Rational Abstract Art

                                                                            Introduction       Black paintings were made by Frank Stella and by Ad Reinhardt.   We show Stella as a young man making one. By the way, two from-the-tube black pigments are Ivory black and Mars black, but used straight they look plain.  There are very deep purple paints available which when added to the straight black produce a more voluptuous black. There is another attractive “chromatic” black that can be mixed from a very dark blue and very dark brown, resulting in an intense lively black. But in the photo of the young Stella, he is succeeding admirably with black paint out of a can and freehand ‒ amazing. Digression ‒ Black Used For Clothing Isn’t it strange that black is the...

Musical Minimalism Martin Creed can even make music ‒ or at least sound.  In the Summer of 2018 the Birmingham Museum in Britain had on display a work called Three Metronomes installed by Creed.  Look at the photo in which three Yamaha metronomes are attached to a wall. They are just compact green disc-like devices and each one makes a tapping sound at a set interval. It sounded a bit like this to me.  ba-dat ______ dat-a-dat_______a-dat_________a-dat-a-a-dat-a-dat___.  It continues in that fashion. You hear the dat sounds spaced further apart or closer together and in different combinations ‒ almost like some unexpected little rhythm played with drumsticks on a table. What is going on?  A metronome can be set to tap at a chosen specific interval, say one beat per second.  To explain creed’s work suppose the first A metronome makes a tap every 1.0 seconds, the second B metronome taps every 2.1 seconds, and the third ...

                     Minimal Works with Flair and Humor Is minimalist art austere? reserved?  To answer, let’s look at the work of Martin Creed.  He is British and seems to express a certain British kind of zany humor.  Start by looking at his message sign, then on to a step-pyramid of colored bars, and then painted x’s, large at the top getting  smaller down to the floor. Do you think those x’s would be more effective with largest on bottom going to smallest on the top, or better horizontally, or randomly, or in a circle?  Why do you think Creed chose the X progression getting smaller downward as he did?                                                     ...

                                       Iron Man, Part 2           Outdoors, the public found the rusty finish of Serra's works objectionable and at times intolerable.  As an example, take Serra’s work called Tilted Arc which was erected in 1981 in Foley Federal Plaza in lower Manhattan in New York City.  It was 120 feet long and 12 feet high and formed a barrier wall that people had to detour around. It was removed in 1989 because of public protest.  The rusty finish was depressing and the shape was rather plain. In contrast, please look at a maze-like wavy steel sculpture called Inside Out, assembled in 2013 in cooperation with the Gagosian Gallery whose credits appear in the photo.  The dramatic back lighting and the fine vantage point in this photo show the beauty of the sculpture, but it is easy to appr...

               Iron Man,  Part 1 The American sculptor Richard Serra is an iron man for having skill and determination to carry out large projects and his preferred material is core-ten steel. He grew up in California working off and on at a steel mill and attending college there before continuing in art at Yale. The name core-ten steel comes from its properties ‒ corrosion resistance and tensile strength.  Corrosion resistance in this case means the steel forms a thin rust-like outer surface which resists further corrosion.  Ordinary steel if not protected from the weather can rust deeply and continuously thus deteriorating. For comparison, copper too forms a coating as seen on old tarnished pennies or on copper roof flashing.  Similarly, bronze ages to have a greenish surface and aluminum in time takes on a grayish look. If cor-ten steel is protected indoors that rusty look doesn’t dev...

Brazilian Neo-Concrete Art Please look at the work from 1958 named Metaesquema 464 by the Brazilian artist, Helio Oiticica.  The title means meta structure but I like the relation to the word schema in English meaning a diagrammatic representation or outline.  The misleading term Concrete art comes from the Dutch De Stijl group some decades before Oiticica. To the De Stijl group and Oiticica their art is concrete in the sense that it is directly conceived, not derived from worldly objects. They argue that shape, and color are real and concrete.                  Oiticica’s work, painted in gouache, looks like a series of belts and belt buckles, but notice the square buckles are always horizontal.  Purist minimalists eschew references to worldly objects like belts, but the mind can’t help doing it, and I see no harm. The black and tan colors look good in the piece and that color combina...

                Minimalist Sculpture A Minimalist work need not have every minimalist characteristic.  In his work Endless Column, from 1938, the Romanian sculptor Constantin Brancusi repeats a basic unit going up and up.  Note the highest part is half the basic unit as if it has been cut off and suggesting that in imagination the column keeps rising.   His early sculpture called the kiss from 1907 features minimal space between the participants and a wrap-around look.  Brancusi was making these sculptures long before the rise of minimalism in the 1960’s. So what was Brancusi reacting to?  Possibly he was reacting to academic sculpture or even to Rodin?           Minimalist Land Art                       Can a minimalist work be a large scale work?   Yes. Please look at Sp...

                   Minimalism: McCracken and Truitt           We ended the previous blog post with this reference. Judd is known for his quotes, for instance,  “A shape, a color, a surface is something in itself.  It shouldn’t be concealed as part of a fairly different whole.”                                              In line with Judd’s quote, look at John McCracken’s one plank leaning against a wall.  That is getting really simple. What role does the color of the floor and wall, width, thickness and color of board, and shadows play?    Here is McCracken’s view from his artist’s statement of 1999: “The plank form I’ve made symbolically connects two worlds.  It touches the floor – the world of sculpture; the physical world we walk aroun...

Modern Minimalism: Andre and Judd Modern minimalism came into its own in the 1960s after Pollock’s time.  See the two typed “poems” on paper and the pillar and cube construction both by the American artist Carl Andre.   Observing those works you could imagine someone saying “I could do that”, or “I could have done that”.  The sentiment is quite understandable, but let’s dig deeper. The first statement seems to say ‒ now that I have seen the work, I could copy it.  That’s acceptable. But the second statement seems to say ‒ I could have, or maybe more clearly, I would have, come up with the original idea, which is rather doubtful.  Another variation is ‒ my kid could do that. In light of all that, the artist deserves credit first for getting the original idea, second for executing the idea, and third for the completed work achieving recognition, then becoming known and shown.                 ...

Art linked with clothing, Part 2 An Aboriginal Artist Continuing further into the past in the blog archive of Artfully Awear by Ariel Adkins, please look at the composite photo of the model next to a painting by the Australian aboriginal artist Emily Kngwarreye.  Notice the dress, the shoes, necklace, and even the model’s hair style harmonize with the painting. In the painting, the painted bands seem to rise up and over one another as if they were living and catching light.  There is a black background that you can only see here and there, but it contributes to the sense of the bands standing out.  Painting on top of black is a problem unless you have very opaque paint or paint twice. Painting twice would take away freshness that this piece seems to have.  You are not alone if you marvel at how the effect was made. I have an idea here, that artist’s techniques are similar to a company’s trade secrets ‒ they aren’t patented...