by arp, baumann, eggeling, giacometti, helbig, henning, janco, morach, richter
11th April 1919

A clear, straightforward gaze must predominate if decisions of great import are to be taken. Spiritually and materially, we demand our right: representatives of an essential part of culture, we, the artists, want to take part in the ideological development of the State; we want to exist in the State and take our full share of responsibilities. We declare that the artistic laws of our time are already formulated in their main outline. The spirit of abstract art represents an enormous extension in man's feeling of freedom. Our faith is fraternal art: art's new mission in society. Art imposes clarity; should serve as a basis for the new man. He should belong to everyone without class distinction. We want to channel the conscious production-strength of each individual into the completion of the communal undertaking. We are fighting lack of system, destroyer of strength. Our highest aspiration is to realise a spiritual basis of understanding for all men. This is our duty. This work ensures the greatest vitality for all people. The initiative for this is ours. We shall direct its course and give expression to its wishes by joining into a harmonious whole its most disparate elements.

Source

Sounds like a lot of the histrionic crap I feed myself. Although I'd be lying if I said I wasn't one of those dramatic-idealist artist types who would resonate with Oscar Wilde's famous saying: "We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars." Incidentally, this album, Halfway Between the Gutter And the Stars by Fatboy Slim is not that good. Hmm, I feel like invoking moby's journal right now.

When looking at artistic photographs of nature, try to imagine that God were actually an artificially intelligent machine that generated all of these beautiful settings. For programmers who have ever tried to create a graphical tree based on recursion, they will appreciate the aesthetic that blossoms from this point-of-view.

In studying art and becoming a good artist, an important tool is being able to focus in on negative space. Negative space is the space outside of that which is active or positive. For example in the following character "0" there is the black, outlined circle, the positive space. The negative space would be the solid white interior of the circle.

Now, couldn't this negative space reasoning be applied to education as well. Couldn't you learn a lot from the things you don't know or aren't learning? Aren't there insights to be gained from the holes of knowledge you have? Sure, creativity, intuition, shortcuts, etc. Moreover, this relates to me leaving school. Not being in school has educated me so much about myself. The tension created in me and around me by prematurely ending my studies has taught me so much about my values and the value of school. A more clearer vision about my motivations, about school's value to me, and the value of an undergraduate degree on others has become more apparent to me by leaving school then by being at school.

Sometimes the greatest insights come from pause, and not action. From closing your eyes rather than from looking. From becoming nothing rather than otherwise.

All art creates an effect. Good art has one special effect in addition to all the other effects--they can create the sense in the viewer to be grateful toward the artist for having intended all the effects.

For example, I can make a painting that makes you want to turn away in disgust. But if I can make a painting that is disgusting but at the same time, you feel in awe of the painting's genius for being able to make you nauseous, then THAT would be considered good art.

This appears in a lot of dualities:

plain vs. subtle
distracting vs. intricate
dirty vs. sublime
conventional vs. classical

Work and artist.--This artist is ambitious, nothing more. Ultimately, his work is merely a magnifying glass that he offers everybody who looks his way.

(Nietzsche)

Every feature you see, every unfeature you see, any criticism you have, any praise you might lob, everything that is noticed, observed, and felt is all "intended." You think a painting is ugly in a certain way, well then it's ugliness in that way IS part of the art; the painting is making a point about ugliness. This is the key to understanding current "inaccessible" art. Identify whatever you distaste and then identify whether your distaste is part of the painting's intended response.

A piece of art that is dishonest, that lacks intention while simultaneously lacking intended unintention, basically lacks a conscious, and therefore is of a lower art form, pretty much a designation deserving of most art out there. If an artist has a bad voice, but uses his bad voice so that it is no longer bad, but actually good, then THAT is good art. This is why I cut Eminem a bit higher than most other artists because he takes his faults and turns them into a form of self-mockery that becomes part of his art.

Why must man seek to elevate himself. Poetry does this all the time, painting fantasms and ghosts about the great human condition. Sure, humanity is pretty great and wonderful, but reading about it does the opposite of elevation.

They tend to be along the lines of:
In the willowing wisps of silence
We discovered a terrifyingly powerful force
A binding nature of the highest kind
We found a unity of souls

BS alert, BS alert. Everytime I read stuff like this, I glaze over it quickly and instead dive into the subtext. All I feel is someone wishing that such and such experience were indeed magical. I tend to find poetry like this as a plug for the emotional void of avarice.

Now, if art were to bring man down to earth and expose him for the animal that he really is, wouldn't that truly have the effect of elevation? Or is being in a postion of lust and unrequited love the desirable postition--or is this just the common position of artists?

Now, when I talk about reducing man to size, I'm not talking painting some guy hunched over in a dark shadow, brooding over a kill. No, that too glorifies man. Man must be declared simply, as he is, without the froof, exactly as he is encountered by us everyday, normal, banal, and fun.

On Plastic there's been this uproar over the Chapman Brothers defacing original Goya's. This is truly controversial, and I'm not ready go about advocating it straight out, but I do want to present the counter-point to the knee-jerk reaction that I saw on plastic. I posted it there and it follows here.

This is great art. I'm not being disingenuous, just bear with me for a moment.

The original Goyas are just art. It's just man splitter-splattering material in a pretty arrangement on canvas. How much did the original Goya's enrich your life? It's not even some of Goya's best work. How much better was your life or anybody's life better because of the existence of these prints? You may have taken a glance at them or read about them a while back and for maybe a good 20 seconds you felt kind of good. Or, you were instructed that Goya was a great man and that this was one of his works, and that gave a little sense of awe, but I bet that that feeling lasted a good 5 seconds as well.

By defacing it, they're first making an in-your-face statement that people take art way too seriously. How much anguish did their defacement cause compared to the anguish you felt when instead of 284 Iraqi's killed, it was 285. Art is nothing. We love it and it makes us feel good, but really, it pales in comparison to the other practical necessities of life. It's the ultimate triumph of subjectivity, and that is why the Chapman's feel it necessary to tear it down.

The act of defacement is apparent in looking at the pieces, and the feeling we get about this act is strong. The act is so wrong, so evil, so terrible. And that is one set of emotions that the Chapmans are trying to evoke. They want you to feel the gravity of sin that is caused mixed with the insanity of caring about art's destruction in the first place.

The resultant mixing of the two is, well, hilarious. It's pure comedy. The choice of the clown heads adds to the effect. It creates an erie, spooky, absurdist feeling about the piece. I look at the piece and I get the same feeling that I get when reflecting about the state of affairs in the world today. Everyting is just so absurd. War, this glorious tradition of honor and bravery, has turned into Bush's pet project and a circus on FOXnews. The Chapman pieces represent the same horrific absurdity.

Also, look at how much our world and values have been defaced in recent times. Resonating with that current sentiment is also one the Chapmans strengths.

And yet, they didn't go far enough that the defacement is that defacing. The originals are still photographed and available. So if someone just had to get their eyes on the pure pure original, I'm sure they wouldn't fly to wherever to see it, they'd probably just look it up. Besides, it was privately-owned anyways. These pieces were going to be nothing until the Chapman's chose to "deface" it. Ask yourself what's worse: them defacing it and showing it, or them just never showing it at all? If we believe in Chomsky's "effects-based" method of thinking, their presentation at least shows something while as them keeping it is the same as them destroying the Goyas and not saying anything about it.

Plus, if you look at the works, the defacement does not completely cover the entirety of the Goyas. You can still get the same understanding of the work and ignore the clown-heads. Also, the colors and positioning of the clown-heads does not interfere greatly with the harmonic visual aesthetics of the original Goyas.

Another interesting way to think is, what if Goya had done these prints and put on the clown-heads himself. It'd be called genius, probably not only because it was Goya's, but because of the clown-heads. It would be hailed as a prophet's vision of impending post-modernist tragedy. So another message is the "who takes credit" concept. i.e. if five people worked on a painting and person A was told this while as person B wasn't, why would the painting change?

I'm motivated to speak on this for a couple of reasons. 1) I genuinely think it's great 2) Nobody on plastic has come out praising the piece, so I feel it's my duty to speak out and 3) I was thinking of defacing my own art work. I was going to put big slashes through my paintings. Of course I'd have original photographs, but the slash through something I cherished so much would be so evil, so suicidal, and yet so absurd, because, after all, they're just paintings. The challenge of getting over my emotional scruples also attracted me to it. I still can't get myself to put slashes through them. The question keeps bothering me, "Why is it so hard for me to do this?" Breaking that limitation would be truly triumphant and my hope is that that break-through would be transferred to the viewer.

homuncul I try to do some of this in my art, emphasizing only the parts of the body that deserve the most attention in conveying a "person" object. Actors tend to be very face people, i.e. their face is their most expressive part, while as for others, it's their shoes or corpulence. What is your homuncul? (thanks to chaz for input)