel that we are somehow inferior due to our failure to grasp the art’s meaning--it becomes our fault.
The problem then becomes how do we know if the subject matter of the art is actually out of reach of ourselves or if the artist is just supplanting complexity with obscurity. This is an important issue. If we are to look at art as communication the fact is that even when having a difficult subject explained to us--even if we cannot grasp the complexity of the subject or even fully understand it--we still know what the subject is. I may not understand one iota about quantum physics but I know that it is a sub-branch of the science of physics and generally deals with stuff that’s very very small. Even if comprehension of the subject is out of my reach, I still know what the subject is. In other words, it is only by knowing what the subject is that I am capable of determining whether the subject is actually within my comprehension or not.
So, as a form of communication art has to, in some way connect people with the original subject of the abstraction.
This is not to imply that art for an artist doesn’t sometimes commence without a clear intent but as the artist gives effect to their own subconscious they do so in the hope that their subconscious speaks to them and that the subject reveals itself to them as their art piece develops. The trick then is ensuring that the subject’s abstraction is capable of being decoded by people other than just the artist.
Also, I’m not saying that people cannot find something in a random detritus of paint on canvas but that it then becomes no different than meditating on the ripples in water or pondering the lines in your own hand or examining Rorschach images for that matter. Anything that you conjure up at that point is entirely the product of your own imagination and in a strange act of transference you have become the creator where both the subject and its meaning is reflected entirely by your own psychology as opposed to art.
The truth is that in the search for subject matter in art we have no interest in finding our own strange accidents; rather we expect a sense of cognisance in our art and our artists. We expect intelligent creation that gives effect to the cognitive and emotional intelligence of the artist.
Art as a sign of cognisant intent is an extension of why we as human beings communicate with other people. It’s not that we expect art or artists to tell us what to think but that we expect their art to engage us--to make an effort.
To quote Curtis Verdun "Abstract art isn’t simply a lack of realism. It’s rather a heightened depiction of what the subject really is."
Unprinted photo titled Rikyu View: The philosophy of grey depicting the the Jetty’s end at Picnic Bay, Magnetic Island looking out across Cleveland Bay. Photographed on a Shen-hao HZX 4X5-IIA Field Camera, Rodenstock 150mm Sironar S @ f/22, 90sec on Polaroid 55p/n film.
Rikyu View’s punctum is the perceived ambiguity of dimension. In spatial terms the foreground jetty appears three dimensional due to the presence of perspective markers such as shadows and vanishing point clues in the timber planking.
However, as the eyes are drawn out to fix on the horizon, three dimensionality is abruptly truncated to two by the dimensionless rendering of water and sky. A sense of spatial disorientation arises as the brain tries to deal with the perceived loss of depth perception and the eyes attempt to hunt continuously from foreground to horizon.
Temporally, Rikyu View heightens this ambiguity by juxtaposing time dilation with instantaneity. The static jetty is impervious to long exposures by virtue of the fact that it doesn’t move. However, over the same 90 second exposure, the clouds in the sky and the sea move constantly and perceptually we register the passage of time. As with the spatial ambiguity above our eyes feel tricked transitioning from the perceived instant of time depicted in the jetty to the dilation of time reflected in the waters and sky.
Simultaneously, our perception of the dimensions of time and space are disrupted.
Rikyu View was inspired by Japanese Architect Kisho Kurokawa‘s writings on the particularly Chapter Six: Rikyu Gray, Baroque, and Camp : Ambiguity and Ambivalence.
New York Times (Andy Grundberg) -- Gordon Parks, the photographer, filmmaker, writer and composer who used his prodigious, largely self-taught talents to chronicle the African-American experience and to retell his own personal history, died yesterday at his home in Manhattan. He was 93.
Read the full story by Andy Grundberg at the New York Times website.
Although I have seen ready recognition of the influence of African sculpture in Picasso’s work I have never seen any mention specifically made of Picasso’s Camera with it’s cracked lens given to him by the Italian futurist Gino Severini around 1905.
"The box camera’s cracked lens caused the facial plane in Picasso’s photo-portraits to be broken themselves, and raised slightly on one side. Attributes he would soon utilize and transpose to his early sketches and preparatory drawings for the seminal LES DEMOISELLES D’AVIGNON."
Edward Steichen viewed the photos on a studio visit and sent several to Alfred Steiglitz, two of which were published in Cameraworks. Steichen would later say: "The images were like the meeting of a shepherd and a mermaid on the trunk of a Buick.â€Â
UPDATE: 18/06/2006
Fresh from the Glowing Red Cheeks Dept. is the embarrassing realisation that this appears to have been a prank all along. See comment #3 below.
