wmtArt.com » theory

Within the Lines

blaha — Sun, 01 Aug 2010 11:56:49 +0000

What if there was nothing to discover? No story, no thousand words, no answer to a non-riddle? What if it was really, really, just a game of forms and colors?
Would it be a sin?
Does this lady need a past?
Is it really so bad for something to be “just” a pretty picture?
We know of the danger of beauty, we know the seductive spectacle means flirting with submission, yet is it really so immoral?

We possibly wouldn’t say it about Rafa? Wilk’s works. They are often witty, playful, insightful. They play with the idea of light, of bi-dimensionality, of what a work is.
But, to continue on my doubt – does having a story constitute a challenge? Or is it just because we like the indolence of layered thinking, the safety net of there being “something else”, so as to let our imagination ride a little further…? But haven’t we turned it into a rule for (a lot of) contemporary art? This story-telling capacity? (Can someone say a good story about this? If so, the author of the story and the author of the work get a bonus.)
What if it’s a pretty picture? What if it’s pretty, pretty, pretty, a thousand times pretty? What if it’s so damned pretty you don’t want it to be a story, to go beyond it being pretty?
Of course, I have the right to omit the depth. And then also, every good story is many stories deep. But some of the best works I know present a fascinating resistance to storytelling. They are like a stone, at once attractive and opaque. They make me want to read within the lines.

And here, somewhat related, is a summer holiday bonus:

We cannot go back

blaha — Wed, 26 May 2010 14:27:05 +0000

Maybe art, maybe some art, maybe this art, maybe some of this art, serves turning the absence opaque, that is, making it at once palpable and impenetrable, so we cannot go back, so we are stuck in the appreciation of this strange, utopic now, and any attempt to overcome it, to look for the actual empty space, meets the opacity of an object, an image, a substitute, substitute not of a reality, but of what ceased to be, of the void that hence remains beyond us, happily or unhappily, hard to say, replaced by the fundamentally meager and helplessly sublime moment of a hesitant, aesthetic, experience, too private to be credible, too credible to be intimate, and yet ours, because we want it to be, because we claim it as such, because we know we inherited it from the silence that came before.

The picture – entitled (…) – is by Marek Wykowski. (Found by Gocha)

The End Is Never Nigh (A few sentences that never made it elsewhere)

blaha — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 19:40:15 +0000

Bloodshedding pieces of black-and-white happiness.
The unfair balance of the picture.

The wider picture. The bloody wider picture always giving it the color that wasn’t there in the first place.
Notice: the wider picture is never the first place. It comes as we back up, until we are nowhere to be found, impressed by the relation of the Thing with that wide horizon, that swift encompassing of the Other into the Thing.

The unfair balance of the picture. Nothing should ever be framed. Frames should be prohibited, forcing us into oblivion, into focusing on the End nearest us. Who knows how many Santa Clauses are necessary?

The unfair balance of the picture.

The pictures are by, in order of appearance, Diane Arbus, Miko?aj Chylak, Diane Arbus, Fischli & Weiss.

The End Is Never Nigh (A few sentences that never made it elsewhere)

blaha — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 19:40:15 +0000

Bloodshedding pieces of black-and-white happiness.
The unfair balance of the picture.

The unfair balance of the picture.

The pictures are by, in order of appearance, Diane Arbus, Miko?aj Chylak, Diane Arbus, Fischli & Weiss.

More Gentle Uncertainty

blaha — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 12:34:30 +0000

Video directed by Takafumi Tsuchiya (TAKCOM).

Visit

blaha — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 08:30:49 +0000

Two pictures from the Visit series (2007/8) by Filip Berendt.
The idea is so simple and to the point that it is irritating. Berendt put an ad in a newspaper saying he wants to make installations in people’s homes out of the things he finds there and take pictures of them. Some people answered. He went to their homes, and, well, did what he said he would do.
The series won him the Sittcomm award last year.

The unwearable jewel

blaha — Sat, 13 Feb 2010 12:17:41 +0000

I love the CRA$H jewellery collection by Super Fertile because it’s impossible to wear. Poor people can’t afford it. Rich people would never dare.
So who is it for?
For us, of course.

Low profile continued

blaha — Sun, 03 Jan 2010 09:50:43 +0000

(via)

This time of the year should be a fairy tale

blaha — Sat, 02 Jan 2010 09:47:47 +0000

Remember Al Magnus?

A Calm Beginning

blaha — Fri, 01 Jan 2010 11:36:36 +0000

Nadja Bournonville, A Form of Protection (2008)

What I like most are the hands.
And the neck.
It’s tense. See the two lines suavely drawing their way into the chest. And the hands, a pianist’s hands, playing out their protagonism, exploring the absent look to shine, and yet tense, they remain, maybe, it’s what they hold, and not who?

(via)