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I know what I art
A couple weeks ago I got to my local art museum's M.C. Escher exhibit before it closed. Escher is a favorite artist of mine not just because of his hypnotic subject matter - I can stare at Ascending and Descending for hours trying to figure out how it works - but his precise ink-and-pen style. The exhibit included a rarely seen series he did in the 1920s - it's not in Ernst's Magic Mirror, the standard Escher book - depicting the days of creation. Long before he developed his signature approach (from Italian architecture and Spanish Moorish tile patterns, mostly), he already had his pen style, and lo, it was Art Nouveau. (A hasty Google image search didn't turn up the full series online, but here's a thumbnail of a Garden of Eden scene that shows the point.)
One caption board quoted Escher about 1970 saying something to this effect: "People tell me that I too am creating Op Art. I do not know what this 'Op Art' may be. I've been doing this sort of thing for thirty years now." Appropriately, it was right by a doorway leading to an exhibit of Op Art, most of which was a bit less eye-watering than these. I was particularly taken with the works of Victor Vasarely.
And upstairs was an exhibit of a Korean-American artist named Il Lee, who creates random hair-like objects by scribbling wildly with a ballpoint pen on paper. It sounds stupid, and it's true enough that when you've seen one or two of these you've seen them all, but viewed in person the maniacal energy of it - even the solid black areas are visibly the result of ballpoint pen scribbling - is enough to make me say "That's pretty neat."
And that's the reaction I like to have. Much abstract modern art makes me say, "Oh, come on. You've got to be kidding me." Mark Rothko, for instance, gives me that reaction. But if my response is to think, "That's pretty neat," then I know the artist has succeeded.
One caption board quoted Escher about 1970 saying something to this effect: "People tell me that I too am creating Op Art. I do not know what this 'Op Art' may be. I've been doing this sort of thing for thirty years now." Appropriately, it was right by a doorway leading to an exhibit of Op Art, most of which was a bit less eye-watering than these. I was particularly taken with the works of Victor Vasarely.
And upstairs was an exhibit of a Korean-American artist named Il Lee, who creates random hair-like objects by scribbling wildly with a ballpoint pen on paper. It sounds stupid, and it's true enough that when you've seen one or two of these you've seen them all, but viewed in person the maniacal energy of it - even the solid black areas are visibly the result of ballpoint pen scribbling - is enough to make me say "That's pretty neat."
And that's the reaction I like to have. Much abstract modern art makes me say, "Oh, come on. You've got to be kidding me." Mark Rothko, for instance, gives me that reaction. But if my response is to think, "That's pretty neat," then I know the artist has succeeded.
no subject
Rothko, on the other hand, latched onto a gimmick with limpet-like intensity. And it was a stupid gimmick. My cousin lived in a neighborhood in Houston where they put the Rothko Chapel, so I went and looked at it. It was no big deal. There was also a famous 20th century sculpture outside the place called "Broken Obelisk." It was an obelisk. Broken. Whoa; too cozmik! Only it wasn't there; it was off for repair, because it didn't bend at the precise angle that made it a significant work of art instead of just a piece of crap.
I wanted to put a little tablet there calling it "Removed Obelisk" and taking credit for its absence as a piece of conceptual art. But the world just wasn't ready for me.
Rothko
I've got to put a word in in favor of Rothko. His stuff really works for me. At one exhibit I thought I was looking at Kubrick's monolith; I just stood and stared at one dark piece, totally lost within. Ann had gotten several galleries away, realized I wasn't nearby, and came back and led me away. So I love the big originals, but I like small reproductions, too.
Not that I insist you must like it too. I just wanted to speak up on his behalf.
All best,
Jeff Smith
Re: Rothko
It's obvious that somebody likes Rothko's work, and not just Morton Feldman, or he wouldn't have the name that he does.
But not me. Some minimalist or abstract art I find moving (not to mention minimalist music, which I thought I'd hate until I heard some), but the first Rothko painting I saw was a big swash of red in SF MOMA that had me thinking "This one is a giant put-on" long before I approached closely enough to see who did it.
I've had the same reaction on subsequent encounters with other work, and am ready to give up.
It's not the monolith. The power of the monolith as art was the context in which it was set. Monolith among the apes: cool. Monolith on the moon: cool. Monolith among the stars: ver cool. Monolith hanging on a wall with a little sign reading, "Monolith, by Stanley Kubrick, 1968": not cool.