Yes for many things. I also watched that movie with Picasso painting over
and over the same canvas, that was some work. I remember my bourgeois taste
for finished work when this artist friend of mine showed me the beauty of
sketches. There was an exhibit somewhere with Leonardo's scribbles, a luxury
I remember.
And yes, not only you, but we all _regularly reinvent the wheel- but it
changes color, so who cares.
Anny Ballardini
http://annyballardini.blogspot.com
http://www.fieralingue.it/modules.php?name=poetshome
From: "Mark Weiss" <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Friday, January 07, 2005 11:16 PM
Yeah, we tend to prefer the sketch to the "finished" work, precisely
because it catches the artist in process. This is a pretty recent
phenomenon, so much so that works deemed incomplete in the past are now
ofetn thought to be finished work. Case in point: among the dozen or so
Mont Saint Victioires of Cezanne's last decade is one stripped down to a
few brush strokes on glue-primed but unpainted brown linen canvas. I saw it
in a retrospective, with a bunch of the others. They were all beyond
wonderful, but this one was on an astral plain.
Related, I think, is our taste for pentimenti in finished paintings, which
were often invisible inthe state that the artist left them, and as such not
part of said artist's final intention. Over time they have asserted
themselves through the upper layers of paint and laid bare some of the
process. Similarly, etchings tend not to hide their process, but even when
they do there are usually earlier state proofs, sometimes of fifteen or
twenty states (Picasso's girl leading the minotaur, for instance, but also
a lot of rmbrandts and 19th century print makers. The different states seem
to us works of art in their own right, and sometimes the artist viewed them
as such. They allow us to walk the process with him/her, to experience the
whims and decisions.
In a wonderful documentary, The Mystery of Picasso, we get to watch him
through the entire process of a painting. I think it's readily available in
rental stores.
All of this I think goes back to the Renaissance and later taste for ruins
and fragments that led people to construct artificial ruins in their
gardens and caused them to value the fragments of Sappho and Holderlin not
for our sense of what they might have been if complete but for what they
are in themselves, a taste that continues. In the visual arts the silliest
example that comes to mind is an art critic's gushing about a fragment--a
mouth--of an Egyptian granite statue in the rehoused Egyptian wing of the
Metropolitan--he called it the most beautiful thing in the collection. The
thing is, within the rigidly standard rules of Egyptian art the mouths of
almost all of the other statues in the Met could have been separated from
their faces and the critic would have been hard put to tell which was
which. But I think that the fragment allowed him to see the form without
the interference of whatever his sense of the culture as a whole.
I'm not suggesting that it's always so silly, tho preferring a part of what
was intended to the realized whole seems like an invitation to vandalism.
But I think what follows from this, or stems from the same source, is our
interest in found objects (I have boxes of to me unnameable industrial
parts), in collage and in bricolage. And also composition by field and
other process-driven art.
I imagine there's been a lot of writing about this. I regularly reinvent
the wheel.
Mark
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