Rothko’s deep darkness Green Ahmanson, Roberta
Journal of Visual Theology,
06/2023, Volume:
5, Issue:
1
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
The paintings of artist, Mark Rothko (1903–1970), are considered in their religious dimension. The essay pursues the significance of Rothko’s words and works by moving from biographies and Rothko’s ...own writings to sites Rothko purportedly loved (e.g., Fra Angelico’s paintings at San Marco in Florence, Santa Maria Assunta on Torcello in Venice, Matisse’s Red Studio at the Museum of Modern Art). Moreover, the essay seeks to illuminate insight into the meaning of Rothko’s luminous panels (considering the artist’s claim to “paint reality”), and the reasoning behind his idiosyncratic instructions for installing his works low to the ground and in groups. The context of the Rothko Chapel (Houston, Texas) is also considered. Rothko’s Jewish heritage and education recall the “luminous cloud” of the Hebrew Bible, while his love for San Marco and Torcello evoke the all-encompassing beauty of Orthodox sacred spaces. Perhaps in these images Rothko saw glimpses of the reality he sought to paint and discovered a way to display his work and communicate its reality most effectively.
Rothko and resonance Morley, Simon
Journal of visual art practice,
01/02/2023, 2023-01-02, Volume:
22, Issue:
1
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
I take Mark Rothko at his word when he claims that an encounter with his paintings involves 'companionship' and argue that this insight reflects the artist's recognition that an observer and his work ...are in a relationship in which, as the German sociologist Hartmut Rosa puts it, 'both sides speak with their own voice'. To understand what this might mean, I first discuss Rosa's theory of 'resonance' and its importance for the study of art. Then, I explore 'resonance' in relation to Rothko, relating it to how he manipulated the language of painting to de-centre the normative visual perception of the observer, but also how he potentially opens this observer up to radically non-normative psychological and somatic experiences. The de-centring involves making space for an active relationship with Rothko's paintings which shifts the observer from the focused, outer-directed and controlling attention that usually dominates visual perception towards a more inwardly directed but more porous mode enacted under conditions of essential uncontrollability.
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L'objectif de cet article est de comprendre dans quelle mesure les individus perçoivent qu'ils gaspillent des objets en empruntant les théories de la distance psychologique et des niveaux de ...représentation. L'analyse de 21 entretiens réalisés à domicile montre que les distances spatiale, temporelle, hypothétique et sociale aux objets influencent la façon dont les individus se représentent leur utilité (abstraite/concrète) et perçoivent ou non leur gaspillage. Plus précisément, les résultats montrent que : 1) les distances spatiale, temporelle et hypothétique aux objets génèrent une représentation abstraite de leur utilité ce qui conduit à un faible gaspillage perçu ; 2) la distance sociale au futur bénéficiaire des objets conduit à une représentation abstraite de leur usage et à un fort gaspillage perçu. Les implications théoriques, managériales et sociétales de ces résultats sont discutées.
Chimes of Freedom Stevenson, Jonathan
Survival (London),
09/03/2022, Volume:
64, Issue:
5
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
In The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War, Louis Menand tests the proposition that the West's victory in the Cold War might have been a bigger win on the cultural level than it was on the ...political and military ones. Nuclear dread does not pervade his narrative, and he handles strategic affairs interstitially. During the Cold War, he suggests, the United States and the Soviet Union exploited the human foibles illuminated by modern literature on a grand scale. Visual art, for its part, elevated and framed American capitalism as a cultural as well as an economic monolith. The US government, including the CIA, sought to weaponise Western culture, but Menand concludes that its unaided power was far greater than any government instrument's. Art may now be less useful or powerful as a tool of cultural warfare than it was in the latter part of the twentieth century.
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Barnett Newman, a seminal figure in the Abstract Expressionist movement, is known to have used Bocour Magna, Aqua-tec, and oil paints. XRF analysis reveals that paints on his paintings dating from ...1967 to 1970 and on his undated ephemera in the Center for the Technical Study of Modern Art at Harvard Museum and the Menil Collection most often do not correspond to the pure historic Bocour paints available for analysis. Newman likely mixed his paints to create specific colors, and multiple instances of his revision of color have been documented. Some of the paints on the paintings are similar to unlabeled jars of red and blue acrylic paints found in his studio after his death, which could contain bespoke formulations created for Newman by the Bocour Company. The white paints and grounds present on the paintings and ephemera are all titanium white based; early works have no calcium, but later works have increasing amounts, suggesting that Newman may have been adding more calcium carbonate as an extender over time. The similarities in white paints on groups of paintings and ephemera suggests Newman used a given paint mixture on multiple objects, which would allow temporal relationships between those objects to be established.
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In this article I initiate an inquiry into the artistic act and its relation to self-expression in an age of computational virtuality, a time when subjectivity is being subsumed by ubiquity and its ...requisite social mediation. Starting from my painting practice, I attempt to access the tacit aesthetic prior to the emergence of the algorithmic mediation permeating contemporary culture, by exploring metaphor in precomputational artistic praxis. I examine the entanglement of self and context in a 'cognitive autoethnography' reflecting on artists' reports from late Modernism, a time when subjectivity found focus in the studio of the individual practitioner, not across networks of digital mediation. I examine metaphors of curiosity and intuition in the creative 'play' of artists to offer a qualitative analysis of 10 articles published in ARTnews magazine during the 1950s and 1960s interviewing Abstract Expressionist artists of the New York School. I seek the individual in the creative act to relocate myself as a practitioner in our age of distributed subjectivity. The study brings into question presumptions about sampling and interpretation, explores the subjective dimensions of creative praxis and speculates on what we - as artists and humanists - may be losing in the algorithmic transformation of embodied creative intentionality.
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Resumen: Partiendo del texto clásico Vanguardia y kitsch, nos proponemos analizar la obra del crítico norteamericano Clement Greenberg. Después de la intervención del Estado norteamericano en el arte ...entre 1935 y 1943 (los WTA), Clement Greenberg surge como uno de los principales críticos que buscaron unificar el “arte elevado” de ese país. Para tanto, el crítico norteamericano busca justificar el nivel artístico de esa vanguardia acercando esa producción a las vanguardias europeas, especialmente el cubismo. Veremos los problemas de Greenberg al forjar una “historicidad inmanente” a las obras de arte para justificar una posible convergencia de las vanguardias europeas en el nuevo contexto de la vanguardia norteamericana: el “expresionismo abstracto”. Greenberg, con ayuda del MoMA y del Estado norteamericano buscó fomentar una “pintura a la americana”, una vanguardia conocida como escuela de Nueva York. Buscamos analizar el contexto en que se forjó esa tendencia artificiosamente unificada y cómo el pop art emerge como una crítica performática de ese contexto. Más que vanagloriarse de sus métodos técnicos, el pop art busca subvertir el contexto de recepción del arte que hasta entonces era expectante del “arte serio y elevado” defendido por Greenberg.
Abstract: Starting from the classic text Avant-garde and kitsch, we propose to analyze the work of the North American critic Clement Greenberg. After the US state intervention in the arts between 1935 and 1943 (the WTA), Clement Greenberg emerged as one of the main critics who sought to unify the “high art” of that country. The critic attempted to justify the artistic level of the American avant-garde by bringing it closer to the European avant-gardes, especially Cubism. We will see Greenberg’s problems in forging an “immanent historicity” of works of art in order to justify a possible convergence of the European avant-garde in the new context of an American avant-garde of “abstract expressionism”. Greenberg, with the help of the MoMA and the American government, sought to promote an “American painting”, a vanguard known as the New York school. We seek to analyze the context in which this artificially unified tendency was forged, and to analyze how pop art emerged as a performance critique of that context. More than boasting of its technical methods, pop art sought to subvert the context of the reception of art that until then expected the “serious and high art” defended by Greenberg.
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