lunes, 30 de mayo de 2011

[ NOTA #4 ] HACE MUCHO TIEMPO... NO TANTO (sigue la fiebre)

[ NOTA #4 ] HACE MUCHO TIEMPO... NO TANTO (sigue la fiebre) del blog DESPUÉS DE LA FIEBRE DEL ORO.


... Encerrado en mi habitación... escucho cintas que he grabado con mi voz... reviso los viejos albumes de hace tantos años... me veo... os veo (nos vemos). Al fin caen frutos del árbol de las manzanas doradas (un trabajo otros para un otro Hercules -que no yo- menos cansado y más extasiado y embriagado.

... dejar después los pensamientos fluir. Las notas del cuaderno brotar a la vista de todos... que lo que de espíritu quede sea... razonable (razón de más)

.... imágenes de la fiebre y del oro. De lo razonado aún por pensar. Con todo y aún mucho por hacer. En camino y en la carretera otra vez.

... pinto dorado feliz de estar en...

... el metataller del artista (uff)... Polke... Richter... James Lee Byars... Leonardo... Turrel... Judd... intentar pintar aun, inclusive.

... el taller fuera y dentro del taller (James Lee B. roi doree)

... el cuadro por hacer o deshacer... limpiar el pincel pintando... planificar...

... los sacos dorados están por llegar... un limbo en lugar del lugar (el lugar en lugar del lugar (   )






















lunes, 14 de marzo de 2011

[ NOTA #11 ] Momento de luz + momento de visión.

[... tachar y volver a tachar... anular (como si de un dedo supuestamente inútil se tratara). Con el proposito de de abrir el sentido a su multiplicidad y dejarlo estar para el conocer estético. Mesa estática y extática que ya no lo será más... mesa vacía que ya no lo está. El objeto para si. Lo que tacha tacha en tanto que comentario y lo que representa en tanto lo que había... en la imagen recordada y en la imagen idolatrada. En el fetiche lo reprimido se muestra como síntoma puesto fuera de nuestro cuerpo físico... ahí fuera. Influyendo con la gravedad de la leyes físicas. Atrayendo nuestro ser a recorrer caminos no sabidos... tal vez desconocidos (mil veces andados por unos o por otros, pero no pensados y no comprendidos). Indeterminación del ídolo... del objeto, de la escena, de la ley en la perversión... ]

[... «Es demasiado idealista... y, por eso mismo, cruel».

Dostoievski, Humillados y ofendidos... ]

[... cruel con la pintura. Con todos los efectos que esta es capaz de desplegar... una idea, un orden una visión. Componer y descomponer... encajar la imagen y dejar que se diga y nos exprese hasta la emoción. Pero esa emoción no llega. No llegará... ]

[... dorado... gamas y capas de dorado que subliman el blanco y negro de la no pintura (o de aquello que se pretendió como pintura otra). Superficies sobre superficies que se ciegan, nublan e invisibilizan las unas a las otras. No puede haber una imagen cabal, completa y frontal de lo que se hace, de la imagen construida, Esta se somete al punto de vista y gana en armonía, en cromatismo, luminosidad y en la negación de si misma y de todo su potencial de sentido a través del valor diferencial que la constituye en lo material. Y en la idea previa, en su origen y en el pretendido destino. Su imagen es azarosa y sujeta al punto de vista y al recuerdo de todos su posibles y potenciales puntos de vista y momentos de luz. Momento de luz y momento de visión se desterritorializan para amalgamarse como el momento de emoción y con el inesperado momento de la verdad... cuando la imagen deja de estar fuera... y ya la idolatramos como a un carnero dorado elevado en su altar que no todo es sin la hecatombe, el sacrificio, o la ofrenda de quienes aguardan del símbolo la alegoría que permitirá vislumbrar el sentido de todo ser y estar... de los acontecimientos y de la razón misma. Signo de vida... ]





domingo, 13 de marzo de 2011

[ NOTA #10 ] ... DICIENDO (Gerhard Richter...)


Picturing things, taking a view, is what makes us human; art is making sense and giving shape to that sense. It is like the religious search for God.
Notes, 1962
Since there is no such thing as absolute rightness and truth, we always pursue the artificial, leading, human truth. We judge and make a truth that excludes other truths. Art plays a formative part in this manufacture of truth.
Notes, 1962
Theory has nothing to do with a work of art. Pictures which are interpretable, and which contain a meaning, are bad pictures. A picture presents itself as the Unmanageable, the Illogical, the Meaningless. It demonstrates the endless multiplicity of aspects; it takes away our certainty, because it deprives a thing of its meaning and its name. It shows us the thing in all the manifold significance and infinite variety that preclude the emergence of any single meaning and view.
Notes, 1964-65
Art is not a substitute religion: it is a religion (in the true sense of the word: 'binding back', 'binding' to the unknowable, transcending reason, transcendent being). But the church is no longer adequate as a means of affording experience of the transcendental, and of making religion real – and so art has been transformed from a means into the sole provider of religion: which means religion itself.
Notes, 1964-65
Now there are no priests or philosophers left, artists are the most important people in the world.
Notes, 1966
How do you interpret your role as a painter in our society?
As a role that everyone has. I would like to try to understand what is. We know very little, and I am trying to do it by creating analogies. Almost every work of art is an analogy. When I make a representation of something, this too is an analogy to what exists; I make an effort to get a grip on the thing by depicting it. I prefer to steer clear of anything aesthetic, so as not to set obstacles in my own way and not to have the problem of people saying: 'Ah, yes, that's how he sees the world, that's his interpretation.'
Interview with Rolf-Gunter Dienst, 1970
Art is the highest form of hope.
Text for catalogue of documenta 7, Kassel, 1982
Other people did, however, try to tie a label on you. 'Capitalist Realism' was one catchphrase that stuck. And it was actually coined by you in the first place.
Yes, we were amazed when that happened. It was a real joke to us. Konrad Lueg and I did a Happening, and we used the phrase just for the Happening, to have a catchy name for it; and then it immediately got taken up and brought into use. There's no defence against that – and really it's no bad thing.
Interview with Wolfgang Pehnt, 1984
Could you tell me a little about your Manifesto of Capitalist Realism? 
That was a piece I did in 1963 with Konrad Lueg in a department store, in the furniture department. It was announced in some papers as an exhibition opening, but the people who came didn't know that it was to be a sort of Happening. I don't think it is quite right that it has become so famous anyhow. It was just a lot of fun, and the word itself, Capitalist Realism, hit just right. But it wasn't such a big deal.
Interview with Dorothea Dietrich, 1985
I originally came from Dresden, where Socialist Realism prevailed. Konrad Lueg and I came up with it, for the most part ironically, since I now live in capitalism. It was certainly 'realism', but in another form – the capitalist form, as it were. It wasn't meant that seriously. It was more a slogan for that particular Happening at a furniture store.
Interview with Christiane Vielhaber, 1986
Art is the pure realization of religious feeling, capacity for faith, longing for God. […] The ability to believe is our outstanding quality, and only art adequately translates it into reality. But when we assuage our need for faith with an ideology we court disaster.
Notes, 1988
What does the word 'Informel' mean to you today?
As I see it, all of them – Tachists, Action Painters, Informel artists, and the rest – are only part of an Informel movement that covers a lot of other things as well. I think there's an Informel element in Beuys, as well; but it all began with Duchamp and chance, or with Mondrian, or with the Impressionists. The Informel is the opposite of the constructional quality of classicism – the age of kings, or clearly formed hierarchies.

So in this context you still see yourself as an Informel artist? 
Yes, in principle. The age of the Informel has hardly begun yet.
Interview with Hans Ulrich Obrist, 1993
In general, American Pop Art concentrated on public imagery and commercial culture. But previously you told me that as German Pop artists Polke, Lueg and you wanted to represent a broader experience, a wider view of reality. I wondered if you could say something more about this larger vision in relation to the focus of American Pop Art?
Maybe we didn't even have a chance. The message of American Pop Art was so powerful and so optimistic. But it was also very limited, and that led us to believe that we could somehow distance ourselves from it and communicate a different intention.

So, where does that difference lie? 

It was not possible for us to produce the same optimism and the same kind of humour or irony. Actually, it was not irony. Lichtenstein is not ironic but he does have a special kind of humour. That's how I could describe it: humour and optimism. For Polke and me, everything was more fragmented. But how it was broken up is hard to describe.

sábado, 12 de marzo de 2011

[ NOTA #9 ] NO (insuficiencia_fracaso)

[... Art is the pure realization of religious feeling, capacity for faith, longing for God. […] The ability to believe is our outstanding quality, and only art adequately translates it into reality. But when we assuage our need for faith with an ideology we court disaster. Gerhardt Richter 1988... ]

[... la mesa vacía... y el intento de acabarla llenando la representación con la metáfora de la tachadura, o del borrado...  de ambas cosas, una tras otra o simultaneamente. La cosa sucede y la representación se manifiesta,  encaja y abre paso a un decir lo que no se sabe. Lo que no se sabe pero se intenta... ]

[... la mesa vacía como disfrute del no saber y del hacer por hacer... lo que se sabe hacer y lo que se hace...]

[... tachar / borrar / tachar y borrar (invertir la acción) pura acción poética que expresa el fracaso como problema y la insuficiencia como el terreno de juego para resolver el problema... se insiste una y otra vez...]

[... tachar (y todo lo demás) no es fácil. En el preciso instante de copiar el gesto del artista, que en mi es mera sublimación de lo que se intento decir y se hizo, el pulso tiembla sabiendo que ni es facil ni será adecuado el resultado... sólo el dorado garantiza una capa de sentido que marca la decadencia y la vana gloria de todo intento. Esto es así aún a mi pesar porque el ciclo tendrá que ser explicado... llevando la contraria, y contrariando, al autor. Pero ese es mi camino. Hacia el ídolo... atraído por su saber hacer...]









martes, 8 de marzo de 2011

[ NOTA #8 ] FETICHE_TIEMPO_ESPACIO [ídolo]

[... No hay precisión, o esta, al menos se ve derivada a la sugerencia de no querer ser preciso. O solo preciso cuando lo que se produce es la tachadura, o en su lugar el borrado, ambos como intento o marca: en cada caso el significante es otro ya que incluye las posibilidades multiples de lo que se quiere decir... a saber, que sobre lo impreciso de dice algo que se da por realizado. Esto nos acerca al fetiche pues invoca en el espectador el principio de indeterminación. Demasiadas cosas, todas las por ahora dichas, para una mesa vacía... y también para una cuestión de estilo... y también para un golpe de efecto (que "marca" el des-efecto pretendido... y también un desafecto... ] [... volver a leer y volver a mirar... en la mesa la marca y la indicación de una intención que debe causar en primer lugar, sorpresa, sorpresa... ]

[... quién da más... ]

[... el fetiche como expresión, lo escribía antes, de nuestro participar, infinitivo e infinito, en la determinación y la imposibilidad de la misma por ser el mundo la totalidad de los acontecimientos y de las causas, relaciones y efectos de tal supuesta totalidad... El fetiche como ídolo...]

domingo, 20 de febrero de 2011

[ NOTA #4 ] LA MESA VACÍA...

mesa #2

LA MESA VACIA

Un día, un sufí vio una mesa vacía y, en un éxtasis, se puso a danzar y a desgarrar sus vestidos gritando:
"¡Aquí está! ¡El alimento de todos los alimentos! ¡Helo aquí! ¡El remedio de cualquier hambre!"
Llegaron entonces otros sufíes y se unieron a él, llenos de entusiasmo y de emoción. Pasó un tonto que les dijo: "¿Pero qué idiotez es ésta? ¡Hay ciertamente una mesa, pero ni siquiera hay pan encima!"
El sufí le respondió: "¡Oh aparición insensata! ¡Vete! ¡Si no conoces nada del amor, no importunes a
los que aman! ¡Pues el alimento del enamorado es el amor del pan sin pan! El fiel no tiene existencia. Consigue ganancias sin tener capital. No es posibleque coma un niño que mama."

viernes, 18 de febrero de 2011

[ NOTA #3 ] IGNACIO GARDELLA... MESA (una de ellas)


IGNAZIO GARDELLA (b.1905)
ADJUSTABLE OCCASIONAL TABLE
designed 1949, for Azucena, baize-covered wood with enamelled steel and brass
79cm. sq. 
... tal y como lo vi en Christies

[ NOTA #2 ] Revealing and Concealing: Richter’s “Table”

“…art, whether it is painting, poetry, or for that matter music, springs from the memory of the artist and speaks to the memory of the consumer of that art, [it] is a fundamental truth…criticism is primarily a phenomenon of recognition; and it is that sense of recognition that I have sought to elucidate and develop throughout.”
– J.A. Hiddleston in Baudelaire and the Art of Memory

Everyday, Harvard offers precious artistic moments, such as the opportunity awaiting you at the Sackler Museum in the first-floor gallery of the permanent exhibition, Re-View.  Over the long period of research and contemplation of my senior thesis topic, I longed to see certain original, early photo-paintings by German artist Gerhard Richter in private collections or otherwise inaccessible. Thanks to Harvard’s Benjamin H.D. Buchloh having alerted me to Richter’s Table (1962) at the Sackler Museum, I was able to stand before the work of art that Richter had designated as number one in his Catalogue Raisonné as he began his career in art anew in West Germany.
With Table, Richter took one of his very first steps in a search for a new way to paint, abandoning the Socialist Realism in which he was so thoroughly trained.  Table displays a moving insight into the new world that presented itself to Richter when he defected from East Germany to West Germany in 1961, and the internal conflicts and challenges Richter faced within a society that had perpetrated the barbarism of the Holocaust. In West Germany, Richter had the freedom to express his feelings through his art.


"Table" (1962, oil on canvas) by Gerhard Richter, in its plexiglass case at the Sackler Museum.
 

Table is at once representational and abstract, revealing and concealing, with a swirl of gray paint substantially obscuring the image of the table beneath. One can discern through Table the beginning of Richter’s artistic struggle with Germany’s World War II history.  Part of the horrific reality of this recent history was revealed to him through photographs of Holocaust atrocities when he was an art student in Dresden.  Richter’s personal interaction through his art with Germany’s wartime role and with the idea of uncovering historical memory in the nation of his birth, would be soon integrally combined with his new life in West Germany. In 1957, while still in East Germany, Richter began to reveal a hint of remorse connected to the German perpetration of Holocaust genocide by creating a series of illustrations for a proposed volume of the Diary of Anne Frank.
Table shows Richter drawn to the color gray, signals the very beginning of the idea of photography as a source for his art work, and indicates Richter’s new personal experience of the consumer culture in which West Germany was steeped, as a way of repressing memory of its culpability in World War II and the Holocaust.  As Benjamin H.D. Buchloh writes in “Gerhard Richter’s Atlas: The Anomic Archive,” Germans were living in a state of repression and denial, the “specifically German modality as the condition of repression of historical memory, a sort of psychic anesthesia,” literally drowning memory in the absorbing task of rebuilding the burgeoning West Germany economy.
The placard on the Sackler gallery’s wall tells that Richter’s painting is of an everyday object, an extendable table by the architect Ignazio Gardella, a picture of which had been published “in the important design magazine Domus.” Having just arrived from East Germany, “where advertising of any kind was prohibited, where fashion photography (let alone soft – or hard – pornography) were outlawed, and where images fuelling the desire for tourist travel and consumption would have been banned from the photographic public sphere of the Communist state, Richter could for the first time, endlessly peruse these images in abundance,” writes Buchloh.
Almost as Charles Baudelaire was a flâneur – the intellectual manifestation of the flâneur – acutely observing and interpreting life within Parisian modernity, including all its commodity displays, Richter in his Atlas, a personal collection of photographs begun in 1962, records and curates his observations of the world around him, including in the early section of Atlas photographs from newspapers and books showing jewels (a pearl bracelet in plate 9, a fashion model illustration in plate 10, the film star Brigitte Bardot with her mother in plate 10, a diamond brooch with a huge centrally placed gemstone, a regal diamond tiara and an elaborate diamond necklace with a crown motif symbolic of monarchy in plate 15).  Like Baudelaire’s interest in prostitutes as a Parisian commodity, Richter displays imagery of pornography in photographs of 1967 in Atlas, as well as imagery of cities, among many other subjects.  Photographs Richter collected of concentration camp victims figure importantly in the early part of Atlas.
 Richter's Atlas Sheet 10, 1962, www.gerhard-richter.com
 
Baudelaire, the renowned poet of modernity, was tormented by the traumatic memory-imagery of the old Paris while exploring Parisian modernity, including the presence of what he perceived as evil in modernity, in a new Paris both destroyed and being rebuilt by Baron Haussmann. Paris, based on Haussmann’s planning, became a model for the world of urban modernity. For Baudelaire, Paris became the fragmented city “where ghosts by daylight tug the passer’s sleeve” – ghosts of quarters of old Paris that Baudelaire sought to keep alive through his poetry even in the face of the building of the Haussmannian, new Paris.
Certainly, Germany was a place where Richter felt, within himself, the “ghosts” of the annihilated Jewish victims of the Holocaust, as well as the ghosts of his destroyed birthplace, Dresden.  Baudelaire was alienated by the new Haussmannian Paris rising up around him, yet deeply connected to it, both bereaved and mourning through poetry his exile from the old Paris, yet willingly crossing borders to embrace modernity, inhabiting the new Paris and defying it in his poetry and prose at the same time. Richter, having crossed borders, exiling himself, freeing himself, from the ideology of East Germany, was similarly tormented. Richter’s torment was based upon the shame of the memory of the recent World War II and Holocaust history of his homeland. Richter presented this memory-laden imagery in his photo-paintings from 1962 to 1965.
So, to interact with some on-campus art, now knowing its art-historical background, I recommend a visit to the jewel that is the Sackler Museum – especially the first-floor gallery – to experience Gerhard Richter’s Table.
Photographs of Richter’s Table taken by Victoria Aschheim with permission of the Harvard Art Museum