Dave Whatt: 2

Hi all,

The website listed in his bog entry from 7 June 2010 is incorrect. His MySpace pages seemed to have vanished.

I am currently following his daily blog at http://davewhatt.wordpress.com/. His music is available on his Soundcloud.


He is also on Twitter: http://twitter.com/#!/DaveWhatt

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.

Current Developments: 8

As promised, here are some photographs......

The above imagery are stills from the opening scenes of David Lean's Great Expectations (1946). The imagery is not cinematic, as in not official stills or photographed from a projection on a screen. They are televisual or at least a DVD recording, not video. The nature of the image is important.

Firstly, why did I choose this film and these scenes. The imagery presents us with an atmosphere of menace. The sight of a tree, seen through the eyes of the young Pip metamophoses into a threatening force. Such stylisation is very subtle.

There is something interesting and Romantic about the representation of nature as a malevolent force. I must add an entry about the grandeur of nature and deal with some of these difficult issues.

However the above image is photographed from nature. I did whole sequence of photographs of trees changing the aperture and shutter speed in search of the right effects for my project. I am particularly interested in the way nature or objects are mediated: 'direct images' of nature are overlap screen based imagery.

The above sequences of images are stills from Robert Wise’s The Haunting. The classic horror film uses subtlety to imply menace. The metamorphosis of a wallpaper pattern into a monstrous figure is produced by a slight manipulation of the camera and lighting.
These representations are surrealist and recall the grattage works of figures emerging from wallpaper or wood grain.

The influence of Ernst and my own memories of night terrors as a child led me examine Ernst’s “Irritated gaze” and the relationship between illness and the visual.

The above image interests me because of its ethereal nature. I am fascinated by gestures and blurred figures. This resembles Gerhard Richter’s photo-realist paintings.

Max Ernst: 4

"Max Ernst and the Surrealist Revolution", Part 3.

Max Ernst: 3

"Max Ernst and the Surrealist Revolution",  Part 2.

Max Ernst: 2

"Max Ernst and the Surrealist Revolution", Part 1.

Robert Motherwell

Motherwell was perhaps the youngest of the Abstract Expressionists; he was also their intellectual light, the most educated member of the group, the best travelled and most independent and the artist who was the most connected to the old European avant-garde. He immersed himself in modernist tradition. He especially loved French culture: I imaged that he smoked Gauloises (he did not, he liked the blue label and used it in his collages); he loved French literature: Mallarme, Rimbaud, Lautreamont, Proust and Baudelaire. His contact with surrealism was very important because it prompted Motherwell to paint and involve himself in developing his own for of automatic drawing and painting exercises, firstly with the artist Matta and then with Jackson Pollock.

Elegy to the Spanish Republic No. 34 1953-54.

Although an abstract painter, Motherwell’s work “constantly reaches out into life”: his Elegies
working as “general metaphors of the contrast between life and death and their interrelation" (Lynton, N., 2003 p. 243).

Iberia No. 18, 1958

In Plato's Cave No. 1 1972

Many of Motherwell's paintings rely on oppositions. He uses "the polarity between amphousness and geometry" to evoke "both opposition and ultimate harmony, as between nature and culture, emptiness thought, passivity and action- and on a larger scale, between chaos and cosmos" (Flam, J., 1991, p. 26-27). Paintings like Plato's Cave "seem to set emptiness against the mark of man (sic) in a way that recalls the oldest paintings known, those on the walls of prehistoric caves, especially the mysterious and moving pictographs on the walls of Lascaux and Altmira" (Flam, J., 1991, p. 27).

Summer Open with Mediterranean Blue 1974

Paintings like Summer Open are a manifestation of Motherwell's engagement with Matisse and matisse at his most sensual. The blue seems to reflect the light of Collioure, but a Collioure that this now a lost paradise, part of a Mediterranean culture that has vanished. Is it a nostalgic longing that we see in some of Motherwell's pieces?

Sources:

Flam, J., (1991) Motherwell, London and New York: Phaidon

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

Roy Amiss

I came across these images purely by accident in autumn 2009. I had never heard of Roy Amiss before this point and so it was a shock to see art similar to my own stripe pictures that I had produced from 1995-1997. Works like Spectre of Love have a charge to it that I hope comes close to matching that of Amiss’ optical paintings impact. Amiss is far better equipped to be an artist and a thinker than I and has developed his stripe painting beyond my own capabilities.

This is from the artist’s statement from the Saatchi Gallery website: “Great influences on me have been the ideas of surrealism, philosophy and science - the latter playing an increasing role in my late work. In terms of people, I would cite: the celebrated British philosophers David Hume and Alfred North Whitehead and the artists Dali, Raphael and Da Vinci. I have a great passion for experimentation and use a great variety of materials such as: oil paint, acrylic, pencil, ink, watercolour, chalk, wood, glass, net or vitrage, agar, and chemicals. These materials I have employed in paintings, drawings and objects. Similarly, the techniques I have developed are also diverse: old master glazing and drawing techniques; collage and photo-transfers; the exploitation of optical properties of various materials: automatism, accident and chance; frottage (Ernst) and the paranoiac critical method (Dali): the culturing of bacteria; the application of mathematics” (Amiss, Saatchi 2003-10).

Amiss also cites Ernst and his Frottage technique as an influence and adopts similar approaches to image making.

Atomic Whitehead 1998

Disjunctive David Bowie Clones 1999





Striped Madonna 2000




Quantum miles Davis 2001

Robert De Niro 2004

Leonardo di Capprio 2004

Drew Barrymore 2004

Muybridge to Infinity 2005

The man with no name 2005

Storm in a Teacup 2006




Roy Amiss at the Saatchi Gallery: http://www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk/yourgallery/artist_profile/Roy+Amiss/17298.html

Max Ernst

A quick note about Surrealism and connected terminology: a revolutionary movement and a mode of representation in painting sculpture, film and literature. Surrealists revolted against social and artistic conventions. To do this they exploited the material of dreams, of states of mind between sleeping and waking, and of natural or artificially induced hallucinations. The surrealists produced works that included dreamlike and nightmarish sequences and the juxtaposition of unrelated objects. However, surrealistic or the surreal are now words often used in a loose sense to refer (one may argue wrongly) to any bizarre imaginative effect. There are many references to surrealism in cyberspace discourse. I must reread Richard Coyne’s book Technoromanticism.

Automatism: a term devised I think by Andre Breton to describe a type of writing, but in the visual arts it is non-structured drawing or doodling (usually a form of freehand abstraction), with eyes and (as far as possible) the mind closed, was believed by surrealists to be a means of tapping into the creative powers of the unconscious.


Frottage: The technique of frottage was developed by Max Ernst in 1924 & 1925. Frottage was the technique of taking a rubbing from a textured surface by placing a piece of paper over it, and shading with a soft crayon or pencil so that an impression appears on the surface.



From the Natural History series In the Stable of Sphinx 1925




From the Natural History series Leaf Customs 1925



Grattage (also referred to raclage by the Phaedon Dictionary of Surrealism.): a technique where layers of paint are applied on a basic surface made uneven by objects laid under it, usually with a light background, and then, half random, half consciously scratched off again in raised places.



Vision induced by the Nocturnal Aspect of the Porte St. Denis. 1927

The Horde 1927

Petrified Forest 1927

Cage, Forrest and Black Sun 1927

Norman McLaren

The Scottish born, Canadian filmmaker and animator Norman McLaren (1914-1987) discovered cinema at the Glasgow School of Art. Initially he was influenced by Eisenstein. At some point he was introduced to the work of Osker Fishinger who produced abstract animations and the work of Claire Parker and Alexander Alexeieff and Émile Cohl. Parker, Alexeieff and Cohl used an animation technique called metamorphosis. I am not quite describing the technique correctly. I will have to consult Paul Well’s book Understanding Animation. This technique was developed further and employed by McLaren in a number of his experimental animations.

I particularly interested in its application within the mode of representation of surrealism. A great deal of McLaren’s work was informed by surrealist techniques.





Above are two stills from A phantasy on a nineteenth century painting (1946) which was inspired by the painting series Isle of the Dead (1880- 86) by Arnold Böcklin