Writing about two art shows which took place in 2007, one by a graphic artist, the other by a group of young band members. Chris Kraus says:

“Looking at images from Yates’ Burnout exhibition alongside the Get Hurt documentation, I’m struck by the intangible quality that differentiates art from ephemera. Both shows featured works composed from the same materials, in similar styles. Both bodies of work orchestrate collisions of signifiers drawn from the same bank of cultural references. Yet Yates’ magnificent posters… are decidedly works of visual art“. Kraus, Chris Where Art Belongs Semiotext(e) 2011

What I’m remarking here is the notion that contemporary art is easily identified by its use of signifiers and references – so much that it represents a de facto style in itself. An “ism” of art consisting of signifiers and cultural references.

Wait for my next post to see where I’m really going with this…

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.