Helpful to remember, lest one confuse contextual representation with reality when parsing the intricacies of the incorporeal and ineffable. Angels don't have blond hair because angels don't have hair; angels don't have blue eyes because they don't have eyes (or they have dozens of them). There is nothing wrong, of course, with imagining angels in the form of humans, only with mistaking a small segment of examples for the universal standard. Which is what's so fascinating about the earliest representations of such beings, which flout the conventions of the angelic as they've been transmitted in Western culture, or for that matter the response from those who suffered under colonialism and imagined angels as appearing like themselves. In the contact zones of early modern colonialism, beginning in the sixteenth century and continuing until the modern era, and with a particular zenith during the so-called Age of Reason, people developed syncretic religious traditions between Christianity and their own indigenous faiths, in which divine intermediaries often played an integral role. From Africa to Latin America, India to North America, artists often depicted angels in the visual idiom of their own cultures.
Conversations with Cezanne
CÉZANNE SPEAKS…
(I publish [...] these notes collected by Cézanne's son without adding one line of my own, not wanting to alter in any way the thoughts, reflec-tions, and opinions of the artist ...)
I Critics' opinions about art are formulated more on literary principles than on aesthetic ones.
Il The artist must avoid literature in art.
Ill Art is the manifestation of an exquisite sensitivity.
Iv Sensitivity defines the individual. At its highest level, it identifies an artist.
v Great sensitivity is the most powerful characteristic of any beautiful artistic creation.
vi The most seductive element in art is the artist's own personality.
vIl The artist gives form to his sensibility, to his own, innate individuality.
vIll The nobility of an artist's creation reveals his soul.
Ix The artist materializes and individualizes.
x The artist knows the joy of being able to communicate to others his excitement about nature, that masterpiece whose mysteries he believes he has deciphered.
xI Genius is the ability to renew one's emotion by daily contact with nature.
xII For the artist seeing is creating; creating is composing.
XIII Because the artist does not note down his emotions as the bird sings his song: he composes.
xIv The universality of the immediate impact of a work of art does not indicate its importance.
xv Art is a religion. Its goal is the elevation of thought. xVI He who does not hunger for the absolute (perfection) is content with placid mediocrity.
XVIl An intellect's excellence can be judged by the originality of its creations.
XVIII A mind that can organize powerfully is the most precious collaborator with sensibility in the realization of a work of art.
XIX Art is the adaptation of things to our needs and tastes. xx The technique of any art consists of a language and a logic.s xx1 Style is perfect when it is commensurate with the character and grandeur of the subject it interprets.
xXII Style does not result from the slavish imitation of the old masters; it develops from the artist's personal manner of feeling and expression.
XXIII The manner in which a work of art is rendered allows us to judge the distinction of the artist's mind and insight.
xxIv The quest for novelty and originality is an artificial need which can never disguise banality and the absence of artistic tempera-ment.
xxv Line and modeling do not exist. Drawing is the relationship of contrasts or, simply, the rapport of two tones, white and black. xxvi Light and shadow result from the rapport between colors.
These two most important phenomena differ not by their general intensity but by their individual resonance.
xxVII The form and contour of objects are created by oppositions and contrasts which result from their particular hues.
XXVIII Pure drawing is an abstraction. Drawing and color cannot be separated, since all things in nature are colored.
xxIx As we paint, we gradually draw. Accuracy of tone gives an object both its light and shading. The better the color harmonies, the clearer the drawing becomes.
xxx Contrasts and relations of tones are the secret of drawing and shading?
xxxI Nature exists in three dimensions. There is a distance-a plane- between the painter and his model; it is atmosphere. All bodies seen in space are convex.®
XXXlI Atmosphere forms an enduring foundation. Oppositions of colors divide all the phenomena of light into separate elements upon the screen that is atmosphere. This atmosphere, then, envelops the painting, contributing to its synthesis and general harmony.
xxxIII We can say, therefore, that to paint is to create contrasts. xxxIv There is neither light painting nor dark painting, but simply relationships of tones. If they are placed well, by themselves they will establish harmony. The more numerous and varied they are, the greater is their effect and the more pleasing they will be to the eye?
xxxv Like all the arts, painting has its own techniques, but beauty of tone and harmonious combinations of sensations depend entirely on the artist's discernment.
xxxvi The artist cannot perceive all these relationships directly;
he must feel them.
xxXVII To sense correctly and represent that sensation fully is the foundation of style.
xXXVIII Painting is the art of combining sensations, in other words, of establishing harmony between colors, contours, and planes.
xxxx This method comes from contact with nature and develops through experience. It consists of searching for the expression of what one feels and of organizing sensations within a personal aesthetic.
xL Schools of art, a priori, do not exist. 10
XLl To paint from nature is to set free the essence of the model.
Painting does not mean slavishly copying an object. The artist must perceive and capture harmonyl from among many relationships. He must transpose them in a scale of his own invention while he develops them according to a new and original logic.
XLII To paint a picture is to compose.
page 16 -
Documents of Twentieth-Century Art
Conversations with Cézanne
Michael Scott Doran, Julie Lawrence Cochran (Translator), Richard Shiff (Introduction)
ELYSIUM - a visual history of angelology
At issue with Aquinas's systemization isn't that passages such as the one quoted above don't make sense, but rather that they make too much sense. Serpentine though the reasoning may be, Aquinas's logic is unassailable and, based on the axioms he assumes, conceives of an angelology as rigorous as Euclidian geometry. What's unclear is whether any of it corresponds to an actual reality. With the rise of Scholasticism toward the end of the Middle Ages, what we see in evidence isn't an overabundance of faith but rather a crisis of it. What's clear in reading Aquinas-especially once it's remembered that he abandoned his own philosophy after a mystical experience that was supposedly infinite in its beauty-is that the Summa Theologica is a project of trying to convince yourself of something. Neoplatonists had the benefit of admitting that their systems were forever deferred, always falling short of whatever ultimate things flit unseen beyond the veil of human senses. When it comes to approaching angels, science is deficient in a manner that poetry simply isn't. A powerful tool, poetry — as long as it isn't mistaken for the referent-one that dominated until the High Middle Ages, only to return with the Renaissance humanists, occultists, and Neoplatonists. The Areopagite was among the most subtle of thinkers in this regard, in avoiding intellectual idolatry that confuses the painting of a winged being with intangible celestial forces themselves—a feature of the aforementioned apophatic tradition of which he is an exemplar, a wisdom that understands that the spoken god is never the real God. This is the "being beyond being" as he calls it in Divine Names, something that "is cause of all; / but itself: nothing." What Dionysius's angelology offered was a system of symbol, metaphor, simile, and cipher in which to express the experience of the inexpressible, to hear that which is silent, to see that which is invisible. A language to speak of those without tongues, a hand to write among those lacking limbs, a mind to envision for the thought that is greater than all experience. For Dionysius, angels were both agents of inspiration and a metaphor for meaning; returning celestial beings to their most crucial function, his was a theory of the message. - ED SIMON Elysium page 64
ELYSIUM - a visual history of angelology
Again and again, I return to this question of who among us can see the angels, and why they are so often invisible to the preponderance of people in the contemporary world. In past epochs, visionaries and prophets, mystics and poets were privy to the shimmering resplendence of the celestial choir flitting about in the cosmos. I, who have never seen an angel, and can scarcely believe that such a creature is possible, am envious of William Blake with his espying them in the trees at nightfall, every golden wing quivering in the sunset, every halo glowing in the dusk. As with so much of that which ails us—our nihilism and our prejudices, our alienations and our oppressions-I've long favored that myth of disenchantment, that faith that at one point the ladder to heaven was a bit sturdier and one need not have been as remarkable a soul as Blake to hear the flapping of the angels' wings. "There is a widespread sense of loss here," writes the philosopher Charles Taylor in A Secular Age, "if not always of God, then at least of meaning." I'm not sure that an overabundance of meaning was ever the birthright of humanity, but like all creation myths, this parable about disenchantment does what it needs to do in aiding me to make sense of the world. Because an angel is not something to be etherized and anatomized, dissected and categorized; an angel refers to nothing so vulgar as a body that can be examined with scalpel and calipers, but is closer to a fleeting feeling, a figure of speech, a turn of phrase, a sense that there is something greater and truer and more beautiful than you, and that despite it all you are loved and are capable of loving in return. For you see, an angel is merely love that is given a proper name, grace that is imagined with a face. A blessed wisdom that is so close we can sometimes hear it call to us in our names, the reminder of a wholly foreign and holy Other beautiful and irrational goodness. -ED SIMON Elysium page 15
NEW HISTORY OF WESTERN ART
Chapter 2 Art as Idea page 122
Thinking about art has been dominated by the concept of 'mimesis' since antiquity. Freely translated, the ancient Greek term refers to the 'imitation' of nature which human beings sought to recreate in their art until well into the nineteenth century. The degree to which the creator succeeds in this goal has always been one of the most important benchmarks for the quality of the work of art. Successful mimesis resulted in what the Greeks - who did not have a word for visual artworks - called mimemata (singular mimema: the result of imitation). The concept is of the utmost importance to any understanding of Western art history. Mimesis was the focus of Western visual culture from the antique era until the paradigm shift of Impressionism and its offshoots began to undermine the principle from the latter part of the nineteenth century. No artist before then had dared to produce art that did not consider nature its ultimate model. To this day, many people still judge a work's merit in terms of its mimetic qualities. Consequently, the principle of imitation was at the forefront of the artist's possibilities and limitations for centuries. The techniques of oil painting and linear perspective, for instance, did not just develop out of nowhere but were vital steps in the ancient quest for perfection in the emulation of reality that has typified Western art. Even more than that, the notion that art is essentially an imitation of nature actually fed through over time into the visual culture of non-Western religions and cultures. The ancient Greek concept played an active part, for instance, in the visualisation of Buddhism, whose founder was represented symbolically during the religion's first centuries (up to the fourth century BCE). It was only after Alexander the Great's conquests in the Indus Valley that the Buddha began to be depicted as the idealised human figure we know today [2.6]. Mimesis might thus appear simple and self-evident at first sight, yet it is far from being so. Simulating what we see is not a straightforward process. The term itself is not unambiguous either and has undergone various shifts in meaning since ancient times. Over the centuries, mimesis became an umbrella concept taking in ideas such as imitation, representation, similitudo, simulacrum and prototypum. If we delve more deeply into the phenomenon, which is precisely what occurred in antique Greek culture, emulation proves to be highly complex. Artists can, for instance, imitate nature in an idealised way by seeking to perfect it, but they can also strive for a 'photographic' realism [2.7, 2.8] or give free rein to their creativity and imagine things that cannot be imitated, as they do not actually exist. The centaurs on the famous Parthenon frieze [2.9 ] appear lifelike, but these hybrid mythological beings - half human, half horse - are obviously a product of human imagination.
Ursula magazine - artists Fabien Giraud and Raphael Siboni in conversation with Anne Stenne about possible futures and the influence of Pierre Huyghe
FG: I think a good work is a work that doesn't know its audience. Upon its creation, it doesn't yet know what its audience is, because otherwise it's just communication. Communication is about the transfer of information between two pre-constituted subjects. But the question mark is what I'm obsessed with — and I think Pierre is also. You don't know the identity of the audience or the viewer. And I think that's crucial, not to presuppose. Otherwise, you do bad work.
AS: I agree with you. The work should not be addressed intentionally to an audience as such. It should be indifferent. To push the idea further, it can also exist independent of the presence of the viewer, which is something essential in Pierre's work. He often says, "I'm not exhibiting some thing to someone. I'm exhibiting someone to something.”
FG: It's very difficult to presuppose what the human really is. The only definition of the human I can come up with is that it's something always in the process of transformation of de-identifying itself to become itself.
AS: The human is an escape route.
Elysium, A Visual History of Angelology, Ed Simon
Those who go searching for angels inevitably convince themselves that they've found them; it's the uneasy visions among the unprepared that announce themselves. In my case, I happened to be sitting on my faux leather couch, dusted in crumbs and stains, in my former apartment that overlooked the Lehigh Valley and the crumbling, rusting steel mill some miles downriver, either reading a novel or watching television, I can't remember. Suddenly, with absolutely no indication this would happen, I was utterly, totally, completely, and fully convinced of the following: the unity of all creation, the benevolence of that reality, the thrumming of a blessed energy beneath the universe— and most of all, I felt a genuine and infinite tenderness toward all of my fellow suffering creatures, an empathy that for a second made pure adrenaline course through my heart, that left my mouth dry and my head dizzy. I felt, for a second, as if I was in the glorious presence of a kind and knowing and wonderful something.
Now, normally I'm rather a shit. Which is why this uncharacteristically moving sense of togetherness with existence still remains so memorable to me. And I'm under no illusions as to the veracity of that experience, that divine "click" that suddenly moved in heart and spirit, soul and mind. No doubt there could be some recourse to material explanation, a kernel of dopamine that got loose in my synapses, some endorphins kicked up for a physiological reason. At that point I was a few months sober, and the reformed among us tribes of dipsomaniacs often speak of a so-called pink cloud, the heady rush of those first few months when you've dried out and you're no longer bathing your nervous system in liquid depressant, so the most basic of normal functions appear as if heaven to you. So maybe it was some random neuron flaring, just a bit of the cognitive flotsam that gets trudged up now and again, more often through chemical inter-vention, but occasionally through the sheer randomness of everything.
All of this could be true-and it strikes me as utterly irrelevant. Because whether that experience was just "in my head" misses the point of what perception is-everything is, of course, mediated through my head. The question is whether it corresponded to anything in the outside world, but when it comes to ecstasy and transcendence that very question strikes me as more of a categorization mistake than as anything that is particularly useful, Barbara Ehrenreich, the great muckraking journalist, writer, and thinker, had a not dissimilar experience when she was a thirteen-year-old girl in California, writing in Living with a Wild God: A Nonbeliever's Search for the Truth about Everything how she suddenly realized that "it seemed astounding to just be moving forward on my own strength, unim-peded, pulled toward the light." This was no Saul to Damascus moment for Ehrenreich, who was and remained an atheist her whole life, but it was an acknowledgment of an uncanny something. Reflecting on that moment, she writes, "You can and should use logic and reason all you want. But it would be a great mistake to ignore the stray bit of data that doesn't fit into your preconceived theories, that may even confound everything you thought you were sure of."
Because the situation is, whether angels are "real or not," people have long experienced them, and still do. I'm envious, because I would love to see an angel, though I think that I've experienced grace, and that's not necessarily a different thing. Often the word "theophany" is used to describe the divine encounter, the experience of something that is infinite and eternal, both immanent and transcendent, and far above our prosaic reality. The beauty of theophany is that such encounters happen in the real world, for where else would they occur? - Elysium, A Visual History of Angelology, Ed Simon, Introduction - Torward an Angelic Poetics, page 7
Henri Cartier-Bresson, The Mind’s Eye
To me, photography is the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event as well as of a precise organization of forms which give that event its proper expression.
I believe that, through the act of living, the discovery of oneself is made concurrently with the discovery of the world around us, which can mold us, but which can also be affected by us. A balance must be established between these two worlds-the one inside us and the one outside us. As the result of a constant reciprocal process, both these worlds come to form a single one. And it is this world that we must communicate.
But this takes care only of the content of the picture. For me, content cannot be separated from form. By form, I mean a rigorous organization of the interplay of surfaces, lines, and values. It is in this organization alone that our conceptions and emotions become concrete and communicable. In photography, visual organization can stem only from a developed instinct. - 1952
Henri Cartier-Bresson, The Mind’s Eye - Writings on photography and photographers, page 42
A NEW HISTORY OF WESTERN ART by Koenraad Jonckheere
A NEW HISTORY OF WESTERN ART by Koenraad Jonckheere
page15
[[A NEW HISTORY OF WESTERN ART]], [[Koenraad Jonckheere]], page 15, introduction
The opening up of the discipline of art history in the twentieth century provides the basis for how this book is structured. Art history took off in the previous century, with increasingly frequent attempts to explain artistic developments from new and interdisciplinary angles. These innovations relied on a succession of big names: art historians who creatively scrutinised the history of their own field before thoroughly transforming it. Some of them - Heinrich Wölfflin or Max J. Friedländer, for instance - developed classic models for the study of style and authenticity, while others presented new interpretative concepts and structures. One such was Aby Warburg, who pioneered iconology - an innovative discipline that evolved out of iconography, with the goal of interpreting visual language within a broad context. Furthermore, the focus of art historiography has shifted in recent decades away from the relationship between artist and artwork toward reception aesthetic' (the way the work has been received by the public over the centuries) on the one hand and 'technical art history' (the study of the material and technical characteristics of the objects) on the other.
The fresh interest in an artwork's various layers of meaning ranged from the elementary analysis of their iconography through to their complex contextual interpretation. In pursuing that interest, the aforementioned art historians were among those who, from the twentieth century onwards, consistently drew on insights from other academic disciplines: economics, the history of science, neurology, sociology, anthropology, religious studies, chemistry, mathematics etc. As a result of this, art history is no longer purely 'historical' (based on source research) or formalist (stylistic history), but has transformed itself into a Bildwissenschaft, the study of visual culture. In this way, art has increasingly been examined from entirely new perspectives, with the emphasis in many cases no longer on aesthetic value but rather on the way in which its visual language functions within a given culture and context. This tendency has been reinforced by the steadily advancing visualisation of communication in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Today's newspaper front pages are filled with photographs rather than text. Images capture the stories told on social media, with millions of photos and videos uploaded to the Internet every day. In this digital world, even the physical relationship with the material object seems to be disappearing. Aesthetic images flash by and seldom appear in physical form any more. Prolonged contemplation has given way to fleeting stimuli.
This book considers art as a catalyst. the object that absorbs meanings and history and drives the chemistry of thought processes. Separate from the aesthetic experience or intriguing concept alone, art is the materialisation of new technologies, the visualisation of new societal paradigms or even the financial valorisation of a perception. Art is the instrument of politics and religion, the pacesetter
of revolutions and the spark that triggers extreme reactions, such as image-smashing. Art is a visual idiom, the vehicle of unlimited meaning but, above all, an exceptionally powerful form of communication, all with a touch of magic, as Johannes à Porta recognised.
The book does not agree in this sense with Ernst Gombrich's famous statement that 'There really is no such thing as Art. There are only artists? To claim the opposite would be going too far, but the least we can say is that it is the works of art that call the shots. They are first and foremost wonderful objects in which an infinite number of stories that appeal to the imagination cohere. The upshot of this is also that beauty and taste are not the be-all and end-all either; they are merely one link in a complex of factors.
Akakdemie-X, Christopher Williams
[[akademie-X]], [[Christopher Williams]]
Lesson 35 - No Plexiglas, No Electricity, No Humour; or Love is Colder Than Death, page 36
PAYING ATTENTION TO OTHERS - Pay attention to what other artists are doing. It gets harder and harder as the amount of art being produced keeps growing, but it’s super important to know what your colleagues are up to. To be able to think about the present historically, you have to look at as much as you can right now. There’s a more social aspect to it as well, which is that, if you expect people to pay attention to your work, you need to pay attention to theirs… artists such as John Baldessari and Ed Ruscha continue to go to galleries every month, getting to know younger artists and constantly looking at other people’s work.
It’s important to absorb as much information as possible but then to think through your materials.
AKADEMIE X LESSONS IN ART + LIFE - Tim Rollins
[[akademie-X]],[[Tim Rollins]]
page 268 lesson 28: Art is Not Just Experience
We believe good art is work that doesn't ask permission to exist, to be is enough. Good art is anything made sincerely yours. This art can be affirmative, shamelessly beautiful or ugly, a contribution of dissent, audacious and critical, yet deeply celebratory by the very fact of its existence. We think good art is always a gift, an affirmation of a mysterious gratitude. It's not instrumental but feels inevitable. Art is a faith proposition built upon a base of wonder.
AKADEMIE X LESSONS IN ART + LIFE - Wangechi Mutu
[[akademie-X]], [[Wangechi Mutu]]
page 228, Lesson 24: Living Art
The sharpening of visual intelligence is crucial for artists. I would recommend drawing - and by this, I don't mean drawing in a pedantic, high-school, instructional manner; I mean using your hand and your mind to pull out information from the subconscious onto a surface and into the real world. It is one of the best ways to shorten the distance between your brain and your fingertips and to allow you to gauge what is going on from within yourself. When you speed up that process, by drawing with as basic a material as pencil or charcoal, or ink and brush, your senses of intuition, honesty and integrity are sharpened. I would also push every artist to enhance their sense of context and their role as artist by visiting museums or the theatre, going to poetry readings, hanging out at DJ slams, listening to live bands - to participate in and enter cultural spaces in one way or another. Figuring out what's happening in other genres and media in your particular moment in time is important to you as a visual artist because even if you don't feel it's relevant to you, making cross-references makes you aware of your own position and place, your aliveness at that particular moment in time.
Everyone should understand as much about the past as they can possibly get in their heads. As the voices of their culture and their communities, artists in particular should know as much as possible about what has happened prior to their own existence. It's a way to stand out as the voice of the present, to pay homage to what has happened, and avoid repeating and recycling the mistakes that have already been made. It's also a way to remain in touch with your own humanity, and with the humanity of others whom you don't know.
AKADEMIE X LESSONS IN ART + LIFE - lesson 26
TUTOR: Raqs Media Collective
Page 248
The Third Lesson: Time for Wine
The third lesson is about time. Sometimes, to learn this lesson, we have to prepare a feast - a feast with no food, but with a lot of wine and many notes. One of the forms this has taken is a symposium on time, which was first produced in the Wide Open School at the Hayward Gallery, London, in the summer of 2012. The form is simple and remains durable.
Fifteen or so participants sit in a large table, each with a plate and a wine glass in front of them. A set of carefully chosen notes on time printed on index cards appear on the plates, in the form of ‘courses’. Each ‘guest’ reads the ‘portion’ on his/her plate and everyone drinks, and after a round of readings (a course) the ‘table’ has a conversation. The idea is to let thinking, conversation and the requisite amount of wine do its job to add up to a stimulating consideration of time. Time itself is physically present. The cumulative, incremental effect of wine, factored through time, tranforms the experience into being enveloped inside a dilating fold. ‘Students’ cease to be students, and process elaborate theories. The reticent blossom into the loquacious, and the shy become bold. Once, at the end of the feast, people burst into song, and tears. Invariably, there has been laughter. The length of time this takes is a minimum of three hours, about the duration of a well-paced meal. As the courses gather momentum, an intensification of ideas and images, of associations and possibilities, takes hold, and we begin to get a grip on the qualia of time itself. We understand the relationship between, the presence of art. and the intensification of experience: of a different sense of time.
AKADEMIE X LESSONS IN ART + LIFE
AKADEMIE X LESSONS IN ART + LIFE
LESSON 23
TUTOR: Carrie Moyer
Page 220
Sharpen your visual intelligence by looking at art in person - Close looking is a means of gathering information in order to analyse a work of art within the parameters set by its maker. Through careful examination the object reveals its materials, size, scale; the processes and methods of its facture; the identity of the maker; its relationship to the history of the medium and genre as well as to the world at large. using this form of connoisseurship to decide if art is ‘good’ or ‘bad’ would defeat the purpose. It’s more like being a scientist and learning how to analyse and identify what you’re looking at.
Introduction by Robert Motherwell, page 10, Dialogs with Marcel Duchamp, Pierre Cabanne
An artist must be unusually intelligent in order to grasp simultaneously many structured relations. In fact, intelligence can be considered as the capacity to grasp complex relations; in this sense, Leonardo’s intelligence, for instance, is almost beyond belief. Duchamp’s intelligence contributed many things, of course, but for me its greatest accomplishment was to take him beyond the merely “aesthetic” concerns that face every “modern” artist - whose role is neither religious nor communal, but instead secular and individual. This problem has been called “the despair of the aesthetic:” if all colors or nudes are equally pleasing to the eye, why does the artist choose one color or figure rather than another? If he does not make a purely “aesthetic” choice, he must look for further criteria on which to base his value judgments. Kierkegaard held that artistic criteria were first the real of the aesthetic, then the ethical, then the realm of the holy. Duchamp, as a nonbeliever, could not have accepted holiness as a criterion but, in setting up for himself complex technical problems or new ways of expressing erotic subject matter, for instance, he did find an ethic beyond the “aesthetic” for his ultimate choices. And his most successful works, paradoxically, take on that indirect beauty achieved only by those artists who have been concerned with more than the merely sensuous. In this way, Duchamp’s intelligence accomplished nearly everything possible within the reach of a modern artist, earning him the unlimited and fully justified respect of successive small groups of admirers throughout his life. But, as he often says in the following pages, it is posterity who will judge, and he, like Stendhal, had more faith in posterity than in his contemporaries. At the same time, one learns from his conversations of an extraordinary artistic adventure, filled with direction, discipline, and disdain for art as a trade and for the repetition of what has already been done.
How to be an Artist, Jerry Saltz, Page 76, Zettel 150
If you think that all art should be like High Renaissance painting, or like van Gogh, Eva Hesse, or Basquiat, think again. Human beings are hardwired to crave change. The universe is expanding; so are we, and so is art. Which doesn’t mean it’s getting better, or worse, only that all art was once contemporary art, in conversation with its time. yours is, too. Every choice you make - should serve not nostalgia, but your visceral present. You are an artist of modern life. That personal, specific urgency is what finds every successful work of art. - How to be an Artist, Jerry Saltz, Page 76, Zettel 150
The Story of Art, E.H. Gombrich Page 154, Zettel 148
The great artists of subsequent periods had made one discovery after another which allowed them to conjure up a convincing picture of the visible world, but none of them had seriously challenged the conviction that each object in nature has its definite fixed form and colour which must be easily recognizable in a painting. It may be said, therefore, that Manet and his followers brought about a revolution in the rendering of colours which is almost comparable with the revolution in the representation of forms brought about by the Greeks. They discovered that, if we look at nature in the open, we do not see individual objects each with its own colour but rather a bright medley of tints which blend in our eye or really in our mind. - The Story of Art, E.H. Gombrich Page 154, Zettel 148
Reductionism in Art and Brain Science page 42, Zettel 147
Some birds, insects, and fish have photoreceptors that respond to the ultraviolet light (shorter wave lengths than humans can see), and some snakes, insects; and vampire bats have receptors that can respond to infrared radiations or heat (longer wavelengths than humans can see). Certainly those animals can see spectral “colors” that we cannot and their perceptions are presumably different from ours - Reductionism in Art and Brain Science page 42, Zettel 147
Reductionism in Art and Brain Science page 184, Zettel 142
While abstract paintings that appeal to our imagination call into play the brain’s top-down processing mechanism, figurative paintings that appeal to us call into play the default network of the brain. The default network, which was discovered in 2001 by Marcus Raichle (Raichle et al. 2001), consist primarily of the three brain regions: the medial temporal lobe, which is involved in memory: the posterior cingulate cortex, which is concerned with evaluating sensory information; and the medial prefrontal cortex, which is concerned with theory of mind - that is with distinguishing between another person’s mind, his or her aspirations and goals, and one’s own mind…recent studies suggest that the default network is most active during high aesthetic experience in art. (Edward Vesesel Nava Ravin, and Gabriella Starr) This intriguing finding suggests that since activation of the default network is related to our sense of self, its activation in response to art enables our perception of painting to interact with mental processes related to the self, possibly affecting them and even being incorporated into them. This line of thought is consistent with the idea that a person’s taste in art is linked to his or her sense of identity - Reductionism in Art and Brain Science page 184, Zettel 142
Reductionism in Art and Brain Science, Eric Kandel page 165, Zettel 137
Katz introduced a new reductionist concept into figurative art: his paintings have a flat background and lack of conventional perspective. In addition, he stressed pictorial values over narrative. He explained that “style and appearance are the thing that I’m more concerned about than about what something means. I’d like to have the style be the content, meaning, emptied of content.” (Strand 1984) - Reductionism in Art and Brain Science, Eric Kandel page 165, Zettel 137