Category Archives: art

General arts and culture posts

Watertower at MoMA

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Can you spy the water tower? It’s in the top right.

The rooftops of NYC are filled with water towers, but this one is deceptive. It is not actually a water tower, but a commissioned piece Water Tower by British artist Rachel Whiteread. Cast in clear resin of the inside of a real water tower, it actually has no color of its own. A fact I didn’t realize when I was trying to take a picture of it and couldn’t quite get it.

Whitehead says:

So it’s a single clear plastic casting of a full–sized water tower that sat on the roof on the corner of West Broadway and Grand Street, on a dunnage.

I had originally thought of making this piece solid but that’s technically impossible. So we had to make it empty, so the whole thing is a skin of about four inches all the way around. And it has the texture of the inside of the water tower, so it’s really about solidifying water and trying to make this water look like it’s just frozen in a moment of time. It’s like the actual water tower has been stripped away and there’s this solid water left behind.

It’s translucence means that in different lights it shows up more or less visibly, like a sky ghost over Manhattan.

Rachel Whiteread. (British, born 1963). Water Tower. 1998. Translucent resin and painted steel, 12′ 2″ high x 9′ in diameter.

Beauty and the Best: A Call to Arms

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You probably already seen this link, you just don’t recognize it yet. I’ve seen it twice in blogs today, and I read it myself yesterday. Entitled Beauty and the Best by Theodore Dalrymple in the New English Review, it hashes up much pertinent and heady classic art debate in order to “understand how and why this terrible shallowness has triumphed so completely almost everywhere in the west” that contemporary art is incapable of serious, informed and moving art.

One is almost tempted to call him atavistic, or say his ideas are charming in an grandfatherly sort of way. Unless, of course, you’ve ever wanted more from your art than Damien Hirst could give you or you were ever struck by the craftsmanship of a statue by Bernini or some other forgotten barbarian. If that is the case, you will enjoy the spirit of Dalrymple’s argument immensely.

Connections: VanGogh and Nietzche; Too Much in the Sun

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Both died mad at the end of the 20th Century, and their incipient fame and death in their prime only suggested how much more of which they were capable. But the similarities between philosopher Nietzsche (1844-1900) and painter Van Gogh (1853-1890) are more than the biographic (e.g. syphilis) or zeitgeist-related. I imagines the same anguished ethos formed the works of both, but I could be imagining things. Their style, however, is palpably similar in different mediums. According to Nietzsche, all philosophers had to be artists in order to completely express their thoughts.

Reaper. 1889.

Deceptively joyous, their works make one feel as if the creator has stared at the sun too long without seeing the fingerprint of god on it. They take radical ways to express a view of the world that is intense and yet accessible on the surface. Influential as they have been, they remain isolated iconoclasts in their paeans.

Their works are accessible only in their apparent joyousness. Van Gogh is repeated on shirts and posters because people find his work pleasant. Nietzsche becomes the easy catch phrase for the undergrad searching for a strident, carefree tone. This view confuses the bright veneer of a conclusion with the strenuous wrestling that went into its making. Within Nietzsche words lies the horror that is in the root of the oldest fairy tales, and Van Gogh paints as one who must paint the flatness of life in the purest pigments and thickest layers because the world enters his consciousness with the cunning of the light that finds the hungover man and makes him wince. Such heightened feeling is not always pleasant, even when it has been transformed into the aesthetic object.

“There are endless corn fields under dull skies, and I’ve not shied away from portraying this sadness and utter loneliness…”- Van Gogh

Wheat Field with Cypresses
Painted around Saint-Remy in early June 1889

Merely the madness of artists on view? Perhaps, in that these men used their art to express a worldview that Conrado de Quiros, a writer for the Phillipean Enquirer, puts it well by saying, “That’s the truly depressing part of it, that the suicidal tendencies afflict the creative and not the destructive. I wouldn’t mind it if our public officials were seized by a sudden epidemic of wanting to commit suicide. But no, the tendency afflicts Plaths and Van Goghs and Nietzsche’s of this world and my friend and my son’s friend and others of their kind. People who feel life so intensely, so acutely, so sharply they are often crushed by it.”

It is a mistake to view these two artists as unrelated raving lunatics. I would venture rather that they are raving artists depict the intensity of life head on and struggle in their valuation thereof. If their similarities do not depict the same temperament exactly, they do the same view of a world as one to reckoned with, in all its glory. A glory that became overwhelming.