Chance in art
I've just read a wonderful book called, 'A Sweeper-Up After Artists,' by Irving Sandler. Sandler is a retired American art critic and this is his memoir of over 50 years as an art critic in the New York art world.
His contemporaries include the big names of American Art: Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, David Smith, Frank Stella, Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Jackson Pollack. Many of my earliest impressions of art were based on the works of people like these.
One of the people Sandler writes about is composer John Cage. Sandler considered Cage to be 'the most influential art critic/theoretician in the second half of the twentieth century.'
Cage is well known for his work titled 4'33" which I've written about elsewhere. A pianist opens the piano and sits at it for four minutes and thirty-three seconds without playing a note. The 'performance' includes the physical act of the pianist and the ambient noises from within and around the performance hall.
According to Sandler, Cage's idea was that life and art were inseparable. '... Consequently, any sound or material, by itself or in any combination, whether intended or not, is art.' This would be a challenging concept for most people paying to see a performance.
This makes me think of the art of Bruce Nauman. I have only seen a little of his work and at first I wondered why it would be called 'Art.' At the Tate Modern I saw a video piece of his that was shot overnight in his studio. 'Nothing' happened for most of the video but at some point his cat made an appearance, and mice ran through the studio (apparently the cat wasn't there at the time), and a barn owl flew through the studio. In the PBS series 'Art:21' Nauman has created a stairway out of different sizes of paving stones, and when one walks the stairway he or she has to think about each step as they are different. I'm now thinking that Nauman is presenting 'life' as art, which might fit in with Cage's concept.
When I was a teenager I visited a university in British Columbia and met some conceptual artists. This meeting had a significant effect on me and shaped some of my interests in art. One work they showed me consisted of three pine trees in a forest of trees and through the trunks of three of the trees they had bored a one inch diameter hole and lined it with plastic tubing. By looking through one tube at just the right height and direction I could see through all three trees along that line. Doing so relied on the wind not blowing the trees out of alignment, and the work was temporary as it would fail once the trees grew a little. A very simple concept and execution but it really hit me.
As a young person when I heard about, and saw, some of the 'blank' canvases and monochromatic paintings I wondered if the artist had actually originally painted something of significance on that canvas then painted over the work in all white or all black, trusting the viewer to believe the artist that something of significant 'art' actually existed under the black or white painted canvas. Did the artist have a secret work?
I played around with jig saw puzzles, turning the pieces upside down and dividing the mixed-up pieces into three piles, then painting the backs of one pile red, the next blue and the last yellow. My interest was to see what pattern on the back, if any, would appear when the pieces were turned right side up and reassembled into the puzzle.
I love the concept of John Cage's work 4'33" but I would have been bored and angry 'listening' to it. I wouldn't have been ready for it. Likewise, watching Nauman's video works of him bouncing off a corner had me wondering what game he had been able to play on the critics and art intelligentsia. I like the concept of chance, and jazz improvisation sometimes really moves me, yet I also love the music of Philip Glass which is completely planned and doesn't seem to have any element of chance in it.
My larger metal sculptures to date have been tightly planned and executed, generally drawn in a CAD program that eliminates all chance and spontaneity in the pieces. Chance features in some of my newer mild steel rod and plate projects where I use Microsoft Excel as a random number generator to determine the lengths of some of the 16mm threaded rods used in the pieces. I'm about to start making some outdoor pieces based on rolled pipe pieces where I used somewhat random radiuses in rolling galvanised steel pipe sections.
Ah, it's all fun, isn't it?
His contemporaries include the big names of American Art: Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, David Smith, Frank Stella, Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Jackson Pollack. Many of my earliest impressions of art were based on the works of people like these.
One of the people Sandler writes about is composer John Cage. Sandler considered Cage to be 'the most influential art critic/theoretician in the second half of the twentieth century.'
Cage is well known for his work titled 4'33" which I've written about elsewhere. A pianist opens the piano and sits at it for four minutes and thirty-three seconds without playing a note. The 'performance' includes the physical act of the pianist and the ambient noises from within and around the performance hall.
According to Sandler, Cage's idea was that life and art were inseparable. '... Consequently, any sound or material, by itself or in any combination, whether intended or not, is art.' This would be a challenging concept for most people paying to see a performance.
This makes me think of the art of Bruce Nauman. I have only seen a little of his work and at first I wondered why it would be called 'Art.' At the Tate Modern I saw a video piece of his that was shot overnight in his studio. 'Nothing' happened for most of the video but at some point his cat made an appearance, and mice ran through the studio (apparently the cat wasn't there at the time), and a barn owl flew through the studio. In the PBS series 'Art:21' Nauman has created a stairway out of different sizes of paving stones, and when one walks the stairway he or she has to think about each step as they are different. I'm now thinking that Nauman is presenting 'life' as art, which might fit in with Cage's concept.
When I was a teenager I visited a university in British Columbia and met some conceptual artists. This meeting had a significant effect on me and shaped some of my interests in art. One work they showed me consisted of three pine trees in a forest of trees and through the trunks of three of the trees they had bored a one inch diameter hole and lined it with plastic tubing. By looking through one tube at just the right height and direction I could see through all three trees along that line. Doing so relied on the wind not blowing the trees out of alignment, and the work was temporary as it would fail once the trees grew a little. A very simple concept and execution but it really hit me.
As a young person when I heard about, and saw, some of the 'blank' canvases and monochromatic paintings I wondered if the artist had actually originally painted something of significance on that canvas then painted over the work in all white or all black, trusting the viewer to believe the artist that something of significant 'art' actually existed under the black or white painted canvas. Did the artist have a secret work?
I played around with jig saw puzzles, turning the pieces upside down and dividing the mixed-up pieces into three piles, then painting the backs of one pile red, the next blue and the last yellow. My interest was to see what pattern on the back, if any, would appear when the pieces were turned right side up and reassembled into the puzzle.
I love the concept of John Cage's work 4'33" but I would have been bored and angry 'listening' to it. I wouldn't have been ready for it. Likewise, watching Nauman's video works of him bouncing off a corner had me wondering what game he had been able to play on the critics and art intelligentsia. I like the concept of chance, and jazz improvisation sometimes really moves me, yet I also love the music of Philip Glass which is completely planned and doesn't seem to have any element of chance in it.
My larger metal sculptures to date have been tightly planned and executed, generally drawn in a CAD program that eliminates all chance and spontaneity in the pieces. Chance features in some of my newer mild steel rod and plate projects where I use Microsoft Excel as a random number generator to determine the lengths of some of the 16mm threaded rods used in the pieces. I'm about to start making some outdoor pieces based on rolled pipe pieces where I used somewhat random radiuses in rolling galvanised steel pipe sections.
Ah, it's all fun, isn't it?
posted by Rick's Rambles at 7:47 am
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