Air Guitar

Air Guitar: Essays on Art and Democracy by David Hickey, 1997

Novels

It would be remiss of me not to mention various novels I have read recently, as ideas in them swim through my head, almost becoming the theme of a certain time. It's true I don't get as much time to read novels now, but sometimes it's irresistible.

Siri Hustvedt. The Blindfold. 1992. London. Hodder and Stoughton.

I've had a look through this blog to find where I wrote about another Siri Hustvedt novel - What I Loved, a truly intelligent novel set within the New York art and academic world which still preys on my mind. I can't find the previous comments, but when I saw this book I jumped at it - she's a truly superior author. This was her first published novel, and it's a strange and assured affair. There is a time in life around the early twenties when life is very precarious and dangerous. This is an enjoyably unsettling and destabilising tale of a person who shifts identity in the meandering city of New York.

30th May 2014

Paul Auster. The New York Trilogy. 1987. London. Faber and Faber.

I don't realise it at first, but Paul Auster is married to Siri Hustvedt. What interesting conversations they must have.

Another novel set in New York as a place to get lost in, unsettling and ultra conscious.

Patrick Gale. Notes from an Exhibition. 2007. London. Fourth Estate.

A wonderful novel about the life of a fictional woman artist, and how she works through bipolar disorder and family life. Much better than that sounds. The structure is also enjoyable, clustering the narrative around a series of exhibits from the artist's life.

Kate Atkinson. Behind the Scenes at the Museum. 1995. London. Black Swan.

This is a book with layers of memories and revelations about the past, seeping into the now. It's such a vivid telling of the childhood voice, and I have found myself thinking about it often.

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My list of novels to read when the MA is done is growing, starting with Howard Jacobson. The Finkler Question. 2010 . London. Bloomsbury, which I have heard is genuinely brilliant and funny and is in my eyesight as I write this. I shall not review it nor blog about it, but just read for sheer pleasure.

I shall also be looking out more Siri Hustvedt.

11th November 2014

Contemporary Video

This not-quite accurate article (When artists first began using film and video tape (ah, the nostalgia) in the 1960s and 1970s) (Video art history starts earlier), nonetheless emphasises the reinvention characterised by successful moving images artists.

Has video art become obsolete?
The term itself seems old-fashioned, but today's best video artists – from Tony Oursler to Elizabeth Price – have managed to uniquely reinvent the whole art form:

http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/jonathanjonesblog/2013/jan/23/video-art-in-the-vanguard

Contemporary / Peer / Current / Practice / Artists / Issues / Concerns / Research

I am looking to make and identify connections and parallels between my work and practice and that of others working today, with a view to locating myself in contemporary practice.

What a moveable feast, or ever shifting smorgasbord.

It's not easy to summarise what current concerns in art might be, out of the multiplicity of possibilities. I prefer to look at artists' overall reasoning rather than details of their individual practice. I'm interested in contemporary ideas about what art is.

Elizabeth Price notes that Like many artists, I am preoccupied with the histories and debates that shape 20th-century and contemporary art.

Whatever its form or medium I think art is, or should be, a way to understand our time – the time in which we live. It is a way to apprehend and influence it. 

http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2013/nov/20/elizabeth-price-art-understand-time-annual-award

I admire Elizabeth Price and find her words and ethos convincing, and yet for myself, I conclude that we share less a shared time, but an overlapping series of times and concerns. I know that in art history we are always considering work in its contemporary context and try to get into the mind set of other times, but I have always tried to make work that could not be dated. Perhaps that is ridiculous, and some sort of cyclic oxymoron, especially considering my main medium of digital video. Perhaps we can only ever be informed by our own age, but anyway I do not make work which deliberately deals head on with contemporary political and social issues. Having said that, my work and ideas are of course totally informed by what happens in the here and now, in events which happen in my own life and the world.

I look to realisations, to the lens of understanding.

6th May 2014

Weintraub, L. (2003) Making Contemporary Art: How Today's Artists Think and Work. London. Thames & Hudson.

Rothenberg, D. (2012) Survival of the Beautiful: Art, Science and Evolution. London. Bloomsbury.

Every artist should read this book, and every scientist, and anyone interested in evolution, culture, and the nature of thought and existence in general. Perhaps that conveys the scope of this book, which draws together many disciplines and insights into a convincing and delightful discourse.

The book explains how nature is aesthetically pleasing, how it has evolved to be so, and how humanity has evolved in relation to beauty, from the earliest tracings of cave paintings. The art instinct shaped the civilisation of early humanity, and the flowering of our culture and psychology.

Rothenberg questions whether it is only human art which has meaning, and ponders whether animal works are really fundamentally different. Beauty emerges in animal behaviour contrary to scientific theories of sexual selection – the patterns of bird and whale song correspond, revealing a purpose other than purely functional.

The author flits from music to philosophy to mathematics to art, connecting ideas and showing the interconnection and underlying patterns of beauty in all things.

11th November 2014

Tanizaki, J. (2001) In Praise of Shadows. London. Vintage.

Spalding, J. (2010) The Best Art You’ve Never Seen: 101 Hidden Treasures From Around the World. London. Penguin.

This was a review book from the Good Book Guide which explored the various ways we do not see some art, either because it is actually destroyed or vanished, and more intriguingly, is obscured before our eyes. The book is quite mainstream, but some of the ideas move towards the abstract and the conceptual.

In my own work, I tend toward making work which may well be unobscured, but you often have to actively look in order to see it and understand what is seen. I am very in love with those ideas about hiding art in plain sight, and destabilised imagery:

http://eleanormacfarlane.blogspot.co.uk/2014/02/destabilised-imagery.html

Examples from my own work:

Eleanor MacFarlane. Which alters when it alteration finds. 2014

http://eleanormacfarlane.blogspot.co.uk/2014/02/which-alters-when-it-alteration-finds.html

Eleanor MacFarlane. Vessels. 2012

http://www.galleryofwonder.co.uk/Info%20Eleanor%20MacFarlane.html

There are various reasons why artworks may not be on general view, such as having been hidden in private collections, concealed by inaccessible locations, neglected by shifts in fashion or politics, or degraded by time.

The book is rather mistitled in that you may or may not have seen the art – it features pieces in major museums that the author assumes have been overlooked, simply because they are placed amongst so many other artworks, such as the marble figurine Voltaire Naked by Pigalle. Several images are fairly well known, although the erotic The Origin of the World by Gustave Courbet has not always been to public taste.

However, there are plenty of treasures here, and the point is well made that not all artworks receive equal attention through the ages, and indeed, that some pieces are conceived through intrigue and danger, such as Auschwitz victim Felix Nussbaum’s Self Portrait with Jewish Identity Card, made in secret in the most oppressive circumstances.

Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa is probably the most famous painting in the world, yet is included because we can never now truly see it, hidden behind its permanent layer of barrier glass and the unrestored patina of age. There are layers of seeing, and art does not journey seamlessly into a preserved state in a gallery, but has a more hidden history.

11th November 2014

Sontag, S. (2002) On Photography. London. Penguin.

Sloane, P. (1966) Colour: Basic Principles and New Directions. London. Studio Vista.

Scruton, R. (2009) Understanding Music: Philosophy and Interpretation. London. Continuum.

Serious music undoubtedly makes us think, and Roger Scruton presents a depth of knowledge and understanding which could make listening to a Symphony all the more meaningful, having considered these points of analysis. Although we may know we feel something when experiencing Beethoven, the inner voice which music expresses is sometimes elusive, needing interpretation. So we can uncover clues to our responses by understanding that context is all.

Each chapter is in essay form, covering issues from Mozart through Wagner to Schoenberg. Thus what is known as Western classical music is considered through aesthetic and critical points. Key sections of music are analysed, compared, put in historical context, and considered through the viewpoints of various thinkers. Not light reading, but worthwhile for those who would like a deeper relationship with classical music.

11th November 2014

Sacks, O. (2008) Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain. London. Picador.

Mundy, J. (2013) Lost Art: Missing Artworks of the Twentieth Century. London. Tate.

Art that is still part of our cultural legacy may cease to exist physically through damage, theft or its temporary nature. Examples of lost art include Tracy Emin’s tent Everyone I have ever slept with 1963 – 1995 which was destroyed, alongside a great deal of other works, in a warehouse fire in London in 2004. Hundreds of original pieces, many important to the history of art, were lost in one night, and now only exist in documentation and the national consciousness.

Some art never makes it into the public arena, being considered so degenerate or subversive that it is supressed. Although stashes of collections still come to light, there is still much art plundered by the Nazis which remains stolen. Lost Art considers work which has vanished through accident or design, avarice or political manoeuvring. 

Perhaps you could say that art is the manifestation of ideas, and that trying to make art permanent is illogical. Eva Hesse said of her work in 1969, a year before her early death aged 34: Art doesn’t last. Life doesn’t last. It doesn’t matter. And yet her fragile Sans III made of latex which has long since degraded, poetically articulates that transient nature, and is a concept that still transmits, even in a photograph.

11th November 2014

Mirzoeff, N. (1998) The Visual Culture Reader. London. Routledge.

Meigh-Andrews, C. (2013) A History of Video Art. 2nd Revised edition. London. Bloomsbury Academic.

This book very much puts me in mind of creating my own and personal history of video art. Last year in the MA there were several student projects based upon text, including Elkin's Stories of Art where he so eloquently persuades of the individual map of art history and impressions.

http://eleanormacfarlane.blogspot.co.uk/2013/04/group-seminar-student-led.html

As an artist I probably know more than the usual viewer about the history of video art, and as a moving image artist I probably know more than perhaps painters, and yet I found that the book is certainly not reflective of my own idea of the history of video art.

Although books are fairly solid in that they are published and, in some cases, verified and referred to , thus building up what knowledge is, how inevitable it is that history will be revised as time moves on. For example, and I repeat myself from somewhere else in this blog of some years ago, many history books about art written in the late 20th century barely included mention of Louise Bourgeois, while a current book would doubtless cite her as being most influential to that century all along, even in relative obscurity until later in life. Its' a paradoxical conundrum, but reflects the overlapping waves of time and influence. Similarly, many of the omissions to emerge in future books about the history of video art are influences yet to be acknowledged, or even widely seen. We often look back and find what was significant.

It's a brilliant book, really interesting and informative - there really is nothing new under the sun, even in video art. It gives a shared language and frame of references for other moving image artists and is a great resource to discover artists, terms, movements, and so on.

My own personal history of video art, or my influences in moving image, is a project I would like to research some time after the MA. It's quite hard to grasp every frame of reference and influence - impossible, and yet video art or moving image does not exist in a vacuum, and so I would list significant images and painters that struck me over the years, the influence of film and TV, and especially the aesthetics of those from vanished times. The tech of glass fronted TV's, which I still use, the children's' TV which fed me, the evening light reflected in Glasgow tenement windows.

The book also discussed the debates over the claiming of terms amongst video art and film. Although I understand the importance of such histories, to me, now, it ends up as an argument between oil and acrylic painters that the other is not a real painter because of their medium and its provenance.

11th November 2014

Kirby, J. (2011) Techniques of Painting. London. National Gallery.

I'm very fond of this book and stick it in my bag to read on the tube. It's an always fascinating behind the scenes look at paintings, the collection of the National Gallery, and brings trails of other thoughts in its wake.

28th August 2014

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It’s quite an insight to remember that painters once painted according to their cloth or canvas. Until the relatively recent availability of ready-made art materials, the art of painting required mastery in the art of preparing boards, canvases, and the paints themselves. This fascinating book unpeels the layers of art history to the facts of what was available to artists and when. Before the 16th century, paintings were usually made directly upon wooden boards, carefully prepared to prevent warping. Ruben’s A View of Het Steen in the Early Morning, 1636, is painted upon 19 joined planks. The advent of canvas allowed a freer use of the brush, leading to more naturalistic imagery and the dawn of expressionism.

Using examples from the National Gallery collection, hidden secrets are revealed in excellent illustrations. Van Dycke painted on striped ticking, used then as now, for mattresses; Michelangelo’s painting shows signs of bubbling caused by overheated materials, and Cézanne favoured flat brushes. Whether you visit galleries, study art history, or paint, the Closer Look series shows the mechanics behind inspiration.

I took this book along to an art class with a student I was tutoring for the Independent Art School to encourage her to have an experimental approach to using materials. http://eleanormacfarlane.blogspot.co.uk/2014/07/independent-art-school-tutoring.html

Like many adult returns, my student wanted to learn how to do things "properly" and the correct methods for using materials, Although it's certainly helpful to know how to get the best out of certain materials, it's important to appreciate that artists have always been resourceful and inventive and stepped outside the boundaries of available media. 

I love to see behind the scenes of art. It seems like a revelation to understand how artists construct work.

11th November 2014

Heartney, E. (2008) Art & Today. London. Phaidon.

Hartridge, H. (1949) Colours and How We See Them. London. Bell.

Harbison, R. (2000) Eccentric Spaces. Cambridge, Mass. MIT.

Elkins, J. (2010) Visual Cultures. Bristol. Intellect.