I want to take a minute to explain what I’ve been looking at and thinking about lately, that is, the works of the French Nouveau Realists – which is to say the group of Tinguely, St Phalle, Arman, Sporreri, Ceasar, Christo, &c. in and around the late 50’s and early 60’s. One of the methods of Nouveau Realism was the use of real objects in and of the world in the making of art. While Duchamp proposed the idea of the ordinary object elevated to the level of Art by the choice of the artist, he only produced a few banal examples. It was in the works of the Nouveau Realists that this idea was brought to fruition with beauty. It is, after all, pointless to propose revolution in art if it does not result in beauty.

I say “1961” because it seems to me a pivotal year for Western culture. It marks the change from abstraction in art to the sequential popular art movements of the 60’s which continue to this day, the rise of Rock and Roll culture which has supplanted the (revolutionary) role of the artist with that of the star, and television’s spectator culture which created the audience for it.

The inversion of “61” gives 1919, roughly the year Duchamp quit readymades, and, 1961 is fifty years ago from today.

At this time also, was the “concrete” movement in music and film. I think  of Xenakis, Robert Breer, and especially of Stan Brakhage. Concrete elements in art are acquired from the real world, and are not related to abstract elements which are Platonic distillations of real elements, or expressionistic elements, which are emotional subjective representations.

I think some creative people of that time were trying very hard to be in and of the real world, fully engaged in the experience of it, and making in artworks which themselves were real-world things, objective, and not responsive or interpretative.

The reader may be helped in his understanding by exploring these links:

Arman:     http://www.armanstudio.com/fernandez-arman-untitled-234-3-17-eng.html

My muse has abandoned me because because I did not pay her enough attentions. I can’t focus on scupture when I have everything else going on right now here. I am only able to read books – easy popular autobiographies. I’ve reading Life, by Keith Richards. Before that, Decoded, by Jay-Z, and Chronicles Vol. 1, by Bob Dylan. Each of them makes a special mention about Winter. For Dylan, his eternal memory of his early days in New York is made in Winter, cold and snow. How so many of his album covers show him in a Winter coat? Jay-Z says the same about his days as a hustler, standing on a corner in the wind and cold, doing business, uses that image in his lyrics. And Keith Richards tells about the London winter when the Stones first formed, trying to stay warm in small apts, learning the Bluesman’s craft.

Winter should be a time of inspiration which comes from within yourself. You defend against the external world. Identify what you have, useful, to do. Working in the context and materials you have. The external cannot bring you anything now. You are on your own.  At last.

I was looking through a book of Alexander Calder when I heard a voice in my head say “I need some assholes to blow up my 6 inch models to 30 feet tall”. What is meant by that I don’t know. Maybe that anyone’d be dumb enough to do that kind of work, and who could I get to pay for it? What’s it mean that lately I’m thinking I want to do something that big?

Not getting much sculpting done lately. I was in Madison WI. for Thanksgiving . Made a point to see again something I really like at the Chazen Museum. But someone should bother to dust it off once in a while. It is furry on the shoulders with dust. Shame.

Leonard Baskin (American, 1922-2000) Laureate Standing, 1957 Cherrywood, 36 x 10 x 10 in.

Saw some good David Smith, Barbra Hepworth, and Deborah Butterfield, which reminded me that abstraction is not chaos, rather, it is rational. People sometimes confuse expressionism of a melodramatic type with abstraction.

Also stopped in Chicago and saw Cloud Gate by Anish Kapoor. It is bogglingly great. It works on so many levels. People can engage with it depending on whatever they are prepared for. It could be a funhouse piece for some, and be an Op Art illusionism for others, just depends.

There, to the south of Bengal, on the east coast, a miraculous thing happened when, according to legend, a log of wood was seen floating in the sea and a mythical king ordered a carpenter to make it into an image of God.  The carpenter stipulated that he be left working behind closed doors for twenty-one days. The king opened the door prematurely; the carpenter, who was God himself, vanished. Though the image remained incomplete, it was installed in the temple. The image of Jagannatha, Lord of the World – in his temple of the twelfth century in Puri, an imposing structure built in the Great Tradition and of lavish sophistication – is a log of wood Just that and nothing else. Large eyes are painted on it and arm stumps branch out.  (Binayak, Mishra “Folklore and Pauranic Tradition about the Origin of God Jagannatha” Indian Historical Quarterly XIII (1937) 600-609)

My Dad retired 20 years ago and took up painting as a hobby. He occasionally sends me pictures of what he is doing.

This one post, The world’s creepiest painting, gets more comments that the rest of my blog. So, here are more paintings by George De Genaro.