Lothar Quinte
art history
Frank Stella
I like real art. It’s difficult to define REAL but it is the best word for describing what I like to get out of art and what the best art has. It has the ability to convince you that it’s present – that it’s there. You could say it’s authentic… but real is actually a better word, broad as it may be. – Frank Stella
Learn more about Frank Stella here.
Bob Law
In 1959, Bob Law lay in a Cornish field and wondered how to describe the space he was in. His solution was a series of drawings in which figurative elements – such as trees or houses – are arranged along a doddery pencil line at the perimeter of the paper. A year later, Law had distilled this approach to his signature device: the rectangular perimeter alone, bounding empty space, sometimes accompanied by a date, a title or his name, always in block capitals. – Jonathan Griffin
See more artworks by Bob Law here.
Craigie Aitchison
Craigie Aitchison did some art defacing to his self portrait.
Created in the late 1950s/early 1960s, the image was destroyed by the artist after a visitor to his studio called the portrait ‘flattering’.
Aitchison reacted to the perceived criticism by lacerating the painting.
The artist was known for his dislike of self promotion but was persuaded to let Martin Wyld, the head of conservation at the National Gallery, restore the painting. Aitchison agreed under the proviso that the scars would remain visible.
Read rest of the article here.
Andreï Tarkovski
Andreï Tarkovski had still polaroids that seem to have the essence of art in them. See this collection of prints at bright bright day.
My Picture is a sum of Destructions
The old days’ pictures went forward toward completion by stages. Every day brought something new. A picture used to be a sum of additions. In my case a picture is a sum of destructions. I do a picture – then I destroy it. In the end, though, nothing is lost: the red I took away from one place turns up somewhere else.
Statement by Pablo Picasso, 1935
I can hardly understand the importance given to the word research in connection with modern painting. In my opinion to search means nothing in painting. To find is the thing. Nobody is interested in following a man who, with his eyes fixed on the ground, spends his life looking for the pocketbook that fortune should put in his path. The one who finds something no matter what it might be even if his intention were not to search for it, at least arouses our curiosity, if not our admiration.
Statement by Pablo Picasso, 1923
read the whole text here
Warhol TV
The Radicant
The radicant is becoming my little white bible…
“In ordinary language, ‘modernizing’ has come to mean reducing cultural and social reality to Western formats. And today, modernism amounts to a form of complicity with colonialism and Eurocentrism. Let us bet on a modernity which, far from absurdly duplicating that of the last century, would be specific to our epoch and would echo its own problematics: an altermodernity whose issues and features this book seeks to sketch out.”
The last continent to be discovered is time…
Un nouveau concept en art
Posted on Le Monde on 04/09/09
by Emmanuelle Lequeux
Le Français Nicolas Bourriaud aime les concepts et ce n’est pas ce qu’il fait de plus mal. Cet ancien directeur du Palais de Tokyo, le principal centre d’art en France, a profité de son exil londonien pour développer son nouveau credo dans le cadre d’une exposition à la Tate Britain.
Dans les années 1990, il a forgé l’idée d'”esthétique relationnelle” : voir les oeuvres pour les liens sociaux qu’elles tissent et produisent entre elles et non comme des objets d’art autonomes. Dans les années 2000, il a défini les plasticiens comme des “sémionautes” : navigateurs sur un océan de signes.
Sa nouvelle recherche est joliment intitulée “Altermodernisme”. Pour Bourriaud, les vingt-cinq dernières années du XXe siècle “furent un long épisode mélancolique. Les oeuvres d’art se sont définies comme un après : après le mythe du progrès, l’utopie révolutionnaire, la défaite du colonialisme, les luttes d’émancipations politiques, sociales et sexuelles”. Il faut revenir au présent. Le terme altermodernisme suggère “une multitude d’alternatives à une voie unique. L’alterglobalisation définit la pluralité des oppositions locales à la standardisation économique, et donc la lutte pour la diversité”.
Reste à illustrer ce propos avec des oeuvres d’artistes, tous “nomades culturels”. Un énorme champignon atomique érigé dans de la vaisselle en Inox par l’Indien Subodh Gupta dit le chambardement nécessaire à l’émergence de cette pensée nouvelle. La suite est plus confuse, et la pensée de Bourriaud s’avère difficile à suivre. Même si on y ressent que le déplacement, dans le temps et l’espace, vaut leitmotiv.
Citons les frappantes peintures inspirées à Franz Ackerman par ses voyages mondialisés, ou le sublime environnement de cristal liquide de Gustav Metzger, octogénaire qui fait chanter les murs en moirures et moisissures. Ou enfin Katie Paterson qui nous met en relation téléphonique avec un glacier en pleine fonte…
“Altermodern” : Tate Triennal 2009, Tate Britain, Millbank, Londres. Jusqu’au 26 avril.
Robert Rauschenberg erases a de Kooning Drawing 1953
Alfred Barr
more on Alfred Barr here