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I know what I art
Apr. 29th, 2007 09:28 amA 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.
