Fun Stuff > MAKE
As abstract as you can stomach
Johnny C:
It's the context, man.
Lines:
--- Quote from: KharBevNor on 21 Dec 2006, 19:09 ---Well, for a start, here, fine art here is, as far as I'm aware (and I was planning to do it at BA stage for a month) to be a lot more narrow than what: you'd do a theatre studies or design for theatre degree or music performance or whatnot for most of those things you mentioned, but there is a certain amount of cross-over into other areas of traditional art and media (the most obvious being that fine-art encompasses things like sculpture, video art, performance art and, of course, installations and interventions). I'm reasonably certain you can't do a specific degree in, for example, performance art, though places like Glasgow offer a lot of mickey mouse degrees like 'environmental art' that probably cover that. Most British art education seems to take a quite firm basis from a Bauhaus-derived foundation course (try getting in to anywhere half decent without a foundation degree. Just about possible if you're picasso mark 2. Even then Brighton would probably have objections.) So it's quite well divided into the five 'key areas' of 3D, graphics and design, fine art, lens based media and textiles and fashion. Of course, as I said, you get a lot of crossover, but the degrees themselves tend to stay together in those sort of groups, as it were, apart from obvious exceptions like fashion illustration.
--- End quote ---
i guess here you're either fine arts, design, or communication arts. fine arts is your 2D, 3D, and photography/electronic media. design is geared for the corporate world, like graphic, industrial, and fashion. communication is kind of a mix, where illustration, etc. falls. at the school i go to, i get designers in my fine arts studios quite a bit, but i don't know any fine arts people in design studios unless they plan on transferring to design. i don't know how it works elsewhere, but my school is so freaking competitive and full because of it, that we really can't do both. we don't even have communication arts at my college, which sucks, because i like illustration. our foundation courses are also different, though somewhat similar in context, like drawing, color, etc.
and i still say intent matters. to me.
dancarter:
Wow. Okay, I'm jumping in a little late here, so bear with me.
I took three years of fine art, two more of design and colour theory. Not that any of that gives any more or less weight to my opinions, of course.
I think the thing about suprematism, abstraction, non-representation or most of the 20th century movements, is that by and large, they are very much about the context of the culture they were in, and of the time they were produced. Time becomes a context in and of itself. Think about something like Futurism. That was very much a product of Mussolini-era communist Italy. The fascination with speed and the automobile, with war and conquest and might. The era ends(well, the era blew itself to pieces)and while the art endures to this day, the context is perhaps slightly or grossely altered by the course of history. The same thing can be said for the Dadaists. Revolutionary for their time, and people still use their techniques, but their relevance has kind of been lost 60 years removed from Hitler(and that could be because new people might not get the context and those who do may prefer to forget about that era altogether).
Applying that concept to something like the abstraction or non-representation, the context of time matters because these things, in their time, had not been done before. Perhaps that appreciation of the inventiveness of it erodes in the later generations because we're used to it by now or have known it to always be there. While I do kind of wonder about whether the importance of it relies mainly upon the theory behind the styles or upon the art the era produced (as per Malevich's "White on White": did he really mean what he was getting at or did someone just hide all of his other paints that day?), there's not really much that can deny the fact that this was something new and it was and is best to not think of it in terms of emotions. That isn't the purpose of it. I do disagree though, that it's not a part of a specific culture. It is. Not a world culture, but an historical culture. I've seen people cry in front of Rothko paintings and feel nothing for a terrifcially bleak and sad Schiele landscape. To each thier own. I appreciate the simplicity to an extent, and certainly in Rothko's case, the richness of colours their blending, but ultimately it does little to move me. Representational or not, I really could care less why someone did something the way they did it. If I want to know the history behind any specific era or painting, I'll seek that out and that affords insight but not the artist's rationale behind it. I don't much care about that as I don't really want or feel it's good to have it explained to me. That reduces the work to a singular viewpoint, eliminating the viewer's own feelings and experiences from the process. It's not about sharing ideas then. It's about showing off.
And speaking of Warhol, the best thing I've ever heard about him is that he's the single most overrated and underrated artist. The Brillo box is just a take on Magritte's "Fountain", and yes, he did revolutionize art as a commodity, but the Romans were doing that with copies of Greek statues that had different head applied to them to suit the buyer centuries eariler.
ekmesnz:
The funny thing about Warhol's Brillo Box and other works like it that he and his contemporaries produced is that the artists really did craft those; they aren't ready-mades but a reinterpretation of the concept of the ready made.
As for the other points that have been made, there's no point in talking unless you read the posts before you, ESPECIALLISMUSLISTLY ABOUT CONTEXT :wink:.
salada:
quick question, if any of the earlier posters are still following this thread: where would you place sculpture in all this?
i ask because i just got back from a trip to bilbao (one last hurrah before i pack up my life in SW france and head back to aus) and they have a room of richard serra sculptures -- not at all representational or anything, made from huge sheets of 12' tall 2" thick steel.
i've always liked his stuff from photos and the like, but it basically comes back to what i'd mentioned before in this thread: one of the things you just have to see in person (and in this case, walk in/through/around) to even begin to wrap you head around it.
thoughts? representation/abstraction in artwork besides painting?
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