Ward (1905-1985) became known in the 1930s for his "wordless novels" comprised entirely of woodcuts. (His first, Gods' Man, a powerful story about the corrupting influence of money, debuted the week of the great stockmarket crash in 1929).
I discovered a battered collection of Ward's books on my father's bookshelf. This illustration-- one of my favorites-- was from Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.
At age five, I was already expert at drawing scary monsters. I'd figured out that the two most important ingredients for a monster were 1.) a scary face, and 2.) great big muscles. Yet, Ward's monster had neither. Ward succeeded in unnerving me without showing a face at all.
That gave me plenty of food for thought.
Today you see artists straining to draw scarier faces and bigger muscles. They'd do well to linger for a moment over the work of Lynd Ward.
115 comments:
Ok. My last post was civil enough; I'm due some trollin'.
This typifies how graphic art lost its way in the 20th century. Fine if you only notice details, but the overall design (if you can call it that) is just highly fragmented, cobbled together shapes that lack any real unity, a foul which reeks of high school notebook amateurishness.
I do agree that the Dianabol oddities have played out.
Powerful work.
Kids react very forcefully to raw symbols. I was stunned to find that the monster island book I had as a kid was illustrated as crudely as it was, and yet I was truly mesmerized by it.
Ward's stuff looks crude, but is actually very sophisticated. Using raw symbols in an advanced way, as here, makes for some powerfully emotional work.
That era of expressionist realism led to a lot of interesting work. My favorite being Stanislav Szukalski. At his best, He managed to combine expressionist stylization with enormous mimetic integrity.
Ward's stuff looks crude, but is actually very sophisticated.
Oh. An obese, ugly supermodel with a great personality. I see.
Etc, etc: -- “…but the overall design (if you can call it that) is just highly fragmented, cobbled together shapes that lack any real unity…”
It doesn’t look fragmented to me. The graphic effect of the whole is one of a screeching mouth.
It’s under the calm village. A crying creature under ground. A screaming mole.
What better symbol for what’s happening inside the mind of the figure who tears the man to pieces.
Kev - am a big Szukalski admirer, I read that he was friends with Leonardo DeCaprios parents and when asked how he learned anatomy , he replied that his father taught him - in that after dying in an accident , Szukalski dissected him .
Al McLuckie
What better symbol for what’s happening inside the mind of the figure who tears the man to pieces.
I can play Philip Glass' Opening from Glassworks on the piano. It's quite a lovely minimalist piece; the downside is I can't play anything else (I'm a guitar player). As long as it sounds like Opening, I'm good. Entirely analogous to Ward.
etc, etc...
Your mind is like an iron vise constantly squeezing down on lemons.
Hey Al,
Yeah, I read all that stuff too. I've been a huge fan of Szukalski ever since I read about him in Ben Hecht's Child of the Century (one of the great books of the 20th century as far as I'm concerned) and then sought his work out, pre internet.
I had the opportunity to view his monographs from the 1920s through interlibrary loan about a decade ago. They are such valuable and rare books, that they wouldn't even let me take them out of the library. The Works of Szukalski and Projects in Design are the names. I once bid on a copy of PiD on ebay, about ten years ago. I think my bid was 80 dollars. I thought nobody knew who he was. Boy was I wrong, the book went for 1200!
The wildest story I heard about him was about his time in Poland as National Sculptor. And how his entire life's work came crumbling down around his ears with the Soviet invasion. One of the first shells from a Soviet tank, so the story goes, fired on his museum-studio... blew a massive hole in the chest of his largest sculpture.
Your mind is like an iron vise constantly squeezing down on lemons.
Well Kev, a lemon such as declaring an artist's work to look crude and then immediately trying to rehabilitate it as something that looks sophisticated is a lemon that is just too ripe and juicy to resist.
Etc,
Don't know if you have the ability to understand this, but quite often there is more to a thing than meets the eye. Therefore, mentally meeting a thing halfway may produce understanding and appreciation unavailable from your current position in a Bakelite helmet, under an electric blanket, in a fortified bunker, a mile beneath the Parthenon.
Btw, I've come upon a superhero alter ego idea for you (an alternate blogger posting name, if you wish) which better reflects the scope of your erudition, the freedom of your imagination, and the spiritual quality of your character: The Iron Peanut.
kev - Ward's stuff looks crude, but is actually very sophisticated. Using raw symbols in an advanced way, as here makes for some powerfully emotional work.
I’m curious, when you say “raw symbols,” are you referring to the large phallus in the lower right side of the Ward composition? If its use is intentional, is there a Freudian subtext to Frankenstein I didn’t know about? If so, I think I know what really scared five year old David. :)
Don't know if you have the ability to understand this, but quite often there is more to a thing than meets the eye.
There is where we irreconcilably differ I suppose, as I believe the aesthetic experience to be the raison d'être of visual art.
Iron Peanut,
The issue is that our ability to experience aesthetic information is limited by our imaginative range. One can only appreciate with the eye to the extent we can dream. And we cannot analyze what is invisible to our appreciation.
Matthew,
The whole picture is built of raw symbols. By raw, I mean unrefined, crude mark making. As opposed to smoothly blended classical rendering. Mark making is aesthetic writing. There are certain things that simply cannot be expressed through smooth marks. Placing a limitation on mark making is like ripping out half the pages in dictionary because you don't like the sound or meanings of certain words. It is reductionist and anti-creative. It reminds of what the chi-coms did to the beautiful writing system they inherited. Dogma always seeks to limit the range of language in order to control what is said.
Never mind kev. I Googled "Freud and Frankenstein" and came up with a plethora of psychoanalytical insights. For example from Alison Bangerter: "This paper will look closely at the relationship between Victor Frankenstein and his monster. This monster not only represents a part of Frankenstein's fractured psyche, but also serves, as a symbol of Frankenstein's phallic desires."
Geez, Frankenstein's monster has all new meaning now. Thank you David.
Concise but impactful blog post. :) Thank you for sharing that beautiful piece of terror - I hadn't know the artist until now.
And I agree --- thinking of the games industry, they are getting a little redundant with five-mouthed muscle men!
Matthew,
Ha!
Well, the first thing to understand about literary academic writing is that everything is written under the publish or perish regime.
Secondly, human beings will do anything to keep from perishing, so therefore will write anything in order keep from perishing. Keep that in mind when you read any analysis of Frankenstein or other great work of art, and keep a pinch of salt handy. :)
I've read Frankenstein analyzed according to Freud, Marx, Gender Theory, ignorance of science, worship of science, a method for understanding the belief system of Romanticists, as a metaphor for societal and personal estrangement, as a religious metaphor, as an atheist manifesto, as a myth which develops according to structuralist theory, as a bald attempt to use the myth of prometheous and the prestige of science to give an otherwise ludicrous fantasy story some literary credibility, and more.
It all boils down to analyzing a literary work (i.e. playing around with it as opposed to thinking about real life) according to some overriding concept. This is liberal arts curricula as entertainment.
Such analysis' is only one level above fans arguing that there are good solid reasons why the Yankees suck and the Mets will win next year if they can just get a decent closer in the off season.
Kev,
Do you make a distinction between using versus interpreting "raw symbols?" As an artist, how do I control their meaning? It seems to me the difficulty of their use is avoiding collateral damage i.e. saying something unintended and counterproductive to the point I’m trying to make. Do I use a hand grenade (rough unrefined marks) or a sniper's rifle (clean refined lines)?
Matthew,
That's a good question. The answer is that you are working with a foundation of symbols whether you paint like Bougereau or Kandinsky. Every shape, every color, every edge, every directional thrust, ever value is a symbolic expression. So the same problem applies to any work of art in any style one might make. Your guide is your taste, which is based on your educated instinct.
The issue is that our ability to experience aesthetic information is limited by our imaginative range.
So those with greater imaginative range will experience more aesthetic pleasure? Since this seems to suggest then that children should logically experience greater aesthetic pleasure, I have to ask: What role do you say cultivation has?
I read cultivation as civilization. Sorry.
I always liked what the British Empire had to say about rearing children: That every young generation was potentially a horde of barbarians that would destroy civilization unless they were educated in time.
In the west that generation came of age in 1968.
;/
I strongly believe that the foundation for a true education is classical. Once that foundation is laid, a Romantic education can be added, then a modern education. (I think the problem with the modern education system is that it doesn't teach classical or romantic principles well at all. So it is an imbalanced view of how to think.)
Postmodernism, I believe, is the education that destroys education and should be combatted at all turns.
This comment got eaten, but was posted just prior to the above:
I think....
An understanding of the range of creativity is greatly assisted by knowing just how many knobs there are to turn. Just how extensive the possibilities are for expression. This leads to the appreciation of difference. I think this comes with mature contemplation of the varieties of human experience.
So, I'm not sure if it's true that children necessarily have more imaginative range than adults, particularly creative adults.
I would say that children are more susceptible to experiencing the aesthetic effects of unrefined expression. However, we all have a need for simple artistic release now and again. And, as well, not everything that looks crude is unsophisticated, (i.e. the works of Lyn Ward, Ralph Steadman, Saul Steinberg, or Jack Davis, just to name a few).
The opposite of this ability to appreciate the scope of possibility is the preference for security over possibility, (which is to say, the preference for order and stability over creative change).
The need for order is a method of stilling anxiety. And it is perfectly understandable that many people would prefer such pacifying. Particularly as one's circumstances, for whatever reason, become more worrisome.
Civilization's role in all this, it seems to me, is simply to provide a forum where good speech can compete with the bad speech on equal terms. Where there is a choice available, on an individual basis, between consuming the beautiful or consuming the ugly.
Sadly, marketing (politics/business) is constantly attempting to game the market in its favor...
Ugly worthless, destructive junk will stop at nothing to sell itself, including using underhanded methods, such as advertising induced peer pressure, or "first dose of the drug is free" as in virtual living (2nd life) and other forms of pornography.
I don't have an ready answer to that problem, as it is probably impossible for everybody to produce or do something worthwhile to sell at market. And how do we stop a person from attempting to make a living selling crap if people are willing to buy the crap? This would abrogate the rights of both buyer and seller.
This gets into the same gray area as environmental activism. The issue is pollution hurts everybody, but does it hurt us enough that a whole bunch of human freedoms should be rescinded in order to make the world utterly free of porn, soot, coca cola, and pcbs?
Kev,
Ok fair enough. There are some things I still disagree with, primarily that from my formalist perspective something can only look crude because it is crude, but perhaps we are operating with slightly different personalized definitions of "crude".
Yeah, David, it's funny the things that affect us deeply when we are kids. I remember being affected by a great book called "Minn of the Mississippi" about a baby snapping turtle making a trek up a river. Incredibly well illustrated, but back then, it just seemed like a wondrous world to me. Wish I had it still.
And etc...good choice on the Glass! Kev...great superhero name!
ken meyer jr
Re: The Design
Just beyond the calm limits of a sleeping village, a man sinks into a dark descent that culminates in MURDER!
My approach is formalist and abstract (i.e. removed from narrative):
Diagram
1.Oval center mass superimposed on a horizontal
2.Rotated
3.Regular tripartite division
It's fairly bland in my opinion. Add to this a notan that is ill proportioned, highly fragmented, and crude (more apparent by reducing Ward's illustration to postage stamp size) as I described in my first post, and I don't find anything particularly impressive about this design.
Of course, as I said this approach excludes narrative, and I'm not holding my breath for any methodological affirmation from a blog called "Illustration Art".
:)
But anything could be made to look visually uninteresting by reducing it to a functional diagram:
Titian’s Venus of Urbino could be thought of as a lozenge up-ended by a square.
Masaccio’s Holy Trinity just a triangle and an arch divided into thirds with a golden section thrown in.
Chris,
That just isn't so. The principles I used were pretty much taken directly from Heinrich Wölfflin, one of the greatest art scholars in history. I highly recommend his writings. I feel like I have too many posts in this thread, so I'll zip it awhile.
As someone who quoted wolfflin on this blog a few years ago, I think I'll chime in here...
Who cares what art historians say? Show me one work of art by wolfflin that demonstrates that he actually can demonstrate that the principles he espouses as being the necessary ones are actually what makes a work of art a good one?
It seems to me like The Iron Peanut has fallen into the dreaded clutches Captain Art Academic -- a ruthless felon and destructor of culture who tries to claim artistic expertise through the use of the mouth rather than his own works.
Iron Peanut Addenda...
Just noticed that link to those circle diagrams you drew.
You're kidding right?
Not to belabor a point I've made previously, but one of the first principles I learned about art as a kid was "put nothing down without a reason." The corrollary for the viewer then is, "Everything you see is there for a reason." And the epistemological follow-on is, "If you don't know why some element appears in a work of art, then you don't really understand that work of art." And if you don't understand one work of art, guess what? There's probably a whole bunch of others you don't understand as well.
You're right that adding more muscles and teeth are the only way most illustrators today can think of to outdo earlier monsters. It is too limited. The masters of suspense worked with much more.
one of the first principles I learned about art as a kid was "put nothing down without a reason."
Kev,
Would this prequel diagram clear things up?
Sorry for catching up late again.
Etc, etc wrote: "highly fragmented, cobbled together shapes that lack any real unity, a foul which reeks of high school notebook amateurishness."
I don't know why those fragmented backgrounds with the shifting planes seemed to be such a popular style of the day; perhaps it was the legacy of Cezanne or cubism; perhaps it was a rebellion against the camera and an effort to inject the artist's subjective impressions into the image. Maybe one of the true scholars in our little group can shed some light on this. But for whatever the reason, there seems to be a great deal of graphic work from the 1920s-1940s where the planes of the background have been steamrolled flat or assembled into a patchwork quilt of impressionistic glimpses.
But I don't find anything "amateurish" about this look. It doesn't have the most cohesive design I've ever seen, but I think powerful content can serve as glue, just as color and shape can.
Li-An-- Many thanks, I think so.
Kev Ferrara-- "Ward's stuff looks crude, but is actually very sophisticated."
Well, it certainly looks stark. His wood cuts don't allow for as much nuance as a painting, or for the descriptive line of a pencil, but I agree with you, that hardly makes them unsophisticated.
Chris Bennett wrote, "It doesn’t look fragmented to me."
I think you make a good point. It may be fragmented under the laws of perspective, but still cohere thematically.
Al McLuckie-- Yikes! That's not an artist learning anatomy, that's a son working out some family issues.
Kev Ferrara-- I'll have to take a closer look at Szukalski. I've seen a little of his sculpture, which I found interesting, but he also seemed so deeply weird that I placed him in the category of "entertaining eccentrics" rather than "artists I can learn important things from." I am a big Ben Hecht fan (I was raised in Chicago) so that may be a good path to get re-introduced to him.
Matthew Harwood wrote: "the large phallus in the lower right side of the Ward composition..."
I'm still not old enough to see that.
Etc, etc wrote: "I believe the aesthetic experience to be the raison d'être of visual art."
I assume you mean a visual aesthetic experience? I am sympathetic to this view, even though it has become pretty unpopular in the post modernist era. It seems to me that if someone chooses a visual medium, they have an obligation to respect the attributes of that medium, and deal with the special challenges it presents (the creation of form, the appreciation for design, etc.). In fact, I've posted so many unkind things about the "My-message-is-so-smart-I-don't-have-to-draw-well" crowd, I'm sure people are tired of reading them. But having said that, I assume you don't draw a bright line between form and content? It would seem fairly elementary that one side can enhance the other, and that if you come up with a bold or important, that can be an important ingredient in what you call the aesthetic experience?
Jesse-- Thanks!
Matthew Harwood wrote: "Do you make a distinction between using versus interpreting "raw symbols?" As an artist, how do I control their meaning?"
Now you've done it. You've opened Pandora's box and let out the most basic metaphysical questions of art. How are we ever going to stuff them back in there?
I think Kev's answer is a good one, but there is so much more. The pre-Raphaelites might realistically paint a cracked jug to symbolize a girl's lost virtue, but that's a different kind of symbol than Egyptian hieroglyphs, and we interpret them in different ways. When we have lost the ability to discern the literal meaning of a symbol as the artist (may have) intended (often because as Kev and Etc, etc were discussing, we are not adequately "cultivated") the mere fact of their symbolism continues to retain separate aesthetic validity. For example, raw symbols scratched in a cave wall (or written in that abandoned house in Blair Witch Project) are undecipherable but can have more power than symbolism we understand.
In my view, it is not necessary to understand what the artist meant. In fact it is very often anti-climactic. I don't know of many great artists who attempt to "control the meaning" of symbols with any specificity, beyond making sure a leg doesn't inadvertently look like a phallus. ((Hemingway said every artist needed a bullshit detector that enabled them to stand back and assess their work with fresh eyes, to avoid such calamities). Most artists, I think, are happy to benefit from the inherent ambiguity of symbols.
Kev Ferrara wrote: "you are working with a foundation of symbols whether you paint like Bougereau or Kandinsky."
But Kev, wouldn't you say that "symbols" covers a whole lot of territory, including some dramatically different experiences? It seems to me awfully difficult to lump them together to form a cohesive foundation of anything.
Etc, etc wrote: "What role do you say cultivation has?"
What is this, the week for raising questions about the core meaning of art?
I have mixed emotions about "cultivation." We remain unaware of layers of meaning in art when we lack the experience (or the cultivation) to understand them. I previously quoted Goethe: "We only see what we know." But there is a clear downside to cultivation, and Kev knows it. Just before he was writing that stuff about the importance of civilizing "barbarians," he was writing about the ills of pedantry and academic writing that mislead us and embroil us in pointless debates.
The pre-Raphaelites might realistically paint a cracked jug to symbolize a girl's lost virtue, but that's a different kind of symbol than Egyptian hieroglyphs, and we interpret them in different ways...
Actually, those are quite alike in my understanding. Each is a coded symbol whose meaning/definition is known to a particular tribe and not to anyone outside that tribe.
A cracked jug that means something specific to a particular peer group is a painted word. At some point the definition was established for the item, no different than the way this cartoon establishes the meaning of its elements, (except the pre-raphs didn't write the meaning of the symbols they used direction onto their paintings.)
A heiroglyph is a pictographic word. It is only different from a painted word in the level of realism, not in its role as a symbol of some particul meaning to some particular tribe.
This is why allegory is a form of text-based writing, whether it be realistic, heiroglyphic, or, as in the McCay example, editorial.
But Kev, wouldn't you say that "symbols" covers a whole lot of territory, including some dramatically different experiences? It seems to me awfully difficult to lump them together to form a cohesive foundation of anything.
The foundational symbolic ideas, in my paradigm, are concepts universal to human experience, so basic as to go constantly unnoticed.
David, are you saying you are a big fan of Ben Hecht's but that you haven't read Child of the Century?
As my Jewish Grandfather used to say:
Vot?!
a painting of a rose isn't a 'symbol' of a rose. it's a painted likeness of a rose.
the rose only becomes a symbol if it stands for something else e.g. love.
Kev Ferrara-- I don't think of hieroglyphs as allegorical. I think they primarily represent specific words or sounds. They can be read literally, just as we read our modern alphabet to convey meaning.
Contrast that with using a cracked jug as a metaphor for despoiled virtue; now the "thing" being symbolized is a concept, not an object. Now to comprehend the meaning of the symbol you need the power of abstract thinking. The crack in the jug conveys the loss of the girl's virginity and the opening of a passage where she was once "perfect." It represents the shattered life that can no longer function and perform the role that God intended. The metaphors give you a lot of room to meditate on and spin out life's lessons.
I'm not aware of a similar role for hieroglyphs. A hieroglyph arm represents an arm (or the sound of an arm); a reed represents a reed (or the sound of a reed). Over thousands of years, the pictograms inevitably acquired additional sophistication. The eye of horus came to symbolize not just an eye, but protection from the god horus. But for me, hieroglyphs and the cracked jug symbolize different types of reality, and symbolize it in different ways.
This doesn't mean that one category of symbol is necessarily superior to the other. Personally, I am more moved and inspired by hieroglyphs than by the symbolism of the pre-Raphaelites.
Personally, I am more moved and inspired by hieroglyphs than by the symbolism of the pre-Raphaelites.
We should all rejoice that oppressive Victorian morality is a thing of the past and women can now express themselves; who knew there were so many repressed tattooed single mothers and lesbians?
David,
Art and Writing both seem to have evolved from pictographs. Pictographs use graphic objects that symbolize concepts. These concepts are either obviously analogs of the phenomenon depicted, or are assigned to the symbol by a culture-specific mandate or agreement, which can either established verbally, written as a decree or otherwise, or
labeled
on the picture.
This is quite like how conceptual definitions are attached to words.
Yes, Heiroglyphics seem to be ordered like text, in a linear fashion, but this does not change the very close relation between its brand of pictographic text and allegorical/editorial pictographs. Both are textual. An association of pictographic words is an association of pictographic words. The heiroglyphs are just slightly more abstracted and formalized than painted allegories and slightly less abstracted and formalized than word-based text.
Using a cracked jug to represent a gal's deflowering is not a symbolism we would necessarily recieve aesthetically. (Rather, we would need to be taught the pictorial word/symbol's definition in order to understand the meaning of the jug.) Therefore the jug would be allegorical, not metaphorical.
In my opinion, Metaphor is another one of those poetic concepts that our education system constantly gets wrong. Clearly the mass education of students required that we not be so choosy in putting together our English departments, nationwide. Although some large credit, as I see it, must go to popademics like George Lakoff who make their money in the so-called "metaphor industry" abusing and conflating all manner of tropes to pad out their slim theses.
Which is another way of saying, yes, cultivation is a sword that cuts both ways. In the hands of an insightful master, a sword penetrates to the heart of things. In the hands of a free swinger, everything is shredded.
... also, Matthew (if you're still reading) there aren't any 'raw symbols' in the Frankenstein illustration. there are raw, unrefined marks / forms but no symbols.
Laurence,
All marks have an innate symbolic meanings which are communicated aesthetically. Otherwise art wouldn't communicate anything.
marks have DESCRIPTIVE qualities which equate to things such as gesture, touch, speed etc, but that doesn't make marks 'symbols'.
Marks do not necessarily have descriptive qualities.
8
|
~
^
But they all have symbolic value to the human imagination. The more simple the marks, the more abstract the meaning.
Your use of the word Descriptive is incorrect. Descriptive is the opposite of Aesthetic. Descriptive is literal. Aesthetic is suggestive.
i'm happy to substitute descriptive for suggestive in the above statement and thank you for correcting me. that still doesn't make marks 'symbols'.
a square inch of cross hatching might suggest something, but it doesn't symbolise anything.
a square inch of cross hatching might suggest something, but it doesn't symbolise anything.
Meaning only comes to us through the play of conceptions, which can only take the form of symbols. The conceptualization process is the conversion or reification of a percept into a concept. Once a percept is conceptualized, it can be handled by the mind.
Meaning runs the gamut from abstract and emotional to concrete and specific. So must, therefore, concepts. So must, therefore, symbols.
Symbols, therefore, need not have some precise referent in order to be symbols.
I believe your expectation that symbols be devoid of vagueness is an artifact of the word-centric poetics taught in English classes. Words only seem to have an innate specificity because of their formalization into specific patterns of letters.
Thanks Laurence John, I'm still here.
I've been using a variety of marks in my artwork the last couple of years and am intrigued with the distinctions being made here.
Kev, I like your writing. Would you mind telling us about your training? You sound experienced and well read in several different areas.
JSL
JSL, I appreciate your appreciation. But there's nothing I can tell you about my formal training that will bolster what I contend.
So anything I say about Aesthetics, Cognition, and Perception (and how the three interrelate) is surely up for questioning. But you'll have to wade through the mass of material out there on your own. It is a huge topic we've just dipped a toe into, with many competing paradigms. (And fyi, my views are bound to have a mass of detractors, both in the sciences and the humanities.)
If you still wish to know more about me specifically, my blogger profile has some jive and a link.
Best wishes.
"All marks have an innate symbolic meanings which are communicated aesthetically. Otherwise art wouldn't communicate anything"
Kev, you know very well that art communicates meaning through the image as a whole, not just in the surface mesh of abstract marks, so why are you pursuing this line ?
"Symbols, therefore, need not have some precise referent in order to be symbols."
if the question "what is it a symbol of ?" can't be answered, then i would suggest that the word symbol is inappropriate. i also think that calling a single mark on a piece of paper a 'concept' is taking you straight into the realm of Captain Art Academic.
Laurence:
Consider:
‘Squashed circle’
and :
O
One is the name given to a concept.
The other IS the concept.
Chris, you and Kev could make a killing in the fine art world with 'concepts' like that.
You’re absolutely right Laurence. It shows the degree of our culture’s dependence on text as substitute for aesthetic emotion very nicely.
But what is a concept like the novella ‘A clockwork Orange’ or ‘Madame Bovary’ other than a series of word concepts linked together to form one big complicated one?
What is a picture other than a series of mark concepts linked together to form one big complicated mark (the painting)?
Well Laurence, I think I've explained my understanding. I don't see the benefit of quibbling about the semantic scope of the words "concept" or "symbol."
I think your real issue is the question of intentionality... is it possible for a human being to intentionally make a mark which is not, in some way, symbolic?
The answer I have come to is a simple "no."
Kev, if every intentional mark is symbolic then every abstract painting is symbolic and also every used piece of toilet paper. Your argument doesn't work.
Kev, if every intentional mark is symbolic then every abstract painting is symbolic and also every used piece of toilet paper. Your argument doesn't work.
Every abstract painting is symbolic. That's why its art. But symbolic communication doesn't have to be sensible to be symbolic. A sentence can be built of perfectly adequate words and perfectly adequate grammar and still be gibberish...
(The lance's shift in obviousness was a petulant bifurcation of the rock's liquidity.)
... yet you wouldn't dispute that the entire sentence above is built of symbols.
The marks one finds on used toilet paper can be quite significant if you are wondering if you have ulcerative colitis. To an animal, however, blood in the movement is meaningless because they are mostly unable to convert their percept into concepts. So their symbolic knowledge does not compound or combine.
The history of symbols is tied together with the history of artifacts or clues. And the basic symbolic value of all human marks, artifacts or clues, let's not forget, is the signification of the presence of a human. If we found an artifact of an alien race, you can be it would be symbolic.
*you can bet it would be symbolic.
Morgan:
Zero added to zero equals nothing.
Therefore, if a mark doesn’t mean anything than a mark added to another mark won’t mean anything either.
In ‘visual writing’ there is no such thing as English marks, French marks, German marks or American marks. I don’t speak Italian but I completely understand what Titian’s late paintings have to say to me.
Re-posted because of typo screwing up my meaning...
Morgan:
Zero added to zero equals nothing.
Therefore, if a mark doesn’t mean anything then a mark added to another mark won’t mean anything either.
In ‘visual writing’ there is no such thing as English marks, French marks, German marks or American marks. I don’t speak Italian but I completely understand what Titian’s late paintings have to say to me.
Ooops,
I mean MORAN.
Not Morgan,
Sorry Moran, my symblol reading is a bit sloppy today...;)
Chris, I wrote this before you posted your last comments but it fits with what you're saying.
If every intentional mark by an artist is symbolic, then the inverse must also be true that every intentionally unmarked part of a composition is symbolic. This is especially true in printmaking were an artist works in the negative. To mark or not mark is similar to the 1s and 0s of computer languages.
(Out of curiosity, I inverted some of Ward's black and white prints to better see his handwork. Often his pieces work both ways.)
Matthew:
Absolutely!
Think of the white paper that surrounds the marks on a drawing:
One moment a shirt front, one moment a cheek, next moment the sky… and all are contingent on the marks that trap the unsullied whiteness.
Mathew,
This goes to the point that "marks" are a subset of a larger category of human artifacts: the evidence of our decisions.
Drawing is in fact, just the process of making artistic decisions; composing. What you leave blank in a picture is a decision, just as much as every mark is a decision. And every decision is, at very least, a symbol of the presence of the consciousness that created it.
Chris or Kev,
At first I was trying to fit this concept into a Zen or Tao philosophy but now I don't think it is oriental at all but western in nature. Western because an individual artist's expression is the sum total of the decisions that individual makes. In the Eastern tradition the artist gives up his individuality to forces outside of him or herself.
Matthew Harwood said... "To mark or not mark is similar to the 1s and 0s of computer languages." ~ The Game of Yes & No
No,
The idea is not that a picture means necessarily just the sum total of marks. That is only the case if there is no unity to the result that has any kind of cogency. In which case all that is left to carry the symbolic freight is the abundance of components.
If the overall work has unity and sublimity, the components come to signify more than a mere summation.
In my opinion, Art has its own philosophy, aesthetics, which is quite well developed. It doesn't add anything to label it as eastern or western.
Kev: "...who tries to claim artistic expertise through the use of the mouth rather than his own works."
__________
Do you think your own work shows the artistic expertise that comes out of your mouth?
Kev,
I agree my use of "sum total" above is incorrect and should be replaced with "by-product."
An individual artist's expression is the by-product of the decisions that individual makes.
As a child of the West, I highly value my individuality. An individual’s accountability (good or bad) for his/her decisions is what I was going for here and I think that is a Western point of view. I also think of Aesthetics as a philosophy that grew out classical Greece and Western traditions.
Thank you अर्जुन,
I enjoyed the Alan Watts lecture but was disappointed it wasn't one of your obscure music videos making the same point.
Lipov,
I am an artist, and always have been. I am quite satisfied that I have sufficiently tested what I claim about aesthetics in my own work. I do not speak from the place of academic. I am not removed from what I say. In fact, I constantly test it in practice.
Furthermore, talking on a blog is no way to go about getting famous for having opinions. Its just fun.
And this is the point to understand when considering those who make claims professionally about certain realms without actually having any experience in those realms.
Lipov, are you an artist by chance? I'd love to see your work if you are.
"but was disappointed it wasn't one of your obscure music videos making the same point." ~ DAMN!
"talking on a blog is no way to go about getting famous for having opinions." ~ DOUBLE DAMN!!
Matthew:-- “Western because an individual artist's expression is the sum total of the decisions that individual makes. In the Eastern tradition the artist gives up his individuality to forces outside of him or herself.”
Kev's kinda answered this already Matthew, but I'll just add this:
I explored eastern ideas very deeply regarding making art at one time ‘there is no painter, just painting’, ‘the will cannot create anything’ etc etc.
My own view is that the principles of aesthetics are the same, differing only in concepts and beliefs concerning the nature of individual ‘identity’ and its relation to how culture is produced and experienced.
Chris -- I explored eastern ideas very deeply regarding making art...
Me too, and I still practice meditation (TM) and have a great respect for eastern insights and traditions. What I'm curious about now is finding and exploring equivalent insights in the Western tradition. Following this debate it struck me that the difference between the two philosophies was as fundamental as how one thinks about placing a mark on a sheet of paper.
But that’s my point Matthew, it isn’t any different. The difference lies in explanations and interpretations by the cultural philosophy of the respective cultures after the fact.
I’ll have a little think and see if I can give a concise answer to what I mean by the state of mind of the artist making a string of marks being identical in both cultures (when it is effective as universal visual communication).
"In my opinion, Art has its own philosophy, aesthetics, which is quite well developed. It doesn't add anything to label it as eastern or western."
Kev
Don't you think different people or different groups of people have different outlooks or different conceptions of the world and hence their art is an expression of that viewpoint? One only has to look at French and English gardens to see different expressions of mind. The way different people organized their enivoriments, how they structure their language, reflect the structures of a specific nationally and their values or outlook. The American Indian had no conception of land ownership. Art can really only express a specific mental viewpoint.
Just an aside if Art is the language of symbols, does the use of photography by artists today reflect and imporvishment of the language of art, the inability of the artist to conceptualize reality?
Thanks Chris,
I often find this way of communicating difficult. When I agree it sometimes comes off as argumentative and a lighthearted quip as deep-seated sarcasm. I often cringe when I reread my posts a day later.
Yes, Aesthetics is universal and can cross over cultural differences. What I was trying to relate was my new found appreciation of that point of view. When I was young, I gave up on western philosophy and explored Zen Buddhism, Tibetan Buddhism, the Tao and a sprinkling of Hinduism. Even today, I tend to see the world through an eastern philosophical prism.
Kev
Don't you think different people or different groups of people have different outlooks or different conceptions of the world and hence their art is an expression of that viewpoint?...The American Indian had no conception of land ownership. Art can really only express a specific mental viewpoint.
Hey Tom,
My viewpoint is that human perceptions of sense experience do not change due to philosophy, worldview, language, religion, etc. So, regardless of who we are, we all share the rock bottom foundations of aesthetics. Culture is merely draped over our human commonality.
The more a culture codifies/formalizes its identity, the further it drifts from its universal roots, and the more tribe-centric it becomes. But only at the extreme ends of things, when a culture becomes formalized to the point of monomania or decadence, does its art become merely tribal/political, with no universality to it. At this point the works become text, coded so only the in-crowd can get the meaning.
I’m a bit dubious about the claims about American Indians having no concept of possession. There is no other way to explain their antogonism against the incursions of settlers unless they thought we were tresspassing on land that was theirs. As nomads, I would think they pretty much believed that “home” was where they hung their hats. But wherever they hung their hats, that home was protected by violence.
Just an aside if Art is the language of symbols, does the use of photography by artists today reflect and imporvishment of the language of art, the inability of the artist to conceptualize reality?
Tom, that is exactly what I believe.
However, It is hard to know whether photography is more the result of conceptual impoverishment, or the cause of it. TV, for example is almost all photographic and has had a massive influence.
And, I would add, the dominance of writing and talking as the communication medium of the west, has allowed text-based thinkers to dominate art discourse, (and thus art commerce) perpetuating completely ignorant views about Art and Aesthetics culture-wide.
So the impoverishment has, it seems to me, become institutionalized.
Matthew:--"...I tend to see the world through an eastern philosophical prism."
That's nicely put Matthew.
My view is that at the threshold of making marks this is irrelevant.
To confound you, and sound a bit like an eastern mystic myself:
How you take the boat to the lake is quite different to floating on it.
Eastern thought is an existential attitude that was invented to quell fear and its insidious daughter, anxiety.
Western thought adopts religion into its world view as compensation to existential fear and anxiety.
These two outlooks sit outside the internal mechanisms of fundamental visual grammar and the state of mind to write with it eloquently and at its most poyent.
Kev has just put things very beautifully:
“So, regardless of who we are, we all share the rock bottom foundations of aesthetics. Culture is merely draped over our human commonality.”
Tom "...if Art is the language of symbols, does the use of photography by artists today reflect an imporvishment of the language of art, the inability of the artist to conceptualize reality?"
photography
film
painting
symbols, allegories, metaphors, dream images etc are not restricted by any particular medium, only by the intentions of the particular artist at the helm.
Laurence,
There is a great difference between coming up with a tidy overarching concept for a photograph, and conceptualizing everything for a painting, from the anatomy of a knuckle to the meaning of light. Those photos are such typical work for the medium, where the surface carries everything and obfuscation passes for mystery. Cant you feel how dead they are, internally?
And I don't even like the painting you compared them too, it's too art-house... "looka me, I got a symbolism! A lady with wings!"
A better comparison might be Walter Everett, whose mature work is completely imagined, from the ground up. His concepts are practically irrelevant compared to what his imagination does with everything.
Kev, whether you like those examples or not isn't the issue. they merely illustrate my point above about different mediums, although if you haven't seen Andrei Tarkovsky's 'Stalker' (second link) you're missing one of the masterpieces of art cinema.
Hi Kev and Laurence
Wow those Evertt's are nice. That is what I meant by conceptualization, or symbols, the artist ability to create forms that would allow him to construct a picture from the ground up and draw a forearm or a hill or anything. The symbolic problem being how can one make the forms and spaces of the world drawable and paintable.
If we are going to compare images, we really should be comparing apples with apples. Judging a single photograph on the basis of the movie in which it appears isn't sensible. A film, like a painting, has many opportunities to be art. A single photo is very limited and limiting.
I want to emphasize that you seem to only be looking and comparing at the top level of the still images, where the scenario resides, Laurence. This picture is completely imagined… from the atom to the stars. It is not just “dreamy”, it is a dream. It isn't built of real things. Its very substance is imaginative.
"...Judging a single photograph on the basis of the movie in which it appears isn't sensible."
not what i was doing Kev. notice the link said 'film' meaning the movie.
Hey Tom,
Very pleased you appreciate Everett's work. I would add that the challenge of art is not just to use visual symbols "to draw and paint" everything, but to evoke emotions and thoughts in the process. Using no words. Just visual epiphanies.
Hi Kev
Agree, but anyone who has gone to the effort to create the symbols most likely will not be lacking in feeling.
Hi,
good work..keep blogging
As someone who quoted wolfflin on this blog a few years ago
I assume you haven't read Wolfflin in depth, otherwise you would have presented that as a far better qualifier than "I've quoted him"?
Show me one work of art by wolfflin that demonstrates that he actually can demonstrate that the principles he espouses as being the necessary ones are actually what makes a work of art a good one?
Again, have you read him? Are you unable to evaluate the veracity for yourself? Veracity is the only credential I require. If you have read him and are attempting to discredit him, the burden of proof is on you.
Since your criteria for what has veracity is limited to that which you agree with through you reason, rather than what you find has worked for you in practice, I'm not terribly interested in who or what you find has veracity. And it is really striking that you have not yet understood that your penchant for insisting upon the correctness of the sources to which you subscribe adds no weight to your opinions. Appeals to authority are mindless substitutes for actual thought.
rather than what you find has worked for you in practice
You don't even know my name, let alone know what has or has not worked for me in practice. I do have to hand it to you, Kev; you are tenacious and fearless in the stratagem of defending one absurd argument with another absurd argument ad infinitum. So go ahead and get the last word in and claim victory one more time; this is getting quite boring.
If you are implying that you have indeed demonstrated your claims to your own satisfaction in your artwork then, hey, here's a crazy idea... Let's see your work.
Otherwise there is absolutely no way for anybody to know, from reading what you say, if you are a nutter or not.
For all I know, you are a massive talent, who's completed important realist murals and gives workshops in color theory to teeming crowds of art students. But the reality is, all I know of you is your stubborn streak a mile wide, your narrow fixation on a certain style of classical realist art (and a few texts that seem to explain its charms for you), and your anonymity. Don't expect to both be taken seriously as an authority on the aspects of art you find interesting (or worth debating) and also to stay in a hidey hole of anonymity.
Fronting authoritativeness while demonstrating cowardice doesn't jibe. Your move.
Your move.
I moved around twelve years old; away from comic book aesthetics and their cliche dialogue.
Iron Peanut... How droll.
I'm sure you couldn't have failed to notice that you have cherry picked a minor issue of wording to argue with, rather than grappling with the substance of the point I was making.
Once again, the front you front (maturity) is belied by your behavior (juvenile debating tactics).
Care to post a link to your work wherein you prove Wolfflin's points in practice? I'm particularly interested in the inane simplification of Ward's Frankenstein picture you posted earlier. I'd like to see you how you build a really impressive composition using the "formalist and abstract" method you tried to impress us with then.
(Anyone would be loath to move while in zugzwang. But that's never stopped you before. Push another pawn. Maybe my clock will run out.)
Kev,
You are mistaken (and now you will be insulted as well) in that you believe it simply has to be laid naked before you and you will understand it. It requires time and cultivation of a specific skill, a skill which is not as instinctive and ingrained as interpreting narrative.
Are you under the impression that you have cultivated some skill which I do not possess?
Pray tell, what skill is that? Of analyzing compositions abstractly? Of plotting out geometric understructures to classical paintings? Overlaying golden section diagrams? Noticing figural envelopes? What?
What skill are you claiming exactly that actually amounts to a skill?
Why ask such questions of one you suspect to be a nutter?
No nutter thinks he's a nutter. So I am attempting to get you to demonstrate your character to yourself. This begins a journey into epistemology, which I consider a road to healing.
In this regard, your irrelevant assertion that "interpreting narrative" is a skill which is "instinctive and ingrained" demonstrates exactly what I'm trying to get across to you. Your obsession with analysis is preventing you from recognizing that it is synthesis that is the hallmark of talent and the far more essential skill to discuss. Those that have synthetic talent are the authorities to which one should pay due attention. Everybody else is guessing.
No nutter thinks he's a nutter. So I am attempting to get you to demonstrate your character to yourself. This begins a journey into epistemology, which I consider a road to healing.
No, Kev. You are the nutter; we were discussing art and suddenly you thought you were Dr. Phil.
synthesis that is the hallmark of talent and the far more essential skill to discuss
By the authority of whom?
Iron Peanut,
Do you understand the difference between analysis and synthesis?
Analysis takes things apart, to examine the elements in isolation. Synthesis puts elements together, creating new unities.
Art is putting things together, creating new unities.
So you see, "authority" in this matter is your own ability to understand the most basic ideas imaginable.
David,
I have been keenly following this blog. Not only it has been interesting but also practically useful.
I am sharing an interesting link; on artists and themes they used in psywar operations of WW II and even later -
http://www.psywarrior.com/PsyopComics.html
Regards
KravMaga SreeRam, Chennai (Madras), India
ksr960@gmail.com
very interesting how something so menacing can look so beautiful. It's definitely not the way we see monsters portrayed today. I think it's stunning!
Do you understand the difference between analysis and synthesis?
Actually I understand the orthodox as well as Kantian definitions of those words.
The fact is that practically all recorded conversation about art by philosophers and artists has been and is analytic; there can be no synthesis without analysis. What a profoundly ignorant comment by you; that's a definite conversation ender and I'm tired of your little game of deflecting one poor argument with another.
there can be no synthesis without analysis.
Not only is this an irrelevant remark to the question of where does the power of art reside, or whether the artist or the academic knows more about how to analyze pictures (typical of the feeble diversionary responses ginned up by your Iron Peanut) but it demonstrates how completely ignorant you are of how the imagination works and how most art is created.
But this is to be expected. If there's anything that you have demonstrated time and again, it is just how tightly knotted a small mind can be.
I think it would be a great benefit if we could all see your artwork. I'm sure it would be a dazzling display of analyticity.
Oh, but you'll change the subject won't you...
very nice blog, keep it up, will share this site to others.
Paintings
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