thanks in advance, anja christine

thanks in advance, anja christine

The work can be elegant and tasteful, with a touch of whimsy introduced by the texture of the materials. Or it can become overwhelming and obnoxious when poorly considered.

The work can be elegant and tasteful, with a touch of whimsy introduced by the texture of the materials. Or it can become overwhelming and obnoxious when poorly considered.

Karen Archey must have been on to something if this post elicited such defensive remarks.

I think whenever the issue becomes “spelling” the reproached is automatically the winner. (guilty)

To draw from Tom Moody’s list: for me personally, far and away the most important reason is #6 “Avoidance of known art materials”. I don’t know why this seems so important that I want to universalize it. A friend told me they were eager to get into a wood shop and my initial (internal) reaction was that the resulting work would be too artful and forced, which is obviously idiotic. For me personally, it’s the “air of indifference” and that “I didn’t really try hard,” which isn’t true, but that’s part of it. I want it to look that way. I think this comes out of my few, earnest years as a painter–I would try really hard, and it would show, and still no one would care. (The paintings also weren’t good.) At least this way I can save face.

I was reading a Greenberg essay recently and it is always nice to read something from decades ago (in this case 40 years ago) that is completely relevant today–it makes you realize you’re not on to something as relevant and “avant-garde” as you think you are. I think a edited extract, although lacking some context, is relevant here. I don’t agree with it all, and I think it can be said that two-dimensional work is no longer necessarily “pictorial”, but there’s something to that assertion.

“The case of what passes nowadays for advanced-advanced art has its fascination. This isn’t owed to the quality of the art; rather it has to do with its very lack of quality. [...]

Something like a break in the continuity of sculptural taste has appeared: something that looks, even, like a vacuum of taste. This ostensible vacuum has come in opportunely for academic sensibility that wants to mask itself. Here is the chance to escape not just from strict taste, but from taste as such. And it’s in this vacuum that avant-gardist art has produced, and performed, its most daring and spectacular novelties. But this vacuum also explains, finally, why they all come out so un-new, why phenomenal and configurational innovation doesn’t coincide the way it used to with the genuinely artistic kind.

Art that realizes–and formalizes–itself in disregard of artistic expectations of any kind, or in response only to rudimentary ones, sinks to the level of that unformalized and infinitely realizable, sub academic, sub-kitsching art–that sub-art which is yet art–whose ubiquitousness I called attention to earlier. [...] Some recent art that happens not at all to be avant-gardist in spirit gets admired precisely when it fails to move you and because of what makes it fail to do so.”

CG “Counter-Avant-Garde”

At the end I think he’s talking about “conceptual art”

Maybe that’s not that interesting.

AFC #1

Karen Archey must have been on to something if this post elicited such defensive remarks.

I think whenever the issue becomes “spelling” the reproached is automatically the winner. (guilty)

To draw from Tom Moody’s list: for me personally, far and away the most important reason is #6 “Avoidance of known art materials”. I don’t know why this seems so important that I want to universalize it. A friend told me they were eager to get into a wood shop and my initial (internal) reaction was that the resulting work would be too artful and forced, which is obviously idiotic. For me personally, it’s the “air of indifference” and that “I didn’t really try hard,” which isn’t true, but that’s part of it. I want it to look that way. I think this comes out of my few, earnest years as a painter–I would try really hard, and it would show, and still no one would care. (The paintings also weren’t good.) At least this way I can save face.

I was reading a Greenberg essay recently and it is always nice to read something from decades ago (in this case 40 years ago) that is completely relevant today–it makes you realize you’re not on to something as relevant and “avant-garde” as you think you are. I think a edited extract, although lacking some context, is relevant here. I don’t agree with it all, and I think it can be said that two-dimensional work is no longer necessarily “pictorial”, but there’s something to that assertion.

“The case of what passes nowadays for advanced-advanced art has its fascination. This isn’t owed to the quality of the art; rather it has to do with its very lack of quality. [...]

Something like a break in the continuity of sculptural taste has appeared: something that looks, even, like a vacuum of taste. This ostensible vacuum has come in opportunely for academic sensibility that wants to mask itself. Here is the chance to escape not just from strict taste, but from taste as such. And it’s in this vacuum that avant-gardist art has produced, and performed, its most daring and spectacular novelties. But this vacuum also explains, finally, why they all come out so un-new, why phenomenal and configurational innovation doesn’t coincide the way it used to with the genuinely artistic kind.

Art that realizes–and formalizes–itself in disregard of artistic expectations of any kind, or in response only to rudimentary ones, sinks to the level of that unformalized and infinitely realizable, sub academic, sub-kitsching art–that sub-art which is yet art–whose ubiquitousness I called attention to earlier. [...] Some recent art that happens not at all to be avant-gardist in spirit gets admired precisely when it fails to move you and because of what makes it fail to do so.”

CG “Counter-Avant-Garde”

At the end I think he’s talking about “conceptual art”

Maybe that’s not that interesting.

AFC #1