The image shows Container Series (2009), a ceramic installation by contemporary Chinese artist Liu JianHua, recently acquired by the Art Gallery of New South Wales.    From the description of the work by the AGNSW:

In this beautiful celadon work ‘Container Series’ 2009, Liu acknowledges the magnificent ceramic heritage of China by re-creating traditional ritual vessel shapes such as stem cups and ‘gu’ ( wine vessel), and placing them alongside more contemporary shapes to present an impressive installation of 37 pieces of varying size and shape. The pieces are randomly arranged, in contrast to the formal presentation of temple and imperial settings of the past. Arranged as an installation they are placed as on a blank canvas. Liu has used a celadon glaze, in emulation of the classic greenwares of the Song dynasty (960-1279). All the pieces look to be filled with a red liquid, but the ceramics are in fact hollow, with a red glaze on top of each piece giving the illusion of liquid. Like the celadon, the red is another classic of the Chinese ceramic repertoire, traditionally known as ‘sang de boeuf’ or oxblood (‘langyao hong’). The way the artist has used the two colours to dramatically contrasting effect is innovative and effective. The red colour evokes blood, and the work may be a homage to those whose blood has been spilt in the pursuit of specific goals. Each piece is handmade and thrown on a wheel. They were glazed first with the celadon then the red ‘langyao hong’ glaze, after which they were fired only once in a kiln at about 1342 degrees centigrade. Most parts were made in varying numbers of editions.

Eugene Tan has noted of Liu’s work that it, ‘reflects the complex ontological relation between the production of consumer goods in China and the international art system, thereby also reflecting the recent, rapid growth of the Chinese contemporary art market.’ (Tan, undated)   As such, Liu’s work makes allusions to the present situation in China both culturally and economically.”

[Note: The commentary by Eugene Tan is dated 2009-07-02 on the web-page linked to here.]

A description of another installation of this artist can be found here.

In a previous post I remarked that a drawing of a tree is certainly not itself a tree, and not even a direct, two-dimensional representation of a tree, but a two-dimensional hand-processed manifestation of a visually-processed mental manifestation of a tree.   Indeed, perhaps not even always this:    A drawing of a tree is in fact a two-dimensional representation of the process of manifesting through hand-drawing a mental representation of a tree.

After reading Cain’s book, I realize that one could represent the process of representational drawing as a sequence of transformations,  from real object, through to output image (“the drawing”), as follows (click on the image to enlarge it):

It is important to realize that the entities represented by the six boxes here are of different types.  Entity #1 is some object or scene in the real physical world, and entity #6 is a drawing in the real physical world.  Entities #2 and #3 are mental representations (or models) of things in the real physical world, internal to the mind of the artist.  Both these are abstractions; for example, the visual model of the artist of the object may emphasize some aspects and not others, and the intended drawing may do the same. The artist may see the colours of the object, but draw only in black and white, for instance.

Entity #4 is a program, a collection of representations of atomic hand movements, which movements undertaken correctly and in the intended order, are expected to yield entity #6, the resulting drawing.  Entity #4 is called a plan in Artificial Intelligence, a major part of which is concerned with the automated generation and execution of such programs.  Entity #5 is a label given to the process of actually executing the plan of #4, in other words, doing the drawing.

Of course, this model is itself a simplified idealization of the transformations involved.  Drawing is almost never a linear process, and the partially-realized drawings in #6 serve as continuing feedback to the artist to modify each of the other components, from #2 onwards.

References:

Patricia Cain [2010]:  Drawing: The Enactive Evolution of the Practitioner. Bristol, UK: Intellect.

Orchids
Words from a sympathetic heart
Are as fragrant as orchids;
Like orchids in feeling,
They are agreeable and always joyous;
You should wear these orchids
To protect yourself from the spring chill;
When the spring winds are cold,
Who can say you are safe?

Reference:

Wen Fong [1976]: Returning Home. Tao-Chi’s Album of Landscapes and Flowers. New York, NY, USA: George Braziller.  The translation is due to Wen Fong.

Jean-Pierre Bertrand (1937-, France) presented a long rectangle hung on the wall, divided into 10  narrow panels.  Each panel was filled with organic materials mixed together and cooked  (honey, fruit juice, cooking-salt solution) to make a smooth paste, which he then glazed.  The panels were of two different colours:  panels 1 and 9 (reading from the left) were red, the others off-white.  They shone quietly on the wall, their simplicity and timeless calm an antidote to the breathless featurism of the rest of documenta,  a thousand artworks each shouting “Me! Look at Me!”.

A later work by Bertrand, Bright yellow green no. 1,  was acquired by the Art Gallery of NSW, described here. As with many post-war artists and composers, his art is profoundly concerned with the materiality of the medium he uses, the actual and specific physical attributes of the oils and paints, and the ways in which these attributes influence the visual image they are part of.    This concern by visual artists goes back at least to Turner.

Cildo Meireles (1948-, Brazil) fitted a square room with 2000 loudly ticking clocks on the walls, all set to different times, and hung 7600 yellow folding tape measures from the ceiling.  To walk through the room, one had to push through the tapes, unable to see more than a step or two in front at any time.  Nothing so evoked a tropical jungle as this installation:  unable to see much, having to push vines out of the way, and assaulted by an insect cacophony.

documenta 13 will be held in 2012, details here.

I saw an exhibition of Bridget Riley’s work in a career retrospective of her work at Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art some five years ago.  With what great delight her paintings shimmered, danced and cavorted across the canvas before one’s very eyes, while the waters of the sunlit Harbour did the same through the MCA’s windows!    I was reminded of this seeing the current, small exhibition of her work in the Sun-Lit Room at the National Gallery, London.  While “sunlit” is an aspirational term in London this week, her paintings, some of them painted directly onto the walls themselves, still dance before our eyes.  Robert Melville, writing in the New Statesman in 1970, expressed it  best:   “No painter, dead or alive, has ever made us more aware of our eyes than Bridget Riley.”

Morton Feldman once said of the paintings of the abstract expressionists that they only perform for you as you leave them.  “Not long ago Guston asked some friends, myself among them, to see his recent work at a warehouse.  The paintings were like sleeping giants, hardly breathing.  As the others were leaving, I turned for a last look, then said to him, “There they are.  They’re up.” They were already engulfing the room.”   (Feldman, p. 100, cited in Bernard, p. 182) Riley’s paintings are up and dancing before you even enter the room!  What pleasure these paintings give, what delight one has just being in their company!

References:

I have posted before about the art of the national treasure who is Ms Riley, here.

Reviews of the NG exhibition here:  Hilary Spurling, Maev Kennedy, and Adrian Searle.    And images from the Exhibition here.

The image above shows two assistants of Bridget Riley painting her work Arcadia 1 directly onto the wall at the National Gallery. Photograph credit: The National Gallery.

Morton Feldman [1965]: Philip Guston:  The last painter.   Art News Annual 1966 (Winter 1965).

Jonathan W. Bernard [2002]:  Feldman’s painters.  pp. 173-215, in:  Steven Johnson (Editor):  The New York Schools of Music and Visual Arts. New York, NY, USA:  Routledge.

Technorati Tags: Bridget Riley

If philosophy were the attempt to solve a given problem, I should see reason to be discouraged about its success; but it strikes me that it is [page-break] rather an attempt to express a half-undiscovered reality, just as art is, and that two different renderings, if they are expressive, far from cancelling each other add to each other’s value . . . I confess I do not see why we should be so vehemently curious about the absolute truth, which is not to be made or altered by our discovery of it.  But philosophy seems to me to be its own reward, and its justification lies in the delight and dignity of the art itself.” [Letter to William James, 1887-12-15, quoted in Kirkwood 1961, pp. 43-44.]

Reference:

M. M. Kirkwood [1961]: Santayana:  Saint of the Imagination.  Toronto, Canada:  University of Toronto Press.

I wanted to say something to counteract the perception of Shakespeare’s compositional method as a kind of lyric soduku, and put in a word for the kind of glorious, messy procedure I’m quite certain it was, whatever the crystalline and symmetrical beauty of the final results. Like most poets, Shakespeare uses the poem as way of working out what he’s thinking, not as a means of reporting that thought. Often he’ll start with nothing more than a hangover, a fever and a bad night spent being tormented by the spectre of his absent lover. Then he’ll use the sonnet as a way of making sense of it all – a way, first, to extract a logic from pain, and then a comfort from that logic, however warped it might be. Form, in other words, allows him to draw some assuagement from the very source of the agony itself.”

On Shakespeare’s soduku tendency – the use of puns and associations, clever wordplay, and supreme mastery of subtle and sometimes paradoxical links between syntax and semantics (or, form and meaning) – the best source I know is the commentary of Helen Vendler, which Paterson later refers to.

Paterson also comments on Shakespeare’s sexual orientation:

However, the question: “was Shakespeare gay?” strikes me as so daft as to be barely worth answering. Of course he was. Arguably he was bisexual, of sorts, but his heart was never on his straight side. Now is not the time to rehearse them all, but the arguments against his homosexuality are complex and sophistical, and often take convenient and homophobic advantage of the sonnets’ built-in interpretative slippage – which Shakespeare himself would have needed for what we would now call “plausible deniability”, should anyone have felt inclined to cry sodomy.

The argument in favour is simple. First, falling in love with other men is often a good indication of homosexuality; and second, as much as I love some of my male friends, I’m never going to write 126 poems for them, even the dead ones. Third, read the poems, then tell me these are “pure expressions of love for a male friend” and keep a straight face. This is a crazy, all-consuming, feverish and sweaty love; love, in all its uncut, full-strength intensity; an adolescent love. The reader’s thrill lies in hearing this adolescent love articulated by a hyper-literate thirty-something. Usually these kids can’t speak. The effect is extraordinary: they are not poems that are much use when we’re actually in love, I’d suggest; but when we read them, they are so visceral in their invocation of that mad, obsessive, sleepless place that we can again feel, as CK Williams said, “the old heart stamping in its stall”. “

Reference:

Helen Vendler [1999]: The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets.   Cambridge, MA, USA:  Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.

PS:  My view on the identity of the author of the plays and poetry known as William Shakespeare’s can be found here.

Music critic Alex Ross discusses John Cage’s music in a recent article in The New Yorker.    Ross goes some way before he trips up, using those dreaded  - and completely inappropriate – words “randomness” and “chance”:

Later in the forties, he [Cage] laid out “gamuts” – gridlike arrays of preset sounds – trying to go from one to the next without consciously shaping the outcome.  He read widely in South Asian and East Asian thought, his readings guided by the young Indian musician Gita Sarabhai and, later, by the Zen scholar Daisetz Suzuki.  Sarabhai supplied him with a pivotal formulation of music’s purpose:  “to sober and quiet the mind, thus rendering it susceptible to divine influences.”  Cage also looked to Meister Eckhart and Thomas Aquinas, finding another motto in Aquinas’s declaration that “art imitates nature in the manner of its operation.”

 . . .

In 1951, writing the closing movement of his Concerto for Prepared Piano, he finally let nature run its course, flipping coins and consulting the I Ching to determine which elements of his charts should come next.   “Music of Changes,” a forty-three-minute piece of solo piano, was written entirely in this manner, the labor-intensive process consuming most of a year.

As randomness took over, so did noise.  “Imaginary Landscape No. 4″ employs twelve radios, whose tuning, [page-break] volume, and tone are governed by chance operations.”  [pages 57-58]

That even such a sympathetic, literate, and erudite observer as Alex Ross should misconstrue what Cage was doing with the I Ching as based on chance events is disappointing.  But, as I’ve argued before about Cage’s music, the belief that the material world is all there is is so deeply entrenched in contemporary western culture that westerners seem rarely able to conceive of other ways of being.  Tossing coins may seem to be a chance operation to someone unversed in eastern philosophy, but was surely not to John Cage.   

References:

Alex Ross [2010]:  Searching for silence.  John Cage’s art of noise.   The New Yorker, 4 October 2010, pp. 52-61.

James Pritchett [1993]:  The Music of John Cage.  Cambridge, UK:  Cambridge University Press.

Here are other posts on music and art.

Technorati Tags: Alex Ross, I Ching, John Cage

I have asked before what music is for.  I don’t know Hirschfeld-Mack’s intentions.  However, from my own experience, I know that watching this work can induce an altered mental state in its viewer, “sobering and quieting the mind, thus rendering it susceptible to divine influences,” in the words of Gita Sarabhai (talking about music).  The experience of watching this work is intensely meditative, akin to listening attentively to the slowly-changing music of Morton Feldman (1926-1987).

Hirschfeld-Mack was the only Bauhaus artist to end his career in Australia, a career Helen Webberley describes here.    His art is another instance of the flowering of geometric abstraction in art in the first three decades of the 20th century.  In the last decades of the 19th century and the early years of the 20th, there was widespread public interest in the ideas which had recently revolutionized the study of geometry in pure mathematics.  These ideas – the manifestation of postmodernism in pure mathematics a century before it appeared in other disciplines – first involved the rigorous study of alternatives to Euclidean geometry during the 19th century, a study undertaken when there still considerably ambiguity about the epistemological status of such alternatives, and then the realization (initially by Mario Pieri and David Hilbert in the 1890s) that one could articulate and study formal axiomatic systems for geometry without regard to any possible real-world instantiation of them.  Geometry was no longer being studied in order to represent or model the world we live in, but for its own sake, for its inherent mathematical beauty and structure.

At the same time, there was interest – in mathematics and in the wider (European) culture – in additional dimensions of reality.    The concept of a “fourth dimension” of space motivated many artists, including Kazimir Malevich and Piet Mondrian; both men sought to represent these new ideas from geometry in their art, and said so explicitly.  Similarly, the cubists sought to present an object from all perspectives simultaneously, the futurists to capture the dynanism of machines and the colours of metals, and the constructivists to distill visual art to its essential and abstract forms and colours.   Of course, having many times flown over the Netherlands,  I have always seen Mondrian’s art as straightforward landscape painting, painting the Dutch countryside from above.

Geometric abstraction reappeared in the art of Brazil in the 1960s, and in so-called minimalist art in the USA and Europe, from the 1960s onwards.  Like Hirschfeld-Mack’s work, much of that art is sublime and deeply spiritual.  More of that anon.

References:

M Dabrowski [1992]:  Malevich and Mondrian:  nonobjective form as the expression of the “absolute’”.  pp. 145-168, in: GH Roman and VH Marquardt (Editors): The Avant-Garde Frontier: Russia Meets the West, 1910-1930. University Press of Florida, Gainesville, FL, USA.

Gladys Fabre and Doris Wintgens Hotte (Editors), Michael White (Consultant Editor) [2009]:  Van Doesburg & the International Avant-Garde.  Constructing a New World.  London, UK:  Tate Publishing.

LD Henderson [1983]: The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art. Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, USA.

David Hilbert [1899]: Grundlagen der Geometrie. pp. 3-92, in: Festschrift zur Feier der Enthullung des Gauss-Weber-Denkmals in Gottingen. Teubner, Leipzig, Germany.   Translated by EJ Townsend as:  Foundations of Geometry, Open Court, Chicago, IL, USA. 1910.

Mario Pieri [1895]:  Sui principi che reggiono la geometria di posizione.  Atti della Reale Accademia delle scienze di Torino, 30: 54-108.

Mario Pieri [1897-98]: I principii della geometria di posizione composti in sistema logico deduttivo.  Memorie della Reale Accademia delle Scienze di Torino 2, 48: 1-62.

Technorati Tags: Tate Modern, Hirschfeld-Mack, Bauhaus, Geometric abstraction, minimalist art