To create a wall plane art, free from picture-plane and frame …. to revive seeing as an instantaneous, ongoing, physical awareness - a dance of attention between elements, properties, and place …. to extend Cezanne’s ‘non finito’, Mondrian’s ‘DeStijl’, and Rabinowitch’s ‘Construction of Vision’ as paths towards a concrete, continuous comprehension.
Conscious Seeing - “We see immediately and continuously with our whole bodies. Pictures are for the head.” (James Gibson)
Using wall plane applications made from washi, art papers and other light responsive materials I create an array of elements held within a viewer’s field of vision. Eclipsing relations and oppositions between elements and their properties can both create and destroy an array’s appearance. Changing appearances within an unframed field can heighten awareness of our ‘making’ of a work’s ‘poetic’ unity.
Poiein/poiesis (to make Gr.) "the activity in which a person brings something into being that did not exist before.”
Recognizing our unifying ‘making’ force in seeing can draw attention to our participation in what we consider to be “real”. This in turn can present “reality” as a cultural construction, a process of collective “realization” through perception, imagination, and language - changing and evolving over time.
Our awareness of seeing itself as the creative force in Art is subdued by the dominance of the bounded ‘picture plane’ that unifies, subordinates, and isolates its contents both before and after ‘seeing’. Any identity formed from our engagement with the infinite energy of the universe and its looming sheens of appearance comes from within. “Where man is not Nature is barren”. William Blake
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“We evaluate artists by how much they are able to rid themselves of convention, to change history,” Richard Serra
Against interpretation: not an explanation for “that” … for direct perception and play, an ongoing participation in “this”
" It must be abstract. It must change. It must give pleasure.” (from Wallace Stevens' poem 'Notes towards a Supreme Fiction' ):
“A war between the mind and sky” (Wallace Stevens) field of light ) ( light of mind
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field of light: An equivalent to Monet’s “Envelope” -- "For me, a landscape does not exist in its own right, since its appearance changes at every moment; but the surrounding atmosphere brings it to life - the light and the air which vary continually. For me, it is only the surrounding atmosphere which gives subjects their true value." Monet
Can awareness of Monet’s "envelope" be made directly present in art, rather than through representation?
Arrays are designed to engage a flat white wall as an open ‘ground’ for element applications and a reflector of ambient light. I am not interested in a theatrically lit "White Cube", just a sufficient wall space with adequate light from different sources. Ambient light: reflected - diffused - absorbed
light of mind: judgments of sameness and difference between elements and their properties, alignments, proportions, and locations. — a coherence and decoherence of relations across time within the unifying presence of the field of light.
An extent of appearance - not a content of recognition
field of light ) ( light of mind (polarity: mutually generative force of oppositions)
“Extent”: a polarity between an array’s expanding outness in the field of light (vertical and horizontal extension) -- and its cohering inness in the directed light of mind. (focused intention)
the visual field as a process of transaction between boundary and intimacy (peripheral and foveal - physiognomic?)
an ornament becomes art when it appears to generate its ground as place, and when this ground presents its ornament as particular. i.e. Some Romanesque capitals appear to be the source of their vaults while the convergence of vaults to their column accentuates the uniqueness of each capital.
a process of individuation -- In Art, mind and matter coexist. Perception is an ongoing act of measure that enables existence of both perceiver and perceived. -- anti "picture" (i.e. the picture as object....a frozen window to an imagined place.) anti essence. A polarity is anti essence.
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MAKING: Method )( Sensation (facture is a dimension)
Method: Materials/Tools/Actions
Materials: Mostly common cheap materials selected for their opposed sensations; crafted, and installed to reveal the “field of light”: paper, aluminum foil, charcoal, wax, chalk, sand, mesh, plastics, wall paint. (Arte Povera) no intrinsic value in materials that can obscure aesthetic function. (house materials)
Tools: knives, straight edges, meshes, abrasives, squeegees, cellulose and other adhesives, water (house tools)
Actions: . No: gestural actions in the use of media (i.e. drawing, painting, cutting) Yes: sagittal actions -- printing, tearing, screening, spraying, flocking, blotting, placing, applying --Basic hand craftsmanship - no mysterious techniques - Papier Colle - Braque’s “papery, powdery, procedures” (Picasso)
A work is an "array" of applications - not a mural, site specific, or environmental installation but a location and space established by the placement of elements. (Matisse cut outs as applications: adjustment and placement )
Materially a piece is insubstantial compared to its size, but its properties, craftsmanship, and installation are primary to its being. There is little of substance to see except differences between surface, edge, and light through point of view and judgment. But each element of application is perceived as an object distinct and separable from its ground, yet attached to the wall with precision, continuity, and tightness - like a limpet.
Sensation: Contrast)(Gradient)(Affect (all senses are one)
Isolation and continuity: the appearance of taut adhesion (touch) to the wall gives each element a feeling of autonomy in a common ground, conditions for a sense of place.
Saggital actions in the use of media give textures, tones and gradients a sense of non-expressive, immediate directness - another form of "application".
Whiteness has no meaning … the white wall is a scale free reflector of ambient light. Occasional use of indigo as a dark element, a recognition of color on the border of another dimension. (At the moment I feel that strong or different colors distract from awareness of an overall field of light).
Shifting appearances but no spatial illusions.
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DESIGN Form/Emphasis/Tradition
Design principles are used to join and separate elements and their properties, by acts of perception (light of mind)
Open art pulls you in and spreads you out, but does not push away as in the “presence” emphasis of Minimalism. Yet the wall plane becomes a stabile counter to the directed forces of looking.
Within the picture plane composition is constrained and weakened. But free from a fixed external boundary composition can directly address the body’s internal sense of equilibrium between forces of balance and impulse. I prefer the term "array" over "composition" in the sense of arranging elements in an open field to be ready for action.
When an unframed array is perceived directly and kinesthetically as a “dynamic equilibrium” it can no longer be considered as a presentation of a hierarchical division of relative importance. (Minimalism's critique of modernist abstraction) - turning Mondrian inside out.
Judd’s hybrid art ("Specific Object") resists composition by creating an immediate "presence" that is conceptually apparent and not dependent on construction over time. The "image" of an array is not seen as a given, but only as a result of ongoing acts of construction and destruction.
The invention of a composition always permitted surprise and aesthetic decisions from within the process of making (as well as looking). An "array" can resist boundary, shape, and preconceived concepts as content. (like composition arrays can evoke a figurative (anthropomorphic) representation. Emphasizing different materials in the elements resist this.)
Simple forms towards a formless unity
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ETC.
Modernism is long dead. Long live its desire for iconoclasm, new vision, and the primacy of the “actual” in a time that is losing it as the source of reality.
not conceptual but comprehensible – no mediated interface but an unmediated direct perception of things, sensations and their relations --- not digital, not analog, not metrical, not symbolic, not transcendent, not ironic, --- direct, intimate, immanent,actual and out. “Perception destroys memory by its own act.” David Rabinowitch
Euro modernity’s misguided universal idealism could be reimagined as a diverse “Consciousness that exists for itself.” (Gilroy “Black Atlantic”) Through his love of Jazz dance and music Mondrian was beginning to see that his aspiration for a convergence of life and art already existed in African culture but in a fundamentally different way than “The Modern” was going.
The strength of “things” as art is in their stillness and silence. In this they can bring to awareness the dynamism of “reality” even if only for a moment. "To restore silence is the role of objects " Samuel Beckett (the unique silence of Calder’s mobiles)
A work becomes art when it is seen again and again with pleasure, surprise and fulfillment. (Matisse's "armchair"?) Most environmental installations are seen cursorily and only once as a form of entertainment or information. Where do they go? In works of Art the inside is bigger than the outside. “Opening a Center”
Can Visual Art steer our storytelling minds to the dead end where the imagination makes a leap for the real? Can at least some Art be a conscious opposition to "virtual reality" and the “algorithm” (Piranesi’s infinite interior)
Determinations of sameness and difference can lead to an awareness of the particular in the right conditions. The particular does not exist by itself but in polarity between relation and sensation. Physical beauty is a superficial device for attraction, but it can activate an alertness and attention to the particular in a kind of timelessness.
Dimensions: Vertical is the body's unification of gravity (in) and ground (on). Horizontal is the body's unification of distance (away) and extension (beside). Saggital is the body's unification of intimacy through seeing acts: foveal (within) and peripheral (without). Facture is the unification between matter and properties
A construction is a counterpoint across dimensions, not an arrangement of parts, but an embodiment of independence.
Artists of coherence and decoherence: (unity across time)
Mondriaan dynamic equilibrium – balance)(light - in/out - form/formless - construction/destruction
Pollock, Rothko foveal )(peripheral (intimacy/boundary) flat/spatial
Rabinowitch construction of vision --"I am aiming not for a wholeness, but the continuous regeneration of perception with respect to one thing." “scale”
Reinhardt, Rothko, Irwin liminal boundaries/ facture
Martin, Hesse, Judd formless facture
Dorethea Rockburne. Drawing which makes itself
Morandi double edge (inside/outside) substance/appearance
Cezanne the “non-finito” bringing the outside in.
(DeKooning’s late work)
Immanent Realists:
Owen Barfield (Goethe) Figuration
Daniel Kahneman System 1 / System 2
Gibson (s) Ecological Perception (direct - embodied - affordance)
To create a floor-plane art from horizontal, contingent massive planes that in their grounded yet changing appearances are free from empathy identity. Observations across shifting alignments of form, light and orientation can open awareness of our vertical presence, standing, and place.
Notes for “Bedouin”
Notes for “Black Atlantic”
Notes for “Fields”
My Art --- wall plane application groups: “Array”, “Bedouin” and “Atlantic”
participation/separation. “…Fail Better”. “Appearance”. “Loomings”
SOME ROUGH THOUGHTS TO EVOLVE AND ELABORATE:
EXTENT vs. CONTENT – an unbound art of our experienced ‘extent’ not a bounded interior holding virtual ‘content’.
EXTENT AND PLACE
To present an art as balance in becoming – an expansion and contraction between elements, their properties and place. To release Cezanne’s “non finito” from rigid planes and frames, and amplify seeing as ongoing comprehension.
My ‘wall plane’ art challenges the dominance of the picture object by presenting a new format for frontal attention. Compositional. balance in a picture plane is represented by the unity of the picture plane itself. In open art arrivals at balance are physically experienced.through one’s body.
With wall plane applications made from papers and light responsive materials I create an array of elements held within the ambient field of a viewer’s vision. Perceived alignments and oppositions between elements and their properties both create and destroy an array’s appearance. Changing appearances within an unframed field can bring awareness of the viewer’s active making of a work’s ‘poetic’ unity.
Poiein/ poiesis (to make Gr.) "the activity in which a person brings something into being that did not exist before”
Recognizing that we are the unifying ‘making’ force within seeing can draw attention to our participation in what we consider to be “real”. This in turn can present “reality” as a cultural construction, a process of collective “realization” through perception, imagination and language changing and evolving over time.
Any identity formed from our engagement with the energy of the universe and its myriad sheens of appearance comes from within. “Where man is not Nature is barren”. William Blake
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Conscious Creative Seeing is who we are. Awareness of this is blocked by the passivity of the picture plane that separates and unifies is contents in advance of and at the end of seeing.
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revealing the power of balance – the force of “apart” identity. Apart reality is repressed by the picture plane. “Apart playing” (cool RFThompson) Apart composition?
Proprioception is the “groove” of seeing. Unity as balance in a dynamic field of oppositions is experienced as a kind of emptiness (extent) not fullness (content)
Paintings, drawings, and photos diminish awareness of their surrounding space. Pictorial objects set an inward focus by making the picture plane an independent ‘backing’ with a hard boundary isolated from its surroundings. The separation of this plane is often emphasized by a rigid frame. And frames often hold protective sheets of glass increasing the picture’s isolation from the viewer’s space. This inward drive is to enhance the picture as a different place and time for the viewer to align with and imaginatively enter.
with its fixed perspective the framed picture plane freezes the optic flow of our moving body in passing .
The bounded picture plane as a unified given does enable the mobility of the art object, and a space for freedom of expression and intuition through the immediacy of decision making in painting and drawing.
The hanging of a painting vs. application vs. Mural painting.
It is also true that pictorial artworks presented as decorative objects are radiant within their locations. This outward expression begins with the tangibility of the artwork’s materials and surfaces and is amplified by the coherence of design and facture that compose the pictorial space. A pictorial object’s radiance is often enhanced by matting, decorative frames, and lighting. These containers and amplifiers draw attention to the unity of the picture as an object before any considered judgment of its internal orders can be made. Care in “hanging” these vibrant objects may enable awareness of a wall or part of a room as a “place”, but this will not affect the isolation and dislocation of these objects’ illusionary interiors.
A computer screen or a projected image’s exclusion from its surroundings is absolute. Luminous screens are transparent, offering no dimension of touch, obliterating any sense of place and to some degree time. The same is true of large-scale LED screens that have the capacity to address a viewer’s body more directly or overwhelm its environment. Even “augmented reality”, with its virtual overlays on our surroundings, maintains its separation from “the real”. The “metaverse” now offers a new dimension of isolation and fantasy.
By conveying information through a ‘picture’ format “Media” (orig: Middle - Between) in general, separates us from shared space and its dynamic field of intimacy. This escalating limitation of the immediate in seeing is a loss. ‘Printed” text on an illuminated screen or even a sheet of paper also contributes to this separation.
My work may have several parts that activate connections but remain as they are without representation. The experience of unity in seeing them together is not diminished by the picture plane or illusion.
From Cezanne’s non finito Cubists began to objectify painting, leading to non objective art to the object.
It can be argued that most of our waking experience is within unmediated surroundings, so this engagement with‘reality’ should have plenty of opportunity to ………educate our perception. Cubist picture compositions of the virtual can be seen as patterns for ways of seeing that can be used to address the actual. Our desire to make “selfies” of almost every experience seems to come from our strong inclination to pictorialize and isolate moments for memory.
“Wheels within wheels”
60’s minimalists rightfully attacked the weakness of ‘composition’ in European painting as it moved towards abstraction. This weakness was a result of the picture’s containment of all elements within its bounded object. This given object precedes any judgements of relational unity while diminishing awareness of the continuous dance of balance within us as we observe. Balance is a physical state of being whose presence and dynamics can be activated by composition. Awareness of this force can be its own strong medium and subject and not just an organizing framework for a picture’s illusions and interpretations. By eliminating the picture plane I wish to reveal the experience of balance in composition as an intrinsic force of our identity. Balance is the core of ambulance and dance, life and language.
Order in the confined space of a picture plane is intrinsically hierarchical and overpowers heterarchical relations that are possible in an open field.
“In a group of related items, heterarchy is a state wherein any pair of items is likely to be related in two or more differing ways. Whereas hierarchies sort groups into progressively smaller categories and subcategories, heterarchies divide and unite groups variously, according to multiple concerns that emerge or recede from view according to perspective. Crucially, no one way of dividing a heterarchical system can ever be a totalizing or all-encompassing view of the system, each division is clearly partial, and in many cases, a partial division leads us, as perceivers, to a feeling of contradiction that invites a new way of dividing things. (But of course the next view is just as partial and temporary.) Heterarchy is a name for this state of affairs, and a description of a heterarchy usually requires ambivalent thought… a willingness to ambulate freely between unrelated perspectives.” Wikipedia
Mondriaan’s progressive transition away from the isolated picture to include the surrounding wall space has not been adequately considered. His step-down frames and diamond shape canvasses play important roles in joining (and opposing) the “dynamic equilibrium” of his interior compositions with the outside that embodies our horizontal ground plane and vertical stature. At the end of his life this interest led to multi-panel installations that diminished the inside/outside tension but unfortunately gravitated towards an architectural/urban idealism.
Mondriaan’s love of Jazz music and dance likely informed the out-in-the-open creation/destruction that underlies his work and the idea that art could leave its cave of illusion and come into life -- a recognition of the depth of competing rhythms in African aesthetics far deeper than Picasso’s image appropriations.
It is unfortunate that some museums still bury Mondrian’s paintings within an additional boxed in frame and even behind glass. Dynamic Equilibrium. Equilibrium and Rhythm/flow. Other cultures are more fully aware of the role of balance in art. The groundedness of balance between unreconcilable competing forces underlies the concept of the “Cool” across African cultures. Crossbeat music, dance and song in cultures of the Sahel are a foundation for this state of being. Swing
Abstract Expressionists and ”Color Field” artists of the 50’s and 60’s tried to engage a participatory intimacy by expanding the scale relationship between image, the picture plane, and how they address the viewer’s body (recently this expansion of scale has reached a new dimension but no matter how big or intimate there is no escaping the picture plane and its dominant unity.
The following Minimalist disruption invented the possibility for a fully “outward” perception by eliminating illusion, symbolism, expression, and representation all together while focusing on installation, extension and “presence”. The sudden objects, intervals, and placement in Judd’s hybrid art block interpretations and unify with their surrounding space.
For most “viewers” minimalism’s elimination of expression, illusion, and the narrative of a picture as a timeless, displaced “scene” to behold, is regarded as a dead end for art. (Fried) Minimalists, objecting to their label as reductivists, argued that they invented “outness” in their work and its ability to establish a strong presence. Exploring the idea of place lead to an escape from the increasingly inert gallery spaces and into “earth art”, an economically unsustainable end of this trajectory -- (or an unintended warning against our belief in the infinite extraction of materials from nature for “our things”).
We are long past the formalist arguments of “modernism” as we careen into a future where Art’s sophistications, seem frivolous. Society in general continues to wallow in our dream of “total production” and limitless “freedom” as these delusions, based on our fantasy of separation from nature, teeter and crush us into our climate’s accelerating change.
We have failed to realize that to sustain “humanity” our perception and consciousness must evolve and must evolve along with the earth systems that contain us.
Edward Hopper (turns the melancholic inwardness of his scenes towards a confrontation with an inexplicable beauty beyond our reach).
Our growing views of ‘space’– vs. “Universe in a grain of sand”. Mondriaan’s outness
In my Art I use groups of independent elements I call “applications” that are joined with their supportive wall plane to create an entity whose formative boundary is implied. Enhancing awareness of our participation in the imaginative constructions from this entity has been my vision for making art.
Regaining awareness of our active participation in the seeing of “things” feels right. This participation is not an illusion, or a new phenomenon, but a reviving of a dimension of seeing that has been repressed by our common belief in the autonomy of what we see.
Although installed rather than “hung”, I do not consider my applications as “installations” which usually incorporate a whole wall or a room as part of the artwork. I am interested in the intimate space around the applications as an arena for local engagement, a place for the dynamic formation of a “field” established between foveal, peripheral and passing vision. (Cezanne ‘s “non finito”) (non objective art? Not a hanging -- “setting up a camp in the wilderness”
….to knowingly engage in the process of “figuration” (“Saving the Appearances” Owen Barfield) … the ‘thing’ as our idea both personal and cultural … its silent Word (logos?), in saying and seeing. Seeing as “revelation” – including the “positive” and the “negative” as part of the balanced field of perception. Seeing is an immediate whole that can reveal its elements and their changing relations as forces balanced in opposition. Without a ‘backing’ or a frame this balance is experienced from within.
To build faith in human progress through awareness of imagination as our collective representation in its formation of a shared reality. We create what is “real”
http://owenbarfield.org/BARFIELD/encyclopedia_barfieldiana/Lexicon/Directionally_Creator.html
“davar” hebrew. = word/talk/thing. (logos?) ….. the unification of seeing, body, and identity. A “Word” is a contraction that “reveals” the thing. ‘Perception creates a flux between figure/ground. A word (name) acts as a contraction in this flux isolating the “thing” from its surrounding space. It has a tendency towards passivity. It diminishes the situation as a flux’.tzimtzum chabad.org/library/article Mandorlas?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dabar
Dabar: Never complete always in the process of being made. http://yadahyah.blogspot.com/2013/09/dabar-logos-word.html
Idolatry?
A continuity between physical elements and their surrounding space is presented in Dan Flavin’s luminous sculptures. But this is a forced joining where the viewer is not aware of participating in continuity or separation. “Light Art” tends to be installation art that engages the whole environment and overpowers the intimacy of surface and our formation of boundary that binds us through touch and our body to identity. “Conscious” to know together - to be mutually aware - awake. Old English wæccan to watch, Latin vegēre to enliven
Drawings and paintings often convey a positive/negative “figure/ground” duality. By being on the same surface a drawn line or a perceived edge establishes equivalence between the boundary’s “inside” and “outside”. The physicality of this equivalence can be strongly achieved in both imagery and abstraction, illusionistic or not. The weakness of this phenomenon in pictures is that the container of this equivalence, the picture plane, presents its simplistic frame and surface as the dominant object, given in advance and making all the elements within it subordinate. This hierarchy of containment was a main complaint of the minimalists for whom compositional parts in “European art” were always subordinate. This bounded picture plane presumes the wholeness of its contents asserting its unity as a given before any judgement of the coherence and balance of its forms.
Any compelling unity within the “picture” belongs to illusion with little or no connection to affordance. ) “Affordance” is part of but not the same as presence.
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A proximity of objects on an open plane can be seen together as a group or as separate elements. If the objects are precisely attached to the plane at their outermost edges, a kinesthetic tension is formed by this dichotomy. This tension can engage our physical and imaginative impulse for the use of things (“affordance”) even with perceived constructions.
An array of limpets attached to a rock may appear to be unified with the rock, and yet are seen together as well as separate from each other and from the rock. In a similar way the tight application of unique and separable elements to a plane is physically different than the uniformity of illusion in mural art.
A good part of my effort over many years of tinkering has been to find a way to achieve this limpet like attachment so that elements can be released and applied to different wall planes without damage or difficulty. The idea that “place” is a human construct that is ‘moveable’ is important. The metaphor of a tent and the “nomadic” vision of a moveable place is inspirational as a way of seeing and being. That planes are a means for creating place as both inside and outside seems fundamental. Making an encampment camp usually meaning "field" from Latin "campus, campania"
William Blake’s fierce opposition to the industrial era’s separation of things from place and from the imagination that unifies them is essential. –the perception of Things is similar to the perception of place.
I am not inspired by a pristine gallery with lighting dedicated to the art. I prefer the environment of everyday life and work with an open wall for seeing, and adequate light that doesn’t try to glorify.
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Like seeing a snake behind glass in a zoo the picture plane diminishes our unmediated recognition response to an image or perceptual complex. Is this is an aspect of idolatry – the mediation of seeing by safe recognition?
The space of Capoeira? Or Sign Language? A boundary of human physical expression
Composition - Gestalt and “affordance” differences-- relation of order and inferred use = meaning
An offering of boundaries, surfaces, and relations with and within which to act. The subtle urge within us to act with the affordance potentials around us.
A niche is a set of affordances along with its acts of life. An element or group of elements may offer multiple affordances – each affordance eclipsing the others.
After a century of Modernism David Rabinowitch’s invention of his “Construction of Vision” are important advances into conscious participation. His exceptional work is barely known in the US.
Construction of Vision vs. Construction of Form
Rabinowitch’s “construction of vision” is a significant invention in both making and seeing art. Minimalists criticised the empty “European” formalism that emerged from the strategies for composing complex scenes in traditional painting and almost all graphic design. Composition evolved into a hierarchical form of abstract unity based on “Gestalt” concepts. Rather than using a minimalist approach of repeating elements to avoid a hierarchical order, Rabinowitch’s invention of “construction of vision” places changing perceptions from the given elements in balanced opposition to each other across time and points of view.
Scale: Rabinowitch: “When you experience a particular wholeness, a sense of scale is necessarily involved. Like this little sculpture here on the wall, the sculpture that my granddad made for me ("Tool Handle," 1965): that has a particular sense of scale that a photograph could never reflect. Scale here is essentially your bodily reality and the work grasped as one condition.”
“….Design is about the visible - Art is about the invisible”
Is it possible to bring Rabinowitch’s Construction of Vision outside the picture plane?
Rabinowitch’s use of “scale” (continuous comparison of different constructions perceived from the same elements – constructions that eclipse each other in comparison) and “adequacy” (establishing a sufficient balance between these mutually destroying comparisons) is the “construction of vision”. A state of “Grace” = Balance and mutual destruction of systems that share each other’s properties - a condition that is only available in direct and personal encounter with the object. In his “construction of vision” drawings Rabinowitch’s set of elements used for constructions are a construction in themselves: a line and a circle are the same and radically different. A linear circle and a solid circle are the same and radically different. A circle and ellipse are the same and radically different. Etc.
C of V Connections: Burning bush -- “Khen” (encampment/ tent/grace in Hebrew). Nomad -- Cross beat in Sahel musical traditions. Swing in Jazz. Calder’ Mobile?– balance unifying a changing field of appearances. (not exactly the same…the change of appearances is more on the side of the mobile and less the viewer)
Comparisons- Cross Beat. “Agua” metaphor in Cuban drumming – A gravity towards balance and stillness in complex rhythmic oppositions ….a balance of forces that an individual can physically experience with a group. The unity of drumming and dance.
Cezanne’s experiments with composition led to an awareness of Gestalt concepts that underly perception. This led to formalism and eventually, as long as it remained in pictorial space, an increasingly empty abstraction. But Cezanne’s comparisons and contrasts between compositional groups within his still lifes are a tentative origin of ‘Scale’ perception that is not addressed in modernism and abstraction. Some connections are explored in Malevich but his work remain as “pictures”
Reaching out from the concrete (elements) to perceived relations between elements and reconfirming with the concrete
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The concept of “Application” can also be extended to methods of making marks that avoid any evidence of gesture. Any “Sagittal” transfer of marks or materials to the surface: Not about sequences of bodily expression. A sense of all at once even if accumulated and erased: collage, spray, snap, attach, transfer, lift, screen, print,pounce, press, dent, spill, group, splotch, tear?, puncture, drop, etched,
Michael Fried’s opposition: “the function of the tableau form has been to counteract or compensate for the transparence of the photographic surface by keeping the viewer at a distance from the latter, not just physically… but also imaginatively.”
Composition in representation is a distancing device that separates the viewer from the picture. ??
The framing of a virtual world centers our point of view to an optimal viewing axis perpendicular to the picture plane. This idealized position separates us from seeing in passing or our “ambient optic array”(Gibson) as a primary tool for engaging the world.
Bedouin: Tent – “Encampment”
Rothko – Installations
Cezanne’s final paintings.
Modernist “composition” with its hierarchy and balance of elements within the picture plane strives for artworks with a unified “gestalt”.
“Vision” as a balance of unique constructions that mutually create and destroy each other within a field is an arrival at a state of grace within us…. a forming of place.
Judd’s opposition to “European” painting in the 60’s initiated a new pathway for Art. The aesthetic argument that followed remains fierce and exclusive.
Illuminating the essential “weakness” of pictorial composition, material handling, and ambiguous messaging within the rigid picture plane was an important exposure.
Reconsidering Boundary between “internal and external relations” R)
Presence vs. Presentness. (Fried)
Not relief in traditional sense Not an object in physical sense
A dynamic object in immanence?
“Khen” ‘setting tents’ in ancient hebrew also has come to mean grace.
( Idolatry )
?? “fragments of energy”- gestalt - figuration(word/thing) – Alpha thinking – (Beta thinking).
( Collective Representation ).
There are six individual principles commonly associated with gestalt theory: similarity, continuation, closure, proximity, figure/ground, symmetry & order (also called prägnanz)
The law of prägnanz is sometimes referred to as the law of good figure or the law of simplicity. This law holds that when you're presented with a set of ambiguous or complex objects, your brain will make them appear as simple as possible.
We see a word as a whole immediately and independent of its letters. Multi dimensional familiarity.
Objects or groups of objects that challenge and transform that immediacy.
Mechanical font design combined with reduced letter size and spacing eliminates awareness of the form and relations of each letter in the revelation of a word. The word is now immediate and only.
Judd and a priori givens.
Pragnanz vs. Dazzle
Fragments of energy in the field of vision are open to gestalt separations, coherences and other ID processes to determine a thing – the process of figuration locks together with a word or name of the thing). Alpha thinking is the phrase or sentence made from these words. Beta thinking is the examination of Alpha thinking.
Cubism challenges the immediacy of pragnanz . Figuration is trained for this immediacy. Awareness of Figuration can hold it at bay. “Razzle Dazzle” and other forms of camouflage is a disruption of Pragnanz. My father participated in the Navy’s development of Razzle Dazzle camouflage at the beginning of WW2 and designed several patterns for warships.
Idolatry is the loss of awareness of our participation this process, and the belief that the immediacy of figuration implies that it doesn’t exist as a procedure. The reality of things becomes external -- that representation is not a collective construction but given and fixed.
Inside appears bigger than the outside. Judd - Rothko
The complex and subtle Cross rhythmic music traditions of African cultures below the Sahel is a parallel to Rabinowich’s construction of vision. Perhaps Mondriaan understood much earlier this possibility for a dynamic reality by his reinvention of the role of the picture plane and its frame. The frame simultaneously crops the inside and releases its “dynamic equilibrium” into our space. A visual parallel to “Swing”? = the impulse to dance = life
“Creative Seeing”
Fringe in Plains Indian clothing and artifacts. Boundary vs. Margin - What is Intimacy.
Artists that do the same stuff but do it really differently vs. artists that really do something different.
Stepping Off the Picture Plane: Cezanne Mondriaan Rothko. (Ad Reinhardt) Judd. Agnes Martin. ? Eva Hesse, Rabinowitch.
Consistent but incomplete. - (Wabi Sabi?)