Interview - Mark C. Taylor in correspondence with Vito Acconci.
Taylor: In making the 'viewer' a participant in the work of art, you often create situations that invovle or imply a certain danger. What lessons does such danger teach?
Acconci: In some early 1970s pieces, I learned that commitment to an idea, to an abstraction, can be frightening. i could be so concerntrated on applying stress to the body that I ignored the ravages that stress was making on my body; I could talk myself into a hypnosis where I probably could have killed somebody. And, gradually, I learned respect for the viewer. Yes, maybe the insertion of real-world everyday fear is a whiff of fresh air into the hothouse of an isolationist art system. But, at the same time, danger only confirms and enhances the victimization of the viewer. Museum-goers are automatically victimized: they're in a building with no windows, as if in a prison - they're ordered 'Do Not Touch'. The art is for the eyes only, and they're in a position of constant desire, hence constant frustration. So, danger to the viewer is unfair; it takes advantages of somebody who's already down. Later, in some of my installations from the late 1970s, where viewers could release a projectile and thereby endanger either themselves or others, I learned that I was cheating. I was depending on, resorting to, the safety mechanism of gallery/museum; I must have known it couldn't happen here, this was a gallery, this wasn't real - I was only making a metaphor, and I thought I hated metaphor.
Tuesday, 29 June 2010
Sunday, 27 June 2010
Edward R. Tufte, Envisioning Information
INTRODUCTION
The world is complex, dynamic, multidimensional; the paper is static, falt. How are we to represent the rich visual world of experience and measurement on mere flatland?
This book celebrates escapes from flatland, rendering several hundred superb displays of complex data. Revealed here are design strategies for enhancing the dimensionality and density of portrayals of inormation.
...
Charts, diagrams, graphs, tables, guides, instructions, directories, and maps compromise an enormous accumulation of material. Once described by Philip Morrison as "cognitive art," it embodies tens of trillions of images created and multiplied the world over every year. Despite the beauty and utility of the best work, design of inofmration has engaged little critical or aesthetic notice: there is no Museumn of Cognitive Art. This book could serve as a partial catalog for such a collection.
...
To envision information -- and what bright and splendid visions can result -- is to work at the intersection of image, word, number, art. The instruments are those of writing and typography, of managing large data sets and statistical analysis, of line and layout and color. And the standards of quality are those derived from visual principles that tell us how to put the right mark in the right place.
...
The world is complex, dynamic, multidimensional; the paper is static, falt. How are we to represent the rich visual world of experience and measurement on mere flatland?
This book celebrates escapes from flatland, rendering several hundred superb displays of complex data. Revealed here are design strategies for enhancing the dimensionality and density of portrayals of inormation.
...
Charts, diagrams, graphs, tables, guides, instructions, directories, and maps compromise an enormous accumulation of material. Once described by Philip Morrison as "cognitive art," it embodies tens of trillions of images created and multiplied the world over every year. Despite the beauty and utility of the best work, design of inofmration has engaged little critical or aesthetic notice: there is no Museumn of Cognitive Art. This book could serve as a partial catalog for such a collection.
...
To envision information -- and what bright and splendid visions can result -- is to work at the intersection of image, word, number, art. The instruments are those of writing and typography, of managing large data sets and statistical analysis, of line and layout and color. And the standards of quality are those derived from visual principles that tell us how to put the right mark in the right place.
...
Monday, 17 May 2010
The Written Freedom, for man, by man
'And God said to man: I have placed you in the world that you may more readily see what you are. I have made you neither an earthly nor a heavenly, neither a mortal nor an immortal being, in order that you, as your own sculptor, may carve features for yourself. You may degenerate into an animal; but by using your free will you may also be reborn as a god-like being.'
Giovanni Pico Della Mirandola, 'Oration on the Dignity of Man'
有空要读一读。
.
Giovanni Pico Della Mirandola, 'Oration on the Dignity of Man'
有空要读一读。
.
Prints & Drawings
Prints & Drawings, a pictorial history
Gottfried Lindemann, Translated by Gerald Onn
Phaidon Press, 1970
ISBN 0 7148 1760 0
Introduction
Graphic art has always been overshadowed by the painted picture. With its small format, its economical use of colour and its delicate techniques it is a fundamentally less spectacular art form and consequently is known only to the small group of connoisseurs who visit the collections of prints and drawings or are themselves collectors. But although it has not been easy for the general publich to gain access to this special branch of the fine arts, its importance as an independent medium has long been established. After all, the great European graphic collections were started as early as the sixteenth century. This, however, is only of incidental interest. What really matters is the fact that line drawing -- which lies at the heart of graphic art -- actually forms the basis of all artistic activity. Children's drawings, the incised drawings of the prehistoric cave dwellers, and the Greek vase paintings all testify in their different ways to the primacy of linear composition over colour. Moreover, when an artist chooses to portray reality in linear terms he takes the crucial step which leads away from nature and towards abstraction. Colour, on the other hand, has constantly induced artists to emulate nature.
It would be wrong to think that, by restricting himself to a linear technique, the artist also restricts his power of expression. Drawings alone offer immense scope. There is the delicate silver point, the pencil -- which is capable of producing a whole series of greys -- chalk, charcoal and the reed pen, whose harsh line stands in marked contrast to the smooth stroke of the ink brush. But, quite apart from drawings, we also have the various graphic media, which permit of infinite variations extending from the black and white contrast of the linoleum cut to the painterly nuances of the etching. With this wide selection at his disposal the graphic artist is extremely well equipped. And, like every other artist, he can use colour to heighten his effects.
But however hightly we may feel inclined to rate prints and drawings as a genre, we should not overlook the fact that in the course of their development they have led a decidedly chequered existence. In certain historical periods the only drawings produced were those used as sketches or studies while in others drawings were regarded as an autonomous branch of art and included a number of really great works. The copper engravings and woodcuts of the Durer period were conceived in purely artistic terms, whereas in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries these techniques were used largely as a means of mechanical reproduction. In general we may say that linear composition reached its peak whenever it was pursued independently of painting and, conversely, that it reached its nadir whenever it became busservient to paitning. And so in this enquiry, in which we hope to trace the historical development of prints and drawings, we shall be assessing the imnportance of the graphic art of various periods with reference to paitning and the other artistic activies.
The illustrations include a number of less well known but none the less important prints, which it is hoped will now reach a wider public....
Well, well, i typed this purely for relax my figures. Published in 1970, it is now NOT interesting to me AT ALL. Maybe also because I am not a 'professional' painter, so the significance of drawings and paintings are equivalent on my mind. Besides, any painter would know drawings are important. Real interesting collectors would also keep an eye on their favourate artists' working process. Maybe only art sales are not so fond of prints and drawings.
我估计drawing和painting的区别和意义，有机会问问徐芒耀老师，他应该会回答得比较清楚。
Gottfried Lindemann, Translated by Gerald Onn
Phaidon Press, 1970
ISBN 0 7148 1760 0
Introduction
Graphic art has always been overshadowed by the painted picture. With its small format, its economical use of colour and its delicate techniques it is a fundamentally less spectacular art form and consequently is known only to the small group of connoisseurs who visit the collections of prints and drawings or are themselves collectors. But although it has not been easy for the general publich to gain access to this special branch of the fine arts, its importance as an independent medium has long been established. After all, the great European graphic collections were started as early as the sixteenth century. This, however, is only of incidental interest. What really matters is the fact that line drawing -- which lies at the heart of graphic art -- actually forms the basis of all artistic activity. Children's drawings, the incised drawings of the prehistoric cave dwellers, and the Greek vase paintings all testify in their different ways to the primacy of linear composition over colour. Moreover, when an artist chooses to portray reality in linear terms he takes the crucial step which leads away from nature and towards abstraction. Colour, on the other hand, has constantly induced artists to emulate nature.
It would be wrong to think that, by restricting himself to a linear technique, the artist also restricts his power of expression. Drawings alone offer immense scope. There is the delicate silver point, the pencil -- which is capable of producing a whole series of greys -- chalk, charcoal and the reed pen, whose harsh line stands in marked contrast to the smooth stroke of the ink brush. But, quite apart from drawings, we also have the various graphic media, which permit of infinite variations extending from the black and white contrast of the linoleum cut to the painterly nuances of the etching. With this wide selection at his disposal the graphic artist is extremely well equipped. And, like every other artist, he can use colour to heighten his effects.
But however hightly we may feel inclined to rate prints and drawings as a genre, we should not overlook the fact that in the course of their development they have led a decidedly chequered existence. In certain historical periods the only drawings produced were those used as sketches or studies while in others drawings were regarded as an autonomous branch of art and included a number of really great works. The copper engravings and woodcuts of the Durer period were conceived in purely artistic terms, whereas in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries these techniques were used largely as a means of mechanical reproduction. In general we may say that linear composition reached its peak whenever it was pursued independently of painting and, conversely, that it reached its nadir whenever it became busservient to paitning. And so in this enquiry, in which we hope to trace the historical development of prints and drawings, we shall be assessing the imnportance of the graphic art of various periods with reference to paitning and the other artistic activies.
The illustrations include a number of less well known but none the less important prints, which it is hoped will now reach a wider public....
Well, well, i typed this purely for relax my figures. Published in 1970, it is now NOT interesting to me AT ALL. Maybe also because I am not a 'professional' painter, so the significance of drawings and paintings are equivalent on my mind. Besides, any painter would know drawings are important. Real interesting collectors would also keep an eye on their favourate artists' working process. Maybe only art sales are not so fond of prints and drawings.
我估计drawing和painting的区别和意义，有机会问问徐芒耀老师，他应该会回答得比较清楚。
Sunday, 16 May 2010
Saturday, 15 May 2010
Punctum
Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes, Vintage Classics
Page 43:
Very often the Punctum is a "detail, " i.e., a partial object. Hence, to give examples of punctum is, in a certain fashion, to give myself up. Here is a family of American blacks, photographed in 1926 by James Van der Zee. The studium is clear: I am sympathetically interested, as a docile cultural subject, in what the photograph has to say, for it speaks (it is a "good"photograph):
it utters respectability, family life, conformism, Sunday best, an effort of social advancement in order to assume the White Man's attributes (an effort touching by reason of its naiveté). The spectacle interests me but does not prick me. What does, strange to say, is the belt worn low by the sister (or daughter) -- the "solacing Mammy" -- whose arms are crossed behind her back like a schoolgirl, and avobe all her strapped pumps (Mary Janes -- why does this dated fashion touch me? I mean: to what date does it refer me?). This particular punctum arouses great sympathy in me, almost a kind of tenderness. Yet the punctum shows no preference for morality or good taste: the punctum can be ill-bred. William Klein has photographed children of Little Italy in New York (1954); all very touching, amusing, but what I stubbornly see are one child's bad teeth.
Kertész, in 1926, took young Tzara's portrait (with a monocle); but what I notice, by that additional vision which is in a sense the gift, the grace of the punctum , is Tazra's hand resting on the door frame: a large hand whose nails are anything but clean.
However lighting-like it may be, the punctum has, more or less potentially, a power of expansion. This power is often metonymic. There is a photograph by Kertész (1921) which shows a blind gypsy violinist being led by a boy; now what I see, by means of this "thinking eye" which makes me add something to the photograph, is the dirt road; its texture gives me the certainty of being in Central Europe; I perceive the referent (here, the photograph really transcends itself: s this not the sole proof of its art? To annihilate itself as medium, to be no longer a sign but the thing itself?), I recognize, with my whole body, the straggling villages I passed through on my longago travels in Hungary and Rumania.
There is another (less Proustian) expansion of the punctum: when, paradoxically, while remaining a "detail," it fills the whole picture. Duane Michals has photographed Andy Warhol: a provocative portrait, since Warhol hides his face behind both hands. I have no desire to comment intellectually on this game of hide-and-seek (which belongs to the Studium); since for me, Warhol hides nothing; he offers his hands to read, quite openly; and the punctum is not the gesture but the slightly repellent substance of those spatulate nails, at once soft and hard-edged.
extra viewing:
butdoesitfloat on André Kertész
Page 43:
Very often the Punctum is a "detail, " i.e., a partial object. Hence, to give examples of punctum is, in a certain fashion, to give myself up. Here is a family of American blacks, photographed in 1926 by James Van der Zee. The studium is clear: I am sympathetically interested, as a docile cultural subject, in what the photograph has to say, for it speaks (it is a "good"photograph):
it utters respectability, family life, conformism, Sunday best, an effort of social advancement in order to assume the White Man's attributes (an effort touching by reason of its naiveté). The spectacle interests me but does not prick me. What does, strange to say, is the belt worn low by the sister (or daughter) -- the "solacing Mammy" -- whose arms are crossed behind her back like a schoolgirl, and avobe all her strapped pumps (Mary Janes -- why does this dated fashion touch me? I mean: to what date does it refer me?). This particular punctum arouses great sympathy in me, almost a kind of tenderness. Yet the punctum shows no preference for morality or good taste: the punctum can be ill-bred. William Klein has photographed children of Little Italy in New York (1954); all very touching, amusing, but what I stubbornly see are one child's bad teeth.
Kertész, in 1926, took young Tzara's portrait (with a monocle); but what I notice, by that additional vision which is in a sense the gift, the grace of the punctum , is Tazra's hand resting on the door frame: a large hand whose nails are anything but clean.
However lighting-like it may be, the punctum has, more or less potentially, a power of expansion. This power is often metonymic. There is a photograph by Kertész (1921) which shows a blind gypsy violinist being led by a boy; now what I see, by means of this "thinking eye" which makes me add something to the photograph, is the dirt road; its texture gives me the certainty of being in Central Europe; I perceive the referent (here, the photograph really transcends itself: s this not the sole proof of its art? To annihilate itself as medium, to be no longer a sign but the thing itself?), I recognize, with my whole body, the straggling villages I passed through on my longago travels in Hungary and Rumania.
There is another (less Proustian) expansion of the punctum: when, paradoxically, while remaining a "detail," it fills the whole picture. Duane Michals has photographed Andy Warhol: a provocative portrait, since Warhol hides his face behind both hands. I have no desire to comment intellectually on this game of hide-and-seek (which belongs to the Studium); since for me, Warhol hides nothing; he offers his hands to read, quite openly; and the punctum is not the gesture but the slightly repellent substance of those spatulate nails, at once soft and hard-edged.
extra viewing:
butdoesitfloat on André Kertész
Friday, 14 May 2010
Realism claims "truthfulness"?
The graphic work of Kathe Kollwitz (1867-1945), who lived in the poorer districts of northern Berlin, exemplifies an approach which combines the emotional charge of German Expressionism with sober social realist concerns. Her Mother with Dead Child shows its subject without a context; there are no narrative details of the kind which Wallis included to explain the death of his stonebreaker.
But as a printmaker, she was able to specify a meaning for some of her pictures by adding a caption or slogan and using them as posters on behalf of the socialist and pacifist causes she espoused. This technique enabled her work to move from the gallery walls, to the pages of left-wing newspapers and the walls of the street. Her style combined the direct message-bearing capacity of graphic design with a psychological internsity which made her subjects more than just stereotypical victims. The theme of the mother and dead child obsessed Kollwitz as a private fear which was tragically realized in the death of her son in the First World War and of her grandson in the Second. Her strategy of infusing social realism with emotive themes became a widespread approach in left-wing art. But does this persuasive intention compromise realism's claim to "truthfulness?"
This question is particularly problematic where realist approaches intersect with the techniques of social documentary. The American photographer Lewis Hine (1874-1940) was an influential figure in the development of documentary photography. Hine worked as a campaigner for The National Child Labor Committee between 1906 and 1918 and within the wider Progressive Reform Movement. This was not a revolutionary movement, but one which sought the improvement of working-class conditions through legal reform. Hine's practice combined propaganda with social anthropology, taking pictures as part of a project to collect information and statistics on poverty, and as he put it, for "publicity in our appeal for public sympathy." His own sympathy for the people, espeicially the working children he photographed, is not in doubt, but recent attention to the ethical implications of photography has raised questions about the ideological assumptions and functions which underpin his work.
His Family in Tenement, New York City is typical of the studies he made of poor housing conditions as part of the Reform Movement's campaign to extend the bureaucratic basis of welfare provision. Through this photograph the spectator is brought like a visitor to the family. Most of the children look back with faces which variously suggest curiosity, anticipation, or indifference, and the mother's expression has an air of hospitality which removes any sense of intrusion or voyeurism. The family remains anonymous in the title, though, and despite the naturalness of the image, it is being shown as a sociological example. The room, the household objects in it, and the children's clothing are inspected as evidence of the family's economic and social status. There are no signs here of extreme poverty, so what is it that makes this family an object of the viewer's concert? Studies of Hine's work have pointed out how often he showed such families without a father present, using the absence of a male provider to signal the family's lack or neediness. The positioning of the spectator/photographer as filling this gap underscores the paternalistic impulse of the Reformist ideology, which tended to regard social reform within a Christian framework of father's care and authority. Hine's work underlines the problem for socially concerned documentary: that in depicting the poor for philanthropic purposes, such images require their subjects to conform visually with the expected styles of "being poor." His photographs also show that realism can never be truly objective because all images are contrived; mediated through the process of representation.
Propaganda and Art, by Toby Clark
Page22-24.
Toby Clark 寫得真好。也或許只是我，他的文字看來比較順暢。不像法國人的那麼抒情。哈哈。
Thursday, 13 May 2010
Putting things together
So I have the powerful El Lissitzky works sending me straight up to the sky, and while floating in my imagined USSR space, I was scoping where I could find a foldout catalog of his design for the Soviet pavilion at Pressa, Cologne back in 1928. I would examine its usage of paper and calculation of colors used for the printing.
Lissitzky would be a perfect example to introduce DESIGN - art with audience in concern or say art with propaganda purpose.
In DESIGN, all kinds of tool and forms are working together as a machine with one purpose on its mind, to convey the director/constructor's ideas. Drawings, photography, paintings, printings, paper, and other materials that are visually STABLE are gathered together by the constructor. Different from some Suprematism and other stream of artists, Lissitzky confirmed that "aesthetic program remained dominant to technological considerations", which as how I understand means the idea of the work is conceivable. And Lissitzky must be a very cool person, his works seem to undergo great calculation and considretaion, measuring everyone's emotional gain and loss. Then he rely on aesthetic calculation to remain neutral and gather his fans...
Designers always stay cool and neutral.
. no good .
El Lissitzky
El Lissitzky in Germany 1922-1925, by Matthew Drutt
[page 9, paragraph 1]
Whatever the reasons, what resulted from his initial sojourn -- which lasted barely two years and was characterized b frequent travel to various German cities and neighboring countries -- was a series of collaborative and interdisciplinary projects that drew upon his explorations of painting, graphic design, and architecture combined with a burgeoning interest in photography, catapulting him into the limelight of the international avant-garde and transforming him into something of an ambassador for activities emerging both at home and abroad.
An exemplary figure.
from FIGURATION to GEOMETRIC ABSTRCTION.
under the tutelage of the Suprematist painter Kazimir Malevich.
[page 9, paragraph 2]
In an essay written in 1920, Lissitzky proclaimed: "The artist constructs a new symbol with his brush. This symbol is not a recognizable form of anything in the world -- it is a symbol of the new world, which is being built upon and which exists by way of the people." Lissitzky carried Suprematism beyond Malevich's orginal formulation of pure painting imbued with a spiritul aura. With their multiple references to real and abstract space, the Prouns became a system through which Lissitzky not only ruminated upon formal properties of transparency, opacity, color, shape, and line but began to dwell upon the deployment of these forms into socialized space, placing him into the path of the emergence of Constructivism, which, using a similarly reductive visual vocabulary, sought to merge art and life through mass production and industry.
Russia, VKhUTEMAS (the Higher State Artistic-Techinical Workshops)
Germany, Bauhaus.
[page 9, paragraph 3]
Its interdisciplinary environment, where painting, design, architecture, photography, and handcrafts were taught under a single roof, was radically opposed to the traditions of the academy and reflected the new persona of the artist as worker or engineer as it was evolving amid the rhetoric of Soviet culture. The collision between art for art's sake and art with a utilitarian purpose was settling there by the time Lissitzky arrived.
OBMOKhU (the brother Stenberg Medunestky, Ioganson, and others)
UNOVIS (Senkin, Klutsis, Ermolaeva, and others led by Malevich and Lissitzky)
[page 10, paragraph 2]
Thus, for Lissitzky constructive art could be successful as art only if its aesthetic program remained dominant to technological considerations, a sentiment he would continue to assert in the ensuing years.
我以為所謂的審美標準，就是指作品能夠為大眾讀懂，不因為概念而局限觀眾和藝術家之間的溝通。Lissitzky之所以注重字體的設計和運用，因為在抽象構成中，文字可以幫助觀眾理解符號，總結大意。Lissitzky是藝術家，也是設計師。我想設計師是有政治經濟頭腦的藝術家。藝術家的專職還是在於追求提升自我的技術和表達個人情感。
[page 10, paragraph 4]
In the tradition of modernist journals procaliming the arrival of new art forms to a broader audience, such as L'Esprit Nouveau, de Stijl, and Valori Plastici, Ehrenburg and Lissitzky published the periodical Veshch-Gegenstand-Object, which appeared only twice in 1922 but whose objective was to act as an international hournal of contemporary culture, hence its trilingual title and content. It provided both a window to the West for artists back in Russia and a vew for Western readers into the various cultural activities in the Soviet Union. The inaugural issue included notices of forth coming exhibitions, artist' congresses, and announcements for other avant-garde periodicals, as well as interview with such artists as Fernand Leger and Gino Severini, articals by le Corbusier and Theo van Doesberg, and one by Nikolai Punin celebrating Tatlin's Monument to the Third International, which was fast becoming the symbol in Germany for Russia's artistic revolution.
內容豐富。
[page 11, paragraph 1]
"From now on, art, while preserving all local characteristics and symptoms is international. ... We consider the triumph of the constructive method to be essential for our present. 'Object' will champion constructive art, whose mission is not, after all, to embellish life but to organize it."
藝術家已經表示，我們將不止被“物件”美化，還將被“物件”管理。藝術家从上個世紀就開始認真地推進這個[人]被[物化]的項目。
[page 12, paragraph 1]
What is different about Lissitzky's converntion is the implication that the incorporation of a photograph into an abstract space would have for his impending deployment of abstract space into real space. Again, theorizing these issues through the Proun, his primary preoccupation at the time, he wrote: "Proun begins as a level surface, turns into a model of three dimensional space, and goes on to construct all the objects of everyday life."
Lissitzky解釋何謂Proun，這個概念輿達達有分別，比較重要，請記。Lissitzky是一個考慮3維空間的人。可能因此他的平面構成會很精簡，他在做疊影的時候，不止看到了平面上色彩的滲透，還看到的是對3維空間的可能性。
很想把這篇文章盡快讀完。但是心緒又有些煩亂。找到一個網站，有很多關於藝術的短片。甚好。
This website reminds me a female artist Bridget Riley. Would be helpful for the lesson of female artists.
Wednesday, 12 May 2010
北上南下
There is another problem with longitude, other than methods to calculate it, namely that a zero needs to be set arbitrarily. At first, as is to be expected, several different places were chosen as the zero such as Paris, Cadiz, Naples, Pulkova, Stockholm and London. International agreement was needed to set cartographic standards and the International Meridian Conference held in Washington D.C. USA in 1884 had delegates from 26 countries. They standardised the Greenwich Meridian as the zero for longitude and, after some delay, all countries adopted this and the equator as the basic reference lines.
There is, of course, another decision to be taken in order to standardise maps, namely how the map is oriented. It is fairly logical to have either north or south at the top, but which is chosen is a completely arbitrary decision. Early Christian maps had north at the top while early Arabic/Muslim maps had south at the top. Without any international agreement, it has become standard practice to have north at the top of a map. Other collaborative international projects have been less successful. In 1891 there was an International Geographical Congress in Bern which established the International Map of the World. Standards were set and a symbol convention was chosen. The scale was to be 1:1000000 and several nations agreed to cooperate to produce a world map to this standard. Some, but not all, of the proposed maps have been produced but the project has never been completed.
有趣的是河童也有這樣的嘗試，把地圖倒過來看。所有的視覺習慣收到挑戰的時候，有趣就產生了。找到一条規則，打破，重建。聽上去像是地震。
在練習河童的房間俯視圖後，還可嘗試把自己的房間倒過來畫。
Map
size, dimension, comparison, accuracy, copy, interpretation, symbols, sigh, time and space.
A map is a visual representation of an area—a symbolic depiction highlighting relationships between elements of that space such as objects, regions, and themes.
Many maps are static two-dimensional, geometrically accurate (or approximately accurate) representations of three-dimensional space, while others are dynamic or interactive, even three-dimensional. Although most commonly used to depict geography, maps may represent any space, real or imagined, without regard to context or scale; e.g. Brain mapping, DNA mapping, and extraterrestrial mapping.
First of all, some interesting Cartography history.
Monday, 10 May 2010
the Winter Garden Photograph
Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes, Vintage Classics
Page 67:
28.
There I was, alone in the apartment where she had died, looking at these pictures of my mother, one by one, under the lamp, gradually moving back in time with her, looking for the truth of the face I had loved. And I found it.
The photograph was very old. The corners were blunted from having been pasted into an album, the sepia print had faded, and the picture just managed to show two children standing together at the end of a little wooden bridge in a glassed-in conservatory, what was called a Winter Garden in those days. My mother was five at the time (1898), her brother seven. He was leaning against the bridge railing, along which he had extended one arm; she, shorter than he, was standing a little back, facing the camera; you could tell that the photographer had said, "Step forward a little so we can see you"; she was holding one finger in the other hand, as children often do, in an awkward gesture. The brother and sister, united, as I knew, by the discord of their parents, who were soon to divorce, had posed side by side, alone, under the palms of the Winter Garden (it was the house where my mother was born, in Chennevieres-sur-Marne).
I studied the little girl and at last rediscovered my mother. The distinctness of her face, the naive attitude of her hands, the place she had docilely taken without either showing or hiding her, like Good from Evil, from the hysterical little girl, from the simpering doll who plays at being a grownup -- all this constituted the figure of a sovereign innocence (if you will take this word according to its etymology, which is:"I do no harm"),all this had transformed the photographic pose into that untenable paradox which she had nonetheless maintained all her life: the assertion of a gentleness. In this little girl's image I saw the kindness which had formed her being immediately and forever, without her having inherited it from anyone; how could this kindness have proceeded from the imperfect parents who had loved her so badly--in short: from a family? Her kindness was specifically out-of-play, it belonged to no system, or at least it was located at the limits of a morality (evangelical, for instance); I could not define it better than by this feature (among others): that during the whole of our life together, she never made a single "observation." This extreme and particular circumstance, so abstract in relation to an image, was nonetheless present in the face revealed in the photograph I had just discovered. "Not a just image, just an image," Godard says. But my grief wanted a just image, an image which would be both justice and accuracy - justesse: just an image, but a just image. Such, for me, was the Winter Garden Photograph.
For once, photography gave me a sentiment as certain as remembrance, just as Proust experienced in one day when, leaning over to take off his boots, there suddenly came to him his grandmother's true face, "whose living reality I was experiencing for the first time, in an involuntary and complete memory." The unknown photographer of Chennevieres-sur-Marne had been the mediator of a truth, as much as Nadar making of his mother (or of his wife - no one knows for certain) one of the loveliest photograph in the world; he had produced a supererogatory photograph which contained more than what the technical being of photography can reasonably offer. Or again (for I am trying to express this truth) this Winter Garden Photograph was for me like the last music Schumann wrote before collapsing, that first Gesang der Fruehe which accords with both my mother's being and my grief at her death, I could not express this accord except by an infinite series of adjectives, which I omit, convinced however that this photograph collected all the possible predicates from which my mother's being was constituted and whose suppression or partial alteration, conversely, had sent me back to these photographs of her which had left me so unsatisfied. These same photographs, which phenomenology would call "ordinary" objects, were merely analogical, provoking only her identity, not her truth; but the Winter Garden Photograph was indeed essential, it achieved for me, utopically, the impossible science of the unique being.
好一个感伤的巴特。我发现一个用感觉多过术语来写作的人，要向巴特先生学习如何热情地推销自创的词汇。
就像那些涂鸦的年轻人一样。还要准备古典音乐，培养高尚的感情。
bonus -- 原来Nadar有很多轶事。他是最早用人造光拍照的摄影师，他把自己的工作室借给印象派画家使用，促成第一届印象主义画展，他还是最早作高空摄影的人。了不起，了不起。
Page 67:
28.
There I was, alone in the apartment where she had died, looking at these pictures of my mother, one by one, under the lamp, gradually moving back in time with her, looking for the truth of the face I had loved. And I found it.
The photograph was very old. The corners were blunted from having been pasted into an album, the sepia print had faded, and the picture just managed to show two children standing together at the end of a little wooden bridge in a glassed-in conservatory, what was called a Winter Garden in those days. My mother was five at the time (1898), her brother seven. He was leaning against the bridge railing, along which he had extended one arm; she, shorter than he, was standing a little back, facing the camera; you could tell that the photographer had said, "Step forward a little so we can see you"; she was holding one finger in the other hand, as children often do, in an awkward gesture. The brother and sister, united, as I knew, by the discord of their parents, who were soon to divorce, had posed side by side, alone, under the palms of the Winter Garden (it was the house where my mother was born, in Chennevieres-sur-Marne).
I studied the little girl and at last rediscovered my mother. The distinctness of her face, the naive attitude of her hands, the place she had docilely taken without either showing or hiding her, like Good from Evil, from the hysterical little girl, from the simpering doll who plays at being a grownup -- all this constituted the figure of a sovereign innocence (if you will take this word according to its etymology, which is:"I do no harm"),all this had transformed the photographic pose into that untenable paradox which she had nonetheless maintained all her life: the assertion of a gentleness. In this little girl's image I saw the kindness which had formed her being immediately and forever, without her having inherited it from anyone; how could this kindness have proceeded from the imperfect parents who had loved her so badly--in short: from a family? Her kindness was specifically out-of-play, it belonged to no system, or at least it was located at the limits of a morality (evangelical, for instance); I could not define it better than by this feature (among others): that during the whole of our life together, she never made a single "observation." This extreme and particular circumstance, so abstract in relation to an image, was nonetheless present in the face revealed in the photograph I had just discovered. "Not a just image, just an image," Godard says. But my grief wanted a just image, an image which would be both justice and accuracy - justesse: just an image, but a just image. Such, for me, was the Winter Garden Photograph.
For once, photography gave me a sentiment as certain as remembrance, just as Proust experienced in one day when, leaning over to take off his boots, there suddenly came to him his grandmother's true face, "whose living reality I was experiencing for the first time, in an involuntary and complete memory." The unknown photographer of Chennevieres-sur-Marne had been the mediator of a truth, as much as Nadar making of his mother (or of his wife - no one knows for certain) one of the loveliest photograph in the world; he had produced a supererogatory photograph which contained more than what the technical being of photography can reasonably offer. Or again (for I am trying to express this truth) this Winter Garden Photograph was for me like the last music Schumann wrote before collapsing, that first Gesang der Fruehe which accords with both my mother's being and my grief at her death, I could not express this accord except by an infinite series of adjectives, which I omit, convinced however that this photograph collected all the possible predicates from which my mother's being was constituted and whose suppression or partial alteration, conversely, had sent me back to these photographs of her which had left me so unsatisfied. These same photographs, which phenomenology would call "ordinary" objects, were merely analogical, provoking only her identity, not her truth; but the Winter Garden Photograph was indeed essential, it achieved for me, utopically, the impossible science of the unique being.
好一个感伤的巴特。我发现一个用感觉多过术语来写作的人，要向巴特先生学习如何热情地推销自创的词汇。
就像那些涂鸦的年轻人一样。还要准备古典音乐，培养高尚的感情。
bonus -- 原来Nadar有很多轶事。他是最早用人造光拍照的摄影师，他把自己的工作室借给印象派画家使用，促成第一届印象主义画展，他还是最早作高空摄影的人。了不起，了不起。
To Paint
Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes, Vintage Classics
Page30:
13.
The first man who saw the first photograph (if we except Niepce, who made it) must have thought it was a painting: same framing, same perspective. Photography has been, and is still, tormented by the ghost of Painting (Mapplethorpe represents an iris stalk the way an Oriental painter might have done it); it has made Painting, through its copies and contestations, into the absolute, paternal Reference, as if it were born from the Canvas (this is true, technically, but only in part; for the painters' camera obscura is only one of the causes of Photography; the essential one, perhaps, was the chemical discovery). At this point in my investigation, nothing eidetically distinguishes a photograph, however realistic, from a painting. "Pictorialism" is only an exaggeration of what the Photograph thinks of itself.
Yet it is not (it seems to me) by Painting that Photography touches art, but by Theater. Niepce and Daguerre are always put at the origin of Photography (even if the latter has somewhat usurped the former's place); now Daguerre, when he took over Niepce's invention, was running a panorama theater animated by light shows and movements in the Place du Chateau. The camera obscura, in short, has generated at one and the same time perspective painting, photography, and the diorama, which are all three arts of the stage; but if Photography seems to me closer to the Theater, it is by way of a singular intermediary (and perhaps I am the only one who sees it): by way of Death. We know the original relation of the theater and the cult of the Dead: the first actors separated themselves from the community by playing the role of the Dead: to make oneself up was to designate oneself as a body simultaneously living and dead: the whitened bust of the totemic theater, the man with the painted face in the Chinese theater, the rice-paste makeup of the Indian Katha-Kali, the Japanese No mask... Now it is this same relation which I find in the Photograph; however "lifelike" we strive to make it (and this frenzy to be lifelike can only be our mythic denial of an apprehension of death), Photography is a kind of primitive theater, a kind of Tableau Vivant, a figuration of the motionless and made-up face beneath which we see the dead.
不是很喜欢罗兰巴特的笔调。大概法国人都是这样的。自言自语。感伤有余。我仿佛见到一个面对大海，悠然叹息的男子，他喜欢说话，穿柔软质地的衣服和皮鞋。他不会让我感兴趣，我不会喜欢听他说话，我宁可听海。
这第13小章题为‘作画’，但忽悠忽悠就把化学反应、剧场、时间、角度、死亡的名字都点了一遍。好像提起死亡就会很有深度……虽然我有时也有这样的倾向。
‘化学反应’倒是提醒我可以介绍seib早期的摄影绘画作品。
Page30:
13.
The first man who saw the first photograph (if we except Niepce, who made it) must have thought it was a painting: same framing, same perspective. Photography has been, and is still, tormented by the ghost of Painting (Mapplethorpe represents an iris stalk the way an Oriental painter might have done it); it has made Painting, through its copies and contestations, into the absolute, paternal Reference, as if it were born from the Canvas (this is true, technically, but only in part; for the painters' camera obscura is only one of the causes of Photography; the essential one, perhaps, was the chemical discovery). At this point in my investigation, nothing eidetically distinguishes a photograph, however realistic, from a painting. "Pictorialism" is only an exaggeration of what the Photograph thinks of itself.
Yet it is not (it seems to me) by Painting that Photography touches art, but by Theater. Niepce and Daguerre are always put at the origin of Photography (even if the latter has somewhat usurped the former's place); now Daguerre, when he took over Niepce's invention, was running a panorama theater animated by light shows and movements in the Place du Chateau. The camera obscura, in short, has generated at one and the same time perspective painting, photography, and the diorama, which are all three arts of the stage; but if Photography seems to me closer to the Theater, it is by way of a singular intermediary (and perhaps I am the only one who sees it): by way of Death. We know the original relation of the theater and the cult of the Dead: the first actors separated themselves from the community by playing the role of the Dead: to make oneself up was to designate oneself as a body simultaneously living and dead: the whitened bust of the totemic theater, the man with the painted face in the Chinese theater, the rice-paste makeup of the Indian Katha-Kali, the Japanese No mask... Now it is this same relation which I find in the Photograph; however "lifelike" we strive to make it (and this frenzy to be lifelike can only be our mythic denial of an apprehension of death), Photography is a kind of primitive theater, a kind of Tableau Vivant, a figuration of the motionless and made-up face beneath which we see the dead.
不是很喜欢罗兰巴特的笔调。大概法国人都是这样的。自言自语。感伤有余。我仿佛见到一个面对大海，悠然叹息的男子，他喜欢说话，穿柔软质地的衣服和皮鞋。他不会让我感兴趣，我不会喜欢听他说话，我宁可听海。
这第13小章题为‘作画’，但忽悠忽悠就把化学反应、剧场、时间、角度、死亡的名字都点了一遍。好像提起死亡就会很有深度……虽然我有时也有这样的倾向。
‘化学反应’倒是提醒我可以介绍seib早期的摄影绘画作品。
Sunday, 9 May 2010
Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes
Contents
Part One
1. Specialty of the Phtograph
2. The Photograph Unclassifiable
3. Emotion as Departure
4. OPERATOR, SPECTRUM and SPECTATOR
5. He Who is Photographed
6. The SPECTATOR: Chaos of Tastes
7. Photography as Adventure
8. A Casual Phenomenology
9. Duality
10. STUDIUM and PUNCTUM
11. Studium
12. To Inform
13. To Paint
14. To Surprise
15. To Signify
16. To Waken Desire
17. The Unary Photograph
18. Co-presence of the Studium and the Punctum
19. PUNCTUM: Partial Feature
20. Involuntary Feature
21. Satori
22. After-the-Fact and Silence
23. Blind Field
24. Palinode
Part Two
25. "One evening . . ."
26. History as Separation
27. To Recognize
28. The Winter Garden Photograph
29. The Little Girl
30. Ariadne
31. The Family, the Mother
32. "THAT-HAS BEEN"
33. The Pose
34. The Luminous Rays, Color
35. Amazement
36. Authentication
37. Stasis
38. Flat Death
39. Time as PUNCTUM
40. Private / Public
41. To Scrutinize
42. Resemblance
43. Lineage
44. CAMERA LUCIDA
45. The "Air"
46. The Look
47. Madness, Pity
48. The Photograph Tamed
Part One
1. Specialty of the Phtograph
2. The Photograph Unclassifiable
3. Emotion as Departure
4. OPERATOR, SPECTRUM and SPECTATOR
5. He Who is Photographed
6. The SPECTATOR: Chaos of Tastes
7. Photography as Adventure
8. A Casual Phenomenology
9. Duality
10. STUDIUM and PUNCTUM
11. Studium
12. To Inform
13. To Paint
14. To Surprise
15. To Signify
16. To Waken Desire
17. The Unary Photograph
18. Co-presence of the Studium and the Punctum
19. PUNCTUM: Partial Feature
20. Involuntary Feature
21. Satori
22. After-the-Fact and Silence
23. Blind Field
24. Palinode
Part Two
25. "One evening . . ."
26. History as Separation
27. To Recognize
28. The Winter Garden Photograph
29. The Little Girl
30. Ariadne
31. The Family, the Mother
32. "THAT-HAS BEEN"
33. The Pose
34. The Luminous Rays, Color
35. Amazement
36. Authentication
37. Stasis
38. Flat Death
39. Time as PUNCTUM
40. Private / Public
41. To Scrutinize
42. Resemblance
43. Lineage
44. CAMERA LUCIDA
45. The "Air"
46. The Look
47. Madness, Pity
48. The Photograph Tamed
Sunday, 2 May 2010
Stenberg Brothers
MoMA exhibition of Stenberg Brothers back in 1997 offers some good summaries in the introduction.
INKhUK (INstitut KHUdozhestvennoy Kultury, or institute of artistic culture). Active: 1921-24.
There was a shift from the illustrator-as-creator to the constructor-as-creator or nonlinear-narrator-as-creator. In the visual language of the constructor or Constructivist, the Stenbergs and other graphic designers and artists assembled images, such as portions of photographs and preprinted paper, that had been created by others. Thus, the Stenbergs and others realized wholly new images (or compositions) which were no longer about realism. Hence, graphic design as a modern expression eschewing traditional fine art was born in the form of the printed reproductions of collage or assemblage.
Source: Wiki.
Some good sites to read more:
http://greenlanddesign.org/coleg/
Russian Constructivism
Kinofilm
Russo Graphica
Sinead Lau's blog
Wednesday, 28 April 2010
Stalin, an image
Art and Propaganda, by Toby Clark
Page 95:
Stalin employed a stable of court painters to produce hundreds of official portraits, some of which were of immense size and painted by brigades of artists working under production-line conditions. The financial rewards and privileges for favoured artists could be substantial, but painting Stalin was a dangerous occupation. Those who worked closely with him, such as his political colleagues, secretaries, interpreters, and bodyguards, had a tendency to "disappear," to be arrested, executed, or secretly murdered according to his paranoid whims. In reality, Stalin was short, fat, and bandy-legged with a pock-marked face, narrow forehead, and withered left arm. But an official artist would have been unwise to depict his physical appearance with any degree of accuracy.
As a young man at the time of the October Revolution, Stalin had played no more than a peripheral part in the Bolshevik uprising. This potentially embarrassing fact was glossed over by fctional biographies, which exaggerated the revolutionary adventures of his youth, and descibed his warm friendship with Lenin. Evidence in fact suggests that Lenin viewed him with distrust and personal dislike. Stalin, in turn, came to fear all the "Old Bolsheviks" and anyone who had been involved in the original revolutionary movement. From the mid-1930s, he set about purging the Party leadership and armed forces in waves of show trials and mass-executions. Among those caught up was the Constructivist artist Gustav Klucis, who died in a prison camp in 1944, where he was interned for having fought for the Bolsheviks in the Ninth Regiment of Latvian Rifles in 1917. For Socialist Realist history painters, the depiction of the October uprising had to be approached with caution. The historical insurrection had to be recounted in a manner which stressed that the rebellion had been contained, like the continuing revolutionary process under Stalin, by strict obedience, self-discipline, and respect for authority.
This conservation revision is seen in The Winter Palace is Taken by Vladimir Serov (1910-68), which was completed a year after Stalin's death.
Two battle-weary soldiers stand in the hall of the captured palace. Spent cartridges at their feet suggest the fading echoes of gunfire. Their victory, rewarded with a quiet cigarette break, marks the pivotal event of Russian history. But it is a sombre scene with an air of order and harmony enhanced by the symmetrical composition and the laborious academic style. Ostensibly, the painting's purpose is to venerate the Workers' State by dignifying its moment of origin, though its effect is to reconstruct that moment as one of the grim stasis, drained the rebellious energy.
After Stalin's death in 1953 there was some relaxation of cultural regulations. In February 1956 the new leader, Nikita Khrushchev, formally denounced Stalin at a closed sesson of the Party Congress, and subsequiently thousands of works of art of the Stalinist period, especially those which depiected him, were destrpyed or hidden and disappeared from the art history books. Although the excesses of Stalin's personality cult were not repeated by his successors, the heroization of Soviet workers continued as the principal theme of Socialist Realism.
Builders of the Bratsk Hydroelectric Power Station by Viktor Popkov lines up the stock characters and assigns to them their required qualities; even while taking a work-break they look sober, industrious, and vigilant. But during the 1960s and 1970s nonconformist and dissident art groups were increasingly active. Technically, it had never been illegal for an artist to work in unorthodox styles, but attempts to exhibit outside the official framework frequently met with police harassment. In the 1970s numerous small exhibitions were held in defiance of Party regulations and were duly closed down, sometimes within hours of opening. In Moscow in September 1974, an open-air exhibition on a patch of suburban wasteland was broken up by bulldozers and water cannons. The "Bulldozer Exhibition" was widely reported in the Western press.
Page 95:
Stalin employed a stable of court painters to produce hundreds of official portraits, some of which were of immense size and painted by brigades of artists working under production-line conditions. The financial rewards and privileges for favoured artists could be substantial, but painting Stalin was a dangerous occupation. Those who worked closely with him, such as his political colleagues, secretaries, interpreters, and bodyguards, had a tendency to "disappear," to be arrested, executed, or secretly murdered according to his paranoid whims. In reality, Stalin was short, fat, and bandy-legged with a pock-marked face, narrow forehead, and withered left arm. But an official artist would have been unwise to depict his physical appearance with any degree of accuracy.
As a young man at the time of the October Revolution, Stalin had played no more than a peripheral part in the Bolshevik uprising. This potentially embarrassing fact was glossed over by fctional biographies, which exaggerated the revolutionary adventures of his youth, and descibed his warm friendship with Lenin. Evidence in fact suggests that Lenin viewed him with distrust and personal dislike. Stalin, in turn, came to fear all the "Old Bolsheviks" and anyone who had been involved in the original revolutionary movement. From the mid-1930s, he set about purging the Party leadership and armed forces in waves of show trials and mass-executions. Among those caught up was the Constructivist artist Gustav Klucis, who died in a prison camp in 1944, where he was interned for having fought for the Bolsheviks in the Ninth Regiment of Latvian Rifles in 1917. For Socialist Realist history painters, the depiction of the October uprising had to be approached with caution. The historical insurrection had to be recounted in a manner which stressed that the rebellion had been contained, like the continuing revolutionary process under Stalin, by strict obedience, self-discipline, and respect for authority.
This conservation revision is seen in The Winter Palace is Taken by Vladimir Serov (1910-68), which was completed a year after Stalin's death.
Two battle-weary soldiers stand in the hall of the captured palace. Spent cartridges at their feet suggest the fading echoes of gunfire. Their victory, rewarded with a quiet cigarette break, marks the pivotal event of Russian history. But it is a sombre scene with an air of order and harmony enhanced by the symmetrical composition and the laborious academic style. Ostensibly, the painting's purpose is to venerate the Workers' State by dignifying its moment of origin, though its effect is to reconstruct that moment as one of the grim stasis, drained the rebellious energy.
After Stalin's death in 1953 there was some relaxation of cultural regulations. In February 1956 the new leader, Nikita Khrushchev, formally denounced Stalin at a closed sesson of the Party Congress, and subsequiently thousands of works of art of the Stalinist period, especially those which depiected him, were destrpyed or hidden and disappeared from the art history books. Although the excesses of Stalin's personality cult were not repeated by his successors, the heroization of Soviet workers continued as the principal theme of Socialist Realism.
Builders of the Bratsk Hydroelectric Power Station by Viktor Popkov lines up the stock characters and assigns to them their required qualities; even while taking a work-break they look sober, industrious, and vigilant. But during the 1960s and 1970s nonconformist and dissident art groups were increasingly active. Technically, it had never been illegal for an artist to work in unorthodox styles, but attempts to exhibit outside the official framework frequently met with police harassment. In the 1970s numerous small exhibitions were held in defiance of Party regulations and were duly closed down, sometimes within hours of opening. In Moscow in September 1974, an open-air exhibition on a patch of suburban wasteland was broken up by bulldozers and water cannons. The "Bulldozer Exhibition" was widely reported in the Western press.
model for the future
Art and Propaganda, by Toby Clark
Page 81:
Tatlin's tower reveals a highly centralized vision of both government and propaganda and it typified the Russian avant-garde's naive enthusiasm for mass-media technology. Tatlin's friend, the poet Velimir Khlebnikov (1885-1922), called the radio "the main tree of consciousness;" "The radio will forge the broken links of the world soul and fuse together all mankind." In cinema, photography, and graphic design, techniques of montage were developed to high levels of sophistication in the 1920s by avant-garde film-makers such as Sergei Eisenstein (1898-1948) and designers such as Gustav Klucis (1895-c.1944), Aleksandr Rodchenko (1891-1956), Varvara Stepanova (1894-1958) and the Stenberg brothers.
Page 82:
The avant-garde artists of the Russian Constructivist movement, of which Tatlin was a founding figure, viewed design practices linked to mass production as a means of integrating art with the reconstruction of society. With designs for communist clothing, textiles, furniture, architecture, and even entire cities, Constructivists sought the creation of a total design aesthetic for changing the behavioral habits of the Soviet population, or, as they called it, for "organizing the psyche of the masses." Because of the low levels of industrial technology and materials, few Constructivist designs went into production. By the late 1920s, the Constructivists' vision for their project veered between a radical utopianism and a sinister fantasy of social engineering. On the one hand, Tatlin's design for an "air-bicycle," a human-powered flying machine based on bird anatomy, was devised for the physcial and perceptual liberation of the travelling worker - unfortunately his prototype failed to fly. On the other, there were plans
Page 85:
in Consturctivist architecture to enforce communal living in vast housing blocks where private habits could be rigorously policed, children would be raised collectively, and, in one proposal, residents would carry out all activities (including sex) according to a twenty-four-hour timetable.
Between Lenin's death in 1924 and Stalin's rise to power some five years later, the Party leadership maintained its policy of permitting relative pluralism in the arts, but it became increasingly clear that realist approaches were officially favoured more than the avant-garde's experiments. Among the many artistic groups of the 1920s, the Association of Artists of Revolutionary Russai (AKhRR) had been the largest, and gained support for its realist art among influential trade union and Red Army officials. In 1928 the party launched the Cultural Revolution, which aimed to reinvigorate the revolutionary process, and was expressed by a drive to "proletarianize" the arts.
Serafima Ryangina's Red Army Art Studio captures the mood of the artistic and literary groups which sought to train up a new generation of working-class artists. Some of the leaders of these groups, themselves often middle-class and too yong to have been involved in the original revolution and civil war, took to shaving their heads and wearing khaki fatigues to express their militant "class-war" spirit. This prepared the ground for the autocratic cultural policies of Stalinism.
Page 81:
Tatlin's tower reveals a highly centralized vision of both government and propaganda and it typified the Russian avant-garde's naive enthusiasm for mass-media technology. Tatlin's friend, the poet Velimir Khlebnikov (1885-1922), called the radio "the main tree of consciousness;" "The radio will forge the broken links of the world soul and fuse together all mankind." In cinema, photography, and graphic design, techniques of montage were developed to high levels of sophistication in the 1920s by avant-garde film-makers such as Sergei Eisenstein (1898-1948) and designers such as Gustav Klucis (1895-c.1944), Aleksandr Rodchenko (1891-1956), Varvara Stepanova (1894-1958) and the Stenberg brothers.
Page 82:
The avant-garde artists of the Russian Constructivist movement, of which Tatlin was a founding figure, viewed design practices linked to mass production as a means of integrating art with the reconstruction of society. With designs for communist clothing, textiles, furniture, architecture, and even entire cities, Constructivists sought the creation of a total design aesthetic for changing the behavioral habits of the Soviet population, or, as they called it, for "organizing the psyche of the masses." Because of the low levels of industrial technology and materials, few Constructivist designs went into production. By the late 1920s, the Constructivists' vision for their project veered between a radical utopianism and a sinister fantasy of social engineering. On the one hand, Tatlin's design for an "air-bicycle," a human-powered flying machine based on bird anatomy, was devised for the physcial and perceptual liberation of the travelling worker - unfortunately his prototype failed to fly. On the other, there were plans
Page 85:
in Consturctivist architecture to enforce communal living in vast housing blocks where private habits could be rigorously policed, children would be raised collectively, and, in one proposal, residents would carry out all activities (including sex) according to a twenty-four-hour timetable.
Between Lenin's death in 1924 and Stalin's rise to power some five years later, the Party leadership maintained its policy of permitting relative pluralism in the arts, but it became increasingly clear that realist approaches were officially favoured more than the avant-garde's experiments. Among the many artistic groups of the 1920s, the Association of Artists of Revolutionary Russai (AKhRR) had been the largest, and gained support for its realist art among influential trade union and Red Army officials. In 1928 the party launched the Cultural Revolution, which aimed to reinvigorate the revolutionary process, and was expressed by a drive to "proletarianize" the arts.
Serafima Ryangina's Red Army Art Studio captures the mood of the artistic and literary groups which sought to train up a new generation of working-class artists. Some of the leaders of these groups, themselves often middle-class and too yong to have been involved in the original revolution and civil war, took to shaving their heads and wearing khaki fatigues to express their militant "class-war" spirit. This prepared the ground for the autocratic cultural policies of Stalinism.
Tuesday, 27 April 2010
Propaganda in the Communist State (part 1)
Page 73:
In theory, communism views revolution as a continuous process which transforms consciousness alongside the transformation of social reality. As implemented by state communism, national programmers of reconstruction, like industrialization or the collectivization of agriculture, were intended to have profound effects on people's habits of thought and behavior, to an extent that would far exceed the mere proaganda of words and images. In practice, communist regimes have represented social change through a screen of censorship and illusion, producing a condition which some have described as dream-like because the official version of reality is so far at odds with everyday life. For the long-lasting regimes, like that of the Soviet Union, the term "propaganda" has not had negative connotations among communists, and because communism is said to provide an objective and scientific understanding of the world, little disctinction is made between propaganda and education. In art, the main expression of state communism has been Socialist Realism, formally defined and introduced under Joseph Stalin in 1934 as the official aesthetic of the Soviet Union and later imposed by communist states throughout the world. It has been one of the most widely practised and enduring artistic approaches of the twentieth century.
It has often been argued that Socialist Realism was essentially similar to the official art of Nazi Germany. There are certainly many points of comparison. Both emerged fully in the 1930s and produced images which idealized workers and peasants and elevated their leaders in personality cults. Both used easily readable populist styles. The Soviet and Nazi regimes both backed up the persuasive techniques of propaganda with brutal methods of coercion which included arbitrary imprisonment and mass-murder. But
P74:
a closer look at the iconographies of the two systems reveals important differences. Ideologically, communism and fascism took very different views of nature, technology, work, warfare, history, and human purpose. These ideological distinctions were moulded by deeply rooted cultural and social traditions specific to each national context. A conspicuous contrast, as noted earlier, was between Nazism's mythic glorification of the past and Soviet communism's enthusiasm for progress. Nazism emerged partly as a reaction against the instability produced by Germany's rapid modernization. In the Soviet Union, however, as in other communist nations such as the People's Republic of China, Cuba, and the Afro-Marxist states in post-colonial Africa, political revolution took place in advance of substantial modernization. The achievement of modernity was an aspiration closely linked to the establishment of communist society.
"Organizing the Psyche of the Masses"
The imposition of Socialist Realism in 1934 marked a substantial increase in the Soviet state's control over art and was characteristic of Stalin's rule over the Party, exercised since the late 1920s. But it was preceded during the years which followed the October Revolution of 1917 by a period when the leadership had allowed and encouraged the experiments of many different communist art groups and the heated debates between them. These debates were not onl about the most suitable style for communist art, but concerned wider quiestions about the function of art in this new society. From the outset it was clear that the revolution which created the world's first Workers' and Peasants' Government had entirely altered conditions for the patronage, audience, and sites of art. Soviet art was to be principally state-funded, public, and directed to a mass audience. But how were "the masses" to be conceived? What was to be their role in the production of art; what was the status of their tastes; and what was art supposed to do to them? These issues provoked a cluster of further questions: Should culture become "proletarian", or should it just be called "socialist" and aspire to be classless? Should it incorporate the achievements of bourgeois culture, or were all traditional kinds of art irredeemably tainted with capitalism and therefore to be abandoned?
Black Square by Kazimir Malevich (1878 - 1935) encapsulates a radical view of this unique situation. It consists only of a black square on a white background. Painted shortly before the revolution and exhibited in 1915, Malevich originally conceived it
Page 75:
as an extremist avant-garde gesture which announced the end of tradition in painting and the beginning of a transcendetal, or what he called "Suprematist," level of perception and representation. He declared: "I have transformed myself into the zero of form and dragged myself out of the rubbish-filled pook of Academic art." The meanings of the painting were altered by the new context of the October Revolution of 1917. From that date, he used it to symbolize a rupture in history, the termination of the old order and the birth of the future out of revoution. For Malevich and his followers in the group UNOVIS (Affirmers of the New Art), old-fashioned approaches to art could only
Page 76:
confine the human mind to conservative ways of thinking. Against this, they developed abstract art in which a vocabulary of pure geometric forms, usually brightly coloured, were designed to address the viewer's senses with dynamic effect. The Russian avant-garde had described this effect as sdvig - a sudden enlightenment or "shift" of perception. Though he called them "non-objective," meaning abstract, some of Malevich's paintings refer in their titles and appearance to a cosmic or interplanetary environment signifying the transcendence of earth-bound habits of thought and the creation of a new world. Malevich's ideas drew on Apocalyptic beliefs that had long been nurtured in Russian culture, predicting the revelation of God's will to humanity along with the end of the material world and the creation of a celestial realm of pure spirit. A feature of this belief is the idea that divine knowledge will be revealed in abstract form, unmediated by language. Beyond the partial revelations of the Old and New Testaments, a "Third Text" will communicate directly to the human soul. Malevich saw this as a model for the imminent illumination of the consciousness of the proletariat.
The Bolsheviks' leader, Lenin, more pragmatic and suspicious of avant-garde extremes, viewed the function of art as lying within the broader framework of education, for which tackling the illiteracy of 80 percent of the population and the scarcity of basic technical skills were the real priorities. Conservative in taste, he felt that socialist culture should build on the best achievements of the past and, by developing these, "raise" the cultural standards of the masses. This was linked to his view of the role of the Party, the main theoretical element of Marxism-Leninism. To Lenin, the Russian working classes, mainly rural peasants, were not ready to generate revolutionary consciousness by themselves. The outbreak of strikes and rioting in cities in the winter of 1916-17, which forced the abdication of the Tsar, had been what Lenin called with some disdain "spontaneous": a premature, disorganized rebellion uninformed by political awareness. Lenin himself, like many other Bolsheviks, was in exile at the time and had to return to Russia to take charge of the uprising and oust the weak provisional government in the coup of October. The Party was to provide leadership and formulate the theoreical basis of policy. As in Lenin at Smolnyi by Isaak Brodsky (1884-1939), which was painted six years after Lenin's death, many paintings of Lenin show him writing or holding a book; these validate his self-appointed position as the legitimate interpreter of doctrine.
The October Revolution was followed by almost four years of civil war, which saw an emphasis on "agitational propaganda"
Page 77:
or agit-prop, a term that descirbed the more immediate, emotional techniques of propaganda. Of early agit-prop practices, street festivals and mass-action dramas revealed a version of public art which stressed popular involvement. Aiming to maintain the momentum of revolutionary enthusiasm in th face of the hardships of the civil war, agit-prop gorups sought to create an atmosphere of colourful celebration. Alongside the posters, murals, and huge decorations on buildings, elaborate floats using trucks, trams, or horse-drawn crats carried tableaux of revolutionary themes. Derived partly from festivals of the French Revolution, they also combined the tradition of Russian Orthodox ceremonial processions with the carnivalesque styles of folk entertainment, incorporating clowns, life-size puppets, street criers, and circus acrobats as wellas the ballet of the Bolshoi Theatre. The third anniversary of the October Revolution was celebrated by a reenactment of the storming of the Winter Palace performed by a cast of thousands mobilized by the drama groups of the Red Army and Navy. Outside the palace a stage had been built with two platforms, a red one for the workers and a white one for the aristocrats. A battle was fought out on a bridge between them. The aristocrats were routed and fled in trucks pursued by military searchlight beams and accompanied by artillery salvoes and a volley fired from the Aurora battleship anchored nearby on the River Neva. Inside the palace, with what the director called a "cinematic effect," each
Page 78:
window in turn was lit up by a spotlight to reveal a sequence of fighting scenes. Victory was announced by a firework display on the roof while a massed band played the Internationale.
The dramatic reinvention of the revolution as carnival related to a vein in Marxism which envisages the future as a condition in which all human activities, harmonized by collective endeavour, become playful or creative. By the late 1930s, this ludic spirit would begin to decay into the dour and ominous parades of marching athletes and military hardware that characterized Stalin's state rituals and that would increasingly resemble the morbid cremonies of Nazi Germany. But in its earliest years, under the slogan"the theatricalization of life," mass drama, evised by artists more than politicians, sought to dissolve distinctions between actors and spectators, and between the production and reception of propganda. This presaged later Nazi methods of mass-participation in propaganda events, but the Soviet version was motivated by more egalitarian values. The implied ideal of ending artistic professionalism and beginning a culture of universal creativity was close to the spirit of the network of proletarian culture organizations called the proletkults. Founded in 1917, the proletkults were a movement of utopian adult education, seeking to generate collective working-class culture from the roots. By the end of 1918 the movement was said to have some 400,000 members, 1,000 traning studios and cells in every major factory. Its leading theorist, Aleksandr Bogdanov (1873-1928), was a philosopher, science fiction novelist and maverick Party member who believed with mystical fervour in the supernatural powers ready to be set free by
Page 79:
the collectivization of the working classes and the harnessing of their creative potential. Bogdanov also insisted that art develops independently of economic and political spheres, and sought the autonomy of the proletkults from Party control. To Lenin, however, this amounted to a challenge to the Part's authority and in 1920 he moved against the organization, limiting its powers and bringing it under Party jurisdiction. Bogdanov was forced out of the proletkults and turned his attention to medical experiments. He was fascinated by the potential of blood transfusions, which embodied his faith in science and human regeneration. As if confirming his belief in the sacrifice of the individual for humanity's future, he died in 1928 while experimenting on himself.
Lenin acknowledged the value of the mass dramas, but wanted a more dignified statement of Bolshevism's cultural standards. His own contribution to this was known as the plan for monumental propaganda, which he announced in April 1918 in Pravda under a healine which called for "The Removal of monuments Erected in Honour of the Tsars and their Servants and the Production of Projects for Monuments to the Russian Socialist Revolution." Lenin proposed putting the unemployed to work in pulling down Tsarist statues and replacing them with new monuments commissioned to celebrate revered figures of the past. A list of more than sixty of these was to include historic revolutionaries such as Marx, Engels, Robespierre, and Spartacus, as well as cultural figuers such as Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Rublev, Chopin, and Byron. The statues, in bust or full-length, were hastily knocked up in temporary materials like wood and plaster, and formally unveiled in numerous town squares and on street corners.
Lenin's plan was designed to convey a number of messages about his own views on the role of art. Its ethos was educational - each statue bore a plaque with a brief biography and history lesson - and in contrast with Bogdanov's grass-roots proletarianism, Lenin's was an exercise in sober didacticism aimed at elevating the popular taste. The inclusion of politically conservative writers and artists may also have been intended to reassure the non-communist bourgeoisie about the Part's aesthetic tolerance and respect for Russian heritage.
Extra reading:
Engineers of the Masses: Fordism, Fascism and the Theatre
In theory, communism views revolution as a continuous process which transforms consciousness alongside the transformation of social reality. As implemented by state communism, national programmers of reconstruction, like industrialization or the collectivization of agriculture, were intended to have profound effects on people's habits of thought and behavior, to an extent that would far exceed the mere proaganda of words and images. In practice, communist regimes have represented social change through a screen of censorship and illusion, producing a condition which some have described as dream-like because the official version of reality is so far at odds with everyday life. For the long-lasting regimes, like that of the Soviet Union, the term "propaganda" has not had negative connotations among communists, and because communism is said to provide an objective and scientific understanding of the world, little disctinction is made between propaganda and education. In art, the main expression of state communism has been Socialist Realism, formally defined and introduced under Joseph Stalin in 1934 as the official aesthetic of the Soviet Union and later imposed by communist states throughout the world. It has been one of the most widely practised and enduring artistic approaches of the twentieth century.
It has often been argued that Socialist Realism was essentially similar to the official art of Nazi Germany. There are certainly many points of comparison. Both emerged fully in the 1930s and produced images which idealized workers and peasants and elevated their leaders in personality cults. Both used easily readable populist styles. The Soviet and Nazi regimes both backed up the persuasive techniques of propaganda with brutal methods of coercion which included arbitrary imprisonment and mass-murder. But
P74:
a closer look at the iconographies of the two systems reveals important differences. Ideologically, communism and fascism took very different views of nature, technology, work, warfare, history, and human purpose. These ideological distinctions were moulded by deeply rooted cultural and social traditions specific to each national context. A conspicuous contrast, as noted earlier, was between Nazism's mythic glorification of the past and Soviet communism's enthusiasm for progress. Nazism emerged partly as a reaction against the instability produced by Germany's rapid modernization. In the Soviet Union, however, as in other communist nations such as the People's Republic of China, Cuba, and the Afro-Marxist states in post-colonial Africa, political revolution took place in advance of substantial modernization. The achievement of modernity was an aspiration closely linked to the establishment of communist society.
"Organizing the Psyche of the Masses"
The imposition of Socialist Realism in 1934 marked a substantial increase in the Soviet state's control over art and was characteristic of Stalin's rule over the Party, exercised since the late 1920s. But it was preceded during the years which followed the October Revolution of 1917 by a period when the leadership had allowed and encouraged the experiments of many different communist art groups and the heated debates between them. These debates were not onl about the most suitable style for communist art, but concerned wider quiestions about the function of art in this new society. From the outset it was clear that the revolution which created the world's first Workers' and Peasants' Government had entirely altered conditions for the patronage, audience, and sites of art. Soviet art was to be principally state-funded, public, and directed to a mass audience. But how were "the masses" to be conceived? What was to be their role in the production of art; what was the status of their tastes; and what was art supposed to do to them? These issues provoked a cluster of further questions: Should culture become "proletarian", or should it just be called "socialist" and aspire to be classless? Should it incorporate the achievements of bourgeois culture, or were all traditional kinds of art irredeemably tainted with capitalism and therefore to be abandoned?
Black Square by Kazimir Malevich (1878 - 1935) encapsulates a radical view of this unique situation. It consists only of a black square on a white background. Painted shortly before the revolution and exhibited in 1915, Malevich originally conceived it
Page 75:
as an extremist avant-garde gesture which announced the end of tradition in painting and the beginning of a transcendetal, or what he called "Suprematist," level of perception and representation. He declared: "I have transformed myself into the zero of form and dragged myself out of the rubbish-filled pook of Academic art." The meanings of the painting were altered by the new context of the October Revolution of 1917. From that date, he used it to symbolize a rupture in history, the termination of the old order and the birth of the future out of revoution. For Malevich and his followers in the group UNOVIS (Affirmers of the New Art), old-fashioned approaches to art could only
Page 76:
confine the human mind to conservative ways of thinking. Against this, they developed abstract art in which a vocabulary of pure geometric forms, usually brightly coloured, were designed to address the viewer's senses with dynamic effect. The Russian avant-garde had described this effect as sdvig - a sudden enlightenment or "shift" of perception. Though he called them "non-objective," meaning abstract, some of Malevich's paintings refer in their titles and appearance to a cosmic or interplanetary environment signifying the transcendence of earth-bound habits of thought and the creation of a new world. Malevich's ideas drew on Apocalyptic beliefs that had long been nurtured in Russian culture, predicting the revelation of God's will to humanity along with the end of the material world and the creation of a celestial realm of pure spirit. A feature of this belief is the idea that divine knowledge will be revealed in abstract form, unmediated by language. Beyond the partial revelations of the Old and New Testaments, a "Third Text" will communicate directly to the human soul. Malevich saw this as a model for the imminent illumination of the consciousness of the proletariat.
The Bolsheviks' leader, Lenin, more pragmatic and suspicious of avant-garde extremes, viewed the function of art as lying within the broader framework of education, for which tackling the illiteracy of 80 percent of the population and the scarcity of basic technical skills were the real priorities. Conservative in taste, he felt that socialist culture should build on the best achievements of the past and, by developing these, "raise" the cultural standards of the masses. This was linked to his view of the role of the Party, the main theoretical element of Marxism-Leninism. To Lenin, the Russian working classes, mainly rural peasants, were not ready to generate revolutionary consciousness by themselves. The outbreak of strikes and rioting in cities in the winter of 1916-17, which forced the abdication of the Tsar, had been what Lenin called with some disdain "spontaneous": a premature, disorganized rebellion uninformed by political awareness. Lenin himself, like many other Bolsheviks, was in exile at the time and had to return to Russia to take charge of the uprising and oust the weak provisional government in the coup of October. The Party was to provide leadership and formulate the theoreical basis of policy. As in Lenin at Smolnyi by Isaak Brodsky (1884-1939), which was painted six years after Lenin's death, many paintings of Lenin show him writing or holding a book; these validate his self-appointed position as the legitimate interpreter of doctrine.
The October Revolution was followed by almost four years of civil war, which saw an emphasis on "agitational propaganda"
Page 77:
or agit-prop, a term that descirbed the more immediate, emotional techniques of propaganda. Of early agit-prop practices, street festivals and mass-action dramas revealed a version of public art which stressed popular involvement. Aiming to maintain the momentum of revolutionary enthusiasm in th face of the hardships of the civil war, agit-prop gorups sought to create an atmosphere of colourful celebration. Alongside the posters, murals, and huge decorations on buildings, elaborate floats using trucks, trams, or horse-drawn crats carried tableaux of revolutionary themes. Derived partly from festivals of the French Revolution, they also combined the tradition of Russian Orthodox ceremonial processions with the carnivalesque styles of folk entertainment, incorporating clowns, life-size puppets, street criers, and circus acrobats as wellas the ballet of the Bolshoi Theatre. The third anniversary of the October Revolution was celebrated by a reenactment of the storming of the Winter Palace performed by a cast of thousands mobilized by the drama groups of the Red Army and Navy. Outside the palace a stage had been built with two platforms, a red one for the workers and a white one for the aristocrats. A battle was fought out on a bridge between them. The aristocrats were routed and fled in trucks pursued by military searchlight beams and accompanied by artillery salvoes and a volley fired from the Aurora battleship anchored nearby on the River Neva. Inside the palace, with what the director called a "cinematic effect," each
Page 78:
window in turn was lit up by a spotlight to reveal a sequence of fighting scenes. Victory was announced by a firework display on the roof while a massed band played the Internationale.
The dramatic reinvention of the revolution as carnival related to a vein in Marxism which envisages the future as a condition in which all human activities, harmonized by collective endeavour, become playful or creative. By the late 1930s, this ludic spirit would begin to decay into the dour and ominous parades of marching athletes and military hardware that characterized Stalin's state rituals and that would increasingly resemble the morbid cremonies of Nazi Germany. But in its earliest years, under the slogan"the theatricalization of life," mass drama, evised by artists more than politicians, sought to dissolve distinctions between actors and spectators, and between the production and reception of propganda. This presaged later Nazi methods of mass-participation in propaganda events, but the Soviet version was motivated by more egalitarian values. The implied ideal of ending artistic professionalism and beginning a culture of universal creativity was close to the spirit of the network of proletarian culture organizations called the proletkults. Founded in 1917, the proletkults were a movement of utopian adult education, seeking to generate collective working-class culture from the roots. By the end of 1918 the movement was said to have some 400,000 members, 1,000 traning studios and cells in every major factory. Its leading theorist, Aleksandr Bogdanov (1873-1928), was a philosopher, science fiction novelist and maverick Party member who believed with mystical fervour in the supernatural powers ready to be set free by
Page 79:
the collectivization of the working classes and the harnessing of their creative potential. Bogdanov also insisted that art develops independently of economic and political spheres, and sought the autonomy of the proletkults from Party control. To Lenin, however, this amounted to a challenge to the Part's authority and in 1920 he moved against the organization, limiting its powers and bringing it under Party jurisdiction. Bogdanov was forced out of the proletkults and turned his attention to medical experiments. He was fascinated by the potential of blood transfusions, which embodied his faith in science and human regeneration. As if confirming his belief in the sacrifice of the individual for humanity's future, he died in 1928 while experimenting on himself.
Lenin acknowledged the value of the mass dramas, but wanted a more dignified statement of Bolshevism's cultural standards. His own contribution to this was known as the plan for monumental propaganda, which he announced in April 1918 in Pravda under a healine which called for "The Removal of monuments Erected in Honour of the Tsars and their Servants and the Production of Projects for Monuments to the Russian Socialist Revolution." Lenin proposed putting the unemployed to work in pulling down Tsarist statues and replacing them with new monuments commissioned to celebrate revered figures of the past. A list of more than sixty of these was to include historic revolutionaries such as Marx, Engels, Robespierre, and Spartacus, as well as cultural figuers such as Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Rublev, Chopin, and Byron. The statues, in bust or full-length, were hastily knocked up in temporary materials like wood and plaster, and formally unveiled in numerous town squares and on street corners.
Lenin's plan was designed to convey a number of messages about his own views on the role of art. Its ethos was educational - each statue bore a plaque with a brief biography and history lesson - and in contrast with Bogdanov's grass-roots proletarianism, Lenin's was an exercise in sober didacticism aimed at elevating the popular taste. The inclusion of politically conservative writers and artists may also have been intended to reassure the non-communist bourgeoisie about the Part's aesthetic tolerance and respect for Russian heritage.
Extra reading:
Engineers of the Masses: Fordism, Fascism and the Theatre
Sunday, 25 April 2010
Art and Propaganda, by Toby Clark
Introduction
Page 7:
The neutrality of the word "propaganda" was lost in the First World War, when the collision of obsolete infantry tactics with advanced military technology - especially the machine gun and fast-loading artillery - killed soldiers in such large numbers that traditional methods of recruiment were no longer adequate to replace them. The government at war were required to view public opinion as a matter of national importance, and through the developed media of mass communication such as cheap newspapers, posters, and cinema, individuals became aware of being addressed by the message-making insititutions of the state on a more or less daily basis. The wartime perception of propaganda's links with censorship and misinformation was compounded by its incresed application as psychological warfare waged against the morale of enemies.
After the First World War, government propaganda continued in democratic countries, though official agencies now preferred to refer to it with euphemisms such as "information servies" or "public education". This avoidance of the word, caused by a new sense of its incompatibility with the ideals of democracy, meant that " propaganda" was increasingly associated with the emergent one-party states, such as Sovient Russia from 1917 or Nazi Germany from 1933, which both used it unashamedly in official terminology. In the Western democracies "propaganda" became linked with "totalitarianism", a largely polemical term, which until 1945 was used in the main to describe fascist dictatorships and thereafter, during the Cold War, was frequently applied to the Soviet Union and other communist states.
The present-day connotations of "propaganda art" in the West were to a great extent shaped in the Cold War climate of the United States. From the mid-1940s, New York emerged as the leading centre of modern art, just as the United States now led the world economy. The dominant artistic values of the period were most influentially voiced by the critic Clement Greenberg (1909-94) who since 1939 had warned against the corrupting effects of what he called "kitsch", which he saw both in American mass culture and in the populist official art of Nazi Germany and the Sovient Union. To defend true art against this, artists, should attend to purely artistic concerns; to make, in effect, abstract art which would be immune to political exploitation. The idea that the artistic imagination should remain uncompromised by ideological commitments was not new, but, as argued by critics such as Greenberg in the decades which followed the Second World War, the view gained a special force by its reiteration throughout a growing system of museums, galleries, and publications devoted to modernist art.
These supported a persuasive historical account which implied that the highest achievements of Western art since the mid-nineteenth century were the result of art's liberation from its traditional patron groups: church, monarchy, aristocracy, and government. Freed from serving these patrons, art could be devoted to the progressive development of its formal qualities and paid for by consumers who appreciated artistic innovation as evidence of the natural creativity of the human spirit.
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The numerous international exhibitions which exported Abstrat Expressionism were coordinated by New York's Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in the late 1940s and 1950s and accompanied by curators' statements in which nationalist rhetoric contrasted the "mark of freedom" in American painting with the regimented kitsch of Soviet communism. The realization that some of these exhibitions had been secretly funded by the CIA, a fact widely known by the mid-1970s, made a deep impression on a generation of artists and critics radicalized by the Vietnam War and the Civil Rights movement, some of who, challenged the idea that art should or even could remain separated from political concerns. Among these was the critic Lucy Lippard (b. 1937), who in 1980 wrote an artical for the feminist magazine Heresies called "Some Propaganda for Propaganda". She argued for the rehabilitation of the word, and encouraged artists to try to make "good propaganda": "Such a 'good propaganda' would be what art should be - a provocation, a new way of seeing and thinking about what goes on around us." This positive use of the word has not caught on widely, but the question of whether art can be both political and "good" remains a live issue ofr contemporary artists.
Beyond the controversies provoked by modern motions of propaganda, the use of art in the service of politics has a deep and enduring history. Rulers of the city-states, kingdomes, and empires of the ancient world used art on a monumental scale to reiterate their power, glorify their victories, or to intimidate and defame their enemies. The political symbols and rituals of imperial Rome were highly elaborate under the first-and second-century emperors, whose images were commemorated in monumental statues and a flow of coins and medals distributed throughout the empire. Architectural spaces in Rome were designed for spectacular ceremonies of triumph, obedience and unity, and for parading the booty and captives of war.
Throughout the Middle Ages, art was closely bound to politics because the spheres of religious and worldly authority were largely indivisible. Medieval works of art that ostensibly represented Christian themes were often intended primarily to support the ideological interests of the church bodies or secular powers who commissioned them. Under these conditions, the artist's arims were invariably subsumed within those of their patrons. From the early sixteenth century, particularly in Renaissance Italy, a few artists achieved personal fame, but even the most celebrated were sometimes required to use their skills to design their masters' political accessories, such as heraldic devices for banners, clothing, and armour.
The idea that artitic production might be motivated by the artist's own political convictions barely existed until the late eighteenth century. The French painter Jacques-Louis David (1748-1825) stands out as an early example of an artist who chose to unite his aesthetic and political principles. he fervently progagated the ideals of the French Revolution, painting portraits of its leaders and designing itspageants. He also becaume a powerful politician in his own right, though he was imprisoned for his acitivities after the fall of his hero, the French revolutionary Robespierre (1758-94).
In contrast, the work of David's contemporary Francisco de Goya (1746-1828) exemplifies that of an artist paintfully divided by the transition between traditional and modern conceptions of the artist's role. Goya had been appointed First Painter to the King of Spain in 1799, and as a court artist he made portraits of Charles IV and other members of the Spanish and Bourbon royalty. Yet he was also a liberal-minded intellectural, critical of the repressive and corrupt policies of his employers, and in his own privately made graphic works he attacked the abuse of power and the barbarism of war.
Goya's ambiguous position was not unusual during the period of Romanticism, which lasted until approimately the mid-nineteenth century. Romanticism asserted the artist's individualism and social independence, as evoked in Shelley's famous pronouncement in 1821 that poets "are the unacknowledged legislators of the world." For the future of political art, this new notion of the "genius" had two crucial and conflicting effects. While it might imply that the artist could be a critic of society, it also promoted the idea that self-expression is the true function of art, and one which should not be reduced to everyday social or political concerns.
This conflict has reverberated throughout twentieth-century debates on the relationship between art and politics. These ebates have centred on questions which are still hightly relevant: Does the use of art for propaganda always imply the subordination of aesthetic
quality to the message? Alternatively, can the criteria for judging aesthetic quality ever be separated from ideological values? If propaganda art aims to persuade, how does it do this? And to what extent does it succeed?
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We can assume that each individual understands an image in a different way, and that sometimes the meanings inferred by viewers have been entirely at odds with those intended by the propagandist.
Propaganda in art is not always inherent in the image itself, and may not stem from the artist's intentions. Rather, art can become propaganda through its function and site, its framing within public or private spaces and its relationshup with a network of other kinds of objects and actions. The means of making an ideological statement are almost limitless: Architecture, theatre, music, sport, clothes, and haircuts can communicate a political view, as can spectacles of violence, such as book-burning, assassination, suicide, and terrorism. The aerial bombing ofcivilians, which has become a tourine feature of modern warfare, maybe often be conceived as a communicative action rather than a military one. Usually, the various modes of communication used by a government or political movement cohere to form a more or less systematic programme. And often, art operates within this system through a close relationship with compatible images in films, magazines, advertisements, popular music, and, more recently (and most potently), television and computer networks.
The history of modern propaganda is therefore intimately linked with the rise of mass culture. "Mass culture" is equally hard to define. While it connotes an old-fashioned and authoritarian idea of "the masses", it also implies the mass-production of images and messages by industrial techniques. Both Lenin in Soviet Russia and Hitler in Nazi Germany recognized that the cinema would be a far more effective instrument of persuasion than paintings. But they also placed great importance on art. In their differeny ways, Soviet communism and German Nazism were both viewed by their leaders as movements with a cultural and not just a political mission. Only hand-made works on art in the traditional forms of painting and sculpture could fully convey the prestige of high culture. However, under these regimes propaganda art was often produced in such large quantities and required to conform with guidelines so rigid, that even if made by hand, the results could be described as mass-produced art.
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Chapter One - radical traditons of art in the early decades of the twentieth century.
- Marxist ideas
- early feminist art and its links with avant-garde movements.
Chapter Two - art under fascism, the Third Reich.
Chapter Three - Sovient Union.
Chapter Four - wartime propaganda under Western democracies.
Chapter Five - protest since the Vietnam War.
Extra reading:
现代主义 on wiki
Political Science 312 by St. Francis Xavier University
Art and Propaganda, by Toby Clark
ISBN 0-297-83614-5
Page 7:
The neutrality of the word "propaganda" was lost in the First World War, when the collision of obsolete infantry tactics with advanced military technology - especially the machine gun and fast-loading artillery - killed soldiers in such large numbers that traditional methods of recruiment were no longer adequate to replace them. The government at war were required to view public opinion as a matter of national importance, and through the developed media of mass communication such as cheap newspapers, posters, and cinema, individuals became aware of being addressed by the message-making insititutions of the state on a more or less daily basis. The wartime perception of propaganda's links with censorship and misinformation was compounded by its incresed application as psychological warfare waged against the morale of enemies.
After the First World War, government propaganda continued in democratic countries, though official agencies now preferred to refer to it with euphemisms such as "information servies" or "public education". This avoidance of the word, caused by a new sense of its incompatibility with the ideals of democracy, meant that " propaganda" was increasingly associated with the emergent one-party states, such as Sovient Russia from 1917 or Nazi Germany from 1933, which both used it unashamedly in official terminology. In the Western democracies "propaganda" became linked with "totalitarianism", a largely polemical term, which until 1945 was used in the main to describe fascist dictatorships and thereafter, during the Cold War, was frequently applied to the Soviet Union and other communist states.
The present-day connotations of "propaganda art" in the West were to a great extent shaped in the Cold War climate of the United States. From the mid-1940s, New York emerged as the leading centre of modern art, just as the United States now led the world economy. The dominant artistic values of the period were most influentially voiced by the critic Clement Greenberg (1909-94) who since 1939 had warned against the corrupting effects of what he called "kitsch", which he saw both in American mass culture and in the populist official art of Nazi Germany and the Sovient Union. To defend true art against this, artists, should attend to purely artistic concerns; to make, in effect, abstract art which would be immune to political exploitation. The idea that the artistic imagination should remain uncompromised by ideological commitments was not new, but, as argued by critics such as Greenberg in the decades which followed the Second World War, the view gained a special force by its reiteration throughout a growing system of museums, galleries, and publications devoted to modernist art.
These supported a persuasive historical account which implied that the highest achievements of Western art since the mid-nineteenth century were the result of art's liberation from its traditional patron groups: church, monarchy, aristocracy, and government. Freed from serving these patrons, art could be devoted to the progressive development of its formal qualities and paid for by consumers who appreciated artistic innovation as evidence of the natural creativity of the human spirit.
Page 9:
The numerous international exhibitions which exported Abstrat Expressionism were coordinated by New York's Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in the late 1940s and 1950s and accompanied by curators' statements in which nationalist rhetoric contrasted the "mark of freedom" in American painting with the regimented kitsch of Soviet communism. The realization that some of these exhibitions had been secretly funded by the CIA, a fact widely known by the mid-1970s, made a deep impression on a generation of artists and critics radicalized by the Vietnam War and the Civil Rights movement, some of who, challenged the idea that art should or even could remain separated from political concerns. Among these was the critic Lucy Lippard (b. 1937), who in 1980 wrote an artical for the feminist magazine Heresies called "Some Propaganda for Propaganda". She argued for the rehabilitation of the word, and encouraged artists to try to make "good propaganda": "Such a 'good propaganda' would be what art should be - a provocation, a new way of seeing and thinking about what goes on around us." This positive use of the word has not caught on widely, but the question of whether art can be both political and "good" remains a live issue ofr contemporary artists.
Beyond the controversies provoked by modern motions of propaganda, the use of art in the service of politics has a deep and enduring history. Rulers of the city-states, kingdomes, and empires of the ancient world used art on a monumental scale to reiterate their power, glorify their victories, or to intimidate and defame their enemies. The political symbols and rituals of imperial Rome were highly elaborate under the first-and second-century emperors, whose images were commemorated in monumental statues and a flow of coins and medals distributed throughout the empire. Architectural spaces in Rome were designed for spectacular ceremonies of triumph, obedience and unity, and for parading the booty and captives of war.
Throughout the Middle Ages, art was closely bound to politics because the spheres of religious and worldly authority were largely indivisible. Medieval works of art that ostensibly represented Christian themes were often intended primarily to support the ideological interests of the church bodies or secular powers who commissioned them. Under these conditions, the artist's arims were invariably subsumed within those of their patrons. From the early sixteenth century, particularly in Renaissance Italy, a few artists achieved personal fame, but even the most celebrated were sometimes required to use their skills to design their masters' political accessories, such as heraldic devices for banners, clothing, and armour.
The idea that artitic production might be motivated by the artist's own political convictions barely existed until the late eighteenth century. The French painter Jacques-Louis David (1748-1825) stands out as an early example of an artist who chose to unite his aesthetic and political principles. he fervently progagated the ideals of the French Revolution, painting portraits of its leaders and designing itspageants. He also becaume a powerful politician in his own right, though he was imprisoned for his acitivities after the fall of his hero, the French revolutionary Robespierre (1758-94).
In contrast, the work of David's contemporary Francisco de Goya (1746-1828) exemplifies that of an artist paintfully divided by the transition between traditional and modern conceptions of the artist's role. Goya had been appointed First Painter to the King of Spain in 1799, and as a court artist he made portraits of Charles IV and other members of the Spanish and Bourbon royalty. Yet he was also a liberal-minded intellectural, critical of the repressive and corrupt policies of his employers, and in his own privately made graphic works he attacked the abuse of power and the barbarism of war.
Goya's ambiguous position was not unusual during the period of Romanticism, which lasted until approimately the mid-nineteenth century. Romanticism asserted the artist's individualism and social independence, as evoked in Shelley's famous pronouncement in 1821 that poets "are the unacknowledged legislators of the world." For the future of political art, this new notion of the "genius" had two crucial and conflicting effects. While it might imply that the artist could be a critic of society, it also promoted the idea that self-expression is the true function of art, and one which should not be reduced to everyday social or political concerns.
This conflict has reverberated throughout twentieth-century debates on the relationship between art and politics. These ebates have centred on questions which are still hightly relevant: Does the use of art for propaganda always imply the subordination of aesthetic
quality to the message? Alternatively, can the criteria for judging aesthetic quality ever be separated from ideological values? If propaganda art aims to persuade, how does it do this? And to what extent does it succeed?
Page 13:
We can assume that each individual understands an image in a different way, and that sometimes the meanings inferred by viewers have been entirely at odds with those intended by the propagandist.
Propaganda in art is not always inherent in the image itself, and may not stem from the artist's intentions. Rather, art can become propaganda through its function and site, its framing within public or private spaces and its relationshup with a network of other kinds of objects and actions. The means of making an ideological statement are almost limitless: Architecture, theatre, music, sport, clothes, and haircuts can communicate a political view, as can spectacles of violence, such as book-burning, assassination, suicide, and terrorism. The aerial bombing ofcivilians, which has become a tourine feature of modern warfare, maybe often be conceived as a communicative action rather than a military one. Usually, the various modes of communication used by a government or political movement cohere to form a more or less systematic programme. And often, art operates within this system through a close relationship with compatible images in films, magazines, advertisements, popular music, and, more recently (and most potently), television and computer networks.
The history of modern propaganda is therefore intimately linked with the rise of mass culture. "Mass culture" is equally hard to define. While it connotes an old-fashioned and authoritarian idea of "the masses", it also implies the mass-production of images and messages by industrial techniques. Both Lenin in Soviet Russia and Hitler in Nazi Germany recognized that the cinema would be a far more effective instrument of persuasion than paintings. But they also placed great importance on art. In their differeny ways, Soviet communism and German Nazism were both viewed by their leaders as movements with a cultural and not just a political mission. Only hand-made works on art in the traditional forms of painting and sculpture could fully convey the prestige of high culture. However, under these regimes propaganda art was often produced in such large quantities and required to conform with guidelines so rigid, that even if made by hand, the results could be described as mass-produced art.
Page 15:
Chapter One - radical traditons of art in the early decades of the twentieth century.
- Marxist ideas
- early feminist art and its links with avant-garde movements.
Chapter Two - art under fascism, the Third Reich.
Chapter Three - Sovient Union.
Chapter Four - wartime propaganda under Western democracies.
Chapter Five - protest since the Vietnam War.
Extra reading:
现代主义 on wiki
Political Science 312 by St. Francis Xavier University
Art and Propaganda, by Toby Clark
ISBN 0-297-83614-5
Tuesday, 13 April 2010
Thursday, 1 April 2010
Wednesday, 31 March 2010
about the course flow
关于每一堂课的Keyword Brainstorm:
1. The Artist Within: Left-brain vs. Right-brain Perception
To know your own body through images & to raise interest in drawing skill practise.
* First drawings:
Up-down reversed drawing for classmate; blind drawing to music; left hand drawing.
* Involve choerography.
From face expression, hand gesture to body movement. Degas.
* Analyse the image:
Strokes; composition; color. vs emotion; feelings; intention.
* Dot, line, surface, volumn. Kandinsky.
2. Purpose of Art: Imitation vs. Expression
To compare and apply the two different ways of art-making: copy and/or extension of the nature.
＊在此想比较中西方自然与画家的关系。以及绘画材料对画的影响。
The eastern: 从玄学思想影响的魏晋山水开始到文人画的大写意。具象画较晚出现。
The western: Medieval religous painting, Da Vinci, Jan van EyckCézanne, to Modernism.
Some tools: (composition from last lecture) to GRID. Dürer.
Extension:
* The students' understanding of the nature.
* Do a sound recording of students drawing same strokes over and over. Students do a solo one after one. (Can also use Akio Susuki's rubber/glass painting.)
3. Painting and Poetry in Western and Eastern Traditions
Literature & Visual literacy.
Illustrations for Bible.
William Blake.
Chinese poems and scenery paintings.
Instructional Paintings by Yoko Ono.
4. Western Academy Painting vs. Chinese Intellectual Paintings
* need reconsideration. I would like to input knowledge about western painters in China from Ming-Qing dynasties and minimize the content of western academy painting, since this concept varies a lot in styles and concept through different stages of art history.
5. Painting after the Invention of Photography
Camera obscura
The dutch scenery paintings. Vermeer
David Hockney.
Super-realism in current scene.
6. Impressionist and Expressionist and Their Influence from the East
Turner.
Monet.
Gauguin.
Lautrec
* Suggest to add a lecture to talk about Ukiyo-e.
7. Exploring Unique Visions: Cubism and Abstract Schools of Paintings
Cubism's linkage to space - 3d, video/time - 4d.
Picasso. Mondrian. Duchamp. Dadaism. Milo. Magaret. Klee.
8. Women Painters from Different Countries: Engendered Eyes and Experiences
Women Artists link on wiki.
Some possible choices:
Frida Kahlo. 潘玉良. Valadon. 单峥. Cassatt. Yayoi Kusama.
9. Eastern Masters Trained in the West: Reinventing the Ancient Visions
10. Revolutionary Paintings: Russian Prints and Chinese Woodcut Prints
* can't find much information about russian prints...
Escher.
Kollwitz.
11. Japanese Manga vs. American Comics
Suggest to broaden the countries/artists. for exampple: 丰子恺.
Character styling. Cosplay. Story telling.
12. World Maps in Various Forms
Information Design.
13. Mapping in Visual Storytelling and Design
Make a sketchbook / booklet, a summary of the whole course.
1. The Artist Within: Left-brain vs. Right-brain Perception
To know your own body through images & to raise interest in drawing skill practise.
* First drawings:
Up-down reversed drawing for classmate; blind drawing to music; left hand drawing.
* Involve choerography.
From face expression, hand gesture to body movement. Degas.
* Analyse the image:
Strokes; composition; color. vs emotion; feelings; intention.
* Dot, line, surface, volumn. Kandinsky.
2. Purpose of Art: Imitation vs. Expression
To compare and apply the two different ways of art-making: copy and/or extension of the nature.
＊在此想比较中西方自然与画家的关系。以及绘画材料对画的影响。
The eastern: 从玄学思想影响的魏晋山水开始到文人画的大写意。具象画较晚出现。
The western: Medieval religous painting, Da Vinci, Jan van EyckCézanne, to Modernism.
Some tools: (composition from last lecture) to GRID. Dürer.
Extension:
* The students' understanding of the nature.
* Do a sound recording of students drawing same strokes over and over. Students do a solo one after one. (Can also use Akio Susuki's rubber/glass painting.)
3. Painting and Poetry in Western and Eastern Traditions
Literature & Visual literacy.
Illustrations for Bible.
William Blake.
Chinese poems and scenery paintings.
Instructional Paintings by Yoko Ono.
4. Western Academy Painting vs. Chinese Intellectual Paintings
* need reconsideration. I would like to input knowledge about western painters in China from Ming-Qing dynasties and minimize the content of western academy painting, since this concept varies a lot in styles and concept through different stages of art history.
5. Painting after the Invention of Photography
Camera obscura
The dutch scenery paintings. Vermeer
David Hockney.
Super-realism in current scene.
6. Impressionist and Expressionist and Their Influence from the East
Turner.
Monet.
Gauguin.
Lautrec
* Suggest to add a lecture to talk about Ukiyo-e.
7. Exploring Unique Visions: Cubism and Abstract Schools of Paintings
Cubism's linkage to space - 3d, video/time - 4d.
Picasso. Mondrian. Duchamp. Dadaism. Milo. Magaret. Klee.
8. Women Painters from Different Countries: Engendered Eyes and Experiences
Women Artists link on wiki.
Some possible choices:
Frida Kahlo. 潘玉良. Valadon. 单峥. Cassatt. Yayoi Kusama.
9. Eastern Masters Trained in the West: Reinventing the Ancient Visions
10. Revolutionary Paintings: Russian Prints and Chinese Woodcut Prints
* can't find much information about russian prints...
Escher.
Kollwitz.
11. Japanese Manga vs. American Comics
Suggest to broaden the countries/artists. for exampple: 丰子恺.
Character styling. Cosplay. Story telling.
12. World Maps in Various Forms
Information Design.
13. Mapping in Visual Storytelling and Design
Make a sketchbook / booklet, a summary of the whole course.
西方发现中国丛书
在图书馆瞥见的一本《清宫洋画家》原来出自一个西方学者的角度，系［西方发现中国丛书］之三。译者耿昇的另一些译作似乎很值得一读，有〈中国文化西传欧洲史〉、〈中国对法国哲学思想形成的影响〉。可借来一读。
現僅作抄錄：
P5
利瑪竇（Matto Ricci）絕不會忘記，主要是科學，是西方科學才可以吸引中國人，才會為西洋人的文明昭雪，並由此而提醒那些熟悉底細情況的人，產生受基督宗教歸化的想法。
P9
被啓蒙時代人士理想化了的18世紀的中國形象，輿真實的中國之形象，該有多大的差異啊！當時中國已經僵化，鄙視貿易、利潤和國際交流，並且拒絕接受外國的發明創造。中國在他們的發明中本來是超前西方數世紀，18世紀的中國卻在沉睡中，並不再希望前進發展了。
現僅作抄錄：
P5
利瑪竇（Matto Ricci）絕不會忘記，主要是科學，是西方科學才可以吸引中國人，才會為西洋人的文明昭雪，並由此而提醒那些熟悉底細情況的人，產生受基督宗教歸化的想法。
P9
被啓蒙時代人士理想化了的18世紀的中國形象，輿真實的中國之形象，該有多大的差異啊！當時中國已經僵化，鄙視貿易、利潤和國際交流，並且拒絕接受外國的發明創造。中國在他們的發明中本來是超前西方數世紀，18世紀的中國卻在沉睡中，並不再希望前進發展了。
Monday, 29 March 2010
Female Artists
The ones I like from the book of by Zhou Qing.
Hannah Höch
Cannot miss. The Dada lady.
Tamara de Lempicka
She is a beautiful Polish. Her person is a bit more attractive than her paintings.
Though they both really have a style.
Frida Kahlo
Her works on the internet. Frida will definitely be covered in the lectures.
Yoko Oko. Just because her being together with a man from another culture.
Judy Chicago, but the only good one is "the Dinner Party".
Vanessa Beecroft
Her drawings are very cute.
:)
Though, this book itself is quite boring. I don't recommend.
Hannah Höch
Cannot miss. The Dada lady.
Tamara de Lempicka
She is a beautiful Polish. Her person is a bit more attractive than her paintings.
Though they both really have a style.
Frida Kahlo
Her works on the internet. Frida will definitely be covered in the lectures.
Yoko Oko. Just because her being together with a man from another culture.
Judy Chicago, but the only good one is "the Dinner Party".
Vanessa Beecroft
Her drawings are very cute.
:)
Though, this book itself is quite boring. I don't recommend.
Monday, 22 March 2010
中西画家对自然的理解和表现
山水画的心态－－宗炳之“畅神”
《中国绘画这棵树》P45
山水画开始脱离人物画成为独立的画种，是在六朝时期。其时顾恺之绘有《庐山图》，被称为“山水之祖”；宗炳写有《画山水序》，谈山水与“道”的关系，奠定了中国绘画的哲学基础。当时山水画的发展，和魏晋玄学的兴起有关。“以玄对山水”，用山水画体现玄学的意义，而导致山水画的勃兴。
《范山模水》P26
约在元嘉初年，宗炳作了可能是生平最后的一次远游，他“西陟荆巫，南登衡岳”，并且“结宅横山，欲怀尚平之志”。然而其间却不意染病，无奈回到江陵休养。正是这次染疾和年事渐高等原因，令“性本爱山丘”的宗炳在内心深处产生了一种莫名的恐慌－－“老疾俱至，名山恐难遍睹”，于是他决定“唯当澄怀观道，卧以游之”，将平生所游，“画象布色，构兹云岭”，“皆图之于室”，在澄怀卧游之余，他面对着那些画壁上的景物，“抚琴动操，欲令众山皆响”。就在创作这些山水壁画的同时，宗炳写下了也许是中国山水画发展史上最为经典的一篇文论－－《画山水序》。
P27
在文中他精微地描写了他忘情地面对自己亲笔画在墙上的那些山川故友时内心的细腻感受，所谓“闲居理气，拂觞鸣琴，披图幽对，坐究四荒。不违天励之丛，独应无人之野”，于是乎，他由衷地发出了一番极富震撼力的感叹，并且明确地宣称他画山水画的目的道：“圣贤映于绝代，万趣融其神思，余复何为哉？畅神而已！”“神之所畅，孰有先焉！”
透纳
于油画创作中运用水彩画的技巧。
对印象派有重要影响。
《中国绘画这棵树》P45
山水画开始脱离人物画成为独立的画种，是在六朝时期。其时顾恺之绘有《庐山图》，被称为“山水之祖”；宗炳写有《画山水序》，谈山水与“道”的关系，奠定了中国绘画的哲学基础。当时山水画的发展，和魏晋玄学的兴起有关。“以玄对山水”，用山水画体现玄学的意义，而导致山水画的勃兴。
《范山模水》P26
约在元嘉初年，宗炳作了可能是生平最后的一次远游，他“西陟荆巫，南登衡岳”，并且“结宅横山，欲怀尚平之志”。然而其间却不意染病，无奈回到江陵休养。正是这次染疾和年事渐高等原因，令“性本爱山丘”的宗炳在内心深处产生了一种莫名的恐慌－－“老疾俱至，名山恐难遍睹”，于是他决定“唯当澄怀观道，卧以游之”，将平生所游，“画象布色，构兹云岭”，“皆图之于室”，在澄怀卧游之余，他面对着那些画壁上的景物，“抚琴动操，欲令众山皆响”。就在创作这些山水壁画的同时，宗炳写下了也许是中国山水画发展史上最为经典的一篇文论－－《画山水序》。
P27
在文中他精微地描写了他忘情地面对自己亲笔画在墙上的那些山川故友时内心的细腻感受，所谓“闲居理气，拂觞鸣琴，披图幽对，坐究四荒。不违天励之丛，独应无人之野”，于是乎，他由衷地发出了一番极富震撼力的感叹，并且明确地宣称他画山水画的目的道：“圣贤映于绝代，万趣融其神思，余复何为哉？畅神而已！”“神之所畅，孰有先焉！”
透纳
于油画创作中运用水彩画的技巧。
对印象派有重要影响。
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