Granny O'Grimm's Sleeping Beauty

I saw this at Barbican yesterday.
Beautiful! Oh, don't we love scaring little scaredy children!
A bit Edward Gorey.

Animate the World 2010 VS Anime Weekend

Two heartbreakingly beautiful feasts of animation in one weekend. How do you choose?!

Animate the World 2010 at Barbican
and
Anime Weekend at BFI

Animate the World has got all the workshops, Karel Zeman films, japanimation.



Anime Weekend has got... anime, of course. Including Professor Layton and the Eternal Diva.



Uh...
Brendan and the Secret of Kells?

Disseminated letters

This was just lying on the floor in the studio. A bit like thoughts scattered around in a effort to compose themselves together into something meaningful.

Lepidopterophobia - fear of butterflies (2)

This is linked to Lepidopterophobia - fear of butterflies.


I have also been wondering about how much should I explain my work. I have started reading Susan Sontag and her writing only enforced my opinion, that too much explanation ruins the artwork: rips off the mystery and leaves no space for private thoughts and links.

Can aesthetics of an artwork stop the viewer from reading into the meaning?

We had our mid-point review the other day. The idea is, that a student displays one piece of their work and then he keeps his mouth shut, as others talk about it.

I had my one piece. In fact, I had one part of one piece - mine was only an element from a series. An abstract kind of an element too. As a result, nobody could "read" it.  It was agreed, that the work was aesthetically pleasing, that it encouraged the viewer to return to it, to explore and to discover. Then somebody said, that with some artwork, they are happy not to know the meaning (the intention?). And then came the question:
can aesthetics of an artwork stop the viewer from reading into the meaning?

Hm... Can aesthetics stop the viewer from reading into the meaning?

That brought the whole shitload of questions onto my poor unassuming brain.

1. Do I have to give a clear message?

2. Doesn't that make the artwork the same as a picture book? A dog = a picture of a dog?

3. Isn't straightforward representation of meaning called illustration?

4. Does art have to be "readable" only in it's direct interpretation of intended meaning?

Four days and four nights I did not sleep. Until I came a cross this blog entry from Jonathan Jones, called Explanations are the traitor of art.

If an artist can translate the meaning and purpose of a work into easily understandable words, it means one of two things. Either the artist is lying, in order to ease the way with patrons and funders; or the artist is a fool. And if dishonesty is the reason, that too is something that vitiates art. No serious art is easy to interpret. Nor is there ever a single valid interpretation of art. If art is good, there are many things to be said about it and much that will remain unsayable.

That blog led me onto this article in the Independent called Is art running out of ideas? Artist's forced to explain modern art by Tom Lubbock.

What we're up against here are two of contemporary art's guiding imperatives. Rule 1) Justification by meaning: the worth and interest of a work resides in what it's about. Rule 2) Absolute freedom of interpretation: a work is "about" anything that can, at a pinch, be said about it.

...

That's the problem with these meanings. They're not just highly tenuous. They're depressingly limiting. And we should put them aside. We should stop measuring art by its meaningfulness. We should heed the wise words of Susan Sontag, written almost 50 years ago in her essay "Against Interpretation".

"Our task is not to find the maximum amount of content in a work of art, much less to squeeze more content out of the work than is already there. Our task is to cut back on content so that we can see the thing at all. The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art – and, by analogy, our own experience – more, rather than less, real to us."

And then Wittgenstein - of course :-) - came extremely handy too. "What can be said at all can be said clearly, and what we cannot talk about we must pass over in silence" (from his Tractatus). I suppose art comes into the category of those things, with which language is incapable of dealing very well. Like any other kind of philosophy. To be continued.

Anyway, I can sleep now. I am getting somewhere.

I might have to read that Susan Sontag's book "Against Interpretation".

Tony Trehy, Text Festival & other stuff.

When looking for some Art and Text reviews, I came across Tony Trehy's blog. Tony Trehy is a poet and a curator. He is also a founder of the Text Festival.

which brings together contemporary linguistically innovative poetry with conceptual art practices in a remarkable, internationally recognised, space of dialogue, sharing and experimentation in the field of creative language art.

Really enjoyed the blog! Very interesting, at times personal. Among many things I found on his blog, is the mention of Writing on the Wall, which is what I am reading now.

Hellen Douglas does Daddy Long Legs

A book from Hellen Douglas. Perfect spider.

What Waldemar Januszczak said about text art.

Tower of babble: Jenny Holzer's text art.

This an article from March, but I keep returning to it.

"Text art gives me problems. Obviously, it is not an ism that speeds the pulse. You cannot imagine anyone adoring it with a crazy passion, can you? “What’s your favourite art?” “Text art. It shakes my kidneys!” That isn’t going to happen. If text art gives pleasure, it does so in a mild, thoughtful, dry and passionless way.

As a writer, I also have powerful conceptual difficulties accepting its basic premise. If someone has put some writing in a gallery, surely it needs to be judged first as a piece of writing, not as a piece of art?"

Why is it, that text art seems so passionless as compared to... hm... non-text art? Generally, purely text art gives me a kind of intellectual pleasure that a good thought does. However, it never really grips my heart. Visual, less language based art, on the other hand, can stop the breath. Is it because of the hemispheres or is it just me?

Cluster Thoughts

This blog is related to Pteronarcophobia - fear of flies and Lepidopterophobia - fear of butterflies.
Could I build a metaphor and literally visualise it as a scenario, develop it in a variety of ways. To make up something like a new conceptual metaphor and then invent a pretend reality to accommodate it?











THINKING IN PROGRESS

Box for dormant Cluster Thoughts.