HOOPS! EXPLAIN YOURSELF!

[LMNO]

I'm pretty sure most of you won't like this.




Jackson Pollock.  I love his work.  When I look at his paintings, I can see the movement.  It's like trapped kinetic energy.










And I really, really don't care if you don't enjoy it.  You won't convince me otherwise.

[Cain]

I like some Pollack.  It depends.  I don't think it's "great" art, or especially hard to do, but I find some of his pieces aesthetically pleasing.  The top one and the third, for example, I would quite happily have on the wall or as a screensaver.  The other two...not so much.

[MMIX]

I'm rather disappointed no-one looked at the ice city.

Well nobody commented but a lot of us are probably like the guys walking past that monumental head in the gloriously labelled "Random snow Communist", we don't seem to be looking but we probably had a quick peek. 

[LMNO]

Not sure if it counts as modern art, but the Harbin Ice City in China is awesome regardless

http://www.pbase.com/thepokergod/harbin_ice_festival

Blockpage.

[AFK]

I'm pretty sure most of you won't like this.




Jackson Pollock.  I love his work.  When I look at his paintings, I can see the movement.  It's like trapped kinetic energy.










And I really, really don't care if you don't enjoy it.  You won't convince me otherwise.

I like em, of course I can only see two of them.  It feels very improvy, and kind of looks to me what improv music feels like.  It really captures a moment and depicts how unique moments can be.  (yeah, that sounds kind of pretentious, oh well)

[Faust]

I like that.  It's sculpture (?) that is pleasing to the eye.

Contrast it with this crap:

Do What I do and pretend they are abandoned time machines from the future. If they are too unsightly even for that, act as if you have come across a plane crash.

[hooplala]

Ok, I've been thinking about this a lot, and I'm still not convinced anyone will like this but me, probably the second one, but not sure about the first:

1)  Marina Abramović  - this is obviously Contemporary Art, not Modern, but still.... Marina herself is the art most of the time, most recently she did a piece at the MOMA (she is a performance artist) where she sat at a table and people were encouraged to sit across from her and each stare into the other's eyes for as long as they wanted.  Some lasted hours, some only a few minutes, many were brought to tears.  Here is a single image from that exhibit:



She has done other pieces (like wrestling people, or getting people to suck on her nipples) but this one seemed to me to be the most direct, and the most honest.  She has always said she only puts pieces together that frighten her, and that for her art should be about the artist making herself uncomfortable and working through that.... she said very little frightened her as starkly as just staring into another person's eyes without speaking.

This piece is important to me, both because I have a hard time making direct eye contact for long periods of time, and also because it seems like an activity that our culture could benefit from... its both self indulgent and... well, whatever the opposite of self indulgent is.

It's hard for me to describe, but I really like this piece.


2) LHOOQ

This one is by Duchamp (for real this time), and it just tickles me... both because he has taken someone else's art and changed it into something fun, mischevious and a little dirty.

I'm sure I don't have to say that the base for this is the Mona Lisa, but I just did so deal with it... Duchamp has added a cute little mustache, and every painting could use a little mustache added.  In addition, he has added the letters "LHOOQ" at the bottom of the image, which, when spoken aloud sounds like the French sentence "Elle a chaud au cul." which translates to "She has a hot ass."  Does it get better than that?

[hooplala]

I also love the idea of the sloppy removal of graffiti being a subconscious form of art, aping the technique that Mark Rothko used:



http://www.notcoming.com/reviews/graffitiremoval/

[Eater of Clowns]

A lot of pieces don't translate well to prints or photos.  Pollock's work in this thread doesn't look like much to me, but seeing it in person, the massive size of the canvas, the way it demanded attention, the scope of movements it would take to accomplish it was all very evident.

I have a feeling that if the sculpture Roger posted was viewed in person it would be more impressive, especially if you caught it in the right lighting.

[Cain]

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/worldnews/article-1201398/Liu-Bolin-The-Chinese-artist-turns-Invisible-Man.html

This guy.  Ignore the link, look at the pictures.

[hooplala]

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/worldnews/article-1201398/Liu-Bolin-The-Chinese-artist-turns-Invisible-Man.html

This guy.  Ignore the link, look at the pictures.

That is fantastic.

[Triple Zero]

First, a clarification why I posted the "Eric and the Gazebo" D&D story and claimed it was relevant: I should have been in bed for over an hour, as it was 3AM or something.


Second, there's been 13 new replies while writing this (on and off during the day), which I haven't read yet so maybe the discussion has taken another turn entirely, sorry about that, but if I read those replies now, I'm going to want to change this post as well, and then I never get done.

So, Roger, what is that "crap"? Who made it? What was it titled? And most importantly, by what criteria are you judging it as crap?

Try the filename/URL of the image,

author: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_Graham

title "Pavillion II"

I wonder who wrote that wikipedia article and what they were thinking, because it just seems to be blowing smoke up his ass, for example "The concepts behind Dan Graham's artworks engage the viewer in the artwork.". Except they don't. I slapped a tag on that right now (knowing quite well it will just cause some wiki editor to quote a blurb from the Urban Planning Magazine Glass & Steel Special art catalog).

Because really I believe this sort of thing is some of the least engaging types of art I have ever seen. Dunno if you have a lot of this in the USA, but our cities are pretty much littered with this crap. And this is from somebody who generally appreciates the occasional glass and steel architecture quite a bit.

Do you have these things? It's a whole category of crap called "Urban Planning Art" or something (don't get me wrong, there are some gems in the genre, but they are a rarity), maybe they are judged on the merit of cheapness to build? Got some open space in your city? Let's add some abstract object there that claims to "interact with the environment" and "poses questions about the relation between figure and ground".

There is one in the middle of nearly every roundabout. Though some of them much are uglier than this Pavillion II structure. At least that one is fairly neutral, utterly boring and therefore not even offensive. This is the sort of thing that people walk past without noticing it at first, and then ask one another "Hey, what is that supposed to be, anyway?" which will be answered with a shrug and "It's art .. I guess".

A shrug. That is pretty much the extent of engagement it causes on the viewer.


A lot of these concepts (figure & ground, space, form, etc) are also explored or considered in visual design. Except the idea is, that by paying attention to those concepts, visual aesthetic and clarity and such are achieved. They are a means to an end. Even in conceptual design, that claims to explore, say "figure and ground" doesn't try to get away with a simplistic geometric shape like that, it has to have something more, add a bit of powerful "extra" (and if the artist can't manage that within his own restrictions of his minimalism, they're not very good at it).

ah yes, that reminds me: A friend of mine once wrote an article about the relation between art and science, one of the things he said is that art needs to have multiple layers of meaning (he didn't claim that is a sufficient criterium for art btw). So if you have, for instance, a mechanical object that merely demonstrates a certain physical law, it's not art. An example he gave was an elliptical pool of water (object near a university), an ellips has two focal points, and placed at these points were vibrating poles, demonstrating something about resonance and waves. He said this might be pretty cool, but it's not art. However, if it would have been augmented with some elements connected to the story about how the physics guy that discovered this law, it could be considered art (the quality of the artwork would be dependant on how well the elements are integrated in a clever way, bonus points if you manage to express it in the form of some self-referential strange loop cause physicists dig that shit). BTW he also used the same argument to claim that fractals, while incredibly pretty, aren't art by themselves--which is an interesting discussion I'd gladly contribute to in another thread.


Now this "Pavillion II" maybe have a tiny bit of "extra" (the one way mirror, for instance), but it's such a ludicrously thin, it's hardly anything. I'd almost say it's less than the average person would unintentionally put into a simple craft work that's not intended as art.

Now this would all be fine with me if he'd express his conceptual minimalism on paper or something, but the kick in the face is that he gets commissioned by urban planning committees to design structures that cost hundreds of thousands of euros! If it wasn't for that, and the fact that by the very nature of his crap, his objects are intended to be placed in public spaces, I simply wouldn't care at all, one bit.

BTW here's a small sample of other poop Graham designed:

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Dan_Graham

I've been to exhibitions showing shit like exactly like this at the Kröller-Müller Museum, in the sculpture garden, maybe it was even his.

The only time I felt more decepted/defrauded/cheated for paying entrance fee to a museum was when, in the Berlinische Galerie, upon closer inspection I noticed that one of the paintings was in fact a cheap CMYK inkjet print (including a few minor JPEG artifacts) of the original. This was not intentional, as far as I could tell, it did say "reproduction" in tiny letters under the info plaque.

(Which would have been okay, maybe the painting was temporarily lended out, it's the CMYK part that was bothering me most, because one reason why I enjoy viewing paintings in real life, is that it's impossible to capture the true vibrance of colours of real paint (or in fact, any material) using photography and CMYK printing)

ETA: I also think it's naive to regard only "pretty" things as art with value.

Nobody was claiming that.

What I said is that it's rather straightforward to appreciate certain kinds of modern art, because they're damn cool to look at. That doesn't mean that's all there is to them (Escher's wrok has certain very interesting mathematical ideas, Dali had his own crazy complicated reasons).

Going for the pretty stuff is a good way to get acquainted with modern art, an incentive to learn about the layers beneath the eye-candy, and when you learned to appreciate that, you can also appreciate modern art that may be less immediately striking as pretty, but stands out for its deeper meanings or social commentary or whatnots.

And from there you can move on to even more abstract stuff, that isn't pretty at all.

Though personally I also prefer my modern art both pretty and oddly meaningful. Only a few works of modern art are the exception to that (for me), because their historical value overshadows their lack of pretty entirely--such as Duchamp's Fountain, or John Cage's 4'33".

[The Good Reverend Roger]

Our roundabouts have art from local artists.  Some of it is very nice, some not so good.

But infinetly better than some spag welding window panes together.

[The Good Reverend Roger]

Hoops:  Performance art - as opposed to the performing arts - tends to be Yoko Ono Land.

The staring contest one is mildly interesting, but that road leads to interpretive dance.

[Cramulus]

AH beat me to post. I was just about to say something about performance art.

I really really really like about 10% of the performance art I've seen.

I'll never forget my first contact with performance art. I was in college, I had just taken a german exam and was on my way back to my apartment, when I saw somebody in some kind of absursdist tropical parrot costume running across campus with a ladder under their arm. Intrigued, I followed him to a little alcove, where 7 people in bizarre costumes were doing bizarre activities. I'm not sure that I can even explain it - one person was crawling around, another was hanging up paintings and mirrors on the exterior of the buildings, another had a clip board and was taking notes on the people watching them... there was this odd music playing, and every so often everybody synched up doing the same thing at the same time.

I didn't know what I was looking at! I wondered if maybe it was some kind of LARP, or theater, or art, or what? I had never seen people acting like this, and I stayed for 25 minutes, watching their weird dance, trying to figure out what was going on. It really snapped me out of my robot mode.


other than that, I haven't seen any performance art that got inside my head like that. I've seen some cool stuff, but a lot the stuff I've seen seems to be about watching the artist have this sort of ritual experience, and it draggggggs. Last year I watched a performance art piece which consisted of watching a guy strip down to briefs, oil himself up, and balance a log on top of another log. It took 20 minutes. I almost fell asleep.


That one piece though, the first one I saw, left a big mark on me. It alerted me to how art can affect pedestrians that pass by, how it can change a space so that people experience that space differently. And it made me feel insanely creative - it was probably one of the things in my head when I came up with a lot of my posters.