Author: Patricia Oxley

must listen – idea about how we make ourselves significant ;  art as way of making ourselves significant

saw a Christopher Wool painting with a tutor.  she rated it highly.  I could not see why.  What? do? I? do?

First I need to read this article and try to paraphrase? Understand? extract some principles?

second I need to ask questions:

what pleasure would painting like this yield to the painter – important question – one for my series of life drawings??

does painting need to give pleasure to the painter?  Many levels of pleasure – during and after

Painting any way seems to be deferred in painting.  It’s as if you keep painting e en though its not doing anything for you because you know (have learned) that at some point you will get pleasure from seeing what your hand has done.

 

 

 

Saltz: Christopher Wool’s Stenciled Words Speak Loudly—and Not Everyone Wants to Listen
By Jerry Saltz Follow @jerrysaltz
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Christopher Wool’s Trouble (1989). Photo: Christopher Wool/Courtesy of the Guggenheim Museum of Art, New York
In the catalogue accompanying Christopher Wool’s impressive retrospective now at the Guggenheim, the artist Richard Prince writes of this artist’s multiple uses of “spray-­painted swirls … transfer drips, splatters, puddles, and ‘by-the-by’ patterns,” and how they “taught an old dog new tricks.” The “old dog” here is painting; the “new tricks” are the ways in which Wool’s greasy-looking, commanding surfaces, the narrow formal confines he set for himself, and his ambiguous polycentric spaces create alchemical cyclotrons. Wool’s paintings of blocky letters, words, and phrases; abstract graphic fields filled with erasures; and boxy geometries implausibly synthesize the gesturalism of mid-century Modernism—now out of style, semi-­forbidden—with cooler art from the age of mechanical reproduction. Think of his paintings as places where Warhol’s disaster, flower, and Rorschach paintings meet Pollock’s and de Kooning’s, all done in black mucoid goo. The results have made Wool, 58, among the most influential mid-career American painters.

Wool’s work can grate, be hard to like, easy to hate. And when it’s hated, it’s hated hard. He’s a risky subject for the Guggenheim, one that might alienate wide audiences and critics alike. Many of these blunt scribble-and-smear paintings can leave lay audiences shaking their heads at yet another art-star strutting his disaffected noir-ness. Moreover, the show is simultaneously too long and not comprehensive enough. I dig his gritty black-and-white pictures of New York, but there are just too many of them for most visitors to take. Yet there’s no pre-1987 painting here—work that would explain how Wool emerged in the years when painting was going through another one of its nervous breakdowns. So was his work. No matter: I’m such a 30-year fan that I walked up the Guggenheim’s ramp thinking I’d take any one of these home.

Not everyone would. Brilliant critics, especially the male ones, have lambasted Wool. Dave Hickey deemed his work “trendy negativity … academically palatable brand of designer-punk agitprop.” The L.A. Times’s Christopher Knight dismissed it as “banal,” “impoverished,” and “startlingly conservative.” LA Weekly’s Doug Harvey seethed that “shtick-crippled” Wool’s paintings are “pedantic crap.” The Guardian’s Adrian Searle tweeted recently: “He. Is. Just. Not. That. Good.” These guys don’t like that Wool’s art isn’t “beautiful” in traditional painterly ways and isn’t dryly conceptual or pop. I think it splits the difference and arrives at something electric and ­generative. Just last week, my pal Peter ­Schjeldahl came right out and wrote that he does “fondly wish … for a champion whose art is richer in beauty and charm.” For me, Wool’s work has a lot of both.

So be it if Wool’s art is something some people cross the street to avoid. The show begins with a typically twisted bang in the gallery off the entry ramp. On your left is a large word painting in navy enamel on a stark white-aluminum ground. Like all of Wool’s paintings, it looks like an abstract X-ray. Generic, stenciled, gridded-out letters run almost edge to edge. There’s no punctuation; all the letters are the same size; everything forms an enormously long run-on sentence. Then it decays into babble, executing a nifty Cézanne-ish trick: When you stop trying to read it straight, arrangements, orders, and compositions appear. (The writer Jim Lewis describes it this way: “When you multiply misunderstanding … meaning emerges.”) Finally, you make out the first words of the painting: THE SHOW IS OVER. They’re from Greil Marcus’s classic punk-rock text, Lipstick Traces, and are a perfect metaphor for the artistic dilemma Wool, his in-between generation, and painting itself found themselves in, in the eighties. Starting an exhibition by saying THE SHOW IS OVER—much as Apocalypse Now begins, with Jim Morrison singing “This is the end”—adds paradoxical layers.

As you make your way up the ramp, other paintings of single words like PLEASE, RIOT, and FOOL turn up, as do phrases like YOU MAKE ME and THE HARDER YOU LOOK. It’s like moving through the city and hearing it talk back to you: “Do not block driveway,” “No pets,” “Valid I.D. required.” Glenn O’Brien once called Wool’s work “sign-painting with feedback,” and that feedback goes almost infinite in my favorite Wool painting—the one that quotes words never spoken, only seen, in Apocalypse Now: SELL THE HOUSE SELL THE CAR SELL THE KIDS. The moment I first saw this painting in 1988, I gleaned a different kind of border-to-border abstraction, the simple dense expression of complex thought. The painting became an epic three-line novel. The Guggenheim wisely decided not to show this magnum opus, presumably because its owner has chosen next week to sell it at Christie’s, where the estimate is $15 million to $20 million. Maybe the painting gets the last laugh, as Wool’s own work often taunts such opportunists. The painting taunts such foul hysteria.

Higher up on the ramp, we move beyond word paintings—they are in the minority here—and we instead see Wool continually recycling abstract gestures, motifs, marks, and meandering lines; exploring glutted matte surfaces, uneven blocked-out areas, fragmented overlaps of screened images, faint traces of Benday dots. There are works with repeating flowers. There’s little all-out color. A few blocks of spattered yellow; a couple of paintings have sloshes of a rust-colored cinnamon. Some deep blues read as solid black. There are paintings that look like they’ve been wiped down and almost blotted out. Other times, there are rolled-on areas of splotchy whites, stamped marks, oblong flecks. For me, Wool captures the ways New York looks, sounds, and smells in our time, much as Jackson Pollock’s drip paintings embody the city’s texture in the fifties. I see Wool creating new order out of all this chaos. I see little epiphanies and glean the same clashing, gritty, seemingly haphazard, abrasive, bludgeoning beauty that all of us who live in and love New York can’t live without.

*This article originally appeared in the November 11, 2013 issue of New York Magazine.

Daniel Dennett talking about the danger of the internet going down and the panic that will ensue and says he is working with a group of people thinking through the knowledges and skills the tmight be drawn on at such  time.

My question is that sennett is not calling this art so what is the difference between this kind of activity and the art practices described in the mooc

e.g. he talks about creating all over the world panic observers

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The hue and cry in Germany over Hans Haacke’s artwork Der Bevölkerung (The People)
14 April 2000
On April 5 German Bundestag deputies voted by 260 to 258 in favour of the installation of a work of art, Der Bevölkerung ( The People), by German-American artist Hans Haacke in the German parliament building. The vote was the culmination of months of heated debate in the media over Haacke’s project. Recent debates in the German parliament over issues involving spending cuts affecting tens of millions of people have often taken place in an almost deserted chamber. However, for the debate over Haacke’s artwork, more deputies attended and voted than was the case for the parliamentary discussion and vote on the intervention of the German army in Kosovo. What is so special about this debate and Hans Haacke’s proposed work of art?
In the spring of 1998 a special arts commission appointed by the Bundestag and consisting of a number of parliamentary deputies, supplemented by a handful of art experts, commissioned Haacke to develop a work of art to stand in the northern wing of the fully refurbished parliament building. Haacke’s proposal envisages a large trench filled with earth in which a neon sign illuminates the words “ Der Bevölkerung.” The letter type and the size of the letters in Haacke’s planned installation corresponds to the main inscription which stands above the main steps of the Bundestag, but reads somewhat differently, Dem Deutschen Volk ( To the German People).
Although both German expressions are normally translated with the same word “people,” the German word Volk has a rather different connotation than the word Bevölkerung. The Nazis favoured the term Volk in a number of forms to emphasise their overtly nationalist and exclusive notion of German identity.
Also included in the draft for Haacke’s object was the proposal that the soil for the trench bed should be brought in equal measures by every deputy from his parliamentary constituency.
In three rounds of discussion the arts commission decided on Haacke’s project and voted on two occasions for its implementation. Three parliamentary deputies, two from the CDU and one from the Greens—Antje Vollmer, who is also vice-president of the Bundestag—lodged an objection to the proposal and forced a discussion and vote on the issue in parliament. Positions polarised rapidly in the course of a few weeks with the for and against arguments being argued vigorously in the press.
A number of arguments crystallised in the course of the run-up to the debate. Some voices merely declared that the proposal was inappropriate, some went so far as to declare it “sickening.” In line with her party’s espousal of ecological principles, Antje Vollmer declared that the proposal was nothing but “bio-kitsch.” But two additional arguments also emerged. First of all objections were raised by a number of parliamentarians that the involvement of deputies in transporting soil from their constituencies was a throwback to the Blut und Boden ( Blood and Soil) propaganda of the Nazis. In fact this argument is simply a red herring introduced to muddy the waters and confuse the debate (similar to the accusation in New York that Haacke had defamed the memory of the Holocaust by his installation “Sanitation” at the Whitney Museum).
Haacke has scorned any notion that his proposal involves any concession to Nazi-type propaganda. Indeed, arguing in favour of his text “The People” instead of “To the German People,” Haacke commented: “In fact the deputies have sworn an oath to the constitution and must have an interest that the inscription Dem Deutschen Volk is not interpreted in an exclusively nationalist (völkish) sense. After all there are Nazis who take to the streets and beat up people who appear to be insufficiently German.”
The second objection dealt with exactly this point. A number of deputies articulated open opposition to the term used in the artwork, which they said constituted a defamation ( Verunglimpfung) of the Bundestag and was at the same time unconstitutional. A leading commentary on the front page of the conservative FAZ newspaper went so far as to accuse Hans Haacke of a “deep aversion” to the Germans, accusing him at the same time of “wanting to do away with the German people or at least strip them of their parliament”.
Expressed in this hostility to the use of the term Der Bevölkerung is the standpoint of many parliamentarians that the Bundestag is their own personal property and only they can decide what appears inside the building. In terms of German history and tradition there is something to this argument. The text over the entrance to the parliamentary building does not read The German People, but rather To the German People —i.e., the Bundestag (or what was the Reichstag), as the seat of German democracy, is a concession or gift to the German people (or Untertan) on the part of the ruling circles ( Obrigkeit). Implied in the text is the threat on the part of ruling circles that they reserve the right to take back their gift at any time. In opposition to the American constitution, for example, which guarantees the sovereignty of the people, German political tradition emphasises the sovereignty of the state over the people.
Most newspaper commentaries in Germany have welcomed the parliamentary debate and the vote in favour of the art project as a victory for democracy. Hans Haacke, who attended the debate in parliament, expressed his own surprise and satisfaction that the outcome of the vote was positive. In fact, irrespective of the narrowness of the vote, the handling of such issues by the German parliament establishes potentially dangerous precedents. A handful of parliamentary deputies were able to set aside the decision of their own specialist art committee (the only parliamentary subcommittee with the power to make decisions and not just to advise) and so force a discussion on the merits of a work of art under conditions where the debate was dominated by sensationalist articles in the press spiced with the rabidly nationalist comments of a number of deputies.
The German constitution of 1949 guarantees the complete freedom of art: “Art and science, research and teaching are free.” But in this question as in all others the parliamentary deputies reserve the right to set aside or revise the constitution when they see fit.
If one lesson emerges from the hue and cry over Hans Haacke’s planned project then it is that the merits of a individual work of art cannot and should not be determined and decided on by political parties in parliament. Parliamentary deputies have as much right as anyone else to argue and debate the values of artistic works. They have absolutely no right to decide what the public should or should not see. As the current debate makes clear, however, many German parliamentarians see the issue differently. Their position was summed up by vice-president (and former Maoist) Vollmer who declared at the end of her own speech against the art-work, “It is not a question of freedom of art, but of freedom for the deputies.”

But Nado, really important term that has been used was coined by Nicolas Bourriaud and it’s relational aesthetics. Can you tell us a little bit about it? >> Well, just to say first of all, I have to say, there are so many terms. And it’s important to indicate to our friends in the audience that they are not necessarily clearly defined, but in fact come out of an emergence of an art form that different people have coined terms from around the world. So relational aesthetics was coined by Nicolas Bourriaud in 1992 in his book titled Relational Aesthetics. It’s also useful to know that none of the artists admit being part of it and actually refused to consider being part of it at all.

 

….

And as Nado was pointing out, these terms often are defined broadly, loosely, and they rarely are coined by artists themselves.

nd that is the occupation of existing symbols, stories, events, institutions. >> Yeah. >> In order to effect what they mean. >> Yeah. >> It’s our assessment that every symbol, every subject is fundamentally split, so it’s defined as much by its positive characteristics as it is by that which it excludes, or that which it isn’t. So if you were to use the analogy of a room, it’s definited as much by its ceilings and floors and walls as the negative space in between. And so it’s inhabiting that space, activating that split within a subject. Bringing in that exclusion or thing that it refuses that we can ultimately effect and transform the very understanding or the very definition of a particular thing.

“When I was at Harvard, I had to read a book by Tolstoy on “What is Art?” All I learned from it was that art was a form of communication between man and man. My fault, probably. But meanwhile, I’ve thought a lot about it; and I’ve come to believe that art is communication informing man of his own dignity, and of the value of his life, whether in joy or grief, whether in laughter or indignation, beauty or terror. Terror can be a catharsis, indignation can dignify life, can dignify man in his scorn of the mean and unworthy. On the other hand, the communication which belittles man, or dishonors him – though it may be artful – is not art – it’s simply an exercise in malice. And in the grey land between art and malice, there are only happenings. Man needs the comfort of his own dignity – as a Being, a Creature of the Universe, as Max Ehrmann said. And that’s what the artist is for. To give him that comfort.”
ROBERT NATHAN
From the address at the Annual
Tribute Luncheon of the
Los Angeles Library Association
April 5, 1973

Why Fractals Are So Soothing
Jackson Pollock’s paintings mirror nature’s patterns, like branching trees, snowflakes, waves—and the structure of the human eye.
Morteza Nikoubazl / Reuters

FLORENCE WILLIAMS JAN 26, 2017 SCIENCE
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When Richard Taylor was 10 years old in the early 1970s in England, he chanced upon a catalogue of Jackson Pollock paintings. He was mesmerized, or perhaps a better word is Pollockized. Franz Mesmer, the crackpot 18th-century physician, posited the existence of animal magnetism between inanimate and animate objects. Pollock’s abstractions also seemed to elicit a certain mental state in the viewer. Now a physicist at the University of Oregon, Taylor thinks he has figured out what was so special about those Pollocks, and the answer has deep implications for human happiness.

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This question didn’t always occupy his professional time. Taylor’s day job involves finding the most efficient ways to move electricity: in multiple tributaries like those found in river systems, or in lung bronchi or cortical neurons. When currents move through things such as televisions, the march of electrons is orderly. But in newer, tiny devices that might be only 100 times larger than an atom, the order of currents breaks down. It is more like ordered chaos. The patterns of the currents, like the branches in lungs and neurons, are fractal, which means they repeat at different scales. Now Taylor is using ‘bioinspiration’ to design a better solar panel. If nature’s solar panels—trees and plants—are branched, why not manufactured panels?

Taylor describes himself as a type of thinker who jumps across disciplines to solve problems. In addition to his credentials as a physicist, he is a painter and photographer with an advanced art degree. He’s known as a bit of an eccentric around campus. He frequently paddles across Waldo Lake in Oregon when he’s searching for insights, and his hair is so famous it’s almost a distraction. Long and curly, it resembles the distinctive locks of Sir Isaac Newton in his prime. The public affairs office of the university once actually Photoshopped it out of a publication.
Through his meandering career trajectory, Taylor never lost his interest—obsession, really—in Pollock. While at the Manchester School of Art, he built a rickety pendulum that splattered paint when the wind blew because he wanted to see how ‘nature’ painted and if it ended up looking like a Pollock (it did.) Then some years ago, he had a seminal insight while working on nanoelectronics. “The more I looked at fractal patterns, the more I was reminded of Pollock’s poured paintings,” he recounted in an essay. “And when I looked at his paintings, I noticed that the paint splatters seemed to spread across his canvases like the flow of electricity through our devices.”

Using instruments designed to measure electrical currents, Taylor examined a series of Pollocks from the 1950s and found that the paintings were indeed fractal. It was a little like discovering that your favorite aunt speaks a secret, ancient language. “Pollock painted nature’s fractals 25 years ahead of their scientific discovery!” He published the finding in the journal Nature in 1999, creating a stir in the worlds of both art and physics.

Benoit Mandelbrot first coined the term ‘fractal’ in 1975, discovering that simple mathematic rules apply to a vast array of things that looked visually complex or chaotic. As he proved, fractal patterns were often found in nature’s roughness—in clouds, coastlines, plant leaves, ocean waves, the rise and fall of the Nile River, and in the clustering of galaxies. To understand fractal patterns at different scales, picture a trunk of a tree and a branch: they might contain the same angles as that same branch and a smaller branch, as well as the converging veins of the leaf on that branch. And so on. You can have fractals creating what looks like chaos.
Taylor was curious to know if the fractals in the Pollocks might explain why people were so drawn to them, as well as to things such as pulsating screensavers and stoner light shows at the planetarium. Could great works of art really be reduced to some nonlinear equations? Only a physicist would ask. So Taylor ran experiments to gauge people’s physiological response to viewing images with similar fractal geometries. He measured people’s skin conductance (a measure of nervous system activity) and found that they recovered from stress 60 percent better when viewing computer images with a mathematical fractal dimension (called D) of between 1.3 and 1.5. D measures the ratio of the large, coarse patterns (the coastline seen from a plane, the main trunk of a tree, Pollock’s big-sweep splatters) to the fine ones (dunes, rocks, branches, leaves, Pollock’s micro-flick splatters). Fractal dimension is typically notated as a number between 1 and 2; the more complex the image, the higher the D.

“We’ve analyzed the Pollock patterns with computers and compared them to forests, and they are exactly the same.”
Next, Taylor and Caroline Hägerhäll, a Swedish environmental psychologist with a specialty in human aesthetic perception, converted a series of nature photos into a simplistic representation of the landforms’ fractal silhouettes against the sky. They found that people overwhelmingly preferred images with a low to mid-range D (between 1.3 and 1.5.) To find out if that dimension induced a particular mental state, they used EEG to measure people’s brain waves while viewing geometric fractal images. They discovered that in that same dimensional magic zone, the subjects’ frontal lobes easily produced the feel-good alpha brainwaves of a wakefully relaxed state. This occurred even when people looked at the images for only one minute.

EEG measures waves, or electrical frequency, but it doesn’t precisely map the active real estate in the brain. For that, Taylor has now turned to functional MRI, which shows the parts of the brain working hardest by imaging the blood flow. Preliminary results show that mid-range fractals activate some brain regions that you might expect, such as the ventrolateral cortex (involved with high-level visual processing) and the dorsolateral cortex, which codes spatial long-term memory. But these fractals also engage the parahippocampus, which is involved with regulating emotions and is also highly active while listening to music. To Taylor, this is a cool finding. “We were delighted to find [mid-range fractals] are similar to music,” he said. In other words, looking at an ocean might have a similar effect on us emotionally as listening to Brahms.
Taylor believes that our brains recognize that kinship to the natural world—Pollock’s favored dimension is similar to trees, snowflakes and mineral veins. “We’ve analyzed the Pollock patterns with computers and compared them to forests, and they are exactly the same,” said Taylor. This dimension does more than lull us; it can engage us, awe us and make us self-reflect.

But why is the mid-range of D (remember, that’s the ratio of large to small patterns) so magical and so highly preferred among most people? Taylor and Hägerhäll have an interesting theory, and it doesn’t necessarily have to do with a romantic yearning for Arcadia. In addition to lungs, capillaries and neurons, another human system is branched into fractals: the visual system as expressed by the movement of the eye’s retina. When Taylor used an eye-tracking machine to measure precisely where people’s pupils were focusing on projected images (of Pollock paintings, for example, but also other things), he saw that the pupils used a search pattern that was itself fractal. The eyes first scanned the big elements in the scene and then made micro passes in smaller versions of the big scans, and it does this in a mid-range D. Interestingly, if you draw a line over the tracks that animals make to forage for food, for example albatrosses surveying the ocean, you also see this fractal pattern of search trajectories. It’s simply an efficient search strategy, said Taylor.
“Your visual system is in some way hardwired to understand fractals,” said Taylor. “The stress-reduction is triggered by a physiological resonance that occurs when the fractal structure of the eye matches that of the fractal image being viewed.” If a scene is too complicated, like a city intersection, we can’t easily take it all in, and that in turn leads to some discomfort, even if subconsciously. It makes sense that our visual cortex would feel most at home among the most common natural features we evolved alongside. So perhaps part of our comfort in nature derives from fluent visual processing.

If the cause of our relaxation is not entirely rooted in Thoreauvian romance, the solution surely is. We need these natural patterns to look at, and we’re not getting enough of them, said Taylor. As we increasingly surround ourselves with straight Euclidean built environments, we risk losing our connection to the natural stress-reducer that is visual fluency. It all adds up to yet another reason to bring greenery back to cities and get outside more often.

I had one final question for Taylor. I was interviewing him via Skype video because he was on holiday in Australia. His soft curls tumbled to the lower edges of the screen like a fine, galloping creek.

“Is your hair fractal?”

He roared with laughter. “I suspect my hair is fractal. The big question of course is whether it induces positive physiological changes in the observer!”