Schwarz
View current page
...more recent posts
bartok
justin found this one
One of the many revelations here is the quasi-religious mysticism that infused parts of the Bauhaus in its earliest years. The first image you see when you step into the galleries is an Expressionist painting from 1919 by Johannes Itten, who ran the school’s introductory course. Its colorful abstract forms, which break down into a dense pattern of overlapping triangles, circles and rectangles, evoke the refracted glass of a stained-glass cathedral window.
Just below it is a design for a coffin lid drawn in 1920 by Lothar Schreyer, a director of the Bauhaus theater, for his wife (which, in a nice Freudian twist, was used for his mother’s burial instead). A woman’s figure, composed of interlocking circles and laid over a vibrant background of gray and blue, is framed by the lid’s trapezoidal outline. Farther along you come up against Marcel Breuer’s 1921 “African” chair, whose crudely chiseled wood frame looks so out of place with conventional images of the Bauhaus that you may wonder if you’ve walked into the wrong show.
These works reveal an ambivalence about the machine age and what was being left behind. Even as Walter Gropius, the school’s founding director, was promoting a mass-production aesthetic, Itten and others were advocating a more atavistic approach, one that was rooted in the skills of the medieval craftsman. (Itten even began his classes on abstract art with a series of yoga exercises that were meant to reawaken the physical senses and bring the students in closer contact with their work.)
The idea of "boundless abstraction" first surfaced in the water lily murals of Monet -- for Greenberg they were abstract in all but name, and set the precedent for Pollock’s all-over mural paintings -- and was extended by Kandinsky, however hesitantly, in his early works, particularly the famous First Abstract Watercolor (1911, scholars now say 1912 or 1913). There the eccentric continuum of petite color and line perceptions moves beyond the technical boundaries of the work, suggesting an infinite flux of uncontainable visual sensations. Pollock’s implicitly boundless mural abstractions are the climactic statement of "abstraction as total environment," correlate with the idea of the "environment as totally abstract."kuspit building up to a stella russo review
Abstraction came to dominate thinking about the environment as well as art, and the triumph of abstraction signaled by such opposed movements as Abstract Expressionism and Minimalism confirmed that it had become a generalized mode of perception and cognition: only when art and the environment were perceived and understood in abstract terms was their presence convincing. That is the point of van Doesburg’s five-step transformation of a naturally appearing cow into an abstract construction that seemed to have no relation to a cow, yet was an epitomizing summary of it in abstract terms. Duchamp’s readymades, which are everyday objects found in the environment, and given a little twist (or "assistance," as he said), can be read as abstract artifacts), however manqué. With the triumph of abstract visual thinking, every dumb thing reads as abstract art: thus the "surprise" of art, suddenly self-evident and extraordinarily present in the banally evident and ordinarily present.
It became de rigueur to see and understand things abstractly -- it was the modern take on them. To distill and convert old appearances into new abstractions was to modernize them. Sol LeWitt’s photographs of urban geometry -- manholes and brick walls -- makes the innate and intimate abstractness of the urban environment explicit, while suggesting the interchangeability and simultaneity of abstraction and the representation of reality. Mondrian came to prefer urban architecture to natural landscape because the former was overtly abstract while the latter was only subliminally abstract -- he spent the first part of his career extracting that abstractness, no doubt to convince himself that the abstract was "real." He came to regard his art as a "representation" of the "abstract real," in the (mystical?) belief that only the abstract was (really) real. Abstract art became the only "correct" and "real" art because it revealed the abstract truth, which made it seem "scientific" -- certainly Mondrian had what could be called a "scientific esthetics," as his preoccupation with precision suggests -- or at least an "experimental esthetics," for his oeuvre is a series of changing esthetic experiments designed to demonstrate the reality of the abstract.
The Jazz Loft Project
Jazz in the Flower District:
Photographer W. Eugene Smith moved into a loft at 821 Sixth Avenue, in the heart of New York’s Flower District, in 1957. The place had already become a hangout for artists, writers and especially jazz musicians, who rehearsed and jammed there. Among the visitors to the loft: Thelonious Monk, Zoot Sims, Bill Evans, Steve Swallow, Mose Allison, Bob Brookmeyer and hundreds more, over a period of about 8 years.
Four Thousand Hours!:
As Smith settled in and made a home and studio there, he became fascinated – and some say obsessed – with the life in and around the loft. He began to document the activity there in photographs and audio tapes. By the time he left the loft in the late ‘60’s, he’d shot 40,000 photos of musicians, artists, empty rooms, views out the window, jam sessions and parties. He’d recorded roughly 4000 hours of audio tape, including rehearsals for the famous 1959 Big Band concert at Town Hall, featuring the Thelonious Monk Tentet, as well as hundreds of jam sessions among players, known and obscure. Along with the music: conversations, meowing cats, casual visits from the cop on the beat, television and radio programs that happened to be on while the tape was running.
The Project:
Sara Fishko and WNYC, in collaboration with partners at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke and the New York Public Library, are building a radio series from the tapes of loft life discovered in W. Eugene Smith’s vast archive.
missing table and chairs
justin found this
whole tree architecture