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Gouk on Steel
To all my blog readers I would like to recommend the two articles by Alan Gouk on sculpture in steel recently featured on abstract critical—especially the first one, though part 2 has its interest....
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Object Matter
From William Tucker’s book The Language of Sculpture, comes these further words on cubist construction: Pablo Picasso, Construction with fringe 1914 “Apart from their richness and power as individual...
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Snapshot
Two posts back I mentioned two concepts of the picture. The second one—broken, fugitive, moving, unstable—has a definite relation to the most profound idea in modern photography, the “decisive moment.”...
View ArticleThe Unknown Audience
Some of the things that Scott Lyall brought up two posts back are aspects of the current dialectic of theatricality, which Smithson knew a lot about (in fact more than Michael Fried, who has come to...
View ArticleAngelus Novus
If we accept Benjamin’s reading of Klee’s Angelus Novus, that it is moving backwards into the future while watching the increasing pile up of wreckage we call modernity, then it is also looking at us,...
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Helen Frankenthaler
I was moved by Anne Wagner’s obituary for Helen Frankenthaler in the April 2012 issue of Artforum. Every artist has to make their own canon, never more than today, when almost all artists are educated...
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Death Artistically Considered
Lest my readers think I’m getting excessively serious, I would like to expand on something from a couple of posts back. Death, strictly speaking, doesn’t exist, meaning that it is an affair only...
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Time and the Imagination
Human beings are busy little creatures. They move relatively quickly—building, tearing down, inventing, changing, making. But even the time of human activity is slow compared to the speed of the mind....
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Time and Place
“If the place is different, the time is different. If the place is the same, time has not changed.” This pithy two part aphorism by Julian Barbour, actually extracted by me from his book, seems at...
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Abstraction and Time
Always downhill, but never downhearted. Hans Christian Anderson Robert Smithson, Glue Pour 1969
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Powers of Art
One can exert oneself and make many sorts of things in a life. One can make artworks, which do nothing, but just are what they are. Or one can build institutions, or social structures or change life...
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Anton Ehrenzweig
I’m just reading Anton Ehrenzweig‘s The Hidden Order of Art, though I’m ashamed to admit that it took so long to get to it. Years ago I was a close student of Robert Smithson, and this was his main...
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An Expressivist Smithson?
The publication date of Ehrenzweig‘s book was 1967, but he died the year before. He was well versed in contemporary art, and mentions the color field painters, Neo-Dada and Op Art, and has something...
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Abstraction and Empathy
Wilhelm Worringer was an original thinker, and he’s worth some time, even today. Like Ehrenzweig, I first heard of him because of Smithson’s interest, and likewise I didn’t read him until very...
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Figures
An earlier post got me thinking. Balzac’s “The Unknown Masterpiece” is an iconic work of literature for modernists, from say Cézanne to Picasso. The blank map in The Hunting of the Snark is equally...
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