The Story of Art, E.H. Gombrich, page 564, Zettel 160

What upset the public about Expressionist art was, perhaps, not so much the fact that nature had been distorted as that the result led away from beauty…But the men who claimed to be serious artists should forget that if they must change the appearance of things they should idealize them rather than make them ugly was strongly resented. But (Edvard) Munch might have retorted that a shout of anguish is not beautiful, and that it would be insincere to look only at the pleasing side of life. For the Expressionists felt so strongly about human suffering, poverty, violence and passion, that they were inclined to think that the insistence on harmony and beauty in art was only born out of a refusal to be honest. The art of the classical masters, of a Raphael or Correggio, seemed to them insincere and hypocritical. They wanted to face the stark facts of our existence and to express their compassion for the disinherited and the ugly. It became almost a point of honour with them to avoid anything which smelt of prettiness and polish, and to shock the ‘bougeois‘ out of his real or imagined complacency. -

artist Marina Abramovic, from AKADEMIE X, LESSONS IN ART + LIFE

artist Marina Abramovic, from AKADEMIE X, LESSONS IN ART + LIFE

Excerpts from her message

AN ARTIST’S RELATION TO INSPIRATION

  • An artist should not lie to himself or to others

  • An artist should look deep inside himself for inspiration

  • The deeper he looks inside himself, the more universal he becomes

  • The artist is universe

  • The artist is universe

  • The artist is universe

AN ARTIST’S RELATION TO TRANSPARENCY

  • The artist should give and receive at the same time

  • Transparency means receptivity

  • Transparency means to give

  • Transparency means to receive

  • Transparency means receptivity

  • Transparency means to give

  • Transparency means to receive

  • Transparency means receptivity

  • Transparency means to give

  • Transparency means to receive

AN ARTIST’S RELATION TO SYMBOLS

  • An artist creates his own symbols

  • Symbols are an artist’s language

  • The language must then be translated

  • Sometimes it is difficult to find the key

  • Sometimes it is difficult to find the key

  • Sometimes it is difficult to find the key

AN ARTIST’S RELATION TO SILENCE

  • An artist has to understand silence

  • An artist has to create space for silence to enter his work

  • Silence is like an island in the middle of a turbulent ocean

  • Silence is like an island in the middle of a turbulent ocean

  • Silence is like an island in the middle of a turbulent ocean

AN ARTIST’S RELATION TO SOLITUDE

  • An artist must make time for long periods of solitude

  • Solitude is extremely important

  • Away from home

  • Away from the studio

  • Away from family

  • Away from friends

  • An artist should stay for long periods of time at waterfalls

  • An artist should stay for long periods of time exploring volcanoes

  • An artist should stay for long periods of time looking at fast-running rivers

  • An artist should stay for long periods of time at horizons where the ocean and sky meet

  • An artist should stay for long periods of time looking at the stars in the night sky

How to be an Artist, Jerry Saltz #31, Zettel 159

If you are stymied by some artists, keep their names on a list and keep coming back to them. You might start with Rembrandt, unflinching in depicting the physical weight of the world, every vulnerable. Or Constable, as elementally tactile as any artist who ever lived. Once an artist finally makes sense to you, take on a new one. You owe it to you yourself as a seeing machine -

How to be an Artist, Jerry Saltz #19, Zettel 157

Embed thought in Material. What does this mean? An artwork should express thought and emotion ( I contend that the two can’t be separated.) Your goal as an artist is to use physical materials to make these thoughts and emotions, however simple or complex, accessible to the viewer…Erick Fischl had said that he “wanted to paint what couldn’t be said.” All artists are trying, on some level, to do the same.

How to be an Artist, Jerry Saltz #10, Zettel 156

…serious artists tend to develop a kind of creative mechanism - a conceptual approach - that allows them to be led by new ideas and surprise themselves without deviating from their own artistic principles. As an artist, you’re always studying your environment, absorbing sensations, memories of how things work and don’t. The goal is to create a practice that allows a constant recalibration between your imagination and the world around you.

The Story of Art, E.H. Gombrich, Page 544, Zettel 152

…in all the struggles and gropings there was one thing he was prepared to sacrifice if need be: the conventional ‘correctness’ of outline. He (Cezanne) was not out to distort nature; but he did not mind very much if it became distorted in some minor detail provided this helped him to obtain the desired effect….he hardly realized that this example of indifference to ‘correct drawing’ would start a landslide in art. - The Story of Art, E.H. Gombrich, Page 544, Zettel 152

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

WHY POETRY - Matthew Zapruder. page 42 - 43, Zettel 149

Through art, language and therefore experience become “defamiliarized”, so we can feel and experience anew:


The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known. The technique of art is to make objects “unfamiliar”, to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged - Victor Shklovsky

Poetry exhibits the purest form of defamiliarization. This is because in a poem, other tasks such as telling a story, or fully and exhaustively expressing an idea, never take priority. Therefore, it is in poetry that we see most clearly and powerfully, without any other ultimate distraction, how language can be made deliberately strange, how it becomes especially “a difficult, roughened, impeded language”, in order to jar us awake. - WHY POETRY - Matthew Zapruder. page 42 - 43, Zettel 149

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 185, Zettel 143

To be abstracted is to be at some distance from the material world. It is a form of local exaltation but also, sometime, of disorientation, even disturbance. Art at its most powerful can induce such a state, perhaps most potently. - Nancy Princenthal, New York art critique - Reductionism in Art and Brain Science page 185, Zettel 143

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 161, Zettel 135

Turell describes his work in the following terms: “My work has no object, no image and no focus. With no object, no image and no focus, what are you looking at? You are looking at you looking. What is important to me is to create an experience of wordless thought” - Reductionism in Art and Brain Science, Eric Kandel page 161, Zettel 135

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

Reductionism in Art and Brain Science, Erick Kandel page 179, Zettel 139

Thus the reason art pases such an enormous challenge to the beholder is that it teaches us to look at art - and, in a sense, at the world - in a new way. Abstract art dares our visual system to interpret an image that is fundamentally different from the kind of images our brain has evolved to reconstruct. - Reductionism in Art and Brain Science, Erick Kandel page 179, Zettel 139