patternsthatconnect

Today’s drawing is better than yesterday’s. Each line more accurately intersects the previous intersection than did yesterday’s. Also I maintained control of what I was doing, whereas yesterday I ‘lost the plot’ (using a rule makes a big difference). Today the drawing was finished only when I seemed to run out of spaces to divide: a natural conclusion.

today                                                                                                yesterday

Yet the doesn’t the worse drawing seem to have more energy? I like it more than the better one, which seems worse for being better. I guess it all depends on what criteria I am applying.

In Luke Turner‘s Metamodernist Manifesto he says “oscillation is the natural order of things” and he, along with Robin van den Akker, Nadine Feßler and Timotheus Vermeulen, sees this oscillation ( “between a modern desire for sens and a postmodern doubt about the sense of it all, between a modern sincerity and a postmodern irony, between hope and melancholy and empathy and apathy and unity and plurality and purity and corruption and naïveté and knowingness; between control and commons and craftsmanship and conceptualism and pragmatism and utopianism”) as an indication of the emergence of a new cultural dominant – metamodernism.

I feel sure that I am mixing metaphors as I attempt to question the naturalness of oscillation by referring to a business simulation known as the Beer Game, invented, I believe, at M.I.T by Jay Forrester and referenced by Peter Senge in the opening chapter of his book The Fifth Discipline.

Four ‘players’ take up the positions of Factory, Distributor, Wholesaler and Retailer, making up a production and distribution system, the product being crates of beer, represented by coins or counters, that make their way from the factory, to the other sectors and ending up as sales to external customers.

There are some system conditions: no communication takes place between the sectors other than the placing of orders and the receiving of product (silence), and there are delays in production and  transportation as well as in processing the orders. Orders are made by external customers and they are re-acted by each sector concluding with the factory that places orders with its own workforce. The decision-making required by each sector, at the end of each week, is how many crates of beer to order from their supplier upstream.

The activity spans a simulated year, at the beginning the system is stable, customers are ordering 4 crates of beer per week and each sector has 12 crates of beer in their respective inventories. Each sector aims to minimise costs by keeping inventory down at the same time as preventing backlog.

In conducting this simulation (as I have done with groups over 100 times in the last two years) we always find that when external customer orders are stable, the system becomes unstable, with sometimes wild oscillation, (as well as amplification: the oscillation pattern becoming more pronounced the further upstream you go).  A flat line could represent the orders from customers whereas this graph shows the oscillating pattern of orders placed within the system.

Getting back to the Metamodernist Manifesto, if we were to think of orders from customers as the external environment or  ‘nature’, we might conclude that oscillation is an artificial experience. It is not the ‘natural oder of things’ so much as the invented and exaggerated response to external stimuli. We do it to ourselves (that’s what really hurts, apologies Radiohead).

Then again, we could say that it is ‘natural’ in the sense that it is the repeated and predictable response: it seems to come naturally to us.

Maybe what I am saying is that although oscillation may indeed be ‘the natural order of things’, the natural order of things is not itself natural. Whilst the territory is flat, our maps oscillilate wildly.

What is Metamodernism? is a question asked at Notes on Metamodernism, edited by Nadine Fessler, Robin van den Akker, and Timotheus Vermeulen. Here is part of their response to their own question:

We understand metamodernism first and foremost as a structure of feeling, which can be defined, after Raymond Williams, as “a particular quality of social experience […] historically distinct from other particular qualities, which gives the sense of a generation or of a period.” Metamodernism therefore is both a heuristic label to come to terms with recent changes in aesthetics and culture and a notion to periodize these changes. So when we speak of metamodernism we do not refer to a particular movement, a specific manifesto or a set of theoretical or stylistic conventions. We do not attempt, in other words, as Charles Jencks would do, to group, categorize and pigeonhole the creative work of this or that architect or artist.  We rather attempt to chart, after Jameson, the ‘cultural dominant’ of a specific stage in the development of modernity.

Having said all that about not a particular movement or a manifesto, artist Luke Turner has written a Metamodernist Manifesto as follows:

I love the (im)possibility of it, and that it leaves me feeling unsure about whether to take it seriously. It is almost as if the manifesto could itself be seen as an example of the metamodern. It seems to oscilate between sincerity and irony, setting out on a course that is destined to failure but doing it anyway. I think it may offer a basis for further consideration, debate, and practice, and in future posts I will act as if it does, and see what happens.

Apparently Tomma Abts consider her paintings to be finished when they are congruent with themselves.

Here’s something I am working on. I think it is a heightened incongruence I am looking for.

If I have a favourite artist it is Sean Scully. I remember once visiting Tate Modern with a friend, and in the time it took him to see everything in there I had viewed only the three Scullys that were on show. I was literally mesmerised by them. For me, the type of naturally occurring trance state, or reverie, that Franz Anton Mesmer (re)discovered is just the kind of experience provoked by many of Scully’s paintings. Whilst in some ways all aesthetic experience comes into the category of naturally occurring trance, (or if you prefer ‘flow’ state), the work by Sean Scully seems particularly to put me there.

In Issue Ten of Turps Banana, Scully, talking to Peter Dickinson about the bad reception abstract art gets in the UK, says that looking at abstract art “requires contemplation and time”

Sean Scully, Soft Ending, 1969, Acrylic on canvas (226.1 x 226.1 cm). Courtesy of the artist

You could imagine that a gallery might be a good place to find time for contemplation. .. unless it is such a gigantic space that walking past the art becomes the norm.

Sean Scully, Moon, being walked by at Centre Pompidou, Paris in 2008, my photo

Surely he is right about abstraction, it does require contemplation and time, and isn’t it also the case that it rewards the time and contemplation given to it. That is certainly my experience with Scully’s paintings, even the early, minimalist-leaning work.

In Turps Banana, the interview is supplemented by some excellent reproductions, all of early work. I have come to like the more recent Wall of Light series (like the one in my photograph above, taken at Centre Pompidou) so much that I had forgotten how powerful some of the early works are. Soft Ending 1969, for example, seems to have an opticality that is understated or resisted in the later work. The development of Scully’s oeuvre could be read as an increasing emphasis on the physicality and objecthood of painting. Of course that physicality includes the optical much as it could also be seen as a container for the spiritual. Scully talks a lot about the spiritual in art, but I don’t remember him defining what he means by it. What he says in Turps Banana about contemplation and time possibly hints at a way of viewing that approaches spirituality in the sense of meditation.

The new issue of Turps Banana also includes interviews with, or articles about painters such as, Tomma Abts, Christopher P. Wood, Che Lovelace, Gavin Lockheart, René Daniëls and Rose Wylie.

Check out this post at Abstraction Blog with some good photos of three new Scully paintings at his current show at Kerlin Gallery, Dublin, and a link to itunes where you can download Turps Banana.

There is something awkward about the paintings of Rose Wylie, and it’s part of what is so appealing about them. In Issue Ten of Turps Banana, Jeff McMillan interviews the artist (actually, it’s more like a conversation than an interview). He says to her “…your work has a kind of awkwardness” and she answers “Well, I am awkward really”. The awkwardness of the work comes from the artist’s own awkwardness, and I think I respond favourably to it as a viewer because I am also awkward really. Is it just me, or do we often find ourselves in situations where we don’t quite know how to act or what to say? In those moments we find that we lack grace, or ease of movement. Of course, we learn to overcome it, we become comfortable and the ease of movement returns, we no longer feel awkward in that situation. One of the things I like about Rose Wylie’s paintings is that they seem to keep you in that slightly uncomfortable experience.

Rose Wylie, Truss, 2000, Oil on canvas (183 x 178 cm). Courtesy of the artist and Union Gallery, London

I am not quite sure what to make of the painting. It isn’t beautiful, or sublime is it? It is slightly ugly, and that’s equally in the subject matter and in the paint handling. I think that’s a way of saying that it is well observed. The form is congruently related to the content. In the Turps Banana interview she says “I hate elegance… I like ducks”.

(The new issue of Turps Banana also carries, among other things, articles about Sean Scully, René Daniëls, Christopher P. Wood, Che Lovelace, Gavin Lockheart and Tomma Abts.)

Co-creator of NLP, John Grinder* distinguishes between f1 and f2 filters in our sensory perception. We perceive the world out there through our five senses. He calls the point of perception First Access (FA). And right there at FA there is a filtering process going on. We generalise, distort and delete information entirely unconsciously before we are even aware of what we are perceiving. These pre-linguistic filters he refers to as f1 filters.

I have become interested in what abstract art can show us about f1 filters, i.e. the way we construct colour (even when it is not physically there), or the way that a colour looks different depending on the context.

And then there is a second set of perceptual filters. Have you noticed that we sometimes use the word ‘perception’ to mean ‘interpretation’ or ‘opinion’? Here we are dealing with the linguistically mediated filters that Grinder calls f2 filters. I think it would be correct to assign colour symbolism to the f2 set of filters.

When I read this next image as a cross, as in Christian iconography, those linguistically mediated or f2 filters are at work…

…and also in the colour symbolism: even if it weren’t a cross the silver and gold colours communicate something different than say if they were black, brown or red.

*John Grinder and Carmen Bostic St Clair write about the epistemology of NLP in their excellent book Whispering in the Wind .

I saw this. I liked it, and I thought it was worth repeating.

“Repetition doesn’t really exist.  As far as your mind is concerned, nothing happens the same twice, even if in every technical sense, the thing is identical. Your perception is constantly shifting. It doesn’t stay in one place.” ~ Brian Eno I find this statement absolutely revelatory!  In the act of listening to a drone or a repeating pattern or chant, or any kind of sound, we can listen not only to the sound, but ourselves and the mental space … Read More

via earscapes

I enjoyed this post about the continuing relevance of painting that I read recently, though it was written quite some time ago.

I found a terrific article about painting and its complex relationship with the contemporary art scene. It is so provocative, and it reflects many of my own beliefs about the “state of the art” (so to speak) of painting that I posted most of it on my Slow Painting blog. I don’t want to come across as a monomaniacal, logger headed defender of the ancient practice of painting, especially now when there are so many options for visual expression. Whi … Read More

via Slow Muse

I may have said before that I think ‘painting’s many deaths’ would make a good study. I like the idea in this article that painting is indeed dead and that it always has been. That’s why it continues to be relevant: the job of the painter is to make it live!

I have written before about the role of the curator in facilitating the aesthetic encounter (I borrowed the term from Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Rick E. Robinson, The Art of Seeing) and sometimes gone on a bit about how some people seem to be able to see optical effects (for want of a better term) more easily than others.

I noticed something similar on holiday recently, in relation to a ‘natural’ occurrence. When this wave breaks you see a miniature rainbow in the spray. Some people could see it easily as it occurred, some could see it when it was pointed out to them, others just couldn’t see it even after it was pointed out and with repeated viewing. But then, they could see it when re-presented on this short video.

I wonder if it would it be correct to say that the curatorial skill required to facilitate the experience is that of pointing/describing,with some interpreting and little, if any, of judging.