tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29877368541761654872024-03-26T10:07:15.656-04:00PaintingMy struggle to keep the language of painting aliveMartin Mugarhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12799696151828817646noreply@blogger.comBlogger123125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2987736854176165487.post-71256620298956178742024-03-15T08:22:00.061-04:002024-03-26T10:00:48.582-04:00Latest conflation: Lovecraft Mugar and Houellebecq <p> In literary tastes I was never a fan of science fiction or the horrific tales of Stephen King. Only Realism or so to say the focus on the depiction of the here and now, captured my interest. That is how I started my career as an artist as well. I used the tools of perception: value,color and perspective to create verisimilitude. I found that no matter where I was in time and space I could always set up a still life or pose myself in front of the landscape to find a story to tell. The fact of the matter I have not read much in the realm of realism since college and since the 90’s most of my reading has been in philosophy. At first Nietzsche and Schopenhauer but by the late 90’s the French postmodern and its origin in the work of Heidegger totally absorbed me. The postmodern also had an influence on the art world in its making not just after the fact analysis. My reading of it gave me a linguistic handle on the kind of painting coming out of New York. Initially I had no idea that my blogging was coming to the attention of art critics. I would write a blog and post it on other blog sites or email to friends. For a while when it was a free ezine I commented quite a bit on Hyperallergic. It was there in response to an essay by John Yau on a kind of abstraction coming out of New York that I came up with the moniker Zombie abstraction to describe that art scene(None of the participants accepted the label). Several months later Walter Robinson on Artnet described the work as Zombie Formalism. Due to his establishment as an artist and art critic in the NY art world his labeling caught on and now ten years later AI gives him all the credit. Except for several mentions of my role by Raphael Rubinstein I pretty much accepted being peripheral to the discussion. Followers on my blog pointed out that my writing had been noticed by the art critical community. First in an article Rubinstein wrote on French abstraction titled “Theory and Matter” in “Art in America” where he gave me precedence in coming up with Zombie Formalism before Robinson. Now many years later an Italian PHD student who is studying the whole postmodern phenomena in painting for his PHD thesis and was quoting my work as source material. He pointed out a reference in an essay by Rubinstein to my blogging on the Italian philosopher Vattimo and how Rubinstein himself would have benefitted from reading him due to the resemblance of Rubinstein’s notion of provisional painting to Vattimo’s “Weak Thought”. In the essay He admitted to having heard of him second hand but only on my prompting did he read Vattimo. He agreed on the role Vatimmo could play in explaining Provisional painters and although he didn’t think the provisional artists were “weak” in any way. So unbeknownst to me my ideas had infiltrated the postmodern discussion and were having an effect on how it was being formulated. </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgP0jZmc2aUMCUtWwhGBOkFaxJnDWUjn70oaxHs3F5S8GzOYgm2e65Gx8vkqfviUcDpiqcROpP52rfNOkxsOrJKPmGmI1Uzp7qgoLOaZ5r5h6v3vai0DdTvbHeov8Ka8hJgPnnsdjCPppuP_-6jdoAR26V92K-539lEM-gLIrk-B_V5RhlY5sz4DK2gVCR-" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="136" data-original-width="200" height="218" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgP0jZmc2aUMCUtWwhGBOkFaxJnDWUjn70oaxHs3F5S8GzOYgm2e65Gx8vkqfviUcDpiqcROpP52rfNOkxsOrJKPmGmI1Uzp7qgoLOaZ5r5h6v3vai0DdTvbHeov8Ka8hJgPnnsdjCPppuP_-6jdoAR26V92K-539lEM-gLIrk-B_V5RhlY5sz4DK2gVCR-" width="320" /></a></div><p></p><p><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span>Danvers Sanitarium(Arkham)</span><br /></p><p>Having a philosophical handle such as Vattimo’s “Weak Thought” was valuable in my encounter with second generation abstraction. Having a word like Nihilism that allowed me to find connections between Andy Warhol and Flannery O’Connor was indispensable. Words like that could label a whole generation. Lately, I find my own work beginning to make sense in the hands of the master of the macabre HP Lovecraft. Like Stephen King not someone I would go out of my way to read. But a series of encounters and recollections are beginning to haunt me and create a sort of nexus with the world of Lovecraft, a kind of hauntology to use a word invented by Derrida. It started with a book on Lovecraft by Michel Houellebecq from the 90’s. I bought it already some years ago and it has been sitting on my desk, half chewed up by my dog, perused off and on until lately where I am now three quarters of the way through. I was surprised it predated his extremely popular fiction by many years and must have been formative in shaping his world view. It appears the work was published to address the curiosity of a emerging interest in Lovecraft’s work and all things American in France. It included several of his horror stories. Just as Poe found more followers in France among the litterati than in the USA so it would be with Lovecraft. I had bought the book after reading Houellebecq’s “Elementary Particles” that I found interesting especially in so far as it resembled the nihilistic world view of Celine whose “Journey to the End of the Night” is up there on the top ten novels that I have read. The connections to my work I am still sorting out. Some of it is incidental . Considering that Stephen King provides an introduction to the book Lovecraft’s reputation in France was already cemented.</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhHx6B88WQYylL4_tMw4fCcdQ2f6So-UbR4KkP2oK7AmrnvxQWC8k0PlNgXvyb8DZZmzMMh8xG7s2gh7GR54J8IgRGrbj3KrznXOsvcYQLFxS6JrKw_kxDH3IfBrT1in1oyMvC6qzCE_H9yERYsgGuNdY6TaU3FXuzRno9lHwVZVGEZfdPyytSIuTfA8BiW" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1245" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhHx6B88WQYylL4_tMw4fCcdQ2f6So-UbR4KkP2oK7AmrnvxQWC8k0PlNgXvyb8DZZmzMMh8xG7s2gh7GR54J8IgRGrbj3KrznXOsvcYQLFxS6JrKw_kxDH3IfBrT1in1oyMvC6qzCE_H9yERYsgGuNdY6TaU3FXuzRno9lHwVZVGEZfdPyytSIuTfA8BiW" width="187" /></a></div><br />Houellebecq </div><br /></div><p></p><p>I read enough of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michel_Houellebecq">Houellebecq</a>’s book on Lovecraft to learn that the background of his work is 19th c New England but mythologized. It does not take long to peer behind the neologisms to get to the real places. One place that establishes the first connection to me is the world of Arkham that with some probing appears to be Salem, Massachusetts. A suburb of Salem is Danvers where a very gothic sanitarium was built and is referenced in Lovecraft's books. I remembered the building from my childhood as the mental hospital where my grandfather spent time as his mental health deteriorated. I have a distinct memory of his waving to us from his bedroom window as we left the hospital grounds. The hospital that was part of the skyline of Danvers seen from Route 1 has since been torn down.</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEiGYzNm62K7U1_Lslqx_4EaOS_Lt1pZChEIlE7WtgF5Kru8er2glZreZU0xC5ZBlxsxF33XBViqPI747oth9m0_kFaFmnnpvqDLHHeQW0BCM_lBgH62t3nWdGTMkW-uXMhO3THa2rTNPcXh1417VL2KEfnAAiU38qd9KAuh5wvNnAbu79CuYlFEVXtq4oYi" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="540" data-original-width="440" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEiGYzNm62K7U1_Lslqx_4EaOS_Lt1pZChEIlE7WtgF5Kru8er2glZreZU0xC5ZBlxsxF33XBViqPI747oth9m0_kFaFmnnpvqDLHHeQW0BCM_lBgH62t3nWdGTMkW-uXMhO3THa2rTNPcXh1417VL2KEfnAAiU38qd9KAuh5wvNnAbu79CuYlFEVXtq4oYi" width="196" /></a></div> <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H._P._Lovecraft">Lovecraft</a><br /><br /><p></p><p>“The Call of Cthulhu” is one of two stories included in the Houellebecq book. The monsters in particular Cthulhu are described in the contradistinction between their weirdness and foulness and the dour and puritanical new England scientists trying with their expertise to put a label on strange happenings that escape the normal events of the New England landscape. It becomes clear that the monsters or “noxious” beings as he likes to refer to them are not divine and Houellebecq insists that they have a parallel existence in relation to us not vertically arrayed as in Christian eschatology but hidden since time immemorial disappearing from our world only to reappear at various times to disrupt the overly civilized world of New England. It appears that the civilizational edge was the border between New England and New York. His recollections of his first encounter of the New York Skyline defines for him the totally “other” as did the masses of immigrants that filled the streets as something he had a hard time identifying with. All opinions based on knowledge of his character point to a deeply engrained racism. Cthulhu and his minions appear for the most part to sailors who encounter them on the edge of the civilized world. </p><p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H._P._Lovecraft">Lovecraft </a>who wrote in the earlier half of the 20thc did not have much success with publishing his writing but in the world of writers of the same ilk he had a following as an innovator and mentor. No sooner did he pass away then the world “discovered” him and brought him to the attention of the general public. His notoriety began.</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEh8f7e75nKTtgiha6qK5Jvg2gkVcsRyHMQSM9Lm8tjJN5m3EhPQwEGJ8PCXeiZEtMinLWM7mPCKGmv2ls85bni1ITXEG-gML6H0W2FXNUXY-_X4R1dikLRXT-NIXADtkyeZibi609p4-qyLJKfzn64WR5jDrTGGLZxm5ekophIfSOx5iNiaZGBm2Taa9fKH" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="804" data-original-width="804" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEh8f7e75nKTtgiha6qK5Jvg2gkVcsRyHMQSM9Lm8tjJN5m3EhPQwEGJ8PCXeiZEtMinLWM7mPCKGmv2ls85bni1ITXEG-gML6H0W2FXNUXY-_X4R1dikLRXT-NIXADtkyeZibi609p4-qyLJKfzn64WR5jDrTGGLZxm5ekophIfSOx5iNiaZGBm2Taa9fKH" width="240" /></a></div><p></p><p> Heavy Metal Poster</p><p>Oddly enough a world within which he has gained a good deal of fame is in <a href="https://rateyourmusic.com/list/NeinSanity/lovecraftian-themed-metal-bands/1/">Heavy Metal</a> music. Images from his stories appear on their posters and album covers. Considering his proud identification as a well behaved and well-dressed product of New England gentry his resurrection by head bangers is nothing short of bizarre. If you see the heavy metal crowd as wishing to tap into the formless hell that a character like Cthulhu embodies or rather disembodies than it all makes more sense. Their music’s goal is to terrify the audience. Lovecraft’s writing attempts the same with a repetitive incantation of adjectives that tries to give a shape to a rather shapeless identity. </p><p><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgiqyvU0PihuLDzcloPzwnfbkP0LgMiw-ZmrFWpGelHVk3HsA4WlH7idl8MlfRYqXQw_nvn_6p26hsUKUBvvkHrWp8-6HfmwJjhTRaSSxSb2-1xzlEUuEo2uz4ixJ9stbb4NuCJG0S8MIUr2XxY8okhxmcP1GmuVC-VuzTpr46zEkfOO1KdOKEWVHpg59BJ" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="746" data-original-width="560" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgiqyvU0PihuLDzcloPzwnfbkP0LgMiw-ZmrFWpGelHVk3HsA4WlH7idl8MlfRYqXQw_nvn_6p26hsUKUBvvkHrWp8-6HfmwJjhTRaSSxSb2-1xzlEUuEo2uz4ixJ9stbb4NuCJG0S8MIUr2XxY8okhxmcP1GmuVC-VuzTpr46zEkfOO1KdOKEWVHpg59BJ" width="180" /></a></div> Heavy Metal Poster<br /><br /><p></p><p>Finally I found that Lovecraft’s writing might explain a period of my work that I produced in the late 90’s into the first millennia. It got a lot of sympathetic coverage by the Boston Press especially numerous reviews by <a href="https://twitter.com/cmcq?lang=en">Cate McQuaid </a>from the late 90’s in Provincetown into the first decade of the millennia in Boston where she seemed to understand why I was using three dimensional strokes and pushing beyond the limits of flatness. That sympathy came to an end in 2013 at a show at the Bromfield Gallery that were much more obviously aggressive. She just said it all looked the same. Yet, before dismissing them she did notice something about the strokes that I only noticed recently in her review: ”Some of the strokes looked like sliding snails leaving their glistening tracks”. Displeasing and in contradiction to her statement that it all looked the same. This organic reference is the direction I wanted to work to take. Also, I wanted the meaning of the painting to be embodied in each mark. Is this the first hint of the effect of Cthulhu? Ms McQuaid is not a head banging metal head obviously and would not take a conceptual leap with me to the next level I should say “Down” not up.</p><p><br /></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgFAU9PGm9n-OLakvPfInzrCpXHZDlp6VJSHfgRqBbRT87KjOhFVFTynDLn87XvldMDObrRe1Q1Jb1TIbYF9Fddm2aQqbLGlQVq_HisVT0OD9_v2tqOyBJpsHVBuBAZYSi8O75kYhDdDJuKI-H-ox5HUFtOfeOUZJITDUyt8BU3lNao-RxXA7XBch3wYko_" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="938" data-original-width="1166" height="360" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgFAU9PGm9n-OLakvPfInzrCpXHZDlp6VJSHfgRqBbRT87KjOhFVFTynDLn87XvldMDObrRe1Q1Jb1TIbYF9Fddm2aQqbLGlQVq_HisVT0OD9_v2tqOyBJpsHVBuBAZYSi8O75kYhDdDJuKI-H-ox5HUFtOfeOUZJITDUyt8BU3lNao-RxXA7XBch3wYko_=w447-h360" width="447" /></a></div> Mulch<br /><br /><p></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p>Dating from the mid- nineties: this painting came straight out of my head. Strung the ellipses and filled them with stripes. I called it “Mulch” as the ellipses seem to be digesting the stripes. Another title is “Every Body is talking at me” from Nillson. It has a schizoid edge to it</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgaLFDuIj8hVyjKF8AmtmbnogiDsKx4ibsk9eCBsd2N9FZCU1sILlLwZiskCcY845P9Zf7EolGknkkfMQl7W3ktKjCzlu6s9o66QnsayALYL2RFbSegDtl7GbVKIWrUrcFQKSV7vhXBqAa3cnHBv9csZclR4wem-QiukEDtU5NEXJbqwcRDTLgRVuXnU1vd" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="942" data-original-width="786" height="415" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgaLFDuIj8hVyjKF8AmtmbnogiDsKx4ibsk9eCBsd2N9FZCU1sILlLwZiskCcY845P9Zf7EolGknkkfMQl7W3ktKjCzlu6s9o66QnsayALYL2RFbSegDtl7GbVKIWrUrcFQKSV7vhXBqAa3cnHBv9csZclR4wem-QiukEDtU5NEXJbqwcRDTLgRVuXnU1vd=w317-h415" width="317" /></a></div><p></p><p> "Mean Clowns"</p><p> </p><p>A reworking of a painting similar to the last one. A title for this could be "Mean Clowns" This is as close to Lovecraft as I get at this point in my painting. I think I titled this "Footprints"</p><p><br /></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjMZkAivUxnBeLAtPL-6fSdvemAiqaaSeZiE_y5CXsvwOColTifBswhQjrVhOBdKoJPmB_O38rP-LFlal8R4VoWtQtINm4lPDTBOGWulHIBPkoFjFEGT0Mbp8EI6gYZ0107MHPS8TWxlowsRJRDUqPDfFY7SROl__nA50SyZVwIopyzJwiYhQsTKQuDUyKQ" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="1584" data-original-width="1170" height="311" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjMZkAivUxnBeLAtPL-6fSdvemAiqaaSeZiE_y5CXsvwOColTifBswhQjrVhOBdKoJPmB_O38rP-LFlal8R4VoWtQtINm4lPDTBOGWulHIBPkoFjFEGT0Mbp8EI6gYZ0107MHPS8TWxlowsRJRDUqPDfFY7SROl__nA50SyZVwIopyzJwiYhQsTKQuDUyKQ=w229-h311" width="229" /></a></div>click on image to enlarge<br /><br /></div><p></p><p> </p><p>From a show at the Bromfield around 2013. This is where Cate McQuaid stops enthusing about my work when she notices that my strokes look like the tracks of glistening snails. </p><p><br /></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhJgJHAlUfMpj5oJ245yB5JCoaaO15ZZJor5KEuRUlIqSjTfC80mH2tleL_8pmgw6_qLh5GXbCPg6TGJaq51G-IhxSpHrplnE0SJfBIgCTgLdkMqZPNyNamCjjCcGOdS2D8kzxAwvh_wAJt8x0AE8usmztuuFXI_wzrsRNxSbJY8svwLeQkK4uU2UkC6sey" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="932" data-original-width="722" height="322" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhJgJHAlUfMpj5oJ245yB5JCoaaO15ZZJor5KEuRUlIqSjTfC80mH2tleL_8pmgw6_qLh5GXbCPg6TGJaq51G-IhxSpHrplnE0SJfBIgCTgLdkMqZPNyNamCjjCcGOdS2D8kzxAwvh_wAJt8x0AE8usmztuuFXI_wzrsRNxSbJY8svwLeQkK4uU2UkC6sey=w319-h322" width="319" /></a></div><p> </p><p><br /></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><p></p><p> </p><p></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhBkKKuEExEtZl4HkoCwvROJ03dswrcP6DGsG-K5z9uPZ-DuTiuLbtaEjMc30vJurf7a_2k_gze3HYIjQocK8U9vlwEZnalyNnK8yeYsHJYs3w4a4Qdis88t4Vv0pcoY3UlROUQ5YabsSLWRKE4bmj0w2tf7PZgmXGSow4uSkf1jxnVhXfypOMuCMFqAWW0" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="1636" data-original-width="1340" height="358" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhBkKKuEExEtZl4HkoCwvROJ03dswrcP6DGsG-K5z9uPZ-DuTiuLbtaEjMc30vJurf7a_2k_gze3HYIjQocK8U9vlwEZnalyNnK8yeYsHJYs3w4a4Qdis88t4Vv0pcoY3UlROUQ5YabsSLWRKE4bmj0w2tf7PZgmXGSow4uSkf1jxnVhXfypOMuCMFqAWW0=w297-h358" width="297" /></a></div>click on image to enlarge<br /><br /></div><p></p><p>This is where the painting flips and starts to come out at the viewer. Probably something to do with the liberating effect of the white canvas. Fairly recent around 2022 . Spatially I started seeing strokes and drips as splashes.</p><p>Of course my painting is not in the realm of the noxious monsters of Lovecraft but the eventual push of the visual event off the surface seems to speak to a similar aggressive desire to reach out and engage the viewer by the throat. It also begins to abandon the pleasant color field that had dominated my work from the beginning of the millennium. </p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p>
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</div>Martin Mugarhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12799696151828817646noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2987736854176165487.post-31386215015090024992023-08-24T12:21:00.051-04:002023-09-12T12:52:52.178-04:00Dennis Hollingsworth <p><br /></p><h1 style="text-align: left;"> "Nice piece, by the way. Text, peeking. Ground margins. Geometry tweaking." (comment from NY artist Dennis Hollingsworth)</h1><p></p><p></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhDnepMH35ZMlTDXqvRav_4l6PcMr8sP9GtMlYy--RJEYVF0G2CoacY0CyJDsmWUT-q9wspj_70YmxEZTvrYV_V0CzO7q3thUJtu8lYq5sqfBzdWv2Rb_iuMIuguHUIkuj26ZP0t5rQeHnC0RkgP-xq7PPHND35-ntRSKKrwJ-3slMCa0cue5K2dEs90v_L" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="" data-original-height="5175" data-original-width="4231" height="447" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhDnepMH35ZMlTDXqvRav_4l6PcMr8sP9GtMlYy--RJEYVF0G2CoacY0CyJDsmWUT-q9wspj_70YmxEZTvrYV_V0CzO7q3thUJtu8lYq5sqfBzdWv2Rb_iuMIuguHUIkuj26ZP0t5rQeHnC0RkgP-xq7PPHND35-ntRSKKrwJ-3slMCa0cue5K2dEs90v_L=w365-h447" width="365" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Martin Mugar</td></tr></tbody></table><p></p><p>Coinciding with the debut of my writings in 2013 on the topic of Zombie Formalism I noticed that the New York artist Dennis Hollingsworth commenced to follow my writings with the occasional but always intelligent comment. The first time he commented on my painting is in the above statement made last year. The image to which he attached these words is also the first painting in years that I am most unequivocally happy about. For Hollingsworth it is functioning on at least three levels. (Text,Ground and Geometry). The obvious observations made by Boston critics about the gooey candy-colored sensuality is not predominant for him but rather the functionality of the spatial play. He gets it probably because we are both swimming in the same waters, sharing especially the same attitude about the mark. Dennis is attracted to a gnarly irreducible shape that he achieves by cutting his own nibs for the pastry applicator at the expense of the whole. I fall back on store bought nibs letters using the Cyrillic alphabet squeezed out also with a pastry applicator. Our marks are volumetric. For me the volumetric was a commentary on a road not taken in painting where the sloppy confidence of the abex stroke had taken over the thought process of so much painting. My exuded marks evolved from simple drips, to the Cyrillic alphabet, to whole words. Dennis refers to this as the text of the painting. The irreducible for Dennis lies in the strangeness of the stroke; for me the letter and the word. </p><p><br /></p><h2 style="text-align: left;"><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgKJbMVuHfV3qhPzH8mnz2rUMT1Nut9Mzzg4oyZvXLe7jkLyOrKXjw7fc7qLhNBMsNv5i3UL_I4PPV8jwLEu2Qbw-EhI-f9aNkgg8lIXEs2asHC9VYYK3dZ5ZzkrVbYvDzVRb2CholQJ5QF8ylYvP_OAQwAPnk2gdzMXu1GxXQ_XJDMgbGVtnGKN0qX823W/s656/unnamed.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="656" data-original-width="512" height="622" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgKJbMVuHfV3qhPzH8mnz2rUMT1Nut9Mzzg4oyZvXLe7jkLyOrKXjw7fc7qLhNBMsNv5i3UL_I4PPV8jwLEu2Qbw-EhI-f9aNkgg8lIXEs2asHC9VYYK3dZ5ZzkrVbYvDzVRb2CholQJ5QF8ylYvP_OAQwAPnk2gdzMXu1GxXQ_XJDMgbGVtnGKN0qX823W/w457-h622/unnamed.jpg" width="457" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Martin Mugar</td></tr></tbody></table></h2><p><br /></p><p>In June I visited his gallery in Paris Galerie Richard and asked to see some of his work. The director demurred saying they were still in crates having been recently moved due to the closing of the Galerie Richard in NYC and the packing was hard to unpack. Upon my return to the USA I sent Dennis an email telling him of my visit but did not hear back. Recently, I visited his website only to remark that he was being referred to in the past tense. Someone engaged a ChatGPT write his story as an artist. It had a bittersweet lilt to it. It was dated April 2023. </p><p><br /></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEisqLpv_kRZZPIMKGncb_CRNMIA1QjxO9P_gRMJBjddSqkIyCdyPAE-4YIAeOGYeuFW2Do5o7RIgcVQvZm8nXjMBadPVasRYaxoh0N0QM293NcHbzGzLnGR_K9fKDP1x7To6STrVyJqlIa6oELcfrBL_TQjM16echCrNaMr8yeJPj-FkkVn-F4FDtm5gd4g/s3589/Hollingsworth%20%231.jpeg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="3589" data-original-width="2371" height="590" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEisqLpv_kRZZPIMKGncb_CRNMIA1QjxO9P_gRMJBjddSqkIyCdyPAE-4YIAeOGYeuFW2Do5o7RIgcVQvZm8nXjMBadPVasRYaxoh0N0QM293NcHbzGzLnGR_K9fKDP1x7To6STrVyJqlIa6oELcfrBL_TQjM16echCrNaMr8yeJPj-FkkVn-F4FDtm5gd4g/w390-h590/Hollingsworth%20%231.jpeg" width="390" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Dennis Hollingsworth </td></tr></tbody></table><p></p><p><br /></p><p> </p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="text-align: left;"> </span></div><p><br /></p><p>In fact, lately, <a href="http://www.dennishollingsworth.us/">he</a> has been using his webpage and is still alive and painting. I feel fortunate to have heard his opinions on the art world which were for the most part conservative in intent. He was commenting on Twitter on the ongoing struggle in Ukraine understanding the manipulation of the American Neo-Cons in perpetuating it. He had just started to take and interest in the notion of Monadology as it might apply to his work. Again, the irreducible is something that intrigues him.</p><p>The strangeness of the web where people appear and disappear.</p><p><br /></p><p></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhwoP_zDHXP1hv8Q-btaN9EQ0kdinDx-XVglD45MuZ5KZkobWaiOc14oA6zTQkfU9MbrqWv8Xjm19hCzIAQSoAmn2o6HwgLjHjOI5CEvI2pR7ENV9uFiYful5CK4TmcMjiKWei6elnfrelW6UuhB9YJ9NQPHvuKp5jTJK2QFNPG_SbwagQ58Ajr1DDDfPpI" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="" data-original-height="633" data-original-width="853" height="343" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhwoP_zDHXP1hv8Q-btaN9EQ0kdinDx-XVglD45MuZ5KZkobWaiOc14oA6zTQkfU9MbrqWv8Xjm19hCzIAQSoAmn2o6HwgLjHjOI5CEvI2pR7ENV9uFiYful5CK4TmcMjiKWei6elnfrelW6UuhB9YJ9NQPHvuKp5jTJK2QFNPG_SbwagQ58Ajr1DDDfPpI=w463-h343" width="463" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Dennis Hollingsworth</td></tr></tbody></table><br /><br /><p></p><p>Martin Mugar </p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p>Martin Mugarhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12799696151828817646noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2987736854176165487.post-44340028394196425662023-08-08T12:29:00.043-04:002024-02-27T10:16:16.783-05:00"Everything in life is drawing" Richard Tuttle<p> I showed with Tuttle once thanks to Addison Parks who had a Tuttle in his private collection. It may have been a gift from Tuttle who at one point was a friend of Parks. He may have purchased it. Parks put us together in a rather interesting show at the Creiger-Dane gallery in Boston in 1998 of a handful of New York and Boston artists called <a href="http://www.martinmugar.com/from-severed-ear-to-bow-street-gallery.html">“Severed Ear”</a> in what was a postmodernist take on the evolution of modernism. Of course, Severed Ear refers to Van Gogh’s angst and pain. A reference to the human origins of the Modern that over time tread a road toward the Minimal. In a remembrance of Parks in “Provincetown Arts” I mentioned the show’s similarity to the abstract artists considered “Provisional” by Raphael Rubinstein. I had hoped that the show would have an influence on the sensibility of the Boston Scene but that was not to happen as Boston continues to ignore consequential movements, that come from outside its sphere of influence as it did with its preference for Boston Impressionism over the French Modernism of the Armory show. To this day this absence of European modernism presents a huge gap in the MFA’s collection that currently is too expensive to fill.</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEi7j5-qNI8ynw14Ua8_TOyK6ryM93ft8uZjuV7_8K58Qj7mQY8_eOZ70Ob-2Lwl1QyZEDGH-nlkrqpfFrWU_VCTKTW_19G6Bm4Bj1X6yrFNIpd8umdfB1Bm15cFhieV0D7J12WhIagUJlrq6G_a8SEZNp4ckxBlemhjY5YJL970m2tRQxXN1qqBEFf-9Fhu" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="400" data-original-width="850" height="151" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEi7j5-qNI8ynw14Ua8_TOyK6ryM93ft8uZjuV7_8K58Qj7mQY8_eOZ70Ob-2Lwl1QyZEDGH-nlkrqpfFrWU_VCTKTW_19G6Bm4Bj1X6yrFNIpd8umdfB1Bm15cFhieV0D7J12WhIagUJlrq6G_a8SEZNp4ckxBlemhjY5YJL970m2tRQxXN1qqBEFf-9Fhu" width="320" /></a></div><br /><br /><p></p><p> </p><p><br /></p><p>The Tuttle that Addison owned, if my memory serves me, was a not very large oblong rectangle drawing on a rectangular piece of plywood that is to be exhibited nonchalantly on the floor leaning up against the wall. According to Addison, gallery goers felt compelled to report to the gallery director that it had fallen off the wall. I think Tuttle wanted to kick the experience of drawing off the wall out of the realm of framed paper and into the space of the pedestrian (both meanings) where it gets accidentally kicked. I saw a Tuttle show in NYC with Addison that I did not “get”. Mixed media with no attempt to make parts react to a whole. The Hegelian dialectic has until recently directed my own work and its absence in Tuttle irked me to protest the validity of much of what Tuttle does. Addison had to tell me to shut up.</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgFeT3zebSJuWkxTMqccVRot-rxGxWE4cGi7kQicEGotc1SU5gCLYQX9xncMjLE9e1HIDg-o2MqimYNzt2kElD7quJlGaPaq5B2Dzx6Z_-LLKJD1UAglSW06BagOVXFHXFhUkoQgdE86_rUgVS1xDDwelK9eGIa1BsTmQ4NfVJQN8b_xGtXtPS9_N4mpU2d" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="403" data-original-width="537" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgFeT3zebSJuWkxTMqccVRot-rxGxWE4cGi7kQicEGotc1SU5gCLYQX9xncMjLE9e1HIDg-o2MqimYNzt2kElD7quJlGaPaq5B2Dzx6Z_-LLKJD1UAglSW06BagOVXFHXFhUkoQgdE86_rUgVS1xDDwelK9eGIa1BsTmQ4NfVJQN8b_xGtXtPS9_N4mpU2d" width="320" /></a></div><br /><br /><p></p><p>Recently, Jason Travers an artist in the Providence area and a former student from AIB sent me an image of the kind of “drawing” he sees in the asphalt fillings that are ubiquitous on New England roads: an effort to fill in the cracks formed on roads due to frost heaves. The cracks left unattended only speed up the deterioration of the road. There obviously is a machine that pushes out the asphalt at a consistent rate that must be responded to by a regulated gesture of the worker so that the liquid asphalt does not overflow the cracks. These are pedestrian drawing as they are created by someone walking in pedestrian space and make no claim to art. Like Tuttle whose work yearns to jump off the wall, this drawing is part of our lived space and moreover engages the <a href="https://www.facebook.com/brady.kevin/posts/pfbid02fmHkkGZABUxPTDCEq6AXJVDjZtJfFYzNdcy3aCVmfnjSjADNKJMW3tkbGgb6hp13l?notif_id=1691684608169984&notif_t=nf_photo_story&ref=notif">slow entropy</a> (Brice Marden)of time and space of frost heaves and engaging our battle against the deterioration of the road.</p><p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /><br /></div> <h1 style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEg6RnpQN-wNDiFBEiHWs9zepZR_jVME8xsjuyuqfJJpiYm21aHSW_TkSuEX2GCvYLmLgzCA27gGTXKH2tJuY4kH52wjMAbRaD0AvEn4VcAOpmMqCnErQ1zMyEP6uvfvb7U1U-fwEZVexgtb4gF4HL_5ltfaK76KgJDAfFhUpoBFATDu67K8IXTte666iJlV" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="1280" data-original-width="960" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEg6RnpQN-wNDiFBEiHWs9zepZR_jVME8xsjuyuqfJJpiYm21aHSW_TkSuEX2GCvYLmLgzCA27gGTXKH2tJuY4kH52wjMAbRaD0AvEn4VcAOpmMqCnErQ1zMyEP6uvfvb7U1U-fwEZVexgtb4gF4HL_5ltfaK76KgJDAfFhUpoBFATDu67K8IXTte666iJlV=w270-h400" width="270" /></a></h1><br /><p></p><p><br /></p><p>One drawing that has nothing to do with our agency are the patterns on the feathers of the Barred Owl. This is a drawing achieved over millennia The intelligence of nature helped this bird blend in with the tree bark. It is not hiding itself from predators as I assume it has none but is hiding from its prey. The photo has had some success on FB as the owls presence is not revealed instantaneously . As Tuttle says in the above quote: Everything is drawing</p><p> Iguana art </p><p><br /></p><p> <span style="color: #444444;"><a href="https://www.instagram.com/reel/CtJnjHiJ3xA/?utm_source=ig_web_button_share_sheet&igshid=MzRlODBiNWFlZA==">More asphalt art</a></span></p><div><br /></div>Martin Mugarhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12799696151828817646noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2987736854176165487.post-6408287379953953062023-01-11T06:12:00.068-05:002023-08-11T07:11:02.775-04:00Guston at the MFA Boston<p> Since I saw the Guston show last Fall at the MFA <a href="https://martinmugar.blogspot.com/2013/10/boston-art-marathon-bombings-robert.html">Boston</a>, I have been hoping to write a review of his work. Should be something easy to write about but it isn’t. In sum the stops along the way of his evolution are as follows: he starts out his career working realistically with a strong social consciousness finding its subject in the <a href="https://martinmugar.blogspot.com/2022/09/inspired-by-charles-giulianos.html">human suffering</a> of the Great Depression. Then, addressing the same topic of social realism he integrates the various languages of Modernism: the flattening effect of Matisse, the activated line of Klee and the color atmosphere of Monet to arrive in the latter part of his life with a scathing and sardonic vision of the rot of the underbelly of modern consciousness visually borrowing from the language of cartoon pop culture. He even overcomes the last seduction of Abstract Expressionism, although someone thought it looked like, to his chagrin, abstract impressionism. This is the only ambiguous period where the Abex appears to establish a clear break with Social Realism. </p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEg_rMRuCDh0H-ak1WXGe-WCmhlryzqagrr6GM72b5Y5v0CsIRpra2OpbsNJhtzlENLjg7uIzS5_kJMrwB8jRGhOgL6mouHQFWtYcbbiayOmQikZ7j3tNoWc9rLcq7pzqkxalt_tBs2oSudGvN2q_cs-iMEv1ocyu_QQ0ersz8AQUF0DRFXs4WI2kTiNhg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="186" data-original-width="210" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEg_rMRuCDh0H-ak1WXGe-WCmhlryzqagrr6GM72b5Y5v0CsIRpra2OpbsNJhtzlENLjg7uIzS5_kJMrwB8jRGhOgL6mouHQFWtYcbbiayOmQikZ7j3tNoWc9rLcq7pzqkxalt_tBs2oSudGvN2q_cs-iMEv1ocyu_QQ0ersz8AQUF0DRFXs4WI2kTiNhg" width="271" /></a></div> Flattening of the Space 1940<br /><br /><p></p><p>I find, as I summon up memories of my encounters with him personally and his work over the years, there are some questions that are hard to answer. What is the importance of Piero about whom he talked so vehemently at Yale/ Norfolk with the minimalist composer Morton Feldman. Piero deals with a space that is metaphysical in nature grounded in Christian eschatology. Did it influence his work and where? There are the references in the late work to what would be considered by Catholics venial sins such as smoking and drinking, but predominantly it is the sinister masks of the KKK that dominate the later work. My last encounter with the Guston story and the final push to inspire this review was yesterday on a Zoom lecture on his life and work sponsored by the Brooklyn Rail featuring two experts on his work: Kelly Baum, a curator at the Met in NY and Alison de Lima Greene a curator at the MFA Houston who mounted a Guston show in Houston. Alison thankfully clarified the canard concerning the delayed opening of the show as having nothing to do with the controversial nature of the show’s subject. It was all covid related. How does one open a show to the masses when the society is in lockdown</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhR--gkm467Vikf3vDJxHpRAGFqGmdMXtG6KajcFgFZLgaTXKuZP8PX8as7eDUeGgI8VpUqXqC09NyEGoSmyvdqYQ5A1csRGzMba0z70_94_yp7eWs8RFjZ8gl6BmSOjGZ6KZelK2zyiUA-7EFqw9_JT79ySG4-vUEIoSsuDVpDJRz2HvBxyzElUxgd_Q" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="206" data-original-width="210" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhR--gkm467Vikf3vDJxHpRAGFqGmdMXtG6KajcFgFZLgaTXKuZP8PX8as7eDUeGgI8VpUqXqC09NyEGoSmyvdqYQ5A1csRGzMba0z70_94_yp7eWs8RFjZ8gl6BmSOjGZ6KZelK2zyiUA-7EFqw9_JT79ySG4-vUEIoSsuDVpDJRz2HvBxyzElUxgd_Q" width="245" /></a></div> Abstract Work 1953<br /><br /><p></p><p>In the Zoom event sponsored by the Brooklyn Rail I was surprised that Guston’s dialogue with the language of Modernism was only partially addressed. The easy path for Guston could have been to remain a social realist as many of his generation did, working in the volumetric style of much of Depression era art. The dynamic compression of space seen in Matisse and Klee he adapted in order to expand his visual language to its betterment. His use of splotches of color from Monet put him in the Abex movement alongside of Rothko, De Kooning and Gorky, which is where I learned of his art. I recall William Bailey discussing how the abstraction that was being formulated in the work of the Abstract Expressionists in the thirties burst out of the realm of private exploration to define the public notion of American art in the Fifties pushing social realism to the back burner. That Guston was able to join up with a movement antithetical to where he was taking his early work, speaks volumes of his creative curiosity and inventive talents. This break with social realism and zig zag back has probably been explored by Guston scholars. He was seen to be such a successful practitioner of that abstract mode of painting that his move to cartoon-based imagery was seen as catastrophic by Hilton Kramer and others. In <a href="https://martinmugar.blogspot.com/2022/04/charles-giulianos-150-years-celebration.html">Charles Giuliano’s</a> review of the history of the MFA, I read that curator Ken Moffett turned down a gift of a late Guston. He wanted the abstract work without a trace of social realism. Even the above mentioned curators did not bring up the pure visual play of that period of his work and in fact seemed to see some edgy indication of social conflict in the Monet inspired work. </p><p>Part of the Guston lore is that he found at Boston University, where he taught through the end of his life, a group of artists/professors, with similar ethnic/religious roots. It revived an identification with his Jewish roots. He had changed his name from Goldstein to Guston and was not a practicing Jew. I recall a discussion with the artist <a href="https://martinmugar.blogspot.com/2012/11/rethinking-premiss-of-my-nichols-blog.html">Bernie Chaet</a>, who grew up in the same neighborhood that produced the Boston Jewish Expressionist movement and whose career in Boston moved in parallel with several of the professors who taught at BU alongside of Guston. Chaet said he, himself, was shunned by many of them for embracing the seductive color of Bonnard and Matisse in his work. At his home in New Haven, I saw examples of his early work that displayed Jewish religious iconography. So at one point Chaet did embrace his roots. He said that he was seen as an apostate. The artists who grew up in the Jewish neighborhood of Boston looked to Beckmann, Dix and Grosz as worthy exemplars to portray the human drama of hypocrisy and exploitation that defined the 1930's. </p><p>Whereas the earlier Guston is looking out at the world where the social drama is taking place, there is a sense of Guston also being aware of his own corruption, physical and spiritual. He like the Klan is a wearer of masks. Does he hide behind a public persona? In fact, the use of masks appears in his earlier work. Is there a sense of guilt arriving out of his failings in his personal relationships.(I am being speculative here) In a tweet, that I came across, the artist/critic Walter Robinson felt the late painting were very personal and dealt with Guston’s sense of guilt that in some way. </p><p> Walking through the Boston show I found my sensibility put off by the predominance of red.(the two curators on Zoom refer to recurring red walls in the early and later work) It was not the vibrant red of fresh blood that Goya represents in Saturn devouring his offspring but dried blood. In Goya the demonic devours something alive and fresh. In Guston the demonic is reduced to the cartoon imagery as something desiccated. How does that affect an interpretation of the late work? Do contemporary notions of the banality of evil enter the dialogue as addressed in Arendt’s notion of that topic. There is no attempt to embody violence as in the work of Golub. The Klan goes about their business of public self-promotion. We do not see the violence of say the murder of <a href="https://martinmugar.blogspot.com/2017/11/schutz-at-ica-boston.html">Emmet Till</a>. The cartoon imagery provides a sort of barrier to experiencing direct violence </p><p><br /></p><p>But enough criticism of what he didn’t do. Unlike so many of his peers his late work was a sort of apotheosis of self-awareness, personal and cultural . The move to the cartoon allows for the shared societal space in which we live to move to the fore. It disallows the sort of thing that realist painting allows such as the raw and the real of a moment in time. That so much of our identity comes from the political haunted Guston from early on in his career and in the end becomes codified in the way in which we are reduced to cartoon characters reified by the political. The<a href="https://martinmugar.blogspot.com/2022/02/authority-and-freedom-by-jed-perl.html"> political</a> can impose itself on us whether we want it to or not. </p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEiEuyGg1g96D8taknpHDfHxHRtiqFsmtTAYSly1Z-OVjJSe3Lug_GWfrntwzg_38YPYwLo3IeXDtLfgVxldo3Q3RB9y8sYITKV1yg_w8j_Y8uTvdJY7k0Q5SvDxBUaAzdD3BngYAPT3lbpHnuthZ4Y-LmdUDQkXRDn5gpJ6j3b7HwUK0K-hRLS758DsmQ" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="157" data-original-width="210" height="239" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEiEuyGg1g96D8taknpHDfHxHRtiqFsmtTAYSly1Z-OVjJSe3Lug_GWfrntwzg_38YPYwLo3IeXDtLfgVxldo3Q3RB9y8sYITKV1yg_w8j_Y8uTvdJY7k0Q5SvDxBUaAzdD3BngYAPT3lbpHnuthZ4Y-LmdUDQkXRDn5gpJ6j3b7HwUK0K-hRLS758DsmQ" width="320" /></a></div><br /> The late work 1969<p></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p>Martin Mugarhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12799696151828817646noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2987736854176165487.post-75548298140851138962022-09-04T08:28:00.075-04:002023-08-01T17:43:49.487-04:00Giuliano's sister Pip's travels abroad bring back memories of France in the 70's and my introduction to Weltschmerz <p> I had hitchhiked my way up from the Midi to Alsace via Paris where I spent some time with Alix and then moved on to find more work as a farm worker harvesting grapes in Alsace. I followed the northward ripening of the grapes. The last person to give me a lift as I approached Alsace happened to know a “vigneron” whom he thought might hire me. He dropped me off at the door of the wine grower’s estate (I believe his brother was part of the harvesting team) who did not hesitate to take me on. I learned later that even though they had enough workers they thought I had a pleasant smile. Like the family I worked for in L’Herault the vendanges were perceived to be a pleasurable social experience They liked to fill up the ranks of grape pickers with interesting characters, even though it was easier to hand the work over to professional farm workers from Spain who needed the work and would be more efficient. In Alsace many of the harvesters were buyers of the grower’s product, who came for a day or two to enjoy the outdoors and the camaraderie. Some I observed were certified alcoholics who enjoyed a bit too much the passing of the bottle at the end of each row and were quickly dispatched. The time of year was like the mellow wine made of the “noble rot”. We were already getting into the end of October and mornings were chill.</p><p><br /></p><p>One of the first co-workers I met was a sullen Cambodian who sported an oversized military jacket which judging from the way he wrapped his arms around his body didn’t seem to keep him sufficiently warm especially as I learned he was experiencing cold weather for the first time in his life. He had been sent to study in France by his father in Phnom Penh who was a wealthy jeweler. Whether intentional or not his departure from Cambodia coincided with the takeover of Cambodia by the Red Guard. His family was sent to concentration camps where they were killed. He did have relatives who were in refugee camps in Thailand that he communicated with.</p><p><br /></p><p>The harvest lasted a week. I recall the evening meals were enjoyably shared with the owner. The lunch in the vineyards consisted mostly of cured uncooked bacon and wine to wash it down. Much to the disappointment of the family that hired me I overstayed my period of employment when I became horribly ill; I believe due to drinking the “new” wine in the village of Ribeauville and could not leave the dorm where I was housed. Alix had come to join me and nursed me back to health. </p><p><br /></p><p>However, all in all, I was better taken care of there than in the Midi where the workers were given lodging in cold water flats with a single unit gas stove to cook our own food on. We must have been advanced enough money to buy food. We got a quota of two bottles of free wine (“pousse au crime” they called it) each day on top of our pay that we could either save or return to the owner for reimbursement. I recall the Australians on their world tour hopping from one Commonwealth country to the next drank their quota. They marvelously could drink all night and get up refreshed the next morning to pick grapes whereas, if I were to march their consumption, I would wake up at 4 pm the next afternoon with a horrible hangover. </p><p>Our boss in L’Herault created quite a presence. He drove a convertible Mustang. He was well over six feet tall and sported an impressive Asterix style mustache. I had worked for him the prior season when he hired Alix and I as we left an employment office where we inquired about work picking grapes. I suspect he waited to hire us after we left the office to avoid paying a finder’s fee. I remember the pleasure in being carried off to the grey village of Tressan, our place of employment, in the back seat of the Mustang with the top down. </p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjbEFYs8pZUsi_k3W2rBLGkp1AjsVd9kqsIPgfgHTt-U3zS9kZwqqnn8ElnmoKyM7P4qBDCpRh-x6zSIYDGiX5rxBhxbCkPWXtEaZCHidevgfnxBumOg4jm9hM08bC6wShXp1ZWePv-jl1sCq8GlFqPLg-ibz7UY2Vnmu_X2M9wJ1fpcVo6YyvS0sRP1Q/s3050/Tressan_sud_2013.jpeg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1421" data-original-width="3050" height="169" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjbEFYs8pZUsi_k3W2rBLGkp1AjsVd9kqsIPgfgHTt-U3zS9kZwqqnn8ElnmoKyM7P4qBDCpRh-x6zSIYDGiX5rxBhxbCkPWXtEaZCHidevgfnxBumOg4jm9hM08bC6wShXp1ZWePv-jl1sCq8GlFqPLg-ibz7UY2Vnmu_X2M9wJ1fpcVo6YyvS0sRP1Q/w363-h169/Tressan_sud_2013.jpeg" width="363" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Tressan Languedoc</td></tr></tbody></table><br /><p><br /></p><p>Living in the gloomy village, however, did have its entertainment value. Whatever happened out of the ordinary in town would make its way to be discussed in the central square in the evening by the “town fathers” so to speak. One topic that I recall inspired a few laughs was their mockery of the shape of the wife of a friend of mine who came to visit me from the States. She didn’t fit their French definition of femininity being a tad hefty or “big boned” as the euphemism goes. Another involved the interest an elderly woman Madame Thiollet showed in me by baking me on occasions traditional omelets mixed with flour. She worried that being alone without a mate I had no one preparing meals for me. She lived alone with her brain damaged husband who sat drooling off to the side of her poorly lit dwelling. He had been hit over the head accidentally with a shovel while doing road work. The dwelling smelled of spoiled fruit that she as a senior had permission to scour from the fields after the commercial harvest was done. In any case, the gossip of our friendship addressed what they (the evening news in the town square) thought was my intent through our friendship to inherit her house. Years later after I returned to Boston living with my parents before starting my academic career, I received a letter In the mail ambiguously addressed to Mugar Belmont USA (or some address that should not have been sufficient to make its way to me) announcing her death. It came from her son. He had learned that I had made her acquaintance and that she thought enough of me that I should be informed of her passing. I vaguely recall the gossipers of the central plaza said her son’s wife had been a prostitute much to the chagrin of my elderly friend. Such unkind/ ungenerous g ossip. </p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjP0r1qtcSDgR8jqpDzXArXMEk54QXk4Z8igVy77z72jRX46NAVCApiD4zhB1v4liq1raIu9rh4tWkesH6BWAC0HEvVANJxR87KwzHjrEslloIp5u1uMdIafj54vWny7Vpl3yq2rEIicws5OHUWwwJU21QpFuyR9astod6tP-83QLRMCmK0CSJEOlzEYQ/s274/download.jpeg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="184" data-original-width="274" height="226" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjP0r1qtcSDgR8jqpDzXArXMEk54QXk4Z8igVy77z72jRX46NAVCApiD4zhB1v4liq1raIu9rh4tWkesH6BWAC0HEvVANJxR87KwzHjrEslloIp5u1uMdIafj54vWny7Vpl3yq2rEIicws5OHUWwwJU21QpFuyR9astod6tP-83QLRMCmK0CSJEOlzEYQ/w337-h226/download.jpeg" width="337" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Hunawihr Alsace</td></tr></tbody></table><br /><p><br /></p><p>I am not sure of the Cambodian’s name. Leng Noon or Noon Leng. We addressed him as Leng. We became friends, a friendship that lasted ten years even after we returned to the US where he once came to visit. He eventually found training in the hospitality industry. While Alix was finishing her degree at the beaux-arts I returned for a short stay in France and swung down to the Loire valley where Leng was living. He lived in a tent on the edge of a field in order to save money for his education. I passed several days with him. One memory that still haunts me to this day was a meeting he took me to of Cambodian refugees in a public hall. On the middle of the stage sat a man who seemed to have some authority over the others. Leng came up to talk with him in a seemingly deferential manner and then left. Leng must have explained to me who he was and what was the purpose of the meeting but I imagined that the meeting was of a political nature. Was it an anti Khmer-Rouge organization or maybe the contrary, pro-Khmer. A chill ran through me as the notion of politics and identity took hold of my imagination. Was Leng trying to assert his fealty to a political party, so as to avoid being on the wrong side of the power structure. I recall the way <a href="https://wwnorton.com/books/9780393078855">Rosanna Warren</a> brilliantly describes the peripatetic survivor Max Jacob as he negotiates the complexity of the Parisian avant-garde only to find himself despite his conversion to Christianity unable to distance himself from his Jewish origins as the government of France is taken over by the nazi-sympathetic Vichy government. He was holed up in a monastery south of paris which he thought would provide him some sort of protection from the Vichy. He was found out, nonetheless. Others thought that Picasso his mentor or one might say that Jacob was his mentor had enough connections among the "powers that be" to save him from the hands of the Vichy. The avant-garde was a sort of meta identity beyond nationality but it had a small constituency. When the hold of national identity reared its ugly head certain ethnic identities were suddenly lethal. Hearing that Jacob was in a prison waiting his turn to be shipped off to Germany Picasso quipped that Jacob was an angel and he would lift himself over the walls to freedom. </p><p><br /></p><p>Rosanna Warren’s book on Jacob came out before the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Now, all the trademarks of national identity, fealty and loyalty that marked WW2 reassert their terrifying presence. Notions of a sort of Ur Slavic identity independent of the Occident is dredged up to justify the invasion and of course the Western European hold on Ukraine is perceived to be one of decadence. It is like a deck of card that gets reshuffled and one never knows were one will end up in that deck of cards or whether one will be dealt a losing or a winning hand. If the story of Jacob and the revival of ethnic and national identities seemed distant when the book was published in 2019 before the violence of Ukraine, of a past more than 70 years ago Rosanna’s book was prescient of what was to transpire in Europe.</p><p><br /></p><p>One night in Tressan, the vendangeurs were gathered together on the central plaza drinking; we were all drinking pastis. As the evening wore on an Irish boy and a French girl showed some interest in hooking up. They could not communicate since neither one nor the other knew the others language. I found myself negotiating this tryst. The essence of the discussion that all was OK as long the Irish boy would use protection. The Irishman had a friend who showed little interest in participating in where his friend was headed. Over the next few days I got to know him better. He described how his personality had been irreparably marked by the “Troubles” in Northern Ireland where a bombing near by where he was walking left nothing but body parts. It must have blocked his interest in the passing pleasure that his fried would experience that night in Tressan. </p><p><br /></p><p>Like the Australians he had been on a world tour. He had not been home in several years. I asked him if I could do his portrait. I liked it so much I said I would keep it for awhile but if he would share with me his home address I would send it to him at a later date. When I left for Alsace at the end of the vendange I left my art supplies behind with the intention of coming back to pick them up. I returned a year later. Oddly enough the wandering Irishman had come to Tressan that very day to see if I was still there. I don’t recall what he had been doing all that time. We passed the day together reminiscing, Among his stories he told I recall only one. Well before he finally made it home to his house in Northern Island his mother had received the drawing. When she opened up the package and saw the face of her long absent son, she broke into tears.</p><p><br /></p><p>The last time I saw Leng was in the USA in 1986. His visit coincided with our family’s move from a job in North Carolina to one in New Hampshire. We had two cars that had to be moved up north so we gave one to him and let him drive it wherever he wanted as long as he ended up in Maine where we had bought a house. He and his girlfriend arrived in time although we were in a sort of chaos for not having hired a lawyer to finalize the contract on the new home as the moving truck arrived in our driveway. That day happened to be Leng’s birthday and he insisted we celebrate it. I was overwhelmed with the mess of the unresolved closing, so I ignored his request for a celebration or as I recall we may have done something subdued at a local restaurant. I never heard from him again. </p><p><br /></p><p>Maybe one day I will receive a minimally addressed letter from him like the one from Madame Thiolet's son that will recall our good times together.</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiR0teey_TuExABMdlbaT-Z9WzAfL5GLWZ42p8tzLFY82YD2c1KAOhyZ9uRrGmL6iGk_C14YBw9B2Y60eZ6xZ3-W2IbgBrLQDTohmmZjGa7Xe-1kptCjx9DL1KJ4MIc-Ay-Kw0FnaUYjtQXAdDWE-MSRrS-ZIRjGRE2N8aGTM5CfPZY8WI0lxsaelfWlA/s874/m13%20(1).png" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="874" data-original-width="586" height="382" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiR0teey_TuExABMdlbaT-Z9WzAfL5GLWZ42p8tzLFY82YD2c1KAOhyZ9uRrGmL6iGk_C14YBw9B2Y60eZ6xZ3-W2IbgBrLQDTohmmZjGa7Xe-1kptCjx9DL1KJ4MIc-Ay-Kw0FnaUYjtQXAdDWE-MSRrS-ZIRjGRE2N8aGTM5CfPZY8WI0lxsaelfWlA/w257-h382/m13%20(1).png" width="257" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Moon over Montmartre </td></tr></tbody></table><br /><p> <a href="https://martinmugar.blogspot.com/2013/11/who-cares-about-art-scene-when-you-can.html"> A link to a blogpost with an escape from Weltschmerz </a></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p>Martin Mugarhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12799696151828817646noreply@blogger.com12tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2987736854176165487.post-89341587392915858982022-04-02T08:07:00.053-04:002022-04-14T06:51:14.936-04:00Charles Giuliano's 150 years celebration and survey of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts<p></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiswYitkV_ebTmXwIFJQiuU4y93Sf1P5E3hPKe5z1Dk9TsWj0pvI5UmHAitAdPOhxzIlVOqUiw5LOo9HtQozAkQzDU9o2nIbYlSZwYKWZxCMU2TBIHYyGkH1aZm33xiUMFZ9e3Y35Snkakdh5_JMaHg5zu6g6goxIn_H03Tzok9DmKjJpjnRfTt9mCeOA/s255/download-1.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="197" data-original-width="255" height="226" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiswYitkV_ebTmXwIFJQiuU4y93Sf1P5E3hPKe5z1Dk9TsWj0pvI5UmHAitAdPOhxzIlVOqUiw5LOo9HtQozAkQzDU9o2nIbYlSZwYKWZxCMU2TBIHYyGkH1aZm33xiUMFZ9e3Y35Snkakdh5_JMaHg5zu6g6goxIn_H03Tzok9DmKjJpjnRfTt9mCeOA/w293-h226/download-1.jpg" width="293" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Charles Giuliano</td></tr></tbody></table><br /> This <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Museum-Fine-Arts-Boston-History/dp/0996171576">document</a> of the 150 year history of the Museum of Fine Arts is mostly cobbled together from interviews by Charles Giuliano of the actors who shaped that history. One of the first is a 1976 interview of a Globe writer who was part of a team that wrote an expose to take down (or so it appeared ) the newly appointed MFA director Merrill Rueppel. It sets the theme of interviews that expose the machinations of behind the scenes struggle between the old guard board and efforts of others to bring new blood into the Museum. Charles has been connected to the Museum soon after graduating from Brandeis when he was employed in the Egyptian department. He stayed close to the museum via these interviews in his role of journalist for multiple Boston newspapers. He clearly has garnered the respect of his interviewees. Considering that he rarely lobs softball questions one might think that it would have been wiser for them to avoid him, but almost fifty years later he brings the reader, without skipping a director, up to the present with an interview of the current director Matthew Teitelbaum. Maybe the numerous directors all felt that they have to post the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CharlieCard">“Charlie card”</a> on their resume in order to be truly enthroned as director of the MFA. <p></p><p> </p><p>Getting a conceptual handle on these interviews and the scrutiny they provide in the context of the history that came before, is a bit of a struggle. I fell back for help on the template of a recent book by art critic <a href="https://martinmugar.blogspot.com/2022/02/authority-and-freedom-by-jed-perl.html">Jed Perl</a>: Authenticity and Freedom. Authenticity can be seen as meaning tradition and often in Perl’s hand as something numinous and quasi-religious. A case in point is his use of an anecdote about the musical career of Aretha Franklin. She had her start as a singer in her father’s church choir. She was imbued in the gospel tradition of singing that had a long history in black American culture. When she made the break (freedom) into popular music that tradition was always there to shape her new music. The music had roots. The origin of the MFA as a recipient of invaluable Japanese art at its beginning was similar and had a purity that nothing in the later history of the MFA could match. Its collection of Japanese art was given by bluebloods Morse, <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Buddhism-Immortality-William-Sturgis-Bigelow/dp/0341660957/ref=sr_1_1?crid=1V5143AANW55W&keywords=bigelow+buddhism&qid=1648903290&sprefix=bigelow+buddhism%2Caps%2C72&sr=8-1">Bigelow</a> and Fenellosa who lived in Japan as practicing Buddhists and in their collecting of the Japanese artifacts had eventually received the imprimatur and permission of Japanese collectors and scholars such as Okakura Kakuzo, who in turn became the first curator of the Boston collection. Moreover, Okakura was a world-renowned scholar of Zen Buddhism whose “Book of Tea” is purported to have influenced Martin Heidegger’s understanding of Japanese thought when Okakura studied under him in Germany. The Japanese who were initially shocked by the export of national treasures such as the “Burning of the Sanjo Palace” put a stop to any further expatriation. They eventually accepted it as a way of sharing the Japanese cultural heritage with the world. However, this is to be contrasted with the unseemly attempt to transfer a Raphael from Italy to Boston by Perry Rathbone toward the end of his tenure that necessitated a whole book by his daughter to rehabilitate his reputation. Jan Fontein, director and curator of the Asian collection said that these exchanges with the Japanese were a generation ahead of the ”repatriation movement” .</p><p>Money and lack thereof becomes another leitmotif of the book. Bigelow was well off. The Japanese collection was well endowed. Moreover, its cultural value was never questioned. These were cultural treasures by deceased artists. A hilarious anecdote that sheds light on the topic of money in one interview relates the reaction of a French curator of Textiles at the MFA, who lashed out at Alan Shestak in a meeting of curators that he was tired of hearing about money, and that in Lyon, where he worked in the museum, to talk about money was beneath them. He refused to shut up about his opinions and eventually was fired. He refused to leave his office and had to be chased out by the police in keystone cop style. Of course, in France everything is paid for through taxes up front and one never knows the real cost of things. The Metropolitan in New York receives millions from the state of New York. Boston nothing. The National Gallery gets all its money from the government. Expenses always seem to exceed income even during the halcyon days of Malcolm Rogers who somehow increased the endowment but increased the debt at the same time. </p><p><br /></p><p>Later in the book a recurring theme is who among contemporary artists should be collected. Ananda Coomaraswamy, the curator of the collection of Indian art (1933-1947) felt that no living artist should be collected. Problem solved. But the MFA was expected to collect Boston artists, first the Brahmin Boston Impressionists and then the Jewish Boston Expressionists (<a href="https://martinmugar.blogspot.com/2012/11/rethinking-premiss-of-my-nichols-blog.html">Hyman Bloom, Jack Levine and Karl Zerbe)</a>. A thorough collecting of the latter was obviated due to rampant anti-Semitism. Every curator had their faves. One director liked Hyman Bloom up to a point and another only looked at Color Field but could not tolerate Hans Hoffman. Merrill Reuppel turned down the purchase of Pollock’s “Lavender Mist” which at the time was reasonably priced and was soon acquired by the National Gallery. The turning down of this masterpiece is another recurring theme of lost opportunities, along with the dearth of “modern classics” by Picasso and other cubists. Somehow the MFA never heard of the Armory Show. They would eventually get a Picasso but it was not one of his best. When I taught at UNC-Greensboro they had in their collection one of De Kooning’s women. The story behind its purchase is that it was bought for $5000 dollars and the director was fired for spending too much on it. Unfortunately, such a serendipitous mistake was not made at the MFA. </p><p></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgGczTH4qATd7sPLI2_Nu9HgDgUWdOPESn2OdFFD5xEX52dT83jUOHh1nBZkXmLoXrFK3FfEW1kM2bTQT_iCH_019pd8sqoOPXJ5ueindezndj-UgT0Xd3B2OyBa9Eod35uqi2VeFC0h9TJy839WgaCc4DlWO-I9-t703K_cWMOo-hVOhVwrgX2QRyj7A/s262/download-2.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="193" data-original-width="262" height="193" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgGczTH4qATd7sPLI2_Nu9HgDgUWdOPESn2OdFFD5xEX52dT83jUOHh1nBZkXmLoXrFK3FfEW1kM2bTQT_iCH_019pd8sqoOPXJ5ueindezndj-UgT0Xd3B2OyBa9Eod35uqi2VeFC0h9TJy839WgaCc4DlWO-I9-t703K_cWMOo-hVOhVwrgX2QRyj7A/s1600/download-2.jpg" width="262" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">What could have been:"Lavender Mist"</td></tr></tbody></table><br /> <p></p><p>As a born and bred Bostonian, Charles does a great job of following the vagaries of the city’s economy to which the success of a director and the MFA seemed inextricably tied. The period of the establishment of the Ancient Egyptian, Classical Greek and Roman, Japanese and Indian collections corresponded to the building of Back Bay. The sluggish economy of the 1970s when townhouses in the Back Bay were going for $70,000 weighed heavily on the Museum’s ability to raise money. </p><p> </p><p>To stick with the conceptual structure of Authority and Freedom that Perl provides: i.e. freedom would be the letting go of the authority of the early collections of Asian art works with which early curators established their authority at the inception of the MFA.. The freedom might be more related to the necessity of responding to the multiplicity of art forms and styles that in fact the museum has a hard time keeping on top of and on dealing with the issues of racial equity that must be addressed if the Museum is to garner the respect of and truly represent the community. Racial tension has always been a reality in the Boston community that the Museum has mostly tried to ignore and struggled to address. But that is far from the days when housing and displaying the artifacts of ancient cultures were the only worry. The business side that so upset the French curator did not reduce everything unnecessarily to the big buck but, according to Barry Gaither, adjunct curator of African American Art, the arrival of Seybolt, a so-called uncouth Midwesterner from the business world of Underwood Devilled Ham to the board of trustees, was appalling to some but to him a breath of fresh air. Gaither a black saw himself as another outsider like Seybolt. And when someone mentioned that Rathbone was not a Bostonian, Gaither answered that he was trained at The Fogg. Seybolt a protégé of former MIT president Howard Johnson had strong Washington connections that would become crucial in getting financial contributions from DC to support travelling shows. </p><p><br /></p><p>The mostly Brahmin board probably lived in the glow of the MFA’s early days when they were able to keep the museum self-sustaining but not expanding. Keeping the museum up to date, after the market crashed in the late ‘60s, probably required the intervention of the Seybolt/Rueppel regime. The expansion of the US government in the days of the Great Society required that the Museum establish Washington connections belying the vision of the centrality of Boston as the Athens of America. Already left economically behind by New York City it could not blithely ignore Washington DC as a source of money.</p><p> </p><p>How will it deal with the virtual museum? The NTP? Just as the advent of Zoom in the age of Covid unexpectedly opened up the possibility of working from home so the virtual museum of the metaverse might do the same to the museum goer. How does the Museum continue to take in revenues in a wide open world of art without walls? And how does racial equity differ from racial equality in its impact on the functioning of the museum within the community? The goal of the MFA should be to exert its freedom by staying ahead of the game and not play "catchup". </p><p> </p><p>What these interviews succeed in doing is conveying the increasing multidimensionality of the Museum over the years from simple roles of storing, curating and exhibiting art, to the never ending need to raise money and the imperative of community outreach. Although at times the directors seem hapless and self-absorbed, they all in their own way add to the success and survivability of the MFA. Charles Giuliano who is one of the few Boston Critics to observe the Boston Art Scene holistically has included in his quiver of accomplishments a global understanding of the MFA. </p><p><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Museum-Fine-Arts-Boston-History/dp/0996171576">Link to buying the book on amazon</a></p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><div><br /></div>Martin Mugarhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12799696151828817646noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2987736854176165487.post-58552661932658423662022-02-05T06:54:00.023-05:002023-01-17T10:50:32.031-05:00"Authority and Freedom" by Jed Perl<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEid7jd7JdkqLUZcTn2Afn_t22y5--Jsps8U4szneQ_cfL1_u_rp6ghw3Kv34S97HDYFvpE9mwv-AgQR10_2mcELFmsF-d3pKqxHU9hvHK0knZ5kPkQ0BOLE2y0rkZBQ7dVZEhsfF8j_aizJkpynL4M4nOBFUBodqGTP5fiB6qSqNPEnJ1VgSA5Vf6W0ew=s218" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="218" data-original-width="218" height="281" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEid7jd7JdkqLUZcTn2Afn_t22y5--Jsps8U4szneQ_cfL1_u_rp6ghw3Kv34S97HDYFvpE9mwv-AgQR10_2mcELFmsF-d3pKqxHU9hvHK0knZ5kPkQ0BOLE2y0rkZBQ7dVZEhsfF8j_aizJkpynL4M4nOBFUBodqGTP5fiB6qSqNPEnJ1VgSA5Vf6W0ew=w281-h281" width="281" /></a></div><br /><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p>In his latest book “Authority and Freedom”, Perl establishes a paradigm that spells out a healthy antidote to the purpose for which art is currently practiced in our culture. He sees it as a paradigm that has always existed even as far back as the work of Egyptian artisans millennia ago where the hand of the craftsman can set itself off from the strict story telling of the hieroglyphs. In the Middle Ages artisans told stories in paint, glass and sculpture from the Bible but let come into play their own fantasies of what took place in the biblical story book. Hence: Authority and Freedom. The church embodies on the one hand the notion of authority, the traditionalist base that dictates how one should proceed as artists according to the parabolic story line of the Bible. On the other hand fears of sacrilege did not hinder the freedom to play of the artisan who pushes against the limits of the authorization. According to Perl priests would take notice of these deviations from the tradition but I suppose once something is written in stone as it were it is hard to excise. They live on untouched to this day. The choice of the word authority seemed awkward to me at first glance as cognates such as authoritarian come to mind and must be explained away as not being what Perl intends. The meaning of authority Perl wishes to work for him is borrowed from his readings of the writings of the philosopher Hanna Arendt in particular ”What is Authority” for whom the word has more in common with the latin word augere meaning augment. Authenticity is another cognate that unlike authoritarian is closer to Perl’s intent. </p><p><br /></p><p>The book is built out of many examples from the history of art, music and poetry among other artistic domains to elucidate the dynamic between authority and freedom. If you look up the usage of authority in the dictionary it tends toward imposition of dogma to be accepted due to its, legal validity, gravity and authenticity. In a religious realm it is a passage of scripture that settles argument. In the hands of an individual, it represents the power to reinforce or convince people through a command. In fact, many of the examples of authority that Perl provides for the most part seem to grow out of the spiritual realm. His description of a memorable rendition of "Wholy Holy" by Aretha Franklin points to the roots of her popular music in the heart of the black Southern Baptist Church. Gospel becomes the authority for the breakaway of her career into the realm of pop. But this breakout can at times be a breakdown as in the poetry of T.S. Eliot’s the “Waste Land” where the spirituality of the past is seen to dissolve and fragment no longer providing the pillars of wisdom that so forcefully shaped Western Culture. </p><p><br /></p><p>The dichotomy of Authority and Freedom can take place historically from one cultural artifact to the next but can take place within the work of the individual artist’s career. Perl points out that the classicism of Michelangelo’s early work becomes blatantly Baroque later in life as it breaks down the classical canons that other Renaissance artists followed. It can be seen as well as a harbinger of the Baroque that followed the Renaissance. </p><p><br /></p><p>Authority has a numinous almost prophetic aspect to it in the hands of Perl. It is a source of clarity and insight that tries to organize the world harmoniously. It devolves into the secular but out of that movement art happens. The individual is the agent of this evolution. The aforementioned Medieval craftsmen sneak their opinions and play it into their sculpture and painting but in the case of Mozart and Beethoven there is a battle between them and the aristocracy that in the day owned their musicians. Both wanted to be respected as creative forces in their own right. I recall an anecdote of Beethoven and Goethe taking a walk in the countryside around Vienna when they encounter an important Hapsburg to whom out of deference Goethe instinctively bowed. Beethoven according to the story trudged right past him and said: “He should be bowing to me.” Mozart also tried to establish himself as a commercial success beyond the patronage of the aristocracy. He wanted to be his own authority in breaking away from societal authority where they were in many ways no more important than valets The notion of genius cannot be ignored as the center of gravity that establishes these shifts in authority from the aristocratic overlords to the creative individual. The world would then submit to an authority built out of force of genius. What an exciting dynamically charged interaction! It is the birth of modernity. </p><p><br /></p><p>These transfers of power,not to diminish the validity of the event in the work itself where this battle takes place are societal events. The most recent societal shift is the ongoing dissolution of the Beethovian individual that thrust itself into richer and deeper and more powerful notions of self-hood, by the Marxist-Leninist belief that the individual only has an identity by being part of the societal whole. The battle of Beethoven to assert his individuality in the context of aristocratic sponsors participates in the larger societal struggle against the kings and queens that had shaped the world through the 19thc with one violent revolution after another culminating in the Russian Revolution at the beginning of the 20thc. Power was handed down from one generation of royalty to the next and over time the European aristocracy intermarried to create a superstructure that exists in part to this day. Beethoven was a radical, who looked to Napoleon to break down the established order, freeing the individual to create their own story. This is an incredibly dynamic storybook. But what happens when you are told that the state, which represents the newly liberated masses, cannot be criticized or that the individual’s life has no private meaning only a political one. </p><p><br /></p><p>Any attempt to see the individual as separate from the state and other than as a manifestation of liberation of the masses is suspect and treasonous. To ignore this is referred to as “false consciousness”. That is: your very being is suspect if you don’t see how oppression is built into the capitalist system of which you are a part. In the Soviet Union gulags were set up to cure individuals of this false consciousness and a paltry yet courageous few such as Sakharov and Solzhenitsyn were able to reach out to the West with stories of the how horrible the oppression was in the USSR. Shostakovich’s music embodies the anxiety of existing in this authoritarian world where one’s loyalty to the cause of the worker is always under scrutiny. </p><p><br /></p><p>Perl ends his book with a a story about W.H. Auden’s famous eulogy to W.B. Yeats. It embodies the essence of the Authority/ Freedom interplay. There appeared around the same time several essays by Auden about Yeats who in the 30’s showed sympathy for the European fascists. In the eulogy Auden charitably saw this as a sort of silliness and a sentimentality for the old aristocracy that Yeats admired and from whom he received patronage. In the end Yeats’s poems are well wrought and to this day resonate with the general public and therefore can be seen as democratic. He exercised his freedom to be a maker of poems even if when it came to his “doing” in the world of politics he failed miserably with his allegiances. (Perl distinguishes the making of the poem over which the poet has absolute control with the doing of politics where mistakes can be made in a world that is often beyond our control.) What seems to be missing in this description of Yeats is his theosophical interests. They seem to be the authority by which he gives gravity to his language. He will apply it, so it seems, through magical incantations. Although I can find no proof the lines “The silver apples of the moon, The golden apples of the sun” taken from the “The Song of Wandering Aengus” seems to have some source in a magical symbolic incantation .They to this day have a feel of the mysterious in them. Ray Bradbury named a collection of his short stories “Golden Apples of the Sun” and said his wife had introduced him to Yeats and these words had the same effect on him as they do on me. Could this be the authority hidden in Yeats’s work? The spiritual authority he attributes to Aretha Franklin from her Southern Baptist gospel roots. In lesser hands of a not great maker of poems, the influence of theosophy could be stultifying as Flannery O’Connor commented about a very catholic novel she was told to read and admire by a catholic priest, whose dogma was correct but whose story was badly told.</p><p><br /></p><p>I had a face to face interaction with Auden in 1970 that is strangely pertinent to this essay. He came to dinner with the Scholars of the House at Yale, a group I was part of whose members were allowed to work on independent projects during their senior year. I was an admirer of Yeats and must have known at the time about the Eulogy he wrote for him. I asked him after dinner what he thought of Yeats. He responded very adamantly that he was a fascist. And left it at that. How did Ed Mendelson his biographer who accompanied him to the dinner react? Auden passed away the following year. Did he no longer have the same tolerance for Yeats’s politics? Did it finally seem to matter that he supported fascists? A classmate Joe Knight who studied English Literature at Yale and Harvard said there is evidence that Auden was extremely jealous of Yeats’s talents. At the end of his life did the wrong politics gave Auden the possibility of cancelling Yeats’s greatness as a poet. It suggests that behind the concern for art being politically correct is the illness that Nietzsche said awaited our culture as a whole: "the waste land grows": Resentment or “Ressentiment” as he used it is the deeply sour well out from which we channel art into predetermined realms of activity. <a href="https://martinmugar.blogspot.com/2020/10/divagations-on-jed-perls-second-volume.html">Perl's new book is its diagnosis.</a></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p> </p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p>Martin Mugarhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12799696151828817646noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2987736854176165487.post-61267071633851571772021-12-18T15:29:00.051-05:002021-12-21T13:09:51.530-05:00The painting of Don Shambroom<p> Don Shambroom and his work looms large in my blogging that started in 2012. Mostly his opinions that have been shared with me either at visits to his studio on the Millers River in Massachusetts, via email or comments left on my blog posts. Just a presence that added up over time. What he had to say on culture and art were most often very prescient. He has a knack for thinking deeply about any subject that he decides to focus on. Most recently an interest in the life and work of Marcel Duchamp resulted in the publication of a monograph on <a href="https://martinmugar.blogspot.com/2018/12/donald-shamboomsduchamps-last-day-and.html">Duchamp’s last day </a>published by the David Zwirner gallery. In order to write the book he had to enter and hold his own in the world of Duchamp scholars and chroniclers which was no mean task. When we first met at Yale and then again when our paths crossed in Boston exchanges were face to face. Since the advent of the internet these exchanges have been hijacked by the web and have become part of the very subject matter of his painting. </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><br /><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgwH_IM0Kn1pbdAE-rJfJ-p-_jiGDuRQ2h-kuwkUV-q_IH8tlsZEQxIEu0m4c3nlii3q3DMWTfDMjt8MwrCIN_4x_xI2OIuMOSYq3wNkYzE5-AnUNvTchuqS8GfSeAQzARx01smCnMhB72bTEpT89Pse86jllKFZnDksaoTSWG1atrSOrSqK4-PFQ7DUg=s962" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="962" data-original-width="960" height="319" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgwH_IM0Kn1pbdAE-rJfJ-p-_jiGDuRQ2h-kuwkUV-q_IH8tlsZEQxIEu0m4c3nlii3q3DMWTfDMjt8MwrCIN_4x_xI2OIuMOSYq3wNkYzE5-AnUNvTchuqS8GfSeAQzARx01smCnMhB72bTEpT89Pse86jllKFZnDksaoTSWG1atrSOrSqK4-PFQ7DUg=w319-h319" width="319" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Cow Bird</td></tr></tbody></table><br /><p><br /></p><p>The imagery of the art world in the 20th c to my eye is torn between a Hegelian systematization and the Kantian sublime. Newman, Rothko, de Kooning define the sublime. Of course, Rothko and Newman deal with the numinous presence of the self and de Kooning with the terror (an aspect of the sublime) of being torn apart but somehow surviving to be reconstituted in the real. For these painters the artist still wields power to move the viewer. These artists represent the part that resists being overwhelmed by the whole. The Hegelian trope can be seen in the part being subsumed in the whole. Here the part can either resist strongly or acquiesce subserviently. I noticed this subservient stand in the work of <a href="https://martinmugar.blogspot.com/2017/11/schutz-at-ica-boston.html">Dana Schutz</a>. She applies a cubistic language that in the end is not a structure into which parts are grounded in the real but a system that obliterates a meaningful use of the parts. It embodies the postmodern dream of the death of man. We are uploaded to the mediaverse starting in the 50’s with the tv understood by Marshall McLuhan as messaging through it mediatic structure and coopting our whole physical reality finally on FB or at last dreamed of in the metaverse qua Oculus. </p><p><br /></p><p>The artists who no longer resist this effacing of the human presence can be seen in the artistic phenomena of zombie formalism that I was one of the first to talk about. It seems to have grown out of the branch of modernism that does not ground itself in the human body a case in point being Frank Stella whose early graphic design-based work is already one degree removed from embodied perception. </p><br /><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEirJYOq_B5AEXzhOEZTXbxxDXC7Ya9I4UbryGsL73H_fMl7qKNXTR5UIJNXjEgaSRqouEb0YDKObD_Dt2YbM0zA4qiTwQCQ-HXhZDiQUJQMY-e299Tis7xbOF0yvO-4mCahK4OTIRkOqm4q8LF-bZI6b2s4paLQhsTYm6txM8TMAbqjsnaNdkZyZoW1MQ=s966" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="966" data-original-width="960" height="422" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEirJYOq_B5AEXzhOEZTXbxxDXC7Ya9I4UbryGsL73H_fMl7qKNXTR5UIJNXjEgaSRqouEb0YDKObD_Dt2YbM0zA4qiTwQCQ-HXhZDiQUJQMY-e299Tis7xbOF0yvO-4mCahK4OTIRkOqm4q8LF-bZI6b2s4paLQhsTYm6txM8TMAbqjsnaNdkZyZoW1MQ=w419-h422" width="419" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">String Theory </td></tr></tbody></table><br /><p><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><p></p><p><a href="https://martinmugar.blogspot.com/2017/10/the-show-goes-on-schnabel-fils-walter.html">Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe </a>a painter and critic who stumbled across my writing emailed me in direct response to something I had written about the characters in <a href="https://martinmugar.blogspot.com/2013/12/zombie-artthe-lingering-life-of.html">Zombie Formalism</a>. I found it applied to the work of Dana Schutz. His words addressed the struggle of the part and the whole in any Hegelian inspired work of art where the part provides “no bodily surprise” (to quote Gilbert-Rolfe). Nothing that can break out of the whole. He sent me a link to his writing on the Sublime. The art of Shambroom like any smart artist who wants to find his or herself engaged in understanding the human condition of late modernity has to sort out this Hegelian/ Kantian struggle of the system v.s. the Sublime. Unlike the submission to the systemic like Schutz whose visual world seems to grow out of Saturday morning cartoons or the Zombie formalists who bleed any life out of abstraction, he creates a hybrid of both the intensity of seeing by the artist one on one with things of the world and a systematic world derived from <a href="https://martinmugar.blogspot.com/2017/05/rauschenbergs-coming-to-town.html">Rauschenbergian space.</a> On the one hand the face, the individual is lifted up into a societal miasma on the other hand things of the world are granted a kind of beauty in their isolation, a stance that exalts their magic of having appeared in time and space. Like a Janus face he looks backward into the 19thc on to the Renaissance and Baroque where the artists were capable of holding up the moment and the thing in its beauteous moment of revelation and on the other absorbing the language of modernism where the human presence is swept up into a higher structure. By straddling the two worlds he is casting doubt on any attempt to see the imagery of mass culture as a superior sort of transcendence as in Warhol, a Hegelian “aufbehung” which ambiguously means both a cancelling and a lifting up. </p><p></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj65xLBQphE_GTEqMMoUi28bFLcl9ZSFG0aha7R-X9CCVuOGRZPZ0kAgCrWr6ZVJF8MzSdOcLM0dq0zR6O1S_hUCPgqAqYqi3qQiHgb8vhoZHOUOKTJggrK7IQwUIcQ_4TjxxINh6CvTq1k/" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="" data-original-height="478" data-original-width="640" height="334" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj65xLBQphE_GTEqMMoUi28bFLcl9ZSFG0aha7R-X9CCVuOGRZPZ0kAgCrWr6ZVJF8MzSdOcLM0dq0zR6O1S_hUCPgqAqYqi3qQiHgb8vhoZHOUOKTJggrK7IQwUIcQ_4TjxxINh6CvTq1k/w448-h334/DSC08236.jpeg" width="448" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Symbolic Drift</td></tr></tbody></table><br /><br /><p></p><p>This strategy of maintaining both realities side by side without sublimating one into the other, resembles the task that Ernst Junger set for himself. In his writing. He is famous for his WW1 account of trench warfare ”Storm of Steel” that I recently learned that Don read while attempting in his own scholarly manner to understand warfare as manifested in WW1 .For <a href="https://martinmugar.blogspot.com/2013/10/in-bfa-charles-giuliano-has-written.html">Junger </a>WW1 represented a dramatic change in the role of the individual to technology. It is technology that drove the battle not individual acts of heroism. The book had a big influence on <a href="https://martinmugar.blogspot.com/2014/03/can-you-jump-out-of-enframementor-is.html">Heidegger’s</a> understanding of the growing nihilistic role of technology in 20thc life that he called “enframement” and more particularly ”machination” (that continues to this day in more and more insidious fashion on the internet.) In my own blogging I have called this transformation the “Humpty Dumpty” effect where the integration of the image of the individual into the whole as we knew it and as it is represented in the art of the west say in the work of Piero or Michelangelo is irretrievably lost as we move into the 20thc. All the king’s horses and all the kings men could not put Humpty Dumpty together again. </p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEh4wPWReAwYOzofdVS3Hshs24QoQGmtrT5IG9bJCOmHcCU6MDn4l8GNvAjiZ3i6BsTmkjVigGPuVMdE8vI-Q6T7YsCWF3YIG1l-wtW-n9QavRLl54NTc51YbH9mJXYO7SJiYDA9r01cLUnJ0sMOKE9fBXWSZXPO0fxjZd-RfAaEu705jI0SMSUHi5N8Tg=s300" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="175" data-original-width="300" height="183" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEh4wPWReAwYOzofdVS3Hshs24QoQGmtrT5IG9bJCOmHcCU6MDn4l8GNvAjiZ3i6BsTmkjVigGPuVMdE8vI-Q6T7YsCWF3YIG1l-wtW-n9QavRLl54NTc51YbH9mJXYO7SJiYDA9r01cLUnJ0sMOKE9fBXWSZXPO0fxjZd-RfAaEu705jI0SMSUHi5N8Tg=w314-h183" width="314" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">John Singer Sargent's "Gassed"</td></tr></tbody></table><br /><p><br /></p><p> In the interim between the wars Junger pondered in his writing how the life of the individual might function outside of the political and technological system. achieving in “The Adventurous Heart” an almost mesmerizing descriptions of the objects of the day to day reality that he encounters sometimes enhanced by drugs. His goal was to describe the surface of the real with such intensity so as to reveal something of a hidden reality. It also represents a shift of weight from the individual subsumed in the political to its own private inner magic. In many ways it parallels the power of many individual artist such as Picasso who functions as free agents outside the system. Or the proliferation of shamanic types in the 20thc century such as Alistair ‘Crowley, Krishnamurti or<a href="https://martinmugar.blogspot.com/2013/03/busapagliatheosophy-and-peggy-lee.html"> Rudolph Steiner</a> who attempt to integrate divinity in a post Christian era. Another short book written by Junger between the wars “Forest Passage” posits the strengthening of the individual in connection with the natural world as it steps outside the leviathan. I was taken aback by the first image described in “Adventurous Heart” in overwhelming detail of a tiger lily, which in turn brought to mind a painting by Don Shambroom of a daylily represented in almost stereoscopic detail. There is no postmodern cynicism in this painting. This is not the world of <a href="https://martinmugar.blogspot.com/2020/03/artists-without-faces-or-what-do-you.html">Yuskavage or Currin</a> that keeps pushing the envelope to further dimensions of perversity. The realm of <a href="https://martinmugar.blogspot.com/2017/04/innocence-and-experience.html">Blakean innocence</a> finds its place in Don’s openness to the opening of a flower. </p><p></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiL7zsWbBfYHhWOo-ChiMF6MpLhEK_Ro2BS3P0I2Gd-esdwFe4mZg-1Pd1lO2P-5E0UuzIS0icUfXQQ3Gsp1iBhaqfz481ZFNa2361m3stp4ujnIGRFlnLGvX6LEMcs8RhBHMNX-FaL05En/" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="" data-original-height="770" data-original-width="1046" height="280" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiL7zsWbBfYHhWOo-ChiMF6MpLhEK_Ro2BS3P0I2Gd-esdwFe4mZg-1Pd1lO2P-5E0UuzIS0icUfXQQ3Gsp1iBhaqfz481ZFNa2361m3stp4ujnIGRFlnLGvX6LEMcs8RhBHMNX-FaL05En/w380-h280/FA0e62aXIAM9JJW.jpeg" width="380" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">"Circle of the Lustful" William Blake</td></tr></tbody></table><br /><br /><p></p><p>Shambroom’s art embraces a hybrid notion of the societal whole and the individual as its own kind of whole. He leans on the structure of a visual language derived from Rauschenberg to insert images of faces known from mass media side by side with those of people in his immediate family. Sometimes there is text given the same weight as the faces and bodies. Interpenetration of the 19thc world of portraiture and that of billboards or flashing internet imagery. Everything is on the verge of overwhelming the individual. A child on a swing is impinged on by graffiti/slogans. What one must remember in observing these paintings is that everything is hand painted. There is the 20thc lingua franca of collage but the 19th c love of paint to represent the here and now. Again we are helped by a seeing Shambroom as hermeneutically orchestrating a sort of clash/crash between two periods of time and two notions of the universe, that seem to have bifurcated irretrievably to which his work says adamantly No. The dreamscape of people carried along in a sort of cosmic stream seems to remove a purely societal critique and opens up the possibility of a Blakean insertion into a higher spiritual realm. Shambroom’s work can only make sense if seen as issuing from a shamanic magic incantation. An attempt to merge the media images of mass culture with the domestic play of children</p><p><br /></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEj_dxPHkw4RSJ2tGKrS1CxIgFWAyUcx7b9bMuUCQdZ_8tE8XFT2Z25bQr6kxRDCx0G-1e79gdC0b9efRsVgItT25AdTQhY9UfIAptZrlM1kBoL1tsCBqTSiRoPEiWxAwAICDcm6LnToNEnNQLuiwfTwRNTcDRwax_p2ztW-m1FY6UynBM1zoxvoxUjK8Q=s566" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="480" data-original-width="566" height="372" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEj_dxPHkw4RSJ2tGKrS1CxIgFWAyUcx7b9bMuUCQdZ_8tE8XFT2Z25bQr6kxRDCx0G-1e79gdC0b9efRsVgItT25AdTQhY9UfIAptZrlM1kBoL1tsCBqTSiRoPEiWxAwAICDcm6LnToNEnNQLuiwfTwRNTcDRwax_p2ztW-m1FY6UynBM1zoxvoxUjK8Q=w439-h372" width="439" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Day Lily</td></tr></tbody></table><br /><p><br /></p><p><br /></p>Martin Mugarhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12799696151828817646noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2987736854176165487.post-3151580572664222362021-12-03T08:04:00.053-05:002021-12-04T06:20:30.108-05:00Miles Hall who previously interviewed me on my painting has written a sympathetic appraisal of my book on drawing and painting <p> <span style="font-family: verdana;">Drawing and Painting: Perceptual theory as a basis for learning how to draw, by Martin G. Mugar </span></p><p> While Mugar never mentions the construction of cathedrals in Drawing and Painting, his approach got me thinking about what that might mean in one’s own art and teaching. </p><p> Humans are tremendously fickle creatures, and sometimes when things go out of style, we have a hard time seeing them for what they are.</p><p> In April of 2019, while the world held its breath and Notre Dame burned, I couldn’t help but think of certain ironies concerning the near universal esteem – or even veneration - being expressed for that cathedral at the prospect of its loss. This in contrast with the ubiquitous scorn the structure was viewed with only two-and-a-half centuries before. In fact, the rise, fall, and rise again in the fortunes of its reputation – from the late Medieval period to the Enlightenment and through to the Romantic era - could be seen as a classic case study of the vagaries of stylistic perception over time.</p><p> The Gothic style’s plunge into disrepute got me thinking about current trends in our perception of Modernism, whose once powerful cache has seen a significant drop in our lifetime. We tend to forget that Modernism wasn’t a monolithic movement or aesthetic, and neither was the Gothic. Rather, the modern period was a century of varying forms where a whole spate of conflicting definitions of art’s essential nature were proposed. Because of its general ideological fervor, our Postmodern eyes tend to see Modernism in hindsight as a highly controlled set of styles, ideas, and institutions. The paradoxical thing is that this race to delineate and limit the parameters of art came out of a desire for freedom from traditional, academic forms and constraints. The early Modernist’s initial impulse was the ambition to build something new from the ground up, not as groups or a collective society (that happened later,) but as individuals. </p><p> Martin Mugar’s book, Drawing and Painting, grows out of much of the same soil early Modernism did, i.e. the desire to build painting anew, one artist at a time, with individual human eyes. This book places the act of visual perception squarely at the center of both drawing and painting. It encourages the student to cultivate their own cognitive awareness in the act of seeing. Its underlying premise is that vision isn’t just an open window for plundering stylistic preferences or narrative material. It’s not merely a tool in the shaping of our aesthetic or conceptual inclinations, but a deeply significant, ongoing, experiential act, never ancillary. The “eye is always in the process of stabilizing the world” according to Mugar, and the very essence of drawing is grounded in “this ordering of perception.” </p><p> As I read this book, I was struck by the notion of someone still believing, in very strong and certain terms, that artists can truly innovate through persistent looking, analyzing and feeling. One senses there is still something of the same naive sophistication bouncing around in the author’s head that was present when painters like Monet, Matisse, Braque and Marquet first stepped out into the French countryside to re-discover painting via the observation of nature, or “nature seen through a temperament,” as Zola put it, though I’m guessing Martin might be prone to replace Zola’s use of the subjective term “temperament” with language more firmly grounded in visual function. This is because 150 years later, Mugar’s book is backed up with more cognitive and art historical data, which he mines to make a logical argument for his premise. </p><p> Martin’s theory emerges out of decades of experience, from both his studio work and his teaching practice. It is informed by his extensive knowledge of Art History and an intense personal interest in philosophy. Alongside this there are specific investigations into cognitive science as it relates directly to certain visual issues. Most all the details of this knowledge stay in the background however, as Mugar offers up a series of practical exercises. These are laid out as something like arenas for the exploration of vision itself. We are given points of focus, each designed to tap into certain aspects of visual processing. Discoveries are left for the student to unearth through a visual, Socratic question and answer process. Formal issues are dealt with experientially and through looking rather than by describing a particular design concept: Drawing, cutting, collaging, finding negative shapes, using the imagination and redrawing. On the painting side, certain lighting and color parameters are established. There is a strong emphasis on starting out each exercise within its given boundaries, but there is also a feeling that the thoughtful game of chess, once established by those original limitations, could land the student just about anywhere. The destination is not restricted. There are unlimited possibilities in starting from inside those borders. </p><p> I would be hesitant to strictly call these exercises or assignments, and I doubt they are something to which one could firmly attach a grading rubric of the check-list variety (thankfully.) This doesn’t mean they lack objectivity, as Mugar is a stickler for really making you look at what’s going on in front of you. Caravaggio, Seurat, Cezanne and Braque figure prominently in this book, not for any emphasis on their stylistic flourishings, but because Martin relates certain perceptual functions to what each of these artists did on the picture plane, and how each one saw in new and innovative ways. He orders these exercises according to a different logic of sequence than most teachers I have encountered, starting with those visual processes that happen deeper down in the brain: A nod not only to cognitive science, but to simple intuitive experience as well.</p><p> While Martin doesn’t explicitly stray into the depths of philosophy proper in Drawing and Painting, we get hints of how his knowledge in that field enriches this book. One can see his interest in the thought of Heidegger - or perhaps other flavors of phenomenology and existentialism – permeating the mental atmosphere of its pages. Martin’s approach is also philosophical in this way: he does not offer up recipes or a set of instructions. Even with specific projects given, one must attempt to penetrate the meaning of each working situation he sets up through action and reflection. Though simple and straight forward in some ways, all is left open enough to be somewhat opaque and elliptical in terms of end points. Single sentences can be mined and reflected on for manifold implications. This book will utterly elude and exasperate the student who is looking to memorize technically rehearsed answers for surety and peace of mind. It is not a how-to manual. </p><p> Drawing and Painting calls us to ask questions, frame inferences, and create something of our own conclusions while being given a partial tour of the territory. The whole map is not handed to us, a priori. Instead, we are initiated into a knowledge of how to navigate the wilderness. What we discover in that wilderness is left up to us. </p><p> With its compact, elliptical prose this book is somewhat short, and I found myself wanting more. While he dips into certain aspects of perceptual science – the striate cortex was one that was new for me – there are many others that he leaves alone. I went away feeling like other, unmentioned aspects of vision, like depth of field, the fovea, and center surround, could each have had their own set of exercises tailored for them – along with many others. Or did the author decide that in the case of this book, less really was more? This would leave open the possibility that Mugar treats teachers like he does his students, and those things are left for us to figure out in our own curricula. </p><p> In any event, this is an important and timely book. Much of its significance is its tendency to go against the grain of our present-day reasoning. The algorithm, the template, the prefab architectural plan, these are the spirit of our current artistic age. We are offered an array of various templates which give the illusion of freedom. If followed, no thinking or feeling of your own is required. Sharpen your pencil, measure this, measure that, rinse, wash repeat. </p><p> Part of the beauty of Gothic cathedrals, and much of the reason we admire them today, is that they were constructed with no architectural plans. Their engineering specs were worked out during the construction process. The builders of Notre Dame defied gravity by experiment, by an intuitive understanding of their materials and the laws of physics. Drawing and Painting is a call to something similar. It is a call to build painting from the ground up, but in this case through an intimate, experiential knowledge of the laws of visual perception. To some that may seem old fashion. To others, it may be the only new way through.</p><p><br /></p><p>- Miles Hall, December 3, 2021</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p>Martin Mugar currently resides in New Hampshire. His writing appeared on Painter’s Table. </p><p>Book is available at: <a href="https://www.amazon.com/dp/1475021364">https://www.amazon.com/dp/1475021364</a></p>Martin Mugarhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12799696151828817646noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2987736854176165487.post-21088889723514573122021-08-14T09:38:00.035-04:002021-12-03T08:11:34.564-05:00Forge at Betty Cuningham and Dave Row in Rockland Maine<p> </p><p><span style="white-space: pre;"> <br /><br /><br /></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjWuGfZWtFDh8dBD8HT97CyKNruZxGcJ5LPGvf2sBq27JJxF5dWMafPo7Xl3mCVECxuFJTxaENb8zI4xpAi-5RpQB7pEos0hU9vEAWX_C76x8UEkmgRqSYDPIbi039oigtuVqoIMdk0dRaQ/s640/forge+1.jpeg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="430" data-original-width="640" height="277" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjWuGfZWtFDh8dBD8HT97CyKNruZxGcJ5LPGvf2sBq27JJxF5dWMafPo7Xl3mCVECxuFJTxaENb8zI4xpAi-5RpQB7pEos0hU9vEAWX_C76x8UEkmgRqSYDPIbi039oigtuVqoIMdk0dRaQ/w412-h277/forge+1.jpeg" width="412" /></a></div><br /> Forge<p></p><p>There has been a good deal of enthusiasm for the work of the late Andrew Forge recently shown at Betty Cuningham in NYC. The subtitle for the show” The Limits of Sight” seemed mistaken. My first reaction is: Whoever titled this show as such is making the grand claim that Forge in his work is establishing the limits of vision once and for all by working in the domain of the optical world of cones where color is activated in the retina, beyond which there is nothing. I am sure that he did not make that claim himself. Impressionism used this organizational strategy, which was most refined in the work of Seurat, where it took on the rubric of Pointillism. Reality reduced to cone generated dots that is known in the world of cognitive psychology as a lower order event. Structurally it can be considered a ground for and or a description of the visual world of things which in cogntive theory is a higher cognitive event. Seurat was not an abstract painter but used an abstract cognitive language of seeing as his underpinning of a representational world. Another contemporary practitioner of dots as support for representation is Chuck Close. Forge can be seen as someone who jettisons the representational end point using the pointillist ground to create these lower-order cognitive events. If you look at him in contrast to dot-meisters Richter, Hirst or Kusayama , they are more self-consciously abstract and the marks show no residue of brush marks. The gesture of Forge is one of the traditional hand-application of the brush to canvas. A dot in Hirst or Richter is derived from the world of graphic design. I should add that I did not see the show. I was able to zoom in on several of the paintings so as to see the quality of the brush stroke which were decidedly rather thinly applied brush stroke. <span style="white-space: pre;"> </span> </p><p><span style="white-space: pre;"> </span></p><p><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgolEGS9jyTdbbN8mb5f6xQhmWc7LGDFc27gv-7bcGARHP9ywWWA1ScNiIefSzJgjssqxgyPdOs_gbfysHmrDxf-TaXAvFLAhftR8nAR8l_p8Jeu2XSDMj1hsQqwnqp9D2bsO7UaXS8Aa3X/s2048/forge+2.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1371" data-original-width="2048" height="288" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgolEGS9jyTdbbN8mb5f6xQhmWc7LGDFc27gv-7bcGARHP9ywWWA1ScNiIefSzJgjssqxgyPdOs_gbfysHmrDxf-TaXAvFLAhftR8nAR8l_p8Jeu2XSDMj1hsQqwnqp9D2bsO7UaXS8Aa3X/w431-h288/forge+2.png" width="431" /></a></div><p></p><p><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> Forge(detail)</span><br /></p><p><br /></p><p>This more traditional application of paint opens up his work to a gestalt of open-ended exploration; an almost religious feel of anticipation. Moreover, the choice of colors is not color-pack derived as in Hirst or Richter. The mood is one of “where the painting is going to take the viewer” rather than where the painting “is” which is in the modernist ethos of Stella or the later work of Al Held hammered down. All dominated by the harsh connection of part and whole that controls the outcome ahead of time.</p><p><br /></p><p>On the one hand he abandons the representational goal of Seurat and Close but on the other hand does not revert to a hard modernist ethos. </p><p><br /></p><p>This notion of a painting existing in time took on more meaning when I saw the work of David Row currently on view at the Center for Maine Contemporary Art which is more about space. It is probably one of the more perfect installations I have ever seen. The symbiosis of the museum space and the works of art is well that symbiotic. The work is modernist as is the space. The scale is large enough to activate the space or another way of putting it the space does not overwhelm the works. The paintings push out into the space. Some of the imagery is of abstract shapes that are fissured as though having submitted to a seismic shift so that the museum space moves into the opening provided by the painting. The only doubt I have is does this seamless interaction of space and work point out an over dependence of the painting on the space. Maybe it is not a valid question as if one were to think that Michaeleangelo’s nudes were too dependent on the space of the Sistine Chapel. But there is no doubt the paintings are a sort of spatial installation. Row’s work that is also on exhibit at the Cove gallery in Portland along with other Maine connected artists. The work is smaller and there is no attempt to make the work interact with the exhibition space. Although the work is strong it does hint at its need for a monumental space to achieve its true visual impact. </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiyV_jI2wXqdn2ZqUiKQiEQo3SSo9jjqReyj-wMaGO7XjDzQg4_WjF6w9e8AEK152Lwq3uwDhEMLQ3hXeWql27GXWnoD32b4jUytSkwkpWvOQtzdbHFkFv3yezIBHfrf-bHRNcI4GaOaAvN/s1921/row+1.jpeg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1106" data-original-width="1921" height="184" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiyV_jI2wXqdn2ZqUiKQiEQo3SSo9jjqReyj-wMaGO7XjDzQg4_WjF6w9e8AEK152Lwq3uwDhEMLQ3hXeWql27GXWnoD32b4jUytSkwkpWvOQtzdbHFkFv3yezIBHfrf-bHRNcI4GaOaAvN/s320/row+1.jpeg" width="320" /></a></div><p></p><p><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> Row</span><br /></p><p>In a review by Peter Plagens of one of Row’s New York shows, Plagens takes issue with what he refers to as “fussed over surface” which figure in the work at the Maine contemporary art space. I had an inspiration of a body of work where the scratched or roughed up surface was replaced by Forges’ probing pointillist marks. It would be a sort of hypertext that dug into the space of the canvas and at the same time reached out into the gallery space. </p><p>But that is probably more than one person could achieve in a lifetime.</p><p><br /></p><p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEihKc-f6grUjnWE94GuSvLYPgH7mSq-zwqSG1j0QxwTdBHGJziaIfVozpB-hQwJy-MMOrM2ZLQ5G8Mnih2eLP4iFhruNwS_jU7CYFreefnKiSHhRnEcD9OgAGnli5Kefw9CgVz8ZadZl9Gg/s2048/Screen+Shot+2021-08-14+at+8.00.04+AM.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1152" data-original-width="2048" height="315" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEihKc-f6grUjnWE94GuSvLYPgH7mSq-zwqSG1j0QxwTdBHGJziaIfVozpB-hQwJy-MMOrM2ZLQ5G8Mnih2eLP4iFhruNwS_jU7CYFreefnKiSHhRnEcD9OgAGnli5Kefw9CgVz8ZadZl9Gg/w560-h315/Screen+Shot+2021-08-14+at+8.00.04+AM.png" width="560" /></a></div><br /><p></p><p><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> Center for Maine Contemporary Art</span> </p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p> </p><p><br /></p><p><span style="white-space: pre;"> </span></p><p><br /></p>Martin Mugarhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12799696151828817646noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2987736854176165487.post-37210111199449885502021-06-06T09:11:00.114-04:002021-06-16T09:34:10.136-04:00Is there a Connection between Materiality and Painting from the French Deconstructionists to Ha Chong Yuan<p>Almost a year after I wrote my essay in 2013 on <a href="https://martinmugar.blogspot.com/2013/12/zombie-artthe-lingering-life-of.html">Zombie Abstraction </a>I got an email from Mark Stone at https://henrimag.com/ that I had received confirmation of my role in coining the term Zombie Formalism from “Art in America” critic Raphael Rubinstein in an article he wrote in that magazine on French postmodernist thinking and French abstraction:<a href="https://www.artnews.com/art-in-america/features/theory-and-matter-63030/">"Theory and Matter"</a> My son who has a Phd in internet studies said getting that reference in hard copy was the Mt Rushmore of writing in the digital realm. Not long after that thumbs-up I attended a lecture by the artist Sharon Butler, at the Maine College of Art. She is the founder of the ezine “Two Coats of Paint” and the term “casualist painting” that competes with Rubinstein’s “provisionalist” painting that defined much of the painting in the “Forever Now” show at MoMA. In the Q&A after the lecture Butler who had read, I suspect, my blogpost that written in response to John Yau’s article in <a href="https://hyperallergic.com/96934/what-happens-when-we-run-out-of-styles/">Hyperallergic </a>, introduced me as the coiner of Zombie Formalism. Walter Robinson of course for most people is the fountainhead of the ZF moniker even though he wrote of it several months later and Jerry Saltz placed him squarely in the lineage (but no mention of my work), wrote an essay in the New York magazine that made it a current term of the art world. </p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiHSPNcdHGIIwIaCr1fuu5GbZSv3fmc7aovsVFhk6EhGQ2urKd6ECZmPxDIiuz2xSqmXcW69VwbdIno-y61iMnYMdmLNwyTaK7dOAMDk8brV-ZEQ3vC8-CsWP6fLcQb84iU_XHPGlgCfWjO/s1460/PC_11-42011.jpeg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="978" data-original-width="1460" height="203" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiHSPNcdHGIIwIaCr1fuu5GbZSv3fmc7aovsVFhk6EhGQ2urKd6ECZmPxDIiuz2xSqmXcW69VwbdIno-y61iMnYMdmLNwyTaK7dOAMDk8brV-ZEQ3vC8-CsWP6fLcQb84iU_XHPGlgCfWjO/w303-h203/PC_11-42011.jpeg" width="303" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Ha Chonghyun (Ha Chong Yuan)</td></tr></tbody></table><br /><p><br /></p><p>For some reason I never read the whole article by Rubinstein. A recent article again by Yau in <a href="https://hyperallergic.com/645640/ha-chong-hyun-what-abstraction-can-face-up-to/">Hyperallergic</a> on Korean abstraction referred to as Dansaekhwa and the specific concern for a member Ha Chong Yuan. Support and surface issues are central in his painting and made me recall the article by Rubinstein, which draws a direct link from French postmodernist theorists such as Derrida, Lacan and other Maoist thinkers such as <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alain_Badiou">Badiou</a> and a bevy of young artists in the 70’s who took their words seriously enough to deconstruct the pristine metaphysical structure of the flat surface. Hence: <a href="https://www.artnews.com/art-in-america/features/theory-and-matter-63030/">Theory and Matter</a> . There is no attempt by Yua to connect Ha Chong Yuan with this movement but I am sure it exists. And as he missed on the zombie label he seems to miss out on the history of support and surface. It would be fruitful in creating an east/west link. Unlike the French artists who in the style of Hantai take apart the ground completely verging on sculpture Hua reconstructs his surfaces to emulate Rymanesque monochromism and in its reliance on thin parallel horizontal lines the work of Agnes Martin. But these two American artists retain a painterly visuality whereas Ha adds another dimension in the laborious way the pictures are constructed out of slats of wood through which a limited palette of paint is squeezed through from behind and then adumbrated with wire diagonally applied. In reproduction the work does look like either Martin and Ryman, but once one understands the way they are built a whole new level of meaning is attained through a notion of materiality and labor. <a href="https://www.artforum.com/print/reviews/201502/ha-chonghyun-49820">Schwabsky in Art Forum</a> points out the title of Ha’s painting is called “Conjunctions” referring to paint and support merging. This emphasis of the painting acknowledging and giving primacy to support has to have come out of the French connection. Or maybe it was the France based Hungarian Hantai who influenced them. </p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiW3dUXqTH5OHrqABkUXlS1XU7_41J3zwmIJnHtFydZ8dwbw6-5azu5nELUT90L_MDqSVdz1nOrf7R83iMSWBMI2wuRcbM5zM7EXKpPQ20WzwMJDnEYvxH16A4VtyuT1t3S_XlQSAaSJbXp/s1000/img-pierre-buraglio104450545695.jpeg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1000" data-original-width="786" height="367" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiW3dUXqTH5OHrqABkUXlS1XU7_41J3zwmIJnHtFydZ8dwbw6-5azu5nELUT90L_MDqSVdz1nOrf7R83iMSWBMI2wuRcbM5zM7EXKpPQ20WzwMJDnEYvxH16A4VtyuT1t3S_XlQSAaSJbXp/w290-h367/img-pierre-buraglio104450545695.jpeg" width="290" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">"Theory and Matter" Pierre Buraglio</td></tr></tbody></table><br /><p><br /></p><p>What I missed in not reading thoroughly the Rubinstein piece is his discussion of the know-nothing attitude of zombie formalism. And Schjeldahl’s dismissal of the art that issued from French theoretics. American Art could stand on its own. It has an innate swagger that Bataille noticed in the American soldiers arriving in Paris after WW11. I talk about it <a href="https://martinmugar.blogspot.com/2012/02/impossiblity-of-transcendence-in.html">here </a> Of course, it is well-known that none of the zombie formalists espouse that label or see it as definitive of their work. Rubinstein said that its freedom from theory maybe makes it susceptible to the kind of mercenary flipping that Robinson described in his essay. The joke about the stock market being just cans of sardines comes to mind: “These sardines are not for eating. They are for buying and selling” said a business friend of my father when I inquired years ago about a current stock market boom. The French artists build their art on the shoulders of Maoist and Marxist revolutionaries that want to change the world for the better. Zombies are neo-liberal merchants who reduce art to merchandise. I remember in highschool staying at the Ritz Carlton at a room rented by this friend of my father who merchandised toothbrushes. There was a supermarket toothbrush display set up in the room. I vaguely recall the name of the salesman. Nev Levinson? I learned later from my dad that the salesman ended up in prison for fraud or some other corrupt activity. In my mind he is conflated with Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman”. Bleakly pushing goods around for a cut of the action. It was a side to my father that he did not want to dwell on but I do recall on several occasions where he talked about other business acquaintances who wondered about what it all meant. A story of a successful lawyer friend who would turn the lights out in his office and touch in the dark all the accoutrements of his trade including awards et alia. My artist friend Addison Parks, who had something of the priest about him would periodically find defects in my character, once blamed my father for having some nefarious nihilistic influence on me. At the time I dismissed his attempt to subject me to deep analysis as way off base especially in so far as my father created an image of himself that I accepted as a decent man who cared about the welfare of those around him. There must have been some fear on the part of Addison that my art was not all hunky dory and not just the child’s garden to play in that he described in the invitation of my first solo show at Crieger-Dane in Boston. What he must have sensed, that scared him as it does many other people, was a rather nihilistic notion that maybe the secret garden to play in is enshrouded in a kind of void. That the primal thrust is not to creating harmony but rather a raw Nietzschean will to power and its attendant destruction of what is.</p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgjGtbPXhhYTjyMEibq4l6irx2eYIKLYKGmyImiiXmPkF5I1-RmVwKrPh8IM7Lda_gP0wgzcWCRhv4zfWlbDPsACSGSrGlGqJUJOZw_ObD8ilVaF3GKRrhndhH4E_aZ-4YiyAjzdQaEyDbX/s1000/Joan-Miro-Burnt-canvas-IV-1973.jpeg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="670" data-original-width="1000" height="273" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgjGtbPXhhYTjyMEibq4l6irx2eYIKLYKGmyImiiXmPkF5I1-RmVwKrPh8IM7Lda_gP0wgzcWCRhv4zfWlbDPsACSGSrGlGqJUJOZw_ObD8ilVaF3GKRrhndhH4E_aZ-4YiyAjzdQaEyDbX/w408-h273/Joan-Miro-Burnt-canvas-IV-1973.jpeg" width="408" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Joan Miro</td></tr></tbody></table><br /><p><br /></p><p>I recently received a link to a blog post by the abovementioned <a href="https://henrimag.com/">Mark Stone</a> about the late work of Miro. My gosh it is a grim exploration of the canvas as battleground. Gone is the playful child’s garden that so influenced Calder. Had Calder who clearly saw child’s play in the work of Miro been aware of a nihilistic streak in his work? My attempt to create a good guy/bad guy dichotomy in my <a href="https://martinmugar.blogspot.com/2020/10/divagations-on-jed-perls-second-volume.html">Calder/Warhol essay </a>been misguided. Are they both bad guys? Had <a href="https://www.thewoventalepress.net/2020/12/10/calder-and-warhol/">Calder’s</a> (Woventale's version of my blog) playmate in the playground always been an enemy of painting. Schjeldahl quotes him from early on: </p><p>“I want to assassinate painting,” Joan Miró is reported to have said, in 1927. Four years later, the Catalan modern master elaborated, in an interview: “I intend to destroy, destroy everything that exists in painting. I have utter contempt for painting.” </p><p>This grimness seems to be the other side of the Dada coin. Maybe the jump into the surreal has more to the do with an embrace of the void rather than the child’s garden. Stone seems to see that this is no longer a critique of capitalism and commodification as Miro attempts but rather the status quo of art and the world we currently live in.</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p>Martin Mugarhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12799696151828817646noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2987736854176165487.post-13208596206563613392021-01-15T08:46:00.083-05:002021-04-19T08:04:42.828-04:00Outside the Walls, a meditation on the contemporary scene <p> One thing I miss is the time when America had big dreams about the future. Now it seems like nobody has big hopes for the future. We all seem to think that it’s going to be just like it is now, only worse.</p><p>—<a href="https://harpers.org/archive/2020/06/always-leave-them-wanting-less-andy-warhol/" target="_blank">Andy Warhol, America</a></p><p>It’s sort of my philosophy—looking for the nothingness. The nothingness is taking over the planet.</p><p>—The Andy Warhol Diaries</p><p> Art outside the Walls</p><p>These quotes followed the byline of Gary Indiana’s hit job on Blake Gopnik’s “Warhol” in Harper’s. I was directed to the article by Jed Perl after I sent him <a href="https://martinmugar.blogspot.com/2020/10/divagations-on-jed-perls-second-volume.html" target="_blank">my blogpost </a>on his “Calder” that compared their two mega tomes that were published this year. In that blogpost I pointed out that Calder uploaded his metaphysics of form into the popular culture and Warhol took “pop” culture and downloaded it his work. I thought that was rather clever of me! </p><p> Judging from the above quotes I thought that the Harper’s article might deal with the subject of nothingness in the work of Andy. The second quote seems to be a paraphrase of Nietzsche’s famous quote about how the wasteland grows. In an earlier essay I referred to Warhol as an acolyte of the church of contemporary nothingness. 15 minutes of fame was all the transcendence we would know in life. In a brief exchange with Gopnik on twitter when Gopnik’s book first came out I got gopnik to read the above-mentioned essay, which he found interesting but wrong. He went on to praise Koons as the successor to Warhol. He used the term aesthetic agnosia as <a href="https://martinmugar.blogspot.com/2014/09/jed-perls-review-of-koons-retrospective.html">Koon’s</a> contribution the world of art. Aesthetic agnosia is a sort of brain damage that disallows as it were the recognition of an object. Does Koon’s cause brain damage or is the use of the term meant to describe Koon’s rendering of his objects inaccessible to normal aesthetics. Is not nihilism just an expansion of our notion of what is aesthetic. There seemed to be a resistance on Gopnik’s part to my attempt to see Warhol as a priest of the religion of nothingness. Based on the above quotes Warhol was no philosophical neophyte. </p><p><br /></p><p>The Indiana piece surprisingly did not deal with nihilism despite the quotes but was a rather straightforward essay on a book that seems to be a rehash at best and badly written at the worst.</p><p><br /></p><p>Over the years artists have left comments on my blog insisting that the so-called nihilistic tendencies of <a href="https://martinmugar.blogspot.com/2013/12/zombie-artthe-lingering-life-of.html">Zombie Formalism</a> provided just another tool in the artist’s toolbox to make interesting art. These comments were framed in a sort of resentment that the use of the term nihilism that has such mean connotations should be applied to the postmodern phenomena of neo-abstraction. I never said that such art was off limits but rather that is had consequences. And made it difficult for an artist to engage the work of the visual powerhouses of Pollock, Gorky, Rothko and de Kooning in a sort of visual battle in the way they had engaged Picasso, Miro and Kandinsky in their work. Raphael Rubinstein named it ‘provisional painting’ and <a href="https://www.twocoatsofpaint.com/">Sarah Butler</a> named it casualist painting, both monikers implying a rather open-ended attitude toward painting, on the one hand not aggressively reductive and on the other not reaching for a Hegelian self-overcoming. I once lauded her strategy of putting that kind of painting in a negative dialectic with modernism. A handle for art critics to grab on to. Addison Parks in Boston put together a show called “the severed ear” that seemed to say abstraction is a visual language that need not be only a noisy gigantomachia but should be spoken as it were to describe day to day experiences. He included the witty deconstruction of Richard Tuttle and the private narrative of a life lived in the art of Tim Nichols. In the case of Parks, he just liked that kind of painting as it seemed to allow for more autobiography. In the case of Rubinstein it seemed to be a sort of weak Hegelianism influenced indirectly by the philosopher Vattimo’s notion of “weak being.” Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe references one of the adherents of the provisionalist school <a href="https://martinmugar.blogspot.com/2015/05/topoi-of-contemporary-culturethomas.html">Charlene von Heyl </a>in an article he wrote called Teaching What Can’t be Taught” whose work was included in the <a href="https://martinmugar.blogspot.com/2014/01/the-nihilist-condition-and-provisional.html">“Forever Now” show at MoMA.</a> Whereas the show was premised on the end of dialectics and history where in the lingo of Fukuyama the same ideas just get recycled, Jeremy puts her in a world of just good painting, where quoting Herbie Hancock on playing with Miles Davis: They just got it right as the music was playing itself. </p><p><br /></p><p>For me I cannot shake the creative explosion of the Impressionists and its seminal effect on Modernism. It seemed based on a deeper cognitive notion of how our eye/mind shapes the world and I probably rather naively thought that more and deeper insights could be drawn from that period in time. Reading the work of cognitive scientist David Marr in the late 80’s it even seemed possible to come up with an abstraction that went deeper or somewhere else. <a href="https://martinmugar.blogspot.com/2019/07/amazon-says-my-drawing-and-painting.html">Svetlana Alpers</a> who was introduced to my book on drawing and painting had read his work but had not predicted the same radical conclusions. Serendipitously I learned that a colleague of Alpers at UC-Berkeley Whitney Davis had such hopes and expresses his disappointment in an interview from “Farewell to Visual Studies” edited by James Elkins et alia. But the postmodern equivocation of cultural and scientific insights made it impossible to construe anything world changing of the visual in his work. Scientific culture has been problematized as purely a Western phenomenon on par with the world views of other cultures. As well as our popular “pop” culture. In the mean-time social issues so dominant in the thirties and forties of the last century have overtaken temporarily the commercial world of art. Interestingly enough the book which is collection of discussions on the role of Visual Studies at the University level there are scant references to contemporary artists. </p><p><br /></p><p>I have been led to repeat some territory already covered in earlier blogposts and in my book as a prelude to writing about a show of a former student she put together in Black Mountain NC. Such a portentous place where Albers taught painting and Charles Olson taught poetry. I said I could not promise that it would be sympathetic and mentioned my review of a show by Lorraine Shemesh, who I was a student with at Tanglewood with Philip Pearlstein as the artist in residence. Just had this flash that she does underwater Pearlstein’s. In any case I used it a pretext for the impossibility of what could have been very romantic paintings but placed a barrier between the seer and the seen. And talked about the romanticism of Edwin Dickinson that was so 19thc with its Shakespearean notion of the seer.</p><p><br /></p><p>The art world is so beholden to the historical and its Hegelian version that it is absolutely impossible to get recognition if you are outside the zeitgeist or in some way either evolving with it the dialectics or consciously rejecting them. A former student talked about an interesting exchange with Roberta Smith and her husband Jerry Saltz on the relationship of his art to the contemporary scene. Although Saltz came across as the mensch he plays on twitter, he peremptorily dismissed this student’s involvement in painting the figure in the landscape as overdone in the art world and not worth talking about. This is without seeing the student’s work. I have found the notion of a personal journey in art that might conjure up some necessary interactions with art of the past crucial to being an artist. IN the 90’s I was soaking up and applying so much AbEx only to be told by an art historian at UNH that it has already been done. The harsh constraints imposed by the academicians on the individual artists.</p><p><br /></p><p>Despite attempts to contemporize the show with its title “The feminine gaze” and have it carried along by notions of the diversity of a women’s gaze like all art the medium is the message. Moreover, the strength of the work lies in the success with which each artist uses their respective mediums. Fortuitously Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe in the above quoted essay cites Paul Valery who felt that ceramics was the highest form of art as it involves the possibility of the piece blowing up in the kiln. This possibility haunts Melisa Cadel’s work reinforcing a notion of the fragility of the human ego and the human body. The ego seems strengthened in the ceramic of the bald head empowered by the wreath of bloodied hands. The reference to a native American headdress works in that the role of feathers is to empower the wearer with the power of the bird from whence they came. Or are they “scalps” of past conquests. People get bloodied in her work; there is a man presumably killed by a victorious woman. No matter how adversarial the images seems in the end the bald headed woman surrounded by her conquests seems to speak to vulnerability. Is the work about fragility of our human conquests? The hoody that is flat on the floor might be a reference to wife killer Carl Andre whose work was often placed in the same manner on the floor? I have lately been reading about Cormac McCarthy and his classic "Blood Meridian" that someone described as a mix of Sam Peckinpah's "The Wild Bunch" and Melville's "Moby Dick". Is this ceramic head that of Judge Holden the scalper?</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEijWr7fOWA1bumkoV6gHHicvrAtKOOX9JDfGaV7ttDC-MXv9KTHSd6kcDoqigKVAT55Lkw9BNzEsQDB5IIU9AkfPuLtI8zHovvLkgkL_RliGqRe-BauREJFHGC7EiZOj_Q0bqT-0uLRRx6_/s2048/7.+Gallery+2+Angel%2527s+portrait+%2526+Anne%2527s+drawing.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1382" data-original-width="2048" height="270" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEijWr7fOWA1bumkoV6gHHicvrAtKOOX9JDfGaV7ttDC-MXv9KTHSd6kcDoqigKVAT55Lkw9BNzEsQDB5IIU9AkfPuLtI8zHovvLkgkL_RliGqRe-BauREJFHGC7EiZOj_Q0bqT-0uLRRx6_/w400-h270/7.+Gallery+2+Angel%2527s+portrait+%2526+Anne%2527s+drawing.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">Cunningham and Bessac</div><br /><br /><p></p><p>Angela Cunningham has learned marvelously the techniques of verisimilitude. Realism’s evolution from the Early to the High Renaissance results in an increase in the recognition of individual personality in portraiture. Angela understands the connection between oil painting technique and the uniqueness of each person’s face. In the Mannerists that precision becomes “mannered” and less precise. Angela stops before that stage. The technique of chiaroscuro perfected by Caravaggio leaps beyond the mannerists and is where Angela chooses not to go. She feels at home in the seamless connection of body and face that playing around with black and white might undermine. So different from <a href="https://martinmugar.blogspot.com/2020/03/artists-without-faces-or-what-do-you.html">John Currin</a> an artist who used classical techniques only to mock their ability to describe a self.</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEirH8aZwzz9Oy7Z7lxovI4lOsF48z9lzFpiMGssooR5aWDNvYbkX0yDkpsn87DNXhyYIP5S0QQ9MpszSJK60oI9XNirNGz7KCKc17_AbuAyT6DzBN8YP_vEXnkfm8OXTfMGMMryTVZtYxt9/s2048/6.+Gallery+2+Melisa%2527s+sculpture+%2526+Angela%2527s+paintings.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1163" data-original-width="2048" height="245" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEirH8aZwzz9Oy7Z7lxovI4lOsF48z9lzFpiMGssooR5aWDNvYbkX0yDkpsn87DNXhyYIP5S0QQ9MpszSJK60oI9XNirNGz7KCKc17_AbuAyT6DzBN8YP_vEXnkfm8OXTfMGMMryTVZtYxt9/w431-h245/6.+Gallery+2+Melisa%2527s+sculpture+%2526+Angela%2527s+paintings.jpg" width="431" /></a></div><br /><p> Cadel and Cunningham</p><p>Anne Bessac makes that leap using charcoal within the language of chiaroscuro. Functioning on the borderline of using black and white both as abstraction/flatness and the voluminous allows her to achieve an energy that is reminiscent on the one hand of Richard Serra’s abstract charcoal drawings and Jim Dines figurative drawings. This juggling of the two directions that the use of value can take the viewer gives her work a great deal of visual sophistication. The faces are suppressed in favor of the bodily presence. Like those two artists she “values” the white of the page incising the marks made by the line into its whiteness. The woman’s monumentality reference the earth mothers of prehistoric times. </p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhTk-DZT8ch_gayIK_rtZZyoob89u8l0ogDpbBCy7w8Xq_Ohwy6dUNaEDafg-zq0_RxWUxgikI2QzGtPYbVrBdxfRYjjCozIfnsSkBXMh2UAKdt_EsOE8l3w8etzKFaT2TN7EfeFw03qJPX/" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="2048" data-original-width="1890" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhTk-DZT8ch_gayIK_rtZZyoob89u8l0ogDpbBCy7w8Xq_Ohwy6dUNaEDafg-zq0_RxWUxgikI2QzGtPYbVrBdxfRYjjCozIfnsSkBXMh2UAKdt_EsOE8l3w8etzKFaT2TN7EfeFw03qJPX/w408-h240/9.+Gallery+2+Anne%2527s+drawing+%2526+Melisa%2527s+sculpture.jpg" width="408" /></a></div><br /><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> Cadel and Bessac</span><br /><p></p><p>Although the works in this show are a vehicle for the contemporary political agon of feminism they show a reverence for both the material used and the historicity of the visual languages. They are hermeneutical. They reach back into the past to see how those languages can be used as platforms for contemporary narratives.</p><blockquote style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; text-size-adjust: auto;" type="cite"><div><br /></div></blockquote><div dir="auto" style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; text-size-adjust: auto;"> The above work can be seen at the: </div><div dir="auto" style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; text-size-adjust: auto;"> <span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><a href="https://floodgallery.org/exhibitions/">Flood Gallery, Black Mountain, NC</a></div><div dir="auto" style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; text-size-adjust: auto;"><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span>“Diverse, The Contemporary Female Gaze”</div><div dir="auto" style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; text-size-adjust: auto;"> <span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span>November 15, 2020-January 31, 2021</div><div dir="auto" style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; text-size-adjust: auto;"><br /></div><div dir="auto" style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; text-size-adjust: auto;"> <a href="mailto:carlos@floodgallery.org"></a></div><div dir="auto" style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; text-size-adjust: auto;"> <a href="mailto:carlos@floodgallery.org"> carlos@floodgallery.org</a><br /></div><p><a href="https://www.thewoventalepress.net/2021/02/17/the-feminine-gaze/"> https://www.thewoventalepress.net/2021/02/17/the-feminine-gaze/</a> A critique more focused on the artists</p><p>followed by a thoughtful comment by Anne Bessac </p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p>Martin Mugarhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12799696151828817646noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2987736854176165487.post-27300564118454329292020-10-05T09:11:00.059-04:002021-06-06T14:36:01.683-04:00Divagations on Jed Perl's second volume of "Calder"<div>As I began to think about finishing my reading and reviewing Jed Perl’s monumental second volume of the life of Calder, the art world was inundated by the responses to the publication of <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Warhol-Blake-Gopnik/dp/0062298399">Blake Gopnik’s </a>thousand page book on <a href="https://martinmugar.blogspot.com/2014/01/the-nihilist-condition-and-provisional.html">Warhol</a>. I gathered from a few exchanges with Gopnik online that he sees the media saturated work of Warhol and Koons as the incontrovertible art of the present and in that sense world changing. The edge between mass culture and the individual has broken down and this duo with their philosophically hip intersubjectivity are defining the present and are the wave of the future. I came away with this encounter with Gopnik and the reading of Perl with what seemed to be a vision of two worlds diametrically opposed. On the one hand you have Calder who has uploaded the modernistic visual language of Miro into his own mobile work and in so doing added to its self-understanding as a transcendent language in defining the modern experience. He then heroically shepherds it from the world of kinetics down to earth into stabile sculpture where it takes its place in the public spaces created by the new urban landscape. On the other hand you have Warhol downloading the images of mass culture into his consciousness and calling them or at least being called by the art world high art. To make that claim requires that we acknowledge the overwhelming reality of mass visual media(television and movies) as dominant of the world we live in. It is a passive acknowledgment of the way the media colonizes our consciousness. It is in a sense reactionary as it is based on a parallel understanding between the flat screen of painting and the flat screen of the cinema and television. Nothing can be more antipodal to Calder who explodes the flat images of Miro into mobile 3D imagery. It is a continuation of the modernist vision of transforming our science-based notion of space and time started by the cubists. The history of Western art experiences this sort of upheaval periodically as in the perspective of the Renaissance or the chiaroscuro of the Baroque. Caravaggio’s chiaroscuro affected a change on painting that lasted three hundred years until its decadent manifestation in the Salon painters. Even the epigone of “everybody can be an artist” Jerry Saltz has come out with an article in New York magazine acknowledging his world changing genius.(did he plagiarize that as he did my exercise on abstract patterns from <a href="https://martinmugar.blogspot.com/2019/07/amazon-says-my-drawing-and-painting.html">my book </a>on <a href="https://www.amazon.com/dp/1475021364">drawing and painting</a> where I made the above point about Caravaggio? )</div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi7ooqR7X1kKfh3Kk3YW2tNzh7_HxVFdNz5w9obJHMowbdDoDYtKtU9_1epKIVcChYyFHqrnA0zSmkjw-obksYWxjSgF6gE8TRrSk2nuOgMQGsXNeNFtvB9AKQmuI50fvtTiCX6T6QQCNku/s1723/1200px-Original_Grand_Rapids_City_Hall.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1723" data-original-width="1200" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi7ooqR7X1kKfh3Kk3YW2tNzh7_HxVFdNz5w9obJHMowbdDoDYtKtU9_1epKIVcChYyFHqrnA0zSmkjw-obksYWxjSgF6gE8TRrSk2nuOgMQGsXNeNFtvB9AKQmuI50fvtTiCX6T6QQCNku/s320/1200px-Original_Grand_Rapids_City_Hall.jpg" /></a></div><br /><div><br /></div><div>In the context of Gopnik’s attempt to supplant the centrality of the modernism of Picasso and Miro with the media critique/pastiche of Warhol, Perl’s book could not be more timely. It reminds us of the uniquely inventive transformations that individuals bring to the greater culture. If Gopnik’s Warhol gives credence to the importance of the mediated world we live in by downloading its banality into his imagery, Calder uploads the individual creations of Miro into sculpture with a new notion of time and space. Reading Perl’s description of Calder’s life midst the movers and shakers of modernism creates a lucid image of the negotiations and strategies these artists pursued as they take their place on both sides of the Atlantic in the creative storm of modern art. Those events take place in the context of the political turmoil of the 20thc that could have easily swallowed them up. Interestingly, we see that the intellectual evolution of Calder’s work seems to parallel the architectural transformation of the urban scene so as to create a kind of urban space starting in the 1950’s perfectly adapted to Calder’s work. At the very beginning of the second volume, Perl describes the events leading up to the installation of the stabile “Grande Vitesse” in Grand Rapids Michigan. There was a newfound pride in the city that created sufficient wealth to replace the antiquated landscape of 19thc America with a sleek new modernism. Although the industrialists were for the most part pedestrian in their artistic tastes, in the case of Grand Rapids one town father was married to an artistic sophisticate Nancy Mulnix who had been aware of Calder’s work early in her life and was an aficionado of modernism at a time when a taste for its subversive ideas was not shared by the general public. Perl reminds us that the world out of which Calder’s work came was defined by the writings of Joyce, the art of Picasso, the music of Stravinsky and the dance of Balanchine. At mid-century this was still the avantgarde. As the old 19thc Grand Rapids succumbed to urban renewal and the 19thc city hall despite protests from a public ,who as in so many cases such as Boston, came to appreciate the old just as it was being destroyed, a new city hall was being designed by Skidmore Owings and Merrill. (Ironically some of the modern buildings that replaced 19thc Boston are slated for demolition). The building that might have looked impressive if it was on the scale of a New York City skyscraper it comes across as a rather squat low budget expression of the modernist spirit. Doing some research on the Vandenberg plaza now commonly called the Calder Plaza, it appears that to this day few citizens are pleased with the outcome of the urban renewal of a half century ago. Much nostalgia is expressed toward the destroyed city hall. However, the disappointment over the antiseptic urban space does not extend to the Calder which is for the most part admired and appreciated on its artistic merit. The high tide of modernism left its mark with numerous Calder’s throughout the Urban landscape. </div><div><br /></div><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhPeD-asMwQCsZUnlBX2FoV7eW0ghZAbN0Jopx5wPITTmCPBoCTxX3S2n8Oo7H7J9AVMvBXyxbsL6iyKNUtF0C2W9tJuwaF1cTGvYGWZZpXYS5NAABrr3LTISab00js54jooCcSBDHbK8h2/s761/SOM001-1.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="531" data-original-width="761" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhPeD-asMwQCsZUnlBX2FoV7eW0ghZAbN0Jopx5wPITTmCPBoCTxX3S2n8Oo7H7J9AVMvBXyxbsL6iyKNUtF0C2W9tJuwaF1cTGvYGWZZpXYS5NAABrr3LTISab00js54jooCcSBDHbK8h2/s320/SOM001-1.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Calder Plaza Grand Rapids MI</td></tr></tbody></table><br /><div><br /></div><div>What intrigues me is the lifespan of artistic ideas from their inception and to their waning. Perl does a marvelous and painstaking job doing contact tracing of the ideas of Calder and the avant garde of the time. He was the avantgarde and Man Ray is the only other American I can think of who played as successfully in the transatlantic stage of modernism as did Calder. One gets a sense of its transcendent <a href="https://martinmugar.blogspot.com/2017/12/ideas-matter-1929-davos-debate-and.html">nature of ideas</a> being exchanged from mountain peak to mountain peak although the image that often comes to mind is a rather mundane one of a ball being tossed sideways or downfield in a match of rugby on its way to its destination. Or maybe a better one would be the Monty Python soccer match of philosophers shouting out their oracular insights to the world without going anywhere. Although Calder was not a theorist and kept his ideas to himself, Calder’s world seemed to function on the belief that ideas matter and that his work was destined to be the vehicle for a new expression of time and space. The ball that is being passed around on its way to the stabiles started out with Miro. One sees its effect on Gorky. So dominant and salient is his influence Perl at one point in the book wonders if Calder who was a neighbor of Gorky in Connecticut had influenced Gorky’s late work. Maybe so, but a case could be made for the parallel influence and evolution of Miro on both their oeuvres. </div><div><br /></div><div>The ideas embodied in Calder’s work are embedded in our day to day life. The most salient example are the mobiles as the conceptual basis for crib toys. It is easy to ignore the fact that their prevalence has to do with the depth of their scientific understanding of time and space. Mondrian and de Stijl had an influence on architecture and fashion but to have transformed the experience of a child’s first years of life is quite astounding. Moreover, they are so seamlessly inserted into that realm that it is hard to imagine crib life without them. </div><div><br /></div><div>But this is the way that new concepts work. They shake things up reshaping the world we live in. And then because of their ubiquitousness like electricity their conceptual depth is forgotten. </div><div><br /></div><div>Reading <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Calder-Conquest-Space-Later-1940-1976/dp/0451494113/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=calder&qid=1601907072&s=books&sr=1-1">“Calder”</a> required an adjustment of my habitual expectations of the reading of Perl’s writing. I always enjoy his incisive critique and deflation of the art “powers that be”. I have spoken with many artists who are part of his fandom. We all seem to suffer in silence from the exclusivity of the art world with Perl our sole public voice. I wonder if they found it difficult to read a book by Perl that is unequivocally enthusiastic about its subject. Calder’s life is nothing short of a never-ending story of successfully achieving venues for his work and the best critical response. The successes come from the start: being born to a family of artists who provided important career connections, a perfect marriage, meeting up with the French avantgarde at the right time, joining the transatlantic artistic aristocracy and then toward the end of his life achieving a near total conquest of the world of public sculpture in the USA and Europe. The only way to read this biography is to go along for the ride. Perl has provided not only the large arcs of that life but the infinitesimal detail. </div><div><br /></div><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhFJEFNB172FBqOYLjT-KwqHcyZR8UuC17-x2sSVa0-jNwBawI2AOUVLKRXjIr0WptXmAl8nV_emMORxqu8qKdC358zfLNuz1U-zF60OvsuifCMrYeQdcXiI4G6y6xXgmuq-2fxt-gbeMRq/s239/download.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="211" data-original-width="239" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhFJEFNB172FBqOYLjT-KwqHcyZR8UuC17-x2sSVa0-jNwBawI2AOUVLKRXjIr0WptXmAl8nV_emMORxqu8qKdC358zfLNuz1U-zF60OvsuifCMrYeQdcXiI4G6y6xXgmuq-2fxt-gbeMRq/s0/download.jpg" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Warhol version of a Calder Mobile</td></tr></tbody></table><br /><div><br /></div><div>The strange disconnect of this glorious life and work and its seamless embodiment of a positivistic scientific understanding of time and space seems distant from our postmodern times. A large majority of what is exhibited manifests the societal critique of the self, caught in the web of a societal construct whether it is shaped by a notion of Marxist false consciousness or the pandemic of social media. This is Warhol’s era. Cynically Ironic. Power hungry. No wonder that Warhol and Trump were both mentored by Joe McCarthy’s lawyer <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roy_Cohn">Roy Cohn. </a></div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhaLZjZzn66Q-sf4XllJljmDt32ijzgHpuqca9rxs01hUc1XDPV-i_YW6Gqvx4LQ4xxoFzO2cDUdYQ3aHuO_6JbADwQIahVoq0pEXGQ7XvzA-WMIHHqm1XoiQeQlZL5U9DW-tMVfDAbVAgM/s1729/il_1588xN.1834729799_gon1.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1729" data-original-width="1588" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhaLZjZzn66Q-sf4XllJljmDt32ijzgHpuqca9rxs01hUc1XDPV-i_YW6Gqvx4LQ4xxoFzO2cDUdYQ3aHuO_6JbADwQIahVoq0pEXGQ7XvzA-WMIHHqm1XoiQeQlZL5U9DW-tMVfDAbVAgM/s320/il_1588xN.1834729799_gon1.jpg" /></a></div><br /><div><br /></div><div> this essay has been picked up by <a href="https://www.thewoventalepress.net/2020/12/10/calder-and-warhol/">Woventale Press</a> with some edits that accentuate the difference between Warhol and Galder</div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div> </div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div>Martin Mugarhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12799696151828817646noreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2987736854176165487.post-13515980516153481622020-07-11T05:56:00.003-04:002021-03-28T09:15:20.203-04:00Photographer Joseph Podlesnik and Provisional Painting<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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There is an old Maine locution “You can’t get there from here” that is a response to a question from a lost driver getting directions in the Maine backcountry. Factually it states the obvious: it might be hard to describe the way places are connected by convoluted country roads but it also embodies a kind of laconic Yankee spirit that raises the question of why would one bother to go elsewhere when here might be<a href="https://www.blurb.com/b/10205871-dumb-space?fbclid=IwAR1kxjuWSWK8rbPOAMxUiJLsz0FBPiC9aLi7oJsA8jRT4Hx7c44K94F2M9I"> just fine. Joseph Podlesnik</a> adds to this dialogue: once you get there leaves us in a quandary: There may not be a here at all.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Cartier-Bresson</td></tr>
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In photography and painting perspective has often been the main visual tool that connects the human presence to the here and now which becomes place. The image created by the handheld camera establishes ipso facto a tight bond via the picture plane on the back of the camera to the environment. If it is parallel to the subject matter or at an angle to it, the way the eye is moved by the image can be quite different. In an 8x10 format you can actually manipulate the plane in the back of the camera to be in alignment or not with the subject matter. As a young artist in the 70’s when flatness reigned in the world of Painting I took pleasure in looking at the snap shots of photographers who documented their presence in the world. It was a humanist bent that led me to appreciate the work of Cartier-Bresson. He is a master of the manipulation of perspective as a tool to both submit his subjects to perspective and then liberate them from its hold at the last minute so to speak. The perspectival effect was either achieved through the converging lines of architecture receding or with similar objects each being smaller in scale. In this photo he used both:<o:p></o:p></div>
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The perspective is created both by the receding barrier and the scale of the two men in proportion to each other. One wonders how different the image would be if the man closeup would be looking through a hole at what I presume to be a construction site. The side of his face is parallel to the picture plane of the camera putting him in the photos structure, but his looking away is an escape from the structure of the perspective to something outside the snapshot.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Eggleston is another photographer hypersensitive to the picture plane. Whereas Cartier-Bresson is using the diagonals Eggleston often uses the parallel picture plane as an inert underlying structure on which to hang some other visual strategies. In this picture the trash cans hang like two barbells supported by the food stand. It is a closed system except for the soft candy hues of the stand and their evocation of a warm summer day which like the gaze of the man in the Cartier-Bresson photo is an emotional release.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">William Eggleston</td></tr>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Cartier-Bresson</td></tr>
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Podlesnik compresses the space with the same perspectival tools but squeezes the human presence almost completely out of the scene for the most part with no escape, no hope for empathy for the human condition. The suburban/urban space he describes seems drawn from the non-spaces of industrial parks, parking garages, motels off of the highway. But the nihilist aesthetic is so powerful they could just as well be anywhere in the hands of Podlesnik. Cartier-Bresson and Eggleston started us down the route away from the monument, the easily recognizable. Poldesnik takes us ever further afar to the edge of the void with the places almost unrecognizable. But there is a surprisingly unexpected release in all his images but not in the subject matter of the photo: the things he describes are often represented with the marks ,structure and textures of abstract painting. Sometimes we see the influence of minimalism at other times that of postmodern provisionalist painting as defined by Raphael Rubinstein a style of painting shown several years ago in a show at MoMA entitled “Forever Now”.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Mary Heilmann</td></tr>
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Can’t get there from here? Just at the moment where Podlesnik seems to abandon the here and now and “the place” seems to be lost in an existential dead end, the viewer is transported by a kind of transcendence into the language of painting. It might be considered in computer parlance as hypertextual the simultaneity provided by the computer in our modern life where one image suggests another.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Martin Mugarhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12799696151828817646noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2987736854176165487.post-21558581739784551822020-05-14T09:02:00.201-04:002022-02-16T16:41:04.381-05:00As good as it gets on the internet (Or the Three Penny Author)<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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I put my blogposts on Medium, a site that promotes writing on the web. My writing rarely gets any feedback as adjudged from the dearth of what Medium refers to as “claps”( I just got one for an article on Jed Perl). They offer some remuneration as readers pay a fee for access to the site. Last month I got an email that 3 cents($.03) had been deposited in my savings account from all the voluminous reading of my blogs. I really don’t despair anymore at the paucity of interest on Medium. I get emails from them touting what they consider to be the hottest submissions that are for the most part pulp stories of unsolved murders that have no real thinking going on, let alone narrative style.<o:p></o:p></div>
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I recently got sucked into another site called Academia that distributes scholarly papers. As an enticement to join they said my name is getting mentioned on their site. The only way to find out who mentioned me is by joining them for around $100 a year. (Linkdin uses the same trick where they say someone is talking about you, but again you have to pay to find out) When I finally gave in and joined, the “mention” that they half-described was nowhere to be found. There have been other mentions since that I vaguely recall as authentic but they tend to be chaotically strung together obscuring any real sense of where the mentions were made. They do reach out to people I have mentioned in my articles toauthenticate my referencing them. My blogs are not formatted academically but they have been disseminated by the site to numerous individuals who are often associated with universities worldwide as resident scholars, students or alums. Since my blogs are for the most part illustrated, I hope the recipients are finding them at least visually entertaining.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Twitter is all about power and the participants obviously love to wield it. Interactions with the famous can happen but they are for the most part short lived. You might be flattered to find your tweet acknowledged but it is never for long.e.g.my interaction with the Pulitzer prize winning critic Jerry Saltz. I had sent him a rough draft of my self-published book on Drawing and Painting to New York magazine offices where he is on the staff. A week later I found him describing one of the exercises in his own words but with an illustration he could have only taken from the copy I sent him as the source of the image was rather obscure. I sent him a message asking him about the rip-off and he replied with cryptic <span style="font-family: "wingdings";"></span>. He never acknowledged that I was the source of the exercise. He got 55 likes. Why did he bother to reprint what I wrote? With one hand he showed what I had written to his followers all of whom thought it was interesting but with the other hand made sure I did not get credit for it. It hurt and I think that was his intention. I think my hope was for the much vaunted and desired “retweet”, so important that often tweeters will say that a retweet does not represent an endorsement. If he wasn’t interested in power then he might have just given the book a tweet. I would have sold a few copies and that would be the end of it. But that would mean I am piggybacking on the precious reputation he has so assiduously built on and cultivated over a lifetime. That reputation has monetary value.<o:p></o:p></div>
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I had a rather pleasant exchange with Blake Gopnik, a propos his recently published “Warhol”, where he engaged me in a dialog about what I had written on Warhol which he found very interesting but wrong. It was a quirky linking on my part of Warhol to Flannery O’Connor due to their shared umbrella of nihilism. Nihilism is sort of a dog whistle that you are clearly anti-humanist and he rejected that Warhol was a nihilist. And that the shared religiosity of Warhol and O’Conner was bogus as Warhol’s connection to his religion was rather shaky. Maybe he at least gave me the time of day as I knew from the horse’s mouth that Philip Pearlstein was Warhol’s roommate at Carnegie-Mellon. The accessibility he provided me by answering my questions was an opportunity to show that he was the expert and that I should buy the expert’s book to have the definitive answer on Warholiana. He is promoting his book. That’s all. Nothing wrong with that. I was able to extend the discussion to his opinions on Koons whose artistic value is based on what Gopnik calls “esthetic agnosia” and the exchange ended there.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Facebook is folksy in comparison to the ego flaunting/flouting on Twitter. Twitter with its message limit forces you to hone your message whereas on FB you can ramble on. Topics are mostly about family events and the Peaceable Kingdom where Lions get along with baboons and the endless casts of clever cats and more cats. If I get sporadic feedback on Twitter (as indicated by the stats)I am sure to get lots of likes on FB. I am sure this folksy image is cultivated by the managers. The world of twitter discussions are short lived storms and then subside and can’t be revived. Maybe you leave a mark on your interlocutor or not. Things are more relaxed on FB. I recently posted for the hell of it an image of a painting I had done in NC years ago that ended up in the Weatherspoon Museum. It created some interest from students at UNC-Greensboro and some sincerely thoughtful comments from people who follow my work. I tried to flip the conversation to my book on drawing and painting in the hope of maybe selling a copy. FB is not a platform for forcing anything on anyone. We are just nice folks with an opportunity to celebrate Mother’s Day. It is not about making a profit except for FB. I didn’t bring up the book again. I flipped to my Amazon stats page and there was no sign of anything sold. Just some page views that have little monetary value.<o:p></o:p></div>
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It was the philosopher Rene Girard who talked about the magic of the “like” button. It offers us the illusion that we are all on the same (FB) page. It engenders a kind of harmony an often false sense of agreement. I think it is the power of the retweet that makes Twitter different in that our power on Twitter is based on your number of followers and to be retweeted by someone with numerous followers is inherently valuable as it gets you out of the bubble of your limited followers. I notice the editor of Hyperallergic is parsimonious with his retweets. I got one once when he retweeted an article he pretended to show interest in publishing and when I threw in the towel and put it on my blog he felt he could at least give me the imprimatur of his retweet. Never again, even though be follows me.<o:p></o:p></div>
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That brings up the existence of the comments section provided by many online magazines where I first interacted with the Hyperallergic editor who leaves the comment section open to anyone. Comment is often allowed only to buyers of a subscription. The monetization of the web is continuing apace. More and more sites not only now limit comments but open access to certain articles only to subscribers. If it doesn’t slowdown the number of readers and in fact increases them then there is nothing to stop it. But the comment sections have been my bread and butter starting with Hyperallergic. It was there that I made my first impact on the web commentariat. I read an article by John Yau, a well-known critic/poet from the days of hard copy. It described a phenomenon of a certain bland imitative abstraction that was being shown in NYC. It was going for big bucks and he was not a fan. Based on the images he supplied I got on a tangential rant that became a blogpost with a label for the work: <a href="https://martinmugar.blogspot.com/2013/12/zombie-artthe-lingering-life-of.html">“Zombie Abstraction”</a>. I linked it to the comment section for the Yau article and that was that. Four months later an article by Walter Robinson appeared in another online magazine referring to the same sort of painting as Zombie Formalism. Its publication must have appeared on the comment section of Hyperallergic. I pointed out in a back and forth exchange with Hrag Vartanian the publisher in the comment section that it was I who first used Zombie to describe work of that ilk. Vartanian at Hyperallergic came to my defense although somewhat dismissively saying that zombie was in the air and that it was inevitable someone would use the moniker. At a later date Raphael Rubinstein in an article in <a href="https://martinmugar.blogspot.com/2014/09/my-notion-of-zombie-art-is-referenced.html">“Art in America”</a> mentioned me as the first to use the term. I heard from a blogger who is closer to the NY art scene that Robinson and Rubinstein are friends and that Robinson at the time was furious at the unwillingness of his friend to give him credit for first inventing the term. I must admit that if someone with the notoriety of Robinson had not written about the New York abstraction that I referred to, then my article would have remained insignificant. Such is the case with my article on <a href="https://martinmugar.blogspot.com/2016/05/shake-and-bake-aesthetics-in.html">“shake and bake” abstraction</a>. I think the label is a clever one and the points I made are valuable but it will never achieve the same notoriety. As for ZF I did make the tour of online art writers who wrote about ZF. If they had a comment section or email I tried to convince them to include my name as the inventor of the moniker. Most agreed seeing the evidence from Hyperallergic to make the change. <a href="https://martinmugar.blogspot.com/2019/07/amazon-says-my-drawing-and-painting.html">Saltz </a>who was a major disseminator of the term with his “Zombies on the Walls” that appeared on the online version of New York Magazine noticeably did not. <a href="https://artcritical.com/2014/10/31/noah-dillon-on-zombie-formalism/">Noah Dillon </a>of artcritical.com did make the change. My blog comes up on the first page of a google search for Zombie Formalism.<o:p></o:p></div>
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There is a pleasurable sense of isolation of being alone on the mountain top associated with blogging that can get one into trouble at times. It is probably a pleasure in getting things right in so far as you are not a gun for hire and write for yourself. Something as well about the facility of word processing that allows for one to get carried away by precision to such a degree one becomes oblivious to one’s audience. I write on my computer in solitude. One paints that way. It is the nature of the profession. I have had a knack for reinventing myself or at least respecting the issues that my painting represents to me and following their lead. In retrospect a lot of issues that I struggled with were not shared by collectors. I find critics have always been ready to chime in on the ideas that motivated my work. But that only reinforced my solitude and willingness to follow my intuition. Recently, this introspection backfired when I wrote about a hurtful experience I had with a New Yok coop gallery that with one hand accepted my work for a Summer group show and with the other upon the delivery of the work asked me to remove it from the show. No one ever gave me a reason for it. There was a smugness from the people I talked with on the phone that such a work would not be allowed to hang in the show. I could understand how it got in the show. The curator was a color field painter. In a desperate attempt to find some logic to it I made the farfetched claim that it was due to the gallery members who based on my research were fairly traditional artists sharing the views of a conservative(not politically) art critic whose work I actually admire. When the critic and his friends failed to show any interest in my<a href="https://www.amazon.com/dp/1475021364"> drawing and painting book</a> it dawned on me at the height of obtuseness I had probably rubbed him the wrong way. And even more appalling it took me a whole year to delete the presumably offending blog post. I was most likely so in love with my own words alone there at the computer at 6am when I do most of my writing that I let it stand published on my blog for this long. To use an oft used expression: I cut off my nose to spite my face.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Casting a net into the net does bring in some interesting catches from well-known artists and critics who stumble across my writing, that would only happen off the web if I were published in respected journals. They have enjoyed my invective and in the case of one artist/critic shared some choice gossip about a contemporary artist that I had written about and I went on to repeat it on blog and then was asked by the source to delete as being too personal. What do I hope to achieve by all this blogging and interacting with the denizens of the web? On the one hand one creates a narcissistic self-referential bubble that only serves to reinforce a kind of clarity about one’s inner life but adds only to further isolation. On the other hand, there is a clear sense of chumming for fish. Throw something out on the water to attract some activity in the hope of catching a bigger fish. Meantime the ground of all this ranting and raving (there is some cogent thinking I hope) is my painting. It is still premised on being in the “white cube” the stage where the viewer and the work can interact and where both can be transformed. It is still primitive and is reminiscent of a believer in a church(a religious metaphor I used once on twitter that brought out the ire in an atheistic art critic with lots of followers) yet miles away from the tumult on the net where everybody and their uncle pretends to know the status quo of the art world and the future. We all pretend to be omniscient. It was an early thinker of the internet Clay Shirky, who referred to this mass internet phenomena in his book “Here Comes Everybody”. But as I have pointed out (and my son Gabriel wrote his PhD thesis on this topic) there is still a power structure that those who have achieved notoriety outside the internet can enforce via a hierarchy of power built into websites on the internet. Trying to break into that hierarchy probably is the goal of my blogging. But as I have pointed out above there are always those who will with pleasure remind you of <a href="https://martinmugar.blogspot.com/2011/12/as-artist-we-live-mostly-surrounded-by.html">your irrelevance</a>, where exactly you are situated in the pecking order.<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">I just got (Feb 20, 2021)blocked on twitter by the above mentioned Hraj of Hyperallergic for grousing about the newly imposed cost of commenting on his site. I used the word paywall that he said was the wrong word to use for paying for comments. It was the use of the wrong word that upset him. This obsession with language usage bespeaks a sort of priestly class that loves to control the meaning of words and penalizes misuse. He did not comment on my complaint about paying for commenting but using "paywall" that he insisted only applies to content. So much gratitude for following his site for 8 years. But it did get a lot of hits, although due to his blockage I cannot any longer access his comments. I thought of Freud's statement about the narcissism of minor distinctions but realize that if you play with it a bit you come up with a narcissist of minor distinction that describes Mr Vartanian. In regards to the distinction between the homespun folkiness of FB v.s. Twitter, Vartanian belied his understanding of the power-laden nature of Twitter when in his final au revoir he told me to go back to FB.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">This mean spirited type seems to thrive on the internet. I recently posted one of my older blogs on the above mentioned Academia.edu, that many readers had enjoyed over the years. Not a great philosophical text but at heart a tender reminiscence of friends and conversation. It brought out a "scholar" who dismissed it as unworthy of comment. No dialog. What could have been a nice exchange was stopped in its tracks. He has continued to accuse me of trying to get the de Kooning I wrote about to submit to labels. It made me reread what I wrote and I am reassured that is was not an easy task and that I kept the concepts grounded in the painting I chose to write about. </div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">I will never forget the anecdote Addison Parks told me about the day he introduced his wife to his mentor Leon Polk Smith. Throughout the meeting, Leon ignored her. As the meeting came to an end, Addison pointed out his rudeness. He told him "if you are not nice you are nothing". It seems that everyone would rather be the lawyer pouncing on your slipups in word usage. My demeanor is just show appreciation for what comes your way and spread the word. </div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">Recently, Jerry Saltz commented on a comment I made on a tweet where he posted a photo of himself kneeling in awe in front of a Rembrandt self-portrait at the Madison/Frick. It was a mixed "???!!!" but seemed to concur with what I said as did numerous followers. Here is what I said: "<span face="-apple-system, system-ui, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #0f1419; font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;">He does not lose the veneer of infinite detail as you move closer. It never becomes just paint." It had more than 5000 impressions. Now that is when Twitter works. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;"><span face="-apple-system, system-ui, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #0f1419; font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;"><span face="-apple-system, system-ui, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #0f1419; font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Now my access to a larger audience has been excised by Saltz when he blocked me after I complained about being blocked by Vartanian. I thought he would see himself as inclusive and less petty.But it is all the same club. It is the pleasure of excluding. The exclusion principle. They know you only get seen except on their backs. So I limp back to FB. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;"><a href="https://twitter.com/jerrysaltz/status/1374887694556348420/photo/1">Twitter</a><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;"><ul class="topn-table table-condensed table-hover" style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #292f33; font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; list-style: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; width: 845.5px;"><br /></ul></div>
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Martin Mugarhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12799696151828817646noreply@blogger.com12tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2987736854176165487.post-58760935929195607692020-03-18T14:44:00.012-04:002021-09-18T07:05:01.091-04:00Artists without faces. Or what do you hang your hat on? Jean Gabin, Cecily Brown, Dana Schutz and John Currin. <div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-size: 20pt;"> Artists without faces.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 20pt;"> Or what do you hang your hat on?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 20pt;"> Cecily Brown, Dana Schutz and John Currin.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 20pt;">.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Jean Gabin:"We had faces then"</td></tr>
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<span style="font-size: 20pt;">"We had faces then." Words that describe the Hollywood actors of Gabin’s era: Cary Grant, Humphrey Bogart, Kirk Douglas, Greta Garbo and Marlene Dietrich to name a few. What does it mean to have a face? A sense of fate etched into the face, when you accept the persona which is one part what life casts across your bow and the other part how you deal with it. Maybe grounded in the singularity of Christ’s body and face on the cross as he fulfills his unique destiny/apotheosis in a discrete moment in time. Or the heroes and heroines of the Iliad born to families that already doom them to a fate beyond their control. Does not apply to Tom Cruise, Leonardo DiCaprio, who still looks like to me the pre-adolescent he was one in “What’s Eating Gilbert Grape”. Too much a baby face to my taste for his gangster roles and Johnny Depp who always intrigued me with his performances in “Ed Wood” and “Edward Scissorhands” is not growing old gracefully. Unlike Gabin he won’t find a role for an aging personality that Gabin created in “The Dominici Affair”. Nor will Jim Carrey transcend his iconic roles in “The Truman Show” and “The Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind”. In this postmodern age the self is dischargeable, it carries not burden of debt; it has no beginning, middle and end. Things seem to bog down in the middle. We are more Buddhistic now! Or transcendental meditators like Carrey. …In our culture if our image is no longer pretty to the public then we had rather euthanize ourselves than seem less than perfect. OK, acting is a job and your face is what you sell. But there seems to be a way that some careers transcend that purely mercenary definition. Their way of persisting to the bitter end.<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Grant and Bergman</td></tr>
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<span style="font-size: 20pt;"> From Wikipedia on Dietrich:<o:p></o:p></span><br />
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<span style="background: white; color: #222222; font-size: 20pt;">Marie Magdalene "Marlene" Dietrich was a German-American actress and singer. Throughout her long career, which spanned from the 1910s to the 1980s, she continually reinvented herself. <table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Dietrich</td></tr>
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<span style="background: white; color: #222222; font-size: 20pt;">It might be that Hollywood no longer likes it characters to age (obviously Weinstein, the gatekeeper, liked his women young) or is it so pervasive that our society cannot accept the wisdom that comes with age. The notion of the self consistently prevailing over or outwitting death has disappeared in our throw away culture.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 20pt;">What to hang your hat on? Nothingness? This strange sort of erasure has oozed into the painting world. Three cases in point: Dana Schutz, Cecily Brown and John Currin.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 20pt;">When I wrote my seminal piece on <a href="https://martinmugar.blogspot.com/2013/12/zombie-artthe-lingering-life-of.html">“Zombie Formalism”</a> I started the essay discussing some philosophical ideas that are current in academia that may be the underpinning of this new notion of self-erasure:<span style="color: white;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Gabin</td></tr>
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<span style="background: rgb(255, 249, 238); color: #222222; font-size: 20pt;">“In the first few pages of Santiago Zabala’s “The Hermeneutic Nature of Analytic Philosophy”, there are incessant quotes and statements about how Tugendhat and other 20<sup>th</sup> c philosophers overcame the subject/object fallacy of Western metaphysics. First Charles Taylor in a heading states: “Tugendhat is very certain of the kind of construal of self-consciousness he cannot accept. He calls it the subject-object model, and its basic error is to construe consciousness as a relation to an object.” The author in the first paragraph goes on to quote Gadamer: ”….the subject as starting point, just as orientation to the object, is contested by making the intersubjective communication in language the new universal system of reference.” A few paragraphs later he says:”The impossibility of the mental eye means the end of any pure subjectivity, the end of Cartesian subjectivity, which implies that objects can be seen “objectively” or “scientifically”.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="background: rgb(255, 249, 238); color: #222222; font-size: 20pt;">This is the end of the central role played by the Socratic notion of knowing thyself. Further along in the essay I write:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="background: rgb(255, 249, 238); color: #222222; font-size: 20pt;">“The counterattack on this sort of male gaze in 20th century philosophy is the subject of Martin Jay’s “Downcast Eyes”. To make his point about the domination of the visual in our culture, his first paragraph uses a laundry list of words etymologically based in the visual. In the first two sentences he succeeds in using: glance, demonstrate, vigilantly, keeping an eye out, illuminating insight and mirroring.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="background: rgb(255, 249, 238); color: #222222; font-size: 20pt;">“And, of course, it got extended to the objectifying gaze, which was found most obviously in the male ego, responsible for all that was wrong with the world from slavery, sexism to the despoliation of the environment.”<o:p></o:p></span><br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Schutz</td></tr>
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<span style="font-size: 20pt;">What struck me about <a href="https://martinmugar.blogspot.com/2017/11/schutz-at-ica-boston.html">Dana Schutz</a> at her Boston ICA show beyond the obvious hip ”in your face” cartoony funk of the brush stroke was the un-thought out color palette. It seemed to arise out of a beginner’s paint kit of ochres and umbers with a few primary colors thrown in as spice. There was no self-doubt or even a bow to the exploration of 20thc color's ability to move the viewer. It seemed to come right out of the tube. I pointed out in my Schutz essay how in Kirchner and Beckman, who could be considered precedents of Schutz, set off the human gaze against the acid color as in Kirchner's case or with aggressive cubism as in Beckmann’s, that both try to dissolve it. Instead of seeing the erasure or distortion of the face as a fault or lack maybe it is just the final exit of a Shakespearean/Socratic/Christian self-consciousness. The self-consciousness that arises out of the inevitability of sin or as one sees in the <a href="https://martinmugar.blogspot.com/2013/11/who-cares-about-art-scene-when-you-can.html">American Westerns</a> the plodding perseverance of the actor who in spite of the burden of sin tries to do good and in the end can etch something substantial into the human gaze.</span><br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Currin's cloning </td></tr>
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<span style="font-size: 20pt;">But we are postmodern. We gain our identities by being part of the group/herd or experiencing no separation between the mass media and the self. Hence the cartoon faces in Schutz’s work. Currin has faces, indeed, but with his ironic gaze deconstructs the vanity of women who imagine themselves to be unique fashion plates into generic good looks. Warhol bequeaths the face to the replicability of the silk screen. But still with the recognizability of the movie star or politician of the larger culture. The persona that still might seduce us with the magic of a Dietrich or of a Garbo is in the clammy hands of Currin devoid of magic, never star quality but intentionally cloned. The snark of a scientist looking at the world through a microscope, the human entity now subject to the replication of a virus.</span><br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Cecilly Brown adds her physical presence to her work</td></tr>
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<span style="font-size: 20pt;">The best abstraction acknowledges a self that is not necessarily synonymous with the human face yet tries to achieve the steadiness of a gaze constantly undercut by the psychological and bodily drives. Gorky, Pollock, Rothko had fragile mastery of those underlying forces. Our contemporary practitioner of abstract art Cecily Brown suffers from what <a href="https://martinmugar.blogspot.com/2011/11/modern-arts-considered-this-article-for.html">Baxandall</a> perceived to be the weakness of so much late 19<sup>th</sup> c Realism. It was not grounded in the self but was merely descriptive of the current social world. The artists of the Salon painted identifiable landscapes not their perception of them. Brown thinks herself to be an abstract painter who paints abstractions in the tradition of Pollock and de Kooning but like Schutz she never thought twice about the dynamics of color and the tension of flattened space. There is no hovering of the neural matrix over the void that one finds in Pollock, the angst of Rothko knowing his colors hide the reality of one’s nothingness or Gorky’s incredible synthesis of the languages of psychology(surrealism) and Cubism that tear at each other like angry cats. With Brown it is not zombie formalism but flaccid “Descriptive Abstraction” similar to the dead end of late Salon figuration of the 19thc. All great abstraction takes a bow to Picasso’s "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon" with its violent flattening of space a</span><span style="font-size: 20pt;">nd his outrageous imposition of his portrait on the women.I am reminded of a discussion I had with </span><a href="https://martinmugar.blogspot.com/2011/12/art-as-survival-of-fittest.html" style="font-size: 20pt;">Al Held </a><span style="font-size: 20pt;">of a portrait that Matisse did of his wife that he so much admired. A compression of foreground and background that releases an explosion of energy. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 20pt; text-align: left;">I once imagined a day when the earthy angst of the early work of <a href="https://martinmugar.blogspot.com/2016/10/essay-on-show-of-lester-johnsons-work.html">Lester Johnson</a> would matter more to our culture than what <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Warhol-Blake-Gopnik/dp/0062298399">Blake Gopnik</a> sees as the radicality of a Warhol. Yes! radical in that it uproots the human presence from any authentic meaning on earth. Once pulled away from the body and inserted into the matrix of mass media, it will never be radical in the true sense of the word </span><span style="font-size: 20pt; text-align: left;">again. It will roll on and on like tumbleweed over the modern desert. Still waiting for someone to create a radical art that is faithful to its real definition that it is “rooted” in the human presence.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 20pt; text-align: left;">Otherwise what is there to hang your hat on.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: 20pt; text-align: left;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: 20pt; text-align: left;">if you are interested in learning more of my ideas on art get my book on <a href="https://www.amazon.com/dp/1475021364">Drawing and Painting</a></span></div>
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Martin Mugarhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12799696151828817646noreply@blogger.com12tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2987736854176165487.post-12001139251088336612019-11-24T07:29:00.005-05:002021-03-18T18:24:01.423-04:00UNC-Greensboro Professor Michael Ananian reviews my book on Amazon<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"><br /></div><div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"><br /></div><div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"><br /></div><div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"><br /></div><div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEik2hM39ZS6bV7fInmloeTePzkDjsHPRr1mFaInQx0TZNIXzz7kVIAkHI0TtKdvEU58Y1YSGrxrNR_5-luIntkSQUMYp9Nd8dgc6DdYvTM3N9GdxqjofI0Xx5sio5gXbKdA4nU1uMzmRJNn/" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="499" data-original-width="333" height="293" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEik2hM39ZS6bV7fInmloeTePzkDjsHPRr1mFaInQx0TZNIXzz7kVIAkHI0TtKdvEU58Y1YSGrxrNR_5-luIntkSQUMYp9Nd8dgc6DdYvTM3N9GdxqjofI0Xx5sio5gXbKdA4nU1uMzmRJNn/w241-h293/41z58eS8KkL._SX331_BO1%252C204%252C203%252C200_-1.jpg" width="241" /></a></div><br /><br /></div><div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"><br /></div><div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"><br /></div><div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<span face=""amazon ember" , "arial" , sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #111111; font-size: 13px;"><a href="https://www.amazon.com/dp/1475021364">“Drawing and Painting”</a> should be read by anyone who cares about the current state of art school education and its future. Mr. Mugar’s treatise about visual perception and the role of 20th century modernist art theory in the education of painters is timely and relevant, much in the same way as Charles Hawthorne’s “Hawthorne on Painting,” Robert Henri’s “The Art Spirit,” Ben Shan’s “The Shape of Content,” and Frank Stella’s “Working Space” were during the time of their creation.</span><br />
<br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #111111; font-family: "Amazon Ember", Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;" />
<span face=""amazon ember" , "arial" , sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #111111; font-size: 13px;">Mr. Mugar asserts the primacy of visual perception and seeing as the basis for constructing any kind of painting or drawing, be it abstract, non-objective, representational, perceptual, etc. This challenges current thinking about art’s principal purpose as a mouthpiece for community-engaged political and social change that anyone who wants to engage in can. He accurately concludes that the form-as-content issues of 20th century modernism originate in the perceptual experience of the visible world and in the visual/cognitive functions of the brain. He makes a compelling argument that these ideas are still relevant and important if future generations of painters, curators, critics, etc. want to know how to look at and interpret painting and its history as visual experiences and not merely as arcane, sociopolitical artifacts.</span><br />
<br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #111111; font-family: "Amazon Ember", Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;" />
<span face=""amazon ember" , "arial" , sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #111111; font-size: 13px;">Michael Ananian</span><br />
<span face=""amazon ember" , "arial" , sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #111111; font-size: 13px;">Professor of Painting and Drawing</span><br />
<span face=""amazon ember" , "arial" , sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #111111; font-size: 13px;">University of North Carolina at Greensboro</span><br />
<span face=""amazon ember" , "arial" , sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #111111; font-size: 13px;"><a href="http://michaelananian.com/">michaelananian.com</a></span><br />
<span face=""amazon ember" , "arial" , sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #111111; font-size: 13px;"><br /></span>
<span face=""amazon ember" , "arial" , sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #111111; font-size: 13px;"><br /></span></div>
Martin Mugarhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12799696151828817646noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2987736854176165487.post-38610754637300497242019-11-12T06:01:00.001-05:002020-01-12T10:38:09.390-05:00Mondrian and Monet flowers in Paris and Notre Dame as Rhizome<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 18.0pt;">My
book on <a href="https://www.amazon.com/dp/1475021364">Drawing and Painting</a> languishes in virtuality, somewhere on the servers
at KDP, although occasionally on my dashboard I see someone scratches at the file
to bring it in to actuality but then after a page or two lets it lapse into
the mostly unread. Is the unread like the undead when it reverts back to the
virtual? Not quite fully alive? I notice that spell check won't let me consider the
spelling of virtuality as valid; so I look it up and find it has a rather
esoteric philosophic meaning making its way from Duns Scotus to Charles Sanders
Pierce, Bergson, Proust and Deleuze, though not in direct order of descent. It
seems it has uses in many domains of intellectual pursuit: Virtual Image in Science,
Virtual World in Technology, Virtue in etymology and the Possible in Ontology.
The most intriguing is the actuality of the Eucharist as truly embodying the
blood and body of Christ: (actual vs virtual), which was held as untrue by the Sacramentarians
and supported by Luther.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 18.0pt;">What
I can gather from this divagation is that information needs red-blooded humans
to make it truly come alive. Like a revolution needs people in the
street willing to spill blood to fulfill the words of its goals. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 18.0pt;">Seeing
an art show in a gallery does fit the bill of live human contact activating art. The reality of the white cube, so close to that of a church with
believers, will never die (I hope). </span><br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiR5bOkOrtuQv0WZXj_ipXiAp3NfYZe5g8ZpknnEzXhmx4JX5SYpnOgTAjNxpD47QkoYbG47Y8VOoS1-UP1QoeBAJe5COvcnGO6MXl9sMFnvBpUa2mXlH69W9fib_aOW6ub6hBfcN2afBcc/s1600/images.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="198" data-original-width="256" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiR5bOkOrtuQv0WZXj_ipXiAp3NfYZe5g8ZpknnEzXhmx4JX5SYpnOgTAjNxpD47QkoYbG47Y8VOoS1-UP1QoeBAJe5COvcnGO6MXl9sMFnvBpUa2mXlH69W9fib_aOW6ub6hBfcN2afBcc/s1600/images.jpg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Mondrian</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 18.0pt;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 18.0pt;">In Paris I saw a show at the Musee
Marmottan Monet of the early work of Mondrian that changed my opinion about
Piet. </span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 18pt;">If
you put his work into the context of those whom he influenced especially post
WW11 American artists he comes across as the progenitor of an arid intellectualization
of art. Early Stella for example is an hard-nosed Yankee interpretation of Mondrian.
If you see the abstraction in the context of his early work, his painting
becomes more tentative and probing. The overall mood of many of his landscapes
is reminiscent of the </span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 18pt;"> </span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 18pt;">Hudson River School’s
use of luminism to evoke the transcendental. Even as he begins to coax an
underlying linear visual structure out of these landscapes the moody light of
dawn or dusk remains.</span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjLPN-fC_IThja9gsvAIlDLXk62VTprMX-XvRarw5SgloR4amJXVFFfCZyjnBkOxBhWbo3ZPLki5ogdRy9aEP9qJPc_w0C9enFUrzX5GrblDVqh7hwuTyjsFp7yqy80SdijisvNPu5YKlXL/s1600/download-4.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="198" data-original-width="254" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjLPN-fC_IThja9gsvAIlDLXk62VTprMX-XvRarw5SgloR4amJXVFFfCZyjnBkOxBhWbo3ZPLki5ogdRy9aEP9qJPc_w0C9enFUrzX5GrblDVqh7hwuTyjsFp7yqy80SdijisvNPu5YKlXL/s1600/download-4.jpg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Mondrian</td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 18.0pt;">Throughout
his career he drew flowers belying my understanding that they were limited to
the pre-abstraction stage of his career. The petals are soft and pliable and
verge in their organicism on the infinite. On the one hand they could be seen
as the antidote to his abstraction, on the other hand the abstraction has a lot
of that pliability, a gentle push and pull off of the flat surface of the canvas.
<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Notions of tenderness and delicacy come
to the fore.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Mondrian</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 18.0pt;">This
reconsideration of the geist of his work helped me reconsider the work of the
late Monet on permanent display downstairs from Mondrian. My first response is
that he is a better abstract painter than his imitator Guston. And like Mondrian
was moved by the organic growth of flowers, although his flowers are more explosive
like Dylan Thomas’s green fuse.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgUXvMlWXcahyKmdZUyJqPKKkoBIgFLjwCTVhw-89IjBkmu-chKtv3_nynoHWw_YB_uM4U_OxkhblUkR8Q2sOZe_xb5YmmvSHH7EsVRqtvdfKBFV7DEZXnzszzXCrsiBm1Mws09xyCP8aqh/s1600/images-2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="207" data-original-width="243" height="340" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgUXvMlWXcahyKmdZUyJqPKKkoBIgFLjwCTVhw-89IjBkmu-chKtv3_nynoHWw_YB_uM4U_OxkhblUkR8Q2sOZe_xb5YmmvSHH7EsVRqtvdfKBFV7DEZXnzszzXCrsiBm1Mws09xyCP8aqh/s400/images-2.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Monet</td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 18.0pt;">So
the role of the flower seems formative in abstraction. At least in Europe.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 18.0pt;">The
plug has been pulled on Notre Dame’s magic. I heard from my sister who spoke
with someone involved in funding the repairs that the scaffolding put up for
the renovation pre-fire is so completely welded to the stonework that there is
a risk of collapse of the building if they are separated. The notion of hierarchy
and the blending of heaven and earth embodied in the building have been
severed. I am sure anti-hierarchical <a href="http://martinmugar.blogspot.com/2014/09/my-notion-of-zombie-art-is-referenced.html">Bataille</a> would have loved this and <a href="http://martinmugar.blogspot.com/2012/02/impossiblity-of-transcendence-in.html">Deleuze</a>
would encourage leaving it as is or turn it into a structural rhizome as part of
the infrastructure of the urban sprawl.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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Martin Mugarhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12799696151828817646noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2987736854176165487.post-57925964566332002012019-07-24T19:45:00.000-04:002020-07-19T10:47:01.692-04:00This interview with Miles Hall a former student from my years in Boston covers a lot of territory<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<a href="https://www.lucidrva.com/martin-mugar-conversation">https://www.lucidrva.com/martin-mugar-conversation</a><br />
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhItGNLXXKEnjFglOyRjBc2QIrnPRo6-H-VcFsAd97Kv58bON2P4-Sv20LtPlQayMV5LtrlX3nMHRpWc3LWbNRINw6D-Pxnvh1vG4-o2YADRLLoJKAUsEuZfnO2St_Vs3asLDfsemIdrsLU/s1600/MugaR%252BHEADER.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="872" data-original-width="763" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhItGNLXXKEnjFglOyRjBc2QIrnPRo6-H-VcFsAd97Kv58bON2P4-Sv20LtPlQayMV5LtrlX3nMHRpWc3LWbNRINw6D-Pxnvh1vG4-o2YADRLLoJKAUsEuZfnO2St_Vs3asLDfsemIdrsLU/s320/MugaR%252BHEADER.jpg" width="280" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">my still life from early 80's next to a Steiner blackboard drawing.(Miles Hall made the connection)</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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Martin Mugarhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12799696151828817646noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2987736854176165487.post-19661509187533085222019-07-19T19:02:00.017-04:002022-02-25T13:38:22.481-05:00Links to the book and other related comments from readers of the book<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"><br /></div><div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"><br /></div><div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"><br /></div><div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"><br /></div><div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"><br /></div><div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"><br /></div><div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"><br /></div><div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"><br /></div><div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"><br /></div><div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"><br /></div><div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"><br /></div><div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"><br /></div><div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi7MqUjz_-G4h0Cotlpl3FIegKCO8fjKg7spPzhx_k_KPm21Rii5FC2-_V_9_g1lZiPGg_6DuwVuTs2HRpwPaPJmpig_RQtJyjzNpYC5hVG5qi7yKCwoNgWSvyC_TCVzHjJm-uzrnJOmVwQ/" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="499" data-original-width="333" height="425" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi7MqUjz_-G4h0Cotlpl3FIegKCO8fjKg7spPzhx_k_KPm21Rii5FC2-_V_9_g1lZiPGg_6DuwVuTs2HRpwPaPJmpig_RQtJyjzNpYC5hVG5qi7yKCwoNgWSvyC_TCVzHjJm-uzrnJOmVwQ/w317-h425/41z58eS8KkL._SX331_BO1%252C204%252C203%252C200_-1.jpg" width="317" /></a></div><br />Link to book<br />
<span face=""arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-size: large;"><b>Jerry Saltz </b></span><span face=""arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-size: x-small;">took an exercise from the copy I sent him and posted it on Twitter sans attribution:</span><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-1qd0xha r-ad9z0x r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0" color="inherit" face=", , "blinkmacsystemfont" , "segoe ui" , "roboto" , "ubuntu" , "helvetica neue" , sans-serif" style="border: 0px solid black; box-sizing: border-box; cursor: pointer; display: inline; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 1.3125; list-style: none; margin: 0px; max-width: 100%; min-height: 0px; min-width: 0px; outline-style: none; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; position: relative; text-align: inherit; white-space: inherit; z-index: 0;"> click on Mar 19 below to see the image he stole(he got 55 likes)</span><br />
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<a aria-label="Mar 19" class="css-4rbku5 css-18t94o4 css-901oao r-1re7ezh r-1loqt21 r-1q142lx r-1qd0xha r-a023e6 r-16dba41 r-ad9z0x r-bcqeeo r-3s2u2q r-qvutc0" data-focusable="true" dir="auto" href="https://twitter.com/mugar49/status/1108164458260713472" role="link" style="border: 0px solid black; box-sizing: border-box; color: #657786; cursor: pointer; display: inline; font-stretch: normal; line-height: 1.3125; list-style: none; margin: 0px; min-width: 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; text-align: inherit; white-space: nowrap;" title="8:32 PM · Mar 19, 2019"><time datetime="2019-03-20T00:32:50.000Z">Mar 19</time></a></div>
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From Alix Bailey:One of the last times I visited him in his studio he showed me your book.<br />
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<a href="https://www.amazon.com/dp/1475021364">https://www.amazon.com/dp/1475021364</a><br />
probably needs some fine tuning but to be on the other side is rather exciting after 10 years of writing editing gettin permissions for reproduction etc.<br />
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<b>A thorough review from James Sundquist a painter in RI:</b><br />
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<span face=""amazon ember" , "arial" , sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #111111; font-size: 13px;">This text is a great treatise on drawing and its roots in perception. I felt the book operates on many levels that makes it an accessible and useful text to many. A large portion of the book is more or less a course designed by Mr. Mugar on how to train a student's eye and how to translate that into drawing. The progression of drawing exercises is rooted in a vigorous study of perceptual theory and history, which grounds the drawing process into something concrete that anyone can learn. Drawing is not about learning how to draw, its about learning how to SEE.</span><br />
<br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #111111; font-family: "Amazon Ember", Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;" />
<span face=""amazon ember" , "arial" , sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #111111; font-size: 13px;">For the beginner, this offers a very specific course one can follow to begin to develop and train their perceptual and consequently, their drawing faculties. For someone more advanced, or for the mature artist, it offers a great refresher on seeing and making to reintegrate into their practice. For the teacher, this offers a step-by-step course in drawing one could deploy over the course of a semester. There is also lots of interesting art historical anecdotes that relate the development of drawing and painting to parallel discoveries in the sciences.</span><br />
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<span face=""amazon ember" , "arial" , sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #111111; font-size: 13px;">All in all a good read and a good practical text to have in the studio or classroom.</span><br />
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from <b>MIKE ANANIAN </b>professor of art at UNC-G<br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica"; font-size: 12px;">This fine Sunday I have been able to smell the roses: with coffee by my side and a little time to relax, I sat and read more of your book on drawing. Although I have only read as far as chapter 2, I just had to pause to exclaim that I'm deeply impressed with your insights about the relationship of value and line and the physiological functions of the seeing, visual cognition, etc. versus the intellectual and aesthetic. I must confess, with my beginning students measurement by way of line and the distinction and discernment of planes, again using line instead of value contrasts, has been my teaching method. Your book has already challenged me to reconsider my approach not only in my teaching of drawing but also how I begin a painting in my studio. It's a wonderful book. I just wanted to let you know that. When I finish it, I'll review it enthusiastically on Amazon!</span><br />
<br />
<span face=""arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif" style="font-size: large;">Mark Stone</span> does a nice summary of the book on twitter <a href="http://henrimag.com/?p=11485">http://henrimag.com/?p=11485</a><br />
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here is MARKS first response:<br />
<span face=", , , "segoe ui" , "roboto" , "ubuntu" , "helvetica neue" , sans-serif" style="background-color: #e6ecf0; color: #14171a; font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span>
<span face=", , , "segoe ui" , "roboto" , "ubuntu" , "helvetica neue" , sans-serif" style="background-color: #e6ecf0; color: #14171a; font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Hi Martin - I've put together a post for your book which I plan to post on Saturday morning on Henri. I really enjoyed the reading and I think you've done a wonderful job putting together an interesting and useful "handbook" for artists! I also enjoyed your history through art and how that informed the construction of your "lessons" for artists. Good job, Martin!</span><br />
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<span face=", , , "segoe ui" , "roboto" , "ubuntu" , "helvetica neue" , sans-serif" style="color: #14171a;"><span style="background-color: #e6ecf0; font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;">My first response:</span></span><br />
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It dawned on me that in this book I have collated 30 years of teaching in 7 different academic settings. I was developing new exercises right to the end when I taught at NHTI in Concord,NH in 2007. On the one hand I am chagrined I had to move around so much on the other all that change helped to generate new ideas. What I found intriguing was the universality of visual intelligence.The community college students at NHTI, many of whom would transfer on to 4 year schools were the equals of Dartmouth or UNH students.<br />
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I added the following to the site on Amazon:<br />
<br />
<span face=""arial" , sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-size: 14px;">Perceptual theory as a basis for learning how to draw. The author describes his own development as an artist at Yale College and advanced studies at the Beaux-Arts in Paris and at Yale University where he acquired his MFA. He studied with William Bailey, Lester Johnson, Al Held, Erwin Hauer and Bernard Chaet the author of "The Art of Drawing".cThis book is deeply informed by readings in cognitive theory and personally discovered connections between drawing, painting and science. Moreover, it is shaped by 30 years of teaching at Dartmouth College, The University of New Hampshire, The University of North Carolina at Greensboro and the Art Institute of Boston, now part of Lesley University. The book uses images of student work, the work of the artist and that of his teachers in particular Al Held and Erwin Hauer. It is one of the few books available to the student and teacher that makes the work of the 20thc abstract painters teachable and not esoteric. Mugar sees a clear correlation in the evolution of artistic styles and the understanding of how the eye sees the world. The book is a practical textbook with explicit exercises but also a philosophical text on what art is at this point in History</span><br />
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<span face=""arial" , sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-size: 14px;">From </span><span face=""arial" , sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-size: large;">Svetlana Alpers </span><span face=""arial" , sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-size: x-small;">who is an acquaintance of my sister Betty in NYC:</span><br />
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Dear Betty,</div>
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Thanks for sending me your brother's book. I have now taken the time to read it through.</div>
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I share his interest in the relation between seeing and drawing/painting. </div>
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It is full of interesting points-- starting off with the review of David Marr in the NYRB which was not only important for your brother but for myself and Michel Baxandall ( also mentioned in the text.) We both thrilled to Marr's discoveries and the opportunities they offered to think newly about seeing by painters and thru pictures ( as it were). Studies of vision have moved fast since then and Marr seems a bit old-fashioned !!!</div>
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Perhaps your brother makes too quick and firm a link between the knowledge we have about the eye and seeing and what artists do/have done- the "lines" he posties in Cezanne do not convince me. Baxandall, who was much concerned with the question of vision and painting , thought we did not know nearly enough to make the kinds of links claimed in this book. </div>
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There is a kind of single-mindedness running through-- an anxiety to be or is it to do or make right. Maybe writing thoughts out in a book is different from practice in the classroom. I expect your brother has been a fine teaches-- in fact his students' work and his own look good on these pages.</div>
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from a classmate at Belmont Hill School <span style="font-size: large;">Jay Paris</span>:<br />
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Appreciate its readability and continuum of thinking and exploration. Makes me wonder what a life would have been like as a painter. Good work!</div>
from <span style="font-size: large;">Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica"; font-size: 12px;">Hi Martin, Thank you very much for sending me your book, I enjoyed it and have a couple of people in mind who'd probably like to look at it. All the best, Jeremy.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica"; font-size: 12px;">From another Yale classmate </span><span style="font-family: "helvetica"; font-size: large;">Dr Joe Knight</span><span style="font-family: "helvetica"; font-size: 12px;"> who went on to study English literature at Harvard:</span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">Dear Martin,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">You book is a fascinating "tour
de force" - a brilliant exposition of complex matters which displays
exceedingly great erudition, an admirable command of the history of art from
the Renaissance to the present, and a lifetime of experience both creating and
teaching art.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">Your writing also demonstrates that
some artists can write as well as they can paint - your sinuous and commanding
prose keeps the reader turning pages with excitement and unable to stop.
I doubt that there exists any short disquisition that explicates your subject
with as much excitement and verve. It is surely about time that you gave
the world your concise contribution to their appreciation of the nuances of
great art and the principles of teaching it to all promising students as
well as a clear outline for art teachers of how to teach those students well.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">If you truly mean what you wrote in
your card - namely, that you may edit your book further in the future - I will
venture a few minor suggestions for you to consider. If not, then feel
free to ignore them.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">Firstly, your opposition between
great artists' interest in seeing, their intuitive understanding of the effects
of light on the eye, and the scientific study of the biology of the eye and the
process of learning how light affects it, may be considered as a possibly
unnecessary dualism which in its championship of art does injustice to science.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">The study of the ocular mechanism was
already far advanced in the time of Plato, and Aristotle championed against
Plato the theory of intromission - ie. that light rays from outside the eye
excited receptors from the optic nerve in the process of seeing - as opposed to
the theory of extromission which proposed incorrectly that emanations from the
brain to the eye created the light energy which we then perceive.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">And it has been speculated that the
phenomenon of the Camera obscura was known even to Paleolithic Man and was used
by him in his cave paintings.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">Leonardo da Vinci was an unusual
example of a combined artist and scientist, and he, too, favored intromission
and studied the structure of the retina as well as other parts of the
biological structure of the eye. The full structure of the optic
mechanism was scientifically well advanced before Rembrandt, Vermeer, the
Impressionists, Cezanne and Matisse made their visual experiments on how light
can affect the production of great and even revolutionary paintings.
Galen studied the mechanism of seeing in the 2nd Century C.E., and Islamic
scholars as early as Avicenna later made significant advances in the European
Middle Ages.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">Your book's apparent opposition
between art and science, led me to review the famous debates between science
and the arts & humanities, from Matthew Arnold and Thomas Huxley, to the
"Two Cultures" set forth by Lord Charles Snow and refuted in an
unfortunate ad hominem manner by Dr. F.R. Leavis. In this regard, an
essay by Lionel Trilling entitled "The Leavis-Snow Controversy"
showed up the weaknesses of Snow's position and the inadequacy of Leavis's
mean-spirited response. But the finest exposition of this mistaken
opposition between the two modes of knowing and learning is an essay by Isaiah
Berlin called "The Divorce between the Sciences and Humanities."<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">On a more mundane level, I would
simply remind you that sometimes when you refer to the "eye", perhaps
it would be more accurate to refer to the "eyes", as the art and
science of seeing depends not merely on a single eye, but on binocular vision
which provides the viewer and the artist with both perspective and depth.
I know this from personal experience, as I have a lifelong amblyopia, and
consequently lack depth vision, and this severely detracts from my ability to
detect the fine points of much figurative art, and may also impair my
appreciation of abstract art as well.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">I will make only one more substantive
comment on the overall thesis of your book. Judging from the main part of
its subject matter, perhaps a more accurate title than <u>Drawing &
Painting</u> would be <u>Teaching Drawing & Painting</u>.
And in this regard, I might consider showing somewhat fewer of your own
drawings and paintings (some readers may consider this practice somewhat
"egotistic") and also somewhat fewer of your student paintings,
especially the less successful ones, in favor of illustrating your teaching
principles with the more illuminating art of the great Masters of the late 19th
and 20th centuries.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">By the way, as you mention Vermeer
several times, I cannot recall if I have previously mentioned to you the very
fine film illustrating the painting of one of his greatest works. The
film is on YouTube and is called "Girl with the Pearl Earring".<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">Finally, although your writing in
general is brilliant and striking in its trenchency and cognitive excellence,
there are of course quite a few minor grammatical errors. I have far too
much neuropathic pain to write all these small errors out in an email, but if
you are really serious about someday revising your book to make it even better
- though it is quite fine already - if you would send me another copy I will
endeavor to mark the spots where a slight change in grammatical form might
render some sentences more comprehensible.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">Please don't take my minor quibbles
with any seriousness. It is in my nature as a habitual literary critic to
pay undue attention to relatively unimportant matters of grammar and sentence
structure.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">Overall, I can only judge your book
as a masterful guide to university teachers of art of how best to teach their
most promising students to strive to make maximal use of their intrinsic
talents. And your own example makes a further significant point:
Rarely a great artist may also be a great art historian, an effective teacher,
a major philosopher of conceptual, figurative and abstract art, and even a seminal
prophet of what may become the next major stage in the development of culture.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">I salute you. You have
attempted a difficult project and succeeded beyond any reasonable
expectations. A century from now your book will most likely still be
read, and its principles practiced by most farsighted teachers of the next
several generations of aspiring artists. It was certainly worth it to
wait till your book could be published rather than giving up because of the
crassness of the publishing world. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">It is a triumph!<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">How proud I am of my college
roommate. How honored I am to be your friend.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">Yours sincerely,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">Joe</span></div>
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Liked</h1>
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<h2 style="text-align: left;">
from Charles Giuliano at BFA http://www.berkshirefinearts.com/10-22-2019_drawing-and-painting-by-martin-g-mugar.htm<a href="http://www.berkshirefinearts.com/10-22-2019_drawing-and-painting-by-martin-g-mugar.htm">http://www.berkshirefinearts.com/10-22-2019_drawing-and-painting-by-martin-g-mugar.htm</a></h2>
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<br />Mike Ananian will be posting this on the amazon site as a review of my book.</h2>
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“Drawing and Painting” should be read by anyone who cares
about the current state of art school education and its future. Mr. Mugar’s treatise about visual perception
and the role of 20<sup>th</sup> century modernist art theory in the education
of painters is timely and relevant, much in the same way as Charles Hawthorne’s
“Hawthorne on Painting,” Robert Henri’s “The Art Spirit,” Ben Shan’s “The Shape
of Content,” and Frank Stella’s “Working Space” were during the time of their
creation.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal">
Mr. Mugar asserts the primacy of visual perception and
seeing as the basis for constructing any kind of painting or drawing, be it
abstract, non-objective, representational, perceptual, etc. This challenges current thinking about art’s
principal purpose as a mouthpiece for community-engaged political and social
change that anyone who wants to engage in can.
He accurately concludes that the form-as-content issues of 20<sup>th</sup>
century modernism originate in the perceptual experience of the visible world
and in the visual/cognitive functions of the brain. He makes a compelling argument that these
ideas are still relevant and important if future generations of painters,
curators, critics, etc. want to know how to look at and interpret painting and
its history as visual experiences and not merely as arcane, sociopolitical
artifacts.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Michael Ananian<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Professor of Painting and Drawing<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
University of North Carolina at Greensboro<o:p></o:p></div>
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From <b>Miles Hall </b></div><div class="css-1dbjc4n r-my5ep6 r-qklmqi r-1adg3ll" style="-webkit-box-align: stretch; -webkit-box-direction: normal; -webkit-box-orient: vertical; align-items: stretch; border-color: black black rgb(230, 236, 240); border-image: initial; border-style: solid; border-width: 0px 0px 1px; box-sizing: border-box; flex-basis: auto; flex-direction: column; flex-shrink: 0; margin: 0px; min-height: 0px; min-width: 0px; padding: 0px; position: relative; z-index: 0;"><b><br /></b></div><div class="css-1dbjc4n r-my5ep6 r-qklmqi r-1adg3ll" style="-webkit-box-align: stretch; -webkit-box-direction: normal; -webkit-box-orient: vertical; align-items: stretch; border-color: black black rgb(230, 236, 240); border-image: initial; border-style: solid; border-width: 0px 0px 1px; box-sizing: border-box; flex-basis: auto; flex-direction: column; flex-shrink: 0; margin: 0px; min-height: 0px; min-width: 0px; padding: 0px; position: relative; z-index: 0;"><h2 class="date-header" style="background-color: #fff9ee; color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 0px; position: relative;"><span style="background-color: transparent; letter-spacing: inherit; margin: inherit; padding: inherit;">Friday, December 3, 2021</span></h2><div class="date-posts" style="background-color: #fff9ee; color: #222222; font-family: Georgia, Utopia, "Palatino Linotype", Palatino, serif; font-size: 14px;"><div class="post-outer"><div class="post hentry uncustomized-post-template" itemprop="blogPost" itemscope="itemscope" itemtype="http://schema.org/BlogPosting" style="margin: 0px 0px 25px; min-height: 0px; position: relative;"><a name="315158057266422236"></a><h3 class="post-title entry-title" itemprop="name" style="font-size: 24px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0.75em 0px 0px; position: relative;">Miles Hall who previously interviewed me on my painting has written a sympathetic appraisal of my book on drawing and painting</h3><div class="post-header" style="font-size: 12.6px; line-height: 1.6; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em;"><div class="post-header-line-1"></div></div><div class="post-body entry-content" id="post-body-315158057266422236" itemprop="description articleBody" style="font-size: 15.4px; line-height: 1.4; position: relative; width: 570px;"><p> <span style="font-family: verdana;">Drawing and Painting: Perceptual theory as a basis for learning how to draw, by Martin G. Mugar </span></p><p> While Mugar never mentions the construction of cathedrals in Drawing and Painting, his approach got me thinking about what that might mean in one’s own art and teaching. </p><p> Humans are tremendously fickle creatures, and sometimes when things go out of style, we have a hard time seeing them for what they are.</p><p> In April of 2019, while the world held its breath and Notre Dame burned, I couldn’t help but think of certain ironies concerning the near universal esteem – or even veneration - being expressed for that cathedral at the prospect of its loss. This in contrast with the ubiquitous scorn the structure was viewed with only two-and-a-half centuries before. In fact, the rise, fall, and rise again in the fortunes of its reputation – from the late Medieval period to the Enlightenment and through to the Romantic era - could be seen as a classic case study of the vagaries of stylistic perception over time.</p><p> The Gothic style’s plunge into disrepute got me thinking about current trends in our perception of Modernism, whose once powerful cache has seen a significant drop in our lifetime. We tend to forget that Modernism wasn’t a monolithic movement or aesthetic, and neither was the Gothic. Rather, the modern period was a century of varying forms where a whole spate of conflicting definitions of art’s essential nature were proposed. Because of its general ideological fervor, our Postmodern eyes tend to see Modernism in hindsight as a highly controlled set of styles, ideas, and institutions. The paradoxical thing is that this race to delineate and limit the parameters of art came out of a desire for freedom from traditional, academic forms and constraints. The early Modernist’s initial impulse was the ambition to build something new from the ground up, not as groups or a collective society (that happened later,) but as individuals. </p><p> Martin Mugar’s book, Drawing and Painting, grows out of much of the same soil early Modernism did, i.e. the desire to build painting anew, one artist at a time, with individual human eyes. This book places the act of visual perception squarely at the center of both drawing and painting. It encourages the student to cultivate their own cognitive awareness in the act of seeing. Its underlying premise is that vision isn’t just an open window for plundering stylistic preferences or narrative material. It’s not merely a tool in the shaping of our aesthetic or conceptual inclinations, but a deeply significant, ongoing, experiential act, never ancillary. The “eye is always in the process of stabilizing the world” according to Mugar, and the very essence of drawing is grounded in “this ordering of perception.” </p><p> As I read this book, I was struck by the notion of someone still believing, in very strong and certain terms, that artists can truly innovate through persistent looking, analyzing and feeling. One senses there is still something of the same naive sophistication bouncing around in the author’s head that was present when painters like Monet, Matisse, Braque and Marquet first stepped out into the French countryside to re-discover painting via the observation of nature, or “nature seen through a temperament,” as Zola put it, though I’m guessing Martin might be prone to replace Zola’s use of the subjective term “temperament” with language more firmly grounded in visual function. This is because 150 years later, Mugar’s book is backed up with more cognitive and art historical data, which he mines to make a logical argument for his premise. </p><p> Martin’s theory emerges out of decades of experience, from both his studio work and his teaching practice. It is informed by his extensive knowledge of Art History and an intense personal interest in philosophy. Alongside this there are specific investigations into cognitive science as it relates directly to certain visual issues. Most all the details of this knowledge stay in the background however, as Mugar offers up a series of practical exercises. These are laid out as something like arenas for the exploration of vision itself. We are given points of focus, each designed to tap into certain aspects of visual processing. Discoveries are left for the student to unearth through a visual, Socratic question and answer process. Formal issues are dealt with experientially and through looking rather than by describing a particular design concept: Drawing, cutting, collaging, finding negative shapes, using the imagination and redrawing. On the painting side, certain lighting and color parameters are established. There is a strong emphasis on starting out each exercise within its given boundaries, but there is also a feeling that the thoughtful game of chess, once established by those original limitations, could land the student just about anywhere. The destination is not restricted. There are unlimited possibilities in starting from inside those borders. </p><p> I would be hesitant to strictly call these exercises or assignments, and I doubt they are something to which one could firmly attach a grading rubric of the check-list variety (thankfully.) This doesn’t mean they lack objectivity, as Mugar is a stickler for really making you look at what’s going on in front of you. Caravaggio, Seurat, Cezanne and Braque figure prominently in this book, not for any emphasis on their stylistic flourishings, but because Martin relates certain perceptual functions to what each of these artists did on the picture plane, and how each one saw in new and innovative ways. He orders these exercises according to a different logic of sequence than most teachers I have encountered, starting with those visual processes that happen deeper down in the brain: A nod not only to cognitive science, but to simple intuitive experience as well.</p><p> While Martin doesn’t explicitly stray into the depths of philosophy proper in Drawing and Painting, we get hints of how his knowledge in that field enriches this book. One can see his interest in the thought of Heidegger - or perhaps other flavors of phenomenology and existentialism – permeating the mental atmosphere of its pages. Martin’s approach is also philosophical in this way: he does not offer up recipes or a set of instructions. Even with specific projects given, one must attempt to penetrate the meaning of each working situation he sets up through action and reflection. Though simple and straight forward in some ways, all is left open enough to be somewhat opaque and elliptical in terms of end points. Single sentences can be mined and reflected on for manifold implications. This book will utterly elude and exasperate the student who is looking to memorize technically rehearsed answers for surety and peace of mind. It is not a how-to manual. </p><p> Drawing and Painting calls us to ask questions, frame inferences, and create something of our own conclusions while being given a partial tour of the territory. The whole map is not handed to us, a priori. Instead, we are initiated into a knowledge of how to navigate the wilderness. What we discover in that wilderness is left up to us. </p><p> With its compact, elliptical prose this book is somewhat short, and I found myself wanting more. While he dips into certain aspects of perceptual science – the striate cortex was one that was new for me – there are many others that he leaves alone. I went away feeling like other, unmentioned aspects of vision, like depth of field, the fovea, and center surround, could each have had their own set of exercises tailored for them – along with many others. Or did the author decide that in the case of this book, less really was more? This would leave open the possibility that Mugar treats teachers like he does his students, and those things are left for us to figure out in our own curricula. </p><p> In any event, this is an important and timely book. Much of its significance is its tendency to go against the grain of our present-day reasoning. The algorithm, the template, the prefab architectural plan, these are the spirit of our current artistic age. We are offered an array of various templates which give the illusion of freedom. If followed, no thinking or feeling of your own is required. Sharpen your pencil, measure this, measure that, rinse, wash repeat. </p><p> Part of the beauty of Gothic cathedrals, and much of the reason we admire them today, is that they were constructed with no architectural plans. Their engineering specs were worked out during the construction process. The builders of Notre Dame defied gravity by experiment, by an intuitive understanding of their materials and the laws of physics. Drawing and Painting is a call to something similar. It is a call to build painting from the ground up, but in this case through an intimate, experiential knowledge of the laws of visual perception. To some that may seem old fashion. To others, it may be the only new way through.</p><p><br /></p><p>- Miles Hall, December 3, 2021</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p>Martin Mugar currently resides in New Hampshire. His writing appeared on Painter’s Table. </p><p>Book is available at: <a href="https://www.amazon.com/dp/1475021364" style="color: #993300; text-decoration-line: none;">https://www.amazon.com/dp/1475021364</a></p></div></div></div></div>
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Martin Mugarhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12799696151828817646noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2987736854176165487.post-47155892030693731522019-06-24T06:48:00.005-04:002020-08-30T14:14:06.525-04:00 "Wilma! Fred locked out." Yipes! Stripes! Fruit Stripe Gum<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<span style="font-family: "helvetica"; font-size: large; text-size-adjust: auto;">When I first wrote about <a href="http://martinmugar.blogspot.com/2013/12/zombie-artthe-lingering-life-of.html">Zombie abstraction</a> in December 2013 several months before the concept achieved notoriety in Walter Robinson's now famous essay on Zombie Formalism, I got a blowback in a comment on my Zombie blog from artist <a href="https://www.craigstockwell.com/">Craig Stockwell </a>that insisted that my difficulty with this sort of painting was unfounded and that the artists grouped together initially by <a href="https://hyperallergic.com/96934/what-happens-when-we-run-out-of-styles/">John Yau</a> in Hyperallergic were just expanding the language of abstraction. They were quoting the past but not deflating it. When I noticed that Craig was currently quoting color field stripes in his work, I reached out to him and sent him a painting I did from the late 90's first shown at Crieger-Dane in Boston that included quotations of colorfield stripes. I acknowledged that there was nothing zombiesque in the work but like Stockwell's work it was playing murkier notions of color with the bright electric color of optical/color field art. On twitter I made the same critique of Peter Halley who makes outlandish statements about his work and technology. I found him just expanding the level of energy and in so doing expanded the vocabulary of painting in general.</span><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEigxj_5gQTnRqZa1N7q2Nxe5ofx9P0dfegZpkSgWMd6yX7snmucFJ_81ciAnTzQ4RbvDRf3LECNouPHflycWTrkh7a6ZlOMuTKcJyvBgHuqbf-dRCfyICMPC6Ge3M9XVmK6rHUheROqtSaz/s1600/Mugar002.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="516" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEigxj_5gQTnRqZa1N7q2Nxe5ofx9P0dfegZpkSgWMd6yX7snmucFJ_81ciAnTzQ4RbvDRf3LECNouPHflycWTrkh7a6ZlOMuTKcJyvBgHuqbf-dRCfyICMPC6Ge3M9XVmK6rHUheROqtSaz/s640/Mugar002.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">"Mulch" 58"x 70" 1996<br />
another title I almost used was from the Fred Neil song made famous ny Nillson:<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2AzEY6ZqkuE">"Everybody's Talkin at me"</a></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica"; font-size: large; text-size-adjust: auto;">I sent the image of "Mulch" to <a href="https://www.saatchiart.com/jayclifford">Jay Clifford</a>, an artist who works out of Worcester. Since he first commented on my <a href="https://martinmugar.blogspot.com/2012/09/what-is-fair-and-foul-in-art-worldtim.html">Tim Nichols </a>blog some years ago we have been exchanging emails about our work and the current art scene. His response is below. Its free associative style revealed some new insights into the work as well as confirming the playful nature of the work. I insisted I quote it unedited. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica"; font-size: large; text-size-adjust: auto;">"....wow its materializing and dematerializing at the same time. It’s like star trek and maybe there is a problem with the transporter and people can’t quite come back or get sent out either. I can see why Ronnie(Landsman who accepted my work into a group show only to let the gallery members turn it away on delivery) liked this. Its like the painting itself isn’t fully there either like its a fading memory itself or an incomplete or uncompleted memory or an absurd memory or memory of absurdity or an absurdist reconstruction of memory.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">There is something Hanna-Barbera about it like a surreal approximation of the flintstones, Yogi Bear, The Jetsons, Wacky Racers, Scooby-doo.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">The constructed cartoon reality we had as kids we lived in that tv land was our neighborhood and then we moved on, grew up but where did this place go it's still there somewhere in our memories.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Our adult rational selves feels shame that we lived this crap but it was our youth; it was us. We had no choice but to go this route of cartoon hollywood nonsense.We were seduced and we were not fully developed mentally to know we had a choice to not go there like we did.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Kids want to be happy and entertained and that level of experience purity is unattainable later in life. The pure state of childhood mesmerization and complete alignment is never achievable to that extent once we grow up. Our formative years are based upon cartoon nonsense. Our adult selves are skeptical, critical, jaded. We have been lied to and abandoned in time really by this hollywood constructed reality factory. The pure state we experienced was lie, a fabrication , hand painted film stills linked together that are fused in memory and its complete nonsense viewed through our adult mind. The dreamy memory of childhood entertainment we had is lost and critiqued and we were brain washed indoctrinated to be receptive to the fabricated lie.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">The adult self can not fully reconstruct this time because of the adult awareness and critical mind. This painting is the inability of our adult selves to reconnect to our former child selves and there is a permanent disconnect between the two. There is an incomplete connection not fully materialized but not fully erased. There is cognitive dissonance, interference, static, poor reception like on the tv in the old days when it was raining or snowing and you’d move the rabbit ear antennas around trying to find the signal.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Inside of the cartoon bubbles is the history of art that too has been critiqued and devalued and is relegated to the visual scrap heap with the lost episodes of the flintstones. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">The adult critical mind rejects everything but still maintains belief in purity in the possibility of pure belief, experience, alignment and visual representations of that ideal.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">This could be a film still or sorts of awareness and rejection, of reevaluated experience. It ironically is complete and pure and beautiful. Maybe somehow you have found a way to representationally reconnected to the pure state of alignment of our lost child selves via the painted approximation of the cognitive dissonance of awareness."</span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEifulzL4sjkQC92J4yRWP3GJizTGS1RNExcuxdSoTz4US5z3hyy1jD-BFa9sWW1A_pDg5IB93LyESb-Z2Jwo_pXJVFRWSxTssSXBJomLjum3bycxPaxMHW4YfNOgsl8yW5qrLaGOw0MWQ85/s1600/download.jpeg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="194" data-original-width="259" height="299" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEifulzL4sjkQC92J4yRWP3GJizTGS1RNExcuxdSoTz4US5z3hyy1jD-BFa9sWW1A_pDg5IB93LyESb-Z2Jwo_pXJVFRWSxTssSXBJomLjum3bycxPaxMHW4YfNOgsl8yW5qrLaGOw0MWQ85/s400/download.jpeg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MSrhxAidI08">"Yipes Stripes"</a><br />
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click on the youtube link to watch kids suffer from sugar highs</td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg9fp364GdnUxlE02a7jyU0Shm_8wMsNvYWotw6koTexLalCkEq7u7RCZEyo3l1YkfCCKfDeNrBgtFIcXRhB8fy4oxaWzm5ssaYsOJzHiRTXaMsGP1imczICGxk_d83se1pTMjoN68L5wYs/s1600/TS2.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1219" data-original-width="1000" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg9fp364GdnUxlE02a7jyU0Shm_8wMsNvYWotw6koTexLalCkEq7u7RCZEyo3l1YkfCCKfDeNrBgtFIcXRhB8fy4oxaWzm5ssaYsOJzHiRTXaMsGP1imczICGxk_d83se1pTMjoN68L5wYs/s320/TS2.jpg" width="262" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Craig Stockwell's work with sensibility similar to above Yipes Stripes still</td></tr>
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<br /></div>
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Martin Mugarhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12799696151828817646noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2987736854176165487.post-67832195287198397452019-05-15T19:13:00.001-04:002019-08-15T08:03:21.960-04:00These paragraphs subvert the message of my book when I recall Heidegger's dictum that Western Philosophy does not think<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="color: #231f20; font-family: "myriad pro" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">PART TWO: PAINTING</span><span style="font-family: "myriad pro" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b>Chapter 1</b><br />
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The cognitive structure of the eye and the road to pure color painting</h4>
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<br />(An aside on the role of abstract thinking in seeing and art)</h3>
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<span style="font-size: small;">Abstraction that is created by the power of the concept to shape and establish structure is visually exciting. When it becomes mechanical, it loses its élan. The concepts that we teach are not new to the world but they are new to the student and the freshness of discovery is part of the experience of drawing and painting. All the concepts that give us space and the objects in it are embedded in the visual apparatus of the eye and mind and when they are uncovered there is often a sense of surprise and enhanced power. The revelation of the concept can carry the student’s work along for weeks, as it seems to magically shape their visual world.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;">For example, the simple understanding of the underpinning of value in all perception can have a liberating effect on the student who once labored under the misconception that everything has its own technique. “How to paint” the still life or the landscape or portraiture is the title of many an art textbook that can befuddle the student. Even watercolor is best understood as grounded in the perception of light and dark and color and at least should be seen as an extension of ink wash; however, many people love technique and will pay enormous amounts to study with a watercolorist guru with some magic formula that will create the veneer of professionalism.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;">On the other end of the educational spectrum and typical of the education I had in the liberated 1960s and ’70s is the idea of the individual as a source of novelty and invention. We were taught to startle and to wow the viewer with something surprising. It often had to be big and bold. I remember a classmate who threw himself through his painting in one blazing gesture of self-expression. To navigate between the cult of the self, premised on the uniqueness of individual vision and the dry concepts of visual technique was a challenge, to say the least. The personal epiphanies about the role of perception in art became my touchstone.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;">From the first discovery of the primacy of value, to the role of directional lines, to the reversal of figure and ground and how each would shape my work for months on end was the grounding of my existence first as a student and then as an artist. It often meant moving in territory already trod by others and, within the culture of self-absorption in which I grew up in, I was considered reactionary. Comments about how such and such a style was dead were standard. My freshman design teacher told me that painting was dead when I decided to paint the grill of an Oldsmobile for a design project on the automobile. Take a photograph, he said, to which I replied I don’t have a camera but I can paint.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;">In the 1990s, I became engaged in Abstract Expressionism and tried to integrate its concepts into my work. An art history professor at UNH saw abstract expressionism solely as an event in the art historical record and therefore as something that was over and done<span class="s1"><span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></span></span>with. But by pulling this art out of the historical context and seeing its connection to perception makes it accessible at all times to all artists. It isn’t inaccessible but grounded right here in the human brain. In truth, it always astounds me how the major figures of 20th century art work with the gradual liberation of the underlying principles of seeing. Take the example of Cy Twombly mentioned above: His linear work is said to be inspired by ancient Roman graffiti but it can be seen also as a continuum of the gradual liberation of the line from form that began with Cézanne, advanced through Mondrian and finally reaching its apotheosis with the Abstract Expressionists. You have to have Gorky before you have Twombly.<br />
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<span style="font-size: small;">As I write about the role of perception in Western Art I begin to hear the words of Heidegger that most of Western Philosophy does not think, that it is, for the most part, technological. If Mondrian’s work can be seem as having its origin in perception, it could be<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">seen as only a generalization of perceptual structures. As I stated earlier, the hidden linear structure that Cézanne liberated became the source of Mondrian’s further abstraction. His attempts to reduce everything to the simple language of line filled in with color seems in its seductiveness to pretend to be an underlying metaphysical structure and Mondrian’s theosophical interests seem to support this thesis. But like so much Western thinking it does not doubt in any way its own validity and inevitability.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;">Matisse’s life long reduction of color from its Impressionist roots to the color cutouts can seem some sort of triumph over complexity. But when seen as being propped up by the ability of the eye to simplify complex value into shape it appears purely technological. Al Held’s “Big N” is a play on shape recognition that jumps out of abstraction into letter recognition from a low level to a higher level of cognition but it does not say “So what.” This is in keeping with the Humpty Dumpty theory where for example the liberated lines of Cézanne which are imbedded with color and planes and a feeling for the holistic pull of gravity become an end in itself in the work of Mondrian and devolve into a kind of quirky liberated gesture in Twombly. But the whole that was still attempted in Cézanne is abandoned. We are left with a pile of parts that can’t be put together again.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span>(<a href="http://martinmugar.blogspot.com/2012/11/i-published-this-on-my-blog-awhile.html">Link to a blogpost from the mid-nineties on the primacy of perception that I critique here</a>)<br />
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<a href="https://www.amazon.com/dp/1475021364">Link to buy book on Amazon</a></div>
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Martin Mugarhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12799696151828817646noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2987736854176165487.post-38903233785729139412019-03-22T07:10:00.000-04:002019-07-19T18:44:07.399-04:00According to Amazon the book is for sale<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<b>link to book on Amazon </b><a href="https://www.amazon.com/dp/1475021364">https://www.amazon.com/dp/1475021364</a><br />
<b>Project #4:</b></div>
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<b> Studies of both still life and indoor/outdoor repeated with Ink and Brush </b></div>
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After doing several sessions using charcoal, this project also could be repeated with black ink. The proportion of the white to black is a variable that the student can play with. The white takes on more power as it becomes increasingly isolated. There are other qualities that can be exploited with black and white as well. There is the Rorschach effect where the shapes become evocative apart from their role in the purely visual black-white dynamic.</div>
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Most of what I teach arises from a self-reflective process of a stable viewer looking at the same set of objects in a controlled visual event over time. This allows the student to get in touch with the stabilizing structures of the visual event as it is created within the eye. However, once the student liberates these shapes, they are free to be manipulated by the unconscious so that black shapes can take on unexpected meanings. Also and probably
more importantly is the introduction to the shape making ability of the eye. The eye tends to interpret things as shapes if they are of uniform value. You can imagine a person moving toward you: at a distance they may be just a dark value against a lighter surrounding. As they approach the viewer, details are more prominent and the person may even be recognized. </div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj6NBsK6AusUsOb6LEXZSi7gPT0zQ5BH5eJEcWu5Q1bvA46H_KjGLfI9t62OD__v6nwq5XMQxE6C8HGH_IcpMGRcmQLd4yuJNjk9JprRgVeoT7RoBa2FM5KHuZQ2svD65cV9GqhKuqoBa0W/s1600/Matisse.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj6NBsK6AusUsOb6LEXZSi7gPT0zQ5BH5eJEcWu5Q1bvA46H_KjGLfI9t62OD__v6nwq5XMQxE6C8HGH_IcpMGRcmQLd4yuJNjk9JprRgVeoT7RoBa2FM5KHuZQ2svD65cV9GqhKuqoBa0W/s320/Matisse.png" width="240" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Matisse Dahlias and Pomegranates</td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEijuk_ddGrDL64vqfG2sq1eyAGZRGUWM5lAmwwruPrTWVRdFMYbE9f6Fyzo3xCJ1GzY-WxXEohEAgmf8RuVY-HO6d5zkTLahdXTPke6y6VBMZai8Vle7RYG4R-fe0HeFX9XuHaWfEEfFUd9/s1600/Matisse+2.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEijuk_ddGrDL64vqfG2sq1eyAGZRGUWM5lAmwwruPrTWVRdFMYbE9f6Fyzo3xCJ1GzY-WxXEohEAgmf8RuVY-HO6d5zkTLahdXTPke6y6VBMZai8Vle7RYG4R-fe0HeFX9XuHaWfEEfFUd9/s320/Matisse+2.png" width="230" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Matisse Interior with window and palm trees</td></tr>
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The tension between figure and ground and its deconstruction can be explored in this exercise. In our day-to-day life, all that we need to focus on are the things at hand. They are always seen against a ground but the ground drops away and only serves as a backdrop. In the indoor/outdoor work of Matisse and Bonnard that I referred to above, the outdoor view is seen simultaneously with the background and engages in a sort of flip flop where neither one assumes any dominance. This ambiguity can release a good deal of visual energy. It in- forms the paintings of Al Held; in particular, the famous “Big N” at the MoMA, which is, in fact, a big N created out of two small triangular shapes at the bottom and top of the canvas. The eye cannot see both interpretations simultaneously and flip flops back and forth between the N and the triangles. These are issues that come to the surface, as it were, when you work with black and white abstract shapes. The student stumbles into these issues which, if they were treated as technical exercises, would not have a lasting impact on the student. </div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiYs1FmmUrSKN84pvSKIiUwU62YxIE33QDiFSs4D4x2wSHR4ER905UOH635me3RdwTGgynodPL5AWeYowiDm16qZk7sGlHWoOI46UCLy57RueZ9eGTb2P-kOFLaDsAwUmNJROAbZbCfrLy9/s1600/student.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="432" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiYs1FmmUrSKN84pvSKIiUwU62YxIE33QDiFSs4D4x2wSHR4ER905UOH635me3RdwTGgynodPL5AWeYowiDm16qZk7sGlHWoOI46UCLy57RueZ9eGTb2P-kOFLaDsAwUmNJROAbZbCfrLy9/s640/student.png" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Student Drawing from NHTI Concord,NH</td></tr>
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<b>Project #5: Cutting out black and white shapes from black and white drawings.</b> </div>
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After the study is done, an exercise that can be fun and revelatory of the eye’s cognitive strength is to use a mat cutter to cut out the black and white shapes and then using the cut-outs to rebuild the drawing. Not only are these cut-out abstract but the eye tends to interpret simple shapes as recognizable things. With this exercise, the student is also
participating in the transition that Matisse made from observational drawing to his cut- outs. We do not literally see patterns in our day-to-day experience. Just like lines that we discussed above, they are structures that allow us to see but are not seen. (As I have said elsewhere in the book, drawing makes explicit hidden visual structures.) </div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjlGNLqZ2okSqRC5bVZMFRYLzshaglTcXKANUDas8K_dLPYlH9quM-d2hMvfcAQQl_6zy-7NMZ93tXPtal4-iaqo2zMWtn46va-BG8j6Ur_kh5uW3bb64hyebbolEME52g2DiXRCe3I-6-Z/s1600/sarah+griswold.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="464" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjlGNLqZ2okSqRC5bVZMFRYLzshaglTcXKANUDas8K_dLPYlH9quM-d2hMvfcAQQl_6zy-7NMZ93tXPtal4-iaqo2zMWtn46va-BG8j6Ur_kh5uW3bb64hyebbolEME52g2DiXRCe3I-6-Z/s640/sarah+griswold.png" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Sarah Griswold at NHTI(cut out ink wash still life drawing)looks like a person riding a dragon</td></tr>
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To see patterns, you often have to screw up your eyes or do what I have suggested in the last exercise: push the student into an extreme visual situation of indoor/outdoor. If it took Matisse decades to move from the chiaroscuro of the Salon School to the abstraction of the cutouts, then it makes sense that the student should be
led through a recapitulation of the process to experience the deeper visual that makes Matisse's cut-outs work.</div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEilyOQ8K1votESKL7lKw3Szvqg2WLd5l6YbUFSoIpN1_Uww2pVGsYmxICB0mc_BqXsYNCpDSRYo20Czn0J_KaOFitpzbH3qn4lL_2Dv9eHF9k-NJNM00wrFJzib7gZeZtxGhEXghzV_e0tj/s1600/Untitled.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEilyOQ8K1votESKL7lKw3Szvqg2WLd5l6YbUFSoIpN1_Uww2pVGsYmxICB0mc_BqXsYNCpDSRYo20Czn0J_KaOFitpzbH3qn4lL_2Dv9eHF9k-NJNM00wrFJzib7gZeZtxGhEXghzV_e0tj/s400/Untitled.png" width="289" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Matisse cut out</td></tr>
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Often this project is taught as a design exercise without understanding the origins of abstraction. The student’s understanding will be stretched like a rubber band only to revert back to its original shape after the exercise. The ability to recognize shapes as objects without detail also reminds the student of some higher cognitive functions that con- nect us with the real world of things. The “Big N” functions ambiguously as it moves back and forth between abstraction and letter recognition. The deconstructive process that takes
you back to raw material of perception i.e. value, can in turn move back to a literal description of things in our world. </div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhpIzgC1CHImW7jPY_Doxk7ItCUhm8sTaXaRYZCU_VQ0sM2u2iAApPk8W0FraLoUUV3wo5sb7yfmHDjfhTeh6s7tEkgWEoWPLTyQW1Wb7TMmQa4azK1m7IYWvSKeidMCeQhQUU6uvSKg54b/s1600/frisby.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhpIzgC1CHImW7jPY_Doxk7ItCUhm8sTaXaRYZCU_VQ0sM2u2iAApPk8W0FraLoUUV3wo5sb7yfmHDjfhTeh6s7tEkgWEoWPLTyQW1Wb7TMmQa4azK1m7IYWvSKeidMCeQhQUU6uvSKg54b/s400/frisby.png" width="335" /></a></td></tr>
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<span style="font-size: small; text-align: left;"> From “Seeing” by John Frisby. The abstract shapes add up to a knight on horseback. By permission of Oxford University Press, 1990 </span></td></tr>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjbMoxrpAMwAqH74t2mK9J_eCRL9X8VaTwZjaZ1gPvb9RLAvDLKBtmhVi6jG0P7yp793o8W3jtYkJLQP52AIriYnTdGtzlWlcywNjY1YwuJuy1TmzOV0zXoRROo39PiFb8TQ1v4Nhyphenhyphenvwabr/s1600/big+n.png" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjbMoxrpAMwAqH74t2mK9J_eCRL9X8VaTwZjaZ1gPvb9RLAvDLKBtmhVi6jG0P7yp793o8W3jtYkJLQP52AIriYnTdGtzlWlcywNjY1YwuJuy1TmzOV0zXoRROo39PiFb8TQ1v4Nhyphenhyphenvwabr/s640/big+n.png" width="628" /></a></div>
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The Big “N” by Al Held (1964) 93/8 x 9
Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY
© 2018 Al Held Foundation, Inc. / Licensed by ARS, New York NY</div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi2dn4xxv5I7sC2muC3NS2lbhkC6DH5caMa4I5Y1AnMXUc9s_BhJpTeZR_xJxFeZ4tgvu1vUDGPeUYNQpuUtwe5MecgrXz5OS_y-V04NQ0YEN62Iyh0Uy7ngArjJ7lpikT9aZ10RIrCL16w/s1600/me.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="616" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi2dn4xxv5I7sC2muC3NS2lbhkC6DH5caMa4I5Y1AnMXUc9s_BhJpTeZR_xJxFeZ4tgvu1vUDGPeUYNQpuUtwe5MecgrXz5OS_y-V04NQ0YEN62Iyh0Uy7ngArjJ7lpikT9aZ10RIrCL16w/s640/me.png" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Authors painting 1995(is it two separate entities glowering at each other or one shape split in two?)</td></tr>
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<a href="https://www.amazon.com/dp/1475021364">https://www.amazon.com/dp/1475021364</a></div>
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Martin Mugarhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12799696151828817646noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2987736854176165487.post-92078615654234520552019-03-20T16:42:00.002-04:002019-08-14T14:14:33.879-04:00Part One Drawing:HIstory and Science of Seeing<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
PART ONE: DRAWING<br />
<a href="https://www.amazon.com/dp/1475021364">link to buy book on amazon</a><br />
<h3 style="text-align: left;">
Chapter 1 </h3>
<h4 style="text-align: left;">
History and Science of Seeing </h4>
<h4 style="text-align: left;">
Theoretical: Caravaggio’s breakthrough a new basis for the real and for drawing </h4>
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The most radical change that took place in the history of painting following the Renais- sance was Caravaggio’s exploration of chiaroscuro (Italian for light/dark values) in the late 16th and early 17th centuries. It was a self-revelation of the inner structure of the ret- ina. To access that structure, it is surmised that he used a camera obscura, which allowed him to stabilize all the objects in his field of vision, illuminated by a single source of light into a coherent whole or visual event. The camera isolates what I like to call a visual event. When a view is fixed and then studied, it is observed that some objects are closer to the light source and therefore lighter; others are further away and therefore lost in obscurity.<br />
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Moreover, some objects reflect light onto adjacent objects. Just as a photo tends to over- expose areas that are brightest with a loss of detail, and underexpose others with an equal loss of detail, a similar thing happens in Caravaggio’s work. The overexposure creates highlights and the underexposure creates shadows. It were almost as though he had studied Ansel Adam’s zone theory of photography.<br />
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The retinal processing of light derived from Caravaggio’s insight into seeing became the lingua franca of Western Art for the next four hundred years. Within a hundred years of his breakthrough, one style dominated the western world from Velazquez in Spain to Rembrandt in Holland. According to Michael Baxandall in his book “Shadows and Enlightenment,” both scientists and artists of the 18th century were interested in the nature of perception and particularly the way by which the retina translates patterns of light and dark into form. For Baxandall, the authenticity of an artist such as Chardin lies in great measure in his ability to convey the notion that the observed is an invention of the seer. The painting’s center of gravity is always within the observer. Although the narrative and its social implications are important, the studied expression of the perceptual experience as an event is primary.<br />
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At L’Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris during the late ’70s, I took a course in the techniques of Baroque painting; in particular, the mixed oil and tempera technique used by Vermeer. Professor Wacker had us imitate the steps used to achieve a finished Baroque painting (on a small scale). What struck me about the process is that you did not need to show a figure in its entirety in order to represent it convincingly. Drawing was more of a rough sketch to sort out the placement of various zones of light. The highlight with its lack of detail is painted with white tempera, the middle ground again with tempera but with various color is glazed with oil to blend into the shadows, which was often a large part of the picture.<br />
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The artists of the Italian Renaissance artists like Raphael had to draw out every inch of the human figure while an artist like Rembrandt could throw 80 percent into obscurity and still create a believable image since he mimicked the way the eye organizes reality in patterns of light and dark.<br />
#1 Baxandall, Michael. Shadows and Enlightenment,”London and New Haven, Yale University Press, 1995<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgzkqVVSWbzMa37WKwVk1bvLyB_Px9XSXgPPbq1lIDuxnFBPfAW-JJhNfyjjvNj7cTQDRzeBnMlIGykL7qtvSlmjpMGE4YKibCTSMfUfguHTUiBAViYF48FKSy5MjriTzyMlti75AtGNUX8/s1600/me+landscape.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="490" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgzkqVVSWbzMa37WKwVk1bvLyB_Px9XSXgPPbq1lIDuxnFBPfAW-JJhNfyjjvNj7cTQDRzeBnMlIGykL7qtvSlmjpMGE4YKibCTSMfUfguHTUiBAViYF48FKSy5MjriTzyMlti75AtGNUX8/s640/me+landscape.png" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Artist's Drawing at age 20 with compressed charcoal</td></tr>
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20th Century Watershed in Understanding The Eye </h3>
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In my peregrinations as a teacher, I have observed many schools do a decent job teaching the value based drawing and painting dominant in Europe from Caravaggio until the end of the 19th century. Many more schools base their more advanced teaching on whatever is the current flavor of the art scene. It is the 20th century that has not been codified into a teaching method and is woefully absent from most curriculums. There is an interesting parallel between the development of the 20th century visual language and the under- standing of perception that can facilitate the teaching of 20th century art.<br />
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One cannot talk about drawing technique without discussing the organizational force of the eye. The organizing of our visual space is very complex, so much so that the language of the eye has succumbed only piecemeal to our understanding. Although they do not make specific claims about the structure of the brain, the artists always precede the scientist in understanding how the eye works. Take for example the development of cubism. It has its roots in the work of Cézanne who focuses on the planar surfaces of objects and starts to separate out the linear boundaries of the forms from the forms themselves.<br />
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This separating out of the lines foreshadows the work of cognitive scientists in the latter half of the 20th century who located the striate cortex of the brain which responds to lines that move in precise directions. Some parts respond to vertical lines, others to diagonals. Grouped together they help create deep space and a sense of our relation to verticality.
Of course, these lines are hidden from our experience of seeing but they are implicit in
our understanding of the space we move in. This bringing to the surface (and we can say that the surface of the paper or canvas is where this elicitation takes place) of what is hidden in the perceptual process and turning it into an aesthetic defines the evolution of
painting in the West. The inspiration for using these ideas as a method of drawing is that we find work that uses these concepts convincing since it reveals the inner structure of the eye. A “good” drawing is grounded in the hidden structures of our perceptual experience.<br />
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The relation between the work by neuroscientist David Marr in the 1970s on the structure of object recognition and Mondrian’s early breakthroughs in his language is uncanny.
Mondrian’s famous serial study of a church façade is made up of a series of drawings that show a gradual reduction from a value-oriented representation of the subject to a final product of short discontinuous lines all assuming various positions in relationship to the vertical. It is iconic for art historians who wish to represent the move from the 400 years of light/dark-based art to the start of 20th century abstraction. It does to drawing what the late Monet studies of the Rouen cathedral did with color. Both dissolve the object
as being there in front of the subject. Everything is now made up of parts, which can be used to construct new realities. Strangely, it becomes emblematic of the new age of mass culture where the present as experienced by the individual (which was always the focus of chiaroscuro) is less important than their function in the whole of society, or more simply a coherent sense of the parts to a whole. The implication of this for a general notion of the evolution of the language of painting is that stylistic change can be achieved not by going beyond the current visual language in a kind of hip one-upmanship, but by going into
the underpinnings of that language which are not visually determined. It is not surprising that Cézanne was considered “farouche,” incapable of normal human interaction. Merleau-Ponty thought he was schizophrenic while I would guess he was autistic. #2<br />
Liberated from social conventions he was more attuned to the raw visual experience of what he saw.<br />
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#2 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice.“Cézanne’s Doubt,”in“Sense and Nonsense,”Translated by Hubert L. Derives and Patricia Allen Derive 6th Edition (Evanston, Illinois; Northwestern University Press, 1991) 9-25<br />
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Starting in the ’50s, scientists Hubel and Wiesel discovered specific locations in the brain dedicated to the perception of lines that assumed vertical, horizontal and oblique directions. What they did not understand was that the derivation of these lines came from value shifts perceived on the object being observed. Crucial to this thinking and of relevance to its relation to drawing is the primacy of light and dark to line. The value
shifts perceived by the mind come first and are the raw material out of which line is perceived. Some scientists call this low order vs. high order structure. Dramatic value shifts indicate that three dimensional form is moving in space, away from the light source. It is a phenomenon of crucial importance to the viewer who needs to see the world as real in order to function within it and is therefore reinforced by the imposition of lines. All these lines combined create wedges that perspectively create space. Moreover, the relationship of these lines to each other is one of proportions. They lend themselves to measurement to allow the observer to establish their exact relationship to objects. The outcome of this process is what we call space.<br />
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This understanding of line on my part grew out of an article by Israel Rosenfield titled “Seeing Through the Brain,” in The New York Review of Books (October 11, 1984) on the work of David Marr at MIT. In retrospect, I suspect that my interpretation of the role of these discontinuous lines creating space was my own interpretation of an image that was reproduced in the article. It shows a photo of a teddy bear that is then turned into a more
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pixilated version by a computer. The computer subsequently imposed straight lines on the value shifts and ended up with a third image of the teddy bear looking like something like a cross between a Cézanne and a Giacometti. I recently tracked down the image and bought the book from whence it came; “Seeing,” by John P. Frisby.<br />
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Frisby stated that Marr saw these lines as providing insight into the structure of forms but there is no mention of space. The dropping off of value and its role in describing volume seemed essential in putting the object into space. Each object loses its isolation in the cube of theatre/space created in the Renaissance and now participates in a spatial continuum. In the work of Cézanne, it seems to open up objects to the forces of gravity as well. Struc- ture is also the outcome of this and further work by Marr talks about some innate ability to see axes and symmetries. But I still believe in the epiphany that I had reading the article and the correspondence between that image and the role of space in the work of Cézanne, Mondrian and Giacometti.
Image on the upper right shows similarities to Mondrian and Giacometti.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Scientific study by David Marr from Frisby’s “Seeing,” p. 110. By permission. (Oxford University Press, 1990)s</td></tr>
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Martin Mugarhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12799696151828817646noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2987736854176165487.post-42530114340437779322019-03-19T19:39:00.000-04:002019-08-14T14:13:32.366-04:00First few pages of my book on drawing and painting<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-size: x-large;">Premise of Book </span></h2>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><a href="https://www.amazon.com/dp/1475021364">link to buy book on amazon</a></span></h4>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Drawing is based in the structure of how we see and how we see is revealed from the Renaissance onward in Western Art </span></h4>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Drawing grows out of our understanding of how the eye shapes our reality but from my exposure to myriad books on how to draw, it is usually taught as an exercise in aesthetics which, by definition, is a branch of philosophy dealing with beauty, art and taste. I am a believer in all three but to worship at that altar can be a real hindrance to learning
how to draw. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Another definition of aesthetics says it deals with the senses. The immediate message we can take from this definition is that knowing and understanding which are the realms of science have nothing to do with art. The aesthetic world is where we go when we tire of the dry world of science and need to breathe directly the fresh air of the sensory world. It is a world where we ask: How does it feel? </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">I believe that the visual language at its base is one of cognition. If you were to ask a class of first graders to draw where they would like to be if they were not in school they have at their disposal literally a language of circles, squares, triangles and lines to describe their world. They can take us to a baseball diamond, a zoo or their room with all the
objects in it. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">There is no question of taste and sensibility, in fact, the performance of these kids is pretty much uniform. There is no one who excels for his or her aesthetic sensibility. Their drawings are a cognitive act, not an aesthetic one. From an adult perspective we tend to be in awe of their spontaneity but the cognitive power of the universal language they use lets them pragmatically express what they know about the world they live in. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Ask those same kids four years later to do the same exercise and, except for a few, they would all say, “We are not artists, we can’t draw.” What has changed? The verbal has supplanted the visual language as a way of description except for those “class artist” relatives of the “class clown” (the one you ask to draw some cartoon character for you) who still feel there is some possibility for further use of the visual. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">The class artist knows that the stick figure world is not going to cut it anymore. It cannot describe the complexity of the world they now inhabit; something the spoken and written word can do. The verbal is also a social medium and allows for interpersonal action, which is what is needed in order to be human. What do you teach students that represents a step forward in their development?</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"> Left to their own devices, the student of artistic ability will take an interest in texture and detail and will receive accolades from their teachers and peers for that achievement. Or there is often an interest in what I call the degenerate form of classical drawing that we find in cartooning especially that of superheroes with its obsession with anatomy and pneumatic form. I have been often asked over the years to judge numerous art contests at the high school level and find that both these modes of drawing dominate the work submitted. Both are dead ends. Or are just ends in themselves, but lead nowhere. There is
always the rare cartoonist who goes on to establishing a career or the master of detail who goes on to success as a photo-realist. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"> The only way out of these options is to relive the history of western art and the way it mimics in an oddly self-recursive fashion our self-awareness of the inner cognitive structure of seeing. What has to be pointed out is that we move through the world with ease physically, encountering people and things and cognitively interpreting it, a monumental task that happens as fast as we can “see.” </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">The eye is always in the process of stabilizing the world so that we won’t stumble and wallow in the quicksand of incomprehension. I will demonstrate in this book that drawing is grounded in this ordering of perception and is a language that is just as descriptive as the spoken language. Aesthetics is an edifice built on top of this descriptive ability. Beauty and taste are achieved by those who know the language by heart and can stay with it and shape it to speak to more complex issues of the meaning of life. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"> When Kant developed his notion of aesthetics, the language used in the creation of art was fairly homogeneous. It was taught and acquired by all artists in Europe and by the time these artists were ready to create their own body of work, they had years of experience mastering the craft. Art historians could talk about the difference between Raphael and Michelangelo in terms of sensibility and refinement. Their language was for the most part identical, based on some rather solid visual structures, some of which were recent acquisitions such as perspective, but for the most part the language they used already existed in ancient Greece and Rome. The goal was not novelty but emulation of the past, and the glory went to the most perfect mimesis. </span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj7Dx4Li1-uwQfxvLLbb2M_s31lUtXCOV0f7Zn57m0b7VAgx5luu-vB93zWxTNvwaXugAXnmpxcZTcQP4PPAJl4jKINlFkVzEd782dd3QxWoxs1J0DGE9uMe8lP4yK8btP-2h816eOh9T7v/s1600/my+portrait.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="582" data-original-width="458" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj7Dx4Li1-uwQfxvLLbb2M_s31lUtXCOV0f7Zn57m0b7VAgx5luu-vB93zWxTNvwaXugAXnmpxcZTcQP4PPAJl4jKINlFkVzEd782dd3QxWoxs1J0DGE9uMe8lP4yK8btP-2h816eOh9T7v/s640/my+portrait.png" width="500" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Self Portrait done in 1969 at BU Tanglewood with compressed charcoal</td></tr>
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Martin Mugarhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12799696151828817646noreply@blogger.com3