Artwork: Olafur Eliasson, Solar Compression, 2016 @ Palace of Versailles; photo: Anders Sune Berg, www.olafureliasson.net, 2016.
ART IN OTHER WORDS
Philosophy
"As a human being, you have no choice about the fact that you need a philosophy. Your only choice is whether you define your philosophy by a conscious, rational, disciplined process of thought and scrupulously logical deliberation -- or let your subconscious accumulate a junk heap of unwarranted conclusions, false generalizations, undefined contradictions, undigested slogans, unidentified wishes, doubts, and fears, thrown together by chance, but integrated by your subconscious into a kind of mongrel philosophy and fused into a single, solid weight: self doubt, like a ball and chain in the place where your mind's wings should have grown." (Ayn Rand)
Culture
"'It's quite possible that my whole project is flawed.' he speculates. 'That, in the great frame of things, when contributions are weighed in the balance of usefulness to the human race, I may be found very wanting, but it's too late for doubt now. Neither is there time for it.' The trouble with this introspection is that it sounds so phoney. Gormley clearly does not doubt his own significance. His self-criticism is laced with narcissism. And that's fair enough, maybe. If you are going to be an artist you need a big ego. It's injudicious of Gormley to wonder about something that only the future can decide." (Jonathan Jones interviewing Anthony Gormley)
ABSTRACTION
Stew over this black square à la Rothko Chapel
Art is everything... and yet only very specific things. A fact that is just one of many paradoxical joys of our contemporary age. As a result, the artists, museums and curators of contemporary art play with this mutable boundary between art and thing (or, in some cases, art and no-thing). I promise to share (here) the moment I find an artist, museum or exhibition delineating the boundary between art and thing in an authentic way. For now, I am happy enough to play in the sandbox alongside the rest the community, coloring outside of the lines until the outline of 21st century art is engraved deeply and darkly enough to take hold in our minds.
Liquid Mars
Original image from Jan Frojdman's "Fictive Flight Above Real Mars" - graph edits by Hayley Dwight
Augustus Vincent Tack, Aspiration (1931) -- Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C., Oil on canvas, 76 1/2 x 135 1/2 in.
A Fictive Flight Above Real Mars and Aspiration are abstract beacons of nature's sublime anatomy. 86 years ago, Aspiration was commissioned to "invite the viewer to contemplate universal emotions and the underlying unity of life and art." According to the curatorial team at the Phillips Collection, "[Aspiration] suggests a yearning for spiritual fulfillment through increasingly bright hues and mounting forms." When displayed in juxtaposition to Jan's video of Mars created this year, Tack's representation of the Rocky Mountains prefigures the lifeless troughs, swells, cracks and growths on the surface of this alien planet.
As a society, we have yet to completely color-in our understanding of Mars. The lifeless grey-dust of this uninhabitable planet looms in cyberspace, orbiting in and out of our intellectual consciousness. There will be a time in the near future when mankind is as familiar with the mountain ranges on Mars as we are with the Rocky Mountains. For now, we enjoy Jan Frojdman's slow, near-silent tour of this strange planet from afar and consider it sublime art. Despite its raw, sceintific rendering, "A Fictive Flight Above Real Mars" keeps the viewer intellectually abstracted from the subject matter. Conversely, faced with "Aspiration," the viewer is visually abstracted from the representation of a natural monument common to our public consciousness. Arguably, intellectual abstraction and visual abstraction, produce the same artistic effect: spiritual sublimity and, ultimately, artistic masterpiece.
NEW YORK AREA 'STREET ART'
Untitled by Hayley Dwight (glass, spray-paint, wire and canvas)
