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Art and Literature (Read 7497 times)
Psychotronic
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Art and Literature
04.04.2007 at 06:16:30
 
You're right, Ryos. This conversation is off-topic. I don't want people looking for contest information getting bogged down reading about surrealists. Oh, here's a perfectly good forum for this discussion! Hoorah!

So, Joe, I have Godel, Escher, Bach, but I never finished it. I moved while I was in the middle of it, and it's now packed in one of the boxes I haven't cracked open yet. I was mainly interested in the book because of his idea that human consciousness was actually created by some sort of unresolved logical loops, but I never got far enough into the book to understand his reasoning.

Anyway, I see what you were saying about the inversions. I was going by the visual quality. I was obsessed with M.C. Escher for a while, but I work at an art gallery, so I've gradually lost interest in the flashier intellectual concept artists in favor of more expressive and abstract pieces. I'm a Kandinski man, if you try and pin me down, and I've spent hours, literally, staring at a single Jackson Pollack. My Dali and Escher posters from college are languishing in a roll on a shelf, while my walls are full of textured resin pieces and heavily abstracted landscapes. Ah, times change.
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ryos
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Re: Art and Literature
Reply #1 - 04.04.2007 at 06:58:45
 
Funny - I'm about your opposite where art is concerned. For me, art has to do at least one of two things:

1) Look nice, or
2) Pull some cool intellectually-stimulating visual trick, a la Escher.

If a piece of art manages to express something while still accomplishing either of those two things, then that's fine too, but to me, expression in art is not important. Sadly, abstract art can do both of the above, but more frequently eschews them and focuses solely on expressing something. (The OS X abstract desktop backgrounds are good examples of nice-looking abstracts that don't take themselves too seriously.)

I've heard it said that expression is the point of art. Well, I guess I don't like art then, because I just don't care. Call me a commoner if you like. Smiley

Fortunately, there's room for both of us in the world of art. Unfortunately, the world of art seems to subscribe to trends and shuns any who don't comply, and right now, abstract is "in". Ah well.
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Freddy
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Re: Art and Literature
Reply #2 - 05.04.2007 at 04:21:05
 
Since I have a job in the cultural area ... I really love Escher.

And René Magritte is a Belgian artist of course! I would be ashamed if I didn't know that.
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aquaMat
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Re: Art and Literature
Reply #3 - 06.04.2007 at 20:30:26
 
I was a huge Escher fan when I was young (16-20), too... I still like him now...but he's a bit over-exposed, I feel....
I also liked the literary surrealists, dada etc. There was quite a vibrant scene in Germany in the early 20th century.

However I strongly oppose to ryos's view that art has to either "look nice" or "put some stimulating trick..." !!
Where would that leave masters like Jackson Pollock  or most of the expressionists, who made paintings that were definitely NOT nice and no "optical gimmick" either.....but are fantastic masterpieces, real high art.....??

Quite the contrary... I think.... the not-nice paintings are far more interesting than the nice ones (most of the time).
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joeb
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Re: Art and Literature
Reply #4 - 06.04.2007 at 22:15:15
 
Wow, what a bunch of interesting thoughts here.

@psychtronic:
I've finished the book (which I've had since the early 80s) but still have trouble with the propositional calculus. As I mentioned, its kind of like a Brief History of Time, I get to a certain point in the book and run smack into a comprehension wall. If you're interested in the human conciousness stuff I'd suggest The Origins of Conciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. A little bit different take on the foundations of what we call intelligence and our ability to look at ourselves from the outside.

@Freddy and all you European guys:
Born on the wrong side of the ocean so I've never had any exposure to the history surrounding the birthplace of intellectual man. Being a child in the early cold war/post WWII era and then having the 60's explode on me I never had a chance to appreciate history until I got older and "wiser".

Anyway, it's pretty cool to listen to all the different thoughts and opinions on this board and be involved with a group of people that actually stimulate thought. Working in the IT/IM world the thought tends to be rigid and structured along the lines of the latest fads in process control. Which is probably why my mansions tend to be so linear. As Mr Mojo Rising once said, "Break on thru to the other side"
Time to start pounding on the door I guess....

Joe B
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ryos
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Re: Art and Literature
Reply #5 - 06.04.2007 at 23:36:50
 
aquaMat wrote on 06.04.2007 at 20:30:26:
However I strongly oppose to ryos's view that art has to either "look nice" or "put some stimulating trick..." !!
Where would that leave masters like Jackson Pollock  or most of the expressionists, who made paintings that were definitely NOT nice and no "optical gimmick" either.....but are fantastic masterpieces, real high art.....??

Quite the contrary... I think.... the not-nice paintings are far more interesting than the nice ones (most of the time).


*googles Jackson Pollock*

I found this page, and from what I've seen there, he's kind of a mixed bag.

For example, I like his "She Wolf". If you look at the scaled-down thumbnail on the page (akin to standing back from the painting), the distorted figure of a she-wolf appears, complete with overused teats. Click the thumbnail (walk up to the painting), and the figure dissolves completely into a chaotic mishmash of shapes. It then becomes like finding figures in the clouds as you try to see how many forms you can recognize in the mess. That's a cool visual trick!

Or take "Male and Female". It is surreally beautiful to me, and has the added bonus of symbolism in its many hidden figures. Nice.

But then consider "Eyes in the Heat", which looks like a microscopic photo of heart tissue, or "Full Fathom Five", which looks like what it is (paint dribbled on the floor). If that's art, then I know a few house painters who feel seriously underpaid. I've seen more interesting paint dribbles on the floors of unfinished houses.

So...where does that leave Jackson Pollock? Mostly out of work!  Smiley

But...as I said, I have no use for "higher art". Maybe I'm a commoner. Or maybe I'm an engineering student, so I apply that same mindset to art ("That doesn't look like anything, and it's ugly! Why did he bother?"). You decide. Wink

But...also as I said, there's room for all of us in the world of art. There's no reason for me to be offended that some people think "Full Fathom Five" is a masterpiece of expression while all I see are dribbles on the floor. What does offend and embitter me is that the art world lends so much credence to the current vogue to the exclusion of all other styles of merit. For a while, that was abstract and expressionism; I don't know what's "in" now because I haven't kept up.
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Psychotronic
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Re: Art and Literature
Reply #6 - 07.04.2007 at 02:22:00
 
Well, I don't want to argue with you, because you've got your mind made up, but I would be very careful about passing any sort of judgment on a painter based on a picture you've seen on the internet. Pollack's paintings don't look like much on a screen because they're paintings. They're three dimensional and meaty and often huge. I've spent hours looking at a single Pollack at the National Gallery or the Seattle Art Museum or wherever, because it can be an intense and emotional experience. I don't know what you think "higher art" means, but for me, it's about feeling a strong connection to an artist who has managed to communicate something truthful about themselves through a piece of artwork, and it's about learning something valuable about who I am through that experience. Really good artists, like Pollack, can make that happen. Abstraction and expressionism aren't just a fad or a vogue, because we'll never run out of artists who have their own unique point of view, and with luck, some of them will always be talented.

The reason I couldn't stay interested in Escher is that he doesn't have the emotional impact that other artists have. I was probably 25 years old before I ever saw a painting that made me feel something profound, but once that happened, I really couldn't go back to Dali and Escher and Giger.
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ryos
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Re: Art and Literature
Reply #7 - 07.04.2007 at 14:50:50
 
Psychotronic wrote on 07.04.2007 at 02:22:00:
Well, I don't want to argue with you, because you've got your mind made up,

Hey...I've been known to change my mind before. It's not unheard of. So argue away! Smiley

Quote:
...but I would be very careful about passing any sort of judgment on a painter based on a picture you've seen on the internet. Pollack's paintings don't look like much on a screen because they're paintings. They're three dimensional and meaty and often huge.

Fair enough. I've been to the Denver Art Museum a few times, and I can definitely see what you mean. Some of the humongous pieces are stunning.

Quote:
I've spent hours looking at a single Pollack at the National Gallery or the Seattle Art Museum or wherever, because it can be an intense and emotional experience. I don't know what you think "higher art" means, but for me, it's about feeling a strong connection to an artist who has managed to communicate something truthful about themselves through a piece of artwork, and it's about learning something valuable about who I am through that experience. Really good artists, like Pollack, can make that happen. Abstraction and expressionism aren't just a fad or a vogue, because we'll never run out of artists who have their own unique point of view, and with luck, some of them will always be talented.


See, that's the first time anyone has ever made any attempt to explain to me the point of abstract art. I think that's mostly because there are very few (if any) non-art-lovers who actually understand, appreciate, and enjoy it! And I don't know many art lovers...can't think of any off the top of my head!

All I've ever heard is that they're "expressing." The natural question is, "expressing what?" In the case of abstract art, it seems that no mere mortal can ascertain the answer to that question without training, and nobody with training seems willing to explain. All the layman (well, me) can see is a bunch of noise that doesn't add up to anything. The natural reaction is, "People get paid to make that junk? Anyone can splatter paint on a canvas, so how is that art?"

With time, I've come to associate "expression" with "nonsensical garbage that I don't understand" and therefore "that thing that ruins every artist and piece of art it touches." Can you see how I might come to view expression in art, and especially expressionism, with bitterness and contempt?

Now, thanks to you, I know a little of the what and why of abstract art and expression, and I have questions. Questions like: how can an image that doesn't mean anything evoke emotion? Is there something about abstraction that lends itself to the encoding of emotions in visual form? Because it seems to me that an image that looks like something identifiable would do a much better job of, ahem, identifying what it's talking about.

And, finally...is art better at conveying emotion than music? Because music practically *is* emotion, distilled into audible form. Music stinks at communicating ideas, though, something that art can excel at.

Sorry for all the questions; you don't have to answer if you don't feel like it. I'm just excited because I'm closer to unraveling one of the great mysteries of the universe (abstract art and why it exists) than I ever have been before. Will you help me understand? Grin

Quote:
The reason I couldn't stay interested in Escher is that he doesn't have the emotional impact that other artists have. I was probably 25 years old before I ever saw a painting that made me feel something profound, but once that happened, I really couldn't go back to Dali and Escher and Giger.


Hiuh. Maybe I'm just too young then. Wink As they say in Spain, "¡Me falta un año todavía!"
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Freddy
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Re: Art and Literature
Reply #8 - 07.04.2007 at 22:36:58
 
Just generally. I just read something. Art doesn't need to be beautiful , nice, etc. It only needs to be shocking. And in its earliest days it was shocking because of its beauty, its realism, ... But, since we have seen that all before, that is why Esher, Dali, Picasso, ... each in their own way are always stunning when you saw them the "first" time". But when the shock is over ... Simply, we always need an other appetizer. Compare it with Christo or Spencer Tunick. At first it is stunning and then we very fast say: just an other variation, but that theme we have seen before!

Shocked Shocked Shocked
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Psychotronic
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Re: Art and Literature
Reply #9 - 08.04.2007 at 02:03:45
 
Quote:
See, that's the first time anyone has ever made any attempt to explain to me the point of abstract art. I think that's mostly because there are very few (if any) non-art-lovers who actually understand, appreciate, and enjoy it! And I don't know many art lovers...can't think of any off the top of my head!


Well, most art lovers are very annoying to be around. Some of them have their own specific ideas about what makes art good or bad and get really huffy when you don't agree with them, some just like everything, and some people - frankly- are faking it so they can hang around with the cool crowd.

Quote:
All I've ever heard is that they're "expressing." The natural question is, "expressing what?" In the case of abstract art, it seems that no mere mortal can ascertain the answer to that question without training, and nobody with training seems willing to explain. All the layman (well, me) can see is a bunch of noise that doesn't add up to anything. The natural reaction is, "People get paid to make that junk? Anyone can splatter paint on a canvas, so how is that art?"


Well, part of the problem is that art appreciation is mostly an intuitive thing. A lesson, no matter how generous and articulate, can't substitute for simply hanging around a lot of art over time. Abstract art must be a nightmare for professors at college, because instead of talking about the skill of the artist to represent reality accurately, they have to start asking a bunch of self-involved college students how particular paintings make them feel. I wouldn't want that job. I might just start telling them what's good and what's not, and that's probably what happens most of the time.

Most people fall into one of two camps, like on the Jung personality test. Those who are very intuitive have difficulty articulating what it is they are feeling - or more accurately, why they feel the way they do - and those who are very articulate are usually not aware of the subtleties of their own emotions. So it's rare to find someone who can bridge the gap.

Quote:
With time, I've come to associate "expression" with "nonsensical garbage that I don't understand" and therefore "that thing that ruins every artist and piece of art it touches." Can you see how I might come to view expression in art, and especially expressionism, with bitterness and contempt?


Sure. I feel the same way about punk music.

Quote:
Now, thanks to you, I know a little of the what and why of abstract art and expression, and I have questions. Questions like: how can an image that doesn't mean anything evoke emotion? Is there something about abstraction that lends itself to the encoding of emotions in visual form? Because it seems to me that an image that looks like something identifiable would do a much better job of, ahem, identifying what it's talking about.


I can make a stab at this, but I'm really not trained at all, and I've never had a lot of patience for the official explanations of artistic merit. I just have my own ideas, and of course I've seen a bunch of art. But your next question is a good place to start from.

Quote:
And, finally...is art better at conveying emotion than music? Because music practically *is* emotion, distilled into audible form. Music stinks at communicating ideas, though, something that art can excel at.


We're used to using our eyes to get information, and we're used to using our other senses to find out how we should feel about the information we have. That makes visual art a little counter-intuitive, but it might also be what makes it so neat. You use your eyes in a way that you're not accustomed.

It might help if you tried to think of abstract art in exactly the way you describe music: emotion, distilled into visual form. My breakthrough with Pollack was when I was looking at one of those giant conglomerations of paint drips, and I suddenly started thinking of it as Pollack's internal landscape.

When you close your eyes, things don't go black. There's a mess of static and globs and rapidly shifting multi-colored goofiness behind your eyes, and it's probably utterly meaningless. But there's also a full-body landscape of sensations and hormones and memories and thoughts and the emotional context of those thoughts, all coming and going rapidly. And each person's landscape is unique (probably).

An abstract artist places colors and shapes and drips on a canvas in a particular way because his instinct tells him that's where they should go. If his internal landscape were different, his instincts would be different, and he would make different color choices and balance the whole thing differently. So the end result is, in a way, a picture of the way the artist was feeling when he created it. And in another way, it's a picture of who the artist is. When you look at an abstract painting, you're kind of reverse-engineering it to discover why it looks the way it does. What kind of person, in what kind of state, would make the kind of thing you happen to be looking at?

Now, some people just instinctively perform that reverse engineering when they look at a painting, just like some socially intuitive people can tell how other people are feeling without a lot of external hints. But for the rest of us, it's a skill that we can get better at with practice.

Essentially, when you look at a painting, you're making contact with another human being. Good paintings are generally made by interesting people with strong emotional lives, who have the talent and the honesty to put a piece of themselves into every piece of art they make. So when you go through the process of interpreting the painting (which is lightning-fast, once you get used to it), you run into that interesting, emotional, talented person, and you can't help but feel something. Boring people make boring paintings, and highly intellectual people make sterile paintings. And children make innocent paintings without the weight of experience and pain in them, which is why there's a difference between children's scribbles and abstract art.

That's what it is at a very basic level, but you won't hear that from any art professor, because there's a lot of theory that can be more easily taught in lectures - different colors make you feel different ways, the golden mean is visually appealing, etc. - but at the heart of it, I think you have to remember that a piece of artwork is a unique thing that only one person in the world could have made, and there's a reason why it turned out the way it did. The worth of your experience with that piece of art comes in understanding the connection between its form and the intention behind it, and why you react to it the way you do. And if you don't have a reaction, given that you're open to having one in the first place, then it doesn't "speak to you". And that's where that phrase comes from.

Representational art - pictures of recognizable things - can have an emotional impact, of course, but it trades on the emotional connotations we have linked with those objects in our minds, so the process of looking at a representational work is a little different. By necessity, a picture of nothing needs to be interpreted, so the level of viewer participation is a little higher.


That's my take on it, but there's another useful starting point that my dad, who is a painter and art professor himself, harps on. A really good realistic painting has an almost magical sense of depth, where far-away things look far away and close things look closer. And that's cool, because it's not a 3D thing; it's a totally flat picture. If an abstract artist, through the pure use of unidentifiable shapes and colors, can achieve a recognizable sense of depth, that's very cool. If you can somehow put an entire world on a canvas, a world that makes sense in terms of itself but can still relate to the real physical world, then you've done something amazing.
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