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Secrets of the Studio
As an exponent of organicism, and of the artwork that produces itself, I naturally find these words of Adorno very interesting: “…you will find that great tonal music actually bears some resemblance to...
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Unity
Unity or wholeness in art will always appear as the conservative choice. Take the politics out of it and it’s still bad because in my experience at least, reinforced every day in the studio, it is much...
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A Political Idea
According to Eckermann: “Goethe added that the idea of the whole, which turned upon aristocracy and democracy, was by no means of universal interest.” I think it significant that questions such as the...
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Animals All
Following on from the preceding post, here’s another few words from Adorno that fit well, this time from his unfinished book on Beethoven: “What I find so suspect in Kantian ethics is the ‘dignity’...
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Technology and Civilization
For a couple of centuries now the rhetoric of technical innovation has been pretty consistent. Apparently technology has revolutionized all of life and transformed evolution itself. The first question...
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Professionalism as Ending
I know that the previous post ended on an apparent contradiction. Rothko’s mature and characteristic work certainly looks strong in comparison to what preceded it—simplified, clarified,...
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Wilhelm Worringer
Recently I put up a post on Wilhelm Worringer’s classic book, Abstraction and Empathy. It worked off an earlier post about Michel Serres, but I didn’t give it much importance; it was something of a...
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Impossible
A recent short piece by Barry Schwabsky on Ad Reinhardt struck an obscure chord in me. Obscure because so far it’s private. He suggests that Reinhardt’s most cherished ideals and his greatest ambition...
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Caminero and Ai
The tale of the broken vase has come to an end, and in an August 14th. article in the NYT we can read “Mr. Caminero’s lawyer…said: ‘My client has learned what is appropriate behavior for an artist to...
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No Meaning
How does one answer the charge of nihilism? Just observe that nature is nihilist. And that meaning is myth.
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Enlightenment
Lately I’ve been enjoying Andrea Fraser’s writings, and I’m not sure that blog readers who follow me to Stella, Barré, Motherwell or Riley will also come along that way. The fact is that I am a...
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Chaos Shimmering Through
In an old copy of the NYRB I just found an article about Alfred Brendel, who quotes the poet Novalis: “Chaos, in a work of art, should shimmer through the veil of order.” So now I can see where...
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Lost Boundaries
One moment in Lane Relyea’s book that caught my attention was this: “The rise of networks might not mean the end of of all insides and outsides, but it does mean that, with boundaries and the...
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Procrastination
I found a thoughtful but also very amusing article in the NYT, by Anna Della Subin. The topic is procrastination, and she begins with the story of St. Expeditus: According to legend, when the Roman...
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The Basics
John Berger could be a stupidly moralistic critic, but he was perceptive. He notoriously rejected Pollock as a decadent of the age of individualism, meaning he didn’t really understand Pollock at all,...
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The Liteness of Kandinsky
I’ve always had problems with Kandinsky. One is his scaleless space, but more about that another time. Another, which I’ve only just began to clarify for myself, is the arbitrariness of his...
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Aesthetically Pleasing
The previous two posts on Kandinsky might draw the objection that his works do have an order, namely beauty or the indefinable feeling of aesthetic quality. That’s a hard point to argue with, but it...
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Black Rain
Thinking about Kandinsky’s disregard for any tight or comprehensive order, I realize that I don’t quite agree. I want an organic kind of closure, if you could call it that. Poussin after nature, as...
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Art and Nature Today
The trouble with ideas is that everyone has them at the same time. That’s why art is better—the concrete particular is one thing, in one place at one time. One of my favorite chapters in the book is on...
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Once upon the Cephalopodocene
Just to go back to the article by Donna Haraway mentioned in the previous post—it’s pretty good in the way she describes the incredible complexity of the biosphere as a whole, single system. When we...
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