How the Grid Conquered Contemporary Art

http://www.artspace.com/magazine/art_101/how_the_grid_conquered_contemporary_art

 

 

 

 

Assignment 2 - Development of test piece

Assignment 2 - Experimentation

Various strips of recycled hessian arranged into an upward weave.

Assignment 2 - Experimentation

Deconstructed shirt fragments handstitched to hessian.
Gesso and acrylic paint.

First of all, the hessian's weave was overpowering and didn't function well as a background.  I quite liked the idea of the large stitches in this work. However, although the shirt industry was the original impetus for this assignment, I think it's too literal to use shirts themselves.

 

Assignment 2 - Experimentation

Deconstructed shirt fragments - 3 layers of progressively thick gesso
Support - old book cover

Manola Millares

 In looking at artists who either employ fabric, weave or stitch in combination with painting and other media, there was a plethora of these artists working in the post war era - 1950's and 1960's.  Following on from Rauschenberg, any material seems to have been subsumed into the artist's visual language.  Also, the canvas of the painted surface takes a battering as well.  Artists for the first time are assaulting the two dimensional plane of the canvas in different ways. One of these Artists was Manola Millares (Spanish) 1926 - 1972.

"Millares began making collages in 1954 using materials such as wood, fabric and sand. From the beginning his work was characterised by the rough textures of his materials and by his way of tearing, bunching, tying and stitching his materials together. From the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s he employed a particularly austere colour range to create images from which, although abstract, a human figure seemed to emerge. Millares called this figure the homunculus, a term that he associated with ‘man in a primitive state’."
http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/millares-painting-150-t00579

Salvatore Scarpitta

Book - Destroy the Picture: Painting the Void 1949 - 1962

The first book to take a transnational view of destruction in abstract painting of the postwar period. Painting the Void: 1949 1962 focuses on one of the most significant consequences of the rise of gestural abstraction in twentieth-century painting: artists literal assault on the picture plane. Responding to the social and political climate of the postwar period especially the crisis of humanity resulting from the atomic bomb international artists ripped, cut, burned, or affixed objects to the traditionally two-dimensional canvas. The exhibition and accompanying catalogue mark the first time that these strategies have been considered together as a coherent mode of artistic production, expanding the scholarship on this critical moment in history. Artists featured in the exhibition include very well-known figures as well as more obscure ones, though no less important, such as Robert Rauschenberg, Lee Bontecou, Yves Klein, Niki de Saint Phalle, Alberto Burri, Lucio Fontana, Salvatore Scarpitta, Antoni Tàpies, and Kazuo Shiraga, as well as Jean Fautrier, Raymond Hains, John Latham, Otto Müehl, Jacques Villeglé, and Shozo Shimamoto.

Weaving as metaphor

Sergej Jensen and Antoni Tapies
Mending
Red thread and gold leaf

Assignment 2 Experimentation

Assignment 2- Experimentation

Assignment 1 Experimentation

These pieces were constructed using thread embedded into glue on a canvas board support.

T

Chuck Close on Tapestries

I'm making a note about this because I'm curious about painters who also use weave in some form.  Note also Gerhard Richter, Louise Bourgeois - also grids, Agnes Martin and Sean Scully - I need to consider the work of each one and reflect on how their practice might inluence my own work.

A couple of hundred years ago, they were trying to speed up the process of tapestries. They hit upon an idea because Rubens made a painting and it was worth ‘x’ dollars and the tapestry was worth five times as much. There was more status in the tapestry then in the original painting. It took two years to weave a tapestry of an original painting that would take just two months to make. They found a method of making paper tapes which had holes in them that were pulled through the loom. If there were holes, they would send the thread up. If there were no holes they would send the thread down. This ultimately led to the IBM key punch card -- which is also hole or no hole. They were looking at the technology that tapestry makers would use. Binary numbers -- the 1 or 0 just stand for hole or no hole. It goes back to that. It was either on or off. It turns out that the computer, which owes its existence to tapestries, is a perfect medium in which to talk to the tapestry. So I work with the computer to see if we can use certain color threads. There are about 150 different colors and values. There are 65 in the color ones and 250 in the black and white. They are made from the guerrotypes by laying them down on a scanner. The scanner illuminates and records the information. It is like a contact print. We do a lot of work on the computer, then we start weaving test strips. And then weave the whole. This thing over here is a tapestry test. You can see how the threads going in different directions make complicated combinations of colors."

http://www.artnet.com/magazineus/features/scobie/scobie8-5-08_detail.asp?picnum=5

Assignment 2 - Developing further test pieces - Damask

This image combines an earlier rough drawing with an image of woven damask material - again rendered in photoshop,  just to see if there is any potential in taking this further.

Again, the fabric is a weave but it is a far cry from the humble cotton used in shirt manufacture.  Silk and linen damask is expensive and at one time, was a highly sought after commodity.  The juxtaposition of the 'upmarket' fabric with the head hints at elevating the female to a higher social level.  The pattern of the fabric also seems to mirror the shape of the head.  It might be interesting to try wrapping the pattern so that it follows the line of the features.  

Georg Baselitz on Women Painters

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art/news/whats-the-biggest-problem-with-women-artists-none-of-them-can-actually-paint-says-georg-baselitz-8484019.html

"Women don’t paint very well. It’s a fact,” the 75-year-old German artist told the German newspaper Der Spiegel. “And that despite the fact that they still constitute the majority of students in the art academies.”Baselitz conceded there were exceptions, pointing to Agnes Martin, Cecily Brown and Rosemarie Trockel. After praising Paula Modersohn-Becker, however, he added that “she is no Picasso, no Modigliani and no Gauguin”.Griselda Pollock, professor of the social and critical history of art at the University of Leeds, hit back: “The most boring of all arguments is that men are better than women. It’s self-evidently nonsense.”Pollock, co-author of Old Mistresses: Women, Art and Ideology, said: “Only few men paint brilliantly and it’s not their masculinity that makes them brilliant. It’s their individuality.”She continued: “You have to change people’s perceptions. Baselitz says women don’t paint very well, with a few exceptions. Men don’t paint very well either, with a few exceptions.”

After reading this, I immediately went off to look at the paintings of Agnes Martin, Cecily Brown  and Rosemarie Trockel to see why their work was regarded by Baselitz as exceptions to his belief that women don't paint very well.

Assignment 2 - Developing test pieces

This image was rendered in Adobe Photoshop combining two images I have recently worked on.  One layer is painted woven fabric made of shirt material adhered to a canvas and the superimposed layer is a drawing I referred to earlier in this blog.  This is an exploration of the problem of combining work/ideas that have the potential to become more resolved pieces.  I think this way of working has its merits without becoming a slave to photoshop - it's just another tool to look at something in a different way.

The Grid as a Checkpoint of Modernity - Margarita Tupitsyn

http://www.tate.org.uk/research/publications/tate-papers/grid-checkpoint-modernity

I seem to have stumbled upon a concept that I was unaware of.  From exploring the concepts around textiles (from Greek meaning to weave) and the grid like structure of warp and weft, I found that the grid itself is a hugely significant motif in contemporary art. 

"In Western art history the grid has been positioned as an emblem of modernism. In Russia, however, early constructivist artists saw the grid as both a formal and ideological device. After a period dominated by socialist realism, the grid was re-adopted in the 1960s and 1970s by some dissident modernist and conceptualist artists. This essay argues that the grid can still be an effective device in radical art practices as long as it is not perceived as an escapist structure that does not address the topics of today.In her seminal essay ‘Grids’, the art historian Rosalind Krauss claimed that ‘the grid functions to declare the modernity of modern art’.

 ‘By “discovering” the grid’, Krauss continues, ‘cubism, de Stijl, Mondrian, Malevich … landed in a place that was out of reach of everything that went before. Which is to say, they landed in the present, and everything else was declared to be the past’."

Assignment 2 - Test Piece

This series of images shows progression of background preparation for test piece.  I tore strips of shirt fabric and created a weave. The weave was glued to a canvas board and left to dry overnight.  The surface was then primed with white acrylic and over painted with burnt umber.  I was concerned about just applying a piece of fabric to a support without thinking through the concept behind it.  The weave has a number of connections to the project.  Firstly, it makes the construction of the fabric visible by enlarging the warp and weft. It displays a manner of construction that is a centuries old process. The process of weaving has mythical and spiritual connotations.  During the course of my research, I have found that the 'grid' produced by the process of weaving has functioned as a metaphor in the practice of many notable female artists.  

Change of Course

This week, I have moved to the new 'Painting 3' course.  Hopefully this will suit better as I have found the older course a bit restrictive.  I'm waiting on new course material but I have looked at the content on the OCA website .   The work I have already completed will go into Assignment 1 and I am now working on a number of test pieces.