Reading Groups
6th February 2019 Geraint Evans
3 articles
“Lieber Maler, male mir…” Learning from Kippenberger: Figurative painting as provocative and sincere, critical and sentimental Alison M Gingeras
We had a lively discussion about this article which translates as Dear Painter, Paint for me…. Yulia Mahr, who lived in Germany for a long time pointed out that the title was also the tile of a very popular song at the item. This changed our view of what the exhibition by Kippenberger was about. Title is key and a strong title is essential to the quality of the work. Kippenberger is master of the title, using it to provoke and simultaneously to promote himself. According to the author of this article he teeters between raw sarcasm and pathetic self-exposure. This is interesting to me as most of my art is, in some ways, a dip into my own life and autobiography, This left me wondering what pathetic self exposure is. It is important how one choses words to frame reality. ‘Pathetic self exposure’ can equally be seen as ‘gift that comes from a spirit of generosity’. In particular people like Alain d Botton and John Armstrong (de Botton and Armstrong, 2013) remind us of the functions of art to heal and to act as therapy thereby to provide a platform whereby people can understand their own lives better.
We considered the role of figurative painting in conveying conceptual content while also engendering visual pleasure. According to Gingeras the filed is now open for painters to use one of many, many styles: realism, naturalism, kitsch, academicism, expressionism. There are now no clear boundaries between technical skill and deliberately bad painting. My 6 am paintings are made using a marginalised medium and cheap paper with a limited palette. It is of some comfort to me this self exposing kitsch has a place and need not be seen as bad taste.
The fact that Glen Brown unabashedly embraces sentimentality in figurative painting ‘because it is a vehicle of more generous emotion’ is of great interest to me: traditionally modernism has eschewed the portrayal of emotion and in particular positive emotion. But the stage seems slowly to be opening up for opportunities to portray the more transcendent and sincere forms of human existence such as the experience of awe and ecstasy.
Kitsch in the Age of Painterly Reproduction: Or a Short History of Kitsch Biazenka Perica
Again we had a lively discussion around the concept of kitsch. The article suggests that kitsch can be defined as art that produces ‘false feelings.’ False feelings are defined only by example, as emotions that predominate family life that men seek to escape from when they visit the bordello. In my understanding as a psychologist there is no such thing a false feeling. Emotions occur in response to interpretations of events. No emotion is more or less valid than another one. It is thus false to suggest that kitch is the progenitor of false feelings as there is no such thing. So what is kitch then? Quoting Clement Greenberg, the author of this article, Biazenka Perica suggests that kitsch is digested emotion presented on a platter to the viewer, the very opposite of avant-garde art.” If avant-garde art imitates the processes of art, then kitsch imitates its effects.” Where Picasso paints cause, Repin paints affect. Perica denounces Repin by indicating that his paintings digest the emotion and presents it directly to the viewer, sparing him/her the effort of unravelling the art him/herself and providing a short cut to the pleasure of art that ‘detours what is necessarily difficult in ‘genuine art’.
To me these observations are akin to classism with the author defining ‘genuine’ art as somehow hidden and highbrow requiring sophisticated deciphering whereas kitsch is the opposite; obvious, lowbrow and available to immediate apprehension. If indeed this is what kitsch is, then I am cheering for it.
A further discussion ensued about the temporality of what is defined as kitsch. What is seen as cheap and in bad taste in one era may well be elevated to the status of art in the next. Lorraine Monk labelled Jack Vetriano’s art as kitsch, Yulia Mahr countered this by indicating that while he may be seen as kitsch by some in the current moment, he may not be seen as kitsch in future generations.
The discussion of kitsch was important to me because of my evolving philosophy of art which asserts that art needs to be accessible to the viewing public, easily apprehended and responded to, simply because of the nature of art museums in London and Paris and New York where the crowds are so great that paintings must needs be viewed o often o ver the shoulders of others or around their heads..
In the Studio: Painting , Photography and Other Realities Michael Glasmeier.
We did not discuss this article in any great depth. Lorraine Monk pointed us to the key indicators of good painting. These are as follows:
As painters we should be aware :
Of the concepts of our time ie visual or media theory. This knowledge needs to be present in our work. The hard line of the painting indicates Rembrandt’s knowledge of Modernism
That realism has always been on the borders of abstraction as in the Rembrandt painting of an Artist in His Studio where the eyes are mere dots or the delicate area of unplastered wall on the right hand bottom of the painting indicates abstraction
Conversely that an idea can be represented with realism
That self reference is not an invention of Modernism but has been prevalent since the Renaissance. Rebrandt painting himself in his own studio.
That painting is always an object as seen in the miniature painting represented in the Rembrandt painting
That a painting can contain several paintings in this case a self portrait ie Rembrandt painting a picture of himself with nothing else to embellish it. These paintings do not need to relate to each other but may have independent lives of their own
A painting need not show us what we expect to see: the back of the painting that the artist is engaged in, is expressed in negation ie undefined black
That painting creates a space for symbolic thinking.
These principles give me a good benchmark by which to judge my own art. For e.g. in The enemy Within realism is expressed in the face, the hair and the clothes, abstraction in the faded bottles wine, glasses and cocaine hexagons and modernism in the sharp lines of her clothes. In Illumined Darkness 3 there is Christ’s face expressed in negation while there is a painting within the painting in the raised figure of the woman in the foreground.
21st February 2019 Mark Fairnington
James, M. (1992) Engaging Images: ‘Practical Criticism’ and Visual Art London: Menard Press
This was a very lively and interesting reading group, discussing the above article on criticism and meta-criticism. The article compares and contrasts literary criticism with art criticism. Contemporary literary criticism gave new attention to the text of the work and cast into the back ground the historical and philological context of the work. Rather than demonstrating what the text says about say Elizabethan English, or English language in the 15th century, the emphasis was now on expounding the meaning and value of poems, plays and novels. The question became this: If one knew nothing about the author or the historical context of the work, does the work itself speak? Thus a distinction was made between criticism and meta-criticism; criticism relates to the work itself while meta criticism relates to the information and scholarship about the work.
While literary criticism was developing at a rapid speed, art criticism according to this author remained firmly in the stage of meta-criticism, where scholarship about the work took precedent over the understanding of the work itself.
‘ At times it approaches archaeology, treating paintings and sculptures as evidence to be researched rather than as embodiments of visible meanings to be recognized and responded to.’ (pg.13.)
It is very rare to find words that address the nature of the work itself. More often than not, art criticism consists of a verbal description of the work with a ‘few ejaculations of approval or disapproval’ housed ‘in vague and unsubstantiated adjectives’. The author encourages greater sophistication in the exploration of (say) the artist’s use of symbolism or narrative or their allusions to mythology or iconology. In recent years art criticism has slowly begun to take is cues from literary criticism, which according to the author can only be a good thing. But recent readings of art seem to emphasize the instability and incoherence of the artist’s work, rather than its’ integrity. Current critics are more likely to conduct a kind of psychoanalysis on the work as if it had a personality rather than to seek a richer more holistic awareness of ones subjective relationship to the work. Thus even though a new kind of criticism has emerged, it is still lodged firmly within meta-criticism, delving for unconscious intentions in much the same ay as a archaeologist would delve for deep artefacts. Criticism has yet to be practiced.
Where criticism might perhaps be born and integrated into awareness is within art schools. But art schools lurch from being over-intuitive (Don’t think too hard, let the work happen’ to being over-intellectual, sceptical of all notions of inspiration, thus producing somewhat un-moving works to ideologically sophisticated formulae. What to do? The author calls for a transcendence of criticism as it is traditionally known and meta-criticism to what he calls practical criticism. Ideally art education should integrate both criticism and practice, concentrating not just on the ideological context of the art works or its materiality and form but also focussing on the art work’s inherent and autonomous meaning, symbolism and other qualities. This lacuna in art education means that wonderful and precise artists like Maria De Pino (Pinito) of the class of 2017-2018, who spent many hours painting red, blue and yellow patterns on bubble wrap in the hope of communicating spirituality and depth in pattern, was criticised at the Interim exhibition for producing nothing greater than what looked like a piece of Lego. If art education adopted effectively a philosophy of Practical Criticism, the gap between what artists say they are doing vs. what they are actually producing may narrow and close.
We looked at Cezanne’s The Card Players in the light of this article. We discussed the composition of the piece, a complete whole yet with each individual player separate and demarcated by different insignia of class. We looked at Cezanne’s handling of paint, the rough dabs, the flattened forms and overlapping planes, we investigated the architecture of the picture in which Cezanne has distorted the proportion of the figures, we looked at the play of colour and tone. But beyond the article we asked why Cezanne would choose to paint such a subject. We came up with a variety of answers but then went on to note that this question, which is related to the artist’s meaning and intent, is seldom asked in Wimbledon College of Art. I pointed out that Kundan’s Mondal’s work from 2017-2018 class showed a man hanging from a tree. But this produced no comment at all from anybody and was overlooked in favour of a concentration on materiality and form. As a trained psychologist this tendency to ignore or neglect the substance of art communication remains a mystery to me.