Maximalist antidote

Marian Bantjes on her use of patterns and the baroque in a codified world. 

 
John Maeda on simplicity and complexity.

Minimalist syn-drone

I went to a really interesting presentation at CAA a few weeks back by the Association for Critical Race Art History, that included a paper presentation by Charles L. Davis on locating the frameworks of race in architectural style and ornament. (You can watch a similar presentation here.) The perspective posed was compelling: that style and ornament derive from a cultural history, yet there is no discussion of said history after it is adopted in architecture. It seems like there are many instances in aesthetic practices where formalism reigns at the expense of identifying or discussing the importance of the cultural or vernacular that created that aesthetic. There is definitely a long history of utopian experiments that sought to universalize and eradicate the problems of difference (specifically in primary forms of communication, such as language.) Yet most of these experiments fail (otherwise I'd be writing this in Esperanto, I guess.) If they are considered experiments in formalism, they remove the impetus that necessitates language development (perspectives on experience and their subsequent descriptions in order to communicate or perpetuate them.) But what about other modes of production that communicate ideals, such as architecture, art, design and music? These reductive forms, by appealing to a commonality of experience, often talk about their source material, yet are removed from a discussion of the meaningfulness of that cultural history. And minimalism has become something adopted by the market as a means to ignore the problem of difference by clearly exposing the logical, formal elements. As with language, there is a tension between speaking to everyone and speaking to a few; with universalizing an experience and addressing its questions or problems.

I found very little in an initial search for discussions of race in minimalist avant-garde music, but the work of Julius Eastman (an openly gay, black pianist and composer who was at the music department at the University at Buffalo) was often cited as point of discussion. Eastman's compositions are mostly lost, due to a tragic spiral downward towards the end of his life, but he dedicated his output to an exploration of an organic principle of reduction, where in subsequent sections "the information is taken out at a gradual and logical rate." His music also attempts to examine issues of race and identity through these forms. It's surprising that most of the reviews of his work refrain from any discussions of race at all, despite his highly controversial titles. An example of his work is above.

a hole

Where you used to be, there is a hole in the world, which I find myself constantly walking around in the daytime, and falling in at night.  
—Edna St. Vincent Millay

"This then, I thought, as I looked round about me, is the representation of history. It requires a falsification of perspective. We, the survivors, see everything from above, see everything at once, and still we do not know how it was."
— W.G. Sebald

Found

Yesterday, I bought some industrial shelves from a woman who runs a sewing and miscellany shop. She had posted them on Craigslist, which I've loved for the past year because it is affordable and eliminates the more mysterious aspects of a market economy. I've found most of the sellers I've dealt with to be kind and interested in someone using their discarded items that they themselves have no further use for. I suppose that plays off of my own sentimentality: that even things discarded are carefully passed on to another specific user instead of thrown out or anonymously donated.
The shelves are great, a much-needed addition to our cluttered workspace. It was somehow comforting to know that they came from a similar situation: of being filled with fabric, old vintage items, miscellany. The woman who sold them to us showed us a wooden box of cards she had found. She had not seen them in a long time, hidden somewhere on the shelves before their dis-assembly. She was collecting playing cards she found on the street, in the hopes that one day she would have a full deck. It was a curious exercise in ordering the chaotic, and also putting faith in the random. It's beautiful to think that the found cards would not all be the same, that there was an entire deck of mismatched cards laying on streets, waiting for someone to bring them together. Like all curated collections, the order may come from the collector. It is sometimes their role to find the meaning in the accumulation.
After we had loaded up and paid, she said very seriously: "Now remember, take time to set up your shelves and organize. It's very important to do that."

Magnetism

"All of nature in its awful vastness and incomprehensible complexity is in the end interrelated - worlds within worlds within worlds: the seen and the unseen - the physical and the immaterial are all connected - each exerting influence on the next - bound, as it were, by chains of analogy - magnetic chains. Every decision, every action mirrors, ripples, reflects and echoes throughout the whole of creation. The world is indeed bound with secret knots." -Valentine Worth

Seeing is believing

Great article in the New Yorker today regarding the methodology of those who authenticate the work of old masters.

The art historian Bernard Berenson described his talent as a “sixth sense.” “It is very largely a question of accumulated experience upon which your spirit sets unconsciously,” he said. “When I see a picture, in most cases, I recognize it at once as being or not being by the master it is ascribed to; the rest is merely a question of how to fish out the evidence that will make the conviction as plain to others as it is to me.” Berenson recalled that once, upon seeing a fake, he had felt an immediate discomfort in his stomach.

I was thinking about it as a nice analogue for how I (or other artists, for that matter) make an artwork. Over a period of time, abstract connections that make sense on what seems to be an instinctual level are made into words. It is almost as if the response to a life load of knowledge can materialize rather quickly, but the means to communicate why that makes sense takes longer than the formulation of the idea itself. To make a unique idea that is unique to an individual universal enough to be communicated is an interesting process, a primary function of the clunky tool we call language.