The Sublime

Edmund Burke's statue in Bristol's city centre.

During one of our group presentations on Wednesday 17th March, Aaron Francis made some interesting comments about the sublime in relation to , which he and the other full time MA students had discussed in the visual cultures unit. It encouraged me to blog about it and consider its connections with my own imagery. Thank you Aaron.

"I wish to be a Member of Parliament to have my share of doing good and resisting evil"

Chris Baldick described the sublime as “a quality of awesome grandeur in art or nature, which some 18^th-century writers distinguished from the merely beautiful”. Baldick suggests that an anonymous Greek critical treatise of the 1^st century AD, Peri hypsous “provided the basis for the interest in the sublimity, after Boileau’s French translation in 1672” (1991 p. 215).

This new aesthetic concept of the 1700s “anticipated the Romantic sensibility that followed… The key work on the concept in English was Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757) which stressed the power of the Sublime to evoke terror and ‘the grander passions’ ” (Thomas, 1981, p. 174). (Burke misattributes Peri hypsous to a 3^rd century rhetorician Longinus).

Giovanni Battista Piranesi Carceri Plate VII - The Drawbridge 1750-61

Burke describes the sublime as having these characteristics: obscurity, vastness and power, while the beautiful is light, smooth and delicate. Burke's theories provided the vocabulary to describe the work of Piranesi and later the work of Casper David Friedrich and Turner.

Casper David Friedrich The Wanderer above a Sea of Mist 1818

J.W.M. Turner, Shade and Darkness - The Evening Before the Deluge, 1843

J.M.W. Turner, The Morning after the Deluge — Moses Writing the Book of Genesis, 1843

The term Abstract Sublime was used by the American critic Robert Rosenblum in 1961 in reference to paintings by certain members of the New York School. Having been influenced by Edmund Burke, Barnett Newman employed the word ‘sublime’ in connection with his own work from 1948. Rosembum made connections between the similarities between paintings of the sublime in nature by such Romantic Movement artists as James Ward, Casper David Friedrich and J. M. W. Turner and paintings by Jackson Pollock, Clyfford Still, Mark Rothko and Newman (Walker, J.A. 1991)

Barnett Newman - Vir Heroicus Sublimis 1950-51

Marth Rothko: The Rothko Chapel, Houston 1965-66

Bibliography:

Baldick, C (1991) The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press

Thomas, D (1981) Dictionary of Fine Arts London and New York: Hamlyn

Walker, J. A. (1991) Glossary of Art, Architecture & Design Since 1945 Boston, Massachusetts: G.K. Hall& Co.

Abstract Cinema 1: Walter Ruttman

Walter Ruttman is perhaps best known for his film Berlin: Symphony of a Great City from 1927, a film that demonstrated the influence of Soviet film montage as exemplified by Vertov. Before he produced this classic film Ruttman was making short abstract films in the early 1920s. Ruttmen like Eggeling and Richter started out as a painter. For these painters-come-film makers “it seems that at first, they hoped that animation could be, above all, paintings salvation rather than films” (Leslie, 2002 p.46).

Lightplay Opus I has been referred to as “not only the first abstract film to be shown in public, but also a film hand-tinted in striking and subtle colours, with a live synchronised musical score composed especially for it (Russett and Starr, 1976 p. 40).

In 1976 Opus I is said to be missing however above is a film which is claimed to be Opus I. It is claimed that “Ruttman did not wish it (Opus I) to be seen, after he had made improvements to his later films” (Russett and Starr, 1976 p. 40).

As well as producing his Opus films Ruttman produced abstract films for commercial purposes in Munich and Berlin: “in 1923 he created the “Dream of Hawks Sequence” for Fritz Lang’s Siegfried” (Russett and Starr, 1976 p. 41). Later he joined Lotte Reininger in her feature length silhouette animation The Adventures of Prince Achmed Ruttman produced fantasy effects using the wax slixcing machine he had commissioned from Oskar Fischinger. Prince Achmed was completed in 1926 after which Ruttmen gave up animation (Russett and Starr, 1976 p. 40).

Bibliography:

Leslie, E., (2002) Hollywood Flatlands: Animation, Critical Theory and the Avant-garde, London and New York: Verso.
Russett, R.and Starr, C. (1976) Experimental Animation: An Illustrated Anthology, New York: Van Nostrand.

Aaron Siskind

In my own work I try to seek out odd juxtapositions of objects and strange meetings of things and the images of things. I try to seek out artists and writers that attempt to explore similar issues. I really discovered Aaron Siskind after reading David Anfam’s Abstract Expressionism (1994).


Aaron Siskind (1903-1991) was a member of the New York Photo League in the 1930s. His early work was in the social documentary tradition producing projects such as Dead End: The Bowery, and The Harlem Document. In the 1940s he started to connect with members of the New York School, whose dominant aesthetic was abstraction, transforming his work and shaping his interests. His black and white images of this period were of found objects, graffiti, peeling posters and an urban landscape familiar and a source of inspiration to Kurt Schwitters and Robert Rauschenberg.

Martha's Vineyard (seaweed) 2 1943

Abstract expressionists like Gottlieb and Pollock explored calligraphy in an attempt to discover new visual languages. Siskind’s Martha’s Vineyard (Seaweed) looks gestural: a tracing in the sand, a biomorphic form, a letter (A for Aaron?) a figure or a sexual symbol.

Gloucester 16A, 1944

Biomorphism as an art form draws its inspiration from nature and biological forms. We see its visual representation in Art Nouveau and its more curvilinear forms (one thinks of the Paris metro or the dominant architecture of Barcelona, specifically the work of Gaudi ) and of course Surrealism (Arp, Masson, Miro, Tanguy and Dali). The biomorphism of surrealism fed into what became abstract expressionism. The above photograph recalls the totemic art of Masson, Miro, Newman and Rothko. The above image is one that returns our gaze. Do we not see a single blank eye, a hard profile; abstract yet physiochemical like forms or “ovoids” that Motherwell presents to us in his Pancho Villa Dead or Alive 1943, the Elegy for the Spanish Republic series or At Five in the Afternoon 1949.

New York I, 1947

Chicago (Auto-Graveyard) 3, 1948

The surfaces that Siskind presents are rough, fragmentary, divided in much the same way as a de Kooning, a Motherwell, a cubist space or even a Pollock. We see the gestures of the graffiti artists, stains, drips, rust, decay, lettering and urban sign-age.

Chicago 1947-48

Siskind focused more and more on the minute. The charred surfaces that caught his eye reveal “paint smeared- walls whose facades, dense with graphic traces apparently make darkness visible”(Anfam, 1994 p. 153).

Chicago 224, 1953

This last picture again celebrates urban decay, the fragmentary with addition of the glass pain that adds a new layer and perhaps depth to this picture. The torn elements of poster remains recall not only Schwitters and the neo-dada, but the nouveau realism (Hains and Rotello) and the Situationist detournement (Debord and Jorn) that emerged in sixties Europe. This is the language of pop and low culture. What about the writing? Well, it does recall de Kooning’s dust jacket design for Harold Rosenberg’s Tradition of the New (1959) (see Hillier, Beavis The Style of the Century, 2ND Edition, 1999 p. 151).

Simon Morley’s book Writing on the Wall: Word and Image in Modern Art (2003) although does not explore Siskind’s work. However across a number of chapter we see various post-WWII gestures (forgive the pun) that involve calligraphy or writing that move towards abstraction and action painting.

Bibliography:
Abrams, D (1994) Abstract Expressionism London: Thames and Hudson Hillier, B (1999) The Style of the Century, 2nd Edition, London: Herbert Press Morley, S (2003) Writing on the Wall: Word and Image in Modern Art, London: Thames and Hudson.

Diebenkorn and Cezanne

"Cezanne is famous for saying that any idiot can make a deep space, that it is already deep, and that the task of the artist is to carve out that space- an oxymoron that exactly describes Cezanne's general practice" (Gilbert-Rolfe, 1995 p. 91)

Current Viewing

Apart from CSI, NCIS, Law and Order, Numbers, Criminal Minds, The Mentalist and TheEleventh Hour, I have been watching a lot of examples of avant garde film.

I was recently given a set of DVDs, one of which was a Dadaist film selection which included a number of Hans Richter abstract and semi representational film: Rythmus 21(1921-24), Filmstudie (1926) and Ghosts Before Breakfast (1927). The later two seem very surreal in nature. His one time collaborator Viking Eggeling also features on the DVD. His work Symphonia Diagonale (1921-24) is a purely abstract composition.

I also have a DVD of the work of Len Lye from 1935 to 1960/80. This is a really nice addition to my collection of animated films.

I need to prepare myself to watch Vertov's Man with a Movie Camera (1929). This is the film which served as a guide for Lev Manovich in his book The Language of New Media (2001).

A Beautiful Blog: The Art of Memory

This web blog contains an amazing group of imagery from Motherwell, Pollock to Rauschenberg and many others that I am unfamiliar with:

The Art of Memory

Richard Diebenkorn

Heidigger once described the brush stroke as an abyss suspended above the form. Derrida used this description to describe the line (Gilbert-Rolfe, 1995, p. 87).

Untitled, (The Ocean Park) , 1972
gouache on paper

Untitled (Ocean Park), by Richard Diebenkorn, ink, acrylic and graphite on paper, 29 by 21 1/4 inches, 1974


I have mentioned Diebenkorn once in a post in terms of the colour I applied to a painting that I subsequently scanned. The mixing of lamp black and Prussian blue is a mix of of colours used by Cezanne and Diebenkorn. Gilbert-Rolfe compared Diebenkorn to Cezanne and described the bluish black used by the two artists as the "deepest and most unfathomable colour available to the imagination, the colour of the night sky, colour of the bottomless pit" (1995 p. 87). Gibert-Rolfe in his description of Diebenkorn Ocean Park drawings describes the lines as having a depth that is atmospheric and "a fathomlessness of blackness presented in the line". He goes on to say that the line acts as a "boundary " that "subdivides and organises through subdivision the uncertainty of atmosphere- as in the case with both drawing and writing in general, blackness bringing meaning to whiteness, night organizing day" (p. 90)

Gilbert-Rolfe, J. (1995) Beyond Piety: Critical Essays on the Visual Arts 1986-1993, New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Current Developments: 6

More work with slight modulations in brightness and contrast.




Woodgrain and reflections:

Philip Guston

Philip Guston is of interest here because he “took an individual stand somewhere between Romantico-Surrealist and veiled Social-Realist interests” (O’Hara, F., 1975, p.134). Some of Guston’s early work were “haunting reminders of Chirico” (O’Hara, F., 1975, p.134). You can see in the paintings like Mother and Child from 1930 and the Conspirators from 1932.

Mother and Child, 1930.



Conspirators 1932.

The range of influences on Guston’s work is breath taking: from Renaissance Art through to Neo-classicism and Picasso. Guston seemed to move towards expressionism especially from the nineteen forties. We see the influence of Beckman. Works like If this be not I we see the compression of influences: Peiro della Franscesca and Uccello, late Cubism. Porch No 2 is more heavily stylised. The next more was going to be towards abstraction. With the Tormentors we still could see the remains of “Guston’s old props” (Anfam, 1999 p. 140).

If this be not I 1945

Porch No 2 1947

Tormentors 1947-48

Review 1948-50

Review seems filled with the “fragile, shadowed memories of an earlier vocabulary” (Anfam, 1999 p. 140). Critics largely agree that “Guston approached radical abstraction with the greatest of difficultly, only arriving there for certain, after 1951” (Wheeler, 1991 p.58).

In the fifties we see Guston “resolve his divergent tendencies (Wheeler, 1991, p. 58) and “purified his paintings” (O’Hara, 1975 p. 136). The dialogues with de Chirico and Giavanni di Paola disappear – and we see the more abstract tendencies of the paintings of Cezanne and Tiepolo, Turner and Impressionism. Paintings like B.T.W and Zone are made up of shimmering painted strokes, horizontal and vertical dashes making up pluses and minuses: a Mondrian reinterpreted by Monet. The paintings of the fifties do resemble parts of Monet’s Waterlillies: The Irises 1916-23, although Frank O’Hara does say “not late Monet” (1975 p.136). This argument is also supported by Robert Hughes who sees a closer relationship between Guston's abstractions and Mondrian's seascapes he painted on the coast of Schveningen in 1912-15 (1997, p. 584).

B.T.W. 1951

Zone 1953-54

The works could be described as abstract-impressionism as all the forms are dissolved into light and atmosphere. These “optical ‘scenes’” might “be found in nature under exceptional circumstances of light, but which has nothing to do with the observation, analysis and recreation of nature’s own light-phenomena” (O’Hara, 1975 p.137). The works from the fifties into the sixties begin to show a broader range of expressions, gestures and modulations of colour.

The Clock 1956-57

In the sixties the tones darken and the imagery seems unresolved. In the late sixties during a period of political and social upheaval “unexpectedly”, David Anfam recalls “he (Guston) halted the palimpsest compositions which had grown greyed and more monumental by the early 1960s and instead wretched to the surface scenes that they had seemed to cloak” (Anfam, 1999, p.207). Guston in his explanation of “his departure from high-minded formalism… said simply ‘I got sick and tired of that purity. Wanted to tell stories’” (Wheeler, 1991 p.290). The New York Times critic Hilton Kramer called Guston “a mandarin pretending to be a stumblebum” – he was wrong. Guston brought into his paintings his earlier anti-fascist concerns, fusing it with the language of comics and cartoons. This time the Klansmen are bumbling, bullying buffoons of the Nixon years.

Close-up III 1961

City Limits 1969

Daniel Wheeler explains the reasons for this strategy by reminding us that “just as the Baroque had unfolded in the shadow of the High Renaissance, late modernism as a whole, as well as post-minimalism in specific, found itself struggling with the after effects of a glorious past, a modernist past whose revolutions had produced not Utopia, but instead a society shot through with grotesque incongruities, political, economic and aesthetic” (Wheeler, 1991, p.290). Guston’s response was to reclaim the art of his idealistic past and produce once again a humanist art.

The Studio 1969

Why add Guston to this blog anyway? Well, mainly because of his struggle as an artist and the need to recognise the unresolved struggle between the idealistic, the political and a convincing aesthetic that is fully resolved and sustainable.

Sources:

Anfam, D., (1999) Abstract Expressionism New York and London: Thames and Hudson
Hughes, R., (1997) American Visions The Epic History of Art in America London: Harvill Press
O’Hara, F., (1975) Art Chronicles 1954-1966, New York: A Venture Book, George Braziller Inc.
Wheeler, D., (1991) Art Since Mid Century New York and London: Thames and Hudson.

Ad Reinhardt

"An avant-garde in art advances art-as-art or it isn't avant-garde" (Ad Reinhardt).

Ad Reinhardt’s aims as a maker of images seems rather removed from my attachment to what could be called the romantic or spiritual in visual culture.




Reinhardt’s art “moved from geometrical abstraction through a controlled and markedly impersonal form of Abstract Expressionism into a uniquely concentrated and super elegant geometrical abstraction. From 1960 until his death in 1967 he painted nothing but square canvases of one size in which two barely distinguishable coats of black present a cruciform trisection of the surface” (Lynton, N., 2003, p.244).

Abstract Painting No. 5 1962

In 1960 Reinhardt explains his aims as a painter: "Nowhere in world art has it been clearer than in Asia that anything irrational, momentary, spontaneous, unconscious, primitive, expressionist, accidental or informal, cannot be called serious art. Only blankness, complete awareness, disinterestedness; the ‘artist as artist’ only, of one and rational mind, ‘vacant and spiritual’, empty and marvellous; in symmetries and regularities only; the changeless ‘human content’, the timeless ‘supreme principle’, the ageless ‘universal formula for art, nothing else" (Lynton, N., 2003 p.244).




Ad Reinhardt in his essay “Art as Art” argued against art-as-expression or art-as-apocalypse. “Art”, he argued “needs no justification with ‘realism’ or ‘naturalism,’ ‘regionalism’ or ‘nationalism,’ individualism’ or ‘socialism,’ or any other ideas” (Reinhardt, A., 1992 p.806). “The one standard in art”, he suggests “is oneness and fineness, rightness and purity, abstractness and evanescence. The one thing to say about art is its breathlessness, lifelessness, deathlessness, contentlessness, formlessness, spacelessness and timelessness. This is always the end of art” (Reinhardt, A., 1992 p.806).


Sources:

Harrison, C. and Wood, P., (1992) Art in Theory 1900-1990: An Anthology of Changing Ideas, Oxford: Blackwells.

Lynton, N., (2003) The Story of Modern Art, London and New York: Phaidon

Reinhardt, Ad (1962) "Art as Art" in Harrison, C. and Wood, P., (1992) Art in Theory 1900-1990: An Anthology of Changing Ideas, Oxford: Blackwells, pp.806-809.

Daro Montag

Dr Daro Montag is a lecturer from University Collage, Falmouth that now incorporates the Dartington College of Arts. According to University College's website he makes art out of living matter. His wok is produced with the assistance of micro organisms. The results are these incredible abstractions.

''Radiance III' 1994
Ilfachrome print from 35mm slide

''Radiance IV' 1994
Ilfachrome print from 35mm slide

''Yew II' 1996
Ilfachrome print from 35mm slide

'Lower Treculliacks - Mud' 2000
Unique Ilfochrome print. Film, mud, microbes
95cm x 76cm

This Earth (detail), 2006, digital print on
paper, 24" x 24,"

This Earth 1 (detail), 2006, digital print on
paper, 24" x 24,"

This Earth 6 (detail), 2006, digital print on
paper, 24" x 24,"

"Bioglyphs: generating images in collaboration with nature's events". PhD, University of Hertfordshire, 2000: http://sitem.herts.ac.uk/artdes_research/resdegs/model/main0.htm

Current Developments 5

New work: new developments.

The orbs of light seem to reveal spaces, like those within dark rooms.

The painted surafaces fuse with photographic imagary from screens depicting trees and natural forms.

The leaf motif recalls the photogram and the early experiments of Fox-Talbot.There is also the beginnings within this picturing of a fusing of other media: televisual/stills from the 1940s film Great Expectations. It also includes photographs of real objects, spaces and places.

The imagery draws upon a wealth of technologies and there histories. There is solarization, photogram and negative imagery. Slight modulation in opacity of one layer of imagery can have a profound effect on the image as a whole.

Solarization, light bursts and a silvery colour add to a kind of nostalgia or longing that is provoked by the medium of photography.

Current Developments: 4

Max Ernst once described how he struggled to make pictures and with what he called his "Virgin complex" when faced with a blank canvas. The digital void of the blank page in a computer program offers similar challenges: the white page as much as the black one: voids, darkness, the empty spaces of a Malevich white on white painting or a black on black Rodchenko abstraction. To get round the digital blank "canvas" other materials can be scanned and manipulated. Is the black of a monitor screen the same as lamp black oil paint or acrylic?




This sequence of images were produced through the use of collage and painting. Here we see the use of mixed-media; card,glue and paper. The paint is a mix of lamp black and Prussian blue. The use of these colours are largely inspired by the work of Richard Diebenkorn. Other abstract painters are influencing this approach: notably the abstract expressionists and the early abstractions of Rauschenberg.




It does loosely resemble Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket (above) by Whistler.In response to the picture Ruskin said that Whistler was “flinging a pot of paint in the public’s face " .

The format of this piece developed like this and became a digital collage. The composition recalls the work of Ad Reinhardt, Motherwell, Guston and Newman.

Details disappear in an attempt to modulate brightness, contrast and colour.

The modulation of some of the areas of the picture result in the appearnce of orbs of light.



By creating a pooling of light the work suggests a connection between the various media being used. The light pools recall Vermeer’s pictures where he employed a camera obscure. It connects early lens and photographic technology in one space; one picture.