taliesin...meImyself......ART (6.15.97)

I used to paint, but not anymore. Some of my works will be included at Taliesin in a section dealing with my college thesis. The section is not ready yet -- yes, yes, yes, nag, nag, nag; I'm working hard on it, really! It's just that the works and attendant thoughts are a bit out of date, and embarrassing to consider again.

As for my taste in art...a wide variety. I do tend to prefer the representational. There's this whole silly argument in 20th century art history about representational being philosophically untrue and deceiving which I think is just totally frivolous. While people may have hung painted facsimiles to satisfy unfulfilled craving for possession, the astronomical sums paid for abstract art nowadays certainly showed that when the craving knows no bound there's no stopping to it abstract or otherwise. Abstraction has its own danger of becoming a fetish. Having said so much against abstraction, I nonetheless like quite a few abstract paintings, such as those by the Soviet Constructivists or the American Abstract Expressionists.

Yet I do find something infinitely more moving in the (il-)logic of the representational, in taking a facsimiles that is at the same time similar yet different -- they're just paint dabs after all -- to stand for the real. The visual similarity just underlines the differences all the more between the representation and the represented. The more the tension between the similarities and the differences, the more fascinating it is. The experience is especially intense if you're familiar with the process of production, with the aggrevating amount of time it takes to realize that facsimile. Perhaps for this reason -- a question of time, of delay -- photography, because of the speedy appearance of its imagery, never really captivates me as much as the more traditional media do.

The aesthetic experience I strive/look for is simultaneously sublime and beautiful, obsessively near-sighted yet coherently integrated -- not so much homogeneous but complexly balanced. Makes absolutely no sense I'm sure. In fact, I can't really reason about it nor proscribe a way of arriving at it. When it happens upon me, it's quite a religious experience, paralyzing almost -- you don't know whether to cry or what.

I should further qualify that I don't make a clear cut distinction between the art discipline and all the other things in life. While in terms of social organization, the division of labor is probably inevitable, yet the implications cut across labor classifications. The way we talk about any of the professions as if our experiences can be separated into distinct categories such as work, entertainment, politics, religion, philosophy, etc. just dumbfounds me. But that does not mean I'd prefer conceptual artworks. In fact, as I used to paint, I also appreciate the abstract plastic qualities in artworks. So, those artworks which are purely conceptual and one-dimensional (i.e. one sentence thoughts translated into visuals) don't interest me a whole lot. But enough of the negatives...Now a list of a few 'masters' and/or works (and sometime lives) which amused me, accompanied by my own, sometimes uninformed, commentaries...

N O N . W E S T E R N . A R T

• The Benin bronze relief-sculpture plaques from Nigeria on the wall of the grand staircase at the British Museum. Very dramatic where they're situated, these expertly carved forms are so expressive in a lingoistic way -- restrained forms in a complex articulation.
  
  
• Wooden totem poles and cermonial canoes from one of the Oceanian tribes which are on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Arts in NYC. The things depicted are a bit obscene from our Western perspective, but the soaring verticals and horizontals coupled with the jagged lines and forms of the carvings are quite exhilarating. The decontexturalized space of a museum can be so useful at times.

P R E . R E N A I S S A N C E

• Some of the vase drawings of Greek Antiquity are quite expressive despite the schematic execution. In fact I prefer the less naturalistic early vases. And the intricacy of Greek gold jewelry is just awe-inspiring. Now why can't we with our ability to produce microchips produce something equally intricate in the sphere of art. Difference of social priorities I guess.
  
  
• Masterpieces of medieval Celtic manuscripts like the Book of Kells and the Lindisfarne Gospels. Those scribes must have had a lot of fun smuggling amazing little creatures into the decoration of the holy writ. The obssessive intricate interlaces have an expressive vitality of their own -- again, restrained yet euphoric.

R E N A I S S A N C E . & . B A R O Q U E

• Georges De La Tour, whose Irene is my vision of grief and sadness. He's quite good with the rendering of babies in an age of miniature adults mascarading as babies. And having seen the current traveling exhibition of his works, I must also add that the real thing is definitely better than small reproduction. For example, the sympathetic dignity he gave to his hurdy-gurdy players through the scale of the paintings just cannot be conveyed in a book or on a screen.
  
  
• All the standard major figures who painted portraits... El Greco, Frans Hals, Rembrandt van Rijn, Anthony Van Dyck, Jan Van Eyck, Jan Vermeer, etc. What can I say, the human form fascinates me.

I N D U S T R I A L . A G E

• On the side of nostalgic Romanticism, a few of the British Symbolists and Victorian painters... Lawrence Alma-Tadema, Edward Burne-Jones, John Waterhouse, although Alma-Tadema does have a bit of the modern obsession with 'scientific accuracy'. Case in point, for a scene set in the Roman Coliseum, he painted exactly the number of spectators he had calculated would be visible based on know fact about the capacity of the Coliseum. Another funny tidbit: he became a master at painting marbles in response to an early criticism that his first attempt at depicting marble 'looked like cheese'. Burne-Jones and Waterhouse are for the misty-eyed romantic little girls in my psyche.
  
  
• And the forward looking Post-Impressionist descendant of Realism Paul Cézanne, in whose works there's a sense of solidity of forms in spite of the un-ignorable paint dabs which constantly threaten to dissolve the composition. Great sense of colors too.

E A R L Y / M I D . 2 0 T H . C E N T U R Y

• Marcel Duchamp...funny guy. Quite an artwork himself. I love his nonchalant attitude. The idiosyncratic symbolic system that he devised for his works is quite something. A great example is The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass), 1915-23, which should really be seen with the attendant notes mapping out the iconography. But you can view an image of just the work itself at Fresh Widow 3000, a site devoted to Duchamp. Also love his valises--portable museums of replicas of his earlier works. Lots of puns and play on different forms of representation to expand art beyond the traditional media and definition of the discipline.
  
  
• Gustav Klimt's beautiful paintings and Egon Schiele's great sense of forms and lines. Again, there's the fascinating sense of tension between the representational subject and the flattening visual devises: Klimt with his subjects blending or disappearing into a sea of patterns in both his landscapes and portraits; and Schiele with his flat areas of colors which are nonetheless not homogeneous. Although Schiele's drawings are great, I'm piqued by his oil paintings which I never seen live and up front. The closest was at the Guiggenheim Muesum with its great but dysfunctional cylindrical Frank Lloyd Wright building -- utterly useless for focusing attention on the paintings themselves, which are kept a distance because of the architecture.
  
  
• Hans Hoffman, whose abstract expressionist paintings are best experienced live; photographs just don't capture the vivacity of the colors as well as their scale and tactile quality. Coming from the old world and a teacher to quite a few of the American Abstract Expressionists, he's a whisp of a too often over-looked cross-Atlantic link. He was doing the drip method of paint application before Jackson Pollock made a name for himself using this technique, albeit with a difference in composition.

C O N T E M P O R A R Y

• Mark Tansey, whose monotone illustration style paintings of paradoxes composed with images culled from the mass media again exploits the issue of representational truth. Coming from a family of art historians, his paintings are littered with academic references. You'll even see all the modern day big shot theoreticians like Derrida and Barthes alongside the Duchamps and American Abstract Expressionists. These concerns as well as his investment of significance in the painting making process I find very sympathetic to my own conerns and method.
  
  
• Gerhard Richter's works are best viewed collectively as his repertoire synchronically spans both ends of the representational-abstract debate -- not that this debate is the only one he tackles. His execution is quite good on both ends -- smooth, clean, and visually pleasant -- which makes it easier to move on to the issues he's trying to explore through the works rather than getting stuck over jarringly unpleasant imageries.
  
  
• Anselm Kiefer, whose mythic and tactile leaden works are best experienced live because of their epic scale. In small and flat reproductions they just seem dull and ugly.