wendyjanebantam

PERSPECTIVES OF ART HISTORIANS

2005-04-20T21:42:00.000-07:00

Art historians have contributed greatly to the world’s view of art. It may be said art historians shape the world’s view of art. It may also be said each historian has their particular area of interest and focus. Some study one artist for a lifetime and some historians make great attempts to define the meaning of art with the changing winds of cultural unrest; including the view of war as a trajectory to great movements in art. For instance, much study has taken place among art historians regarding Pablo Picasso’s mural, Guernica, particularly the meaning behind his use of imagery and painting style.
As with any study it depends on how encompassing the lense of the observer is. In science~ the evolution of a small flower may be studied for years. Questions such as why does the flower change color? Why does it grow here and not there? Why has it developed a particular shape? Why does it need shade and not direct sun?
For many years, the flower may be studied, and yet the magnification of the research of the flower may be such that outer elements of the surrounding environment may be completely disregarded. Take for instance the small flying insect responsible for pollinating the flower.
Perhaps the flower changes its color to suit the insect, perhaps the flower evolves in such a way so it appeals in a parasitic manner to the green thumb of gardeners, who out of love for the beauty of the flower, propagate the species. This is how the flower survives. Blinded by the beauty of the flower, and confused by the changing qualities of the flower, the research scientist may overlook the most simple of explanations, and even forego the flower’s interaction with its environment and the entire web of it’s existence.

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The study of a work of art brings us to a similar predicament. Art historians researching the work of art and the artist ask the questions, “ Why cubism? What does the bull represent? What is the relationship between Picasso’s dreams and his choice of imagery?”
Artists have always had their muses and use their muses as mirrors upon which they project the way they see the world. Artists use everything in their life experience to create a mythological environment by which they weave a web complex with meaning. Picasso was no different.
So how can it be said that an art historian can lay claim to finding the source of why the art was made? Also, could it be said it is unwise for any student to take a single source as the truth?
This brings us to the five articles regarding Pablo Picasso’s painting, Guernica.
In reading the varying articles presented by the art historians on the meaning of the painting, it came to my attention art historians are as eager to place their mark on the deeper meaning of an artwork as the artist is to make his mark. Take for example the scientist and the flower. The flower doesn’t speak, but the scientist thinks, “ Quickly! I must resolve the history and meaning of this flower, so I can put my name on it’s stem, and the flower will always and forever be remembered in my name!”
With the exception of quoting Picasso on rare occasion as to his own analysis of his creation, so often it seemed in these readings the historians were oblivious to the artist’s intent. And to be fair, most artists would say beyond creating the thing, there is little to say about the piece once it is finished. Leaving this to the art historian, the critic, and the audience.
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From an outsider’s view, art history is necessary. For the artist rarely speaks about the “why” of his work, and therefore no one would know how to think about the work. If it were not for the historical reverence an art historian puts upon the meaning. Political unrest, war, love, unrequited love, abuse, abandonment, competition, spiritual unease. For these reasons and more, the five distinct and differing views of Picasso’s Guernica are agreeable on one level and laughable on another.
To summarize each article: Francis Frascina writes Guernica: An Emblem for Spaniards and claims Guernica was an emblem of anti-fascism to the Spaniards. He uses quotes from Picasso who claims his only propaganda was in the making of Guernica. He also discusses the meaning of “private imagery” and “public meaning”.
Herschel Chipp states in The First Step Toward Guernica there are twelve preliminary sketches of Guernica which are of non political motivation. Claiming instead Picasso’s lover, Marie-Therese Walter was his inspiration for the painting.
In Guernica: The Apocolypse of Representation, Kathleen Brunner writes she found an entire literary reference to Guernica in a play penned in 1580, The Siege of Numancia, written by Miguel de Cervantes.
In the article, How Guernica Fails: Applied Cubism and How Guernica Fails: Touch and Scale, Darley Banward reminds us he is also an artist and critiques Picasso by making the argument Picasso chose the wrong style in which to paint this piece. Banward says the cubist painting style was wrong for Guernica. He criticizes the mass and size of the painting saying it gave Picasso trouble with his paint handling. He also writes Guernica looks like a cartoon, and exhibits better as pieces and parts.

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Finally I come to the longest and most exaggerated piece by Alice Doumanian Tankard, Picasso on the Art Historian’s Couch with the subtle subtitle: Picasso’s Guernica after Ruben’s Horrors of War: A Comparative Study in Three Parts-Iconographic and Compositional, Stylistic, and Psychoanalytic.
First of all, the author should not make reference to a couch, as it refers to a psychological analysis of Picasso, and clearly the art historian is not a psychoanalyst~ although she gives herself credit as one as she gives the bulk of the article over to making reference to Picasso and his father in Freudian terms.
Of all the articles presented I found Francis Frascina’s to be the truest to history and fact. He admittedly writes, “ The mass of literature devoted to the ‘explanation’ and ‘meaning’ of the work has been characterized by diversity.”
Clearly what we see here is the underlying truth that no historian can remain completely objective. Each historian writing in this collected series has a separate view~whether it is socio-political, psychological, or about the process. And as with all history, there is always a personal investment on the part of the historian. Unless the art historian were to simply state the facts. Picasso painted the mural Guernica in the year 1937 to hang in the Paris World Fair. Beyond this, all is subject to a personalized account by the historian of what really happened, and this leaves the real matter up to a jury of readers who must be aware that varying opinions are simply that. History is rewritten. Meaning is contorted, and variables are subject to discrimination. It is for all these reasons Frascina’s article remains the most convincing to me as his writing style and research from news accounts objectively define the times and the situation.

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If I were an art historian, I might delve as deeply as I could into the artist’s own account, and in the end I would try to present with simplicity the facts and details of when and where and with what the work was created. Analyzing the social political temperature of the culture at the time, or giving a psychological profile of the artist opens up an entire world for the reader, as these articles show. However, in the case of art~ could any of this be proven as a real driving force behind the creation?
The real question may be, why do artists feel compelled to make art? Of course, they don’t live in a vacuum void of contact with the world. But for a student to focus on any one of these five discourses would alter their perspective of the work as a whole. As time passes, the work itself constantly changes in it’s meaning.
Art historians have the power to choose how they will present the meaning of a work, their research can reveal any perception they may have. The detective work they do can reveals some of the artist’s motivations, but can it ever reveal the whole intent?
This is why it is important for any person seeking information to look at multiple sources. Whereas each of these articles is singular in it’s approach~they have the benefit, as a whole, of exhibiting multiple perspectives to a single work of art.
Perception is a powerful tool. Even more powerful is one’s ability to override the habit of perceiving the world one way or another. A careful study of anything in the past will reveal not one or two points of view, but multiple views. Anything a historian chooses to see, or focus on, may become all they see. Mistakenly overlooking more diverse factors.
This is the main reason art history is essential, and yet dangerous. Who will cross check the reference of the art historian and challenge them? What artist will defend
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themselves against faulty analysis once they are dead and their journals and sketchbooks gone? It is necessary to have recorded history, but the question is whether the history is unbiased.

2005-01-23T19:11:00.000-08:00

(From left to right) John Andrews with Wendy and Sam on opening night at Kiechel Fine Art.

TROUBADOURS OF ART

2004-11-14T13:31:00.000-08:00

by WENDY JANE BANTAM

When I first saw Pixar Animation’s Luxo Jr. I was sixteen. It was 1986. At the time, my biggest dream was to be a painter, but when I saw the five minute movie Pixar had entered in the Festival of Animation I began to think of paint and storytelling differently. Until then I had thought of my work as a one frame image. Much in the way a political cartoonist might draw a single frame for the editorial column of the newspaper. However, from this point on I began thinking in multiple frames. I started looking at artists who were working in different medium, and telling narrative stories. I studied ceramics, photography, and fiction writing throughout high school and my first years of college. At this time, creative departments were segregated from each other. Administrative departments were reluctant to meld disciplines. Fine art was not design and design was not fine art. Screenwriting was in the English department and video and performance art were considered fringe courses in the school of art.
Computer technology was completely void in the Art Department. "Relevant," an administrator said, "for architects and computer science majors only."I was told to pick one discipline and stick to it, or I would never master anything. And so I picked painting. Through this discipline I would at least be able to learn the manipulation of color and movement through brushwork, texture, and create the illusion of light.
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In the meantime I watched with my face pressed against the glass as artists outside of the university moved into multi media. Sculptors moved into performance and video, musicians moved into film, and painters went towards animation and installation art. Artists like Bill Viola and Laurie Anderson were breaking barriers as they taught themselves the technology they needed to express the narratives they used.
Multi media allowed for freedoms previously limited to artists for lack of equipment. Foundries, kilns, printmaking presses and work space often limited to artists, made construction and transport cumbersome. Multi media began to allow for more diversity, accessible equipment, and a wider audience.In 1991, I crashed a party my performance art professor, Roger Shimomura, was throwing for Laurie Anderson. Laurie Anderson was visiting the University of Kansas to present her video work. As an important side note, she was also visiting Lawrence to meet with her biggest influence, William Burroughs.
William Burroughs had settled in Lawrence, Kansas long before and had been given reverence for his fragmentary narrative. In 1959 he was considered a pioneer. The book by Randall Packer and Ken Jordan, Multimedia from Wagner to Virtual Reality states that for Burroughs,
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"…narrative operated as a vast, multi-threaded network that reflected the associative tendencies of the mind, collapsing the boundaries of time and space, drawing attention to previously undetected connections, drawing attention to the links between disparate ideas and elements."Burroughs stated himself,"Certainly if writing is to have a future it must at least catch up with the past and learn to use techniques that have been used for sometime past in painting, music and film."
In his last years, William Burroughs was stretching the boundaries further in his collaborations with students at the University of Kansas, and his work with musicians and performance artists like Laurie Anderson. None of the students were meant to be at the party that evening, and my interaction with Laurie Anderson was awkward at best. In Roger’s crowded home, she stepped on my foot. At this juncture I was able to tell her how much her work affected and influenced my own vision of how stories could be told.
A handful of us had been studying performance art with Roger Shimomura and Tony Allard. We were doing live performances in bars and alleyways around town and we weren’t really sure why. We were experimenting awkwardly with the equipment available to us and finding our voice through narrative. We couldn’t wait to see her live performance at the K. U. Theatre. At this time, she was performing with so much technical equipment we could barely see her on the stage.
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In 1979, the National Endowment of Arts awarded Laurie Anderson a grant with which she wrote and recorded "O Superman". The lyrics were ominous and suggested a foreboding of war. Warner Bros. Records released the song in England where it shot to No. 2 on the charts. They then released the song on an album of songs called "Big Science". At the time, it was an exciting statement of American culture. The big record label and the reclusive culture of the high art world embraced to propel the pioneering efforts of a performance artist.
In 2002, eleven years after the performances she gave at the University of Kansas, I saw her perform at the Scottsdale Center for Contemporary Art in Arizona. One year after the World Trade Center tragedy she called her performance, "Happiness". Composed using a flexible headband microphone, she used her head as a percussive instrument and had only an I-Pod on the stage with her. Compared to the earlier performances it was exciting to hear the same powerful sounds and images come from such a minimal arrangement. Her interest in technology had freed her form the cumbersome piles of sound and light equipment. Last year she was named the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s Artist in Residence. Through NASA, she will be developing an installation on the cosmos, mapping out the moon and stars.
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In her most recent work, "The End of The Moon", she explores the themes of consumerism, spirituality and war. Themes which have been threaded throughout her work since she was doing performance art on street corners. In an interview which appears on her website she states,"The End of the Moon I guess is a phrase that has some of the melancholy I feel at the moment. Not just melancholy really. More like loss. Like I lost something and I can’t put my finger on what it is. Actually I think what I lost was a country. The last three years have been pretty tough. Pretty alienating for a lot of people."
She exhibits this alienation through her work using binaural sounds, creating the sensation you are on a journey somewhere, but without a destination. Even more she creates the sensation we are floating on our journey, lost. Presently she is working with Japanese designers on an infrared system which allows her to access sounds using small wireless cards. She is now able to travel to performances with two small briefcases.
Bill Viola, an artist renowned for his projections of light and sound was once a musician and an audio/video engineer. Ever since the first portable video camera was available, he has been using video to film ordinary images to explore states of consciousness.
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He avoids special effects and graphics and builds video installations in museums and galleries, transforming the environment from rooms of complete darkness to a space in which the audience is completely immersed by projections and sounds.
His projection installation work can perfectly be described by an entry he wrote in his diary in 1976 by the Sufi poet, Jallaludin Rumi, who lived in the 12th Century."With every moment a world is born and dies, and know that for you, with every moment come death and renewal."Viola studied Buddhism extensively and this has greatly affected his work. In Buddhism there are three universal truths; nothing is lost in the universe, everything changes, and the law of cause and effect.In the Buddha’s teachings there are also four noble truths. In the search to find the end of suffering he saw that life was suffering. This is the first of the noble truths. Then there is the cause of suffering, the end of suffering, and the path to the end of suffering.In the book, "Multimedia from Wagner to Virtual Reality" Bill Viola’s distinction in bringing these teachings forth is described in his concept of Dataspace, a piece he composed in 1983.
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"Viola arrives at the notion of dataspace by considering the spaces that have been constructed over the ages to record cultural history in architectural form…from Greek temples to Gothic cathedrals. He compares "memory places" to the personal computer, with its capacity for storage, instant access and information retrieval. The computer has introduced the "next evolutionary step" in which ancient models of memory and artistic expressions are reborn through the fluid processes of information technologies."
The same themes are visible in some of his most recent work. He has said," If I hadn’t been studying texts and poems of the mystics and the spiritual masters at the time I started with video, I don’t think I could have made as much progress. These individuals gave me the language to understand what I was really seeing. One of the common threads in all these traditions… is the idea everything in front of us right now is merely a world of appearances…the task is to understand and master sensory experience because you need the language of the senses to help decipher this surface and penetrate to the deeper connections underneath."
In his 2001 piece, "Five Angels for the Millennium", Viola penetrates the deeper connections just below the surface especially well. By using five channels of video projection and five channels of stereo sound in the velvet darkness of an empty room, the sound is crisp and clear and reveals the projection of a body falling into water.
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Each air bubble exploding underwater is heard, and likewise, each air bubble seen in the eerie blue light surrounding the body.In a room where the projection is 7 foot by 10 ½ inches high and 10 foot by 6 inches wide, the audience is "with" the body in the water and the sensation is at once both of helplessness and peacefulness and the audience is blanketed in a transcended empathy. It seems as the body is first plunged down into the water surrounded by a mass of bubbles, and then rises slowly, surrounded by the clearing water, the audience is viewing a simple metaphor of both the divine and the mundane.
By showing the human condition in a transcended light, Bill Viola has instilled in his work the belief there is a transformative power in art, a path from suffering.Surely the animation of Pixar Studios in the early 80’s may seem a far stretch from the works of Laurie Anderson and Bill Viola. However, the leaps artists made with the use of technology and multi media during this time were spectacular. They showed multi media is interdisciplinary. Surely the observations made at this time show an interconnectedness with science, technology, spirituality and art. We have also learned narrative communication means more than words and pictures. It has become a sensory experience. This is what multi media artists are striving for. Painters became musicians and filmmakers. Audio technicians became installation artists and new frontiers were set in using the computer for animation. Strong forces created and discovered then, seem to be coming to a place of perfection and continued growth.
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Artists like Laurie Anderson continue to ride the wave of what is cutting edge. And, while Bill Viola remains one of the leading visual and sound narrators of the transcended experience, they both continue to open doors with their pioneering efforts for those of us who are finding our own voice with the mediums available to us.

Living in an Andy Warholian World

2004-09-29T09:47:00.000-07:00

By Wendy Jane Bantam

I am a deeply superficial person.
~Andy Warhol

I am always trying to create work that doesn’t make viewers feel they’re being spoken down to, so that they feel open to participate.
~Jeff Koons

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Andy Warhol once said, “Business art is the step that comes after art. I started as a commercial artist, and I want to finish as a business artist….making money is art and working is art and good business is the best art.” He also once said, “Being born is like being kidnapped. And then sold into slavery.” The art critic Clement Greenberg might have added to this statement by saying if one is an artist this is also like being sold into slavery.
In Clement Greenberg's opening statement from his article, The Avant-Garde and Kitsch, he states, "One and the same civilization produces simultaneously two such different things as a poem by T.S. Eliot and a Tin Pan Alley song, or a painting by Braque and a Saturday Evening Post cover. All four are on the order of culture, and ostensibly, parts of the same culture and products of the same society. Here, however, their connection seems to end. A poem by Eliot and a poem by Eddie Guest- what perspective of culture is large enough to enable us to situate them in an enlightening relation to each other?"
Inspired by Aristotle, Greenberg goes on to claim the "genesis" of the avant-garde artist is to "imitate...the disciplines and processes of art and literature themselves." In so doing, the artist "turning his attention away from subject-matter or common experience...turns it in upon the medium of his own craft."
"Kitsch," Greenberg writes, "is a product of the industrial revolution which urbanized the masses...and established what is called universal literacy." He clarifies this later by stating, "The pre-condition for kitsch...is the availability close at hand of a fully matured cultural tradition...It borrows from devices, tricks, stratagems, rules of thumb, themes, converts them into a system and discards the rest."
From Greenberg's analysis he uses Aristotle to deduce, "if all art and literature are imitation, then what we have here is the imitation of imitating.” And,” the danger and downfall of true culture lies in the artists of the avant-garde succumbing to the pressure of the profit of kitsch." Greenberg believed socialism would help save the true artist from going the way of kitsch.
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This is the crux of the argument, as the intent of the artist is to communicate. And the other intent is to protect the ability to continue to make art. It is only natural for the artist to devise ways to communicate to their audience. Even for the avant-garde to communicate they did not want the adulation of the public was a message.
In our culture we are embroiled in mass communication. The manner in which people receive information now is through new media. If the artist Jeff Koons is, as Lisa Phillips writes in the article Art and Media Culture, "the hyper realization of the contradictions of our age".
What is Thomas Kincade? If Jeff Koons is to high art as Thomas Kinkade is to mass culture, what is the difference between the two? Jeff Koons has stated he believes in "advertisement and media completely." He goes on to say, "…my art and my personal life are based in it. I think that the art world would probably be a tremendous reservoir for everybody involved in advertising. I love the gallery, the arena of representation. It’s a commercial world, and morality is based generally around economics and that's taking place in the art gallery."
If avant-garde is to high art as kitsch is to mass culture, what makes it so? Thomas Kinkade, an artist who franchised his name and employs specialists to highlight prints of his paintings in Thomas Kinkade galleries around the country, is considered by art critics to be kitsch. In an interview from the New Yorker magazine he says, "The No.1 quote critics give me is 'Thom, your work is irrelevant.' Now, that's a fascinating, fascinating comment. Yes, irrelevant to the little subculture, this micro culture, of modern art. But here's the point: My art is relevant because it's relevant to ten million people. That makes me the most relevant artist in this culture, not the least. Because I'm relevant to real people."
Greenberg believed socialism would make everything equal and quench the temptation of the artist to make work that appealed to the mass culture. The artist might then be able to be true his art and not have to struggle. There is a core problem here, that artists are a conduit for culture. We do not live in a socialist country. Greenberg might have made strides to follow politics rather than be an art critic~ because he warns of the danger of the inevitable progression of the movement of art, rather than embracing it as a natural progression of the art in this society.
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Greenberg might have been a socialist, but he was also an elitist. Somehow the two perspectives don't blend. If he wanted socialism, he would have been for the people. And, in being for the people, he would be for an art of the people. Greenberg discussed the ruling class and implied high art is reserved for them. "There has always been on one side the minority of the powerful-and therefore the cultivated- and on the other the great mass of the exploited and poor-and therefore the ignorant." I would ask Greenberg to notice that his perspective of artists is also exploitive, controlling, and limiting. Naturally there would come a day when the artists would go back to the streets~ the view from the top, where the ruling class resides with specialized and limiting views of what art can be, might have seemed isolating.
It is obvious Clement Greenberg believed he was the overseer to true art and felt it was his duty to protect high art and defend the ruling class who- in its limiting way supported the few pet artists they deemed worthy of their attention. Needless to say, they are also buying this work based on the value Greenberg placed on it. This, in a way, is no different from buying stock in Thomas Kinkade.
Greenberg writes, "Kitsch's enormous profits are a source of temptation in the avant-garde... ambitious writers and artists will modify their work and then those puzzling border-line cases appear....the net result is always to the detriment of true culture...."
Jeff Koons might be considered borderline. Maybe Andy Warhol, Kieth Haring, and Claus Oldenberg even. Surely Thomas Kinkade is not even considered border-line, but off the charts in the direction of Eddie Guest, the Saturday Evening Post and The New Yorker magazine.
Greenberg gives an example of an "ignorant Russian peasant" doing a taste test of art like it was a test between Coca-cola and Pepsi, making a satire of the peasant’s ignorant life. The poor man, blindfolded by his own ignorance, does not truly after all know what good art is. He needs someone to educate him and Clement Greenberg steps in.
"Where Picasso paints cause, Repin paints effect. Repin pre-digests art for the spectator and spares him effort, provides him with a short cut to the pleasure of art that detours what is necessarily difficult in genuine art."
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With the exclusivity of galleries, the elitism of museums, and the disdain the artists of the avant-garde showed an ignorant public by exhibiting work they weren’t meant to derive pleasure from, it seems only a natural by-product artists would have to revisit this approach and begin speak to the people through the people's medium. Television, advertising, video, bus stations, telephone poles, graffiti, mass production and disguise themselves through kitsch. Is it any wonder artists now bring the work to mass culture? Not merely "reformulating powerful messages of the media", as Lisa Phillips states, but a new method of survival.
If elitist thinking for so long treats the public as uneducated idiots, and the gap between the wealthy and the poor widens, there are fewer viewers to hear the voice of the new work. In reality, the poor are not always uneducated. In fact, many artists are poor. Artists see the public has an inability to access art. So what we see are artists, not succumbing to the lucrative kitsch model, but using the materials and philosophy their audience understands. Perhaps a simple statement defining the difference of high art to kitsch is this; it is a matter of having to think harder to get to the place where you are going.
For all his theorizing, Clement Greenberg contradicts himself and reveals a base truth when he once said, "I don't get into "becauses". When you come into a studio you see a number of works. My habit is to go to the one I like most. If you start to say "because" you get into art jargon."
Perhaps this is also the base truth of the poor Russian peasant. And why is it so wrong? Greenberg writes condescendingly, "...it is lucky the peasant is protected from the products of American capitalism, for he would not stand a chance next to a Saturday Evening Post cover by Norman Rockwell." Greenberg has acknowledged this is what the peasant might have had access to. Artists such as Andy Warhol, the Guerilla Girls, Jeff Koons and Thomas Kinkade alike understood this, and most likely learned from Greenberg. For even if our country was a socialist country, there would still be good and bad art. This judgment is always contingent on the beholder.