 | | |
 EXT, YOU KNOW THOSE 5-MINUTE POSES that have become so popular in today's few begrudging drawing classes that are offered in most university art departments? The "five minute study" is supposed to train the artist to get the quick impression of the figure. Students are told that the first impulse is somehow fresher and more honest. In fact it's a contrived and debilitating concept. How can a student possibly develop advanced drawing skills without lengthy poses that enable them to seek out and find their errors and then truly perfect their methods by which to find the right lines? In support of these comments let me quote Edgar Degas, one of the icons of Impressionism and Modernist ideology.
Edgar Degas, is quoted by Ives Gammell in his book The Shop Talk of Edgar Degas on Page 22 as saying:
"I always tried to urge my colleagues to seek for new combinations along the path of draftsmanship, which I consider a more fruitful field than that of color. But they wouldn't listen to me and have gone the other way."
And to others he was quoted as saying, "I am a colorist with line."
Then Gammell says,
"In Degas' time the acquisition of this indispensable skill (drawing) was taken for granted as the essential part of a painter's early training. When he had established his shapes he worked over them tirelessly until he had given them the maximum significance."
Degas said,
"Make a drawing. Start all over again. Trace it. Start it and trace it again. [...] You must do over the same subject ten times, a hundred times. In art nothing must appear accidental even a moment."
This would seem in direct contradiction to the assertions of most current teaching that the first immediate impression of a form is what is most important and valuable. Current teaching tends to say that if you need to work over a line it lacks truth and sincerity. What it lacks is quality and clarity. Only the most talented artists who had built up drawing skills over half a lifetime got to the point where they could find the right line on the first try. Clearly Degas would vehemently disagree with the quick pose.
What was clearly of greatest concern to him was that the artist finds the correct line that conveys the feeling or form that he wished to, and not how quickly or automatically he achieved it. This is a crucial point, as it undermines the myth of the modern teaching that the gesture must be captured in the first initial stroke to be great. If students can never perfect their lines they can never learn the skill of recognizing the 'right' line when it is found.
Page 23. Degas said, "Once I have a line I hold on to it, I do not lose it again."
Modern artists are told that they must create something totally original. Nothing about what they do can ever have been done before in any way shape or form otherwise they risk being called "derivative" How utterly absurd.
They've been indoctrinated with the concept that bad = good. Every parameter upon which any standard for quality and excellence can be deduced, they have been told is improper because it's "limiting to freedom of expression."
- There can be no story for then you have to stay within the "tight boundaries" of the tale.
- There can be no illusion for than you are "chained" by the need to recreate a sense of three dimensions.
- There can be no drawing, as that can be "limiting" to objects of people or things taken from the real world.
- They want to remove the "shackles" of modeling, perspective, or subject matter of any sort.
- There certainly can be no attempt at harmonizing of the above parameters with composition, color and tonality, for that would "restrict" one to making everything work together.
On the contrary they have been propagandized by modernism into believing that only those works that break boundaries, ignore standards, and show no interest in skill or technique can be truly "original" or "inspired."
|
Modernism is art about art. Whereas all of the great art in history is Art about life.
|
|
|
In fact, originality of methods takes precedence over everything else. If something has been done before, or is derivative in any way of anything that was done before, it thereby loses value proportionate to those similarities. In such a "through the looking glass" world, every would-be "artist" is placed in the untenable position of trying to create an entirely new art form in order to be considered relevant.
The sheer glaring reality is that nothing could be more imprisoning, binding, restricting, chaining and shackling than the impossible limitations of modernism and post-modernism, that remove from the would be artist every tool (including training) that could give them the ability to create great works of art. The simple truth is that each and every one of us is capable of thinking of something that has never been done before. Does that make it worth doing and the work of genius?
For example:
- I could carefully (with enough money) dig up an old bombed out tenement building in the Bronx, and have it transported to a special slab built for it in Central Park. Rope off the structure, aim lights at it, give it a title and with enough pomp and circumstance think of twenty reasons why this is sheer brilliance in its commentary about the inner city.
- I could boil the entrails of several different animals and then preserve them by imbedding them in clear plastic. I could then hang them from a mobile with similarly preserved body parts of cadavers, and have critics claim that this is the greatest artistic statement about the horrors of war since Guernica.
- I could imbed into the walls, ceiling and floors of a small room, pieces of neon lights, parts from broken machines and engines, and broken pieces of structural building materials like bricks, beams and cinder blocks. Then I could glue between everything millions of nails, nuts and bolts, and have clever writers and critics point out how this room (which could be installed at MoMA or the Guggenheim) is the quintessential statement of the effects of the industrial age on human psychology.
Well, those three ideas took all of 3 minutes to think of. MY GOD! This must mean I'm three-geniuses-rolled-into-one. Why at this rate I could come up with more brilliant ideas for modernism, than all of the modernist geniuses put together, if I just would put aside a week or two.
The thing here that really is interesting, is not their art at all, but the statement it makes about the nature of our species - that so many seemingly intelligent people have been so easily snookered by the tongue twisting, convoluted, illogic of modernist rhetoric. Clearly for many people it is more important to feel that they are some part of an elitist in-group that is endowed with the special ability to see brilliance where most people see nothing and are afraid to say so. Since most people aren't devoted or educated in fine art, they have successfully intimidated the bulk of humanity into cowering away in silence, feeling foolish for their inability to understand. By having successfully gained control of the institutions of higher learning and the major museums of the world, they have been able to perpetuate their fiction under the guise and force of their power and credentials. The average person shrinks away from believing the reality of their own senses in the face of seemingly overwhelming numbers of people in this 20th century "establishment" who authoritatively dictate what is great art and what they should be seeing.
Modern and post-modern art is nihilistic and anti-human. It denigrates humanity along with our hopes, dreams, desires and the real world in which we live. All reference to any of these things is forbidden in the canonistic halls of modernist ideology. We can see that their hallowed halls are a hollow shell, a vacuous vacant vault that locks their devotees away from life and humanity, while stripping mankind of his dignity. It ultimately bores the overwhelming majority of it's would be audience who can find nothing with which to relate.
It has been called exciting and "avant-garde," but the sad truth is that it is incredibly humdrum and monotonous. Whether you glue together pieces of plastic or shards of glass, assemble metal scraps or piles of feathers. Whether you dribble little dollops of colors or drag fat uneven slashes of black. Whether you compile a mountain of paper or wrap the statue of liberty. The effect is always the same: Meaningless primitivism. Modernism is art about art. It endlessly asks the question ad nauseum: what is art? What is art? They believe that only those things that expand the boundaries of art are good all else is bad. It is art about art. Whereas, all of the great art in history is art about life.
| |
| |
