monochromes and hard edged abstraction

http://www.artespain.com/wp-content/uploads/palazuelo2.jpg

missing notable ilx poster plaxico

Lately, as in like, this year?

If you study art history in Canada, as I do, you hear about the VOF controversy non-stop. I actually had a class once that was solely dedicated to it.

― Garth December, virulent food critic (EDB), Tuesday, August 24, 2010 11:01 PM (1 month ago)

i didn't mean the voices of fire controversy was recent. there have been calls for the director of the museum to resign and shit in the last year. its been all over the blogs. every country has a public uproar over meaningless modern art controversy (cf. the tate and equivalent vii for eg.) but the greg.org thing is really funny.

not so much that somebody "did their own newman" there's always some db, but the critical reception.

thats been bothering me. btw i'm going to this show tomorrow:

http://calgaryculture.com/content/softcore-hard-edge

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WwCOn5q5QYc

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WwCOn5q5QYc

http://i386.photobucket.com/albums/oo305/lejospopo/2633d783.jpg

sherrie levine

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WGwbGjbtjQQ&feature

Ok wow this thread. I think I'm getting really into this sort of stuff.

how have i just now seen this thread??

http://www.kuttnersiebert.de/artists/haggerty/pics/haggerty2010/hagg10-002.jpg

what the fuck who is this tell me everything about this

http://boldongrey.at/blog/wp-content/uploads/2009/03/gerwald_rockenschaub_01.jpg

Gerwald Rockenschaub

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ec_9zr8whTw

I love plax. Also this thread. Also monochromes and hard edged abstraction.

Xpost: I saw Ray Gun Virus at the MOMA a few days ago. Absolutely mesmerizing. I love Sharits, and seeing his work in person, projected in full size, and in a dark room, with the sound of the projector there, is a totally different (i.e. much more affective) experience.

Also, really like these Glenn Ligon text-monochromes:

http://www.moma.org/images/dynamic_content/exhibition_page/25952.jpg

This is a much better image:

http://whitney.org/image_columns/0029/1753/stop-313_446.jpg

moma is where i saw ray gun virus too! totally amazing to me, really blew me away, was completely unaware of sharits before. Im working on a zine that im calling monochromes and each issue will have a different theme but the theme will always relate to the monochrome. Love those glenn ligon ones and i was gonna maybe do the next issue all about him. reading derrida for the first time and i always feel like, even though i've never really read much by derrida, that he's always on the periphery (lol) of how i think about things so, idk this sense of the palimpsest but also the raw remainder. like its so haunted by ab-ex, this all over abstraction but also explicitly textual and unearthing the implicitly textual in ab-ex, the guston-like skin: wounded, scarred, pillaged, and marked. and like blackness and racism and history and all that

but yeah monochromes especially have been on my mind a lot recently, also been thinking about certain lawrence wiener pieces in relation to this eg.

"Three minutes of forty-pound pressure spray of white highway paint upon a well-tended lawn
The lawn is allowed to grow and not tended until the grass is free of all vestiges of white highway paint"

and how that sort of simultaneously elides and converges w/ how i would think of say ellsworth kelly and the relationship w/e the optical, the immersive, the formal and the textual.

also this guy matys thursz that i came across in new york at the jewish museum:

"Ashes and Dust (1986-89) is part of Frederic Matys Thursz's series, Elegia Judaica, and serves as a memorial to his uncle Jakob Gutglas, who died in Dachau, and to other victims of the Nazis. Despite its monochromatic nature, the painting features the artist's complex palette and his method of glazing, scraping, and sometimes burning his medium. To create Ashes and Dust, Thursz (2930-1992) performed what he considered a a highly symbolic act: he charred organic material that he then used for his leaden-tone pigments. The artist once explained that the work was inspired by profoundly felt memories of his uncle: "I know that his ashes become my pigment, that his blood legacy is my . . . medium, and that his elegy is now my coherence.""

I mean this idea of the pure physical and the purely metaphysical and how they come into contact and this kindof eucaristic relationship between the two and like the idea of meaning coming about by a kindof transubstantiation is a pretty big part of the way i think about these things. btw dude is a balls to google but im hoping to do a bit of proper research as soon as i have dece library access, maybe gonna try and get a reading pass at the british library.

So I think I'm gonna try to write a thesis vaguely about this. I.e. not this per se so much as postmodern appropriations of post-painterly abstraction/minimal art, particularly vis a vis identity politics (a la FGT, Ligon, Roni Horn, etc.) so I encourage everyone to post relevant pictures to inspire me so I can write a good proposal and get funding! (is it worth making a separate ILE thread for this?)

http://www.corcoran.org/images/chris_martin_homepage.jpg

also edb im writing something at the moment about this too. wolfgang tillman's monochrome photographs are really interesting in this regard, you know the idea of the the pure sensuality of the undifferentiated colour field standing in for the negated image. and they're shiny, you can see yourself reflected in them. im thinking about queer abstraction, and how the appropriation of minimalism/high modernism is a kind of recoding or "passing" (FGT is so explicit about this, but yeah ligon and horn as well) and how that kindof passing has to exist in relation to the queer and the homophobic gaze. so its about fleeting glances. this is why i think there's a case to be made for ellsworth kelly as a queer artist. people talk about him as a really french painter because for him modernism begins with impressionism instead of most american painters where cubism is the axis, one way or the other .shit even like dan graham and richard serra are about bodies in space, space fragmenting; paul mccarthy is about the violence of gesture; kelly is about snatching glimpses reflected in the subway window, refracted light, the instantaneity of the image and how that renders it barely decipherable. i feel like the opacity of his surfaces have more to do with photography (light bouncing off an object or something) and how that fraction of a second is all you need looking back over your shoulder and making eye contact on rue st. honoré.

http://media.tumblr.com/tumblr_matmuskyZk1qaxt8j.jpg

http://media.tumblr.com/tumblr_matno52ipa1qaxt8j.jpg

http://media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m9tvbspmc01qaxt8j.jpg

http://media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m9tve5IIOh1qaxt8j.jpg

http://media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m8hhz24peZ1qaxt8j.gif