[TheForge] Art, doncha know....

[debmiller at fuse.net]

YOU GO REIS!

Ray Miller
Cincinnati


---- ries <ries at riesniemi.com> wrote: 
> I gotta disagree with your thesis.
> It has been my impression, after a mere 50 years or so of travelling  
> the world and looking carefully at art, craft, and industry, that  
> there has always been crap, and there have always been diamonds  
> scattered in amongst it.
> I had a high school teacher, of the classics, as it happened, at an  
> exclusive prep school, way back when in the 60's, who advanced a  
> theory, certainly not his own, that 95% of everything was crap.
> And there is a great Mark Twain quote, something to the effect of "I  
> hate the damn Greeks- they already stole all the good ideas".
> 
> I would suggest that instead of living in an era of charlatans and  
> cheapjack hustlers, we are actually living in an age of some of the  
> greatest craftsmen ever. But since there are 8 billion or so of us,  
> you have to look a bit harder to separate the wheat from the chaff...
> 
> As for your theories on modern art- they dont hold up to actual  
> scrutiny. Jackson Pollock, for example, was quite a good draftsman-  
> he could draw and paint realistically, to quote Archie Bell and the  
> Drells, "just as good as he liked". He chose not to, intentionally,  
> depict realistic scenes, after having done it for 15 or 20 years,  
> because he was more interested in other ideas. This does not make his  
> work any better or worse- just different. Personally, I have stood in  
> front of quite a few large Jackson Pollock paintings in the flesh,  
> and I believe that he was extremely skillfull, and created quite  
> beautiful pieces that did exactly what he wanted them to do. He  
> certainly cared almost not at all about money, fame, or publicity- he  
> was, after all, the artist who urinated in the fireplace of one of  
> the richest art patrons of his time, and frequently destroyed  
> paintings that he could have sold.
> 
> I know a bunch of unbelivably good craftspeople living, and working  
> today- certainly, in many ways, the equals of any that ever lived. In  
> most cases, they have not only 20 or 30 or 40 years of skill and  
> practice, but a comprehensive knowledge of their materials that just  
> didnt exist in the old days. Take blacksmithing and metalsmithing,  
> for example- people like Daryl Meier, or Phillip Baldwin, have a  
> better understanding of alloys, metallurgy, and technique than  
> virtually any mokeme gane or damascus maker from any historical era,  
> and then, on top of that, they have an art history, theory, and  
> general educational background the breadth of which simply did not  
> exist in the 18th century anywhere.
> I can think of another dozen or so smiths today that can equal  
> virtually any historical smiths- in fact, since the greatest  
> historical work was done by teams of large amounts of specialists,  
> they often know more and are more widely skilled than in the 19th  
> century. Certainly, people like Miccelucci were geniuses, and  
> geniuses are rare in any time. But we have a few.
> 
> As for modern sculpture- you need to dig a bit deeper. I have the  
> feeling you made your conclusions first, then found examples to back  
> them up. Sorta backwards, if you ask me.
> You are certainly entitled to dislike any artist, living or dead. But  
> to say somebody like Richard Serra doesnt understand form, mass,  
> materials, space, and fabrication as well as Bernini- well, it just  
> aint so. I once saw a film of Serra working with a crew in the Ruhr,  
> in Germany, in the 70's, forging 6 foot cubes of solid steel with a  
> 20,000 ton press- and believe me, the man is no faker- he knows, and  
> understands, steel, on an intuitive level, as well as anyone alive.
> 
> I have also seen quite a few of Chris Offili's paintings- the ones in  
> which he occasionally wraps up an elephant turd in gold leaf, and  
> uses it as part of the frame. He doesnt toss it at the canvas, he  
> paints, and again, he is a skilled draftsman who paints the way he  
> does out of choice, not ineptitude. He is of african descent, living  
> in england, and to him, the elephant turds have meaning, alluding to  
> colonialism, and the fact that western donors will spend millions to  
> preserve elephants, while in a village a few miles away, children die  
> every day of diaharrea due to the lack of a hundred dollar well- the   
> gold plated turd, if you will.
> 
> I could go on about a hundred more artists working today, in styles  
> and subject matters you may dislike, but whose command of their  
> materials and degree of education and intensity of thought is totally  
> first rate.
> 
> You have chosen to become extremely good at what interests you. And  
> naturally, it disappoints when the entire world doesnt see how great  
> many of the things you love are. But this is due to lack of education  
> on the part of viewers, on our capitalist system of cranking out  
> cheap crap for quick consumption- it is not because other artists,  
> who have chosen other areas of interest, are somehow dragging down  
> the civilisation.
> 
> Ries
> 
> 
> 
> 
> On Nov 6, 2007, at 8:01 AM, George Dixon wrote:
> 
>           Looking for a Silver Bullet for Our Silver Age of Art
> 
>    You live in historic times.  I am not referring to the issues of  
> climate, war or politics.....I am 'talking art' here.
>     First some perspective:
>     A common touch-stone in history is Rome.  Roman society was  
> different than ours, very different, but at a level of human  
> commonalities....we are them and they are us.  Humans act, at a macro- 
> level, in ways that have less to do with the times or the society and  
> much more to do with how humans act in large groups when faced with  
> large realities.  Call it 'how humans are wired as a species'. While  
> a Roman had to walk to the local arena for visceral amusement, folks  
> today have to be urged by the first responders to "move along" as  
> they slow down to scope out a crash scene.  Capice?
> 
>     Rome had what is termed a "Silver Age" (40 BC to 130 AD) in all  
> things creative.  Architecture, intellectual literature and art all  
> reflected the dysfunction of complacency.  While volumes of  
> literature were generated, they were largely overly stylized and said  
> little that was new.  Dogmatic repetition was the order of the  
> literary day.   Architecture did nothing new in either material  
> innovation or design.  In fact buildings often incorporated the  
> finest details of older structures because those components exceeded  
> the quality of contemporary work.  Art followed suit. Sculpture  
> mirrored past compositions and conventions of design, but it did so  
> at a lower level of competency. Skills that were difficult to learn  
> were not popular.  Oh....to be sure, there were those who produced  
> and wanted to be recognized as, shall we say 'artists'.  However, it  
> appears that they put more intellectual capital into wanting-to-be- 
> known-as or into self-promotion than they did in achieving mastery of  
> their medium.
>      Rome in its Silver Age was a powerful, even dominant geo- 
> political empire.  War existed, but far away...the threats of  
> tomorrow seemed to be  several tomorrows into the future.  The  
> economy worked, goods and food flowed, water flowed, mass  
> entertainment was common and cheap. Things were 'historically good'.   
> That is the backdrop of (and perhaps the criteria for) an age of  
> mental complacency.
> 
>             "History does not repeat itself but people always do"  
> said Voltaire, the 18th c philosopher.
> 
>       Art used to mean that one achieved a level of mastery of the  
> tools and materials and then transformed those materials into objects  
> that were pleasing to the viewer, qualitative in their design and  
> construction and challenging enough in their execution to put demands  
> on the artist.
> Fast forward to now.  The 20th century displays a devolution in both  
> innovation and execution of 'art' that can be measured in generations.
> 
> As the 20th century dawned, Claude Monet was innovative as well as a  
> master of his oil paints.  Impressionism showed a world that 'new'  
> could be complex, different and still demand a growth curve of its  
> practitioners.  The work was not literal images of trees or  
> buildings, it was stylized impressions of the subject.  But it had to  
> represent the subject well enough that a casual viewer could figure  
> out what was going on in the painting.  That took clever, masterful  
> use of color and shape to convey an impression from one mind (artist)  
> to another (viewer) in a manner that everyone saw the same  
> thing....no easy task.
> 
> Impressionistic and realistic depictions take effort and time both to  
> learn to do and then to do.  It is called 'delayed gratification'.   
> Post WW2 was the onset of instant gratification.
> 
> By mid-century the slippery slope had produced the Jackson Pollock  
> generation.  Paint was tossed at the canvas.  Since there was no  
> possibility that anyone could recognize the imagery as representing  
> anything from their world, titles became more important.  Frankly, it  
> takes no skill to toss paint, bend bars, or stack fired clay sticks  
> into pyramids....and then call it 'art'.  It does take clever titles  
> (if it comes with an explanatory title then the imagery failed to  
> work....it must be art) and some marketing to turn a buck with it.
> 
>              "No body ever lost a dime underestimating the taste of  
> the general public"  P T Barnum.
> 
> As the last quarter of the 20th c moved toward the millennium  
> minimalism came to the forefront.  The rich artistic traditions in  
> metal, ceramics, jewelry and paint were eschewed (or were considered  
> too difficult and time consuming to learn or master) and in their  
> place we got red boxes placed in subways, cloth draped over both the  
> German Parliament building and some dinky island in the Florida Keys  
> followed by plasma-cut silhouettes in cor-ten steel. Cor-ten has one  
> art property beyond being plasma cutable and wire-weldable....it  
> rusts.  It rusts just so far and then stabilizes.  Wow!
> 
> The equally rich traditions of craftsmanship faded as well.  A 1990's  
> waltz through the Sculpture Garden of the Hirshorn Museum on the Mall  
> in Washington, DC takes the viewer from silhouettes in the distance  
> that are not unpleasing, up to a more intimate range where the crappy  
> welds and the low level of craftsmanship are dominant.  That work  
> simply will not last, too poorly joined, and it has nothing about it  
> that rewards someone who takes distant notice and then walks over to  
> look more closely.  The outline at a distance is all the satisfaction  
> you are going to get.  Get closer and the basic flaws overwhelm  
> whatever gross design was attempted.  Anyway, the walk over is a  
> waste since there are no details to see when you get there.
> 
> What we have now in our Silver Age is painfully obvious.  What got us  
> here was the both intellectual laziness and complacency in prior  
> generations (a by-product of instant gratification)....from which our  
> generations have drawn too accurate a lesson....and a philosophical  
> attitude that the past (pre 20th c) was dead and not to be reflected.  
> Time for something 'New".  In that the past had incorporated  
> competency, mastery, material manipulation and a classical sense of  
> design (which was a natural human-wiring evolution by the way...) as  
> its hallmarks; to do something 'New" meant none of that!    
> Cool....except that when you say none-of-that and toss it off the  
> table you are left with a minimum of options for your 'New'.  Hence  
> the minimalism shows in our tarnished silver age of one-trick-art- 
> ponies.
> 
> It is past time for something 'New' again.  It's time to toss the  
> tired old 'modern art' conventions and vacuous art-speak baggage of  
> yesterday and today...(see 'found objects' in 'art').  How 'modern'  
> can a 60 year old art concept be, especially in an interconnected  
> time like we have?  Let's learn from the Pollock evolution that  
> minimalism is the Emperor's-New-Clothes road to 'art'.  Let's realize  
> but not accept that 'art' has been debased both as a term and as a  
> process.  (That is, unless elephant poop onna religious icon works  
> for you as art.  The elephant worked harder to generate the poop than  
> the 'artist' did to fling it.)  Today, good design which is executed  
> with craftsmanship and a masterful manipulation of a medium  
> incorporating rich visual imagery and detail is as strong a rejection  
> of the gray haired status-quo rut of contemporary art as their paint  
> or poop tossed at canvas was a rejection of pre-20th century art  
> traditions.   They took a wrong turn, called it art and no-one that  
> knew better spoke up.  Then they became academics of art and taught  
> their inadequacies to several generations....and here we are.
> 
> If you want to have an impact and/or make something which stands the  
> fabled test of time in both design and durability, then you need to  
> consider the pre-20th and early 21st century's art criteria of  
> achieving competency and then mastery of your medium. Once you have  
> done that, start to tackle innovative design.   But don't get fooled  
> again.
> 
> Francis Whitaker used to urge new smiths to strive beyond good  
> enough: "there is plenty of room at the top".
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> 
> Ries Niemi
> Industrial Artist
> http://www.riesniemi.com/
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
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