updated March 14, 2016
Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi. We Should All Be Feminists.New York: Anchor, 2014. Print. "I know a woman who hates domestic work, but pretends that she likes it, because she has been taught that to be 'good wife material', she has to be to use that Nigerian word homely. And then she got married. And her husband's family began to complain that she had changed. Actually, she had not changed. She just got tired of pretending to be what she was not. The problem with gender is that it prescribes how we should be rather than recognizing how we are. Imagine how much happier we would be, how much freer to be our true individual selves, if we didn't have the weight of gender expectations." [34]
Ahn, Abe. "Forging Queer Identity with Abstraction." Hyperallergic RSS.19 Oct. 2015. [Web.] Accessed 19 Oct. 2015. <http://hyperallergic.com/243093/forgingqueeridentitywithabstraction/> Identity expressed through abstraction; review of group show in LA
All Divided Selves.Dir. Luke Fowler. Perf. R.D. Laing. 2011. RISD Museum of Art. Documentary film portrait of psychiatrist R.D. Laing. viewed at RISD Museum October 22, 2015. Need to look further into Laing.
Anonymous. "About: What Is Liminality?" Liminality... the Space in between.Anonymous, n.d. [Web.] Accessed Sept. 2015. <http://www.liminality.org/about/whatisliminality/>. the website of an American professor of Korean language and literature living in Seoul and his explorations and contemplations on liminality as it relates to his existence in between
Astala, Lauri. "On Disappearance." Http://www.lauriastala.com.Lauri Astala, 2012. [Web.] Accessed 27 July 2015. <http://www.lauriastala.com/Site/On_Disappearance.html>. video of video installation/projection questioning the position of the spectator in relation to the work
Babitz, Eve. "Oral History Interview with Eve Babitz, 2000 June 14." Interview by Paul Karlstrom. Archives of American Art.Smithsonian, 2010. [Web.] Accessed June 2015. impetus for thoughts on authorship and directed self portraits, particularly in regards to Duchamp; role of the model in the creation of the work, specifically as an 'appendage' to a self portrait; inspiration of birthday party for Duchamp performance in courtyard of Ufer Studios, 28 July 2015.
Baggini, Julian. "What Is the Self? It Depends." Opinionator What Is the Self It Depends Comments.The New York Times, 08 Feb. 2016. [Web.] Accessed 08 Feb. 2016. <http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2016/02/08/theselfineastandwest/?action=clic k&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=storyheading&module=opinionccolleftregion&r egion=opinionccolleftregion&WT.nav=opinionccolleftregion>. What the self is varies across cultures, time, and location; but we can benefit from learning the extent and directions of the variations as a means of better understanding the variations and directions that influence our own concept of self.
Bell, Julian. "Introduction." Five Hundred Selfportraits.London: Phaidon, 2004. N. pag. Print. "I have a face, but a face is not what I am. " [5] self portraits are created by artist, people who present their work to be examined by others self portraits [objects] document a trade "...a profession of self-promoters." [6] we look at fictions "...a painter named Marcia working from her mirror..." [6] Roman tale Most of the following images are discussed in greater detail in 'A Face to the World' by Laura Cumming: Michelangelo [8081],Annibale Carracci [115], Adriaen van Ostade [178], Jan Vermeer [179],Antonio Cioci [203],JeanEtienne Liotard [208], Gino Severini [379], Walker Evans [438], Ilse Bing [453],Marcel Duchamp [482], Andy Warhol [488489],Jasper Johns [490],Robert Rauschenberg [498], Alighiero Boetti [499], Giuseppe Penone [504], Jeff Wall [509], John Coplans [511], Jenny Saville [521],Maurizio Cattelan [535]
Bell, Julian. What Is Painting?: Representation and Modern Art.New York: Thames and Hudson, 1999. Print. One take on the history of the relationship of the painting, the painter and the spectator from beginnings to present. Relationship of original to image to idea [13] Mimesis as a tool to knowledge (Aristotle) to indulge desire (Plato) [15]; "Mimesis is imitation is representation."and Giotto's 'window'.[29] Greek philosophers it was about the relationship between he who depicts and that which is depicted. [33] Shift in the Romantic from imitative to creative; painter's expression of 'nature', leading to concepts of 'modern art' we still explore today. [2124] Representation as custom or convention. [36] The experience of the viewer's disengagement with the painting and subsequent re-engagement. [37] Chp. 2 section 'Portrayal and observation' [4151] human search for "signs of subjects"; portrayal of 'likeness' that goes beyond the physical to the psychological; 'Persona' original meaning is 'mask' worn by the classical actor [43] The camera, closer observation, and Descartes' principal of the mind behind the eye which translates the picture to knowledge. [55] Movement from the internal response of Romanticism to nature and its external expression thru the painting [C.D. Friedrich] to the external response to the object of Realism thru an internal expression within the painting [Courbet]. [5963] to Impressionism and from Kant to Nietzsche: "The world had been systematically unhinged from God by observation,...scientific knowledge;...guarantor of objectivity, was needed to take his place....we can approach these forms through our own delineations..."[7778] untrained "eye (or I)" placed in predicament of how to look...Impressions response 'simply look' leading to Husserl's doctrine of phenomenology. [78] Storytelling, truth, materiality, and temporality. "What is shown will be true,..; what is merely told may be false."[88] How the material expression impacts the spectators' idea that a story must be contained within. [94] Chp. 3 Form and Time [specifically107132] "Expression, in modern painting, has generally meant personal expression; and much of the diversity of modern painting has stemmed from differing understandings of what makes up a 'person'." [133] The 'self', the painting as 'object', and the 'other'. [142144] Formal aspects of the painting as it relates to the artist and the spectator: color and form[148151] German Romantics [Schelling]: when objects become subjects the world would be 'romanticized'. [152] Self portraiture. Bell's take on understanding the subject: body, mind, spirit, self [152] and how the emphasis on any one or combination of these has shifted over time. "Today, freed from the need of describing a particular person...the whole of man's experience becomes [the painter's] model." [Rothko, 165]...Bell understand's this as Rothko's twentieth-century version of the sublime [166] The 'eye'/ 'I' became 'the gaze' [post-Freudian, Lacan, Duchamp], dematerializing the material world. [166] Bell: "...paintings express the painter an idea from the Romantic era through the values of authenticity, spirituality, sublimity, and, more recently, through appeals to the corporeal and sexual make-up of persons...but it is true that most paintings are valued as personal expressions....We tend to think that that is the value of paintings, as opposed to photographs." [168] "But let us be brutal: expression is a joke." [170] "You...cannot determine how I go about my looking. And hence painting,.., is not communication....What we see is what we get: a product, not a process, lies on the wall. But we are not happy to accept this....,a massive institution of explanation has grown up to control and stabilize the market. Part of it is dedicated to attaching a person to each picture,..."[170171] "As a painter, however, it ill behoves me to treat the mismatch of expression and communication as a joke. It is a laughing matter, but there is a level on which all painters are clowns the level on which people accept us. They indulge us in our self indulgence, generously granting us credit for creativity even if the results are [no more] intelligible... Yet this record of creativity,..., retains a power to affect if we open our attention to its striving gestures. And occasionally, it has to be acknowledged that something is delivered that commands more than sympathy. ...For viewer, as for painter, communication functions as a hope." [172] Definition of 'Art' in relation to the art market Chapter 5. the impact of the age of replication, ie. prints, photos [175177] Cubism replacement of pictorial representation with symbolic representation...signs of direction [190] section on Abstraction [192199] Bell advocates the idea of abstraction as a means of universality of forms specific to human consciousness, the conditions underlying all pictures (Mondrian). Post WWII abstraction as a response to an experience beyond traditional forms of representation. Formal abstraction a view from above, surrealism a view from below...in contention with each other, but through mutual dislocation from Europe to New York formed a basis for post-WWII painting. "I think they should look not for, but look passively..." ( Jackson Pollock)..."In other words there was no prior context to the painting itself. The viewer's eyes would submit, and the painting would act."[195] the 'autonomy' of the work of art. Greenberg and the removal of depth...flatness, culminating in Stella. Diagram of spectator and painting according to Alberti and Greenberg [196] Ad Reinhardt cartoon detail from How to Look at Modern Art in America [198] Fun as distancing device in the high/low art debacle of 20th century art [204] "Much of painting happens somewhere in between the indeterminate triviality of fun and the determining self importance of art;"[206] Chp. 6 Representation "This book set out to discuss paintings, but to do so it has been obliged to discuss words." [208] late 20th century "sees all painting as representation" [208] pictorial representation, symbolic representation, and now, systemic representation...structuralism to post-structualism [212217]. meaning gained not through resemblance (positive) but through difference (negative) The dependence of human experience on structures termed by Barthes as 'the effect of the real', is representation...reality is an emerging effect. [217] Post-structuralism/Deconstruction, Derrida: meaning resides nowhere, it is always deferred, therefore "there is no representation of representation" [219] "representation itself does not exist. It is an idea, like God, invented to give things a backup promise of fixity, meaning and presence that they cannot deliver. If meanings shift, this suggests that there is a space within which they can shift. But to define this space is to fall into error: there is no all encompassing geometry, there is only the local emergence of difference." [221] "seeing...is a special case of reading" [230] the marketplace (fun fair) and the big box (institution) [237240] diagram [238]
B e l l m a n , E r i c a . " H o w t o K e e p a S e c r e t , t h e A r t i s t i c W a y . " Th e N e w Y o r k T i m e s .2 8 O c t . 2 0 1 5 . [Web.] Accessed 28 Oct. 2015. <http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/29/tmagazine/artsophiecalle.html>. Sophie Calle's recent work
Berger, John. And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos.New York: Vintage International, 1991. Print. "When is a painting finished? Not when it finally corresponds to something already existing like the second shoe of a pair but when the foreseen ideal moment of its being look at is filled, as the painter feels or calculates it ought to be. The long or short process of painting a picture is the process of constructing such a moment....every painting is, by its very nature, addressed to such a moment." [26] "...,by turning in circles the displaced preserve their identity and improvise a shelter. Built of what? Of habits, I think, of the raw material of repetition, turned into a shelter....The mortar which holds the improvised "home" together ...is memory..... Home is no longer a dwelling but the untold story of a life being lived."[64] "Every migrant knows in his heart of hearts that it is impossible to return. Even if he is physically able to return, he does not truly return, because he himself has been so deeply changed by his emigration." [67]
Berger, John. "Erogenous Zone." 1988. Keeping a Rendezvous.New York: Vintage International, 1992. 20411. Print. "Painting is about the physical, the palpable and the immediate. (The insurmountable problem facing abstract art was to overcome this.) The art closest to painting is dance. Both derive from the body, both evoke the body, both in the first sense of the word are physical." [205] "It is the most immediately sensuous of the arts. Body to body. One of them being the spectator's." [205] "The intimate relation (the interface) between painting and physical desire,...has little to do with the special mimetic texture of oil paint,...The relation begins with the act of painting, not with the medium." [208]
B e r r e b i , S o p h i e . " J ’ e n A i P r i s D e s C o u p s M a i s J ’ e n A i D o n n e A u s s i . " Fr i e z e M a y 2 0 0 2 : n . p a g . [Web.] Accessed Oct. 2015. ‘bête comme un peintre’ (‘dumb as a painter’) Review of ‘Urgent Painting’ exhibition 32 artists selected by 18 curators ‘J’en ai pris des coups mais j’en ai donné aussi’ (‘I’ve had many blows but I’ve given some too’) "aimed for a subjective, personal viewpoint of the medium." The range of painting...in dialogue with itself 1960 to 2002. "One piece significantly a work in progress, by Franck David seemed representative of the exhibition as a whole. Entitled La Collection (undated), this assembly of old mottled mirrors placed on the floor against a wall was reminiscent of the stacked canvases at the back of one of Claude Poussin’s best known selfportraits. Like the Poussin, La Collection mused on the fact that art needs to be embodied in some sort of physical form while being able somehow to transcend the limitations of that form. The fact that it was a work in progress, and the use of mirrors, also hinted at questions about the nature of time and of perception, issues raised throughout the exhibition by the cunning juxtapositions of materials, colours and forms."
B l o w , C h a r l e s . " T h e D e l u s i o n s o f R a c h e l D o l e z a l . " Th e N e w Y o r k T i m e s .1 7 J u n e 2 0 1 5 . [ W e b . ] Accessed 17 June 2015. <http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/18/opinion/charlesblowthedelusionsofdolezal.htm l>. Blow's review of a performance
Branch, John. "Dutee Chand, Female Sprinter With High Testosterone Level, Wins Right to C o m p e t e . " Th e N e w Y o r k T i m e s .2 7 J u l y 2 0 1 5 . [ W e b . ] A c c e s s e d 2 7 J u l y 2 0 1 5 . <http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/28/sports/international/duteechandfemalesprinterw ithhighmalehormonelevelwinsrighttocompete.html>. flip side of transgender? when the biological doesn't match the physical self
B u r k e t t , E l i n o r . " W h a t M a k e s a W o m a n ? " Th e N e w Y o r k T i m e s .6 J u n e 2 0 1 5 . [ W e b . ] A c c e s s e d 8 June 2015. <http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/07/opinion/sunday/whatmakesawoman.html?hpw& rref=opinion&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=wellregion®ion=bottomw ell&WT.nav=bottomwell>. In response to Caitlyn Jenner and the 'male brain/female brain' and the language of transgender. Science shows the brain is shaped by experience, culture, and other factors, but not by gender. The realities, experienced by women born in the female body are not the same as those realities experienced by the women born in the male body. Very problematic issue within feminism. "If that’s the ultimate message of the mainstream of the trans community, we’ll happily, lovingly welcome them to the fight to create space for everyone to express him, her or, in gender neutral parlance, hirself without being coerced by gendered expectations. But undermining women’s identities, and silencing, erasing or renaming our experiences, aren’t necessary to that struggle." "Nail polish does not a woman make."
Catapano, Peter, and Ernie Gehr. "Can We See Philosophy? A Dialogue With Ernie Gehr." Opinionator Can We See Philosophy A Dialogue With Ernie Gehr Comments.The New York Times,03 Oct. 2013. [Web.] Accessed 10 Feb. 2016. <http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/10/03/canweseephilosophyadialogwith erniegehr/>. "The common currency of philosophy is language. But does it have to be?" Can it be visual like film, or painting? "Film, he wrote in 1971, “does not reflect on life, it embodies the life of the mind.”" Can this be said about painting? slow down, experience, perceive, look, question, letting the viewer decide for self not dictated by the maker, "What is it you're making?" "Why work with it?" letting things just happen "... if that is reflected in the work it needs to come from within the work, rather than something superimposed." "So these are questions that do weigh. How to articulate them with the medium? You need to reflect upon the medium itself. What are the characteristics of the medium and how can you make them come alive for someone else?...You have to respond to that. You have to imagine and try to bring that alive in a work. And that’s not easy."
Chapman, Christopher. "Death By Drowning." Bernhard Sachs: Elements.200th ed. South Yarra: Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, 1993. N. p. Print. brochure for exhibition at ACCA body exists in the realm of philosophy, is comprised of the reconstructed dreams/memories of the individual and the memory of the public which is a malleable history, always ready to be "re something or other" Tattoo consciousness through inscription, and religion/philosophy/faith through ritual "Nietzsche has theorised that corporeal inscription is at the origin of all consciousness." not the case today For Sachs the writing is on the figure represented as well as on the work double role of inscription in relation to tattoo and to text/drawing/art= Derrida: origin of language in the visual; Kandinsky's 'point'=the needle piercing the surface of the skin in the process of inscribing the tattoo; Maori drawing is the beginning of tattooing, the incision of the drawn line. Sachs drawing, a process of mapping the body and the psyche, external and internal overlapping space and time. Contradictory shifts occurring in Sachs' work. "The works also speak of a bodily experience that resides in the space between death and consciousness." memory-sleep-death-violence-consciousness "Sleep reinvents memory, twists, collides, and collapses temporal perception, but only sometimes can we remember our dreams."
"Collection." Conversations with the Bride, (19741975) by Imants Tillers.Art Gallery NSW, n.d. [Web.] Accessed 12 Feb. 2016. <http://www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au/collection/works/235.1976.awwwwwwwww/>. Images and details of Conversations with the bride (19741975)
"Concluding Unscientific Postscript." 1846. AKierkegaard Anthology.Ed. Robert W. Bretall. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1972. N. p. Print. The Task of Becoming Subjective pp. 207210 Objectivity and subjectivity; the subjective problem is the subjectivity itself. Christianity concerned with the subjectivity of the individual, this is where the 'truth' exists, "if it exists at all; objectively Christianity has absolutely no existence....and there is greater Christian joy in heaven over this one individual than over universal history and the System, which as objective entities are incommensurable with that which is Christian." [208] from 'The Subjective Truth: Inwardness Truth Is Subjectivity' "The objective accent falls on WHAT is said, the subjective accent on HOW it is said." [213] With the 'how' the subject is an existing individual. from 'The Individual and "The Public"' the "leveling" of the individual through the group is an abstraction [261]
Cotton, Charlotte, Matthias Harder, Joshua Chuang, Laurel Ptak, and AnnChristin Bertrand. Viktoria Binschtok Marriage Is a Lie/Fried Chicken.Heidelberg, Neckar: KEHRER Heidelberg, 2015. Print. Exhibition catalog. c|o Berlin. Viewed July 2015. Truth in photography, truth in language, deciphering in the digital age. How do we read photographs in the 21st century when there is neither original nor original copy to refer back to?
Cumming, Laura. AFace to the World: On SelfPortraits.London: Harper, 2009. Print. Most important chapters for me: 8. Mirrors, 9. Performance, 15. Falling Apart Most images discussed can be found in 500 SelfPortraits Preface: "It turns the subject inside out, and remakes him or her as an indivisible trinity: there is the work of art, the image of the maker and the truth of what he or she sensed, imagined or believed about themselves and how they chose, as we all must choose, to present themselves." [9]
D i n a r d o , K e l l y . " A n d y W a r h o l D r o v e R o u t e 6 6 . S o D i d S h e . " Th e N e w Y o r k T i m e s .1 0 O c t . 2015. [Web.] Accessed 10 Oct. 2015. <http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/11/travel/andywarholroadtrip.html>. 1963 AW drove to LA to go to the Duchamp retrospective, and opening, at Pasadena Museum of Art. He left a mild mannered, successful graphic designer with thinning hair and a movie camera, and returned the wig-wearing Warhol of the Factory and celebrities the world remembers. What did Warhol learn from the drive, the Duchamp retrospective that formed this persona?
D o n a d i o , R a c h e l . " M i c h e l H o u e l l e b e c q , C a s u a l l y P r o v o c a t i v e . " Th e N e w Y o r k T i m e s .1 2 O c t . 2015. [Web.] Accessed 12 Oct. 2015. <http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/13/books/michelhouellebecqcasuallyprovocative.ht ml>. Interview with Houellebecq
D u c h a m p , M a r c e l . Af f e c t i o n a t e l y , M a r c e l : T h e S e l e c t e d C o r r e s p o n d e n c e o f M a r c e l D u c h a m p . Ed. Francis M. Naumann and Hector Obalk. Trans. Jill Taylor. Ghent: Ludion, 2000. Print. letter to Jehan Mayoux, March 8, 1956 [347348]
Duchamp, Marcel. Salt Seller: The Writings of Marcel Duchamp.Ed. Michel Sanouillet and Elmer Peterson. New York: Oxford UP, 1973. Print. DaCapo republication.
Egenhofer, Sebastian. "Figures of Defiguration: Four Theses on Abstraction." Texte Zur Kunst 1 8 . 6 9 ( 2 0 0 8 ) : 1 3 9 4 5 . R p t . i n Do c u m e n t s o f C o n t e m p o r a r y A r t : P a i n t i n g .E d . T e r r y R . Myers. London/Cambridge: Whitechapel Gallery and The MIT, 2011. 20917. Print. abstraction is not just about materiality and self reflection, it is about the monetary value as well "...iconic abstraction began as a systematic destruction of iconic representation,...labour of negation that gave it intensity and a sense of direction." [210] abstract painting reflects on its relationships critique of the application of abstraction to universality "In the history of reality, the destruction of the episteme of representation, a duplicate of the structure of memory, is effected by the abstract power of capital, an eroding force Marx already saw and welcomed; Deleuze and Guattari styled it deterritorialization."[210] abstraction representative of commodity through the nature of repetition/reproduction Egenhofer proposes a continuation of the modernist critique of representation through re-figuration, or masking, but not as a concealment of an existing identity, rather the construction of an identity for which there is no original. "The mask does not reproduce a face: as an imaginary identity, it is stamped from the outside onto the disposition of the work. Warhol's silkscreens, McCarthy's hybrid characters, constituted by protheses, as much as Sherman's 'film stills',..., always also exhibit the insubstantiality, the referential vacuity of imaginary identities. It is the status of the identifying, identity-engendering pictorial figure itself that is here abstract." [212] the alter ego, the invented identity is an 'abstraction' "Universality is no longer sought in the purity of a purely self-exhibiting 'language' altogether unaffected by the declensions of particular vantage, narration and the shades of contingency; it is articulated in the rupture, in the gap between the identification imposed by the imprinted mask and the non-iconic support, just as Warhol stages himself as the pale 'nothing' of the 'mirror' facing ever different faces."[212] what once existed on the flat surface of universality now exists in the depth of the gap "Modern, self-critical painting foregrounds not so much the medium (or the signifier) as the means by which and the mode in which the image is produced. Whereas the concept of the medium makes reference,..., to the depth of the image, to the interior and non-existent latitude by virtue of which an image opens toward that which it displays, the concepts of production and of the means of production equally foreground the time and space beyond the plane of the image." [213] temporal relation of material + process/production= work "The work of Warhol thus in no way constitutes a return of representation: it paradigmatically conceives the indexical integration of the image support with the conditions of its production as iconomorphous." [214] Egenhofer's re-figuration begins not in the 1960s, but in the 1910s and 1920s with collage and the replacement of the 'brush' with the 'photoprint'. "What is essentialist is not the critique of the image undertaken by abstraction,...,an identity that is the form under which the symbolic order grants it recognition." [215] radical abstractness, the facelessness of the subject in relation to the matrix of exchange value...Marx's 'melts into air' The empty 'cogito' of Lacan and Zizek is faceless; a subject that does not know itself or recognize itself in any image. This allows the subject to move freely here and there in the market place of identities.
Elina Brotherus.Dir. Elina Brotherus. Perf. Elina Brotherus. Www.elinabrotherus.com/The Black Bay Sequence.Elina Brotherus, 2010. [Web.] Accessed Jan. 2015. <http://www.elinabrotherus.com/videos/#v4>. The Black Bay Sequence 2010, 60 min 12 sec, HD video (Apple ProRes 422), 16:9, silent. repletion and variation; the figure entering, turning and reemerging from the water over an extended period of time
Elina Brotherus: It's Not Me, It's a Photograph.Dir. Martin Kogi, Jonas Jorgensen, Kamilla Bruus, and Christian Lund. Perf. Elina Brotherus. Louisiana Channel/Elina Brotherus, It's Not Me, It's a Photograph.Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, 10 Jan. 2013. [Web.] Accessed 27 July 2015. <http://channel.louisiana.dk/video/elinabrotherusitsnotmeitsaphotograph>. It's not a self portrait. Using her body as the material, personal, yet, keeping the image open to the viewer repetition of reflection, water (bathing) playing with the idea of the model and the artist/object and subject relationship, and the gaze
Elina Brotherus: The Human Perspective.Dir. Martin Kogi, Jonas Jorgensen, Kamilla Bruus, and Christian Lund. Perf. Elina Brotherus. Louisiana Channel/Elina Brotherus, The Human Perspective.Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, 10 Jan. 2013. [Web.] Accessed 27 July 2015. <http://channel.louisiana.dk/video/elinabrotherushumanperspective>. Impetus for the photographic self portrait and the shock at not recognizing the 'self' one imagines one's self to be in the portrait. Temporality in the video and still portraits "The human figure gives the scale and the human perspective to the landscape, it is like a screen you can project your self into, Brotherus says."
F e r l a , R u t h L a . " J e f f K o o n s L e n d s a H a n d a n d a N a m e . " Th e N e w Y o r k T i m e s .3 1 O c t . 2 0 1 5 . [Web.] Accessed 31 Oct. 2015. <http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/01/fashion/jeffkoonslendsahandandaname.html >. "Told that people are asking $1,500 on eBay for one of his signed H&M bags, he responded in obfuscating artist-speak: “The bag is what it is. When you look into the value of things, it’s all an abstraction. I’m more interested in the feelings and sensations these things might arouse. That’s what this really is about.”" The artist's approach to the replicate: "Certainly, the couple has experienced their share of both. Mr. Koons’s artwork commands tens of millions of dollars. Mrs. Koons paints in the soothing isolation of the studio her husband gave her. “Painting for me is a meditative process,” she said. “It helps me recover from stress.” The artists’ union has produced a tribe of mini Koonses, six children in all, ranging in age from 3 to 14. “I think it just happened,” Mr. Koons said. “We both came from families with only one sibling. We wanted to have a second child as a playmate for our first. The rest was a continuum.” Mrs. Koons, 43, said there had been no conscious decision to bring forth such a teeming family. “It just happened kind of organically for us,” she said. “Besides, it was fun.”"
Finch, Charles. "‘Career of Evil,’ by J.K. Rowling Writing as Robert Galbraith." The New York Times.31 Oct. 2015. [Web.] Accessed 02 Nov. 2015. <http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/01/books/review/careerofevilbyjkrowlingwriting asrobertgalbraith.html>. the pseudonym
F o r t i n i , A m a n d a . " A n A r t i s t S t a n d s B e f o r e H e r F u n H o u s e M i r r o r . " Th e N e w Y o r k T i m e s .0 6 J a n . 2016. [Web.] Accessed 06 Jan. 2016. <http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/07/fashion/anartiststandsbeforeherfunhousemirr or.html>. images
" F r i e d r i c h N i e t z s c h e f r o m T h e W i l l t o P o w e r . " 1 9 0 1 . Ar t i n T h e o r y , 1 8 1 5 1 9 0 0 : A n A n t h o l o g y o f Changing Ideas.Ed. Charles Harrison, Paul Wood, and Jason Gaiger. Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1998. 78183. Print. "We have need of lies in order to conquer this reality, this 'truth', that is, in order to live That lies are necessary in order to live is itself part of the terrifying and questionable character of existence." [782]
" F r i e d r i c h N i e t z s c h e f r o m T w i l i g h t o f t h e I d o l s . " 1 8 8 8 . Ar t i n T h e o r y , 1 8 1 5 1 9 0 0 : A n A n t h o l o g y of Changing Ideas.Ed. Charles Harrison, Paul Wood, and Jason Gaiger. Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1998. 78386. Print. psychology of the artist= frenzy Apollinian and Dionysian "This having to transform into perfection is art." [784] l'art pour l'art [786]
Fuller, Sean. "TALKING WITH ERNIE GEHR ABOUT HIS CARNIVAL OF SHADOWS." InsideOut.Museum of Modern Art, 09 Feb. 2016. [Web.] Accessed 10 Feb. 2016. <http://www.moma.org/explore/inside_out/2016/02/09/talkingwitherniegehrabouthis carnivalofshadows>. contemporary approach to Duchamp's 'WilsonLincoln' effect using shadows and ombre animes
Galbraith, Robert. The Cuckoo's Calling.New York: Mulholland, 2013. Print. read out of curiosity of the relationship of the voice of the author, J.K. Rowling to the pseudonym under which she published this book, Robert Galbraith. At first having knowledge of who wrote the book, and familiarity with the series for which she is well known, it was strange, but eventually as the story progressed the voice shifted to that of Galbraith,,,whoever he is.
Ganz, John. "SEBASTIAN BLACK with John Ganz." SEBASTIAN BLACK with John Ganz.The Brooklyn Rail, 9 Dec. 2015. [Web.] Accessed 31 Jan. 2016. <http://brooklynrail.org/2015/12/art/sebastianblackwithjohnganz>. Black: Especially working on the big paintings for this show there’s a lot more moments of despair, where you’re like, “What the fuck am I doing?” just literally because it takes so much more to do that painting. Like if you make a 9 × 12 inch painting you can have a moment where you’re like, “Oh, this could be bad” and then by 3 pm you’re like, “Oh, that’s good." But if you’re making a big painting it can look bad for a very long time. But these are the weird things that arise from scale shifts. So it’s a valuable thing to try to make it bigger, even if it’s just mastering the practical thing of filling up space. Painting is the activity of just figuring out how to fill up a big rectangle in a way that makes you not want to kill yourself. Black: I give painters more credit. I think they do find out something new. In the activity of making a painting, you come face to face with the fact that every time that you do it, there’s always a moment where you could make a bad one. But when something new happens the artist is just thinking materially. Then when people interpret the work inevitably they go to two poles simultaneously, which are the flip sides of the same coin. They go to the genius-subject and then they go to the extrasubjective zeitgeist thing or the extra-subjective religious thing. They usually get all folded up together. Like the artist is the guy who is somehow in touch with the ineffable and I’m like, “There’s no ineffable, everything’s effable because we’re fing doin’ it.” I think all that stuff cheapens art in a way—it cheapens it and it reproduces a worldview that’s not good to me.
G i o n i , M a s s i m i l i a n o , F r e d i F i s c h l i , N i e l s O l s e n , M a r k G o d f r e y , a n d A n n e P o n t e g n i e . Al b e r t Oehlen: Home and Garden.New York: New Museum/Skira Rizzoli, 2015. Print. Director's Foreward by Lisa Phillips "Albert Oehlen: Stupid as a Painter" by Massimiliano Gioni "Disdain and Desire: Albert Oehlen's Abstraction" by Mark Godfrey "The Normal Life" by Anne Pontegnie Fred Fischei and niels Olsen in conversation with Albert Oehlen checklist, biography,plates see essay on my website http://www.robynthomasexplorations.com/shallowal
Goodyear, Anne Collins. "#5 Constructing a "Madeup History": Self Portrayal and the Legacy of Marcel Duchamp." Inventing Marcel Duchamp: The Dynamics of Portraiture.Ed. Anne Collins. Goodyear and James W. McManus. By Janine A. Mileaf, Francis M. Naumann, and Michael R. Taylor. Washington, D.C.: National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, 2009. 8099. Print. The spectator 'completes' the work. Duchamp's interest was not only in the self portraits he produced, but in the portraits others made of him and how they were disseminated. By 1923 self portrayal was a "leitmotif" of Duchamp's work. Duchamp's interest was in self contextualization...the artist's place in history. He "strategically orchestrated his selfpresentation." [83] Duchamp to Ulf Linde, 1961: "Art is man made and all 'truths' in art are likewise, man made....a great work of art is double man made: the artist makes the work and the spectator, posterity, makes it great." [83] Duchamp to Pierre Cabanne, 1966, the renewed interest in his work, the 'public exposure' "the entire thing is based on a madeup history." [84] Duchamp and his contradiction of self as a means "to avoid conforming to" his own taste. [84]; and this constant self contradiction made it hard for others to make an sure statement about him...always keeping others unsure of the 'truth'. Portraitureidentity: identity"the quality or condition of being the same as something else", consistency, likeness. Duchamp worked against this understanding of identity/portraiture/self portraiture. Duchamp and his alternative identities on one hand Goodyear equates these as 'metaportraiture', "a playful critique of the genre". [85] However she sees it more so as demonstrating "the radical impossibility of fully knowing our world, one another, or even ourselves." [85] "Duchamp's diverse portraiture and selfportraiture enabled the artist to demonstrate the radical multiplicity of the self when depicted in different circumstances and under different settings....Ultimately, (Goodyear argues), Duchamp's most significant legacy is to demonstrate that one thing, one person, can be many things at once, all depending on one's perspective. Identity, then, is not reducible to a single convenient expression but is ultimately unstable and multiple." [85] double portraittwo images created by lines that shift as the spectator 'moves around' the image so two different images emerge; referred to by Duchamp as "WilsonLincoln system" after the first example of this technology he encountered; a 'twoway portrait' shows a single picture can contain two distinct images that are viewed separately. This (for me) is analogous to the figureground relationshipplay found in formal abstraction. perspective one definition: "a picture or figure constructed so as to produce some fantastic effect,...distorted or confused except from one particular point of view, or presenting totally different aspects from different points." [87] Boiteenvalise: a traveling retrospective, a 'selfportrait' "...,the works dramatically testified to the life of an individual forced to live in transit" [88] Duchamp spent most of his life going back and forth between France and New York, his existence was in the space between the two places, the two cultures. 1942 exhibition in NYC, "First Papers of Surrealism" "compensation portrait"a subversion of traditional self portraiture by replacing an image of his face with one that was not his own, in this case a woman photographed by Ben Shahn for the FSA raising (again) the question of the relationship between appearance and identity. (Self portrayal can be betrayal of the spectator, if the spectator allows him or her self to be 'betrayed'; otherwise the betrayal can be that of the object the self by the subjectthe spectator. my thoughts on the "compensation portrait") Duchamp's increased attention to self portraiture and the portraits others made of him after returning to NYC in the 1940s: awareness of his own mortality; the war; aging; deaths of friends, family, colleagues and collectors; solidifying his legacy/posterity; to revive interest in him by the art world now centered in NYC. He became very aware in the language he used about himself with others, in interviews, letters. To Jean Crotti, 1952: "...I don't believe in painting in itself. Every canvas is made not by the painter but by those who see it and grant it their favors, in other words, a painter doesn't exist who understands himself what he does." (self referentialself portrayal) [90] original works of art, particularly painting, are no longer of historical importance...(my question: has the original work regained its historical importance, that is, if it exists?) Tu m', 1918 Another between space Duchamp found himself was the space between 'chance' and 'control'; these two existed in multiple layers, with Duchamp between. He used chance to generate controlled situations, such as how his image was disseminated. To challenge mortality: "If his selfportrayal in changing guises seemed to challenge laws of nature by creating a persona of flexible gender, age, and physiognomy, this changeability, even more important, created the possibility for perpetual selfrenewal....his decision to invent Rrose Selavy "was not to change my identity, but to have two identities,"" [91] The created identity is immortal, and Duchamp was engineering his own immortality. (My question: Is "cheating death" via selfportrayal a form of betrayal of our identity as mortals?) Marcel dechiravit (Self Portrait in Profile) 1957 this will be the key work I address to contextualize my paintings. "The work relies on a combination of negative and positive space. Just as a shadow is formed by the absence of light, so Duchamp's silhouette exists by virtue of the absence of a portion of white or colored paper pasted over a dark ground." [92] figure/ground with the line formed by his profile defining the space between the light and dark. Duchamp first created a zinc template of his silhouette which he placed on the paper and tore around. This eliminated the 'original' and created a tool for repetitive reproduction of the image...a copy that generates copies of a copy [shadowsilhouette). Tu m', a painting of the shadows of Readymades... Tu m' you bore me, I bore you quote from time of Marcel dechiravit (to Katherine Kuh): "I was never interested in looking at myself in an aesthetic mirror. My intention was always to get away from myself, although I knew perfectly well that I was using myself. Call it a little game between 'I' and 'me'." [93] the 'between' space I/Me, shadow portrait/silhouette Jasper Johns wrote upon Duchamp's death: "The art community feels Duchamp's presence and his absence. He has changed the condition of being here." [95] Johns incorporated Marcel dechiravit in numerous works of his own and the idea of his shadow/silhouette as self portrait (pl. 66, pl. 67, and in 'Fall' from Seasons) "For Duchamp, selfportrayal was not an appendage to other aspects of his career but part and parcel of a larger set of conceptual concerns, including his posthumous reputation. By concerning himself with the construction of an identity that was inherently multifaceted, and thus impossible to encapsulate through a single gesture, Duchamp consciously constructed for himself an elusive likeness, the portrayal of which came to serve as a conceptual challenge in itself." [96] transformation process from one thing into another: "The possible is/an infrathin," liminality (possibility of this is a key part of Kierkegaard's interest in the individual) Duchamp: "The possible implying/ the becoming the passage from/one to the other takes place/ in the infra thin." [96] possibilities
Handke, Peter. ""Song of Childhood" by Peter Handke." Livejournal: Gethenian.26 Jan. 2013. [Web.] Accessed 13 Oct. 2015. <http://gethenian.livejournal.com/562440.html>. see my website post http://www.robynthomasexplorations.com/songofchildhoodbypeterhandke
Hart, Deborah. "A Work in Progress." Imants Tillers: One World Many Visions.National Gallery of Australia, n.d. [Web.] Accessed 11 Feb. 2016. <http://nga.gov.au/exhibition/tillers/Default.cfm?MnuID=4>. "Like a garden that is never finished, the work of an artist is forever in the process of becoming. ‘I am “I” who is becoming “I” who is not I’, writes Haniya Yutaka. Imants Tillers, Land beyond goodbye." [exhibition catalogue, Sydney: Sherman Galleries, 2005,] none/all; presence/absence;origins/originality;self/other; appropriation from reproduction; canvas-board system personal, philosophical and practical; choices are visual, intellectual and intuitive; sensuous, layered surfaces; method of "ambiguous self-erasure, or distancing"; "There are no simple answers, but there are intriguing possibilities." distance to gain clarity; TS Eliot's "impersonality";"the seemingly paradoxical dissolution of the self in order to find the self" "To look in the mirror and see the face of another looking back provides an alternative viewpoint" controlled emotion;identification within a complex structure of wider connections;identity/displacement;subjectivity/objectivity;fragmentation/psychic exile;in-betweenness/need to find connections outside of the self;"self as the site of conflict"; "The counterpart to inner conflict is the artist’s intense intellectual and visual curiosity, his ongoing metaphysical questioning and openness to chance, and his interest in a multi-disciplinary, flexible responsiveness to the world." distancing via the elimination of the original;transformation/interaction; "...the portrait of an artist who cherishes the fact that ‘the self’, like art and life itself, is continuously open to interpretation – mutable, never fully understandable and always in a state of becoming." one/many;unit/multiple;underlying structure;intimacy/grand scale;performative process;stacked as a sculptural presence;movement between states of painting, installation as a cyclical metamorphosis;fluid/dynamic;intimacy/expanse;movement/stillness;permanence/impermanence;books stacked, containing information hidden within, the abstractness of the spines, a work in progress; "The cumulative presence of these stacks containing the past and waiting for the future reflects one of the most significant aspects of Tillers’ system: of the boards unfolding from one work to another, to form an encompassing whole, variously referred to as the Book of Power, the Canvas-board System, One Painting and the Large Image Field." "The idea comes from the French poet Mallarmé who wrote in 1895: ‘Everything, in the world, exists to end up in a book’. The panels have been numbered right from the start and the panel count is continuous."[ if this was written today would it read "Everything, in the world, exists to end up online"?] linear/cyclical; unbound/chance; "The idea of Tillers’ system, which is malleable, expansive and ephemeral, involving a performative dimension in the construction and deconstruction of a work each time it is installed and dismantled, is an approach that had its origins in the experimental environment of the visual arts of the 1970s." systems theory/guiding metaphors for art;Ludwig von Bertalanffy's 'open system view';Fritjof Capra’s The web of life; alternative frameworks for painting;Conversations with the bride 1974–75 in part consisting of overpainted postcard images of Duchamp's The Large Glass; "In dialogue with Duchamp, Tillers creates a flexible organisational model that suggests the de-materialisation of the singular art object without negating the possibility of painting as a viable option." detachment/inherited memory;local/international;connectedness of phenomena; writings[and paintings] of Giorgio de Chirico "...the idea of surprising synergies across time and place in those uncanny deja vu moments, and the recurrence of a shared Zeitgeist"; Tillers"locality fails"; "Where the idea of distance is interesting is that it creates space for reflection and for acknowledging difference." cross-cultural meeting places; "is (it) possible to be enigmatic and passionate at the same time.(?)" answer is in de Chirico "an appropriator ahead of his time who was obsessive in his passions and who reworked many of his own paintings, finding coincidences and correspondences in unexpected ways, making intuitive leaps beyond the visible to the invisible.";the metaphysical; Rene Daumal Mount Analogue; "In the process of the accumulation of diverse kinds of knowledge the main protagonists realise that no matter how much you know it is never possible to know it all; that we need to keep on questioning, we need to retain a sense of awe and reverence for the sheer mystery of living that is not lessened but actually increased by gathering different kinds of knowledge." obsessive; rational/irrational; "It was Duchamp who said, almost as an afterthought, that ‘apparently, the artist acts as a mediumistic being that forges a path from the labyrinth beyond the realm of space and time to a clearing’." "...from the 1980s onwards Tillers’ commitment to painting never wavered. Yet he was equally committed to challenging fixed boundaries – quite literally going beyond the frame in his dynamic canvas-board system." Duchamp, Tu m', 1918 readmades' shadow structures; " It is as though this sign might even turn the other way, like when those mischievous souls turn road signs in reverse while the rest of us are asleep, to create an alternative direction, another reading of the puzzle, the conundrum of the labyrinth, that is endlessly engaging in its content while forever retaining the enigma of possibility."
Harvey, Robert. "Rrose Selavy Is Marcel Duchamp." Rrose Selavy Is Marcel Duchamp.Milan Golob, n.d. [Web.] Accessed 11 Mar. 2016. <http://www.golobgm.si/5marcelduchampasrectifiedreadymade/prroseselavyism arcelduchamp.htm>. posted on artist's website
Herriman, Kat. "For Performa, One Artist Stages a Debate — Among His Own Paintings." The New York Times.03 Nov. 2015. [Web.] Accessed 03 Nov. 2015. <http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/04/tmagazine/performacentralparkpuppetshoww yattkahn.html>. performing the studio, performing the painting
H o u e l l e b e c q , M i c h e l , a n d G a v i n B o w d . Th e M a p a n d t h e T e r r i t o r y .N e w Y o r k : V i n t a g e International, 2011. Print. see essay on my website http://www.robynthomasexplorations.com/depthanddeceptibility
Hughes, Robert. Culture of Complaint: The Fraying of America.New York: Oxford UP, 1993. Print. Reading this book made me revisit a very formative period of my life and reflect on how I experienced and perceived the politics, the 'culture wars', of that time; and how this influenced decisions I made. Particularly in my relationship to America and my ability to leave the US for Germany; the effort I made to adapt to the language and culture I found myself in, how I reemigrated into the US almost a decade later, and understand what the culture of America had become in my absence based upon these beginnings. Most memorable phrase from this book: "pale penis people"
Hughes, Robert. "The Decline of the City of Mahagonny." 1990. Spectacle of Skill.New York: Knopf Doubleday Group, 2015. 75105. Print. from Nothing If Not Critical The Decline of the City of Mahagonny Hughes' personal impression of the (NY School) art world, from 19451970s, cultural colonialism ('cultural cringe'), access to originals versus access to reproductions "But Yahweh doesn't show his face in reproductions. He shows it only in paintings." [78] 1980s NY art world: "The decade may be officially dead, but it won't lie down just yet." [79] inflation of market, promotion over connoisseurship, manufactured art-glamour, poor training of artists, museums in crisis Hughes predicted won't go away although it is 1990 he was right. He did suggest NYC would become less important...here he was both right and wrong. Has the "American Century" ended? American art schools and "decay of the fine arts tradition" [8587], looking at art only through reproduction What does this say now we've moved from slides to digitized images on screens? on looking/learning via slides: "Did this foster the dull blatancy of so much recent American painting, all impact and no resonance?" [87] Impact of mass media, print, film, TVon art. What would Hughes say about the impact of the internet in the short time since his death? Have these developments 'lightened the weight' of painting and sculpture further? The pricing out of artists, and everyone except the upper percent, continues... Despite being 26 years old, and written by a cranky person, some of which was justifiable then and even more so now, not much has changed; if anything many of the points Hughes raised have been amplified.
H y z a g i , J a c q u e s . " R o b e r t C r u m b H a t e s Y o u . " Th e O b s e r v e r .1 4 O c t . 2 0 1 5 . [ W e b . ] A c c e s s e d 1 4 Oct. 2015. <http://observer.com/2015/10/robertcrumbhatesyou/>. interview with R.Crumb...reflections on a career of unfiltered self portraiture
Ingold, Tim. Lines: A Brief History.London: Routledge, 2007. Print. writing as an instrument of memory [15]; the act of remembrance conceived as a performance by the reading, telling, journey [16] "Though medieval thinkers did imagine that the work of memory inscribes the surface of the mind much as the writer inscribes the surface of the paper with his pen and the traveller inscribes the surface of the earth with his feet, they thought of these surfaces not as spaces to be surveyed but as regions to be inhabited, and which one can get to know not through one single, totalizing gaze, but through the laborious process of moving around." [16] used in 2015 Summer presentation Chp. 2 Traces, threads and surfaces [3971] "There is, however, a third major class of line, created not by adding material to surfaces, or by scratching it away, but by ruptures in the surfaces themselves. These are cuts, cracks and creases....Kandinsky noted that 'a particular capacity of line [is] its capacity to create surface'...the moving, linear edge of the spade cuts the surface of the soil..."[4445] "Another way of dissolving a surface, of course, is by cutting it up." [59] Klee's line going out for a walk [73] the lines of a network join the dots [80] "What counts are the lines, not the spaces around them." [84]
Joan Mitchell: Portrait of an ... | Search Results | Watch TV Online | Hulu.Dir. Marion Cajori. Hulu.Christian Blackwood, 1993. [Web.] Accessed 10 Nov. 2015. <http://www.hulu.com/search?q=Joan+Mitchell:+Portrait+of+an+Abstract+Painter>. Intrigued by the 'passivity' of Mitchell's presentation of herself in this film in contrast to her paintings and the tales documenting her personality.
Johns, Jasper, and Carol MancusiUngaro. "Artists Documentation Program » JOHNS, Jasper." Artists Documentation Program RSS.Artists Documentation Program/The Menil Collection/The Whitney Museum of American Art/Center for the Technical Study of Modern Art, Harvard Art Museum/The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, 15 Feb. 1996. [Web.] Accessed 15 Nov. 2015. <http://adp.menil.org/?page_id=57>. The artist's inability to remember the details of a particular painting's material composition bordering on boredom of revisiting that aspect of the work in contrast to his interest in the technical solutions of conservation the collection's conservators have found; an interest in new knowledge and approaches one could see he was gathering to take back with him into the studio to apply to the creation of future paintings. http://adp.menil.org/wpcontent/uploads/2011/12/adp1996a_johns_transcript.pdf
Johnson, Kirk, Richard PÉrezpeÑa, and John Eligon. "Rachel Dolezal, in Center of Storm, Is D e f i a n t : ‘ I I d e n t i f y a s B l a c k ’ . " Th e N e w Y o r k T i m e s .1 6 J u n e 2 0 1 5 . [ W e b . ] A c c e s s e d 1 6 June 2015. <http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/17/us/racheldolezalnbctodayshow.html>. transracial and transgender; the possibilities of one, the other, or both
"The Journals." A Kierkegaard Anthology.Ed. Robert W. Bretall. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1972. N. pag. Print. pp.47 Gilleleie, August 1, 1835 "what am I to do" finding the truth that is true for the individual self; it is my life. "I shall now try to fix a calm gaze upon myself and begin to act in earnest; for only thus shall I be able, like the child calling itself "I" with its first conscious action, to call myself "I" in any deeper sense." (6) Looking inward at the self to understand the world beyond the self.
Kaprow, Allan, and Jeff Kelley. Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life.Berkeley: U of California, 2003. Print. Notes on the Creation of a Total Art (1958) "...we do not come to look at things. We simply enter, are surrounded, and become part of what surrounds us, passively or actively according to our talents for "engagement,"...We have differently colored clothing; can move, feel, speak, and observe others variously; and will constantly change the "meaning" of the work by so doing." [11] "What has been worked out instead is a form that is open and fluid as the shapes of our everyday experience but does not simply imitate them. I believe that this form places a much greater responsibility on visitors than they have had before. The "success" of a work depends on them as well as on the artist. If we admit that work that "succeeds" on some days fails on other days, we may seem to disregard the enduring and stable and to place an emphasis upon the fragile and impermanent. But one can insist, as many have, that only the changing is really enduring and all else is whistling in the dark." [12]
" K a r l M a r x o n I n d i v i d u a l P r o d u c t i o n a n d A r t . " 1 8 5 7 5 8 . Ar t i n T h e o r y , 1 8 1 5 1 9 0 0 : A n Anthology of Changing Ideas.Ed. Charles Harrison, Paul Wood, and Jason Gaiger. Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1998. 34143. Print. individual production and material production unevenness of material development relative to artistic development
" K a r l M a r x ' T h e F e t i s h i s m o f C o m m o d i t i e s ' " 1 8 6 7 . Ar t i n T h e o r y , 1 8 1 5 1 9 0 0 : A n A n t h o l o g y o f Changing Ideas.Ed. Charles Harrison, Paul Wood, and Jason Gaiger. Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1998. 34951. Print. the mystical character of commodities is no mystery, products of labor of the individual who is part of society "A commodity is therefore a mysterious thing, simply because in it the social character of men's labour appears to them as an objective character stamped upon the product of that labour;" [350]
K e l s e y , J o h n . " S t o p P a i n t i n g P a i n t i n g . " Ar t f o r u m 4 4 . 2 ( 2 0 0 5 ) : 2 2 2 2 5 . R p t . i n Do c u m e n t s o f Contemporary Art.London/Cambridge: Whitechapel Gallery and The MIT, 2011. 17982. Print. about Michael Krebber recent shows in NYC; betweenness and the idea painting practice as "an ongoing hesitation between repetition and interruption (or between having an idea and having no idea)." [179] Krebber reminds us of identity as a commodity, produced through painting: artist, paintings, and the market each produce and are produced by the other; but sometimes we have to stop this in order to make ourselves. Analogy of Krebber as a painting machine, repetitious, sometimes breaking down, circling around on itself (Duchamp's Rotoreliefs); relocating the place where painting is found by the viewer. "Sometimes the machine stops suddenly,...But you can't begin again unless you stop." [180] Krebber works against 'signature style' by co-opting the styles of others. "Krebber's approach underlines the fact that artists are readymades too, and that readymades can be unmade." [181] the unlimited possibilities of materials as ways in and out of painting. 'The dandy' "endless de-centering of his own identity is the means by which he makes the world around him start to lose its grip....the dandy interrupts the relations that position him as a subject: he wages a subjective or human strike. Like other strikes, this one interrupts a rhythm and opens up a gap...one's own subjectivity becomes momentarily available again." [181] suspension, like repetition, is a distancing device repetition as a strategy of renewal of possibility, "of disassociating an identity from its proper place in order to produce a transformation. Sometimes the only way to change is by dong the same thing over and over again." [182]
Kertesz, Imre. Ich Ein Anderer.Trans. Ilma Rakusa. Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1999. Print. ""Verstehen wir je, was wir denken?" (Jung) Verstehe ich je mein Leben? Kann ich es verstehen? Alles spricht dagegen: das in mir wurzelnde fremde Ich, der sich selbst rechtfertigende Moralist, der lügnerische Fabelproduzent." [96] Translation: "Do we ever understand what we think?" (Jung) Do I ever understand my life? Can I understand it? Everything speaks against it: that foreign I rooted inside me, the self righteous moralist, the lying producer of fables. Questions of identity when occupying the space between, belonging nowhere.
K i e r k e g a a r d , S o r e n . Th e E s s e n t i a l K i e r k e g a a r d .E d . H o w a r d V . H o n g a n d E d n a H . H o n g . Princeton: Princeton UP, 2000. Print. Either/Or (1843) [3783] Kierkegaard writing under pseudonyms...but not; questions of identity and the self, 'who am I?'; caught between. "Laugh at the stupidities of the world, and you will regret it; weep over them, and you will also regret it. Laugh at the stupidities of the world or weep over them, you will regret it either way. Whether you laugh at the stupidities of the world or you weep over them, you will regret it either way." [4344] "...for the true eternity does not lie behind either/or but before it." [44] I believe it lies neither behind nor before, but between. Portrayal and time [68] "You have various good ideas, many droll fancies, many foolish ones. Keep them all; I do not ask for them. But do you have one idea I beg you to hold firmly, an idea that convinces me that my mind has kinship with yours." [77] "...,and I choose absolutely precisely by having chosen not to chose this or that. I choose the absolute, and what is the absolute? It is myself in my eternal validity." [79] "But what is this self of mine? If I were to speak of a first moment, a first expression for it, then my answer is this: It is the most abstract of all, and yet in itself it is also the most concrete of all it is freedom." [80] Works of Love (1847) [277311] "Love...is a work, ..., but a task, and ultimately a gift in a triangle of love, whereby the "you shall" of the task is transformed into an expression of gratitude for the gift, and the imperative ethics is transformed into an indicative ethics of response, into a responsive striving born of gratitude." [277] Matthew 22:39 ...You shall love your neighbor as yourself. This makes me think of reciprocal relationship between artistspectator-work. The work as a gift to the spectator and to the artist, from each and given equally and freely to each. It is up to the artist, the art work, and the spectator to do this work. Doing this work leads to change, to independence, and for Kierkegaard, against despair. "...in loving the actual individual person it is important that one does not substitute an imaginary idea of how we think or could wish that this person should be. The person who does this does not love the person he sees but again something unseen, his own idea or something similar." [300] a solid foundation needs to be established to "build up" (love builds up) "...knowledge and the communication of knowledge can indeed also be upbuilding, but if they are, then it is because love is present." [307] "Love builds up by presupposing that love is present." [309] In the relationship between artist-work-spectator the work is 'built up' by the presupposition of the presence of all three.
K n a u s g a a r d , K a r l O v e . " M i c h e l H o u e l l e b e c q ’ s ‘ S u b m i s s i o n ’ . " Th e N e w Y o r k T i m e s .0 7 N o v . 2015. [Web.] Accessed 07 Nov. 2015. <http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/08/books/review/michelhouellebecqssubmission.ht ml>. entrapped by the selfformed identity
Kostelanetz, Richard. MoholyNagy: An Anthology.New York, NY: Da Capo, 1991. Print. In Defense of "Abstract" Art (1945) [4446] freedom from imitation and the philosophy behind it abstract painting is about research LMH compares the studio to a lab, a place to conduct scientific experiments, to observer, to vary the experiments under controlled conditions "vision in motion" Space-Time and the Photographer (1942) [5766] space-time=reflections-transparent mirrorings; superimpositions "Mirroring means in this sense the changing aspects of vision, the sharpened identification of the inside and outside penetrations." [63] dreams as space-time articulations, blend independent events into a coherent whole different layers of movement as kinetic representations of time-space existences Design Potentialities (1944) [8190] Louis Sullivan "Form follows function."= the work an object is designed to do. "every process has its necessary form, which always results in functional forms." (Raoul France) we try our best, but are limited by our knowledge and practice "Not everything that we know or feel can be verbalized by a language which uses logic and reason as its main characteristics."[88]an argument for abstraction LMH argued in the mid-20th century for artistic research in a scientific/technical orientation as opposed to one based on that of the humanities; the artist should not be limited to the role of a 'specialist' [89] artists synthesize "Novelty for the sake of novelty tries to create the illusion of new organic demands without serving real needs. It is usually an artificial stimulation of business....One remedy against this is the conscientious training of a new generation of producers, consumers and designers who have grasped the importance of the basic relationship of "form and function"."[90]
Lacan, Jacques. Ecrits.Trans. Bruce Fink. Comp. Heloise Fink and Russell Grigg. New York: W.W. Norton &, 2006. Print. The First Complete Edition in English. The Mirror Stage as Formation of the I Function as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience pp.7581 mirror stage identification/transformation of the subject when he assumes an image [76] infants stage prior to objectification, the subject is subject Freud=ego, not yet alienated "..for imagos...the specular image seems to be the threshold of the visible world,...the mirrored disposition of the imago of one's own body in hallucinations and dreams,...,or if we take note of the role of the mirror apparatus in the appearance of doubles," [77] "The function of the mirror stage thus turns out,...to establish a relationship between an organism and its reality or, as they say, between the Innenwelt and the Umwelt." [78] mirror stage insufficiency to anticipation Anna Freud ego defense; shift of specular I to social I; function of misrecognition Verneinung [negation] and On The Subject Who is Finally in Question pp. 189196 "In other words, we obscure the picture in the very process of painting it." [191] the symptom representative of the return of truth into the gap of a certain knowledge [194] Marx's critique of Hegel, the question of truth as ruses dressed up with reason [194] symptom only interpreted in the signifying order which means in relation to another signifier; vague when understood as representing truth, which they are as truth is the basis of the signifying chain [194195]
Laing, R. D., H. Phillipson, and A. R. Lee. "Excerpt from "The Spiral of Reciprocal Perspectives," Interpersonal Perception: A Theory and a Method of Research." 1966. Martha Wilson Sourcebook: 40 Years of Reconsidering Performance, Feminism, Alternative Spaces.Ed. Martha Wilson. New York: Independent Curators International, 2011. 3031. Print. I think about you thinking about me thinking about you... I want you to think about me thinking about you wanting to think about me wanting to think about you... I am afraid you are thinking about me afraid of wanting you be afraid of me being afraid of you thinking about me thinking about you...and so on...
Lotringer, Slyvere. "Becoming Duchamp." Articles, TOUTFAIT: The Marcel Duchamp Studies Online Journal.ToutFait, 01 May 2000. [Web.] Accessed 31 Jan. 2016. <http://www.toutfait.com/issues/issue_2/Articles/lotringer.html>. John Cage, Duchamp and InfraMince
" M a r c e l D u c h a m p ' T h e R i c h a r d M u t t C a s e ' " 1 9 1 7 . Ar t i n T h e o r y , 1 9 0 0 1 9 9 0 : A n A n t h o l o g y o f Changing Ideas.Ed. Charles Harrison and Paul Wood. Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1992. 248. Print. "He CHOSE it."
Marden, Brice, and Carol MancusiUngaro. "Artists Documentation Program » MARDEN, Brice." Artists Documentation Program RSS.Artists Documentation Program/The Menil Collection/The Whitney Museum of American Art/Center for the Technical Study of Modern Art, Harvard Art Museum/The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, 01 Oct. 1992. [Web.] Accessed 08 Dec. 2015. <http://adp.menil.org/?page_id=60>. Viewed this shortly after seeing the artist's recent exhibit of newer paintings and some earlier prints at Matthew Marks Gallery. Continuity in the artist's process. http://adp.menil.org/wpcontent/uploads/2011/12/adp1992b_marden_transcript.pdf
M a y , R o l l o . " K i e r k e g a a r d : A n x i e t y i n t h e N i n e t e e n t h C e n t u r y . " Th e M e a n i n g o f A n x i e t y .N e w York: W.W. Norton &, 2015. 3047. Print. Compartmentalization of culture hallmark of 19th century and its impact on the individual which was a loss of 'center', leading to anxiety. Kierkegaard's study of the individual's anxiety lead to Freud, according to May. Kierkegaard believed the full commitment of the individual could not be separated from thinking. "We think with our bodies." (Nietzsche) [33] overcoming the dichotomy of mind/body Objectivity is an illusion and undesirable, according to Kierkegaard. "Kierkegaard reacted strongly against rigid definitions of such terms as "self" and "truth"; he felt they could be defined only dynamically,..., as continuously developing among living people."[33] For Kierkegaard freedom equals possibility; but with freedom comes anxiety. Normal anxiety is the possibility of freedom and acting upon it; neurotic anxiety is the inability of acting on the possibility. The more possibility, or creativity ("One has anxiety because it is possible to create creating one's self, willing to be one's self,..." [39]), the more potential anxiety. As we become aware of the possibility we have (self awareness) we become aware of our anxiety. self=freedom. Therefore if freedom is possibility, and possibility leads to anxiety, anxiety leads back to self, which is freedom. This 'leading', which is anxiety, is reflection. The reflective act, anxiety, produces inner conflict. Creating is a destructive act; destroying the status quo; it leads to growth, and guilt. "Anxiety and guilt are potentially present at every instant that individuality is born into community."[41] and this should be happening every second of one's life, according to Kierkegaard. Anxiety and guilt are human, we need to remain open to this because this is freedom. "Self realization i.e., expression and creative use of the individual's capacities can occur only as the individual confronts and moves through anxiety creating experiences."[370] Kierkegaard: the emergence of self awareness is a "qualitative leap" (Freud: emergence of the ego). This is freedom. Freedom involves responsibility; the responsibility to "be one's self"; but this does have the flip side of inducing guilt. Refusing this responsibility is a sacrifice of freedom and limits self awareness. "To venture causes anxiety, but not to venture is to lose oneself," and "The more consciousness, the more self." (Kierkegaard) [372]
M a y e r , R a l p h , a n d S t e v e n S h e e h a n . Th e A r t i s t ' s H a n d b o o k o f M a t e r i a l s a n d T e c h n i q u e s .5 t h e d . New York: Viking, 1985. Print. Studio reference and source for oil medium recipes
McKenzie, Janet. "Conceptual Drawing: Recent Work by Bernhard Sachs, Mike Parr, Greg Creek and Janenne Eaton." Studio International28 Jan. 2010: n. pag. [Web.] Accessed "In a global context drawing exists irrespective of cultural identity. It is a basic human instinct to make marks, to draw, to write. infinite possibilities of drawing;conceptual and practical shift from intimate scale to grand scale; installation; "The conceptual and the subjective, arguably the most vital components of contemporary art practice – connect in drawing more forcibly and more appropriately than in any other form of art." the work begins with the drawing; drawing does not remain stagnant; "Drawing as a structural and conceptual necessity has become increasingly necessary for many artists working today. Not merely the creation of an illusion, but of psychological importance, ...drawing has become an enabling activity. Drawing is both the first step towards abstraction, yet also an important way to incorporate reality in to an overall scheme of things. The paradox makes drawing “both the most traditional of activities and potentially the most radical”.Psychological space can be made to coexist with pictorial space, enabling a personal revision of history." Bernhard Sachs exhibitions made up of over 1,000 drawings; obsessive, work ethic, urgency; Beuys and Duchamp;"it is the relentless processing of the physical activity of drawing and processing of critical theory and politics in relation to the meaning of art that fires Sachs, and which makes him a most dedicated practitioners of drawing."; "...negating characteristics in drawing as formal articulations..."; the act of erasing; building up and layering of images;commercialization of the practice of art; "Sachs is uncompromising in his work, determined to uncover truth or authenticity." paradox: “an operatic set of false memories”;disillusionment and anxiety;"While visitors to the exhibition could view the artist working on the drawing installation, the final product could only be viewed for a four hour period, a cinematic slot, like a countdown to nothingness, a particular void."
M e s s e r l i , D o u g l a s . " O n t h e O u t s i d e L o o k i n g I n : M a r d s e n H a r t l e y ’ s P o e t r y . " Hy p e r a l l e r g i c .2 4 Jan. 2016. [Web.] Accessed 24 Jan. 2016. <http://hyperallergic.com/269667/ontheoutsidelookinginmardsenhartleyspoetry/>. Connecting Hartley's practice as a painter and a poet; his identity as an outsider, and the relationship of his work to the Maine landscape.
Mileaf, Janine A. Please Touch: Dada and Surrealist Objects after the Readymade.Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College, 2010. Print. Introduction tactile modes of interaction after the Readymade shifted the relationship between work and spectator [and artist]; altering function of the work and the relationship Touch=reciprocity, decentralization, contact, multiplicity Duchamp's "tactile perception" as stated in his notes on The Large Glass define touch as multisensory...not limited to the physical. Reciprocity of touch is compulsory...be it touching another or the self; this is the only sense that is such. Merleau Ponty: vision and touch merging=reflexitivity of the subject Derrida: "tactility as...indeterminate and non-unifying 'guiding thread'..." unlike other senses simultaneous inseparable and isolated. in the relationship between artist and viewer the work becomes "switching station" or "provocateur" Touch is physical and conceptual. Hannah Höch Da Dandy, 1919 multiple and shifting identifications suggested by touch...again changing the traditional relationship between spectator and work. Chp. 1 "The Taste of Marcel Duchamp's Readymades avoidance of signature style, use of repetition, and indifference as distancing devices Readymade commodity and eroticism Readymades never have 'originals' Duchamp occupied a space physically, mentally, and artistically between Paris and New York for most of his life; it is in this 'between space' of French and American cultures that Duchamp developed the Readymade [28] Readymade and The Large Glass together "provide for a new model of engagement with the work of art" [30] Duchamp and Cubism: experience with Nude Descending a Staircase caused Duchamp to breakaway from group mentality; impact of Picasso's Construction with Guitar, its relation to the surface of the wall, the contextualization provided insights leading to The Large Glass (according to Mileaf) "allowed the object to present itself". [33] Mileaf this lead to Duchamp to explore the 'tactility of taste' as a model by which to interpret work/relationship Duchamp: "aesthetic echo" and differentiation of it from taste. ex. Bottlerack, pun on 'taste', wet/dry, aesthetic/corporeal "Duchamp posits anticipation as the most promising aspect of the creative process." [44] tension, frustration, and delayed sensual satisfaction "The underlying question what happens to a subject when it is transformed into art? leads directly to the readymade, a genre that ultimately rejects representation and places the object in an unmediated relationship with its viewer. The readymade speaks of consumption and production as if art, distilled to its elemental functions, were nothing more than yearning, or possibility. The irony of Duchamp's claim to indifference is made more obvious by this equation of corporeal and artistic desire." [4647] 'tactile wanderings' and Duchamp's thoughts on what we perceive as being 3D in reality belonging to the fourth dimension a matter of our perception that occurs with the flattening of the object. ex. Tu m' (1918) and the corkscrew's shadow in place of the Bottlerack Note to Chp. Two on Man Ray read his autobiography 'SelfPortrait'
Mina, Denise. Resolution.New York, NY: Carroll & Graf, 2002. Print. photograph of two quotes posted on my website http://www.robynthomasexplorations.com/m505m506paintingstudiesprocess "Maureen sat back and looked out of the window at the dark garden. 'I'd like to know everything,' she said wistfully. 'Everything I've ever wondered about. D'ye ever think that?' She tried to smile at him but Liam looked worried. 'I'd like to know everything about everyone. No mysteries left. No secrets.'" "'I don't claim that,' he said, sitting up to face her, looking like the Benny she used to know. 'I just claim to be doing my best. At that time I didn't know what the consequences of my actions were. i lied to myself about what I was doing and why I was doing it. I thought y'ed be okay, I was lying to myself. I don't have an excuse but I'm sorry and I'm trying not to lie to myself now.'"
Miroir.Dir. Elina Brotherus. Perf. Elina Brotherus. Www.elinabrothers.com/Miroir.Elina Brotherus, 2001. [Web.] Accessed Jan. 2015. <http://www.elinabrotherus.com/videos/#v13>. Miroir 2001, DVD loop, 2 min 25 sec, DV PAL 4:3, silent. emergence of the reflected self in the mirror as the steam evaporates; temporality
Mirzoeff, Nicholas. "Chapter 5: Seeing Sex." An Introduction to Visual Culture.London: Routledge, 1999. 16292. Print. Fetishizing the gaze "The gaze is not just a look or a glance. It is a means of constituting the identity of the gazer by distinguishing her or him from that which is gazed at. At the same time, the gaze makes us aware that we may be looked at, so that this awareness becomes a part of identity in itself....JeanPaul Sartre..."I see myself because somebody sees me."...Lacan: "the gaze is outside, I am looked at, that is to say, I am a picture."{mirror stage}...CaroleAnne Tyler explains: "The subject can never reconcile the split between itself and its mirror imago, the eye which sees and the eye which is seen, the I who speaks and the I who is spoken, the subject of desire and the subject of demand, who must pass through the defiles of the Other's signifiers" (Tyler 1994: 218). When I see myself in the mirror, I can never see the Ideal "I" of the imaginary but only the Symbolic "I"." [164165] From inversion to opposites and ambiguity "The very creation of a standardized notion of the human implies the elision of many individual cases in order to sustain the overarching categories....Thus the clarity of the classificatory principal overrides the existence of specific real people." [170] Seeing female sex "Identity is neither cultural nor natural in terms of the binary oppositions but is a formation in constant flux, drawing on physical, psychical and creative resources to create a sense of self or selves from a range of possibilities that are fractal rather than linear." [173174] Mixing: the cultural politics of race and reproduction "...one possible route to a transcultural gaze." [174] race and representation the denial of the reality miscegenation as typical of the fetishistic gaze classifications as specimens rather than individuals the "liminal woman" caught between two worlds (quadroon, octoroon) [176177] Queering the gaze: Roger Casement's eyes the self portrait photographs of Samuel Fosso and Rotimi FaniKayode [187190] challenge perceived notions of identity (race, class, gender); three aspects which are not separate but one
Molderings, Herbert, Frederick Kiesler, and John Brogden. Marcel Duchamp at the Age of 85: An Incunabulum of Conceptual Photography.Köln: Verlag Der Buchh. Walther König, 2013. Print. "When Duchamp was asked by the curator Katherine Kuh in 1961 why he had such a strong need to distance himself as far as possible from the traditional forms of expression, he replied: "I was really trying to invent, instead of merely expressing myself. I was never interested in looking at myself in an aesthetic mirror. My intention was always to get away from myself, though I knew perfectly well that I was using myself. Call it a little game between 'I' and 'me'." [37] A history of Duchamp's staging photographic self portraits throughout his lifetime, even during the years he denied making art; playing with 'truth' of the subject/object and identity. Fictional photography and the idea of the "inframince"[60710 inframince=ultrafine sensory perception "Duchamp's staged self portrait as an old man was an innovative contribution not only to the genre of self portrait but also to the use of photography as a medium of artistic expression. The deliberate game of confusion played by this photograph "from the future" at once presupposed and contradicted the belief in the physical existence of the photographed subject, a firmly established belief based on the law of causality and substantiated by the widespread use of photography. " [6970] continuation of his play with fantasy and ambiguity of identity as revealed in the photographic portrait since Multiportrait, 1917 and Rrose Selavy, 1921.
M u r p h y , K a t e . " W h a t S e l f i e S t i c k s R e a l l y T e l l U s A b o u t O u r s e l v e s . " Th e N e w Y o r k T i m e s .0 8 Aug. 2015. [Web.] Accessed 09 Aug. 2015. <http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/09/sundayreview/whatselfiesticksreallytellusab outourselves.html>. "Of course, selfies can also create a historical record of one’s life, if maybe a little better than reality. They show the world what you are doing and who you are with and how incredibly fun it all is. You often hear the refrain, “Pics or it didn’t happen.” This implies the corollary, “Selfies or you don’t exist,” which may explain some people’s compulsion to document their actions even if doing so diminishes their experience and engagement in the real world."
Nechvatal, Joseph. "An Open Letter to Frank Stella on the Occasion of His Whitney Retrospective." Hyperallergic RSS.16 Nov. 2015. [Web.] Accessed 08 Feb. 2016. <http://hyperallergic.com/253681/anopenlettertofrankstellaontheoccasionofhisw hitneyretrospective/>. see my response to piece on my website http://www.robynthomasexplorations.com/newpage1
Nelson, Robert. "The Age: National, World, Business, Entertainment, Sport and Technology News from Melbourne's Leading Newspaper." Bernhard Sachs.The Age, 12 Feb. 2009. [Web.] Accessed 31 Jan. 2016. <http://www.theage.com.au/news/entertainment/arts/artsreviews/bernhardsachs/2009/02 /12/1234028177294.html>. "The idea works best when the scheme is dark, because the images beneath speak the same language as the image on top, and they argue with one another on equal terms. "
Noë, Alva. "What Art Unveils." Opinionator What Art Unveils Comments.The New York Times, 05 Oct. 2015. [Web.] Accessed 05 Oct. 2015. <http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/10/05/whatartunveils/?_r=0>. "Is there a way of thinking about art that will get us closer to an understanding of its essential nature, and our own?" neuroscience as a method to understanding ourselves it remains inadequate; art as a method is "Works of art are tools, but they have been made strange, and that is the source of their power." "In contrast with mere technology, art doesn’t have to work to be good." "Why do artists make stuff if the familiar criteria of success or failure in the domain of manufacture are not dispositive when it comes to art? Why are artists so bent on making stuff? To what end? My hypothesis is that artists make stuff not because the stuff they make is special in itself, but because making stuff is special for us. Making activities — technology, for short — constitute us as a species. Artists make stuff because in doing so they reveal something deep and important about our nature, indeed, I would go so far as to say, about our biological nature." neuroscientific approach is too in individualistic; art, making stuff, is both an individual and a collective act "...art begins, when we are unable to take the background of our familiar technologies and activities for granted, and when we can no longer take for granted what is, in fact, a precondition of the very natural seeming intelligibility of such things as doorknobs and pictures, words and sounds." "Art disrupts plain looking and it does so on purpose. By doing so it discloses just what plain looking conceals." "A work of art is a strange tool." "If I am right, art isn’t a phenomenon to be explained. Not by neuroscience, and not by philosophy. Art is itself a research practice, a way of investigating the world and ourselves. Art displays us to ourselves, and in a way makes us anew, by disrupting our habitual activities of doing and making."
Nozkowski, Thomas, and Sherman Sam. Thomas Nozkowski: March 31April 25, 2015.New York: Pace, 2015. Print. exhibition catalogue Essay: "Let me show you a place to be..." by Sherman Sam The paintings of Nozkowski are like Proust's thoughts on how we sense place, time and memory by both mind and body. His paintings come from how he has experienced life. "My work is "abstracted" from reality, I suppose, in that each painting has an exact and specific source in the physical world. One of the reasons I do this is to find extraordinary formal devices colors, shapes, compositions which I would not have discovered with a strictly formal way of painting." [8; from interview with the author, Artworker of the Week, #20, Kultureflash, no.67. November 26, 2003] "It is not the corresponding truth in the world that makes artwork valuable."[8] seeking to bring 'content' and the 'personal' back into the painting by moving away from the 'grand scale' figure/ground relationship "Content is a glimpse, de Kooning once said. Perhaps that is all there will ever be, a glimpse; what remains after is what the object really offers. The use value to the viewer is much more complex than what the story of the work or the story in the work offers. That is the reason Nozkowski sticks to his creative principal it offers a point of resistance but also creates an opening or spacing." [1011] "He offers his audience a freedom a freedom to see, to think, and, ultimately, to be." [11] "A Nozkowski painting sets up a situation where something similar can occur. It is a place. a space to see, a spacing for looking. "Everything," he says, "informs everything else." And that's how it should be, but in reality, that's just how it is, even if we don't know it or acknowledge it. Now you just have to look, see, and connect..."[11; Thomas Nozkowski, interview with Garth Lewis, in Thomas Nozkowski, exh. cat. (New York: The Pace Gallery, 2010), p.17.]
Peggy Guggenheim: Art Addict.Dir. Lisa Immordino Vreeland. Perf. Peggy Guggenheim. Dakota Group, 2015. Film. a memory prompt for an autobiography she wrote and I had read many years ago, but also to hear how the current art world figures, those who knew her and those that did not, speak about the role she has played as a patron in 20th century art, and her identity as such.
Pendleton, Moses, Bob Elfstorm, and Lucy Hilmer. "MOSES PENDLETON PRESENTS MOSES PENDLETON." Vimeo.N.p., 2010. [Web.] Accessed Oct. 2015. <https://vimeo.com/8567696>. A video self portrait of the dancer/choreographer, founder of Pilobus and Momix, Moses Pendleton on his 33rd birthday. Filmed in the early 1980s, this video aired on American cable TV channel A&E frequently at that time. I watched it repeatedly at that time, interested in the dance, the images and the way Pendleton told his story. I stuck in a corner of my memory, and I recently found it online; rewatching it often as a source for portraying the self through other media.
Periz, Ingrid. "A Space of Lostness." Australian Art Collector38 (2006): 11625. [Web.] Accessed Bernard Sachs, drawings, installation, image as allegory lacking truth due to intentional or unintentional revision or alteration. Identity based in migration and the weight of culture of origin. "As he puts it, “the aesthetic has become a corrective to the linguistic turn” in his thinking about art." The ghostly images of the history of painting carried in our heads; Judith and Holofernes and St. Eustace and the stag's head as allegories of the current art world. The physical reworking [revisioning] of his work to the point 'the work' no longer exists physically and conceptually erasing, disappearing. Drawing-painting-installation-performance limited and controlled access breaking down traditional constructs of viewing distances between viewer and the work up to the viewer to build and judge what the [his]story is resulting in an "operatic set of false memories" according to Sachs.
P e s c a d o r , P a u l . " S u r f a c e o f C o l o r . " TH E P I T .O c t . 2 0 1 5 . [ W e b . ] A c c e s s e d O c t . 2 0 1 5 . <http://www.thepit.la/newpage1/>. website text for group show in LA exploring expression of queer identity through abstraction
Pointon, Marcia R. Portrayal and the Search for Identity.London: Reaktion, 2013. Print. Introduction: Face =Portraiture "acts of portrayal are bound up with anxieties about betrayal about inauthentic representations and about imagery that appears difficult to control or resistant to reading." (89) Control. Subversive by challenging the status quo. Portraiture as the pinnacle of artist-object-spectator relationship. Rarely do they have a life beyond the lifetime of the subject. The Internet: graveyard of the 'selfie'.(14) Portrayal's betrayal is the destruction of the illusion of our immortality. (20) Where does identity reside in portraiture? (22) is a question the author addresses throughout the book. Chp. 2 the location of identity formation in portraits of non-subjects [human objects, i.e. slaves, women] is the position of the betrayal; doubling, and the relationship between the artist, spectator and the objectification of the subject. Paradox that the portrait, a genre of 'representation' or resemblance, is where abstraction was first explored and expressed. (62) Portraiture is the origin of painting. (63) Mirrors Dorian Gray and Narcissus. The doubling process can destroy the subject by its objectification; mirrors as a distancing device.(73) Chp. 3 relationship between liminality and adolescence Chp. 4 Accessories that bridge the gap between the individual and his identity as a member of a group. Analysis of the details in relation to the whole.(128) Accessories have a liminal character...Derrida's understanding of Kant...accessory as an object neither inside nor outside the subject, this should be the goal of the subject; Freud's idea of the accessory transitional object. (129) Tristam Shandy and 'the gap', expressed in the text (162) and the 'buttonhole', the pocket. Jacques Bethoud's definition of the pun versus the double entendre, collusion and its part in the relationship between artist, object, and spectator. (172) Chp. 5 The whole thing. Self portraiture in the late 20th and early 21st century. Self portraiture, the embodies self is all about the"spectacle of a void" i.e.. 'the gap'. (181) Great source for contemporary examples. Look further into Derek Jarman's final paintings. "The self portrait is, then, a manifestation in some sense of the individual's relationship to his or her body, and, as Ludmilla Jordanova points out, the physical work required in the production is often belied in the resulting image." (188) "the phenomenon of the artist's physical self as recorded in textual traces." (188) Mirrors Jenny Saville; material device and a moral/philosophical concept; the mirror broken. "This deployment of the mirror as a figure in the image,..., challenges its apparently mimetic function, thus establishing a hiatus, a gap or an aporia between self and reflected self that so much self portraiture aspires to close." (196) authenticating surface is the viewer, not the mirror. Paul de Man: 4 selfs judges, reads, writes, reads itself. Pointon adds 5th, the proxy self [collaborator] (198) Je est un autre. Quel Je? Et un autre que qui? Self portraits and temporality the finite life. Mieke Bal [photography] "the portrait is always post-traumatic." (205) The self portrait as a response to confrontation of mortality through illness; preparation for and rebellion from death. The 'performed' self portrait exists only in an after life of its documentation. Sam Taylor Wood's Self portrait in Single Breasted Suit with Hare...bond of pun between artist and viewer. (220) Monica Greco "Why are our bodies not made of hinged flaps or transparent panels, so that we can have a look?" (223) Medical technology and self portraiture, Derrida's "I am dead"...a grammatically impossible statement proven possible through the paintings of Derek Jarman [layering and obscuring] and Ian Breakwell's photographic collage Parasite and Hostthe proxy, makes the absent present. "The portrait offers up an expectation of human presence that is immediately denied by the very plasticity and materiality of the portrait....Louis Marin points out...power accrues to the King's portrait only after death.It is this aporia, the gap between the sign and the referent, that makes portraiture so compelling." (227)
Richter, Gerhard. The Daily Practice of Painting.Ed. Hans Ulrich Obrist. Trans. David Britt. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2002. Print. "One has to believe in what one is doing, one has to commit oneself inwardly, in order to do painting. Once obsessed, one ultimately carries it to the point of believing that one might change human beings through painting. But if one lacks this passionate commitment, there is nothing left to do. Then it is best to leave it alone. for basically painting is total idiocy." [78] "Painting is the making of analogy for something non-visual and incomprehensible: giving it form and bringing it within reach." [99] "Abstract pictures are fictive models, because they make visible a reality that we can neither see nor describe, but whose existence we can postulate. We denote this reality in negative terms: the unknown, the incomprehensible, the infinite." [100] "...the unknown simultaneously alarms us and fills us with hope, and so we accept the pictures as a possible way to make the inexplicable more explicable, or at all events more accessible." [100] "Art is the highest form of hope."[100] "Everything made since Duchamp has been a readymade, even when hand-painted." [101] "Language can express only what language enables it to express. Language is the only language of consciousness. 'what one cannot say, one does not know.' That is why all theory is absolutely circumscribed, almost unusable, but always dangerous." [182] "I am more and more aware of the importance of the unconscious process that has to take place while one is painting as if something were working away in secret. You can almost just stand by and wait until something comes. It has been called 'inspiration' or 'an idea from heaven' but it's far more down to earth and far more complicated than that." [195196] "As Duchamp showed, it has nothing to do with craftsmanship. what counts isn't being able to do a thing, it's seeing what it is. Seeing is the decisive act, and ultimately it places the maker and the viewer on the same level." [217] "I think something in Duchamp didn't suit me all that mysterymongering and that is why I painted those simple glass panes and showed the whole windowpane problem in a completely different light." [225] "I don't like manufactured mystery." [272]
Sachs, Bernhard. "Elements." Bernhard Sachs: Elements.200th ed. South Yarra: Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, 1993. N. pag. Print. brochure for exhibition at ACCA 1. Concerning Reconstruction"analogous to memory and the process of remaking or reforming involved in an act of remembering and particularly retelling. Each act of reconstruction alters the event" 2. Concerning Cities city as embodiment of language the structure of 'I'becoming naturedeath (imitations) 3. During Philosophy "...intuitively we feel we are more than we seem, we are more than our bodies, we are in motion, we are passengers in transit between destinations we refer to ourselves." "This 'History' is decidedly unstable."
Sade. "Part Two: Two Philosophical Dialogues." Justine, Philosophy in the Bedroom, and Other Writings.Comp. Richard Seaver and Austryn Wainhouse. New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1990. 161367. Print. Analysis of Sade's use of dialogue to create character and expound philosophical ideas.
Saltz, Jerry. "The Richter Resolution." Modern Painters.N.p.: n.p., 2005. 2829. April. Rpt. in Documents of Contemporary Art.London/Cambridge: Whitechapel Gallery and The MIT, 2011. 18385. Print. reproduction of photographs in painting...he's sick of it 1855 A.J. Wiertz: "painting would one day 'seize photography by the collar and exclaim: Mine! You are mine now! We are going to work together'." [183] photographs/projectors (cameras) are tools like brushes and rulers..find original ways to use them "...the space between the photograph, the photographer and the thing photographed is rich..." and analogous to that between artist, work, and spectator(?) [183] avoiding the monotony encountered in contemporary photo-based painting, seeking original ways of using photography in painting "...there's nothing whatsoever photographic about Warhol's work." [184] paintings "Weapons of Mass Seduction" are the reason it is so "bottomless" ..."A crucial weapon is the mystical ability to embed thought in viscous substance." [184] "...give the alchemy of painting a chance." [185]
S a m e t , J e n n i f e r . " B e e r w i t h a P a i n t e r : L u c y M i n k C o v e l l o . " Hy p e r a l l e r g i c R S S .0 7 N o v . 2 0 1 5 . [Web.] Accessed 07 Nov. 2015. <http://hyperallergic.com/251543/beerwithapainterlucyminkcovello/>. titles, scale, form, and color
Sartre, JeanPaul. "No Exit." No Exit, and Three Other Plays.New York: Vintage International, 1989. 147. Print. ESTELLE [opens her eyes and smiles]: I feel so queer. [She pats herself.] Don't you ever get taken that way? WhenI can't see myself I begin to wonder if I really and truly exist. I pat myself just to make sure, but it doesn't help much. INEZ: You're lucky. I'm always conscious of myself in my mind. Painfully conscious. ESTELLE: Ah yes, in your mind. But everything that goes on in one's head is so vague, isn't it? It makes one want to sleep. [She is silent for a while.] I've six big mirrors in my bedroom. There they are. I can see them. But they don't see me. They're reflecting the carpet, the settee, the window but how empty it is, a glass in which I'm absent! When I talk to people I always made sure there was one near by in which I could see myself. I watched myself talking. And somehow it kept me alert, seeing myself as the others saw me...Oh dear! My lipstick! I'm sure I've put it on all crooked. No, I can't do without a looking glass for ever and ever, I simply can't. [1920]
Schapiro, Meyer. New York: George Braziller, 1996. Print. The second essay, Script In Pictures: Semiotics of Visual Language I have found to be of greater relevance; particularly the author’s discussions on Goya’s self portraits, the role of text as a mirroring of speech, and the position of the ‘reader’ as internal or external in relation to image and the text contained within.
Schier, Flint. "Painting after Art?: Comments on Wollheim." Visual Theory: Painting and Interpretation.New York: n.p., 1991. 15157. Rpt. in Art in Theory: 19001990 An
Anthology of Changing Ideas.Ed. Charles Harrison and Paul Wood. Oxford: Blackwell, 1992. 1111116. Print. see my website post with citations used from this essay in my presentation at Winter Residency 2016 NYC, 13 January 2016 http://www.robynthomasexplorations.com/newpage2
Schjeldahl, Peter. "Native Soil." New Yorker25 May 2015: 7879. Print. Review of "Frida Kahlo: Art, Garden,Life " at the New York Botanical Garden According to Schjeldahl, we all know what Frida looked like; "The self she portrayed is a fictional creation based on her biography," symbolism, fantasy, ambiguity "gaining intensity through her paint handling" colors absorb light and add to the sense of paintings with a solid presence
Sherman, Cindy. APlay of Selves.Ostfildern, Germany: Hatje Cantz, 2007. Print. Introduction by Sherman "This is the only work I've ever done that was consciously autobiographical." cinematic, cut out photos of self as various characters, mounted in narratives along the wall originally shown at Hallwalls, 1976
S m i t h , R o b e r t a . " R e v i e w : F l o r a C r o c k e t t , a F o r g o t t e n A b s t r a c t P a i n t e r . " Th e N e w Y o r k T i m e s .1 0 Nov. 2015. [Web.] Accessed 10 Nov. 2015. <http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/11/arts/design/reviewfloracrockettaforgottenabstr actpainter.html>. painting across the hall from Duchamp; a woman seen after her death
Solnit, Rebecca. "Woolf's Darkness: Embracing the Inexplicable." Men Explain Things to Me. Chicago: Haymarket, 2014. 85106. Print. "It's the job of the writers and explorers to see more, to travel light when it comes to preconception, to go into the dark with their eyes open." [87] Solnit in discussion with Sontag: "..., and I argued that you don't know if your actions are futile; that you don't have the memory of the future; that the future is indeed dark, which is the best thing it could be; and that, in the end, we always act in the dark. The effects of your actions may unfold in ways you cannot foresee or even imagine." [93] "To me, the grounds for hope are simply that we don't know what will happen next, and that the unlikely and the unimaginable transpire quite regularly." [94] quote I ended my Summer 2015 presentation with Keats negative capability Woolf the city between 46 PM "Here she describes a form of society that doesn't enforce identity but liberates it, the society of strangers, the republic of the streets, the experience of being anonymous and free that big cities invented." [97] for Woolf outside the home, walking, on the city street, is the place for introspection Solnit Wanderlust; the mind in motion while walking "The shell of home is a prison of sorts, as much as a protection, a casing of familiarity and continuity that can vanish outside." [9798] Woolf: "Or is the true self neigh this nor that, neither here nor there, but something so varied and wandering that it is only when we give the rein to its wishes and let it take its way unimpeded that we are indeed ourselves? Circumstances compel unity; for convenience' sake a man must be a whole." [99, in "Street Haunting"] Whitman: "I contain multitudes." Rimbaud: "I is another." aggression of the (art) world against the uncertainty and ambiguity of the (artist's) work (identity) invitation to conversation through the writing, the critique, the work Woolf seeks liberation; going beyond the familiar, the known, the safe: freedom to wander, freedom to roam. Chip Ward: "the tyranny of the quantifiable"; "...partly the failure of language and discourse to describe more complex, subtle, and fluid phenomena, as well as the failure of those who shape opinions and make decisions to understand and value these slipperier things." [105] "Woolf gave us limitlessness, impossible to grasp, urgent to embrace, as fluid as water, as endless as desire, a compass by which to get lost." [106]
S o t h , P h o t o g r a p h s A l e c . " T h e U n s e l f i e . " Th e N e w Y o r k T i m e s .T h e N e w Y o r k T i m e s , 1 0 O c t . 2015. [Web.] Accessed 10 Oct. 2015. <http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/11/magazine/theunselfie.html>. online slide show of Sloth's "unselfies"
S p r i n g e r , P e t e r . Ha n d a n d H e a d : E r n s t L u d w i g K i r c h n e r ' s S e l f p o r t r a i t a s S o l d i e r .T r a n s . S u s a n Ray. Berkeley: U of California, 2002. Print. "An Italian saying that describes the northern artists, "Hanno il cervello belle mani" (They have their brain in their hands), reflects the theoretical identification of head and hand;...:artists think, so to speak, with their hands. ...At the same time, the hand, like the head, symbolized the artist's individuality." [101] hand=eye=brain for artist Kirchner wrote and painted and socialized with 'intellectuals', yet the author tends to be slightly dismissive of this, instead emphasizing the artist's neurotic tendencies instead. "...that does not mean that Kirchner's art grew out of this literary thinking." [119] "Kirchner's Self Portrait as Soldier is thus less a symbol of existential danger (and certainly not a work of protest against the war) than it is a metaphor for his own state of mind and sense of identity "a metaphoric autobiography" as it were....The result is a depiction of an exaggerated anxiety about his identity as an artist, an identity threatened by the military and the war; this anxiety then led to an existential crisis that bordered on self destruction." [128129]
S t e i n b e r g , A v i . " T h e M u r k y M e a n i n g o f t h e K i l l e r S e l f i e . " Th e N e w Y o r k T i m e s .1 0 D e c . 2 0 1 5 . [Web.] Accessed 10 Dec. 2015. <http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/11/magazine/themurkymeaningofthekillerselfie. html>. dying to see ourselves
Stella, Frank, Elizabeth Lunning, and Brad Epley. "Artists Documentation Program » STELLA, Frank." Artists Documentation Program RSS.Artists Documentation Program/The Menil Collection/The Whitney Museum of American Art/Center for the Technical Study of Modern Art, Harvard Art Museum/The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, 09 June 2006. [Web.] Accessed 06 Nov. 2015. <http://adp.menil.org/?page_id=31>. The artist's noncommitted relationship to the material identity of the work. http://adp.menil.org/wpcontent/uploads/2011/12/adp2006c_stella_transcript.pdf
Strohminger, Nina, and Shaun Nichols. "Your Brain, Your Disease, Your Self." The New York Times.22 Aug. 2015. [Web.] Accessed 22 Aug. 2015. <http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/23/opinion/yourbrainyourdiseaseyourself.html>. when identity is compromised or altered by disease in the brain; personal experience
This Must Be the Place.Dir. Paolo Sorrentino. Perf. Sean Penn. Medusa, 2011. Hulu.com. questions of identity and how our behavior or actions are directed by our understanding of who we are as must as by the ‘who we are’ we project is responded to by others his Must Be The Place left me questioning whether or not I was hallucinating the storyline as it became increasingly more bizarre. On the other hand, the shots were quite enjoyable, almost like a well crafted graphic novel by someone who really wanted to mess with the viewer’s sense of his or her own sanity.
Thomas, Robyn. "Annotated Bibliography." Robyn Thomas.15 Feb. 2015. [Web.] <http://www.robynthomasexplorations.com/mcp503annotatedbibliography/>. annotated bibliography for first year research paper
Thomas, Robyn. "Between the Easel and the Wall." Robyn Thomas.28 Dec. 2015. [Web.] <http://www.robynthomasexplorations.com/betweentheeaselandthewall>. essay I wrote and published on my website, the central piece of my presentation at Winter Residency 2016 in NYC 13 January 2016.
Thomas, Robyn. "FINAL Research Paper." Robyn Thomas.15 Apr. 2015. [Web.] <http://www.robynthomasexplorations.com/mcp503finalresearchpaper/>. Year one research paper; Duchamp's The Large Glass.
Thomas, Robyn. "Notes from Two Days in New York City." Robyn Thomas.07 Dec. 2015. [Web.] Accessed 07 Dec. 2015. <http://www.robynthomasexplorations.com/notesfromtwodaysinnewyorkcity>. essay I wrote and posted on my website regarding exhibits viewed December 46, 2015.
T o m k i n s , C a l v i n . " C i n d y S h e r m a n . " Li v e s o f t h e A r t i s t s .N e w Y o r k : H e n r y H o l t , 2 0 0 8 . 2 1 4 5 . Print. Tomkins' New Yorker profile on Sherman. "People are often amazed that someone as nice as Cindy Sherman could be a major artist." [21] in other words, she isn't at all like the work she is known for...she is not making self portraits. "It was a little odd, walking around the empty gallery with the artist...looking at portraits for which she had posed but in which she was not present." [24] Sherman tells stories through the characters she creates. She was (is) not that comfortable with her body, so she decided to confront this discomfort through the use of her own body (via a photo class assignment in college). "The more Cindy's work accessed Cindy, the more it grew," (Robert Longo) [29] She is 'present' somewhere deep within the work. Untitled Film Stills Sherman wanted to tell stories that the viewers could read in different ways...they are open. she admired performance artists, but "felt no inclination to perform in public" [32] Tomkins says she doesn't seem to be 'acting' but refers to her as an actress. She does not title, but numbers her photos to retain ambiguity. She is open to the meanings and theoretical ideas others assign to her work. The camera is the tool she uses to make the art, the photograph is the work; but Sherman is not a 'photographer', she is a picture maker, and artist. "..."looking into the mirror to see what works."...She has no preconceived ideas of what she wants. The character emerges through the process. Sherman has described that process as "trancelike," and it can take a very long time." [44] "My way of working is that I don't know what I'm trying to say until it's almost done."(Sherman) [44] she works alone "With this artist, the work and the life connect in ways that are as surprising to her as they are to us." (Tomkins) [45]
" T r i s t a n T z a r a ' D a d a M a n i f e s t o 1 9 1 8 ' " 1 9 1 8 . Ar t i n T h e o r y , 1 9 0 0 1 9 9 0 : A n A n t h o l o g y o f Changing Ideas.Ed. Charles Harrison and Paul Wood. Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1992. 24853. Print. "I write this manifesto to show that people can perform contrary actions together while taking one fresh gulp of air; I am against action; for continuous contradiction, for affirmation too, I am neither for nor against and I do not explain because I hate common sense." [249] "There is no ultimate Truth." [251] "The contradiction and unity of poles in a single toss can be the truth." [252]
T s u i , B o n n i e . " C h o o s e Y o u r O w n I d e n t i t y . " Th e N e w Y o r k T i m e s .1 3 D e c . 2 0 1 5 . [ W e b . ] Accessed 13 Dec. 2015. <http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/14/magazine/chooseyourownidentity.html>. it's not that simple...
T w o m b l e y , C y , a n d C a r o l M a n c u s i U n g a r o . " A r t i s t s D o c u m e n t a t i o n P r o g r a m » L o g i n . " Ar t i s t s Documentation Program RSS.Artists Documentation Program/The Menial Collection/The Whitney Museum of American Art/Center for the Technical Study of Modern Art, Harvard Art Museum/The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, 17 Dec. 2000. [Web.] Accessed 08 Dec. 2015. <http://adp.menil.org/?page_id=284>. White. Green. For as much as these paintings have been through and the point in history when they were made...materials in transition...it is amazing they are still around. Astonishment. http://adp.menil.org/wpcontent/uploads/2011/12/adp2000c_twombly_transcript_temp.pd f
Luke Fowler: Three Minute Wonders (2009).Dir. Luke Fowler. N.d. UbuWeb Film & Video. Channel 4/Three Minute Wonders, 2009. [Web.] Accessed Oct. 2015. <http://www.ubu.com/film/fowler_wonders.html>. Four film portraits of former neighbors of the filmmaker. Abstraction of image to capture place and identity.
V C A M a r g a r e t L a w r e n c e G a l l e r y / B e r n h a r d S a c h s . Be r n h a r d S a c h s : Anathema/Anachronism/Apostasyr.Melbourne: VCA Margaret Lawrence Gallery/Bernhard Sachs, 2009. Print. brochure for exhibition at VCA Margaret Lawrence Gallery summary exhibition of 'Trilogy' history and representation as world theatre/opera after W. Benjamin's 1924 text, The Origin of German Tragic Drama. Trilogy is actual eight exhibitions, not three, so intentionally misleading. Goethe's Faust history is "not a truth or truths, nor a realty or realities, but an abyss of obsessions seeking objects." Dali's paranoiac critical method "...the past is continually revisited but it is never the same twice." "Played out between...." "Uebermalen creates history in an image" "...the corrupt descent into materiality" "death and its drive" dedicated to "...the violence of those who do not settle for less..."
Venus in Fur.Dir. Roman Polanski. Perf. Emmanuelle Seigner, Mathieu Amalric. Mars Distribution, 2013. [Web.] Accessed 11 Nov. 2015. <http://www.netflix.com/watch/70275370?trackId=&tctx=0,0,ca8afeb3a7b3108b2aec029 07ee28226426d041c:f4eeda8f7991820bdf0a0570d9f90ba08c5e43f6>. truth and identity, psychological manipulation of self and other
Watterson, Bill, and Garry Trudeau. Introduction. Calvin and Hobbes.Kansas City: Andrews McMeel, 1987. N. pag. Print. "Of course, this exclusivity only provokes many grownups into trying to regain the serendipity of youth for themselves, to, in effect, retrieve the irretrievable. A desperate few do things that later land them in the Betty Ford Center. The rest of us, more sensibly, read Calvin and Hobbes. Garry Trudeau" posted on my website http://www.robynthomasexplorations.com/m505m506paintingstudiesprocess
Wenders, Wim. "Ich Schreibe, Also Denke Ich." Die Pixel Des Paul Cezanne.Ed. Annette Reschke. Frankfurt Am Main: Verlag Der Autoren, 2015. 1321. Print. English translation R. Thomas 21. September 2015 http://www.robynthomasexplorations.com/wordsofwenders
Westley, Hannah. "Imaging the Absent Subject: Marcel Duchamp's La Grand Verre." The Body as Medium and Metaphor.Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2008. [Web.] "Duchamp uses the piece to confront and dissolve the hierarchal relations between object and subject, artist and viewer." (20) In order to view La Grand Verre or any work without a clearly stated original identity [representational] the spectator must identify within the work "explicit and implicit indications" that the author, the narrator, and the protagonist are one. The Bride as forerunner of Rrose Selavy and the nude figure in Etant Donnes [Lyotard]; ultimately the figure is Duchamp, or at least the feminine aspects of his self. "autobiography" in intentional act, seeking to capture the subjectivity of the creator through the act of creation..MARiee CELibataries the masculine as well as the feminine aspects of Duchamp's identity embodied and constructed in The Large Glass. Multiple, shifting identities, gender varies, many masculine. Dee, Totor, Slim Pickens, George W. Welch, R.Mutt, Marcel Douxami...there is no 'real' La Grand Verre as a mirror of the fourth dimension; reflects and frames. "A folding mirror that reflects back upon itself, a looking glass where the viewer's gaze is already represented in the work." gendered identity and infra mince, the separation between self and other In The Large Glass it is about the 'interdependence and interchange' , the gaze between subject and object...not one dominating the other. [36]
W i l l i a m s , A l e x . " W h o W a s t h e R e a l L o u R e e d ? " Th e N e w Y o r k T i m e s .3 1 O c t . 2 0 1 5 . [ W e b . ] Accessed 31 Oct. 2015. <http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/01/fashion/whowastherealloureed.html>. control/lack of control of the portrait after death
Wilson, Martha. ""Performance Art: (Some) Theory and (Selected) Practice at the End of This Century," Art Journal." 1997. Ed. Martha Wilson. Martha Wilson Sourcebook: 40 Years of Reconsidering Performance, Feminism, Alternative Spaces.New York: Independent Curators International, 2011. 197200. Print. "Performance art is composed of (often confrontational) ideas; it takes place in "real" time; and the body is its irreducible medium, the locus where text and image intersect. " [198] the possibility of multiple interpretations exist; Lawrence Weiner word and image intersect in the idea of the artist, for Wilson this is the "body" of performance art.
Winters, Terry, and Carol MancusiUngaro. "Artists Documentation Program » WINTERS, Terry." Artists Documentation Program RSS.Artists Documentation Program/The Whitney Museum of American Art/The Menil Collection/Center for the Technical Study of Modern Art, Harvard Art Museums/The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, 04 June 2013. [Web.] Accessed 04 Nov. 2015. <http://adp.menil.org/?page_id=880>. The artist's concern for the quality of the painting, its condition, as a material object. http://adp.menil.org/wpcontent/uploads/2014/09/adp2013c_winters_transcript_final.pdf Winters makes paintings that will withstand the test of time as material objects.
W i t t g e n s t e i n , L u d w i g . Tr a c t a t u s L o g i c o p h i l o s o p h i c u s .T r a n s . C . K . O g d e n . M i n e o l a , N Y . : Dover Publications, 1999. Print. 2.0121 ..."Just as we cannot think of spatial objects at all apart from space, or temporal objects apart from time, so we cannot think of any object apart from the possibility of its connexion with other things." [30] POSSIBILITY is fixed 2.0271 "The object is the fixed, the existent; the configuration is the changing, the variable." [32] we 'are' this is fixed; 'who' we are this is variable 2.171 "The picture can represent every reality whose form it has." [34] picture/image is variable 2.203 "The picture contains the possibility of the state of affairs which it represents." [35] 2.21 "The picture agrees with reality or not; it is right or wrong, true or false." [35] these are variables because they are part of the picture which is variable 2.22 "The picture represents what it represents, independently of its truth or falsehood, through the form of representation." [35] representation is not fixed, it is also variable 6.54 ..."Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent." [108] word versus image Anything can be pictured, represented by the image...it is neither right nor wrong, true nor false, it simply is what it is. Not everything can be 'said','spoken', or put into the form of word/text...the word, in opposition to the image is not what it is, it can be right or wrong, true or false. By remaining 'silent' the possibility of what is or is not remains open.
Wollheim, Richard. Painting as an Art.Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1987. Print. Lecture I What the artist does and Lecture II What the spectator sees relationship of artist to work by placing self in the role of spectator; in turn the spectator is able to see the work in the position of the artistmaker
Wright, Christopher. Rembrandt, Selfportraits.New York: Viking, 1982. Print. image source Wrong Face.Dir. Elina Brotherus and Francesca Woodman. Perf. Francesca Woodman, Elina
Brotherus. Www.elinabrotherus.com/Wrong Face.Elina Brotherus, 2013. [Web.] Accessed Sept. 2015. <http://www.elinabrotherus.com/videos/#v1>. short film of the artists performing, dancing, moving through the space with mirrors; reflecting themselves, sometimes with the reflected face on the other 'wrong' body. Wrong Face 2013, 6 min 08 sec, 16mm film (screening version also as HD video, Apple ProRes 422), 4:3, silent.
Zeltner, Michael. "SelfNarration and the Polarisation of Memory." Thesis. Transart Institute / Plymouth University, 2013. Print. shared with me by Michael after my presentation in Berlin, August 2015 we live under the impression that we only have one reality, when in fact reality is multi-layered; we live our lives in a state of self-deception self-narration: "self-narrations change depending on the context" [8] “In any case, the reflexivity of self-narrative poses problems of a deep and serious order—problems beyond those of verification, beyond the issue of indeterminacy (that the very telling of the self-story distorts what we have in mind to tell), beyond ‘rationalization’. The whole enterprise seems a most shaky one, and some critics, like Louis Renza even think it is impossible, ‘an endless prelude’.” — Jerome Bruner (2004, p. 693)"[10] "...self-narration is such a delicate matter, building as it does on the relationship with the recipient, and the resulting personal feedback process." [12]
Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi. We Should All Be Feminists.New York: Anchor, 2014. Print. "I know a woman who hates domestic work, but pretends that she likes it, because she has been taught that to be 'good wife material', she has to be to use that Nigerian word homely. And then she got married. And her husband's family began to complain that she had changed. Actually, she had not changed. She just got tired of pretending to be what she was not. The problem with gender is that it prescribes how we should be rather than recognizing how we are. Imagine how much happier we would be, how much freer to be our true individual selves, if we didn't have the weight of gender expectations." [34]
A h n , A b e . " F o r g i n g Q u e e r I d e n t i t y w i t h A b s t r a c t i o n . " Hy p e r a l l e r g i c R S S .H y p e r a l l e r g i c , 1 9 O c t . 2015. Web. 19 Oct. 2015.<http://hyperallergic.com/243093/forgingqueeridentitywithabstraction/>. Identity expressed through abstraction; review of group show in LA
All Divided Selves.Dir. Luke Fowler. Perf. R.D. Laing. 2011. RISD Museum of Art. Documentary film portrait of psychiatrist R.D. Laing. viewed at RISD Museum October 22, 2015. Need to look further into Laing.
Anonymous. "About: What Is Liminality?" Liminality... the Space in between.Anonymous, n.d. Web. Sept. 2015. <http://www.liminality.org/about/whatisliminality/>. the website of an American professor of Korean language and literature living in Seoul and his explorations and thoughts on liminality as it relates to his existence in between.
Astala, Lauri. "On Disappearance." Http://www.lauriastala.com.Lauri Astala, 2012. Web. 27 July 2015. <http://www.lauriastala.com/Site/On_Disappearance.html>. video of video installation/projection questioning the position of the spectator in relation to the work
Babitz, Eve. "Oral History Interview with Eve Babitz, 2000 June 14." Interview by Paul Karlstrom. Archives of American Art.Smithsonian, 2010. Web. June 2015. impetus for thoughts on authorship and directed self portraits, particularly in regards to Duchamp; role of the model in the creation of the work, specifically as an 'appendage' to a self portrait; inspiration of birthday party for Duchamp performance in courtyard of Ufer Studios, 28 July 2015.
Baggini, Julian. "What Is the Self? It Depends." Opinionator What Is the Self It Depends Comments.The New York Times, 08 Feb. 2016. Web. 08 Feb. 2016. <http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2016/02/08/theselfineastandwest/?action=clic k&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=storyheading&module=opinionccolleftregion&r egion=opinionccolleftregion&WT.nav=opinionccolleftregion>. What the self is varies across cultures, time, and location; but we can benefit from learning the extent and directions of the variations as a means of better understanding the variations and directions that influence our own concept of self.
Bell, Julian. "Introduction." Introduction. Five Hundred Selfportraits.London: Phaidon, 2004. N. pag. Print. "I have a face, but a face is not what I am. " [5] self portraits are created by artist, people who present their work to be examined by others self portraits [objects] document a trade "...a profession of self-promoters." [6] we look at fictions "...a painter named Marcia working from her mirror..." [6] Roman tale Most of the following images are discussed in greater detail in 'A Face to the World' by Laura Cumming: Michelangelo [8081],Annibale Carracci [115], Adriaen van Ostade [178], Jan Vermeer [179],Antonio Cioci [203],JeanEtienne Liotard [208], Gino Severini [379], Walker Evans [438], Ilse Bing [453],Marcel Duchamp [482], Andy Warhol [488489],Jasper Johns [490],Robert Rauschenberg [498], Alighiero Boetti [499], Giuseppe Penone [504], Jeff Wall [509], John Coplans [511], Jenny Saville [521],Maurizio Cattelan [535]
Bell, Julian. What Is Painting?: Representation and Modern Art.New York: Thames and Hudson, 1999. Print. One take on the history of the relationship of the painting, the painter and the spectator from beginnings to present. Relationship of original to image to idea [13] Mimesis as a tool to knowledge (Aristotle) to indulge desire (Plato) [15]; "Mimesis is imitation is representation."and Giotto's 'window'.[29] Greek philosophers it was about the relationship between he who depicts and that which is depicted. [33] Shift in the Romantic from imitative to creative; painter's expression of 'nature', leading to concepts of 'modern art' we still explore today. [2124] Representation as custom or convention. [36] The experience of the viewer's disengagement with the painting and subsequent re-engagement. [37] Chp. 2 section 'Portrayal and observation' [4151] human search for "signs of subjects"; portrayal of 'likeness' that goes beyond the physical to the psychological; 'Persona' original meaning is 'mask' worn by the classical actor [43] The camera, closer observation, and Descartes' principal of the mind behind the eye which translates the picture to knowledge. [55] Movement from the internal response of Romanticism to nature and its external expression thru the painting [C.D. Friedrich] to the external response to the object of Realism thru an internal expression within the painting [Courbet]. [5963] to Impressionism and from Kant to Nietzsche: "The world had been systematically unhinged from God by observation,...scientific knowledge;...guarantor of objectivity, was needed to take his place....we can approach these forms through our own delineations..."[7778] untrained "eye (or I)" placed in predicament of how to look...Impressions response 'simply look' leading to Husserl's doctrine of phenomenology. [78] Storytelling, truth, materiality, and temporality. "What is shown will be true,..; what is merely told may be false."[88] How the material expression impacts the spectators' idea that a story must be contained within. [94] Chp. 3 Form and Time [specifically107132] "Expression, in modern painting, has generally meant personal expression; and much of the diversity of modern painting has stemmed from differing understandings of what makes up a 'person'." [133] The 'self', the painting as 'object', and the 'other'. [142144] Formal aspects of the painting as it relates to the artist and the spectator: color and form[148151] German Romantics [Schelling]: when objects become subjects the world would be 'romanticized'. [152] Selfportraiture. Bell's take on understanding the subject: body, mind, spirit, self [152] and how the emphasis on any one or combination of these has shifted over time. "Today, freed from the need of describing a particular person...the whole of man's experience becomes [the painter's] model." [Rothko, 165]...Bell understand's this as Rothko's twentiethcentury version of the sublime [166] The 'eye'/ 'I' became 'the gaze' [postFreudian, Lacan, Duchamp], dematerializing the material world. [166] Bell: "...paintings express the painter an idea from the Romantic era through the values of authenticity, spirituality, sublimity, and, more recently, through appeals to the corporeal and sexual makeup of persons...but it is true that most paintings are valued as personal expressions....We tend to think that that is the value of paintings, as opposed to photographs." [168] "But let us be brutal: expression is a joke." [170] "You...cannot determine how I go about my looking. And hence painting,.., is not communication....What we see is what we get: a product, not a process, lies on the wall. But we are not happy to accept this....,a massive institution of explanation has grown up to control and stabilize the market. Part of it is dedicated to attaching a person to each picture,..."[170171] "As a painter, however, it ill behoves me to treat the mismatch of expression and communication as a joke. It is a laughing matter, but there is a level on which all painters are clowns the level on which people accept us. They indulge us in our selfindulgence, generously granting us credit for creativity even if the results are [no more] intelligible... Yet this record of creativity,..., retains a power to affect if we open our attention to its striving gestures. And occasionally, it has to be acknowledged that something is delivered that commands more than sympathy. ...For viewer, as for painter, communication functions as a hope." [172] Definition of 'Art' in relation to the art market Chapter 5. the impact of the age of replication, ie. prints, photos [175177] Cubism replacement of pictorial representation with symbolic representation...signs of direction [190] section on Abstraction [192199] Bell advocates the idea of abstraction as a means of universality of forms specific to human consciousness, the conditions underlying all pictures (Mondrian). Post WWII abstraction as a response to an experience beyond traditional forms of representation. Formal abstraction a view from above, surrealism a view from below...in contention with each other, but through mutual dislocation from Europe to New York formed a basis for postWWII painting. "I think they should look not for, but look passively..." ( Jackson Pollock)..."In other words there was no prior context to the painting itself. The viewer's eyes would submit, and the painting would act."[195] the 'autonomy' of the work of art. Greenberg and the removal of depth...flatness, culminating in Stella. Diagram of spectator and painting according to Alberti and Greenberg [196] Ad Reinhardt cartoon detail from How to Look at Modern Art in America [198] Fun as distancing device in the high/low art debacle of 20th century art [204] "Much of painting happens somewhere in between the indeterminate triviality of fun and the determining selfimportance of art;"[206] Chp. 6 Representation "This book set out to discuss paintings, but to do so it has been obliged to discuss words." [208] late 20th century "sees all painting as representation" [208] pictorial representation, symbolic representation, and now, systemic representation...structuralism to poststructualism [212217]. meaning gained not through resemblance (positive) but through difference (negative) The dependence of human experience on structures termed by Barthes as 'the effect of the real', is representation...reality is an emerging effect. [217] Poststructuralism/Deconstruction, Derrida: meaning resides nowhere, it is always deferred, therefore "there is no representation of representation" [219] "representation itself does not exist. It is an idea, like God, invented to give things a backup promise of fixity, meaning and presence that they cannot deliver. If meanings shift, this suggests that there is a space within which they can shift. But to define this space is to fall into error: there is no allencompassing geometry, there is only the local emergence of difference." [221] "seeing...is a special case of reading" [230] the marketplace (fun fair) and the big box (institution) [237240] diagram [238]
B e l l m a n , E r i c a . " H o w t o K e e p a S e c r e t , t h e A r t i s t i c W a y . " Th e N e w Y o r k T i m e s .T h e N e w Y o r k Times, 28 Oct. 2015. Web. 28 Oct. 2015. <http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/29/tmagazine/artsophiecalle.html>. Sophie Calle's recent work
Berger, John. And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos.New York: Vintage International, 1991. Print. "When is a painting finished? Not when it finally corresponds to something already existing like the second shoe of a pair but when the foreseen ideal moment of its being look at is filled, as the painter feels or calculates it ought to be. The long or short process of painting a picture is the process of constructing such a moment....every painting is, by its very nature, addressed to such a moment." [26] "...,by turning in circles the displaced preserve their identity and improvise a shelter. Built of what? Of habits, I think, of the raw material of repetition, turned into a shelter....The mortar which holds the improvised "home" together ...is memory..... Home is no longer a dwelling but the untold story of a life being lived."[64] "Every migrant knows in his heart of hearts that it is impossible to return. Even if he is physically able to return, he does not truly return, because he himself has been so deeply changed by his emigration." [67]
Berger, John. "Erogenous Zone." 1988. Keeping a Rendezvous.New York: Vintage International, 1992. 20411. Print. "Painting is about the physical, the palpable and the immediate. (The insurmountable problem facing abstract art was to overcome this.) The art closest to painting is dance. Both derive from the body, both evoke the body, both inthe first sense of the word are physical." [205] "It is the most immediately sensuous of the arts. Body to body. One of them being the spectator's." [205] "The intimate relation (the interface) between painting and physical desire,...has little to do with the special mimetic texture of oil paint,...The relation begins with the act of painting, not with the medium." [208]
B e r r e b i , S o p h i e . " J ’ e n A i P r i s D e s C o u p s M a i s J ’ e n A i D o n n e A u s s i . " Fr i e z e M a y 2 0 0 2 : n . p a g . Web. Oct. 2015. ‘bête comme un peintre’ (‘dumb as a painter’) Review of ‘Urgent Painting’ exhibition 32 artists selected by 18 curators ‘J’en ai pris des coups mais j’en ai donné aussi’ (‘I’ve had many blows but I’ve given some too’) "aimed for a subjective, personal viewpoint of the medium." The range of painting...in dialogue with itself 1960 to 2002. "One piece significantly a work in progress, by Franck David seemed representative of the exhibition as a whole. Entitled La Collection (undated), this assembly of old mottled mirrors placed on the floor against a wall was reminiscent of the stacked canvases at the back of one of Claude Poussin’s bestknown selfportraits. Like the Poussin, La Collection mused on the fact that art needs to be embodied in some sort of physical form while being able somehow to transcend the limitations of that form. The fact that it was a work in progress, and the use of mirrors, also hinted at questions about the nature of time and of perception, issues raised throughout the exhibition by the cunning juxtapositions of materials, colours and forms."
B l o w , C h a r l e s . " T h e D e l u s i o n s o f R a c h e l D o l e z a l . " Th e N e w Y o r k T i m e s .T h e N e w Y o r k T i m e s , 17 June 2015. Web. 17 June 2015 <http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/18/opinion/charlesblowthedelusionsofdolezal.htm l>. Blow's review of a performance
Branch, John. "Dutee Chand, Female Sprinter With High Testosterone Level, Wins Right to C o m p e t e . " Th e N e w Y o r k T i m e s .T h e N e w Y o r k T i m e s , 2 7 J u l y 2 0 1 5 . W e b . 2 7 J u l y 2015. <http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/28/sports/international/duteechandfemalesprinterwithhighmalehormonelevelwinsrightto compete.html>. flip side of transgender? when the biological doesn't match the physical self
Burkett, Elinor. "What Makes a Woman?" Http://www.nytimes.com.N.p., 6 June 2015. Web. 8 June 2015.<http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/07/opinion/sunday/whatmakesawoman.html?hpw& rref=opinion&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=wellregion®ion=bottomw ell&WT.nav=bottomwell>. In response to Caitlyn Jenner and the 'male brain/female brain' and the language of transgender. Science shows the brain is shaped by experience, culture, and other factors, but not by gender. The realities, experienced by women born in the female body are not the same as those realities experienced by the women born in the male body. Very problematic issue within feminism. "If that’s the ultimate message of the mainstream of the trans community, we’ll happily, lovingly welcome them to the fight to create space for everyone to express him, her or, in gender neutral parlance, hirself without being coerced by gendered expectations. But undermining women’s identities, and silencing, erasing or renaming our experiences, aren’t necessary to that struggle." "Nail polish does not a woman make."
Catapano, Peter, and Ernie Gehr. "Can We See Philosophy? A Dialogue With Ernie Gehr." Opinionator Can We See Philosophy A Dialogue With Ernie Gehr Comments.The New York Times, 03 Oct. 2013. Web. 10 Feb. 2016. <http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/10/03/canweseephilosophyadialogwith erniegehr/>. "The common currency of philosophy is language. But does it have to be?" Can it be visual like film, or painting? "Film, he wrote in 1971, “does not reflect on life, it embodies the life of the mind.”" Can this be said about painting? slow down, experience, perceive, look, question, letting the viewer decide for self not dictated by the maker, "What is it you're making?" "Why work with it?" letting things just happen "... if that is reflected in the work it needs to come from within the work, rather than something superimposed." "So these are questions that do weigh. How to articulate them with the medium? You need to reflect upon the medium itself. What are the characteristics of the medium and how can you make them come alive for someone else?...You have to respond to that. You have to imagine and try to bring that alive in a work. And that’s not easy."
Chapman, Christopher. "Death By Drowning." Bernhard Sachs: Elements.200th ed. South Yarra: Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, 1993. N. pag. Print. brochure for exhibition at ACCA body exists in the realm of philosophy, is comprised of the reconstructed dreams/memories of the individual and the memory of the public which is a malleable history, always ready to be "re something or other" Tattoo-consciousness through inscription, and religion/philosophy/faith through ritual "Nietzsche has theorised that corporeal inscription is at the origin of all consciousness." not the case today For Sachs the writing is on the figure represented as well as on the work, double role of inscription in relation to tattoo and to text/drawing/art= Derrida: origin of language in the visual; Kandinsky's 'point'=the needle piercing the surface of the skin in the process of inscribing the tattoo; Maori drawing is the beginning of tattooing, the incision of the drawn line. Sachs drawing, a process of mapping the body and the psyche, external and internal overlapping space and time. Contradictory shifts occurring in Sachs' work. "The works also speak of a bodily experience that resides in the space between death and consciousness." memory-sleep-death-violence-consciousness "Sleep reinvents memory, twists, collides, and collapses temporal perception, but only sometimes can we remember our dreams."
"Collection." Conversations with the Bride, (19741975) by Imants Tillers.Art Gallery NSW, n.d. Web. 12 Feb. 2016.<http://www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au/collection/works/235.1976.awwwwwwwww/>. Images and details of Conversations with the bride (19741975)"Concluding Unscientific Postscript." 1846. AKierkegaard Anthology.Ed. Robert W. Bretall.
Princeton: Princeton UP, 1972. N. pag. Print. The Task of Becoming Subjective pp. 207210 Objectivity and subjectivity; the subjective problem is the subjectivity itself. Christianity concerned with the subjectivity of the individual, this is where the 'truth' exists, "if it exists at all; objectively Christianity has absolutely no existence....and there is greater Christian joy in heaven over this one individual than over universal history and the System, which as objective entities are in-commensurable with that which is Christian." [208] from 'The Subjective Truth: Inwardness Truth Is Subjectivity' "The objective accent falls on WHAT is said, the subjective accent on HOW it is said." [213] With the 'how' the subject is an existing individual. from 'The Individual and "The Public"' the "leveling" of the individual through the group is an abstraction [261]
Cotton, Charlotte, Matthias Harder, Joshua Chuang, Laurel Ptak, and AnnChristin Bertrand. Viktoria Binschtok Marriage Is a Lie/Fried Chicken.Heidelberg, Neckar: KEHRER Heidelberg, 2015. Print. Exhibition catalog. c|o Berlin. Viewed July 2015. Truth in photography, truth in language, deciphering in the digital age. How do we read photographs in the 21st century when there is neither original nor original copy to refer back to?
Cumming, Laura. AFace to the World: On SelfPortraits.London: Harper, 2009. Print. Most important chapters for me: 8. Mirrors, 9. Performance, 15. Falling Apart Most images discussed can be found in 500 SelfPortraits Preface: "It turns the subject inside out, and remakes him or her as an indivisible trinity: there is the work of art, the image of the maker and the truth of what he or she sensed, imagined or believed about themselves and how they chose, as we all must choose, to present themselves." [9]
D i n a r d o , K e l l y . " A n d y W a r h o l D r o v e R o u t e 6 6 . S o D i d S h e . " Th e N e w Y o r k T i m e s .T h e N e w York Times, 10 Oct. 2015. Web. 10 Oct. 2015. <http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/11/travel/andywarholroadtrip.html>. 1963 AW drove to LA to go to the Duchamp retrospective, and opening, at Pasadena Museum of Art. He left a mild-mannered, successful graphic designer with thinning hair and a movie camera, and returned the wigwearing Warhol of the Factory and celebrities the world remembers. What did Warhol learn from the drive, the Duchamp retrospective that formed this persona?
D o n a d i o , R a c h e l . " M i c h e l H o u e l l e b e c q , C a s u a l l y P r o v o c a t i v e . " Th e N e w Y o r k T i m e s .T h e N e w York Times, 12 Oct. 2015. Web. 12 Oct. 2015. <http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/13/books/michelhouellebecqcasuallyprovocative.ht ml>. Interview with Houellebecq
Egenhofer, Sebastian. "Figures of Defiguration: Four Theses on Abstraction." Texte Zur Kunst 1 8 . 6 9 ( 2 0 0 8 ) : 1 3 9 4 5 . R p t . i n Do c u m e n t s o f C o n t e m p o r a r y A r t : P a i n t i n g .E d . T e r r y R . Myers. London/Cambridge: Whitechapel Gallery and The MIT, 2011. 20917. Print. abstraction is not just about materiality and selfreflection, it is about the monetary value as well "...iconic abstraction began as a systematic destruction of iconic representation,...labour of negation that gave it intensity and a sense of direction." [210] abstract painting reflects on its relationships critique of the application of abstraction to universality "In the history of reality, the destruction of the episteme of representation, a duplicate of the structure of memory, is effected by the abstract power of capital, an eroding force Marx already saw and welcomed; Deleuze and Guattari styled it deterritorialization."[210] abstraction representative of commodity through the nature of repetition/reproduction Egenhofer proposes a continuation of the modernist critique of representation through refiguration, or masking, but not as a concealment of an existing identity, rather the construction of an identity for which there is no original. "The mask does not reproduce a face: as an imaginary identity, it is stamped from the outside onto the disposition of the work. Warhol's silkscreens, McCarthy's hybrid characters, constituted by protheses, as much as Sherman's 'film stills',..., always also exhibit the insubstantiality, the referential vacuity of imaginary identities. It is the status of the identifying, identity-engendering pictorial figure itself that is here abstract." [212] the alter ego, the invented identity is an 'abstraction' "Universality is no longer sought in the purity of a purely self-exhibiting 'language' altogether unaffected by the declensions of particular vantage, narration and the shades of contingency; it is articulated in the rupture, in the gap between the identification imposed by the imprinted mask and the non-iconic support, just as Warhol stages himself as the pale 'nothing' of the 'mirror' facing ever different faces."[212] what once existed on the flat surface of universality now exists in the depth of the gap "Modern, self-critical painting foregrounds not so much the medium (or the signifier) as the means by which and the mode in which the image is produced. Whereas the concept of the medium makes reference,..., to the depth of the image, to the interior and nonexistent latitude by virtue of which an image opens toward that which it displays, the concepts of production and of the means of production equally foreground the time and space beyond the plane of the image." [213] temporal relation of material + process/production= work "The work of Warhol thus in no way constitutes a return of representation: it paradigmatically conceives the indexical integration of the image support with the conditions of its production as iconomorphous." [214] Egenhofer's refiguration begins not in the 1960s, but in the 1910s and 1920s with collage and the replacement of the 'brush' with the 'photoprint'. "What is essentialist is not the critique of the image undertaken by abstraction,...,an identity that is the form under which the symbolic order grants it recognition." [215] radical abstractness, the facelessness of the subject in relation to the matrix of exchange value...Marx's 'melts into air' The empty 'cogito' of Lacan and Zizek is faceless; a subject that does not know itself or recognize itself in any image. This allows the subject to move freely here and there in the market place of identities.
Elina Brotherus.Dir. Elina Brotherus. Perf. Elina Brotherus. Www.elinabrotherus.com/The Black Bay Sequence.Elina Brotherus, 2010. Web. Jan. 2015. <http://www.elinabrotherus.com/videos/#v4>. The Black Bay Sequence 2010, 60 min 12 sec, HD video (Apple ProRes 422), 16:9, silent. repletion and variation; the figure entering, turning and reemerging from the water over an extended period of time
Elina Brotherus: It's Not Me, It's a Photograph.Dir. Martin Kogi, Jonas Jorgensen, Kamilla Bruus, and Christian Lund. Perf. Elina Brotherus. Louisiana Channel/Elina Brotherus, It's Not Me, It's a Photograph.Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, 10 Jan. 2013. Web. 27 July 2015. <http://channel.louisiana.dk/video/elinabrotherusitsnotmeitsaphotograph>. It's not a self portrait. Using her body as the material, personal, yet, keeping the image open to the viewer repetition of reflection, water (bathing) playing with the idea of the model and the artist/object and subject relationship, and the gaze
Elina Brotherus: The Human Perspective.Dir. Martin Kogi, Jonas Jorgensen, Kamilla Bruus, and Christian Lund. Perf. Elina Brotherus. Louisiana Channel/Elina Brotherus, The Human Perspective.Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, 10 Jan. 2013. Web. 27 July 2015. <http://channel.louisiana.dk/video/elinabrotherushumanperspective>. Impetus for the photographic self portrait and the shock at not recognizing the 'self' one imagines one's self to be in the portrait. Temporality in the video and still portraits "The human figure gives the scale and the human perspective to the landscape, it is like a screen you can project your self into, Brotherus says."
F e r l a , R u t h L a . " J e f f K o o n s L e n d s a H a n d a n d a N a m e . " Th e N e w Y o r k T i m e s .T h e N e w Y o r k Times, 31 Oct. 2015. Web. 31 Oct. 2015. <http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/01/fashion/jeffkoonslendsahandandaname.html >. "Told that people are asking $1,500 on eBay for one of his signed H&M bags, he responded in obfuscating artistspeak: “The bag is what it is. When you look into the value of things, it’s all an abstraction. I’m more interested in the feelings and sensations these things might arouse. That’s what this really is about.”" The artist's approach to the replicate: "Certainly, the couple has experienced their share of both. Mr. Koons’s artwork commands tens of millions of dollars. Mrs. Koons paints in the soothing isolation of the studio her husband gave her. “Painting for me is a meditative process,” she said. “It helps me recover from stress.” The artists’ union has produced a tribe of mini Koonses, six children in all, ranging in age from 3 to 14. “I think it just happened,” Mr. Koons said. “We both came from families with only one sibling. We wanted to have a second child as a playmate for our first. The rest was a continuum.” Mrs. Koons, 43, said there had been no conscious decision to bring forth such a teeming family. “It just happened kind of organically for us,” she said. “Besides, it was fun.”"
Finch, Charles. "‘Career of Evil,’ by J.K. Rowling Writing as Robert Galbraith." The New York Times.The New York Times, 31 Oct. 2015. Web. 02 Nov. 2015. <http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/01/books/review/careerofevilbyjkrowlingwriting asrobertgalbraith.html>. the pseudonym
F o r t i n i , A m a n d a . " A n A r t i s t S t a n d s B e f o r e H e r F u n H o u s e M i r r o r . " Th e N e w Y o r k T i m e s .T h e New York Times, 06 Jan. 2016. Web. 06 Jan. 2016. <http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/07/fashion/anartiststandsbeforeherfunhousemirr or.html>. images
" F r i e d r i c h N i e t z s c h e f r o m T h e W i l l t o P o w e r . " 1 9 0 1 . Ar t i n T h e o r y , 1 8 1 5 1 9 0 0 : A n A n t h o l o g y o f Changing Ideas.Ed. Charles Harrison, Paul Wood, and Jason Gaiger. Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1998. 78183. Print. "We have need of lies in order to conquer this reality, this 'truth', that is, in order to live That lies are necessary in order to live is itself part of the terrifying and questionable character of existence." [782]
" F r i e d r i c h N i e t z s c h e f r o m T w i l i g h t o f t h e I d o l s . " 1 8 8 8 . Ar t i n T h e o r y , 1 8 1 5 1 9 0 0 : A n A n t h o l o g y of Changing Ideas.Ed. Charles Harrison, Paul Wood, and Jason Gaiger. Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1998. 78386. Print. psychology of the artist= frenzy Apollinian and Dionysian "This having to transform into perfection is art." [784] l'art pour l'art [786]
Fuller, Sean. "TALKING WITH ERNIE GEHR ABOUT HIS CARNIVAL OF SHADOWS." InsideOut.Museum of Modern Art, 09 Feb. 2016. Web. 10 Feb. 2016. <http://www.moma.org/explore/inside_out/2016/02/09/talkingwitherniegehrabouthis carnivalofshadows>. contemporary approach to Duchamp's 'Wilson-Lincoln' effect using shadows and ombre animes
Galbraith, Robert. The Cuckoo's Calling.New York: Mulholland, 2013. Print. read out of curiosity of the relationship of the voice of the author, J.K. Rowling to the pseudonym under which she published this book, Robert Galbraith. At first having knowledge of who wrote the book, and familiarity with the series for which she is well known, it was strange, but eventually as the story progressed the voice shifted to that of Galbraith,,,whoever he is.
Ganz, John. "SEBASTIAN BLACK with John Ganz." SEBASTIAN BLACK with John Ganz.The Brooklyn Rail, 9 Dec. 2015. Web. 31 Jan. 2016. <http://brooklynrail.org/2015/12/art/sebastianblackwithjohnganz>. Black: Especially working on the big paintings for this show there’s a lot more moments of despair, where you’re like, “What the fuck am I doing?” just literally because it takes so much more to do that painting. Like if you make a 9 × 12 inch painting you can have a moment where you’re like, “Oh, this could be bad” and then by 3 pm you’re like, “Oh, that’s good." But if you’re making a big painting it can look bad for a very long time. But these are the weird things that arise from scale-shifts. So it’s a valuable thing to try to make it bigger, even if it’s just mastering the practical thing of filling up space. Painting is the activity of just figuring out how to fill up a big rectangle in a way that makes you not want to kill yourself. Black: I give painters more credit. I think they do find out something new. In the activity of making a painting, you come face to face with the fact that every time that you do it, there’s always a moment where you could make a bad one. But when something new happens the artist is just thinking materially. Then when people interpret the work inevitably they go to two poles simultaneously, which are the flip sides of the same coin. They go to the genius-subject and then they go to the extra-subjective zeitgeist thing or the extra-subjective religious thing. They usually get all folded up together. Like the artist is the guy who is somehow in touch with the ineffable and I’m like, “There’s no ineffable, everything’s effable because we’re fing doin’ it.” I think all that stuff cheapens art in a way—it cheapens it and it reproduces a worldview that’s not good to me.
G i o n i , M a s s i m i l i a n o , F r e d i F i s c h l i , N i e l s O l s e n , M a r k G o d f r e y , a n d A n n e P o n t e g n i e . Al b e r t Oehlen: Home and Garden.New York: New Museum/Skira Rizzoli, 2015. Print. Director's Foreward by Lisa Phillips "Albert Oehlen: Stupid as a Painter" by Massimiliano Gioni "Disdain and Desire: Albert Oehlen's Abstraction" by Mark Godfrey "The Normal Life" by Anne Pontegnie Fred Fischei and niels Olsen in conversation with Albert Oehlen checklist, biography,plates see essay on my website http://www.robynthomasexplorations.com/shallowal
Goodyear, Anne Collins. "#5 Constructing a "Made-up History": Self Portrayal and the Legacy of Marcel Duchamp." Inventing Marcel Duchamp: The Dynamics of Portraiture.Ed. Anne Collins. Goodyear and James W. McManus. By Janine A. Mileaf, Francis M. Naumann, and Michael R. Taylor. Washington, D.C.: National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, 2009. 8099. Print. The spectator 'completes' the work. Duchamp's interest was not only in the self portraits he produced, but in the portraits others made of him and how they were disseminated. By 1923 self portrayal was a "leitmotif" of Duchamp's work. Duchamp's interest was in self contextualization...the artist's place in history. He "strategically orchestrated his self-presentation." [83] Duchamp to Ulf Linde, 1961: "Art is man made and all 'truths' in art are likewise, man made....a great work of art is double man made: the artist makes the work and the spectator, posterity, makes it great." [83] Duchamp to Pierre Cabanne, 1966, the renewed interest in his work, the 'public exposure' "the entire thing is based on a made-up history." [84] Duchamp and his contradiction of self as a means "to avoid conforming to" his own taste. [84]; and this constant self contradiction made it hard for others to make an sure statement about him...always keeping others unsure of the 'truth'. Portraiture-identity: identity"the quality or condition of being the same as something else", consistency, likeness. Duchamp worked against this understanding of identity/portraiture/self portraiture. Duchamp and his alternative identities on one hand Goodyear equates these as 'meta-portraiture', "a playful critique of the genre". [85] However she sees it more so as demonstrating "the radical impossibility of fully knowing our world, one another, or even ourselves." [85] "Duchamp's diverse portraiture and self-portraiture enabled the artist to demonstrate the radical multiplicity of the self when depicted in different circumstances and under different settings....Ultimately, (Goodyear argues), Duchamp's most significant legacy is to demonstrate that one thing, one person, can be many things at once, all depending on one's perspective. Identity, then, is not reducible to a single convenient expression but is ultimately unstable and multiple." [85] double portrait, two images created by lines that shift as the spectator 'moves around' the image so two different images emerge; referred to by Duchamp as "Wilson-Lincoln system" after the first example of this technology he encountered; a 'two-way portrait' shows a single picture can contain two distinct images that are viewed separately. This (for me) is analogous to the figure-ground relationship play found in formal abstraction. perspective one definition: "a picture or figure constructed so as to produce some fantastic effect,...distorted or confused except from one particular point of view, or presenting totally different aspects from different points." [87] Boite en valise: a traveling retrospective, a 'self-portrait' "...,the works dramatically testified to the life of an individual forced to live in transit" [88] Duchamp spent most of his life going back and forth between France and New York, his existence was in the space between the two places, the two cultures. 1942 exhibition in NYC, "First Papers of Surrealism" "compensation portrait"a subversion of traditional self portraiture by replacing an image of his face with one that was not his own, in this case a woman photographed by Ben Shahn for the FSA raising (again) the question of the relationship between appearance and identity. (Self portrayal can be betrayal of the spectator, if the spectator allows him or her self to be 'betrayed'; otherwise the betrayal can be that of the object the self by the subject the spectator. my thoughts on the "compensation portrait") Duchamp's increased attention to self portraiture and the portraits others made of him after returning to NYC in the 1940s: awareness of his own mortality; the war; aging; deaths of friends, family, colleagues and collectors; solidifying his legacy/posterity; to revive interest in him by the art world now centered in NYC. He became very aware in the language he used about himself with others, in interviews, letters. To Jean Crotti, 1952: "...I don't believe in painting in itself. Every canvas is made not by the painter but by those who see it and grant it their favors, in other words, a painter doesn't exist who understands himself what he does." (self referential self portrayal) [90] original works of art, particularly painting, are no longer of historical importance...(my question: has the original work regained its historical importance, that is, if it exists?) Tu m', 1918 Another between space Duchamp found himself was the space between 'chance' and 'control'; these two existed in multiple layers, with Duchamp between. He used chance to generate controlled situations, such as how his image was disseminated. To challenge mortality: "If his self portrayal in changing guises seemed to challenge laws of nature by creating a persona of flexible gender, age, and physiognomy, this changeability, even more important, created the possibility for perpetual self renewal....his decision to invent Rrose Selavy "was not to change my identity, but to have two identities,"" [91] The created identity is immortal, and Duchamp was engineering his own immortality. (My question: Is "cheating death" via self portrayal a form of betrayal of our identity as mortals?) Marcel dechiravit (Self Portrait in Profile) 1957 this will be the key work I address to contextualize my paintings. "The work relies on a combination of negative and positive space. Just as a shadow is formed by the absence of light, so Duchamp's silhouette exists by virtue of the absence of a portion of white or colored paper pasted over a dark ground." [92] figure/ground with the line formed by his profile defining the space between the light and dark. Duchamp first created a zinc template of his silhouette which he placed on the paper and tore around. This eliminated the 'original' and created a tool for repetitive reproduction of the image...a copy that generates copies of a copy [shadow silhouette). Tu m', a painting of the shadows of Readymades... Tu m' you bore me, I bore you quote from time of Marcel dechiravit (to Katherine Kuh): "I was never interested in looking at myself in an aesthetic mirror. My intention was always to get away from myself, although I knew perfectly well that I was using myself. Call it a little game between 'I' and 'me'." [93] the 'between' space I/Me, shadow portrait/silhouette Jasper Johns wrote upon Duchamp's death: "The art community feels Duchamp's presence and his absence. He has changed the condition of being here." [95] Johns incorporated Marcel dechiravit in numerous works of his own and the idea of his shadow/silhouette as self portrait (pl. 66, pl. 67, and in 'Fall' from Seasons) "For Duchamp, self portrayal was not an appendage to other aspects of his career but part and parcel of a larger set of conceptual concerns, including his posthumous reputation. By concerning himself with the construction of an identity that was inherently multifaceted, and thus impossible to encapsulate through a single gesture, Duchamp consciously constructed for himself an elusive likeness, the portrayal of which came to serve as a conceptual challenge in itself." [96] transformation process from one thing into another: "The possible is/an infra-thin," liminality (possibility of this is a key part of Kierkegaard's interest in the individual) Duchamp: "The possible implying/ the becoming the passage from/one to the other takes place/ in the infra thin." [96] possibilities
Handke, Peter. ""Song of Childhood" by Peter Handke." Livejournal: Gethenian.Genthenian, 26 Jan. 2013. Web. 13 Oct. 2015. <http://gethenian.livejournal.com/562440.html>. see my website post http://www.robynthomasexplorations.com/songofchildhoodbypeterhandke
Hart, Deborah. "A Work in Progress." Imants Tillers: One World Many Visions.National Gallery of Australia, n.d. Web. 11 Feb. 2016. <http://nga.gov.au/exhibition/tillers/Default.cfm?MnuID=4>. "Like a garden that is never finished, the work of an artist is forever in the process of becoming. ‘I am “I” who is becoming “I” who is not I’, writes Haniya Yutaka. Imants Tillers, Land beyond goodbye." [exhibition catalogue, Sydney: Sherman Galleries, 2005,] none/all; presence/absence;origins/originality;self/other; appropriation from reproduction; canvasboard system personal, philosophical and practical; choices are visual, intellectual and intuitive; sensuous, layered surfaces; method of "ambiguous selferasure, or distancing"; "There are no simple answers, but there are intriguing possibilities." distance to gain clarity; TS Eliot's "impersonality";"the seemingly paradoxical dissolution of the self in order to find the self" "To look in the mirror and see the face of another looking back provides an alternative viewpoint" controlled emotion;identification within a complex structure of wider connections;identity/displacement;subjectivity/objectivity;fragmentation/psychic exile;in-betweenness/need to find connections outside of the self;"self as the site of conflict"; "The counterpart to inner conflict is the artist’s intense intellectual and visual curiosity, his ongoing metaphysical questioning and openness to chance, and his interest in a multidisciplinary, flexible responsiveness to the world." distancing via the elimination of the original;transformation/interaction; "...the portrait of an artist who cherishes the fact that ‘the self’, like art and life itself, is continuously open to interpretation – mutable, never fully understandable and always in a state of becoming." one/many;unit/multiple;underlying structure;intimacy/grand scale;performative process;stacked as a sculptural presence;movement between states of painting, installation as a cyclical metamorphosis;fluid/dynamic;intimacy/expanse;movement/stillness;permanence/impermanence;books stacked, containing information hidden within, the abstractness of the spines, a work in progress; "The cumulative presence of these stacks containing the past and waiting for the future reflects one of the most significant aspects of Tillers’ system: of the boards unfolding from one work to another, to form an encompassing whole, variously referred to as the Book of Power, the Canvas-board System, One Painting and the Large Image Field." "The idea comes from the French poet Mallarmé who wrote in 1895: ‘Everything, in the world, exists to end up in a book’. The panels have been numbered right from the start and the panel count is continuous."[ if this was written today would it read "Everything, in the world, exists to end up online"?] linear/cyclical; unbound/chance; "The idea of Tillers’ system, which is malleable, expansive and ephemeral, involving a performative dimension in the construction and deconstruction of a work each time it is installed and dismantled, is an approach that had its origins in the experimental environment of the visual arts of the 1970s." systems theory/guiding metaphors for art;Ludwig von Bertalanffy's 'open system view';Fritjof Capra’s The web of life; alternative frameworks for painting;Conversations with the bride 1974–75 in part consisting of overpainted postcard images of Duchamp's The Large Glass; "In dialogue with Duchamp, Tillers creates a flexible organisational model that suggests the dematerialisation of the singular art object without negating the possibility of painting as a viable option." detachment/inherited memory; local/international;connectedness of phenomena; writings[and paintings] of Giorgio de Chirico "...the idea of surprising synergies across time and place in those uncanny deja vu moments, and the recurrence of a shared Zeitgeist"; Tillers"locality fails"; "Where the idea of distance is interesting is that it creates space for reflection and for acknowledging difference." cross-cultural meeting places; "is (it) possible to be enigmatic and passionate at the same time.(?)" answer is in de Chirico "an appropriator ahead of his time who was obsessive in his passions and who reworked many of his own paintings, finding coincidences and correspondences in unexpected ways, making intuitive leaps beyond the visible to the invisible.";the metaphysical; Rene Daumal, Mount Analogue; "In the process of the accumulation of diverse kinds of knowledge the main protagonists realise that no matter how much you know it is never possible to know it all; that we need to keep on questioning, we need to retain a sense of awe and reverence for the sheer mystery of living that is not lessened but actually increased by gathering different kinds of knowledge." obsessive; rational/irrational; "It was Duchamp who said, almost as an afterthought, that ‘apparently, the artist acts as a mediumistic being that forges a path from the labyrinth beyond the realm of space and time to a clearing’." "...from the 1980s onwards Tillers’ commitment to painting never wavered. Yet he was equally committed to challenging fixed boundaries – quite literally going beyond the frame in his dynamic canvas-board system." Duchamp, Tu m', 1918readmades' shadow structures; " It is as though this sign might even turn the other way, like when those mischievous souls turn road signs in reverse while the rest of us are asleep, to create an alternative direction, another reading of the puzzle, the conundrum of the labyrinth, that is endlessly engaging in its content while forever retaining the enigma of possibility."
Herriman, Kat. "For Performa, One Artist Stages a Debate — Among His Own Paintings." The New York Times.The New York Times, 03 Nov. 2015. Web. 03 Nov. 2015. <http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/04/tmagazine/performacentralparkpuppetshoww yattkahn.html>. performing the studio, performing the painting
H o u e l l e b e c q , M i c h e l , a n d G a v i n B o w d . Th e M a p a n d t h e T e r r i t o r y .N e w Y o r k : V i n t a g e International, 2011. Print. see essay on my website http://www.robynthomasexplorations.com/depthanddeceptibility
Hughes, Robert. Culture of Complaint: The Fraying of America.New York: Oxford UP, 1993. Print. Reading this book made me revisit a very formative period of my life and reflect on how I experienced and perceived the politics, the 'culture wars', of that time; and how this influenced decisions I made. Particularly in my relationship to America and my ability to leave the US for Germany; the effort I made to adapt to the language and culture I found myself in, how I reemigrated into the US almost a decade later, and understand what the culture of America had become in my absence based upon these beginnings. Most memorable phrase from this book: "pale penis people"
Hughes, Robert. "The Decline of the City of Mahagonny." 1990. Spectacle of Skill.New York: Knopf Doubleday Group, 2015. 75105. Print. from Nothing If Not Critical The Decline of the City of Mahagonny Hughes' personal impression of the (NY School) art world, from 19451970s, cultural colonialism ('cultural cringe'), access to originals versus access to reproductions "But Yahweh doesn't show his face in reproductions. He shows it only in paintings." [78] 1980s NY art world: "The decade may be officially dead, but it won't lie down just yet." [79] inflation of market, promotion over connoisseurship, manufactured art glamor, poor training of artists, museums in crisis Hughes predicted won't go away although it is 1990 he was right. He did suggest NYC would become less important...here he was both right and wrong. Has the "American Century" ended? American art schools and "decay of the fine arts tradition" [8587], looking at art only through reproduction What does this say now we've moved from slides to digitized images on screens? on looking/learning via slides: "Did this foster the dull blatancy of so much recent American painting, all impact and no resonance?" [87] Impact of mass media, print, film, tv on art. What would Hughes say about the impact of the internet in the short time since his death? Have these developments 'lightened the weight' of painting and sculpture further? The pricing out of artists, and everyone except the upper percent, continues... Despite being 26 years old, and written by a cranky person, some of which was justifiable then and even more so now, not much has changed; if anything many of the points Hughes raised have been amplified.
Hyzagi, Jacques. "Robert Crumb Hates You." Observer.The Observer, 14 Oct. 2015. Web. 14 Oct. 2015. <http://observer.com/2015/10/robertcrumbhatesyou/>. interview with R.Crumb...reflections on a career of unfiltered self portraiture
Ingold, Tim. Lines: A Brief History.London: Routledge, 2007. Print. writing as an instrument of memory [15]; the act of remembrance conceived as a performance by the reading, telling, journey [16] "Though medieval thinkers did imagine that the work of memory inscribes the surface of the mind much as the writer inscribes the surface of the paper with his pen and the traveler inscribes the surface of the earth with his feet, they thought of these surfaces not as spaces to be surveyed but as regions to be inhabited, and which one can get to know not through one single, totalizing gaze, but through the laborious process of moving around." [16] used in 2015 Summer presentation Chp. 2 Traces, threads and surfaces [3971] "There is, however, a third major class of line, created not by adding material to surfaces, or by scratching it away, but by ruptures in the surfaces themselves. These are cuts, cracks and creases....Kandinsky noted that 'a particular capacity of line [is] its capacity to create surface'...the moving, linear edge of the spade cuts the surface of the soil..."[4445] "Another way of dissolving a surface, of course, is by cutting it up." [59] Klee's line going out for a walk [73] the lines of a network join the dots [80] "What counts are the lines, not the spaces around them." [84]
Joan Mitchell: Portrait of an ... | Search Results | Watch TV Online | Hulu.Dir. Marion Cajori. Hulu.Christian Blackwood, 1993. Web. 10 Nov. 2015. <http://www.hulu.com/search?q=Joan+Mitchell:+Portrait+of+an+Abstract+Painter>. Intrigued by the 'passivity' of Mitchell's presentation of herself in this film in contrast to her paintings and the tales documenting her personality.
Johns, Jasper, and Carol Mancusi-Ungaro. "Artists Documentation Program » JOHNS, Jasper." Artists Documentation Program RSS.Artists Documentation Program/The Menil Collection/The Whitney Museum of American Art/Center for the Technical Study of Modern Art, Harvard Art Museum/The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, 15 Feb. 1996. Web. 15 Nov. 2015. <http://adp.menil.org/?page_id=57>. The artist's inability to remember the details of a particular painting's material composition bordering on boredom of revisiting that aspect of the work in contrast to his interest in the technical solutions of conservation the collection's conservators have found; an interest in new knowledge and approaches one could see he was gathering to take back with him into the studio to apply to the creation of future paintings. http://adp.menil.org/wpcontent/uploads/2011/12/adp1996a_johns_transcript.pdf
Johnson, Kirk, Richard PÉrezpeÑa, and John Eligon. "Rachel Dolezal, in Center of Storm, Is D e f i a n t : ‘ I I d e n t i f y a s B l a c k ’ . " Th e N e w Y o r k T i m e s .T h e N e w Y o r k T i m e s , 1 6 J u n e 2015. Web. 16 June 2015. <http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/17/us/racheldolezalnbctodayshow.html>. transracial and transgender; the possibilities of one, the other, or both
"The Journals." A Kierkegaard Anthology.Ed. Robert W. Bretall. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1972. N. pag. Print. pp.47 Gilleleie, August 1, 1835 "what am I to do" finding the truth that is true for the individual self; it is my life. "I shall now try to fix a calm gaze upon myself and begin to act in earnest; for only thus shall I be able, like the child calling itself "I" with its first conscious action, to call myself "I" in any deeper sense." (6) Looking inward at the self to understand the world beyond the self.
Kaprow, Allan, and Jeff Kelley. Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life.Berkeley: U of California, 2003. Print. Notes on the Creation of a Total Art (1958) "...we do not come to look at things. We simply enter, are surrounded, and become part of what surrounds us, passively or actively according to our talents for "engagement,"...We have differently colored clothing; can move, feel, speak, and observe others variously; and will constantly change the "meaning" of the work by so doing." [11] "What has been worked out instead is a form that is open and fluid as the shapes of our everyday experience but does not simply imitate them. I believe that this form places a much greater responsibility on visitors than they have had before. The "success" of a work depends on them as well as on the artist. If we admit that work that "succeeds" on some days fails on other days, we may seem to disregard the enduring and stable and to place an emphasis upon the fragile and impermanent. But one can insist, as many have, that only the changing is really enduring and all else is whistling in the dark." [12]
" K a r l M a r x o n I n d i v i d u a l P r o d u c t i o n a n d A r t . " 1 8 5 7 5 8 . Ar t i n T h e o r y , 1 8 1 5 1 9 0 0 : A n Anthology of Changing Ideas.Ed. Charles Harrison, Paul Wood, and Jason Gaiger. Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1998. 34143. Print. individual production and material production unevenness of material development relative to artistic development
" K a r l M a r x ' T h e F e t i s h i s m o f C o m m o d i t i e s ' " 1 8 6 7 . Ar t i n T h e o r y , 1 8 1 5 1 9 0 0 : A n A n t h o l o g y o f Changing Ideas.Ed. Charles Harrison, Paul Wood, and Jason Gaiger. Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1998. 34951. Print. the mystical character of commodities is no mystery, products of labor of the individual who is part of society "A commodity is therefore a mysterious thing, simply because in it the social character of men's labour appears to them as an objective character stamped upon the product of that labour;" [350]
K e l s e y , J o h n . " S t o p P a i n t i n g P a i n t i n g . " Ar t f o r u m 4 4 . 2 ( 2 0 0 5 ) : 2 2 2 2 5 . R p t . i n Do c u m e n t s o f Contemporary Art.London/Cambridge: Whitechapel Gallery and The MIT, 2011. 17982. Print. about Michael Krebber recent shows in NYC; betweenness and the idea painting practice as "an ongoing hesitation between repetition and interruption (or between having an idea and having no idea)." [179] Krebber reminds us of identity as a commodity, produced through painting: artist, paintings, and the market each produce and are produced by the other; but sometimes we have to stop this in order to make ourselves. Analogy of Krebber as a painting machine, repetitious, sometimes breaking down, circling around on itself (Duchamp's Rotoreliefs); relocating the place where painting is found by the viewer. "Sometimes the machine stops suddenly,...But you can't begin again unless you stop." [180] Krebber works against 'signature style' by coopting the styles of others. "Krebber's approach underlines the fact that artists are readymades too, and that readymades can be unmade." [181] the unlimited possibilities of materials as ways in and out of painting. 'The dandy' "endless decentering of his own identity is the means by which he makes the world around him start to lose its grip....the dandy interrupts the relations that position him as a subject: he wages a subjective or human strike. Like other strikes, this one interrupts a rhythm and opens up a gap...one's own subjectivity becomes momentarily available again." [181] suspension, like repetition, is a distancing device repetition as a strategy of renewal of possibility, "of disassociating an identity from its proper place in order to produce a transformation. Sometimes the only way to change is by dong the same thing over and over again." [182]
Kertesz, Imre. Ich Ein Anderer.Trans. Ilma Rakusa. Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1999. Print. ""Verstehen wir je, was wir denken?" (Jung) Verstehe ich je mein Leben? Kann ich es verstehen? Alles spricht dagegen: das in mir wurzelnde fremde Ich, der sich selbst rechtfertigende Moralist, der lügnerische Fabelproduzent." [96] Translation: "Do we ever understand what we think?" (Jung) Do I ever understand my life? Can I understand it? Everything speaks against it: that foreign I rooted inside me, the self righteous moralist, the lying producer of fables. Questions of identity when occupying the space between, belonging nowhere.
K i e r k e g a a r d , S o r e n . Th e E s s e n t i a l K i e r k e g a a r d .E d . H o w a r d V . H o n g a n d E d n a H . H o n g . Princeton: Princeton UP, 2000. Print. Either/Or (1843) [3783] Kierkegaard writing under pseudonyms...but not; questions of identity and the self, 'who am I?'; caught between. "Laugh at the stupidities of the world, and you will regret it; weep over them, and you will also regret it. Laugh at the stupidities of the world or weep over them, you will regret it either way. Whether you laugh at the stupidities of the world or you weep over them, you will regret it either way." [4344] "...for the true eternity does not lie behind either/or but before it." [44] I believe it lies neither behind nor before, but between. Portrayal and time [68] "You have various good ideas, many droll fancies, many foolish ones. Keep them all; I do not ask for them. But do you have one idea I beg you to hold firmly, an idea that convinces me that my mind has kinship with yours." [77] "...,and I choose absolutely precisely by having chosen not to chose this or that. I choose the absolute, and what is the absolute? It is myself in my eternal validity." [79] "But what is this self of mine? If I were to speak of a first moment, a first expression for it, then my answer is this: It is the most abstract of all, and yet in itself it is also the most concrete of all it is freedom." [80] Works of Love (1847) [277311] "Love...is a work, ..., but a task, and ultimately a gift in a triangle of love, whereby the "you shall" of the task is transformed into an expression of gratitude for the gift, and the imperative ethics is transformed into an indicative ethics of response, into a responsive striving born of gratitude." [277] Matthew 22:39 ...You shall love your neighbor as yourself. This makes me think of reciprocal relationship between artistspectator-work. The work as a gift to the spectator and to the artist, from each and given equally and freely to each. It is up to the artist, the art work, and the spectator to do this work. Doing this work leads to change, to independence, and for Kierkegaard, against despair. "...in loving the actual individual person it is important that one does not substitute an imaginary idea of how we think or could wish that this person should be. The person who does this does not love the person he sees but again something unseen, his own idea or something similar." [300] a solid foundation needs to be established to "build up" (love builds up) "...knowledge and the communication of knowledge can indeed also be upbuilding, but if they are, then it is because love is present." [307] "Love builds up by presupposing that love is present." [309] In the relationship between artistworkspectator the work is 'built up' by the presupposition of the presence of all three.
K n a u s g a a r d , K a r l O v e . " M i c h e l H o u e l l e b e c q ’ s ‘ S u b m i s s i o n ’ . " Th e N e w Y o r k T i m e s .T h e N e w York Times, 07 Nov. 2015. Web. 07 Nov. 2015. <http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/08/books/review/michelhouellebecqssubmission.ht ml>. entrapped by the selfformed identity
Kostelanetz, Richard. MoholyNagy: An Anthology.New York, NY: Da Capo, 1991. Print. In Defense of "Abstract" Art (1945) [4446] freedom from imitation and the philosophy behind it abstract painting is about research LMH compares the studio to a lab, a place to conduct scientific experiments, to observer, to vary the experiments under controlled conditions "vision in motion" SpaceTime and the Photographer (1942) [5766] spacetime=reflectionstransparent mirrorings; superimpositions "Mirroring means in this sense the changing aspects of vision, the sharpened identification of the inside and outside penetrations." [63] dreams as spacetime articulations, blend independent events into a coherent whole different layers of movement as kinetic representations of timespace existences Design Potentialities (1944) [8190] Louis Sullivan "Form follows function."= the work an object is designed to do. "every process has its necessary form, which always results in functional forms." (Raoul France) we try our best, but are limited by our knowledge and practice "Not everything that we know or feel can be verbalized by a language which uses logic and reason as its main characteristics."[88]an argument for abstraction LMH argued in the mid20th century for artistic research in a scientific/technical orientation as opposed to one based on that of the humanities; the artist should not be limited to the role of a 'specialist' [89] artists synthesize "Novelty for the sake of novelty tries to create the illusion of new organic demands without serving real needs. It is usually an artificial stimulation of business....One remedy against this is the conscientious training of a new generation of producers, consumers and designers who have grasped the importance of the basic relationship of "form and function"."[90]
Lacan, Jacques. Ecrits.Trans. Bruce Fink. Comp. Heloise Fink and Russell Grigg. New York: W.W. Norton &, 2006. Print. The First Complete Edition in English. The Mirror Stage as Formation of the I Function as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience pp.7581 mirror stage identification/transformation of the subject when he assumes an image [76] infansI stage prior to objectification, the subject is subject Freud=ego, not yet alienated "..for imagos...the specular image seems to be the threshold of the visible world,...the mirrored disposition of the imago of one's own body in hallucinations and dreams,...,or if we take note of the role of the mirror apparatus in the appearance of doubles," [77] "The function of the mirror stage thus turns out,...to establish a relationship between an organism and its reality or, as they say, between the Innenwelt and the Umwelt." [78] mirror stage insufficiency to anticipation Anna Freud ego defense; shift of specular I to social I; function of misrecognition Verneinung [negation] and On The Subject Who is Finally in Question pp. 189196 "In other words, we obscure the picture in the very process of painting it." [191] the symptom representative of the return of truth into the gap of a certain knowledge [194] Marx's critique of Hegel, the question of truth as ruses dressed up with reason [194] symptom only interpreted in the signifying order which means in relation to another signifier; vague when understood as representing truth, which they are as truth is the basis of the signifying chain [194195]
Laing, R. D., H. Phillipson, and A. R. Lee. "Excerpt from "The Spiral of Reciprocal Perspectives," Interpersonal Perception: A Theory and a Method of Research." 1966. Martha Wilson Sourcebook: 40 Years of Reconsidering Performance, Feminism, Alternative Spaces.Ed. Martha Wilson. New York: Independent Curators International, 2011. 3031. Print. I think about you thinking about me thinking about you... I want you to think about me thinking about you wanting to think about me wanting to think about you... I am afraid you are thinking about me afraid of wanting you be afraid of me being afraid of you thinking about me thinking about you...and so on...
Lotringer, Slyvere. "Becoming Duchamp." Articles, TOUTFAIT: The Marcel Duchamp Studies Online Journal.ToutFait, 01 May 2000. Web. 31 Jan. 2016. <http://www.toutfait.com/issues/issue_2/Articles/lotringer.html>. John Cage, Duchamp and Infra-Mince
" M a r c e l D u c h a m p ' T h e R i c h a r d M u t t C a s e ' " 1 9 1 7 . Ar t i n T h e o r y , 1 9 0 0 1 9 9 0 : A n A n t h o l o g y o f Changing Ideas.Ed. Charles Harrison and Paul Wood. Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1992. 248. Print. "He CHOSE it."
Marden, Brice, and Carol Mancusi-Ungaro. "Artists Documentation Program » MARDEN, Brice." Artists Documentation Program RSS.Artists Documentation Program/The Menil Collection/The Whitney Museum of American Art/Center for the Technical Study of Modern Art, Harvard Art Museum/The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, 01 Oct. 1992. Web. 08 Dec. 2015. <http://adp.menil.org/?page_id=60>. Viewed this shortly after seeing the artist's recent exhibit of newer paintings and some earlier prints at Matthew Marks Gallery. Continuity in the artist's process. http://adp.menil.org/wpcontent/uploads/2011/12/adp1992b_marden_transcript.pdf
M a y , R o l l o . " K i e r k e g a a r d : A n x i e t y i n t h e N i n e t e e n t h C e n t u r y . " Th e M e a n i n g o f A n x i e t y .N e w York: W.W. Norton &, 2015. 3047. Print. Compartmentalization of culture hallmark of 19th century and its impact on the individual which was a loss of 'center', leading to anxiety. Kierkegaard's study of the individual's anxiety lead to Freud, according to May. Kierkegaard believed the full commitment of the individual could not be separated from thinking. "We think with our bodies." (Nietzsche) [33] overcoming the dichotomy of mind/body Objectivity is an illusion and undesirable, according to Kierkegaard. "Kierkegaard reacted strongly against rigid definitions of such terms as "self" and "truth"; he felt they could be defined only dynamically,..., as continuously developing among living people."[33] For Kierkegaard freedom equals possibility; but with freedom comes anxiety. Normal anxiety is the possibility of freedom and acting upon it; neurotic anxiety is the inability of acting on the possibility. The more possibility, or creativity ("One has anxiety because it is possible to create creating one's self, willing to be one's self,..." [39]), the more potential anxiety. As we become aware of the possibility we have (self-awareness) we become aware of our anxiety. self=freedom. Therefore if freedom is possibility, and possibility leads to anxiety, anxiety leads back to self, which is freedom. This 'leading', which is anxiety, is reflection. The reflective act, anxiety, produces inner conflict. Creating is a destructive act; destroying the status quo; it leads to growth, and guilt. "Anxiety and guilt are potentially present at every instant that individuality is born into community."[41] and this should be happening every second of one's life, according to Kierkegaard. Anxiety and guilt are human, we need to remain open to this because this is freedom.
M a y e r , R a l p h , a n d S t e v e n S h e e h a n . Th e A r t i s t ' s H a n d b o o k o f M a t e r i a l s a n d T e c h n i q u e s .5 t h e d . New York: Viking, 1985. Print. Studio reference and source for oil medium recipes
McKenzie, Janet. "Conceptual Drawing: Recent Work by Bernhard Sachs, Mike Parr, Greg Creek and Janenne Eaton." Studio International28 Jan. 2010: n. pag. Web. "In a global context drawing exists irrespective of cultural identity. It is a basic human instinct to make marks, to draw, to write. infinite possibilities of drawing;conceptual and practical shift from intimate scale to grand scale; installation; "The conceptual and the subjective, arguably the most vital components of contemporary art practice – connect in drawing more forcibly and more appropriately than in any other form of art." the work begins with the drawing; drawing does not remain stagnant; "Drawing as a structural and conceptual necessity has become increasingly necessary for many artists working today. Not merely the creation of an illusion, but of psychological importance, ...drawing has become an enabling activity. Drawing is both the first step towards abstraction, yet also an important way to incorporate reality in to an overall scheme of things. The paradox makes drawing “both the most traditional of activities and potentially the most radical”.Psychological space can be made to coexist with pictorial space, enabling a personal revision of history." Bernhard Sachs exhibitions made up of over 1,000 drawings; obsessive, work ethic, urgency; Beuys and Duchamp;"it is the relentless processing of the physical activity of drawing and processing of critical theory and politics in relation to the meaning of art that fires Sachs, and which makes him a most dedicated practitioners of drawing."; "...negating characteristics in drawing as formal articulations..."; the act of erasing; building up and layering of images;commercialization of the practice of art; "Sachs is uncompromising in his work, determined to uncover truth or authenticity." paradox: “an operatic set of false memories”;disillusionment and anxiety;"While visitors to the exhibition could view the artist working on the drawing installation, the final product could only be viewed for a four hour period, a cinematic slot, like a countdown to nothingness, a particular void."
Messerli, Douglas. "On the Outside Looking In: Mardsen Hartley’s Poetry." Hyperallergic. Hyperallergic, 24 Jan. 2016. Web. 24 Jan. 2016. <http://hyperallergic.com/269667/ontheoutsidelookinginmardsenhartleyspoetry/>. Connecting Hartley's practice as a painter and a poet; his identity as an outsider, and the relationship of his work to the Maine landscape.
Mileaf, Janine A. Please Touch: Dada and Surrealist Objects after the Readymade.Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College, 2010. Print. Introduction tactile modes of interaction after the Readymade shifted the relationship between work and spectator [and artist]; altering function of the work and the relationship Touch=reciprocity, decentralization, contact, multiplicity Duchamp's "tactile perception" as stated in his notes on The Large Glass define touch as multisensory...not limited to the physical. Reciprocity of touch is compulsory...be it touching another or the self; this is the only sense that is such. MerleauPonty: vision and touch merging=reflexitivity of the subject Derrida: "tactility as...indeterminate and non-unifying 'guiding thread'..." unlike other senses simultaneous inseparable and isolated. in the relationship between artist and viewer the work becomes "switching station" or "provocateur" Touch is physical and conceptual. Hannah Höch Da Dandy, 1919 multiple and shifting identifications suggested by touch...again changing the traditional relationship between spectator and work. Chp. 1 "The Taste of Marcel Duchamp's Readymades avoidance of signature style, use of repetition, and indifference as distancing devices Readymade commodity and eroticism Readymades never have 'originals' Duchamp occupied a space physically, mentally, and artistically between Paris and New York for most of his life; it is in this 'between space' of French and American cultures that Duchamp developed the Readymade [28] Readymade and The Large Glass together "provide for a new model of engagement with the work of art" [30] Duchamp and Cubism: experience with Nude Descending a Staircase caused Duchamp to breakaway from group mentality; impact of Picasso's Construction with Guitar, its relation to the surface of the wall, the contextualization provided insights leading to The Large Glass (according to Mileaf) "allowed the object to present itself". [33] Mileaf this lead to Duchamp to explore the 'tactility of taste' as a model by which to interpret work/relationship Duchamp: "aesthetic echo" and differentiation of it from taste. ex. Bottlerack, pun on 'taste', wet/dry, aesthetic/corporeal "Duchamp posits anticipation as the most promising aspect of the creative process." [44] tension, frustration, and delayed sensual satisfaction "The underlying question what happens to a subject when it is transformed into art? leads directly to the readymade, a genre that ultimately rejects representation and places the object in an unmediated relationship with its viewer. The readymade speaks of consumption and production as if art, distilled to its elemental functions, were nothing more than yearning, or possibility. The irony of Duchamp's claim to indifference is made more obvious by this equation of corporeal and artistic desire." [4647] 'tactile wanderings' and Duchamp's thoughts on what we perceive as being 3D in reality belonging to the fourth dimension a matter of our perception that occurs with the flattening of the object. ex. Tu m' (1918) and the corkscrew's shadow in place of the Bottlerack Note to Chp. Two on Man Ray read his autobiography 'SelfPortrait'
Mina, Denise. Resolution.New York, NY: Carroll & Graf, 2002. Print. photograph of two quotes posted on my website http://www.robynthomasexplorations.com/m505m506paintingstudiesprocess "Maureen sat back and looked out of the window at the dark garden. 'I'd like to know everything,' she said wistfully. 'Everything I've ever wondered about. D'ye ever think that?' She tried to smile at him but Liam looked worried. 'I'd like to know everything about everyone. No mysteries left. No secrets.'" "'I don't claim that,' he said, sitting up to face her, looking like the Benny she used to know. 'I just claim to be doing my best. At that time I didn't know what the consequences of my actions were. i lied to myself about what I was doing and why I was doing it. I thought y'ed be okay, I was lying to myself. I don't have an excuse but I'm sorry and I'm trying not to lie to myself now.'"
Miroir.Dir. Elina Brotherus. Perf. Elina Brotherus. Www.elinabrothers.com/Miroir.Elina Brotherus, 2001. Web. Jan. 2015. <http://www.elinabrotherus.com/videos/#v13>. Miroir 2001, DVD loop, 2 min 25 sec, DV PAL 4:3, silent. emergence of the reflected self in the mirror as the steam evaporates; temporality
Mirzoeff, Nicholas. "Chapter 5: Seeing Sex." An Introduction to Visual Culture.London: Routledge, 1999. 16292. Print. Fetishizing the gaze "The gaze is not just a look or a glance. It is a means of constituting the identity of the gazer by distinguishing her or him from that which is gazed at. At the same time, the gaze makes us aware that we may be looked at, so that this awareness becomes a part of identity in itself....JeanPaul Sartre..."I see myself because somebody sees me."...Lacan: "the gaze is outside, I am looked at, that is to say, I am a picture."{mirror stage}...CaroleAnne Tyler explains: "The subject can never reconcile the split between itself and its mirror imago, the eye which sees and the eye which is seen, the I who speaks and the I who is spoken, the subject of desire and the subject of demand, who must pass through the defiles of the Other's signifiers" (Tyler 1994: 218). When I see myself in the mirror, I can never see the Ideal "I" of the imaginary but only the Symbolic "I"." [164165] From inversion to opposites and ambiguity "The very creation of a standardized notion of the human implies the elision of many individual cases in order to sustain the overarching categories....Thus the clarity of the classificatory principal overrides the existence of specific real people." [170] Seeing female sex "Identity is neither cultural nor natural in terms of the binary oppositions but is a formation in constant flux, drawing on physical, psychical and creative resources to create a sense of self or selves from a range of possibilities that are fractal rather than linear." [173174] Mixing: the cultural politics of race and reproduction "...one possible route to a transcultural gaze." [174] race and representation the denial of the reality miscegenation as typical of the fetishistic gaze classifications as specimens rather than individuals the "liminal woman" caught between two worlds (quadroon, octoroon) [176177] Queering the gaze: Roger Casement's eyes the self portrait photographs of Samuel Fosso and Rotimi FaniKayode [187190] challenge perceived notions of identity (race, class, gender); three aspects which are not separate but one
Molderings, Herbert, Frederick Kiesler, and John Brogden. Marcel Duchamp at the Age of 85: An Incunabulum of Conceptual Photography.Köln: Verlag Der Buchh. Walther König, 2013. Print. "When Duchamp was asked by the curator Katherine Kuh in 1961 why he had such a strong need to distance himself as far as possible from the traditional forms of expression, he replied: "I was really trying to invent, instead of merely expressing myself. I was never interested in looking at myself in an aesthetic mirror. My intention was always to get away from myself, though I knew perfectly well that I was using myself. Call it a little game between 'I' and 'me'." [37] A history of Duchamp's staging photographic self portraits throughout his lifetime, even during the years he denied making art; playing with 'truth' of the subject/object and identity. Fictional photography and the idea of the "inframince"[60710 inframince=ultrafine sensory perception "Duchamp's staged selfportrait as an old man was an innovative contribution not only to the genre of selfportrait but also to the use of photography as a medium of artistic expression. The deliberate game of confusion played by this photograph "from the future" at once presupposed and contradicted the belief in the physical existence of the photographed subject, a firmly established belief based on the law of causality and substantiated by the widespread use of photography. " [6970] continuation of his play with fantasy and ambiguity of identity as revealed in the photographic portrait since Multiportrait, 1917 and Rrose Selavy, 1921.
M u r p h y , K a t e . " W h a t S e l f i e S t i c k s R e a l l y T e l l U s A b o u t O u r s e l v e s . " Th e N e w Y o r k T i m e s .T h e New York Times, 08 Aug. 2015. Web. 09 Aug. 2015. <http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/09/sundayreview/whatselfiesticksreallytellusab outourselves.html>. "Of course, selfies can also create a historical record of one’s life, if maybe a little better than reality. They show the world what you are doing and who you are with and how incredibly fun it all is. You often hear the refrain, “Pics or it didn’t happen.” This implies the corollary, “Selfies or you don’t exist,” which may explain some people’s compulsion to document their actions even if doing so diminishes their experience and engagement in the real world."
Nechvatal, Joseph. "An Open Letter to Frank Stella on the Occasion of His Whitney Retrospective." Hyperallergic RSS.Hyperallergic, 16 Nov. 2015. Web. 08 Feb. 2016. <http://hyperallergic.com/253681/anopenlettertofrankstellaontheoccasionofhisw hitneyretrospective/>. see my response to piece on my website http://www.robynthomasexplorations.com/newpage1
Nelson, Robert. "The Age: National, World, Business, Entertainment, Sport and Technology News from Melbourne's Leading Newspaper." Bernhard Sachs.The Age, 12 Feb. 2009. Web. 31 Jan. 2016. <http://www.theage.com.au/news/entertainment/arts/artsreviews/bernhardsachs/2009/02/12/1234028177294.html>. "The idea works best when the scheme is dark, because the images beneath speak the same language as the image on top, and they argue with one another on equal terms. "
Noë, Alva. "What Art Unveils." Opinionator What Art Unveils Comments.The New York Times, 05 Oct. 2015. Web. 05 Oct. 2015. <http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/10/05/whatartunveils/?_r=0>. "Is there a way of thinking about art that will get us closer to an understanding of its essential nature, and our own?" neuroscience as a method to understanding ourselves it remains inadequate; art as a method is "Works of art are tools, but they have been made strange, and that is the source of their power." "In contrast with mere technology, art doesn’t have to work to be good." "Why do artists make stuff if the familiar criteria of success or failure in the domain of manufacture are not dispositive when it comes to art? Why are artists so bent on making stuff? To what end? My hypothesis is that artists make stuff not because the stuff they make is special in itself, but because making stuff is special for us. Making activities — technology, for short — constitute us as a species. Artists make stuff because in doing so they reveal something deep and important about our nature, indeed, I would go so far as to say, about our biological nature." neuroscientific approach is too in individualistic; art, making stuff, is both an individual and a collective act "...art begins, when we are unable to take the background of our familiar technologies and activities for granted, and when we can no longer take for granted what is, in fact, a precondition of the very naturalseeming intelligibility of such things as doorknobs and pictures, words and sounds." "Art disrupts plain looking and it does so on purpose. By doing so it discloses just what plain looking conceals." "A work of art is a strange tool." "If I am right, art isn’t a phenomenon to be explained. Not by neuroscience, and not by philosophy. Art is itself a research practice, a way of investigating the world and ourselves. Art displays us to ourselves, and in a way makes us anew, by disrupting our habitual activities of doing and making."
Nozkowski, Thomas, and Sherman Sam. Thomas Nozkowski: March 31April 25, 2015.New York: Pace, 2015. Print. exhibition catalogue Essay: "Let me show you a place to be..." by Sherman Sam The paintings of Nozkowski are like Proust's thoughts on how we sense place, time and memory by both mind and body. His paintings come from how he has experienced life. "My work is "abstracted" from reality, I suppose, in that each painting has an exact and specific source in the physical world. One of the reasons I do this is to find extraordinary formal devices colors, shapes, compositions which I would not have discovered with a strictly formal way of painting." [8; from interview with the author, Artworker of the Week, #20, Kultureflash, no.67. November 26, 2003] "It is not the corresponding truth in the world that makes artwork valuable."[8] seeking to bring 'content' and the 'personal' back into the painting by moving away from the 'grand scale' figure/ground relationship "Content is a glimpse, de Kooning once said. Perhaps that is all there will ever be, a glimpse; what remains after is what the object really offers. The use value to the viewer is much more complex than what the story of the work or the story in the work offers. That is the reason Nozkowski sticks to his creative principal it offers a point of resistance but also creates an opening or spacing." [1011] "He offers his audience a freedom a freedom to see, to think, and, ultimately, to be." [11] "A Nozkowski painting sets up a situation where something similar can occur. It is a place. a space to see, a spacing for looking. "Everything," he says, "informs everything else." And that's how it should be, but in reality, that's just how it is, even if we don't know it or acknowledge it. Now you just have to look, see, and connect..."[11; Thomas Nozkowski, interview with Garth Lewis, in Thomas Nozkowski, exh. cat. (New York: The Pace Gallery, 2010), p.17.]
Peggy Guggenheim: Art Addict.Dir. Lisa Immordino Vreeland. Perf. Peggy Guggenheim. Dakota Group, 2015. Film. a memory prompt for an autobiography she wrote and I had read many years ago, but also to hear how the current art world figures, those who knew her and those that did not, speak about the role she has played as a patron in 20th century art, and her identity as such.
Pendleton, Moses, Bob Elfstorm, and Lucy Hilmer. "MOSES PENDLETON PRESENTS MOSES PENDLETON." Vimeo.N.p., 2010. Web. Oct. 2015. <https://vimeo.com/8567696>. A video self portrait of the dancer/choreographer, founder of Pilobus and Momix, Moses Pendleton on his 33rd birthday. Filmed in the early 1980s, this video aired on American cable TV channel A&E frequently at that time. I watched it repeatedly at that time, interested in the dance, the images and the way Pendleton told his story. I stuck in a corner of my memory, and I recently found it online; rewatching it often as a source for portraying the self through other media.
Periz, Ingrid. "A Space of Lostness." Australian Art Collector38 (2006): 11625. Web. Bernard Sachs, drawings, installation, image as allegory lacking truth due to intentional or unintentional revision or alteration. Identity based in migration and the weight of culture of origin. "As he puts it, “the aesthetic has become a corrective to the linguistic turn” in his thinking about art." The ghostly images of the history of painting carried in our heads; Judith and Holofernes and St. Eustace and the stag's head as allegories of the current art world. The physical reworking [revisioning] of his work to the point 'the work' no longer exists physically and conceptually erasing, disappearing. Drawingpaintinginstallationperformancelimited and controlled accessbreaking down traditional constructs of viewingdistances between viewer and the work up to the viewer to build and judge what the [his]story isresulting in an "operatic set of false memories" according to Sachs.
P e s c a d o r , P a u l . " S u r f a c e o f C o l o r . " TH E P I T .T h e P i t , O c t . 2 0 1 5 . W e b . O c t . 2 0 1 5 . <http://www.thepit.la/newpage1/>. website text for group show in LA exploring expression of queer identity through abstraction
Pointon, Marcia R. Portrayal and the Search for Identity.London: Reaktion, 2013. Print. Introduction: Face =Portraiture "acts of portrayal are bound up with anxieties about betrayal about inauthentic representations and about imagery that appears difficult to control or resistant to reading." (89) Control. Subversive by challenging the status quo. Portraiture as the pinnacle of artistobjectspectator relationship. Rarely do they have a life beyond the lifetime of the subject. The Internet: graveyard of the 'selfie'.(14) Portrayal's betrayal is the destruction of the illusion of our immortality. (20) Where does identity reside in portraiture? (22) is a question the author addresses throughout the book. Chp. 2 the location of identity formation in portraits of nonsubjects [human objects, i.e. slaves, women] is the position of the betrayal; doubling, and the relationship between the artist, spectator and the objectification of the subject. Paradox that the portrait, a genre of 'representation' or resemblance, is where abstraction was first explored and expressed. (62) Portraiture is the origin of painting. (63) Mirrors Dorian Gray and Narcissus. The doubling process can destroy the subject by its objectification; mirrors as a distancing device.(73) Chp. 3 relationship between liminality and adolescence Chp. 4 Accessories that bridge the gap between the individual and his identity as a member of a group. Analysis of the details in relation to the whole.(128) Accessories have a liminal character...Derrida's understanding of Kant...accessory as an object neither inside nor outside the subject, this should be the goal of the subject; Freud's idea of the accessory transitional object. (129) Tristam Shandy and 'the gap', expressed in the text (162) and the 'buttonhole', the pocket. Jacques Bethoud's definition of the pun versus the double entendre, collusion and its part in the relationship between artist, object, and spectator. (172) Chp. 5 The whole thing. Self portraiture in the late 20th and early 21st century. Self portraiture, the embodies self is all about the"spectacle of a void" i.e.. 'the gap'. (181) Great source for contemporary examples. Look further into Derek Jarman's final paintings. "The self portrait is, then, a manifestation in some sense of the individual's relationship to his or her body, and, as Ludmilla Jordanova points out, the physical work required in the production is often belied in the resulting image." (188) "the phenomenon of the artist's physical self as recorded in textual traces." (188) Mirrors Jenny Saville; material device and a moral/philosophical concept; the mirror broken. "This deployment of the mirror as a figure in the image,..., challenges its apparently mimetic function, thus establishing a hiatus, a gap or an aporia between self and reflected self that so much self portraiture aspires to close." (196) authenticating surface is the viewer, not the mirror. Paul de Man: 4 selfs judges, reads, writes, reads itself. Pointon adds 5th, the proxy self [collaborator] (198) Je est un autre. Quel Je? Et un autre que qui? Self portraits and temporality the finite life. Mieke Bal [photography] "the portrait is always posttraumatic." (205) The self portrait as a response to confrontation of mortality through illness; preparation for and rebellion from death. The 'performed' self portrait exists only in an after life of its documentation. Sam TaylorWood's Selfportrait in Single Breasted Suit with Hare...bond of pun between artist and viewer. (220) Monica Greco "Why are our bodies not made of hinged flaps or transparent panels, so that we can have a look?" (223) Medical technology and self portraiture, Derrida's "I am dead"...a grammatically impossible statement proven possible through the paintings of Derek Jarman [layering and obscuring] and Ian Breakwell's photographic collage Parasite and Hostthe proxy, makes the absent present. "The portrait offers up an expectation of human presence that is immediately denied by the very plasticity and materiality of the portrait....Louis Marin points out...power accrues to the King's portrait only after death.It is this aporia, the gap between the sign and the referent, that makes portraiture so compelling." (227)
Richter, Gerhard. The Daily Practice of Painting.Ed. Hans Ulrich Obrist. Trans. David Britt. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2002. Print. "One has to believe in what one is doing, one has to commit oneself inwardly, in order to do painting. Once obsessed, one ultimately carries it to the point of believing that one might change human beings through painting. But if one lacks this passionate commitment, there is nothing left to do. Then it is best to leave it alone. for basically painting is total idiocy." [78] "Painting is the making of analogy for something nonvisual and incomprehensible: giving it form and bringing it within reach." [99] "Abstract pictures are fictive models, because they make visible a reality that we can neither see nor describe, but whose existence we can postulate. We denote this reality in negative terms: the unknown, the incomprehensible, the infinite." [100] "...the unknown simultaneously alarms us and fills us with hope, and so we accept the pictures as a possible way to make the inexplicable more explicable, or at all events more accessible." [100] "Art is the highest form of hope."[100] "Everything made since Duchamp has been a readymade, even when handpainted." [101] "Language can express only what language enables it to express. Language is the only language of consciousness. 'what one cannot say, one does not know.' That is why all theory is absolutely circumscribed, almost unusable, but always dangerous." [182] "I am more and more aware of the importance of the unconscious process that has to take place while one is painting as if something were working away in secret. You can almost just stand by and wait until something comes. It has been called 'inspiration' or 'an idea from heaven' but it's far more downtoearth and far more complicated than that." [195196] "As Duchamp showed, it has nothing to do with craftsmanship. what counts isn't being able to do a thing, it's seeing what it is. Seeing is the decisive act, and ultimately it places the maker and the viewer on the same level." [217] "I think something in Duchamp didn't suit me all that mysterymongering and that is why I painted those simple glass panes and showed the whole windowpane problem in a completely different light." [225] "I don't like manufactured mystery." [272]
Rollo May. "The Realization of the Self." Meaning Of Anxiety.New York: W.W. Norton &, 2015. 37072. Print. "Selfrealization i.e., expression and creative use of the individual's capacities can occur only as the individual confronts and moves through anxietycreating experiences."[370] Kierkegaard: the emergence of self awareness is a "qualitative leap" (Freud: emergence of the ego). This is freedom. Freedom involves responsibility; the responsibility to "be one's self"; but this does have the flip side of inducing guilt. Refusing this responsibility is a sacrifice of freedom and limits selfawareness. "To venture causes anxiety, but not to venture is to lose oneself," and "The more consciousness, the more self." (Kierkegaard) [372]
Sachs, Bernhard. "Elements." Bernhard Sachs: Elements.200th ed. South Yarra: Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, 1993. N. pag. Print. brochure for exhibition at ACCA 1. Concerning Reconstruction"analogous to memory and the process of remaking or reforming involved in an act of remembering and particularly retelling. Each act of reconstruction alters the event" 2. Concerning Cities city as embodiment of language the structure of 'I'becoming naturedeath (imitations) 3. During Philosophy "...intuitively we feel we are more than we seem, we are more than our bodies, we are in motion, we are passengers in transit between destinations we refer to ourselves." "This 'History' is decidedly unstable."
Saltz, Jerry. "The Richter Resolution." Modern Painters.N.p.: n.p., 2005. 2829. April. Rpt. in Documents of Contemporary Art.London/Cambridge: Whitechapel Gallery and The MIT, 2011. 18385. Print. reproduction of photographs in painting...he's sick of it 1855 A.J. Wiertz: "painting would one day 'seize photography by the collar and exclaim: Mine! You are mine now! We are going to work together'." [183] photographs/projectors (cameras) are tools like brushes and rulers..find original ways to use them "...the space between the photograph, the photographer and the thing photographed is rich..." and analogous to that between artist, work, and spectator(?) [183] avoiding the monotony encountered in contemporary photobased painting, seeking original ways of using photography in painting "...there's nothing whatsoever photographic about Warhol's work." [184] paintings "Weapons of Mass Seduction" are the reason it is so "bottomless" ..."A crucial weapon is the mystical ability to embed thought in viscous substance." [184] "...give the alchemy of painting a chance." [185]
S a m e t , J e n n i f e r . " B e e r w i t h a P a i n t e r : L u c y M i n k C o v e l l o . " Hy p e r a l l e r g i c R S S .H y p e r a l l e r g i c , 07 Nov. 2015. Web. 07 Nov. 2015. <http://hyperallergic.com/251543/beerwithapainterlucyminkcovello/>. titles, scale, form, and color
Sartre, JeanPaul. "No Exit." No Exit, and Three Other Plays.New York: Vintage International, 1989. 147. Print. ESTELLE [opens her eyes and smiles]: I feel so queer. [She pats herself.] Don't you ever get taken that way? WhenI can't see myself I begin to wonder if I really and truly exist. I pat myself just to make sure, but it doesn't help much. INEZ: You're lucky. I'm always conscious of myself in my mind. Painfully conscious. ESTELLE: Ah yes, in your mind. But everything that goes on in one's head is so vague, isn't it? It makes one want to sleep. [She is silent for a while.] I've six big mirrors in my bedroom. There they are. I can see them. But they don't see me. They're reflecting the carpet, the settee, the window but how empty it is, a glass in which I'm absent! When I talk to people I always made sure there was one near by in which I could see myself. I watched myself talking. And somehow it kept me alert, seeing myself as the others saw me...Oh dear! My lipstick! I'm sure I've put it on all crooked. No, I can't do without a lookingglass for ever and ever, I simply can't. [1920]
Schapiro, Meyer. New York: George Braziller, 1996. Print. The second essay, Script In Pictures: Semiotics of Visual Language I have found to be of greater relevance; particularly the author’s discussions on Goya’s self portraits, the role of text as a mirroring of speech, and the position of the ‘reader’ as internal or external in relation to image and the text contained within.
Schier, Flint. "Painting after Art?: Comments on Wollheim." Visual Theory: Painting and Interpretation.New York: n.p., 1991. 15157. Rpt. in Art in Theory: 19001990 An Anthology of Changing Ideas.Ed. Charles Harrison and Paul Wood. Oxford: Blackwell, 1992. 1111116. Print. see my website post with citations used from this essay in my presentation at Winter Residency 2016 NYC, 13 January 2016 http://www.robynthomasexplorations.com/newpage2
Schjeldahl, Peter. "Native Soil." New Yorker25 May 2015: 7879. Print. Review of "Frida Kahlo: Art, Garden,Life " at the New York Botanical Garden According to Schjeldahl, we all know what Frida looked like; "The self she portrayed is a fictional creation based on her biography," symbolism, fantasy, ambiguity "gaining intensity through her paint handling" colors absorb light and add to the sense of paintings with a solid presence
Sherman, Cindy. APlay of Selves.Ostfildern, Germany: Hatje Cantz, 2007. Print. Introduction by Sherman "This is the only work I've ever done that was consciously autobiographical." cinematic, cut out photos of self as various characters, mounted in narratives along the wall originally shown at Hallwalls, 1976
S m i t h , R o b e r t a . " R e v i e w : F l o r a C r o c k e t t , a F o r g o t t e n A b s t r a c t P a i n t e r . " Th e N e w Y o r k T i m e s . The New York Times, 10 Nov. 2015. Web. 10 Nov. 2015. <http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/11/arts/design/reviewfloracrockettaforgottenabstr actpainter.html>. painting across the hall from Duchamp; a woman seen after her death
Solnit, Rebecca. "Woolf's Darkness: Embracing the Inexplicable." Men Explain Things to Me. Chicago: Haymarket, 2014. 85106. Print. "It's the job of the writers and explorers to see more, to travel light when it comes to preconception, to go into the dark with their eyes open." [87] Solnit in discussion with Sontag: "..., and I argued that you don't know if your actions are futile; that you don't have the memory of the future; that the future is indeed dark, which is the best thing it could be; and that, in the end, we always act in the dark. The effects of your actions may unfold in ways you cannot foresee or even imagine." [93] "To me, the grounds for hope are simply that we don't know what will happen next, and that the unlikely and the unimaginable transpire quite regularly." [94] quote I ended my Summer 2015 presentation with Keats negative capability Woolf the city between 46 PM "Here she describes a form of society that doesn't enforce identity but liberates it, the society of strangers, the republic of the streets, the experience of being anonymous and free that big cities invented." [97] for Woolf outside the home, walking, on the city street, is the place for introspection Solnit Wanderlust; the mind in motion while walking "The shell of home is a prison of sorts, as much as a protection, a casing of familiarity and continuity that can vanish outside." [9798] Woolf: "Or is the true self neigh this nor that, neither here nor there, but something so varied and wandering that it is only when we give the rein to its wishes and let it take its way unimpeded that we are indeed ourselves? Circumstances compel unity; for convenience' sake a man must be a whole." [99, in "Street Haunting"] Whitman: "I contain multitudes." Rimbaud: "I is another." aggression of the (art) world against the uncertainty and ambiguity of the (artist's) work (identity) invitation to conversation through the writing, the critique, the work Woolf seeks liberation; going beyond the familiar, the known, the safe: freedom to wander, freedom to roam. Chip Ward: "the tyranny of the quantifiable"; "...partly the failure of language and discourse to describe more complex, subtle, and fluid phenomena, as well as the failure of those who shape opinions and make decisions to understand and value these slipperier things." [105] "Woolf gave us limitlessness, impossible to grasp, urgent to embrace, as fluid as water, as endless as desire, a compass by which to get lost." [106]
S o t h , P h o t o g r a p h s A l e c . " T h e U n s e l f i e . " Th e N e w Y o r k T i m e s .T h e N e w Y o r k T i m e s , 1 0 O c t . 2015. Web. 10 Oct. 2015.<http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/11/magazine/theunselfie.html>. online slide show of Sloth's "unselfies"
S p r i n g e r , P e t e r . Ha n d a n d H e a d : E r n s t L u d w i g K i r c h n e r ' s S e l f p o r t r a i t a s S o l d i e r .T r a n s . S u s a n Ray. Berkeley: U of California, 2002. Print. "An Italian saying that describes the northern artists, "Hanno il cervello belle mani" (They have their brain in their hands), reflects the theoretical identification of head and hand;...:artists think, so to speak, with their hands. ...At the same time, the hand, like the head, symbolized the artist's individuality." [101] hand=eye=brain for artist Kirchner wrote and painted and socialized with 'intellectuals', yet the author tends to be slightly dismissive of this, instead emphasizing the artist's neurotic tendencies instead. "...that does not mean that Kirchner's art grew out of this literary thinking." [119] "Kirchner's SelfPortrait as Soldier is thus less a symbol of existential danger (and certainly not a work of protest against the war) than it is a metaphor for his own state of mind and sense of identity "a metaphoric autobiography" as it were....The result is a depiction of an exaggerated anxiety about his identity as an artist, an identity threatened by the military and the war; this anxiety then led to an existential crisis that bordered on self destruction." [128129]
S t e i n b e r g , A v i . " T h e M u r k y M e a n i n g o f t h e K i l l e r S e l f i e . " Th e N e w Y o r k T i m e s .T h e N e w Y o r k Times, 10 Dec. 2015. Web. 10 Dec. 2015. <http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/11/magazine/themurkymeaningofthekillerselfie. html>. dying to see ourselves
Stella, Frank, Elizabeth Lunning, and Brad Epley. "Artists Documentation Program » STELLA, Frank." Artists Documentation Program RSS.Artists Documentation Program/The Menil Collection/The Whitney Museum of American Art/Center for the Technical Study of Modern Art, Harvard Art Museum/The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, 09 June 2006. Web. 06 Nov. 2015. <http://adp.menil.org/?page_id=31>. The artist's noncommitted relationship to the material identity of the work. http://adp.menil.org/wpcontent/uploads/2011/12/adp2006c_stella_transcript.pdf
Strohminger, Nina, and Shaun Nichols. "Your Brain, Your Disease, Your Self." The New York Times.The New York Times, 22 Aug. 2015. Web. 22 Aug. 2015.<http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/23/opinion/yourbrainyourdiseaseyourself.html>.when identity is compromised or altered by disease in the brain; personal experience
This Must Be the Place.Dir. Paolo Sorrentino. Perf. Sean Penn. Medusa, 2011. Hulu.com. questions of identity and how our behavior or actions are directed by our understanding of who we are as must as by the ‘who we are’ we project is responded to by others his Must Be The Place left me questioning whether or not I was hallucinating the storyline as it became increasingly more bizarre. On the other hand, the shots were quite enjoyable, almost like a well crafted graphic novel by someone who really wanted to mess with the viewer’s sense of his or her own sanity.
Thomas, Robyn. "Annotated Bibliography." Www.robynthomasexplorations.com.Robyn Thomas, 15 Feb. 2015. Web.<http://www.robynthomasexplorations.com/mcp503annotatedbibliography/>. annotated bibliography for first year research paper
Thomas, Robyn. "Between the Easel and the Wall." Robyn Thomas.Robyn Thomas, 28 Dec. 2015. Web. 28 Dec. 2015. <http://www.robynthomasexplorations.com/betweentheeaselandthewall>. essay I wrote and published on my website, the central piece of my presentation at Winter Residency 2016 in NYC 13 January 2016.
Thomas, Robyn. "Notes from Two Days in New York City." Robyn Thomas.Robyn Thomas, 07 Dec. 2015. Web. 07 Dec. 2015. <http://www.robynthomasexplorations.com/notesfromtwodaysinnewyorkcity>. essay I wrote and posted on my website regarding exhibits viewed December 46, 2015.
T o m k i n s , C a l v i n . " C i n d y S h e r m a n . " Li v e s o f t h e A r t i s t s .N e w Y o r k : H e n r y H o l t , 2 0 0 8 . 2 1 4 5 . Print. Tomkins' New Yorker profile on Sherman. "People are often amazed that someone as nice as Cindy Sherman could be a major artist." [21] in other words, she isn't at all like the work she is known for...she is not making self portraits. "It was a little odd, walking around the empty gallery with the artist...looking at portraits for which she had posed but in which she was not present." [24] Sherman tells stories through the characters she creates. She was (is) not that comfortable with her body, so she decided to confront this discomfort through the use of her own body (via a photo class assignment in college). "The more Cindy's work accessed Cindy, the more it grew," (Robert Longo) [29] She is 'present' somewhere deep within the work. Untitled Film Stills Sherman wanted to tell stories that the viewers could read in different ways...they are open. she admired performance artists, but "felt no inclination to perform in public" [32] Tomkins says she doesn't seem to be 'acting' but refers to her as an actress. She does not title, but numbers her photos to retain ambiguity. She is open to the meanings and theoretical ideas others assign to her work. The camera is the tool she uses to make the art, the photograph is the work; but Sherman is not a 'photographer', she is a picture maker, and artist. "..."looking into the mirror to see what works."...She has no preconceived ideas of what she wants. The character emerges through the process. Sherman has described that process as "trancelike," and it can take a very long time." [44] "My way of working is that I don't know what I'm trying to say until it's almost done."(Sherman) [44] she works alone "With this artist, the work and the life connect in ways that are as surprising to her as they are to us." (Tomkins) [45]
" T r i s t a n T z a r a ' D a d a M a n i f e s t o 1 9 1 8 ' " 1 9 1 8 . Ar t i n T h e o r y , 1 9 0 0 1 9 9 0 : A n A n t h o l o g y o f Changing Ideas.Ed. Charles Harrison and Paul Wood. Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1992. 24853. Print. "I write this manifesto to show that people can perform contrary actions together while taking one fresh gulp of air; I am against action; for continuous contradiction, for affirmation too, I am neither for nor against and I do not explain because I hate common sense." [249] "There is no ultimate Truth." [251] "The contradiction and unity of poles in a single toss can be the truth." [252]
T s u i , B o n n i e . " C h o o s e Y o u r O w n I d e n t i t y . " Th e N e w Y o r k T i m e s .T h e N e w Y o r k T i m e s , 1 3 D e c . 2015. Web. 13 Dec. 2015. <http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/14/magazine/chooseyourownidentity.html>. it's not that simple...
T w o m b l e y , C y , a n d C a r o l M a n c u s i U n g a r o . " A r t i s t s D o c u m e n t a t i o n P r o g r a m » L o g i n . " Ar t i s t s Documentation Program RSS.Artists Documentation Program/The Menial Collection/The Whitney Museum of American Art/Center for the Technical Study of Modern Art, Harvard Art Museum/The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, 17 Dec. 2000. Web. 08 Dec. 2015. <http://adp.menil.org/?page_id=284>. White. Green. For as much as these paintings have been through and the point in history when they were made...materials in transition...it is amazing they are still around. Astonishment. http://adp.menil.org/wpcontent/uploads/2011/12/adp2000c_twombly_transcript_temp.pd f
UbuWeb Film & Video: Luke Fowler: Three Minute Wonders (2009).Dir. Luke Fowler. N.d. UbuWeb Film & Video: Luke Fowler: Three Minute Wonders (2009).Channel 4/Three Minute Wonders, 2009. Web. Oct. 2015. <http://www.ubu.com/film/fowler_wonders.html>. Four film portraits of former neighbors of the filmmaker. Abstraction of image to capture place and identity.
V C A M a r g a r e t L a w r e n c e G a l l e r y / B e r n h a r d S a c h s . Be r n h a r d S a c h s : Anathema/Anachronism/Apostasyr.Melbourne: VCA Margaret Lawrence Gallery/Bernhard Sachs, 2009. Print. brochure for exhibition at VCA Margaret Lawrence Gallery summary exhibition of 'Trilogy' history and representation as world theatre/opera after W. Benjamin's 1924 text, The Origin of German Tragic Drama. Trilogy is actual eight exhibitions, not three, so intentionally misleading. Goethe's Faust history is "not a truth or truths, nor a realty or realities, but an abyss of obsessions seeking objects." Dali's paranoiac critical method "...the past is continually revisited but it is never the same twice." "Played out between...." "Uebermalen creates history in an image" "...the corrupt descent into materiality" "death and its drive" dedicated to "...the violence of those who do not settle for less..."
Venus in Fur.Dir. Roman Polanski. Perf. Emmanuelle Seigner, Mathieu Amalric. Mars Distribution, 2013. Venus in Fur.Web. 11 Nov. 2015. <http://www.netflix.com/watch/70275370?trackId=&tctx=0,0,ca8afeb3a7b3108b2aec029 07ee28226426d041c:f4eeda8f7991820bdf0a0570d9f90ba08c5e43f6>. truth and identity, psychological manipulation of self and other
Watterson, Bill, and Garry Trudeau. Introduction. Calvin and Hobbes.Kansas City: Andrews McMeel, 1987. N. pag. Print. "Of course, this exclusivity only provokes many grownups into trying to regain the serendipity of youth for themselves, to, in effect, retrieve the irretrievable. A desperate few do things that later land them in the Betty Ford Center. The rest of us, more sensibly, read Calvin and Hobbes. Garry Trudeau" posted on my website http://www.robynthomasexplorations.com/m505m506paintingstudiesprocess
Wenders, Wim. "Ich Schreibe, Also Denke Ich." Die Pixel Des Paul Cezanne.Ed. Annette Reschke. Frankfurt Am Main: Verlag Der Autoren, 2015. 1321. Print. English translation R. Thomas 21. September 2015 http://www.robynthomasexplorations.com/wordsofwenders
Westley, Hannah. "Imaging the Absent Subject: Marcel Duchamp's La Grand Verre." The Body as Medium and Metaphor.Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2008. 15+. Print. "Duchamp uses the piece to confront and dissolve the hierarchal relations between object and subject, artist and viewer." (20) In order to view La Grand Verre or any work without a clearly stated original identity [representational] the spectator must identify within the work "explicit and implicit indications" that the author, the narrator, and the protagonist are one. The Bride as forerunner of Rrose Selavy and the nude figure in Etant Donnes [Lyotard]; ultimately the figure is Duchamp, or at least the feminine aspects of his self. "autobiography" in intentional act, seeking to capture the subjectivity of the creator through the act of creation..MARiee CELibataries the masculine as well as the feminine aspects of Duchamp's identity embodied and constructed in The Large Glass. Multiple, shifting identities, gender varies, many masculine. Dee, Totor, Slim Pickens, George W. Welch, R.Mutt, Marcel Douxami...there is no 'real' La Grand Verre as a mirror of the fourth dimension; reflects and frames. "A folding mirror that reflects back upon itself, a looking glass where the viewer's gaze is already represented in the work." gendered identity and infra mince, the separation between self and other In The Large Glass it is about the 'interdependence and interchange' , the gaze between subject and object...not one dominating the other. [36]
W i l l i a m s , A l e x . " W h o W a s t h e R e a l L o u R e e d ? " Th e N e w Y o r k T i m e s .T h e N e w Y o r k T i m e s , 3 1 Oct. 2015. Web. 31 Oct. 2015. <http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/01/fashion/whowastherealloureed.html>. control/lack of control of the portrait after death
Wilson, Martha. ""Performance Art: (Some) Theory and (Selected) Practice at the End of This Century," Art Journal." 1997. Ed. Martha Wilson. Martha Wilson Sourcebook: 40 Years of Reconsidering Performance, Feminism, Alternative Spaces.New York: Independent Curators International, 2011. 197200. Print. "Performance art is composed of (often confrontational) ideas; it takes place in "real" time; and the body is its irreducible medium, the locus where text and image intersect. " [198] the possibility of multiple interpretations exist; Lawrence Weiner word and image intersect in the idea of the artist, for Wilson this is the "body" of performance art.
Winters, Terry, and Carol MancusiUngaro. "Artists Documentation Program » WINTERS, Terry." Artists Documentation Program RSS.Artists Documentation Program/The Whitney Museum of American Art/The Menil Collection/Center for the Technical Study of Modern Art, Harvard Art Museums/The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, 04 June 2013. Web. 04 Nov. 2015. <http://adp.menil.org/?page_id=880>. The artist's concern for the quality of the painting, its condition, as a material object. http://adp.menil.org/wpcontent/uploads/2014/09/adp2013c_winters_transcript_final.pdf Winters makes paintings that will withstand the test of time as material objects.
W i t t g e n s t e i n , L u d w i g . Tr a c t a t u s L o g i c o p h i l o s o p h i c u s .T r a n s . C . K . O g d e n . M i n e o l a , N Y . : Dover Publications, 1999. Print. 2.0121 ..."Just as we cannot think of spatial objects at all apart from space, or temporal objects apart from time, so we cannot think of any object apart from the possibility of its connexion with other things." [30] POSSIBILITY is fixed 2.0271 "The object is the fixed, the existent; the configuration is the changing, the variable." [32] we 'are' this is fixed; 'who' we are this is variable 2.171 "The picture can represent every reality whose form it has." [34] picture/image is variable 2.203 "The picture contains the possibility of the state of affairs which it represents." [35] 2.21 "The picture agrees with reality or not; it is right or wrong, true or false." [35] these are variables because they are part of the picture which is variable 2.22 "The picture represents what it represents, independently of its truth or falsehood, through the form of representation." [35] representation is not fixed, it is also variable 6.54 ..."Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent." [108] word versus image Anything can be pictured, represented by the image...it is neither right nor wrong, true nor false, it simply is what it is. Not everything can be 'said','spoken', or put into the form of word/text...the word, in opposition to the image is not what it is, it can be right or wrong, true or false. By remaining 'silent' the possibility of what is or is not remains open.
Wollheim, Richard. Painting as an Art.Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1987. Print. Lecture I What the artist does and Lecture II What the spectator sees relationship of artist to work by placing self in the role of spectator; in turn the spectator is able to see the work in the position of the artistmaker
Wright, Christopher. Rembrandt, Selfportraits.New York: Viking, 1982. Print. image source
Wrong Face.Dir. Elina Brotherus and Francesca Woodman. Perf. Francesca Woodman, Elina Brotherus. Www.elinabrotherus.com/Wrong Face.Elina Brotherus, 2013. Web. Sept. 2015. <http://www.elinabrotherus.com/videos/#v1>. short film of the artists performing, dancing, moving through the space with mirrors; reflecting themselves, sometimes with the reflected face on the other 'wrong' body. Wrong Face 2013, 6 min 08 sec, 16mm film (screening version also as HD video, Apple ProRes 422), 4:3, silent.
Zeltner, Michael. "SelfNarration and the Polarisation of Memory." Thesis. Transart Institute / University of Plymouth, 2013. Print. shared with me by Michael after my presentation in Berlin, August 2015 we live under the impression that we only have one reality, when in fact reality is multilayered; we live our lives in a state of selfdeception selfnarration: "selfnarrations change depending on the context" [8] “In any case, the reflexivity of selfnarrative poses problems of a deep and serious order—problems beyond those of verification, beyond the issue of indeterminacy (that the very telling of the selfstory distorts what we have in mind to tell), beyond ‘ratio nalization’. The whole enterprise seems a most shaky one, and some critics, like Louis Renza even think it is impossible, ‘an endless prelude’.” — Jerome Bruner (2004, p. 693)"[10] "...selfnarration is such a delicate matter, building as it does on the rela tionship with the recipient, and the resulting personal feedback process." [12]