More on "extreme abstraction": Adolescent ranting aside, there is always the inherent contradiction of packaging work as extreme or "out there" when it's acceptable enough to curatorial and collector sensibilities to be in a major museum. I don't know David Batchelor's work but the rest of the choices in the Albright-Knox's "Extreme Abstraction" show are bread-and-butter practitioners. Each got noticed for bringing a little added oomph to the art world's workaday business of moving paintings. Besemer is "excessive" in the sense of "look at all those damn tiny stripes, can you believe someone sat there and painted those by hand with a brush?" but her paintings are perfectly crafted modular artifacts that are ultimately quite soothing to collector sensibilities. I'm really not sure what's supposed to be extreme about David Reed, unless it's the polish and seamlessness he brings to his surfaces. Katharina Grosse's best wall paintings do have a bit of that messy graffitti edge but compared to say, Jonathan Borofsky's rambunctious wall fillers of yore she seems positively sedate. In a sense all abstraction is extreme because no one gets it except a handful of aging art world initiates and it still has the capacity to inspire hostility after all these years. (I realize "extreme abstraction" as an exhibition title is sort of a joke and don't want to belabor this.)
perfectly labored to what ends? for the collector? I doubt it so much ( com'mon Tom you are one labor intensive guy-- you explode in it).
Each, as artist, has a principle which they provide evidence of through their personalized practice that takes them/us to a center (not nessacessily verbosely/ tiredly articulated between two places or elixirs). There is, possibly, another place or juice.
Rattling tin cans don't always provide evidence we are in new territory. New territory is not always evidenced by rattling tin cans. I needed these two sentences to express something between them that doesn't, need to, provide any center of, that can, or cans, measures their in-between.
Two statements that reiterate each other may offer or provide room for an extreme thought, and likely provoke an extreme action, though not always embellished with the quota of sirens, bells, and whistles that we are so popularly accustomed--noticing/ responding to--as an example of the extreme (this action may not entail any physical movement or response, at all, indeed).
Generally we consider extreme in relation to pop culture--how farther can something go without loosing popularity --a teleology, no doubt. Often it's a convoluted relation, a weakened idea, a palpitating salivating practice--that signals our ever-ready understanding, our ever persistent grappling, of an/anything out there. To put a idea of out past popularity without loosing it and it's popularity, is the impossibility that I see so much rebellion against (the eye). Living in, educated to live with, living extremely in, our own inability to partake in quieter ends will shake us all up, at some time, sooner or later.
|
More on "extreme abstraction": Adolescent ranting aside, there is always the inherent contradiction of packaging work as extreme or "out there" when it's acceptable enough to curatorial and collector sensibilities to be in a major museum. I don't know David Batchelor's work but the rest of the choices in the Albright-Knox's "Extreme Abstraction" show are bread-and-butter practitioners. Each got noticed for bringing a little added oomph to the art world's workaday business of moving paintings. Besemer is "excessive" in the sense of "look at all those damn tiny stripes, can you believe someone sat there and painted those by hand with a brush?" but her paintings are perfectly crafted modular artifacts that are ultimately quite soothing to collector sensibilities. I'm really not sure what's supposed to be extreme about David Reed, unless it's the polish and seamlessness he brings to his surfaces. Katharina Grosse's best wall paintings do have a bit of that messy graffitti edge but compared to say, Jonathan Borofsky's rambunctious wall fillers of yore she seems positively sedate. In a sense all abstraction is extreme because no one gets it except a handful of aging art world initiates and it still has the capacity to inspire hostility after all these years. (I realize "extreme abstraction" as an exhibition title is sort of a joke and don't want to belabor this.)
- tom moody 7-13-2005 8:55 pm
perfectly labored to what ends? for the collector? I doubt it so much ( com'mon Tom you are one labor intensive guy-- you explode in it).
Each, as artist, has a principle which they provide evidence of through their personalized practice that takes them/us to a center (not nessacessily verbosely/ tiredly articulated between two places or elixirs). There is, possibly, another place or juice.
Rattling tin cans don't always provide evidence we are in new territory. New territory is not always evidenced by rattling tin cans. I needed these two sentences to express something between them that doesn't, need to, provide any center of, that can, or cans, measures their in-between.
Two statements that reiterate each other may offer or provide room for an extreme thought, and likely provoke an extreme action, though not always embellished with the quota of sirens, bells, and whistles that we are so popularly accustomed--noticing/ responding to--as an example of the extreme (this action may not entail any physical movement or response, at all, indeed).
Generally we consider extreme in relation to pop culture--how farther can something go without loosing popularity --a teleology, no doubt. Often it's a convoluted relation, a weakened idea, a palpitating salivating practice--that signals our ever-ready understanding, our ever persistent grappling, of an/anything out there. To put a idea of out past popularity without loosing it and it's popularity, is the impossibility that I see so much rebellion against (the eye). Living in, educated to live with, living extremely in, our own inability to partake in quieter ends will shake us all up, at some time, sooner or later.
- brent (guest) 7-14-2005 6:04 pm