Aesthetic networks

Thank you
Brendan for the talk/visit/critique
Greg than you for the joy and activism
Marika the pokes and pulling at the heart strings
Galina for the chaos
Raquel for the bower bird nest of possibilities
Morgan for code
Tyler the depth
Jason for the intersections
Kirkholm for the precision
Ayo for the energy of the fully raised hand and the shine
Maggie for the interest
Joanne for the craft
Jessica for the permission
Nancy, c, Tosh, Katheryn, Natalya for the lipstick on coffee lids, Elizabeth for the pause, Ambrin and Kera, Morris, Tim, Kris, Yanique and Laura, Margarita

Mari

Val

Sonia

New york smarty pants

Dana, Michelle, Dana, Phyllis, Casey, Liz, Leonard, RAIN, Marina, Pia, Zz, AT,

Jutta Koether

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Jutta Koether’s paintings

perform on many levels.

(case study 3)

Jutta Koether’s artwork establishes a network with the surroundings and makes the white walled presentation of painting problematic.  In what way does the discourse around painting change when a piece is viewed alone versus when it becomes a part of a performance?

Jutta Koether - Seasons and Sacraments, February -April 2013, Dundee Contemporary Arts, Scotland

“Double Session” was the name for one of three performances performed at her solo exhibition Seasons and Sacraments.  It was an exhibition shown in two different countries, with the exhibition presentation changed to respond to the space. Double session is a reference to a lecture from 1970 where Derrida unfolds the difference between an original and a copy the hierarchical difference between the two. The copy performs not a mimicry of anything already in existence but should create/perform a truth of its own.

“In this speculum with no reality, in this mirror of a mirror, a difference or dyad does exist, since there are mimes and Phantoms. But it is a difference without reference, or rather a reference without a referent, without any first or last unit, a ghost that is the phantom of no flesh wandering about without a past, without any death, birth, or presence.”Derrida, 1981 p. 217

The borrowed Derrida title of the Jutta Koether performance invites visitors to the exhibit to question the reality of illusion, the stability of form and the connections between all realms not just between her artworks but all perception and reality.  In this exhibition a visitor would have found: relationships between paintings in many forms, the conflagration of high and low cultural references, and reason to question the meaning of illusion and symbols as they are described, translated, transmuted and described again. Her painting has been described as transitive, painting beside painting, and entering a network. Many of her exhibitions are activated by live performances.  

“You just create a moment, what I call “invisible brushstroke,” and that’s why I like performing, beside the fact that it’s not an object after all. It’s a very intense moment, for me similar to when I look at an artwork that is really fascinating.”- Jutta Koether Gordon, 2011

Jutta Koether’s work is heady but humorous, loud and subtle.  It performs and unfolds on many levels and differently over time.

   Jutta Koether New York 2007

Jutta Koether lives in Germany and New York, Teaches University. She studied philosophy. She makes paintings, plays music with rock stars, and creates assemblage/sculpture. She shows internationally she speaks on panels and cultural institutions as an art critic and artist.  She is a hyphenated artist.

Studying her exhibition, Seasons and Sacraments, creates the question of where is painting now? It recalls the tradition of a network of artworks working in tandem together across media like at Black Mountain College. Looking at Koether’s work confronts questions of taste, aesthetics, and the amount of cultural currency required to understand what at times feels like an inside joke. Koether's work is democratic in that many forms are presented in which invites many points of entry to understanding possible meanings.  At the same time, her work is also elitist in the fact that it's referring to philosophy like Derrida, historical painters like Pussin, and counter-cultures like Punk, and New York noise bands.

Koether, right of Martin Kippenberger 1981 Berlin

Jutta Koether did not go to art school. She studied philosophy in Cologne Germany.  She was most interested in the problems and potential of painting even then.  She met artists and discussed art through her writing work at SPEX magazine including Kippenberger, and Albert Oehlen. She was interested in what women can bring to painting.

“One of my first projects was titled “Smell of Female” after the record and song by The Cramps. I also like to incorporate living social facts from a point of view that is shaped by the female experience. I like to do things with painting that men cannot do. And yet finding the knowledge of the other doesn’t mean to limit yourself, or self-marginalization. I like tactics. Not to stabilize expectations but to confound them. Even those of your friends. Even your own.”Gordon, 2011

Charlene von Heyl, Michaela Eichwald, Jutta Koether, Cosima von Bonin, Isabelle Graw

1991, photo by Hans-Jörg Mayer as a play on “militant” feminism just before she left for NYC

Painting stands apart from other work. It is shown in a white-walled room. It has been defined by Greenberg and Rosenberg and now Krauss as a set thing- pigment on a flat support.  If painting does not perform its set roll then critics may see it as simply not painting. So, in what way does the discourse around painting change when a painting is viewed alone versus when it becomes a part of a performance?

“Her works do not just point melancholically to a social world forever left behind; they also, more enthusiastically, gesture toward a reality in which painting's peculiar means and ends will not necessarily be lost or made irrelevant but will be strategically aligned with other social forces.”Blom, 2011  The activating performances act alongside the paintings and transform the experience of them into an evolving art form that is alive with unfolding readings.

Koether performing with Lux Interior at Reena Spaulings, 2009

The performance of “The Thirst” that accompanied the exhibition at Moderna Museet, Stockholm, is noisy and dark. I quote the comments from the YouTube documentation...

kuku ruku 4 years ago

HORRIBLE. arty-farty rock needs to die

Vlad Putain 3 years ago

+kuku ruku
Fortunately for all, you will die sooner.

The gallery is crowded there are many young people and quite a few older art world adults standing with bemused or outwardly upset faces. Some of the younger set are visibly enthralled: eyes closed filming with their cell phones, eager to engage with the musician/artists. There is a makeshift stage with unfinished two-by-four vertical partitions. The performers sometimes enter the crowd; Kim Gordon walks with her guitar into the crowd at one point and rubs it on to a viewer’s shoulder.  Jutta Koether several times takes a break from playing her Roland synthesizer (heavily distorted so that it sounds more like noise and less like notes) to point a long tube with a video recorder near the end into the crowd. The apparatus that she uses to record looks aggressive almost like a long gun with a site on the end.  It passes close to people's faces, recording them as they record her. This footage is then used as part of the documentation. During the performance Koether also uses long tubes of what looks to be copper to play the synthesizer akwardly from  a distance. There are some spoken word elements performed by both Kim Gordon and Jutta Koether.

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Jutta Koether and Kim Gordon perform “The Thirst” at Moderna Museet, Stockholm 2011.

The youtube documentation I viewed was manipulated to combine Jutta Koether's footage, footage taken from someone or several people in the crowd, and frenetic shots of the paintings from the exhibit  around the room. The paintings also including the assemblage free standing artworks. The resulting video is decidedly Punk/DIY high-contrast, distorted and difficult to watch. The last words from the performance were Kim Gordon saying ”OK, you can come out now”.Moderna Museet, 2011  The performers leave the stage passing out photocopied papers, leaving the guitar set at angle to the amp in order to create feedback.  The audience does not know it is over until Jutta Koether returns to pick up some items and turn off the amps.  The crowd cheers.

Jutta Koether and Kim Gordon perform “The Thirst” at Moderna Museet, Stockholm 2011.

What is the relationship of the performance to the exhibition? There is an aesthetic connection: loud noise, loud colors (pink, red and orange) and text (all caps) in the paintings.  There is also a cultural connection between the back of the paintings covered in black, chains, skulls, viceral looking acrylic/glass to the underground noise/punk/goth scene of New York City.  During the performance do the paintings act as anything other than a backdrop or stage?  After the performance is the reading of the visual artwork altered?  It is impossible to tell without being there. There was a video display of the performance with low volume installed in the spot where the stage had been to mark its passing for the rest of the exhibition. In that way it does give any viewers that missed the live performance a sense of longing that may become attached to the images.  For visitors that are familiar with the underground club scene it may give them a feeling or warmth or nostalgia that connects to their experiences.  If you are an art fan but not a fan of loud noise would you bring that tension and stress to the readings of the paintings even it you did not attend the opening?  

Dämonen für Damen, Herren und Kinder, installation view at Utopie und Monument II, Graz, (2010). Courtesy Daniel Buchholz, Cologne / Berlin.

It is important to state that Koether considers her work painting, even when it takes different forms.  Koether’s work is different than the the installation artists with whom Rosalind Krauss seems perplexed. “Each of the installation artists, like Rebecca Horn or Jessica Stockholder, becomes marked by the very thing they wish to repress, namely painting, so in a sense they become the subject of (subjected to) painting. There seems to me to be a certain strange paradox in installation art in that it continues to refer to painting.”Plante,2013   Greenberg’s idea of meaningful painting is caught up in the idea of materiality and bringing something new to the confines of the medium.  Koether is coming at expanding the practice of painting by allowing painting to play in different forms and create connection in other art and in other thoughts and experiences.  While she may not being doing anything new with pigment she is trying to expand the definition of what painting can be.  She is expanding it with thoughtful exhibition design that controls and manipulates the viewers sight lines and paths of movement.  She is using materials that push the edge of what a support in painting can be, yes canvas, but also a pile of lacquered wood and found objects, formed transparent lucite with assemblage forming a ghostly table cloth, paintings with images on the front and the back visually gloating on glass walls that create everchanging combinations of images as you and other visitors walk around changing what in seen through and next to and reflected back.

Seasons and Sacraments, Dundee Contemporary Arts, 2013

Koether speaks about her mission while working for Texte Zur Kunst, “Here (at TzK) it has been possible for me  to conceive Painting AS painting, to do “inside” and “outside” jobs. To perform an ego-split, to act in opposition, meaning to live the “Figure of Paint” seriously and fundamentally and out of control, and to push my “fortune.” In my “canon”, to be able to conceive together what is bustling about in different stratifications, just like the strokes and layers on a tableau.” Her artistic role models are artists in whom she has “recognized practices of canon/counter-canon and who have translated antagonistic potentials into painting” Koether 2016 p5

Rock ON Jutta!

Works Cited

• Blom, I. “Jutta Koether.” Artforum International, (2011, Summer): 49, 394-395. Retrieved from http://proxy.artic.edu/login?url=https://search-proquest-com.proxy.artic.edu/docview/873817172?accountid=26320

• Cardoso, Ana. “The Staging of Restricted Means in the Landscape Redefines the Terms of Pleasure of Painting…Lux Interior by Jutta Koether”. Reena Spaulings, (2009, 05,18) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RRt0xMTHcTc&t=8s

• DCAdundee. “Jutta Koether- Seasons and Sacraments”. Dundee Contemporary Arts, (2013, 04, 10). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QE2D0DUlEnA&t=589s

• Derrida, Jacques. 1981. dissemination. Chicago: University Press.

• Gordon, Kim. “Jutta Koether: the inside job”. FlashArt, (Issue 276, 2011, 01-02). https://www.flashartonline.com/article/jutta-koether/

• “Jutta Koether & Kim Gordon Performance (2/2)”. Moderna Museet, (2011, 03,30).https://www.youtube.com/watch?annotation_id=annotation_879808&feature=iv&src_vid=RPT2C-3ujCU&v=wwQ2XInLNWA

• Koether, Jutta. “Figure of Paint: On The Incontrovertible!” Texte Zur Kunst. (Issue 25, January 2016): p 134 - 139.

• Plante, David. “The Real Thing: An Interview with Rosalind E. Krauss”. Artcritical, (2013, 08, 30). http://www.artcritical.com/2013/08/30/rosalind-krauss-interview/

Works Consulted

• Anastas, Rhea, Gregg Bordowitz, Andrea Fraser, Jutta Koether, and Glenn Ligon. "The Artist Is a Currency." Grey Room, no. 24 (2006): 110-25. http://www.jstor.org/stable/20442735

• Joselit, David. "Painting beside Itself." October 130 (2009): 125-34. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40368572.

• Sam, S. (2013, 09). Jutta koether. Artforum International., 52, 420-421. Retrieved from http://proxy.artic.edu/login?url=https://search-proquest-com.proxy.artic.edu/docview/1442738344?accountid=26320

Maxine Greene, case study 2

Maxine Greene was the mother on Aesthetic Education.  She spent most of her career at the Teachers College at Columbia University in NYC.  Additionally, she taught and lectured at the Lincoln Center Institute as its philosopher in residence. Greene continued and extended the educational philosophies of John Dewey concentrating on pragmatism and democracy.  She lived from 1917-2014.  She taught teachers and extolled the importance of imagination to true teaching and learning.  She championed the facilitation of students’ seeing new possibilities and awakening to embody becoming a part of community while embracing the integrity and worth of all people.  She lectured and wrote about the importance of keeping arts central in education.  She spread the importance of aesthetic education as THE way to foster imagination and awakening in the classroom and beyond.

“If the cultivation of imagination is important to the making of a community that might become a democratic community, then the release of imagination ought now to be one of the primary commitments of the public school.”

I will look into the thesis that art is important and generative for the teacher, student and democracy if it is done in a way to cultivate imagination.  Aesthetic Education is the way.  Art and teaching art is not a waste of time.  Let us awaken to the possibilities.

Aesthetic education and art education in public schools

Teaching art can be more than teaching how to make art or how to understand the historical importance of art.  The experience of making art can become an aesthetic experience if the maker is noticing the act of making and applies the experience to interactions with other artworks and to being a human experiencing the world. According to Greene, “Aesthetic education is an intentional undertaking designed to nurture appreciative, reflective, cultural, participatory engagements with the arts by enabling learners to notice what is there to be noticed, and to lend works of art their lives in such a way that they can achieve them as variously meaningful. When this happens new connections are made in experience: new patterns are formed, new vistas are opened.”  The pressures of high stakes standardized testing and high stakes teacher evaluations are not conducive to teaching for liberation, aesthetic education is.  Public education is based on antiquated systems that had the goal to create file clerks and factory workers.  In the past this could have been argued to at least have helped the students to get a job after graduation.  Now low level, low skill jobs are replaced by machines or outsourced to areas of less expensive labor.  Imagination is the key to creative and entrepreneurial jobs.  Mass education has an oppressive power structure built into it.  The teacher lectures to all students they repeat/ memorize facts.  Facts can be looked up in a second now.  Now we need to discern truth from deception (a critical act) we need to make things or use things in new ways.  

Oppression in education is the nature of the institution. Much like Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the oppressed, the students and teacher take on the role of the dominating authorities whose aim may not to educate but to maintain superiority and a base of cheap labor.

Imagination poetic visual and social imagination

Habitual routes create loss of vision.  The habitual acts are unthinking acts.  If you are unaware you are unquestioning/ unthinking.  Rote learning is a way of making new information habitual.  Aesthetic education is a way of making the everyday meaningful, beautiful, or enraging.  If you pass empty houses or boarded up houses everyday but do not notice them you would not be moved to outrage.  But if you notice the empty houses and bring experience with the windows in the art of Ben Shahn and Romare Bearden. If you see the empty windows a metaphor for empty eye sockets then the noticing may awaken outrage. What is causing these buildings to sit empty while people live on the street or are doubled up in overcrowded apartments?  You may imagine a different, better possibility.

You may be capable of indignation through engagement with paintings or novels. You may awaken to see feel and act!

 
  Ben Shahn(up) Romare Bearden (down) 

Aesthetic education helps enable a disgust for the status quo and an awakening to what is possible, to social dreaming. Paulo Freire spoke to the interest in art and imagination- “if peasants do not have a notion of a pleasanter world they will not be moved to create a different situation”  When people feel insecure they do not allow themselves the risk of dreaming or setting lofty goals.  This relates to something I recently heard; locations hit by natural disasters experience a twofold contraction of growth.  First through the initial destruction and the use of resources to rebuild but also in the limiting of goals by people who do rebuild. (NPR Maria coverage)

Sartre: 19th century French Factory, Union- begins better way of life makes current situation unbearable. The Utopian thrust of imagination. Rare today- knowing now to the past feeling that there is a cause worth working for that something we could do can change.  Thinking of things as if they could be otherwise. To look at things as if it could be otherwise.

Poems unleash new perspectives on old words, put together so to provide a queer order and novel meaning. Maxine Greene referred to this poem by Adrienne Rich in one of her many lectures available online.

WHAT KIND OF TIMES ARE THESE

There's a place between two stands of trees where the grass grows uphill

and the old revolutionary road breaks off into shadows

near a meeting-house abandoned by the persecuted

who disappeared into those shadows.

I've walked there picking mushrooms at the edge of dread, but don't be fooled

this isn't a Russian poem, this is not somewhere else but here,

our country moving closer to its own truth and dread,

its own ways of making people disappear.

I won't tell you where the place is, the dark mesh of the woods

meeting the unmarked strip of light—

ghost-ridden crossroads, leafmold paradise:

I know already who wants to buy it, sell it, make it disappear.

And I won't tell you where it is, so why do I tell you

anything? Because you still listen, because in times like these

to have you listen at all, it's necessary

to talk about trees.

Only once you can accept yourself, once you accept another person for who they are-even if you do not agree with what they do, then you can see life as it is and then real change can come.  You have to be willing to not know, to discover the answer and know that it will be incomplete, change and forever be in an act of becoming.  

Just because you are aware that there are those that want to make it disappear doesn’t mean that you will not dream of something different, something better. There are different types of dread.  Chicago is dragging with dread. Lives are unvalued and meaningless.  People feel drawn to protect their own survival and interest by use of a gun.  Young folk are plugged into a squawk box that yells insistently, provides live feeds of fights and lascivious pleasures.  Young folk are high.  The sweet feel of oblivion is potent and available where real world comforts are not.

If you feel this way why do you create?

Why do we bother to fight.  Why do we dream of something beyond what we have already seen?  

If poetry/art survives at all it is the combination of the belief in some possible happiness combined with feet planted in the common sense of dread.  It is not escapism to imagine.   It is reaching for the edge of the yawning chasm, letting your eyes adjust to the dim but remembering the brightness of a new day and knowing the sun will rise again.

“It is a sense that there is always more to experience and more in what we experience than we can predict. Without some such sense, even at the quite human level of there being something which deeply absorbs our interest, human life becomes perhaps not actually futile or pointless, but experienced as if it were. It becomes, that is to say, boring. In my opinion, it is the main purpose of education to give people the opportunity of not ever being, in this sense, bored; of not ever succumbing to a feeling of futility, or to the belief that they have come to the end of what is worth having.

Can we work toward a civil society in the future of education?

“Teacher educators and school administrators do not think speculatively despite all the work towards fruitful conceptions of active learning, critical questioning, and the construction of meanings. There is almost no mention of imagination or of its relation to notions of the possible. No attention is paid to Dewey’s idea of the incompleteness of meanings when not rounded out by the imaginative projection of possibilities.”

Can we engage students in constant effort to improve community?  Taking responsibility to improve community is understanding other’s worth and integrity. Other people's potentiality. Each person is on the way. Regard people who have a different aesthetic.  I may not like it but I know that the person is trying to express something.  I can expose myself to this different viewpoint and understand the integrity of this unknown.  This other answer may not be my answer and my answer may be evolving.

It is frightening if someone thinks they have the answer. Tyranny is an authority that prevents you from thinking for yourself.

Can’t control everything.  Interacting with art enable the understanding that we see things differently.  We do things differently. There are many correct answers. “There are no single views of the possible, any more than there are ways of measuring what it signifies in anyone’s imagination. Imagination summons up visions of a better state of things, an illumination of the deficiencies in existing situations, a connection to the education of feeling, and a part of intelligence.”

Education can be an emancipatory act.  “We (and those who are our students) must be given opportunities to choose to be persons of integrity, persons who care.”

Have a ‘we experience’ and connect to community.  Education is not something to do it is a means to unlock the potential of possibilities.  After unleashing the imagination then there needs to be the next step of working together.  As Deweyan democracy in education, “Through the building of a community the ground may be laid for an articulate public empowered and encouraged to speak for itself, perhaps in many voices, within classrooms (and corridors, and school yards) people look forward to seeing, across spaces where there can be dialogue and exchanges of all kinds in which persons can speak in their own idioms, avoiding the formulaic, the artificial and the `sound-bite’.”

Aesthetic education helps unleash social imagination!  Attempting to make sense of the world through experiencing something new.  A glimpse of the sublime allows for frustration at the current state of education and a call for something better. “Art can’t change the world, but it can change someone who can.” - Greene is quoted to say.  This thought alone can save creators from the paralysing self doubt that can arise through questions such as: Why am I doing this?  Is this the most important thing during challenging times?  Isn’t this art production self-indulgent?  Is this art product merely a decoration or plaything for the rich?

Looking into the work of art educator and philosopher Maxine Greene is like taking a cool sip of water: clear, simple and good for you.  Is it possible to practice aesthetic education in urban public schools?“There are, of course,” Greene wrote, “young persons in the inner cities, the ones lashed by ‘savage inequalities,’ the ones whose very schools are made sick by the social problems the young bring in from without. Here, more frequently than not, are the real tests of ‘teaching as possibility’ in the face of what looks like an impossible social reality at a time when few adults seem to care.”

Why art? Why teach?

Art because it may be the thing that can inspire the imagination to see things as they could be, not how they are.  The hope the kindness and the creative power of America the great is built on imagination.  To teach for liberation to offer authentic experiences aesthetic education the teacher must be highly trained but even more importantly highly ethical.  She need to believe in the integrity of all of her students.  To understand the limitations of the administration’s understanding and work toward something better even with her feet planted in the dread of high stakes testing and evaluations.  

“It is not that the artist offers solutions or gives directions. He nudges; he renders us uneasy; he makes us (if we are lucky) see what we would not have seen without him. He moves us to imagine, to look beyond.”

Can public schools build a community of aesthetic education or are they doomed to be a tool of the oppressor.  Can teachers in their classrooms and administrators in their offices imagine something beyond the tyrannical dictates they have little control over? They may be doomed, but maybe they can be open to the possibility of imagining- becoming the thing that does not yet exist- something better!

• Baldacchino, John. 2012. Art's way out: Exit pedagogy and the cultural condition. Vol. 81.;81;. Rotterdam;Boston;: Sense Publishers.
• Baldacchino, John. 2013;2012;. Willed forgetfulness: The arts, education and the case for unlearning. Studies in Philosophy and Education 32 (4): 415-30.
• Baldacchino, John. 2017. Freedom, aesthetics, and the agôn of living in maxine greene's philosophy. Review of Education, Pedagogy & Cultural Studies 39 (1): 18.
• Colwell, Richard. 2015. A challenge from bennett reimer. Philosophy of Music Education Review 23 (2): 117.
• Greene, Maxine. "The Artistic. Aesthetic and Curriculum." Curriculum Inquiry 6, no. 4 (1977): 283-96. doi:10.2307/1179650.
• Greene, Maxine. 1988. Imagination. From the Museum of Education’s Reader's’ Guide to Education exhibition [http://www.ed.sc.edu/museum/Guide.html]  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c9pwAi8-bZE
• Greene, Maxine. "Art and Imagination: Reclaiming the Sense of Possibility." The Phi Delta Kappan 76, no. 5 (1995): 378-82. http://www.jstor.org/stable/20405345.
• Greene, Maxine. 2000. Imagining futures: The public school and possibility. Journal of Curriculum Studies 32 (2): 267-80.
• Higgins, Chris. 2008. Instrumentalism and the clichés of aesthetic education: A deweyan corrective. Education and Culture 24 (1): 6-19.
• Rich, Adrienne "What Kind of Times are These" from Collected Poems: 1950-2012. Copyright © 2016 by The Adrienne Rich Literary Trust.  Copyright © 1995 Adrienne Rich. Reprinted by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/51092/what-kind-of-times-are-these
• Teachers College, Columbia University, Maxine Greene, TC's Great Philosopher, Dies at 96. Published Thursday, May. 29, 2014   http://www.tc.columbia.edu/articles/2014/may/maxine-greene-tcs-great-philosopher-dies-at-96/
• Thayer-Bacon, Barbara. 2008. Democracies-always-in-the-making: Maxine greene's influence. Educational Studies 44 (3): 256-69.

Case study three thesis

Jutta Koether
Jutta is a german artist who lives in New York City.
She is friends withKim Gordon of Sonic Youth.
I wish the perfomances were better that I have seen online.
The question is what is the relationship between performance movement duration and Painting?
Painting as performance as opposed to painting as a artifact of performance.
  Maybe there is a better artist to look at? Laurie Anderson.  Liz Phair. PJ Harvey. David Lynch.

So... not getting any response I have continued to think about why I am interested in painting as performance. The act of making, the solving, becoming is my happy place.  I do not need to have an important idea behind it.  I do not want to do all the work. I want the viewer to have room go draw connections.  I want them to play, dance, or sing their way through a composition. 

Still not sure what the thesis question is but I have looked into
*Cecily Brown, dancing paint through art historical forms?
*Iva Gueorguieva, paint that is so lively that it becomes sculpture and enters the room using the same rythmic articulations used on canvas?
*Arturo Herrera, Is there a connection between play and performance. Are they opposites or are they more alike than exhibition and play? Herrera plays with known images ( cartoons). If you paint/collage/draw a body in motion or fragmented does the brain supply movement connected with sound waves and dance?

Case study 1, Frankenthaler

“I think most things are about ambiguity”

Helen Frankenthaler is an American abstract painter. She burst forth on the art scene when she was featured in Life magazine article in 1952. She was in a relationship with Clement Greenberg whom she met at an opening in 1950. Greenberg was arguably the most influential critic in the world at the time. In 1958, she married Robert Motherwell, a well known Abstract Expressionist painter. She does not want to talk about feminism. She does not want to talk her past marriage or about contemporary painters. “There are three subjects I don’t like discussing: my former marriage, women artists, and what I think of my contemporaries.”  She wants to make beautiful paintings and throw beautiful parties. I appreciate the spontaneity of her work, the quickness, the application of paint, and the non-fussiness above the surface. I think I also like her cocky above-it-all portrait from her breakout Life article. The same thing that makes her paintings convincing I see in portraits of her. She is not asking for permission to be who she is and to create her way.

I have tried to curtail this case study to only be about Frankenthaler’s art, but art is influenced, and the way art is categorized is influenced by who you are.  Some question whether Frankenthaler would have been as successful and remembered as big a painter if she had not been exposed and introduced to the art world through Clement Greenberg. Greenberg brought together many artists and publicized their working style. He showed the soak stain paintings to more artists.  “When Greenberg brought the abstract painters Kenneth Noland and Morris Louis to Frankenthaler’s studio in 1953, they seized upon both her technique and the broad, flat expanses of color she created.”  Noland and Morris brought the soak stain method into their paintings.  Frankenthaler and Greenberg traveled all over Europe looking at paintings and painting side by side. It is hard as a woman to feel like you are taken seriously or your work is taken seriously.  Helen Frankenthaler was an attractive woman who made attractive paintings. Women and all artists have to think about how their art will be viewed.  I am still of the age where I have a chip on my shoulder about being taken seriously as an artist because I am a woman.  Make, make, make, marry, marry, marry... Will you make me? Will you marry me? It is not hard to have a chip on your shoulder “At a time when so many younger artists wouldn't be caught using a word like ''beauty'' - except sarcastically“ She was assured enough to partner with powerhouses and carry on her own work.  She pioneered a new way of working.  She is known as Helen Frankenthaler not so-and-so’s wife.  So, note to self,  knock that chip off honey!

Frankenthaler reacted to Jackson Pollock's drip paintings by creating the soft glowing soak stain painting technique.  A technique that allowed the surface and the paint to be really flat, quickly applied and open to happy accidents.  I like to think that letting the material do part of the work is a material collaboration. She ushered abstract painting from abstract expressionism to color field painting.  She refused to leave-out the reference to anything observable. “What concerns me when I work is not whether the picture is a landscape…or whether somebody will see a sunset in it. What concerns me is, did I make a beautiful picture?” ''Women, as a rule, tend to tidy up pictures that don't need tidying up.” Her enduring question is, it seems: how can I bring the spontaneity of small works, the genuineness of immediate reactions of color, shape and placement, to a larger scale work? This is a question I come back to over and over. Artists I respect have said that my very small study paintings are more successful than the large paintings done after, but that was after seeing the large ones.  I think large scale says, “look at me, everything in this painting is important.”  That is how artists may look at their own small paintings and how others may view them after seeing larger ones but I do not know if they would have as much power without the big brother to compare to.  Here is Frankenthaler on size, “Size and scope is necessary. You cannot accomplish on an easel size what the message is that you might be able to accomplish large scale.”

Photo by Gordon Parks for Life magazine 1952.

The bay 1963

My goal is not to work with color alone. I like the squishiness of paint. I like the hand of the artist visible in the application. I do like the spontaneity, quickness the non- fussiness, openness to interpretation and yes the beauty of Helen Frankenthaler’s paintings. She talks about color only working in space, ''Color doesn't work unless it works in space,'' she says, launching one of her favorite subjects. ''Color alone is just decoration - you might as well be making a shower curtain.''

Explaining the artist/s approach.
Helen is educated and aware of art history.  Her early Bennington College work referred to cubism.  She created her own style in reaction to the abstract expressionists action paintings.  The freedom from rendering of form and the dependence on a brush was established through her soak stain method. First she diluted the oil pigment with turpentine and poured onto unprimed canvas. This creeping flow of color and bloom of oil was at times manipulated with soft brushes to guide the flow but not to establish the initial shape.  She has kept with the non-objective soak stain method for her entire career.  She has switched from oil to acrylic and water on unprimed canvas.  Frankenthaler was also a part of the printmaking renaissance of the early 1960’s.  She created work at many print shops including, Universal Limited Art Editions (ULAE) in Long Island and Tamarind Lithography Workshop in Los Angeles.

Explaining the artist's intentions/ideas.  

Frankenthaler was in a relationship with Clement Greenberg.  She had to have been influenced by his writings and theories about painting.  Greenberg, in short, stated that painting should use painting to understand the motivations and limits of painting.  He introduced Frankenthaler to the galleries and artists who were the most influential during their marriage.  They also toured France and Italy together looking at and discussing art.  They painted together.  Having a critic for a lover to constantly engage with art ideas had to have solidified her understanding of her own place in creating her own ideas.  Art is often a solitary affair.  Making art and being in a relationship with a critic may have been more like a polygamous affair.

Frankenthaler wants to make beautiful paintings. She spoke of beauty as the goal of her painting often.  Wrestling with the formal ramifications of this quest sustained a very long and productive career.  Her work suggests spaces: interiors sometimes, landscapes often.  She makes small works on paper and heroically large works.  She is interested in the materials.  She has stripped down the elements of art to color, shape size and placement.  “My pictures are full of climates,abstract climates, and not nature per se, but a feeling”  This is enough to suggest many things but reveal little definite content over and above beauty and materiality.  

Explaining the artist’s use of materials.

Helen Frankenthaler is most known for her large-scale soak-stain paintings. November 1950, Greenberg escorted her to a show of Pollock's work at the Betty Parsons Gallery. ''It was original,'' she says of Pollock's work, ''and it was beautiful, and it was new, and it was saying the most that could be said in painting up to that point - and it really drew me in. I was in awe of it, and I wanted to get at why.''

Her reaction to the why was eventually to put an unprimed cloth with some charcoal sketches on it on the floor and poured diluted oil pigment into puddles.  She said that she immediately saw a connection to the watercolors she had done plein air.   Getting to the immediateness and the spontaneity of large gestures on large surfaces.  The surfaces are flat the pigment is soaked into the fabric not sitting on top. Frankenthaler seems obsessed with flatness.  Her most successful prints are lithographs, a planographic print.  They look and feel very much like her paintings.  The surface of lithographs do not have the plate marks or incised lines of intaglio prints.  The colors created with touche on stone feel very much like watercolor.  The drying of the oily ink creates tide lines. Touche made marks suggest the bloom of oil stains on paper or canvas as well.

Frankenthaler draws with color.  Drawing to her is creating space not lassoing a shape.  She is using line as a delineation of one thing next to another an edge that well placed creates shape.

In the 1980s she slowly started adding just a bit of thicker paint.

“To acknowledge an osmosis of the past and present around you and go naturally creatively free: Head heart and wrist; to be in control enough to not be in control at all. To have a dialogue with the work and to let yourself go in relation to it. Paintings don’t lie they have their beautiful working order just as nature itself has” “If you have a real sense of limits then you are free to break out of them.”

Explaining the artist’s process and key issues.

Frankenthaler works on the floor pouring liquid color then dragging with brooms, sponges, and fingers.  Her issues are beauty and ambiguity.  She is concerned with the placement of shapes, light, depth, beauty, color, form and perspective on a rectangular canvas.  She balances the magic of direct experience with limits of educated experience.  She works on the floor but thinks of paintings as rectangles on the wall.  Once she sees the paintings on the wall then she cuts down the image to work as a painting. Everything in her life experience affects her art. “One IS one’s work and one’s work is one’s self.”

Some have criticised Frankenthaler for being formulaic and not pushing beyond a specific style.  These same people may take issue with her talking about beauty in painting.  They may not like the ambiguous content.  They may not like her posh style and her upbringing.  They may not like that she is unwilling to be a spokesperson for women.  Helen Frankenthaler was a painter who painted, continued to paint and to deal with issues about the elements that create a beautiful painting with no apologies.

Helen Frankenthaler White Portal, 1967 Lithograph 30 x 22 inches Artist's proof.

References

Art 103 Gallery,  “Art 103 Content 08 part 1 Fhas01 Helen Frankenthaler” film, Youtube video, 0:57-1:37 (August 30 2012).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i9kfufFMRvg

Beyond Print: The Kenneth Tyler Collection, “Helen Frankenthaler and Kenneth Tyler: a 25 year collaboration” (February 21, 2012). Accessed Online

https://tylerblogs.com/2012/02/21/helen-frankenthaler-and-kenneth-tyler-a-25-year-collaboration/

Ruth Fine, Helen Frankenthaler Prints. 1993 Washington: National Gallery of Art, 1993), 11-29.

Gagosian and the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation, “NOW: HELEN FRANKENTHALER: Line into Color, Color into Line,” film [2016], Youtube video, (October 4, 2016).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h35AJ2cn72Y

Jon Mann, “How Helen Frankenthaler Pioneered a New Form of Abstract Expressionism.” Artsy Editorial (September 29, 2017). Accessed Online

https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-helen-frankenthaler-pioneered-new-form-abstract-expressionism

Portland State University, “Helen Frankenthaler at Portland State: Q & A, 1972,” film [1972]. Youtube video, posted November 22, 2013. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=00A1R06tLa8

Deborah Solomon, “Artful Survivor” New York Times Magazine, (May 14, 1989). Accessed Online

http://www.nytimes.com/1989/05/14/magazine/artful-survivor.html?pagewanted=all&mcubz=3