Category Archives: art

Gauguin, Bernard, Cage, Richter

Here we are sat in the the cafe at the Tate waiting for lunch before going to see the Gauguin exhibition – only 30 years late for my thesis!

There were many artists who were trying to claim freedom from nature, to allow themselves the pleasures of more self expression but who were held back by the simple fact that man himself was tied down with his links to nature. A break from naturalism was not to materialize until some twenty years later with the birth pangs of abstract art. The steps these artists of the 1880?s were looking for was a break from observed representation. Paris was a hotbed of ideas within the young educated (or being educated) middle class. Symbolism and its search for new the boundaries of creativity within literature and poetry began to point the way for these young men, their almost post modernist approach to their art looked to steal ideas from every form of intellectual discipline. These painters were a clique and were accused by their contemporaries of being too intellectual to be serious painters.  Gauguin meet one of these young mavericks (Emile Bernard) in his Pont Aven period and embraced the younger mans theories.
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As much as I am a massive fan of Gauguin the highlight of my visit to Tate Modern was looking at the six Richter paintings, ‘John Cage’.
The urge and joy of letting paint drag n drop is…?
The Cage Paintings were conceived as a single coherent group, and displayed for the first time at the Venice Biennale in 2007. Their titles, Cage (1)-(6), pay homage to the American avant-garde composer John Cage (1912-1992). In his ‘Lecture on Nothing’, Cage famously declared “I have nothing to say and I’m saying it.” Richter is equally suspicious of ideologies and any claim to absolute truth. He shies away from giving psychological interpretations to his paintings, preferring to allow viewers and critics to make up their own minds.

Gauguin, Bernard, Cage, Richter

Here we are sat in the the cafe at the Tate waiting for lunch before going to see the Gauguin exhibition – only 30 years late for my thesis!

There were many artists who were trying to claim freedom from nature, to allow themselves the pleasures of more self expression but who were held back by the simple fact that man himself was tied down with his links to nature. A break from naturalism was not to materialize until some twenty years later with the birth pangs of abstract art. The steps these artists of the 1880?s were looking for was a break from observed representation. Paris was a hotbed of ideas within the young educated (or being educated) middle class. Symbolism and its search for new the boundaries of creativity within literature and poetry began to point the way for these young men, their almost post modernist approach to their art looked to steal ideas from every form of intellectual discipline. These painters were a clique and were accused by their contemporaries of being too intellectual to be serious painters.  Gauguin meet one of these young mavericks (Emile Bernard) in his Pont Aven period and embraced the younger mans theories.
Tags:
As much as I am a massive fan of Gauguin the highlight of my visit to Tate Modern was looking at the six Richter paintings, ‘John Cage’.
The urge and joy of letting paint drag n drop is…?
The Cage Paintings were conceived as a single coherent group, and displayed for the first time at the Venice Biennale in 2007. Their titles, Cage (1)-(6), pay homage to the American avant-garde composer John Cage (1912-1992). In his ‘Lecture on Nothing’, Cage famously declared “I have nothing to say and I’m saying it.” Richter is equally suspicious of ideologies and any claim to absolute truth. He shies away from giving psychological interpretations to his paintings, preferring to allow viewers and critics to make up their own minds.

Gauguin, Bernard, Cage, Richter

Here we are sat in the the cafe at the Tate waiting for lunch before going to see the Gauguin exhibition – only 30 years late for my thesis!

There were many artists who were trying to claim freedom from nature, to allow themselves the pleasures of more self expression but who were held back by the simple fact that man himself was tied down with his links to nature. A break from naturalism was not to materialize until some twenty years later with the birth pangs of abstract art. The steps these artists of the 1880?s were looking for was a break from observed representation. Paris was a hotbed of ideas within the young educated (or being educated) middle class. Symbolism and its search for new the boundaries of creativity within literature and poetry began to point the way for these young men, their almost post modernist approach to their art looked to steal ideas from every form of intellectual discipline. These painters were a clique and were accused by their contemporaries of being too intellectual to be serious painters.  Gauguin meet one of these young mavericks (Emile Bernard) in his Pont Aven period and embraced the younger mans theories.
Tags:
As much as I am a massive fan of Gauguin the highlight of my visit to Tate Modern was looking at the six Richter paintings, ‘John Cage’.
The urge and joy of letting paint drag n drop is…?
The Cage Paintings were conceived as a single coherent group, and displayed for the first time at the Venice Biennale in 2007. Their titles, Cage (1)-(6), pay homage to the American avant-garde composer John Cage (1912-1992). In his ‘Lecture on Nothing’, Cage famously declared “I have nothing to say and I’m saying it.” Richter is equally suspicious of ideologies and any claim to absolute truth. He shies away from giving psychological interpretations to his paintings, preferring to allow viewers and critics to make up their own minds.

Richter

As much as I am a massive fan of Gauguin the highlight of my visit to Tate Modern was looking at the six Richter paintings, ‘John Cage’.

The urge and joy of letting paint drag n drop is…?

The Cage Paintings were conceived as a single coherent group, and displayed for the first time at the Venice Biennale in 2007. Their titles, Cage (1)-(6), pay homage to the American avant-garde composer John Cage (1912-1992). In his ‘Lecture on Nothing’, Cage famously declared “I have nothing to say and I’m saying it.” Richter is equally suspicious of ideologies and any claim to absolute truth. He shies away from giving psychological interpretations to his paintings, preferring to allow viewers and critics to make up their own minds.

Self Indulgent

The hungry artist, starving in a one-roomed hovel is the traditional vision we have of a creative person, the painter, the musician, the geek, the hacker, the actor, the cracker – this modern day tortured soul, consumed by poverty and deeply in debt, starved of recognition and acclaim.

These self-proclaimed heroes who wallow in this self-indulgent quagmire achieve obscurity and a lonely demise. To actively follow a creative path that benefits no one is the path of the pathetic and the failure – the everyday is supposedly where taste and inspiration is to be found, the shared pleasures of popular culture, with its homogenized high street and celebrity peddling, porno dreams. Quick fix, new trick, global consuming societies who have ignored the potential cultural backlash and philosophical implications of this bulldozing revolution called ‘choice’ and ‘popularism’. To ignore it is a mistake but to not understand it is a catastrophe. After modernism, postmodernism and global terror, is there a space left for the romantic? ‘Celebrity’ is a relatively new definition of success. The cult of celebrity has turned Andy Warhol’s 15 minutes of fame into an art form in itself. ‘Celebrity Chefs’, ‘Celebrity Gardeners’, ‘Celebrity Cleaners’ even ‘Celebrity Entrepreneurs’. Is ‘Celebrity’ part of this outdated nineteenth century romantic paradigm?  Where is the intellectual discipline? Where is the social profit?

We are not living in a romantic age – the speed trap that captures the mind and soul is dependant on its bandwidth and download time.  This gets us to the end of the day but it remains relentless – tick tock. This fast lane we find ourselves hurtling down is the failure of our twenty-four seven society. This impacts on everything we do creating more and more collapse. It is engrained into our psyche from an early age that failure is a bad thing. From birth to death we are compared, or we compare ourselves, with people that have failed or succeeded. To be successful is to appear to our peers as socially, financially and intellectually superior. To fail is the complete opposite, to be ostracized by this successful society. Our preoccupation with success and its consequent obsession creates within us a crisis of identity. ‘Am I successful?’ ‘Do I appear to be successful?’ ‘Do my friends think I’m successful?’  ‘Am I a failure?’