Thursday, February 1, 2007
grace and confusion
Hopper's painting of the empty room may anticipate the white cube of the contemporary art space, or look back to the simple surroundings of a church, a place where experience can become simple again, can go back to basics, perhaps to be cleansed or some such thing. A container or format for renewel and refocus. In regards to holding today a common language, we hold in common if anything this desire for a means to let the world not be so complicated again, that is the belief in a place where excess can be washed away, a place where we can reset life to zero. We confuse this 'reformating' with grace.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
3 comments:
Great post, Citizen. I've written a few words on Hopper on my oct 11th blog.
As always, you have pointed me to things I never see. Would you say there's a similarity between that simplicity and the 'black square': a single emotion?
What a co-incidence, was just reading Jonathan Jones' article on Hopper this morning.
first welcome welcome I'll put some pictures up soon and all that
I was thinking really in relation to what you wrote about libertarianism as a theory without people or for the absent person - I don't know what libertarianism is as politcial theory so this is more of a gut reaction.
thinking about Hopper it does appear that in the world he depicts some set of possiblities for 'society' have been removed. This is complicated because he would say I imagine that as a painter his only responsibility is to aesthetic success. But the aesthetic has much to do with everything else methinks.
But under the dispassionate guise in a funny way he was marking out the parameters of how we come to aesthetic experiences, the kind of framing of the world it envolves; the 'I'm standing here and what I look at comes to occupy a distinct place in front of me in a particular space set aside for this sort of thing.' I feel this is a little different to the more tradition idealistic view of aesthetics - the idea of detachment from all practicality, the disinterested point of view.
Matisse is criticised for suggesting the pleasures of art should be like a comfortable chair, the bourgeoise sits in. But this domesticated place for art or painting in particular is perhaps a more involving space than the gallery cube we so go in for today. Sometimes I feel Hopper has less in common with this sort of very tradition sense of aesthetic space and has in fact more in common with the rather colder more bureaucratic spaces of hospitals corperate buildings etc. Maybe there is something rather more utilitarian going on underneath the surface. But I'm making this up as I go along thinking on the fly, I'd have to think about it more!
There are many black squares in art, you have to be more specific :) Malevich comes to mind, but with that tradition of the icon there's a very different simplicity going on, a notion of a very powerful invisible force that unites or brings viewer to object, something beyond subject/object.
this is an interesting area
conversation to continue...
Yes, I was thinking of Malevich. In both there seems to be a silence, a passiveness, a sort of marking of space itself. My 'impressions' are that both represent a sort of Post-judgement scenario..there is nothing left to say. Hopper's world is 'full' of strangers..it is surely the gaps between people that are interesting?what Auden would call the cracks in the teacup...
It almost seems to me that art in Malevich or the western tradition has had enough of images, enough of people. There seems to be desire to not go back to some primordial simplicity, but to find some single emotion and latch onto it.
I think of Hopper's inner spaces ..the desert within that matches the desert without and am reminded of Levinas' words on gagarin: on reachign outerspece he said: there's no God here. Which meant, even at the limits, there is only Man. What greater loneliness could there be?
Post a Comment