aesthetic
SWELLMILK #615
13/05/10 02:13
#615 DRAGBLEACHER
everyone ‘belongs’ somewhere.
for me, that night, it was here, behind the bleachers, all by myself, surrounded by a halo of floating rubber... this image is a particular investigation of a particular kind of culture. I took it at the drag races on I-35 about 20 miles north of where I live. The I am learning more about the culture, the process unfolds through the type of visual investigation, one where capture happens in a drunken state and edit happens in an even drunker state. But it this world to me, its brutal, its dark, it is the antithesis of Symphony. It is Dionysian in the way explored by Frederick Nietzsche, who described that type of art as participatory in a way in which one might lose herself within euphoria. It is art making inside of a frenzy, to produce a frenzy, to the end of parasympathetic release. The workup To a DRAG is an amazing thing which includes revving engines and melting of tires. It includes sounds and elevated heartbeats and tremendous hunger for hot dogs covered with sauerkraut and relish. Postures change, expressions change, hands go over ears, idle chat stops, and then the dragster runs. Looking at this image, thinking about all those things, and thinking about the distance that I found for myself just on the periphery, brooding, I think of the sublime. A new plastic hyper-personal glow-in-the-dark sublime that I define for myself. It drags me to dark colors, negative spaces, quietness inside storm in order to define subjects that are filled with terror, dismay, frenzy.
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AESTHETIC: Emic Meaning
21/04/10 01:15
Akiko at her Nihonga
For six years, when I lived in Japan, I watched a Keiko, my mother-in-law, work on turning Holder. The hunger is a traditional Japanese form that uses ground pigment mixed with rabbit skin glue. The images that I’ve seen produced from this form are soft, detailers, and explore the simplest things like flowers, landscapes, and children smiles. But once I was told that shadowing and depth are not allowed to be used by traditional younger painters. Instead of using perspective to show depth is artists instead focus on ideas of placement and size. If this is true color and line are more important I think. Shadowing, or shadows, are to me were the most important aspects of photography. Shadows allow projection, they define and emphasize through a subtle use of negative space. Contrast control whether in traditional film developing or printing, or on a computer program software, is one of the first things a photographer learns. Looking in on the hunger I think about the mimesis, the art of imitation. Historically, the run up to the discovery of photography was led by the desire to imitate accurately. Indeed artists were judge by their capacity to do so and therefore many employed a camera obscure a that could optically project lines onto a page. Artist acting as technician would then be judged by his capacity to trace lines and to make an image with actually rendered detail. That is how it worked in the West, in the East it was different. When I look at a photograph, or it’s quality to render an exact copy of what it proposes to articulate, is no longer a criteria of importance. There is no judge or its mimetic qualities, even photographs. I suppose was a natural reaction for me to view the home to miss a “primitive” art form. It looked childish to me, and seemed overly laborious with regards to time and effort and skill. At that time, for me, as a photographer, simple and the judgments were not enough however, I always believed that he could photograph was one I could transfer its reader into another reality, outside of its frame, away from its surface. I recall, as I grew to love the feelings and emotions that a key codes we hunger” for me that I simultaneously was becoming less interested in looking at photography, even my own, for stimulation. I think the transformation was part of a larger transformation was going through, which had to do with me understanding of context that was other than American. For Keiko the work unfolded slowly on her living room floor, but also unfolded within the strict parameters of the way a hunger has been defined through the centuries. I began to understand that the process of doing in the holder was less a creative one and more an act of worship. One where the artists strives to duplicate the strokes and gestures that have been performed by a master, instead of being creative. Creativity is a self centered act, it retires one to be creative. While some creative people argue that they are a vessel, or a conduit through which the universe flows its creativity, the act itself becomes entirely dependent upon the relationship a single person or a group of collaborators has with the eventual object. The began to understand that what Akiko was doing was not creative, but ritual. The question I ask myself now is who want wasn’t exactly that changed my thinking about her work, from being simple and laborious into being beautiful.I’m thinking of viewer centered aesthetic, one where distance becomes one of the important factors by which we can engage and appreciate things. For me the movement away from the mythic understanding was a movement of distance. Specifically the focus on surface, the focus on form. When I teach photography now I tell my students to look through the camera instead of looking into it. When I look at photographs now I look through them instead into them. I am also asking myself how important it is to understand what the artist was trying to say about what they weren’t making. This is how I understand emic meaning. it is a kind of meaning that gives specific privilege to the voice of one who creates. Who is the creator? Who is the artist? Where does the meaning come from? What role does distance have to play and it?
AESTHETIC: Is My Mom an Art Connoisseur?
13/04/10 01:02
screen shot from the video where my mom talks about art. click here to watch.
The night before, in my aesthetics class, I made a statement that I didn’t really believe, but in some ways wanted to... I often make these kinds of statements when I’m in class, it’s part of the way I have chosen to perform as a student... I do so for the benefit of the topic at hand, as I consider myself a devil’s advocate- or perhaps a sacrificial lamb one who does harm to self in order for others to benefit. left her and shows me to be entirely egocentric, perhaps this short misses is an attempt to crucify that. Last night we were talking about the things that make art, art. We constructed a laundry list of ideas which included things like it “needs to be made, or appropriated,” it needs to be “talked about, or considered,” it needs to “move to people who view it.” A question arose about “who was able to make something art just by talking about it?” The general consensus was that anyone, anyone with voice could say “this is art,” and that that was enough. I disagreed. I suggested that not just anyone could say those words. I suggested that only people who have some kind of formal training, connoisseurs, were able to make such statements, with any validity. I went on to suggest, for example, that my mother was not allowed to say those words. The girl next to me called me a fascist. I went red in the face, but stuck to my statement, however damaging I knew it would become. There is good art and bad art, but it still is art, right?
I consider myself an artist. I have stated formally, I practice every day, sometimes I sell it. I have studied art history, and now investigate ideas about the rules in which we engage art, which some call aesthetics. I know what I like too. which is the argument made most often by Peter Swilling Sunday visitors to the museum. Of course you know you like and it’s not this Jackson Pollock piece. At a certain point in the history of art it became necessary to understand the rules by which it was constructed in order to understand it, so argues Authur Danto. John Dewey argues that you can look at a flower and appreciated, but to truly understand it you need also to understand ideas about soil and sunlight and wind and insects. I believe the same thing about art. People who understand those rules can make valid statements about art, in the same way people who are highly informed about a particular political subjects become the voice of certain ideas. I write this at a time of populist uprising in America. Everyone has been empowered to speak, which is good I suppose, but it gives birth to demagogues such as Sarah Palin. Thomas Kinkade is to art what Sarah Palin is to democracy. There is another aspect to this which I’m a little bit ashamed to admit. It is that I am interested in keeping people out of my field. I want to be unique, I want the word artist to carry some kind of weight. I am ashamed of these feelings, especially as I am in the business of empowering people to become artists, and to use art to extend and order their consciousness. Is there a right of passage to become an artist? Must you really and truthfully have an understanding of the theoretical and historical elements of art in order to feel it? I don’t know, I don’t want to know either.
Truth be told, I appreciate what my mother says about art... once I sent a paper to her that I wrote for class. It was about an art piece that I saw in the museum. I contacted her by Skype and asked her to comment about my writing. I recorded our conversation, her words, as they drifted from observations about formal qualities into sophisticated deconstruction. My mother could recognize that I see things that she doesn’t, and that she simply just looks. Thomas Kinkade’s work I despise. My professor also dislikes Thomas Kinkade. I asked her why. She suggested that the formal aspects of his work fail to mesh with the content of the piece. My mother loves his work though, and understands that it has value, not just economic value, but nostalgic value that evokes important feelings of the people who view, buy, and collect it.
Elliot Eisner has stressed the importance of the cognitive aspect of art and stresses the importance of teaching that alongside of it’s creative aspects. He talks about the idea of connoisseurship, I will quote him here:
Connoisseurship is the art of appreciation. It can be displayed in any realm in which the character, import, or value of objects, situations, and performances is distributed and variable, including educational practice. (Eisner 1998: 63)
Is my mother an art connoisseur? it must remain another unanswered question. Certainly if she’s interested in becoming a recognized connoisseur she could take the Christie’s Connoisseurship Seminar which: “Teaches the critical skills needed to look at art, write about art, research and evaluate works. Students regularly handle or view art objects from Christie’s Education’s study collection and visit artists’ studios, conservation labs, museums and alternative spaces.”
AESTHETIC: "Aesthetic Understanding"
01/05/10 12:21
A photograph evokes meaning for me because of it’s a detail, and because, I suppose, that I can imagine the reality in which it was taken. I notice things in photographs: this clutter in the background looks like it belongs to a house guest, or perhaps there has been a recent vacation, or impending divorce. I can tell if someone’s hair has been toned, if they are aware of the camera, and have chosen to present themselves... All of these things are imagined, and are part of the capacity for a photograph to act as a mirror or a window. I can understand these logically, I suppose because they are fantasy. Here are the things I tell myself as I fall into the willing suspension of disbelief. A photograph mirrors the things that I bring to it, and sometimes it helps my thoughts passed through it into some other world, idea, or set of parameters. But it always does so through the rendering it houses on its surface. Because of this I just think of my experience of looking at photographs as one of filtration. I heard once that photograph can be called a photograph because of the amount of unnecessary detail it houses. All those little things assert themselves, even if they have no apparent reason for being there. You usually won’t find that in most paintings unless they are in the photo realist genre. A photograph is a particular kind of filter, a particular kind of way to see things. Early on in my investigation photographs I became interested in why I was affected differently by them but from other types of art. I think when I look at photographs or I look at a scene I see and understand aesthetically. What is aesthetic understanding, seeing? the question has been an important topic in our class a semester. Morris Weitz suggests that the word (art, meaning of art) is indefinable... he argues, in the vein of Wittgenstein, that the idea names things that are loosely associated together, a ‘family’ of ideas. Artistic things, or ideas, and specifically seeing relate in the same way that my sister and I do. Though we are completely different we share the same blood a similar history, and a very deep intuitive understanding of who we are in relationship to each other. I have come to understand that relationship through my heart but also through photographs... the inarticulate speech of the heart writes itself into the photographs I make of her. it has been difficult for me to separate modernist thinking from my approach to understanding aesthetically. I am happy to believe that meaning comes from the fusion of form with content. I do understand that a photograph makes specific use of the idea of a referent. It’s a form conjures a link to the real contexts, feelings, social constructions that it depicts. The content of a photograph, I suppose, is conjured up first by the form, and then by the referent. This picture of my sister has a very specific context. She was sick and I responded to her sickness by making adjustments on my camera, slowing down the shutter just so. I also shot multiple images of her because I knew that I would juxtapose them together into triptych form, perhaps to subvert any ideas of calm or stillness. When I look at the image now it becomes undefinable, the codes and contexts and form mixed with content and dance so rapidly and I had asked to keep me from focusing. Is this aesthetic understanding? This lines up with what whites argues: “the very expensive, adventurous character of art, its ever present changes and novel creations, make it logically impossible to insure any set of defining properties.” So today, my working definition of aesthetic understanding is associated with cacophony and the release from need to understand.
AESTHETIC: What I Saw
01/02/10 12:44
photograph of a wet images on a street corner through a care window, brent hirak
It’s raining in Texas. It’s flooding, streets are charcoal black and the sky is gray. I pulled up to a stoplight this morning and glanced right to see a brown fence. It’s a place where grade school kids hang their art, kind of a community art piece I think. What remains now are two paintings, at the very end of its expanse, which are self-portraits.
Why only two now?
Based on the empty space looming next to them, I imagine that at least 15 others were also hanging at one point. I imagine the group of kids hanging their paintings, and the teachers carefully watching the traffic as they make sure the work is properly spaced and leveled. I imagine that within the group of kids there are some who were excited that people in cars were going to view their image, and that a few of them were not. Perhaps those two were the shy ones, and because they waited until last minute to hang their work it ended up on periphery. Perhaps, in their minds, this was the least visible place for their work. I imagine myself as a schoolboy hovering in the back of a crowd, clutching something tightly: shy, lonely, not wanting to put my image out for others to see.
Perhaps when others came to pick up their paintings those two kids missed the chance, and that is why the work now streaks with rain. One is a picture of a boy, the other the girl. Based on the color and the facial features I assume they are Latino. I imagine tears there and by doing so I feel sad... This morning I have a moment of aesthetic understanding, empathy– I am moved by art. I am moved to the formal qualities of the image, the colors, curves, and shapes that house themselves there. I am moved by the gray rainy day, the way quiet luminescence falls so softly on things so as not to raise any shadows. I am moved by the wall, its ramshackle publicness, its emptiness. In this kind of light colors are amplified: I remember now that the pigment from the blue sky above us kids was running down and mixing with the color of our eyes. The choice to negotiate a piece of art always comes with its consequences. I can’t help but project myself into the things I see, can’t help but laugh tentatively as my mind drifts into my own or some other past, then into some constructed future. I project myself into some context, into a trajectory that which an artwork helps me to construct.