15 Search Results for "1912"

• "My Name is John Cheever and I "My Name is John Cheever and I Can Write" (B. 27 May 1912 - D. 18 June 1982)

  • From: allenhenriquez
  • Description:

    Pen+ink on paper, 2012.

     

  • 8 months ago
  • Views: 189

• Eastern Arabian Musician Artis Eastern Arabian Musician Artist Fareed El-Atrash

  • From: yuosifziacanta
  • Description:

    الموسيقار الأوحد - الانجازات الفريدية الموسيقية المبتكرة - الانجازات الفريدية العربية الشرقية الموسيقية المبتكرة - الانجازات الموسيقية المبتكرة - الانجازات الفريدية الغنائية الموسيقية المتطورة - الانجازات الفريدية العربية الشرقية الموسيقية المتطورة - الانجازات الموسيقية المتطورة - الانجازات الفريدية الغنائية الموسيقية المتقدمة - الانجازات الفريدية العربية الشرقية الموسيقية المتقدمة - الانجازات الموسيقية المتقدمة - الانجازات الفريدية الغنائية الموسيقية السينمائية الخاصة - الانجازات السينمائية الخاصة - المرحلة السينمائية الثانية - أغاني الأفلام - موسيقار الشرق الأوحد الموسيقار العالمي فريد الأطرش - يغني - ما إقدرش أقول آه - الكلمات من تأليف الشاعر الأستاذ مأمون الشناوي - تلحين وإعداد ، اشراف وتوجيه ، ابتكار وتطوير وتوزيع موسيقي ، موسيقار الشرق الأوحد الموسيقار العالمي فريد الأطرش - من فيلم - تعال سلم - بالأشتراك مع ، الفنانين - سامية جمال - اسماعيل ياسين - الوجه الجديد ، زمردة - عبد الفتاح القصري - عبد السلام النابلسي - الموسيقار النبيل ، محمد البكار - فريد شوقي - محمد الديب - زينات صدقي - وداد حمدي - سعيد أبو بكر - وضيفا الفيلم ، سراج منير ، ميمي شكيب - إخراج الأستاذ حلمي رفلة - إنتاج ، شركة أفلام فريد الأطرش ، سنة الإنتاج 1951- تسجيل صوتي مجسم -  لنشر التراث الفني ، لموسيقار الشرق الأوحد الموسيقار العالمي فريد الأطرش ، والمحافظة عليه -- For the dissemination of the artistic heritage of eastern Arab . Composer, singer, actor and film producer . The master of the Oud ( Lute ) FAREED EL-ATRASH  . ( 1917 - 1974 ) . And maintain it .

  • 1 year ago
  • Views: 124
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• Visit to the Clyford Still Mus Visit to the Clyford Still Museum in Denver

  • From: elizbobb
  • Description:

    I was truely amazed at the collaboration between the architect and the art.  The art and the architecture really compliment each other.  It was well thought out.

    Video by Robert W. Dunlap 2012.  

  • 1 year ago
  • Views: 118

• Kingsfoil "Give It Up Now" Kingsfoil "Give It Up Now"

  • From: rivevideo
  • Description:

    official music video by Kingsfoil

  • 1 year ago
  • Views: 33
  • Not yet rated

• Beyond the Barre ~ Oliver Swan Beyond the Barre ~ Oliver Swan-Jackson

  • From: barreboys
  • Description:

    Behind the scenes video of Suzanne Farrell Ballet's Oliver Swan-Jackson

  • 1 year ago
  • Views: 43
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• Film Independent: 50/50 Film Independent: 50/50

  • From: ovationtv
  • Description:

    Film Independent's Elvis Mitchell interviews writer Will Reiser and actors Seth Rogen, Joseph Gorden-Levitt and Anna Kendrick about their experience making the film 50/50.

  • 2 years ago
  • Views: 258
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• Film Independent: Jackie Brown Film Independent: Jackie Brown

  • From: ovationtv
  • Description:

    Film Independent's Elvis Mitchell interviews Pam Grier, Quinton Tarntino and Robert Forster after a screening of Jackie Brown.

  • 2 years ago
  • Views: 562
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• Lasting Memories Lasting Memories

  • From: mainesweetmaine
  • Description:

    Colonial Theater – Belfast ME

    The Colonial Theater in Belfast, Maine opened on April 12, 1912, the same day the Titanic sunk. Fortunately, the Colonial Theater has stayed afloat and is still showing films, both Hollywood and Independent. In 1923, a fire destroyed the original theater however; the theater was rebuilt and opened for business the following year. As with most theaters in those days, it showed a combination of live entertainment and a movie. As Vaudeville died a slow death, the theater evolved into an all movie theater, which it remains today. The theater has three screens, each named after a former Belfast Theater.

     

    I had some fun with this photo and manipulated it a lot.  I took this a few months ago and this is what it really looks like.

    

     

    
    

     

  • 2 years ago
  • Views: 120

• Photography Newsletter #2 Photography Newsletter #2

  • From: celestejheery
  • Description:

    Rudolph Koppitz (1884 – 1926)

    Rudolph Koppitz was a Czechoslovak photographer, often credited as Viennese or Austrian.

    His work is marked by a pronounced awareness of form, line, and the surface play of light and shadow. Early in his career, Koppitz was known for staging groups of subjects in the style of the Vienna Secession, the most well known example of this being his Bewegungsstudie, "Motion Study".

    

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

    Bewegungsstudie.

    The dancer Claudia Issatschenko plays the cental role in the above very famous photograph. It's meaning is obscure, as it was never explained by Koppitz, but the naked dancer may in some way represent death, or even a fatal moment – she gives the impression of having been struck down as she was advancing. Either that, or she is on the point of coming back to life. Her three attendants, too, seem to be rehearsing either a revival or a loss of consciousness. The implication of this, and of a number of such groupings of naked and draped dancers undertaken in the mid-20s, is that of Koppitz's subject was the stirring of the spirit in relation to the physical body. Figures on the point of dying or reviving can even be understood as metaphors for the work of art in which material is invested with a spirit of its own. In the 1930s Koppitz turned increasingly to the documentation of country life and landscape in Austria.

    Rudolf Koppitz began his career as a photographer in small commercial studios. In 1912, he took a decisive step and left his professional life to go back to school in Vienna. Here he met a circle of artists and pictorial photographers. Koppitz's extraordinary mastery of pictorial processes - pigment, carbon, gum, and bromoil transfer printing gained the respect of his colleagues throughout the world.

    

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

    Self-portrait.

    Featured Photographer: Zhang Jingna

    At a mere 22 years old, Zhang Jingna is a superstar. She's had over 6 million page views on deviantART. Her handle is zemotion. You'll want to check out her work. I promise you.

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

    Redemption.

    Born in the suburbs of Beijing to a humble sporting family, Jingna moved to Singapore at the age of eight. At 14, a mere nine months after picking up air rifle, she broke the national record and joined the national team. Two years later, she left Raffles Girls' School to pursue a degree in fashion design.

    Picking up the camera while studying fashion, it eventually turned into her voice. She left school again in late 2007, and subsequently the national team, to pursue photography full time. By 20, only a year later, Jingna has shot her first major campaign for Mercedes Benz Taiwan with Ogilvy & Mather and became a regular contributor to Harper's Bazaar Singapore.

    
    

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

    The Banquet.

    Jingna then went on to become the youngest recipient of Fellowship in the Master Photographers Association (UK) in 2009. Her portfolio has expanded to include names like Montblanc, Lancôme, Canon, Pond's, Wacom, Random House Publishing, as well as Elle. With works described as being romantic, ethereal and sensuous, Jingna's images exude a quiet and steady confidence with maturity belying her age.

    Jingna is currently based in Los Angeles.

    What I've Been Up To Lately

    Reading, reading, getting frustrated by the complexity of photography.

    I've never undertaken such a demanding creative endeavor. Painting came to me with practice, but it was never difficult. I don't know the first thing about color, I just know what I like and what a painting needs. I am confident. With photography, I feel lost. There is so much of a learning curve, from getting to know the many settings on my camera to learning how to use photomanipulation software.

    I have two people lined up to do a shoot. It is going to take me some time to get ready; I don't want to waste their time while I fiddle endlessly. I just need to be patient with myself. My memory is shot so I don't retain what I read very well. That is not conducive to this medium.

    As far as photomanipulation, I was able to get Photoshop CS5. Wow – it's complicated. Another thing I have not had a problem with – software. A humbling experience. I can't just figure it out by trial and error. Too many variables. I got a book The Adobe Photoshop CS5 Book for Digital Photographers. So far, I have been able to learn a lot in just the first 50 pages.

    I need to buy a portrait lens and a zoom lens for taking close ups of buildings in the distance. I also have a lot of other equipment to buy. Unfortunately, I am going to have to buy these things a little at a time.

    So, I have put taking photos on hold. I have tried in vain to get the effects I want. I think having more appropriate lighting is necessary. For example, I wanted to do a photo of myself laying down with the emphasis on my torso and the rest a gray tone. I experimented with color and found a nice red hue. But as far as having the highlights where I wanted them? No go. The problem, I surmise, is that I have fill lights (the umbrellas) and soft lights (the soft boxes) but nothing concentrated or powerful enough. That's what you get for buying equipment without really understanding it. While I do think that both are necessary for a mini-studio, there is definitely something missing.

    Thanks for reading.

    Celeste J. Heery

    cjh@cjhfineart.com

  • Blog post
  • 2 years ago
  • Views: 74
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• Reconsidering the Spiritual in Reconsidering the Spiritual in Art - PART 1

  • From: Painters
  • Description:

    DONALD KUSPIT

    Reconsidering the Spiritual in Art

    Part 1

    Thank you. It's a great pleasure to be here in sunny Virginia. I appreciate the welcoming weather. It's a great pleasure to be at Virginia Commonwealth once again. I've been here before, in fact several times. It's always a pleasure to see Howard Risatti again, an old friend, and someone whose work I very much admire. I want to thank Adam Welch for the particular invitation, and the Graduate Student Association as well.

    Now, let me say what I'm doing here. Obviously the title—and you see this from the poster as well—is a reference to Kandinsky's very famous and influential essay, in German it was "Geistige in der Kunst." I use the German word deliberately because the word "Geist" in German has a whole different resonance in history than the word "spiritual" in English. Spiritual sounds a little sappy in English. When we say somebody is spiritual, we're not certain if we're giving them a compliment or being ironical, in English. But in German if you say somebody's a "Geistiger Mensch" that's a true compliment, somebody deep, reflective, and serious.

    Now, this paper is coming from a number of different points of view, or trying to address a number of different issues. First, I think it's high time to re-evaluate twentieth-century art in a serious way. It's been scholarly done to death, so to say, everything's been analyzed. There are lots of books on Kandinsky, and people associated with him; his influence has been widely acknowledged. He's a truly famous, major figure. In my humble opinion, ultimately more of a revolutionary than Picasso. André Breton, who was not known for kindness, praised Kandinsky, I'm quoting Breton, "as one of the most exceptional, greatest revolutionaries of vision," which I think is quite an extraordinary statement. I'm not sure that people have fully gotten the whole of why he's so exceptional.

    Now, one of the things that I think is going on in Kandinsky's art, and in On the Spiritual in Art, is an effort to deal with an issue that was raised in Hegel's Phenomenology of Mind, which was published just about a century earlier. Phänomenologie des Geistes, it's sometimes called, phenomenology of mind, sometimes spirit, there are various translations in English, phenomenology of consciousness. And Hegel, if you read it very carefully, reaches a curious point. He goes from sense experience, okay, very particular sense experience, to pure ideational spiritual experience, and he argues that the climax of spiritual activity—let's use that word—is the spirit knowing itself and coming and becoming itself. And then suddenly, having said that, he flips right back into sense experience, and he says the spirit knows itself most through sense experiences. So we have the idea of spiritualized sensing, so to say, implicit in Hegel, the whole thing starts over again, and I think Kandinsky is trying to address that moment.

    Now, I think there's something else that's very important that's going on today. I'm very interested in maintaining what I call the spiritual impulse in art, and I frankly think it's disappearing. For me the debate in art is symbolized by the difference between say Gerhard Richter and Anselm Kiefer. I found it a wonderful relief to see Kiefer's recent show at Gagosian Chelsea. I found it a wonderful antidote in relief from the show by Richter which is now at the Museum of Modern Art, which is now in San Francisco. You can buy a book [Richter 858] for one hundred and twenty five dollars, it has an aluminum sleeve on it, it's the ultimate hype of an artist. There are eight reproductions in it, two texts by prominent artists. It's a very slick production. I've written about both of these people. For me Richter is the ultimate in the spiritless, cynical artist. I have a piece at artnet.com where I wrote a lot, which is called "Gerhard Richter D.O.A." It didn't make me many friends, but I'm getting too old to worry about that. Then I have another piece on artnet.com called "The Spirit of Gray" which is on Kiefer. The subtext was the last ripple of the German Wave, "Deutsche Velle," as it was called when it happened. Anyway, Richter is spiritless, Kiefer is spiritual, and one of the last holdouts. The last show was dealing with the Kabala, with an interesting text on it by Harold Bloom. It was sensationally well received.

    You may be aware—if you're not, I'll make you—that Richter has sharply attacked Kiefer as too pretentious, too much into the sublime, among other things, okay. I think that's a mistake, so that's one thing I want to address. The other thing I think that's happening, and that Kandinsky stands right in the middle of, is that we're at a moment of a paradigm change, as it's called, it's been going on for a while in the history of art. I believe that the idea of fine art is dead or dying. The idea of fine art which emerged in the eighteenth century, symbolized by Kant's aesthetics—and there was no concept of aesthetics in traditional philosophy—and then by the discourses by Reynolds, that that's on the way out, it's going. I think art is becoming very ideological, and it's less interested in mediating this special experience called the "aesthetic," which you can get outside of art but which is intensified and more concentrated within the, so to say, closed circle of discourse which is art.

    So I think Kandinsky is bringing together the spiritual idea of art with the aesthetic idea of art, or let's say the spiritual impulse, and trying to unite them. Okay, so these are some of the things I'm going to do. And I'm going to show works which you're probably familiar with, and I will talk a little bit about them and say things I'm sure you're familiar with from Kandinsky.

    But then what I want to do is to shift it a bit, perhaps in terms that may be a little too general, but it's hard not to be general in the context of such a talk, is shift it a bit and try to talk about just exactly what is meant by the spiritual impulse keeping the spiritual alive.

    I also have to say that there's a subjective motivation behind this talk. As one gets older, one becomes aware of sickness and death. One becomes aware of what Buddha was aware of when he left the closed garden of his pleasures and went out in the world and saw a sick person, a dead body, and he couldn't believe these things existed. That began his spiritual pursuit of enlightenment, and you might say the sub-question, as it were, of this talk is, Can art still offer spiritual enlightenment as Kandinsky thought it once did, or was capable of doing? You may disagree with that, you may not do it. I remind you that Kandinsky, along with Malevich and Mondrian, were all spiritual artists by their own testimony. This has been forgotten. Nobody takes their writing seriously. A while back Hilton Kramer said, "Oh, it's all just about formal innovation, and impulse, and spontaneity." But it's more complicated. The issue is whether it is still possible to re-present, represent, spiritual impulse without the traditional iconography, that's what they were trying to address. So without further ado, I'll begin.

    It is almost a century since Kandinsky, Wassily Kandinsky wrote On the Spiritual in Art. Why reconsider it now? It was written, published in 1912 by Piper-Verlag, and there are a number of essays related to it done in 1910, 1911. Not simply because of historical reasons—not simply because it was time to take a fresh look at a text that had profound influence on twentieth-century art—and some people regard it as the climax of symbolist thinking in art—but because art faces the same problem now, at least in my opinion, that it did then: namely, how to generate and articulate what Kandinsky called ". . . the all-important spark of inner life," or, as he also called it, ". . . of innernecessity." As he said, " It is the core of spiritual experience." The problem is even greater today, in my opinion, than it was in Kandinsky's day: what he meant by the spiritual was self-evident to his audience. Today it is not so self evident. For Kandinsky's audience, and for Kandinsky, its meaning was anchored in religious tradition. Today there is no religious tradition to sustain it. Thus, when Kandinsky described how he came to the idea of the spiritual in art—when he said he realized that "the sensations of colors on the palette" could be "spiritual experiences," and that's right out of Hegel, as Kandinsky said—he described how he felt as though he was taking a "stroll within a picture, that he was surrounded on all sides by painting, whenever he entered a church. He was a very smart man, very, very, introspective and knowledgeable about himself, and he said how he wanted to recapitulate, in part, the experience of walking through a Russian Orthodox Church, which is full of pastel colors, and anybody who's been in Russia, has gone to some of these churches, there's a wonderful group of them outside, right outside of Moscow, you'll know what he was talking about.

    It didn't matter whether it was a Russian Orthodox church or a Catholic church, as he said. The experience was the same whether it was in the Moscow churches or the Bavarian and Tyrolean chapels: it was an artistic experience of religion and a religious experience of art—a sense of the easy and seamless merger of religious and artistic experience, their inevitable reciprocity. The interiors of the churches and chapels that Kandinsky visited are brightly and intricately colored, as he was quick to appreciate, so that the excitement of color and of inner life converged. Color and feeling were inextricable: sense experience was spiritual experience and spiritual experience took sensuous form. That is, the external, visible phenomenon of color seemed to be a spontaneous manifestation of the internal, invisible phenomenon of feeling. Feeling needed color to become consummate—and if you think of Matisse's remarks in his 1908 essay, same kind of thing, he talks about the fascination of color, the instant effect of it—feeling needed color to become consummate and color needed feeling to have inner meaning—to be more than a chemical matter of fact. Kandinsky insisted, as we know, that certain colors and certain emotions necessarily went together. They were not simply arbitrarily or culturally associated but essentially connected, as he argued in the chapter on the "psychological working" or emotional "Effects of Color" in On the Spiritual in Art.

    Now the public who read On the Spiritual in Art when it first appeared in 1911, and also the Blaue Reiter Almanac, the Blue Rider Almanac, when it appeared a year later—the second edition appeared in 1914, and that was the last edition, which he and Franz Marc, who was a close friend, edited together—thus understood what Kandinsky meant when he declared that "their principal aim [was] to awaken [the] capacity for experiencing the spiritual in material and in abstract phenomena." It was, to repeat, a religious experience—an experience of inner life. Church-going induced it, that is it forced one back on one's inner life, in forgetfulness of the outer world—the world outside the sacred space of the church—and the picture is a kind of sacred space for Kandinsky, and Kandinsky thought that abstract painting induced it, as well, if only because in entering an abstract painting one turned away from "the external aspect of phenomena," as he said, toward what he called "feelings of a finer nature." And he makes quite clear he's not speaking about ordinary feelings, for example the kind of feelings that Munch talked about, anger, anxiety, and so forth. He's talking of a different kind of feeling altogether that you . . . he did not associate with what you might call natural existence. What mattered for Kandinsky was what he called the mood, Stimmung, or spiritual atmosphere, his terms of the work, and he has a very interesting footnote deploring the fact that the word mood or Stimmung has become so banal and conventionalized, not its material or outward aspect. The work had to be seen with what he called "spiritual eyes"—eyes that could intuit innernecessity—not eyes that could see only physical material or outer necessity. When Kandinsky spoke of "my tendency toward the hidden, the concealed," he was talking about his ability to see the spiritual concealed in the material—the unfamiliar emotional reality behind familiar material appearances. As he famously wrote in a letter to Will Grohman, the great German scholar, in 1925, "I want people to see finally what lies behind"—that's Kandinsky's emphasis—"my painting."

    On the Spiritual in Art, begins with a long diatribe against what he called "the long reign of materialism, the whole nightmare of the materialistic attitude, which has turned the life of the universe into an evil, purposeless game." Another reason for reconsidering, and, as I hope to show, the necessity of re-affirming the spiritual in art, or the spiritual possibilities of art, if you want to put it more modestly, is that we have not only not awakened from the nightmare of the materialistic attitude in art as well as society, but materialism has become a plague, indeed, the reigning ideology in both. Kandinsky thought that Impressionism was materialism's climactic statement in art, but then he never saw Pop art, which began the ascendancy, not to say dominance, of media-derived art, which is the situation we're in today. The attitude of Pop art is so materialistic, however ironical its materialism is supposed to be, and I have my doubts about that, that it is virtually impossible to find any spark of inner life in it. One can make the same criticism of Warhol's "Marilyn Monroe," and maybe the reality of Marilyn Monroe as well, who Billy Wilder said he was not sure if she was a human being or a synthetic creation, synthetic plastic, he said, as Redon made of Manet. Redon, who wrote some rather brilliant criticism, said Manet's figures lacked "soul"—inner life is what he meant. There is certainly none in Andy Warhol's media mannequins, which is what he paints and what our celebrity society is saturated in.

    One of the reasons that Kandinsky was concerned with inner life is that it registers the pernicious emotional effects of outer materialistic life, affording a kind of critical perspective on materialism that becomes the springboard for emotional transcendence of it. The inability of Pop art to convey inner life, which is a consequence of its materialistic disbelief in interiority, and especially spirituality, which is the deepest interiority, indicates that Pop art's irony is at best nominally critical. Irony in fact mocks belief, even as it spices up materialism, making it seem less banal, that is, populist, thus giving Pop art the look of deviance characteristic of avant-garde art. I dwell on irony because it is opposed to spirituality, not to say incommensurate with it, and also its supposedly more knowing alternative—spiritual people are supposed to be naïve—and because irony has become the ruling desideratum of contemporary art, if you're not ironical, you're not in, apparently redeeming its materialism. This itself is ironical, for contemporary materialistic society and its media have discovered the advantage of being ironical about themselves, namely, it spares them the serious trouble of having to change. This suggests that irony has become a form of frivolity. It is no longer the revolutionary debunking understanding it once claimed to be, for example, in Jasper Johns' American flag paintings, but an expression of frustration, of stalemate, I would say.

    For Kandinsky modern materialism was evident in "the turbulent flood of technological inventions that has poured forth," as he noted in "Whither the 'New' Art?" which was published the same year as On the Spiritual in Art and also the obsession with "the accumulation of material blessings." We live in America and know what that's all about. But he never experienced, Kandinsky never experienced, the blind faith in technology as the solution to all human problems nor the wealth, however unequally distributed, of our business society (which as we clearly have realized from the recent corporate events is a swindle). It is possible to argue that in art, which is what we are concerned with, materialism has completely swept the field. People think of art in completely materialistic terms, what does it cost, what is it going to bring on the market, and the joke is that the real galleries are the auction houses. So that searching for the inner life of a work of art or expecting any art to have spiritual significance is like searching for the proverbial rare needle in a haystack. There is usually no concealed, to think of Kandinsky's idea, spiritual point in most contemporary art, nothing unexpected that would sting the spectator's spirit into self-awareness. To put this another way, there is little that is sublime—which was an idea that Kandinsky also used—about contemporary materialistic art, that is, little that would awaken the capacity for experiencing the spiritual.

    Materialism has increased exponentially in art and society since Kandinsky's day, as the business ideology of today makes clear. I think Warhol's idea that business art was the most important art and making money was business puts it on the line quite explicitly. As he said, he passed through this thing called art, whatever that was. Business materialism is evident in the eagerness for corporate sponsorship of art. One may say corporate legitimation of art's significance—without a corporate sponsor, without commercial value, no historical and cultural value. Business materialism is also evident in the implicit belief that the work of art is a commodity before it is anything else, part of the consumer society, normal enough. That is, its commodity identity is its primary identity, or to put this another way, its marketplace value is its primary value. It seems more and more foolish and farcical to speak of a work of art's internal necessity when it seems designed to cater to, even ingratiate itself with external necessity. It is harder and harder to know what one is talking about when one does so. It is harder and harder to claim that a work of art can be a spiritual experience, however much such artists as Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman, I'm sure you know the difference here, insisted that one was missing the point of their abstract art if one viewed it materially. They were not mere technicians of color, to use a term that has been applied to Rothko, but spiritual provocateurs.

    Ironically, marketing materialism has given art more visibility and prestige than it had when it served religion and the aristocracy. It is a two way street: business's enthusiastic endorsement of avant-garde art's professed autonomy is business's covert way of asserting its own autonomy, that is, its belief that, like art, it is answerable and responsible only to itself. By supporting art, business appropriates art's supposedly intrinsic value and claims to advanced consciousness. Ours is a business culture not a religious culture, and it is impossible to find spiritual significance in what Warhol called business art. I submit to you that Warhol's art is a celebration of business, which is in part why it sells. It is certainly a long way from the color mysticism of the interiors of the churches that Kandinsky visited and that his early abstract works struggled to emulate. Corporate headquarters are not churches, even though their decoration with works of art are attempts to give them spiritual significance. Warhol's Gold Marilyn Monroe, which I showed you before, 1962, is also irreconcilable with Kasimir Malevich's abstract icons, which he compared to spiritual experiences in a desert, the proverbial place to have them.

    In contrast, Warhol's work epitomizes the business materialism of the crowd, it's what I call crowd art. Ironically, Warhol's cynical attempt to turn the dead actress into a sacred presence—and she was very good business, like Elvis—reinforces her profaneness and spiritual insignificance. Gold is either filthy lucre, or, alchemically speaking, ultima materia, that is, the ultimate sacred substance, and Warhol's perverse fusion—and perversion is another major strategy in art, and irony is part of it in contemporary art—perverse fusion of its opposed meanings in the socio-cosmetic construction of Marilyn Monroe is the ultimate materialistic nihilism. It is the exemplary case of the confusion of values that occurs in a business society, and that Kandinsky fought against.

    What I am arguing is that the spiritual crisis of the contemporary artist is greater than Kandinsky's. Kandinsky knew art was in spiritual crisis, whereas today's materialistic artist doesn't see any spiritual crisis. All that matters is materialistic success. I want to just call attention to something, interrupt myself. Earlier this week I received an announcement of new books from Prestel-Verlag, which is a German firm located in Munich, with offices also in New York, and one of the books is called The Eclipse of Art: Tackling the Crisis in Art Today. It's written by Julian Spalding, who is the former director of the Glasgow Museum and also the man who founded the Ruskin Gallery, the St. Mungo Museum of Religious Art, [of] Religious Life and Art, and the Glasgow Gallery of Modern Art. I have to say this struck a resonance with me because my next book, which will be out, Cambridge University Press, early next year, is called The End of Art, and I'm taking this in a different way than he is. I'm arguing that we now are in a situation of "post art," as I call it. That's a term that Alan Capro introduced earlier on, and I sort of run with it and do a variety of other things. So there are a number of people, Spalding is one, I am another, and there are other people I can mention, who feel that something is "wrong in the state of art today" as there was in Denmark way back when.

    The spiritual crisis in art today is more comprehensive than it was in Kandinsky's time, all the more so because what Jacques Barzun called the modern religion of art—his Crest lectures many years ago, an absolutely brilliant book of lectures on art, written in the seventies, as I say, his lectures that he gave in Washington. However private religion it was, and thus more of a cult, is defunct today, however much its vestige lives on in the pseudo-sacred space of the modern museum. I was recently reading about the new Dallas Museum, and apparently you have huge walls with a single work on it, like a sacred experience. I hope it works.

    Kandinsky could fall back on the religion of art, and contributed to its growth, but today it seems quaint and simplistic, which is why many contemporary scholars and interpreters ignore the spiritual writings, as I said, of Kandinsky, Malevich, and Mondrian, regarding them as so much claptrap beside the point of the actual works they produced. The last religious works of art—the so-called purist works, and this is my interpretation of them and one possible interpretation—that Clement Greenberg advocated and analyzed, have become history, marketplace as well as art history. Even more crucially, Kandinsky's assumption that color—these are his terms—transmitted and "translated" emotion, that inner life had a necessary material medium, universally accessible and instantly expressive, has fallen by the wayside. The relentless materialization and mediafication—if I can invent a word—of art, which are accessories to its commodification, has stripped it of the sense of subjective presence so basic to Kandinsky's belief in spiritual experience, leaving us with what from Kandinsky's point of view is the shell of art rather than its spiritual significance. The point I am trying to make is that there is no longer anything hidden or concealed or behind art, as Kandinsky expected there to be. It is all up front: what you see is what you get, as has been famously said by Frank Stella as well as Andy Warhol. Stella, I think strips, along with Ellsworth Kelley, strips abstraction of its spiritual import, reduces it to what I call empirical abstraction, spectrum, or think of the "Spectrum Works" of Kelley, for example. If what you see is what you get, then art has lost its internal necessity, that is, its subjective reason for being, and becomes completely objective or external. One no longer experiences it, but theorizes, theorizes about its material structure and social meaning. Think how much theory props up art today. I am in complete agreement with the famous art historian and museum director, Friedlander, who said that when theory rises up, creativity is on the way down, at least for the artists, if not for the theorists. In other words, belief in the spiritual has been completely uprooted and destroyed in most contemporary art. The idea of the spiritual as such has become meaningless in the art world, thus completing the process of the despiritualization or demystification of art that began with Cubism and climaxed in post-painterly abstraction, as Greenberg thinks.

    In a sense—and I'm going to contradict myself, what I said before about Greenberg—Greenberg's theory of modernist painting is in fact the final intellectual stage of the modern process of despiritualizing art, which in the last analysis is reduced entirely to the terms of its material medium. Such materialistic reductionism, involving the complete objectification of art—it is a case of what Whitehead called "misplaced concreteness"—is evident in Greenberg's assertion that "the great masters of the past achieved their art by virtue of combinations of pigment whose real effectiveness was abstract," and their greatness is not owed to the spirituality with which they conceived the things they illustrated so much as it is to the success with which they ennobled raw matter to the point where it could function as art." Greenberg, Stella, and Warhol have more in common than one might imagine: they are all radical materialists. For them the spiritualist effect of art—the sense of spiritual intimacy it can achieve—is a case of misplaced materialism, that is, a naive misreading of art's physicality. For them the spiritual is an epiphenomenon of art's manipulation of matter, and as such a misapprehension of art. They ultimately want to eliminate the idea that there is something spiritual about art as dishonesty. Honest art involves the attempt to master matter, including, for many artists, social matter. At best, to say that an art is "spiritual" is simply a way of saying that its mastery of matter is successful, or at least convincing to the viewer. This makes the artist a kind of chef who knows how to cook the material medium so that it is tasty and looks appealing, which gives it all the presence it will ever have and need to be credible—simply as art. The idea that the artist might invest his or her subjectivity in the material medium, which is what brings it alive—indeed, the idea that the artist might have a profound subjectivity, and to be an artist you have to be a certain kind of person, that is, experience the inner necessity of spiritual aspiration, and that the only person who can legitimately call himself or herself an artist is the person who experiences art as part of a personal spiritual process—this idea is discarded as absurd and beside the artistic point. Thus the apparently revolutionary materialistic conception of art is emotionally reactionary.

    There is another factor that makes art's situation today more difficult and desperate than it was in Kandinsky's day: the avant-garde has been conventionalized, not to say banalized. This is more than a matter of institutionalization: it is a matter of its bankruptcy. It has run out of creative steam—the age of artistic revolution and innovation is over—and become redundant, feeding on itself, and not always to refine its principles and methods. A good part of what motivated Kandinsky was defiance of convention, as is evident in his pursuit of what he called "unrestrained freedom"—you recall he spoke of this in the essay "On the Question of Form," which appeared in the Blaue Reiter Almanac. This begins, as he wrote, "in the effort toward liberation from forms that have already reached their fulfillment, that is, liberation from old forms in the effort to create new and infinitely varied forms." It climaxes in a sense of what he called "unbridled freedom" fraught with "active spirit"—that is, feeling. "The feeling that speaks aloud will sooner or later correctly guide the artist as well as the viewer." I'll read that again: "The feeling that speaks aloud will sooner or later correctly guide the artist as well as the viewer." Well, what do you do if there's no feeling there? The problem is that what was once unripe new form has become overripe old form and no longer seems so infinitely varied, and what once seemed like emotional liberation—fresh and unique and revolutionary feeling—has now become stale and pro forma. The avant-garde has reached its fulfillment, to use Kandinsky's language, and become decadent. And I think we are in a time of decadence in art.

    The moment of unpredictability and improvisation that was so important to Kandinsky, and that he struggles to achieve in the abstract works produced under the auspices of On the Spiritual in Art—and I want to point out that the scholar Richard Stratton has noted that this has a unique place , this essay, in the history of avant-garde thinking, for Kandinsky's ideas were developed before the art that exemplifies them was made, that is, On the Spiritual in Art is prospective and prophetic rather than retrospective and rationalizing, as many artists statements are—that this moment of unpredictability and improvisation has passed and vanished, never to return. It is incidentally worth noting that the root word of "improvisation" is, it means, "not to foresee," which is not the same as accidental or spontaneous—which is the way Kandinsky's work is usually understood—by chance or by impulse, and why improvisation is more enlivening than either—and Kandinsky's whole point is that art has to be inwardly alive, or it is not worth the creative trouble—since the results of chance and impulse can be foreseen, however not precisely predicted.

    As Franz Marc, Kandinsky's close friend and colleague, wrote in the preface to the second edition of the Blaue Reiter Almanac, as he wrote: "With a divining rod we searched through the art of the past and the present. We showed only what was alive, and what was not touched by the tone of convention." The problem of feeling alive in a society you feel is inwardly dead is crucial for modern existence. "We gave our ardent devotion to everything in art that was born out of itself, lived in itself, did not walk on crutches of habit. We pointed to each crack in the crust of convention"—"it's marvelous, these sort of inspiring words—"only because we hoped to find there an underlying force that would one day come to light. . . . It has always been the great consolation of history that nature continuously thrusts up new forces through outlived rubbish." Well, nature itself seems like outlived rubbish in modernity, and especially post modernity. We are in a nature holocaust, as it's been called, an environmental holocaust, in the midst of it, and no new spiritual forces have come to light in art. Avant-garde art has become habitual, a dead letter with little spiritual consequence, however materially refined.

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• Jim Thorpe Winner of the 1912 Jim Thorpe Winner of the 1912 Olympic Pentathlon and Decathlon

  • From: allenhenriquez
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    Acrylic on paper, 2010.

     

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• Delta Blues 1912 Delta Blues 1912

  • From: rj3mcgee
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    Artwork BY Janie McGee

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• Famous Photographers' Thoughts Famous Photographers' Thoughts

  • From: crenshawa
  • Description:

     

     

    ROBERT BENTON

     

    Where the focus of the photographer’s mind is more on the way he is taking the picture than the reason for taking the picture at all, the result will fall short of what photography is suppose to be. - Robert Benton

     

    WEEGEE

    To me, pictures are like blintzes – ya gotta get ‘em while they’re hot. - Weegee - “Weegee’s New York” by Harvey V. Fondiller., The Best of Popular Photography by Harvey V. Fondiller

     

    JERRY UELSMANN

    I have gradually confused photography and life and as a result of this I believe I am able to work out of myself at an almost precognitive level. - Jerry Uelsmann

     

     

    The contemporary artist...is not bound to a fully conceived, previsioned end. His mind is kept alert to in-process discovery and a working rapport is established between the artist and his creation. While it may be true, as Nathan Lyons stated, ‘The eye and the camera see more than the mind knows,’ is it not also conceivable that the mind knows more than the eye and the camera can see? - Jerry Uelsmann

     

    The camera is a fluid way of encountering that other reality. - Jerry Uelsmann

     

    One of the major changes in attitude that occurred in the world of art as we moved from the nineteenth into the twentieth century was that the twentieth century artist became more involved with personal expression than with celebrating exclusively the values of the society or the church. Along with this change came a broader acceptance of the belief that the artist can invent a reality that is more meaningful than the one that is literally given to the eye. I subscribe enthusiastically to this b - Jerry Uelsmann

     

    My creative process begins when I get out with the camera and interact with the world. A camera is truly a license to explore. There are no uninteresting things. There are just uninterested people. - Jerry Uelsmann

     

    Well, I do think, particularly the way I work, the better images occur when you’re moving to the fringes of your own understanding. That’s where self-doubt and risk taking are likely to occur. It’s when you trust what’s happening at a non-intellectual non-conscious level that you can produce work that later resonates, often in a way that you can’t articulate a response to.” - Jerry Uelsmann

     

    And young people who are learning digital skills discover that the real challenge is coming up with an image that resonates, first of all, with your self and hopefully, with an audience. They can learn all these new techniques and think that they’re easier to use, but creating great images isn’t about the tools. - Jerry Uelsmann

     

    It’s equally hard and labor intensive to create an image on the computer as it is in a darkroom. Believe me. - Jerry Uelsmann

     

    BURK UZZLE

    [b. 1938] American photographer        

    A photographer’s best pictures are from deep inside him, and also some of the worst. Some photographers enjoy distinguished careers without ever taking personal photographs. Others, audaciously and arrogantly and courageously discharge their most private feelings through photography. Trouble is, sometimes it all adds up to baloney. - Burk Uzzle

     

    Photography is a love affair with life. - Burk Uzzle - [cited in: “Creative Camera International Year Book 1976”, Coo Press, London, 1975, p. 11]

     

    PETE TURNER

    [b. 1934] American photographer        

    What have I done wrong?” -he said later.” Nothing, I think. I am steadily surprised that there are so many photographers that reject manipulating reality, as if that was wrong. Change reality! If you don’t find it, invent it! - Pete Turner

     

    Ultimately, simplicity is the goal - in every art, and achieving simplicity is one of the hardest things to do. Yet it’s easily the most essential. - Pete Turner, More Joy of Photography by Eastman Kodak (Editor)

    This book is available from Amazon.com

     

    A photographers work is given shape and style by his personal vision. It is not simply technique, but the way he looks at life and the world around him. - Pete Turner, More Joy of Photography by Eastman Kodak (Editor)

    This book is available from Amazon.com

     

    Looking at photographs, like taking them, can be joyful, sensuous pleasure. Looking at photographs of quality can only increase that pleasure. - Pete Turner - [cited in: “Creative Camera International Year Book 1978”, Coo Press, London, 1977, p. 112]

     

    If photography has developed a special language it should be welcomed as an extension of our senses and seen for what it is – the first faulting steps of an infant medium towards maturity. - Pete Turner - [cited in: “Creative Camera International Year Book 1976”, Coo Press, London, 1975, p. 112]

     

    It has been said a thousand times that photography is a universal language. To accept this notion is to ignore the fact that its meanings cannot be translated in anything other than a woolly and unprecise manner. - Pete Turner - Cited in: “Creative Camera International Year Book 1977”, Coo Press, London, 1976, p. 111.

     

    ROBERT DOISNEAU 

    [1912 - 1994] a French photographer        

    Nowadays people’s visual imagination is so much more sophisticated, so much more developed, particularly in young people, that now you can make an image which just slightly suggests something, they can make of it what they will. - Robert Doisneau - Weekend Guardian (London, April 4, 1992).

     

    When I first started to take photos I’d …pull the black cloth over my head and feel totally secure in the knowledge that no one could see me. - Robert Doisneau , Master Photographers – The World’s Great Photographers on their Art and Technique , Page: 81

     

    The photographer must be absorbent--like a blotter, allow himself to be permeated by the poetic moment.... His technique should be like an animal function...he should act automatically. - Robert Doisneau

     

    If I knew how to take a good photograph, I’d do it every time. - Robert Doisneau

     

    You’ve got to struggle against the pollution of intelligence in order to become an animal with very sharp instincts - a sort of intuitive medium - so that to photograph becomes a magical act, and slowly other more suggestive images begin to appear behind the visible image, for which the photographer cannot be held responsible. - Robert Doisneau

     

    I like people for their weaknesses and faults. I get on well with ordinary people. We talk. We start with the weather, and little by little we get to the important things. When I photograph them it is not as if I were examining them with a magnifying class, like a cold and scientific observer. It’s very brotherly. And it’s better, isn’t it, to shed some light on those people who are never in the limelight. - Robert Doisneau

     

     I don’t usually give out advice or recipes, but you must let the person looking at the photograph go some of the way to finishing it. You should offer them a seed that will grow and open up their minds. - Robert Doisneau

     

    The marvels of daily life are exciting; no movie director can arrange the unexpected that you find in the street. - Robert Doisneau - “The Encyclopedia of Photography” (1984)

     

    A photographer who made a picture from a splendid moment, an accidental pose of someone or a beautiful scenery, is the finder of a treasure. - Robert Doisneau - in the Dutch Photomagazine “Foto” April 1983

     

    A hundredth of a second here, a hundredth of a second there -- even if you put them end to end, they still only add up to one, two, perhaps three seconds, snatched from eternity. - Robert Doisneau - Weekend Guardian (London, 4 April 1992)

     

    
    

     

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• When Aesthetes Competed at the When Aesthetes Competed at the Olympics from the LA Times

  • From: ovationtv
  • Description:

    When aesthetes competed at the Olympics

    

    Jakub Mosur / For The Times

    BRUSH WITH GREATNESS: Jeanne Chamberlain holds her uncle Lee Blair's 1932 gold medal for a watercolor painting.

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    The fine arts once had their own categories at the Games. Lee Blair's watercolor 'Rodeo' won a gold medal in 1932, but it's been missing for decades.
    By David Colker, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
    August 25, 2008

    Lee Blair won a gold medal for the U.S. in the 1932 Olympic Games in Los Angeles without ever training in a gym, on a track or in a pool.
    
    Blair's event: watercolor painting.
    
    Although nearly forgotten, the Olympics held from 1912 through 1948 included arts competitions, with the winners receiving the same gold, silver and bronze medals as the athletes.

    In addition to Blair's category -- he won for a watercolor called "Rodeo" -- there were medals for oil painting, sculpture, architecture, music and literature.
    
    Blair, a Los Angeles native who died in 1993, went on to other successes after winning his medal at age 20. He worked for Disney on several films, including "Fantasia," for which he helped design the dancing alligators. He also created some of the hallmark commercials of early television, including one starring a perky percolator for Maxwell House coffee.
    
    According to family members, he never gave up the dream of being recognized as a great artist. But in his later years, he seldom spoke of his gold medal.
    
    "I don't remember Uncle Lee ever once mentioning it," said his niece, Jeanne Chamberlain. In fact, she had never seen the medal -- until three weeks ago.
    
    In the wake of the death of Blair's son, Kevin, Chamberlain was going through family documents stored in a safe deposit box in Northern California. She pushed aside some papers and found a thin, cardboard box.
    
    "I opened it up, and there was the gold medal," said Chamberlain, 74.
    
    It looked nearly pristine, as if it had been seldom out of the box.
    
    "Of course," she said, "I began to cry."
    
    The arts competitions were not part of the first modern Olympics in 1896. But the founder of the revived Games, Baron Pierre de Coubertin, had long toyed with the idea.
    
    Writing in a French sports magazine in 1891, he proposed an event consisting of a 14-kilometer race and written essay. Not simultaneously.
    
    That event never made it into the Games, but De Coubertin pressed on, declaring in a 1906 speech that it was time to "reunite in the bonds of legitimate wedlock a long-divorced couple -- muscle and mind."
    
    The arts competition debuted at the 1912 Games in Stockholm where an American, Walter Winans, won the gold for sculpture. But he didn't stop there.
    
    Winans also took silver in the 100-meter team running single shots competition, thus becoming the only Olympian in history to win both for sculpture and shooting.
    
    One other Olympian was a double sports/arts threat, according to the book "The Forgotten Olympic Art Competitions" by Richard Stanton. In 1896, Alfred Hajos of Hungary won two golds in swimming. Twenty-eight years later, he got the silver in architecture for his design of a swimming stadium in Budapest.
    
    At the 1932 L.A. Games, the arts component had 540 entries from 24 countries. No chants of "USA" accompanied the competition. Teams of judges quietly evaluated the works, all of which had to have a sports theme.
    
    Most were in the visual arts and were exhibited at the Los Angeles Museum of History, Science and Art (now the Natural History Museum), where 384,000 members of the public viewed them, according to the official report on the Games.
    
    The formal name of Lee Blair's category was Water Colors and Drawing. His "Rodeo" was a vibrant depiction of a crowded corral, full of horses and lariat-carrying cowboys.

    Go to Page 2

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• Bows and Beads Bows and Beads

  • From: cmaerossi
  • Description:
    I create painted portraits based on vintage photos, creating color and capturing the moment of the family member's experience as I see it. A little girl around 1912 with some of her mother's jewelry, tentatively posing for the camera.
  • 5 years ago
  • Views: 111