Art reader's digest

From "Double Take," by Richard Whelan, 1981:

"The choice between black-and-white and color film is, then, not a matter of reactionism versus avant-gardism or of asceticism versus hedonism.  Color and black-and-white photographs are actually about different things.  Color photographs are disjunctive and sensual; black-and-whites are conjunctive and cerebral.  The photographer who uses black-and-white film starts out with an advantage: his medium evidently offers easier access to the subconscious, with its overtones of surrealism and repressed emotions, the expression of which is an essential function of art.  This access to the seething subconscious may help to explain why it is so difficult to imagine in anything but black and white the work of such photographers as Diane Arbus, in whose photographs there is an element of rapacious voyeurism, or Weegee, who was drawn to scenes of violence.  Their photographs simply wouldn't have been as powerful or as disturbing in color.  They would have been just gortesque or horrifying pictures rather than profoundly unsettling photographs.

Car accident, Weegee

"The photographer who uses color film must work extraordinarily hard to make an image that resonates with anything like the kind of ambiguity and dreamlike, subconscious-stimulating qualities that come naturally to black and white.  It may be precisely an intuition of the magnitude of this challenge that began to attract so many sophisticated and adventurous photographers to color during the 1970s."

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Kathy comments:  Would he say the same things today?  Have four decades of color photography achieved their challenge?  Check out what's happening today in black-and-white here.

The fiber bridge

Last week I went on an art road trip with my best museum pal, putting on 960 miles and hitting five different venues in four days.  But the surprise treat of the trip was one that hadn't even been on our radar screen until we arrived in Pittsburgh.  Then we learned that a couple of days earlier, one of the downtown bridges had been yarn-bombed with almost 1000 knitted, crocheted and woven afghans!

And quite the spectacle it made -- each space on the pedestrian railing between uprights was filled with not one but two afghans, one facing outward and one facing in.  Then the railings themselves were covered with black knit or crochet.  Over this past weekend the plan was to go back and also cover the bottom railing, right below the afghans.

In addition, the two big towers of the bridge were adorned with a lot of knit fabric in geometric designs.

The project was dreamed up more than a year ago, planned to coincide with Fiberart International, which is held every three years under the sponsorship of the Fiberarts Guild of Pittsburgh.  (To get an idea of the prodigious planning required to get the project done, check out their blog here.)  The show closed yesterday, but the bridge will remain decorated until September 8.

And to judge from the pedestrians lingering on the bridge last week to inspect, discuss and photograph the afghans, the project is a big hit.

People from all over the region contributed afghans, which had to be 34" x 72" and made of acrylic yarn to stand up to the weather.  After they're taken down, the afghans will be washed and donated to homeless shelters and other charities.

By far the most popular design was the granny square; eight squares and a little border would do the trick.  What I loved best was the improvisational spirit of most of the makers.  A lot of people ran out of the colors they started with, and finished with something else.  A lot apparently decided to use up the yarn they had on hand, no matter what colors.  Some people made only a third or less of a complete afghan, which ended up being joined to other parts.  Some people made only a couple of eight-inch squares.

Mismatched or not, or perhaps because they were mismatched, these hit-or-miss afghans had amazing energy.  It helped that they were all pulled tight around the railings -- flat and taut, they looked like abstract paintings.  If there are bulges or droops, or if the afghans aren't exactly square, which is very likely with makers of all different degrees of expertise, none of that was apparent in this presentation.

Many of the afghans were surprisingly sophisticated in design, considering the limitations of the rules.  Here are some of our favorites.  Sorry about the shadows -- you can't make a bridge move its piers just so you can get a better photo.

Photo suite 86 -- loading dock

 

Art reader's digest

From a review by Holland Cotter in the New York Times of a show by the great Italian painter Giorgio Morandi:

(Near the end of his life,)  "His hand had lost steadiness; his eyesight was, perhaps, failing,  But he didn't rest.  He kept painting.  Why?

Giorgio Morandi, Natura Morte (Still Life), 1954

"You might ask other artist-poets this question: Joseph Albers, say, or Paul Klee or Agnes Martin or a New York artist I know who sits down at his apartment desk for two hours every day -- only two, but always two -- to embroider small squares of raw canvas with abstract patterns in silk thread.  The work is close, slow and painstaking, done stitch by stitch, row by row -- letter by letter, line by line -- in calligraphic loops and tufts.  An inch of embroidery, approximately the size of a sonnet quatrain, takes months to complete.

"But the work goes on.  Because it is controllable reality.  It is a form of thinking that frees up thought.  It is time-consuming, but time-slowing, isolating but self-fulfilling.  It is a part of life, but also a metaphor for how life should be: with everything in place, every pattern clear, every rhyme exact, every goal near."

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Kathy comments:

The good news: a lyrical description of the making of art, perfectly capturing the transcendent allure of slow handwork.

The bad news: why couldn't Cotter have named his admirable artist-friend?

Sign of the week

Paris museums 11 -- Orangerie

What a difference a few decades make!  From the still lifes of Cézanne (1870s - 90s) to the still lifes of Chaim Soutine (post WW1), and art history, like world history, has gone a long way.  After the war nobody much wanted to paint beauty any more; bleeding meat was a perfect metaphor for postwar disillusionment and angst.

Chaim Soutine, Boeuf et tête de veau  (Beef and calf head), 1923 

Chaim Soutine, Le Dindon (The turkey), 1925

Chaim Soutine, Dindon et tomates (Turkey and tomatoes), 1923-24

Chaim Soutine, La Table, 1919

Chaim Soutine, Le Lapin (The rabbit) , 1923-24

Chaim Soutine, Nature morte au faisan (Still life with pheasant), 1924

Chaim Soutine, Le Poulet plumé (the plucked chicken), 1925