patternsthatconnect

There is an impression that results from a particular juxtaposition of colours, lights and shades: what one might call the music of painting

Eugene Delacroix

… is quoted in the frontispiece of  Peter Vergo’s book The Music of Painting, first published in 2010 and just out in paperback.

according to Charles Darwent, Art Quarterly, it’s “a must-have for anyone interested in why modernism looks (and sounds) as it does”

good job I have it then! It was a birthday present, and I have just started reading it.

The front cover shows a reproduction of Theo van Doesburg’s Rhythm of a Russian Dance,1918. Music and dance have an obvious connection with each other and a less obvious one with painting. I have blogged about it before in relation to Mondrian, whose work also features in the book, in a chapter entitled Art, Jazz and Silence. I am also reminded of another book  Music and Modern Art, edited by James Leggio, and containing a chapter by Harry Cooper called Popular Models: Fox-Trot and Jazz Band in Mondrian’s Abstraction.

In a recent Rough Cuts video, James Kalm reviews the Stanley Whitney exhibition Left to Right, at Team Gallery (some great pics here ) saying of Whitney  “His approach to color and rhythm are akin to the spontaneous riffs of great jazz solos”.

In Blogland, Scott Van Holzen’s blog  art in music is dedicated to paintings based on musical themes and Ruth Gray, tells of how listening to some old records, she feels inspired to paint the colours she hears. I guess that making a connection between visual, auditory and kinaesthetic arts is almost bound to get somewhat synaesthetic.

The Alex Hubbard exhibition at Simon Lee Gallery, London, entitled Eat Your Friends, just six works, two of them being videos and the other four being paintings, is absolutely wonderful.

The “title track” is a video that I just cannot help but read as a moving painting with sound.

Montage-like, there are at least three camera views, two look down onto a table top or the floor and one looks forward, and as they overlap actions in one descreet space seem to be taking place also in another. Here it is quite possible to be in two places at once. The actions include spray painting the words “EAT YOUR FRIENDS”, constructing a tower with large cups of take-away coffee until it collapses spilling the contents, and moving a cuboid frame around, “building” some temporary structure the purpose of which seems to defy the logic of building.

The paintings more or less coloured monochromes, made with fibreglass, and found objects: plastic bottles, syringes, broken bits of things, rubbish, the resin sticking the objects to the canvas and forming a high gloss surface over a stained acrylic base. I try to decide whether the objects are carefully placed or randomly scattered and I suspect it’s a bit of both. I study them and then wonder why I am studying them so carefully, what am I expecting to find? Yet I do keep looking, hesitiating to admit that they are beautiful.

Finding beauty and being fascinated is my response to the paintings and also to the two videos. I watch them both a few times (they are only about 5 minutes in length). They have narrative of sorts, something happens, and yet also nothing happens. BOTTOM OF THE TOP, like the first video, also uses text, this time not spray painted but possibly arrived at through cutting out the lettering and dropping it in place along the right hand edge of the frame (I so nearly wrote “painting”) over the duration of the video. That’s how it looked to me. And following what is being written, making sense of it yet it not making sense, is matched by the rest of the action,even whilst acknowledging some of the references, the most obvious one being Magritte’s painting Ceci N’est Pas Une Pipe, a pipe in the bottom left corner billows smoke across the picture plane throughout. In the top right an electric fan whirs and carnations are ‘fed’ through the mesh until, hitting the blades, they are scattered across the picture plane in the opposite direction to the smoke. This is what happens when the carnations hit the fan! Meanwhile the artist’s head wrapped in bandages(?) which he paints blue appears at the bottom. We see only head and an arm placing a fish and an eel and flowers above his head, moving them around and eventually cutting the fish and placing the flowers inside it.

There’s beauty here, amid lots of humour. I am reminded of some of those old black & white surrealist films but can’t quite recall a specific one, and action painting, abstract expressionism, neo Dada, are all in here too, as are art-historical/art critical ideas of constructivism, all overness, and Leo Steinberg’s “flatbed picture plane”, in other words modernism, post modernism, and I want to say post-post modernism (Metamodernism even). For all its humour, this work never seems to me to be parody or irony, or of it is ironic I get the sense that it is post-modern irony itself that is being parodied.

The art works in this show seem to blur the distinction between sculpture, painting, performance, and video as well as the ‘genres’ of figuration, abstraction and surrealism, and delightfully question our ways of making sense of art, non-art and everything else.

Eat Your Friends is showing at Simon Lee Gallery, London until 4 April 2012.

The University of Warwick has an excellent public art collection of over 800 art works. They are often on show right where studying is being done, and you can phone and make an appointment to view specific pieces.

part of the original buildings, designed by the modernist architect Eugene Rosenberg who also selected the first works of the collection, nine in all, two of which were the Jack Bush paintings.

I had learned long ago that there were Jack Bush paintings here but only recently taken the time to go and see them. The only time I had seen any of his paintings in the flesh previously was in a one person show at the Serpentine Gallery in 1980.

Anyway no photographs in this post I am afraid, for copyright reasons, but here are links to photos of the two paintings I saw: Joseph’s Coat and Charcoal Band.

Even more outrageously colourful than I had expected, breathtaking to view, they are hung as a pair, and high up so that perspex cases are not necessary. Climbing the stairs, I got a really good look at them both, Josephs Coat from Bush’s Fringe series, on the left, slightly larger than Charcoal Band, one of his Sash paintings, on the right. They look like oil rather than acrylic colours.

We have the modernist architect Eugene Rosenberg to thank for the selection of these and other colour field paintings in this collection:

I am committed to the belief that the artist has an important contribution to make to architecture. The bond between contemporary art and architecture is not easy to define, but I believe they are complementary – that architecture is enriched by art and that art has something to gain from its architectural setting. If asked why we need art, I could give answers based on philosophy, aesthetics, prestige, but the one I put high on the list is that art should be part of the enjoyment of everyday life.

Thank you Artista for bringing my attention to the Lygia Pape exhibition Magnetized Space currently showing at the Serpentine Gallery, until 19 February 2012. Although you don’t seem to much like the show you say that the work Livro do Tempo (or the Book of Time) is the highlight for you. What a highlight! I must admit to being new to this work and now really keen to go and see it.

Lygia Pape Livro do Tempo (Book of Time) 1961-63 Installation view Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, 2011 © Projeto Lygia Pape and Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía

Here’s a short video of Adrian Searle discussing Pape’s work in general, and Livro do Tempo in particular.

When I wrote about George Shaw’s painting The New Houses, the other day, I suggested that it is a meta painting in two senses: 1) It is a painting within which there are three other paintings, and 2) It is, in my view, a painting about the process of painting.

George Shaw The New Houses 2011 BALTIC presents Turner Prize 2011 © BALTIC & the artist Photo: Colin Davison FILENAME: SHAW

I was using the prefix meta a lot like we do in NLP (Neuro-Linguistic-Programming) where it usually means “on”, “above” or “beyond” and includes “about”. For example a meta model is a model of a model and a meta comment is a comment on a comment: “now that’s an interesting comment”. We could continue to add meta comments: “now that comment about the other comment being interesting was also interesting” etc etc. This painting has a similar structure.

A painting of a painting of a painting or four squares of four squares of four squares

I have been posting about metamodernsm lately and I note that the metamodernists (Nadine Fessler, Robin van den Akker, and Timotheus Vermeulen) use the prefix meta to mean something slightly different than in my usage above. In explanation, they quote the online etymology dictionary on meta:

prefix meaning 1. “after, behind,” 2. “changed, altered,” 3. “higher, beyond,” from Gk. meta (prep.) “in the midst of, in common with, by means of, in pursuit or quest of,” from PIE *me- “in the middle” (cf. Goth.miþ, O.E. mið “with, together with, among;” see mid). Notion of “changing places with” probably led to senses “change of place, order, or nature,”

and they emphasise “the movement with and between what we are doing and what we might be doing and what we might have been doing” and downplay the “reflective stance, a repeated rumination about what we are doing, why we are doing it and how we are doing it”, which I think has been more common.

For them it signifies oscillation or a constant repositioning

Meta- does not refer to one particular system of thought or specific structure of feeling. It infers a plurality of them, and repositions itself with and between them. It is many, but also one. Encompassing, yet fragmented. Now, yet then. Here, but also there.

In relation to the modern and the postmodern, metamodernism is historically beyond whilst also oscillating between those two positions.

I have posted from time to time about modernism and post-modernism (by the way I love that reference in the Simpsons where PoMo is defined as “weird for the sake of weird”).

I came across an excellent write-up at timmarshall20 of the postmodernism exhibition currently showing at the V&A.

And thank you Abstraktion.org for your recent blog post, bringing my attention to a term that is new to me “metamodernism” ( I met a modernism once and it changed my life) and to the WordPress blog on this very subject at Notes on Metamodernism.

In his review of the V&A show, Tim Marshall highlights the ‘past-ness’ of postmodernism, so if metamodernism might be taking its place, what might it look like?

It is an attitude that oscillates between a modern enthusiasm and sincerity and a postmodern irony; between grand narratives and personal life stories; between science and mysticism; between critical distance and affect; and between concepts and craftwo/manship. It is an attitude that says, as Jerry Saltz, of all people, once put it: “I know that the art I’m creating may seem silly, even stupid, or that it might have been done before, but that doesn’t mean this isn’t serious.” It is an attitude also that says, following the legacy of that increasingly important artist Bas Jan Ader, “I know I will fail, but that is the point: to try in spite of”.

(From What is Metamodernism at Notes on Metamodernism, edited by Nadine Fessler, Robin van den Akker, and Timotheus Vermeulen)

At Abstraktion.org they ask if Metamodernism might point the way forward for abstraction, quoting at length from Luke Turner‘s Metamodernist Manifesto I don’t know the answer, but I like the question, and I sense that it is one I will be thinking about a lot.

Fired by the Constructivist art that emerged in Russia from c.1915, architects transformed this radical artistic language into three dimensions, creating structures whose innovative style embodied the energy and optimism of the new Soviet Socialist state.

This link shows the Mondrian painting I saw recently at The Hepworth,Wakefield: Composition C (No.III) with Red, Yellow and Blue  1935, Oil on canvas,560 x 552 mm. I have started to make some studies of it.

I was chatting with someone about abstract painting and contemporary art and, intending to say “post-modernism” it came out as “post-Mondrianism”

The first time I ever heard the word ‘post-modernism’ was in a lecture in 1979. I have no idea who was lecturing but the case they were making for post-modernism was a lot to do with Kandinsky’s notion of the spiritual and both his and Mondrian’s links to Theosophy, but I remember struggling to understand how that was post anything.

There’s a show at The V&A just now called Postmodernism: Style and Subversion 1970-1990 on the blurb they say “many modernists considered style to be a mere sideshow to their utopian visions; but for the postmodernists, style was everything”.  I guess what they say here about “many modernists” would be true for Mondrian, who was highly utopian. So perhaps ‘post-Mondrianism’ says ‘post-modernism’ after all.

Ross Wolfe’s blog charts the importance of Utopianism for modern art and architecture, it’s subsequent demise leading to late and post modernism.