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Lorna Mills and Sally McKay
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Sunday Devotionals
From Black Cat Bone - Burning The Flesh Off Modern Art
Hallelujah
an Evil Digital Film
produced by Force Majeure Film Studios
(a Holy owned subsidiary of Black Cat Bone Global Media Empire)
written, directed and edited by The Right Reverend James
Tower In The Forest 2007 Bamboo, Rattan, Iron, 1500 x 1500 x 2700 cm
While installing at the tree museum we had the pleasure of making the aquaintance of Wang Wen-Chih, an artist from Taiwan, who constructed the wonderful Tree House (my images don't do it justice). These installation images are from an exhibition in Taiwan at the Plaza of Chiayi County Hall.
I've got one brain cell left, and you're getting on it. I'm struggling with my readings for school, trying to get a grip on the context. Since a lot of the writers we're looking at right now are studying ancient Greek and Roman art it's a bit of a stretch. But, in the midst of my misery, I have come across two very charming characters.
Johann Joachim Winckelmann was a gay aesthete living the Baroque era who hated all the art of the Baroque era. Instead, he just adored the Ancient Greeks - mmmmm....slave boy...mmmm. He had a lovely gentle approach to his studies, and reflected on the role of the historian as one who experiences (and mourns) the loss of the culture he studies. He was a Prussian who moved to Rome because there he could be a tour guide and meet boys. He had a sculpture of a faun in his apartment. I'm imagining a tragi-comedy about his life starring Philip Seymour Hoffman as Winckelmann and Brad Pitt as the noble naked Athenian who appears to him in his dreams. (update: the movie should be titled Death in Athens and it should be directed by Gus Van Sant)
The other guy I like is Aby Warburg, who died in 1929. He was really pissed off with the prevailing art history of the day that championed an autonomous formalist approach. For Warburg, everything interesting happened in the transitions between cultures, and he was just as interested in bad art as in good art. He suffered from mental illness and won his freedom from five years in a mental institution by delivering a great big lecture on the Pueblo Indians and the symbol of the serpent. He was worried about technology and the way that civilization's advancements were destroying cultures. Like Winckelmann, he also reflected a lot about the objective/subjective dichotomy in the role of one who studies history. Unlike his contemporaries, he was invested in content, myth and the dark murky side of meaning.
Warburg opened his own library that was an all-over-the-place collection of stuff designed to foster interdisciplinary scholarship. He also worked on a massive picture book, which he never finished. The book was to be a big collection of diverse images, arranged collage-style in a non-heirarchical fashion (and without captions or comments). The book had several working titles, the most official one being Mnemosyne (the goddess of memory) and the funner ones being Ghost Stories for Grown-ups and Picture Book for a Critique of Pure Unreason. Exhibitions of Warburg's images were mounted (I think by him) at his library. You can see documentation here. The first thing I think of is Luis Jacob's Album III at Documenta. I think the Warburg movie should be titled Ghost Stories for Grown-ups and Willem Defoe should have the starring role. (update: on second thought it should be an illustrated novel and Von Bark should write it and Scott Carruthers should do the drawings)
augh. sibling rivalry is always bad, but when one sibling gets a video made about their artwork with sexy German voice-over narration, it gets really really bad. Go here and click on "loss of signal."
I am going to have to pay more attention to detail if I am going to get through school. Of course, it is only the day before class that I realise one of the essays I've been reading is not required, and at the same time I have completly ignored an essay that is. D-oh! oh well, the one I wasn't supposed to read was pretty good. It's about explanation and description of artworks, and the various implications of different kinds of words and situations. Here's a bit that I thought I'd share, since it applies directly to L.M.'s dog, who is a force of nature, if not a work of art.
In everyday life if I offer a remark like "The dog is big", the intention and effect will depend a great deal on whether or not that dog is present or known to my hearers. If it is not, the 'big' — which, in the context of dogs, has a limited range of meaning — is likely to be primarily a matter of information about the dog; it is big, they learn, rather than small or middle-sized. But if it is present — if it is standing before us [perhahps rubbing it's gi-normous slobbery grinning head in your lap] as I talk—then 'big' is more a matter of my proposing a kind of interest to be found in the dog: it is interestingly big, I am suggesting. I have used 'dog' to point verbally to an object and 'big' to characterize the interest I find in it.
From Michael Baxandall's "Patterns of Intention" in The Art of Art History: A Critical Anthology, Donald Preziosi, ed. (Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press), 1998. pp. 59-60
I grew up hanging around the university where my dad taught, I've visited universities for work, and I have meaningful ongoing relationships with lots of people who have degrees from universities. So I guess I sort of thought I had and idea of what going to university might be like. As it turns out, it's an even more immersive world than I predicted, and I feel kind of like I'm travelling to another planet (shades of high school, where my main survival mechanism was to constantly mutter to myself "I'm an alien observer here" and watch The Man Who Fell to Earth repeatedly). But, as my dear friend and colleague Rev. Earl Chunx reminded me: "You can do it. It's a real thing in the world and it's good to know about it." And I do like the fact that educated adults have contracted to help me cram a bunch of potentially useful information into my (aging) noggin.
"Methodology" is the keyword for my first week. It's really important to have one. I am going to have to figure out how to get one without losing my bearings completely. Wikipedia says this:
Methodology refers to more than a simple set of methods; rather it refers to the rationale and the philosophical assumptions that underlie a particular study.So the beginning of the practice of studying art history seems to be mostly about studying the history of art history. I'm good with that! I like meta-levels. But, while dissecting the constructed narratives of western thought, it's a little tricky to figure out how I am going to participate in it.
The biggest change I can detect so far in my art-attitude is that, while I have always respected James Elkins with a certain interest and reserve, now he is my saviour and I am suddenly full of gratitude. His analyses of the history of art history are giving me a context for this whole school business that is helping me understand why I am so far feeling like an utter freak up there on the York U campus.
For instance, in this old Bad at Sports podcast, he talks about the fact that art critics are a separate breed from art historians, that criticism is not really part of academic methodology, and futhermore journalists who write about art for the popular press don't even register on the academic radar, despite the fact that in their worlds they feel very much like part of the bigger art picture. According to Elkins, most academics would never bother to cite a writer like Jerry Saltz. It's weird (is it true? I'll have to snoop around...). Elkins believes that ideas trickle down from academics to critics and curators, into the museums and popular press (really? I always thought it all got spread around sorta laterally and spiderwebby. If not - yike!). He also makes the strange suggestion that maybe journalists should do something that would make them impossible to ignore within academia (like...like what? Intriguing.)