I’m still on a Kentridge kick–there’s a whole host of clips of his work on YouTube, in case you are similarly interested. Unlike many paintings, or god forbid sculpture, a person can appreciate this work without visiting a museum. If you go through a a sequential play of his works on YouTube, like I did recently, it’s like having a museum in your living room.
Happy Saturday!
My fingers are relieved to take a bit of a break this week (perhaps you’re relieved not to be presented with a long, involved post ; ) . I’ve gotten into some topics I find super interesting.
We kicked off the week with a proposal against taking photographs of artwork in museums, which got some agreement, certainly some disagreement, and a lot of mixed feelings. It stuck in my mind, and I revised my opinion to allow that instead of being evil and stupid is was perhaps a sign of engagement with an artwork.
We played a game matching the artwork to its auction house estimate. Nobody won, so I’m keeping the $1M prize. In fact, even the auction houses didn’t win; they still have their two biggest works by Picasso and Giacometti.
I had the pleasure of seeing the musical South Pacific at Lincoln Center, and then having the song Honey Bun in my head for the whole week.
In fact, that annoying song is probably why I got a little contentious in my post on the Affordable Art Fair, contributing to my backhanded praise of the store Urban Outfitters for so cleverly following the pluralistic trends evident at the fair.
And my personal pick of the week was on the use of writing in painting, especially as it evolved during Modernism. Anyways, thanks for a fun week guys, and have a good weekend!
Leon Ferrari, left, and Mira Schendel, right
If a picture is worth a thousand words, a picture containing words has worth to the nth power. The special exhibition up at MoMA now, Tangled Alphabets, examines the works of two artists who explore words extensively in their works, and it got me thinking about how words have been used in art. Writing on an artwork exists traditionally as a signature or a date, or perhaps an inscription such as ‘Marcus me fecit.’
Tangled Alphabets focuses on the work of South American painters León Ferrari and Mira Schendel. The show says that the artists “produced their works in the neighboring countries of Argentina and Brazil throughout the 1960s and 1980s, when the question of language was particularly central to Western culture due to the central role taken by post-structuralism, semiotics, and the philosophy of language.“
Of course, pop art took words in another direction, as they exploited comic books (Roy Lichtenstein) or packaging (Warhol) In these works, the words are an intrinsic part of the image being reappropriated. In the reuse of printed materials, like some of Robert Raucheneberg’s collages, words become part of the material itself.
For a contemporary approach to automatic writing, look no further than MoMA’s recent acquisition. This untitled work, above, by British artist Jack Strange features a lead ball pressing down the g key indefinitely. (I was born the same year as the artist, 1984, and feel like I desperately need to catch up with someone who already has 2 works at MoMA!)
Words are conceptual and tied to a specific meaning, while the visual arts are just that, visual, visceral and more fluid in meaning. The combination of words and images makes your mind work overtime. Having to read something uses a different part of the brain that looking at something, and sometimes words seem too explicit. On the other hand, they certainly pack a punch.
