Shay wrote:
> "Jim Charter" <jrc### [at] aolcom> wrote in message
> news:3ea41827@news.povray.org...
> 
> |  Accordingly, having never seen "Red Square"
> 
> http://max.mmlc.northwestern.edu/~mdenner/Drama/visualarts/avant-garde/r
> edsquare-18.jpg
> 
> I think he called it 'Peasant Woman in two dimensions'.
> 
>  -Shay
> 
> 
LOL I've been thinking it was a monochrome painting all along.  Oh well, 
I guess what I've been saying still stands LOL

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3ea32da0@news.povray.org...
> Gilles Tran wrote:
>   I have a large boar skeleton here in my office
>
> Now there's got to be a story there!
I work in a Agricultural University and a long, long time ago, skeletons of
farm animals were used in anatomy classes. When anatomy was phased out in
favour of computer science (for example), the skeletons were discarded in
different ways. Some human bones were just put in a desk drawer (where the
desk's new owner found them recently to her big surprise, "oops, a tibia")
but larger animals were stored in the basement and later sent to the dump
when the administration thought they were taking too much valuable space. We
couldn't do nothing for a horse and a cow, but we rescued a big male pig and
put it on display in our office, where it's used for decoration (it looks
nice at Christmas for instance). We also got a chicken but it's less
impressive.

G.


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3ea36e13$1@news.povray.org...
> I really need to get out more.  In fact, I'm hoping to do just that.
> Suddenly, I'm realizing how art-deficient I am.  Even so, I've been
viewing
> more and more things via the Web.  I realize that it's not the same as
> actually viewing a painting or other work of art first hand (perhaps
digital
> art excepted), but until I can afford to travel around, it gets me by.

Well, it surely helps to live at 30mn from several major art museums :) I
have a year pass at Pompidou, so sometimes I just "drop by". Of course, the
web is better than nothing, but if there's a big difference between
traditional and digital art media it is certainly that the digital
experience of non-digital art is often a letdown, while digital looks good
on the web. This perhaps even more the case for non-digital contemporary
art, and stuff that look just dumb where you read about it or see it printed
somewhere can be really great in real life.

> Unfortunately, much of my French was learned via Asterix comics.  :-/
Certainly a pleasant way to learn French!

G.

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> LOL I've been thinking it was a monochrome painting all along.  Oh well,
> I guess what I've been saying still stands LOL
>

I posted this link awhile back, too.  It's a larger image.
http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/auth/malevich/sup/malevich.peasant-woman.jpg

I had a few co-workers stare at this with me.  Some tried to figure out if
perhaps there was a hidden picture within the different shades of red paint.
Well, if Malevich was happy painting what he did, more power to him (except
that he was eventually forced to stop and died penniless).

If you notice, the square is not [square].  That bothers me.  My first
thought was that the picture was taken from an angle, but then I realized
this wasn't the case.  If I could imagine myself standing in front of it, I
would figure that I would feel compelled to change where I was standing
several times, thinking that if I just stood a little bit more to the left,
it would look better to me.  But doing so would make the bottom look wrong
(assuming Malevich envisioned a "top" and "bottom").  In that sense, I could
see myself staring at it from several different directions.

Ok.  So what seemed like a worthless picture (to me) initially is suddenly
taking on some meaning.  Even so, I'm not sure I'll ever truly understand
it.  However, some of those Yves Klein paintings were quite intriguing.
That said, I still prefer realism and/or surrealism (leaning more toward
"real" than "surreal").

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Slash

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=
> I posted this link awhile back, too.  It's a larger image.

Yes and I opened the link at the time, but I saw what I *expected* to 
see, a red painting on a white wall.  This expectation was based on my 
association of Malevich's name with the painting I remembered which is a 
white square against white ground.  Now I am even doubting that memory.
> 
> If you notice, the square is not [square].  

This is seen as introducing a *tension* to the composition within the 
reduced pictorial elements.  So, in a way, it's supposed to bother you.

> Ok.  So what seemed like a worthless picture (to me) initially is suddenly
> taking on some meaning.  Even so, I'm not sure I'll ever truly understand
> it. 

Doubt I will either.

  However, some of those Yves Klein paintings were quite intriguing.

Well Klein is a real showman and its hard not to enjoy his various 
antics and means of poking tradition in the eye.  He mocks the 'system' 
then promptly makes money off of it.

> That said, I still prefer realism and/or surrealism (leaning more toward
> "real" than "surreal").
> 

Nothing wrong with it, just remember, many cultures over human history 
have shown a decided preference for the abstract.  And no doubt you do 
enjoy the formal abstract qualities of some architecture, music, and car 
design, even some paintings.

One more anecdote.  I should start by admitting my bias that I dislike 
the artwork of a German artist named Joseph Beuys.  I know I am probably 
offending some Germans in the audience but I mean no disrespect to 
Germany or Germans, I just don't like Beuys' art.  It seems overly 
precious, serious, and didactic to me, and most of the time quite 
derivative.  Never-the-less he enjoyed a tremendous popularity, 
internationally, a few years back.  At this time I did not realize how 
much I disliked the work.  Beuys was so embraced by the modern art world 
that I figured I had better learn to like/understand his work or remain 
a philistine.  So it was that I returned several times to a large 
retrospective of his at the Guggenheim. On one visit, I was standing 
near a work that was a small piece of dull steel, a few cm's in each 
dimension and flat, just sitting on the floor.  An older, middle aged 
man, with a weatherbeaten face, very sincere, looked like he earned his 
living with his hands, came over to me and asked me if I could explain 
to him what it meant.  With my newly minted MFA degree I was quite taken 
aback as I realized I didn't have the first idea of what it meant nor 
could I even speculate about it in any kind of terms that this man was 
likely to understand.  I felt quite embarrassed on behalf of this 
artwork, myself, and modern art by extension. It seemed to me, suddenly, 
that it had become so inbred that it pretended that looking at a small 
piece of steel on the floor was an enlightening thing to do.  The man, 
when he got no satisfactory answer from me, went over to a nearby museum 
guard and asked him the same question.  The guard, young and seemingly 
fresh from the Marines, tried to be helpful and suggested that they look 
at the title.  I'll never forget the sight of the two of them bending 
over the museum tag, next to this piece of steel, and the guard reading 
in a dispirited voice, "steel plate".  I felt that the whole edifice of 
modern art had nothing to say to these two men who in their own way, 
probably knew more about steel than did Joseph Beuys.  I suppose in the 
same situation today I might point out that our shared knowledge of 
steel is what Beuys was about.  Still don't think it would have 
impressed the guy much.

-Jim

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3ea47d3c@news.povray.org...
> at the title.  I'll never forget the sight of the two of them bending
> over the museum tag, next to this piece of steel, and the guard reading
> in a dispirited voice, "steel plate".

Hey, when this exhibition came to France some years ago I took a picture of
an elderly woman bent over the same steel plates, with her head framed by
the legs of the felt trousers hanging on the wall behind her :)
Actually I like Beuys. There's a large part of showmanship/histrionics at
work there too, including the (bogus?) story about him being saved by Tatars

please...), but there's some genuine emotion in some of his work. A piece
like "Plight" for instance (a walk-in installation with rolls of felt, see
http://perso.ensad.fr/~longa/cours/B4.html) is a very comforting, relaxing
place to be and one I regularly go to (and again it looks silly on the web).
The 30-year old butter stuff is yucky though so here's my advice to artists:
don't play with perishable, organic food. The steel plates, of course, are
quite the opposite, with a weighty, mineral, crude, everlasting presence.

G.

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"Jim Charter" <jrc### [at] aolcom> wrote in message
news:3ea47d3c@news.povray.org...
|
|   However, some of those Yves Klein paintings were quite intriguing.
|

By the way. Is this:
http://www.poster.net/klein-yves/klein-yves-das-blaue-schwammrelief-3500
045.jpg
a painting? rocks glued to a board? hot solder dripped onto a piece of
metal? It is very hard to tell from the picture.

 -Shay

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> By the way. Is this:
> http://www.poster.net/klein-yves/klein-yves-das-blaue-schwammrelief-3500
> 045.jpg
> a painting? rocks glued to a board? hot solder dripped onto a piece of
> metal? It is very hard to tell from the picture.
>

I believe it's a "sponge relief" (?) from what I can gather by viewing some
of his other works.  It's very difficult to get a sense of scale, but my
guess would be that it's probably a rather large item.  I guess I used the
term "painting" rather loosely.

--
Slash

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Jim Charter wrote:
> One more anecdote.  I should start by admitting my bias that I dislike 
> the artwork of a German artist named Joseph Beuys.  I know I am probably 
> offending some Germans in the audience but I mean no disrespect to 
> Germany or Germans, I just don't like Beuys' art. 
;-) There are many Germans don't liking Beuys, me included. There's the 
funny story of a cleaning woman, who removed a piece of butter from the 
corner of a room, not recognizing that it was art. She was taken to 
court for that but won the processes IIRC.

Well I never understood art, which only tries to provocate the viewer. 
Maybe Beuys is more than that, I don't know.
For the record: I really like some abstract art such as Miro or 
Hundertwasser. But I only like art, which doesn't need a theoretical 
explanation to give the viewer something. In german there's the saying 

think that's the precondition for good art.

Florian

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Florian Pesth wrote:

> Well I never understood art, which only tries to provocate the viewer. 
> Maybe Beuys is more than that, I don't know.
> For the record: I really like some abstract art such as Miro or 
> Hundertwasser. But I only like art, which doesn't need a theoretical 
> explanation to give the viewer something. In german there's the saying 

> think that's the precondition for good art.
> 
And I like Richter and Kiefer :)  Nothing is ever pure.  I must admit 
that the Beuys retrospective came at a time when the fact that European 
artists had wrested the lead from New York was just starting to really 
sink in.  It's hard to explain but the chauvinism favouring American and 
especially New York art was so internalized I didn't realize I was 
subject to it.  I still don't think that Beuy's was as innovative as the 
hype would suggest, but to the extent that he did add something new, it 
flew in the face of the tenets that I had learned*.  Consequently I saw 
his work as largely derivative and when new, just wrong.  It may have 
been that I sort of sacrificed Beuys to my prejudice in order to allow 
myself to accept the invasion of the next generation of European artists.

-Jim

*What seems to be new in Beuys is the combination of serious 
expressionistic content with conceptual art means.

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