Search Results for: albright

it's a bird, it's a plane, it's Agostino Novello

Comments Off on it's a bird, it's a plane, it's Agostino Novello

Simone_Martini-Agostino_Novello_Altarpiece_2

Daniel Albright, in his highly recommended new book Panaesthetics, discusses this pair of 14th Century altarpiece paintings by Simone Martini, in Siena, Italy. Albright considers how Martini treats time in the paintings. The top image doesn't show a single event, or scene, but works rather like a series of comic book panels. On the left, a vicious dog mauls a little girl. In the center, the Blessed Agostino Novello (who was being promoted as a candidate for sainthood in Siena) swoops down from the ceiling, with his "jet trail" somewhat awkwardly hidden behind a building. On the right, the girl is saved and in the bosom of her thankful family.

Simone_Martini-Agostino_Novello_Altarpiece_1

A second example employs a similar narrative logic, with Agostino displayed much more prominently as he saves a falling girl -- and even grabs the plank from her balcony lest it strike a passerby (Spider-Man would use his webbing for that latter bit). Renaissance perspective hadn't been invented yet, and the odd jumble of buildings contributes to the cockeyed strangeness, but also charm, of this scenario. These are two of the most beguiling paintings I've seen, in jpeg form or otherwise -- nice to look at, and as fun as a summer blockbuster (more fun because they are quiet).

tweets from 2008

Comments Off on tweets from 2008

From my hand-made Twitter archive (don't you wish you had one of these?), vol. 1, long before disillusionment with the owners set in:

using my cognitive surplus 08:32 PM May 10, 2008

voyager where aliens from The Void have a calculator jam session while the Doc bobs head appreciatively and 7 looks on 10:03 PM May 09, 2008

ideas for music series: more acoustic jazz trio songs; a suite of songs in the vein of the DEVO Corporate Anthem 09:48 PM May 09, 2008

premise of Gutenberg Galaxy: understanding transition from oral to literate culture helps us understand transition from literate to media 09:45 PM May 09, 2008

starting the first of the Octavia Butler "patternist" novels, Wild Seed 09:44 PM May 09, 2008

finished the action-packed Iain M Banks downer space opera. it's a bit like Star Wars where Greedo didn't shoot first 02:04 AM May 08, 2008 from web

all batman movies suck 12:17 PM May 07, 2008 from web

@piotch - yes, the museum tours are good, from what I know of them; the artist acceptance speeches seemed like too easy targets 03:16 PM May 05, 2008

what is it about YouTube comments--people are completely uninhibited to say whatever comes into their heads, at all times 08:11 AM May 05, 2008

andrea fraser's striptease video on vvork--she needs to stop obsessing about the success of these assholes (just an initial reaction) 08:07 AM May 05, 2008

am reading my first Iain M.Banks sf novel--he writes non-sf without the middle initial 11:53 AM May 03, 2008

apollo (stringed instrument/mathematical music of the spheres) flayed the satyr marsyas (piped instrument/earthiness and sex) (albright) 11:52 AM May 03, 2008

adorno's appreciation of music has little to do with the ear but rather music's connection to mental structures 11:47 AM May 03, 2008

like Greenberg, Adorno is a purist: art is valuable to the extent it is disillusioned, authentic (albright) 04:27 PM May 02, 2008

adorno adds music to the laocoon analysis; his Philosophy of the New Music praises Schoenberg and ridicules Stravinsky 04:25 PM May 02, 2008

greenberg: each art should remain inviolate within its own private domain (albright) 04:21 PM May 02, 2008

gotthold ephraim lessing: nebeneinander (spatial arts) vs nacheinander (temporal arts) - each has distinct protocols 04:03 PM May 02, 2008

laocoon problem: man crushed by snakes screams in poem but is impassive in statue owing to different protocols of those media 04:02 PM May 02, 2008

GIF Rescue - Anna Thompson

Comments Off on GIF Rescue - Anna Thompson

anna-thompson

Another undeserving also-ran in an ill-considered GIF-off competition.
In his book Untwisting the Serpent, critic Daniel Albright wrote at length on a theory of "gestus," particularly in reference to Brecht/Weill musicals: "A gestus... might be defined as an entity intermediate between a gesture and a narrative; a sort of schematic of a human figure that defines or epitomizes a whole discursive context in which such a contortion might come into play," he ventured.
If we had a theory of GIFs (and we barely do) that would be an important aspect of them to consider: the extent to which they are suited to iconic moments symbolizing a larger story. In the case of Anna Thompson's GIF above, of the three-frame cinema variety, one might well ask what the larger story is. A tale of Brooklyn hipster failed romance set against a background of gentrification. The man is a primal spirit, beating out a tattoo on building sides wherever he goes, but such an airhead. The woman is smarter than that and waves him off, but somehow keeps his nervous energy bottled in a magical hand movement that she can take wherever she goes.
Or whatever. One noteworthy point about this GIF is that while it mimics the pompous style of a cinemagraph, the whole thing is in jerky, spastic motion, adding to the comedy of the arrested romantic development.

The Ministry of First-Order Expression

Comments Off on The Ministry of First-Order Expression

Disquiet responds to Jaron Lanier's cranky-old-man view of artistic originality and its supposed disappearance in the welter of Web 2.0 herd technologies. Lanier pens a theory that could have been a wall label in the Third Reich's degenerate art exhibition: "The distinction between first-order expression and derivative expression is lost on true believers in the hive. First-order expression is when someone presents a whole, a whole that integrates its own worldview and aesthetic. It is something genuinely new in the world. Second-order expression is made of fragmentary reactions to first order-expression."

In response to that comes Disquiet's calm, sane voice, as heard in this excerpt:

--Technology opens a window into habits of the past. Technology may perversely magnify some human traits (witness the crowd mentality of message boards, and the double-edged sword that is online anonymity), but it also, in many cases, simply makes them more apparent. Prince borrowed sped-up vocals from Parliament-Funkadelic and Béla Bartók based his compositions on folk melodies and Bob Dylan purloined lyrics and melodies from the blues and the Beach Boys loved Chuck Berry just a little too self-evidently — these are not isolated incidents, but mere drops in the example pool of how musicians who are seen as exemplars of originality in fact used pre-existing culture in pursuit of their own voice. Every bands starts out as a cover band.

--Go beyond the (newly Balkanized) pop charts, and there is a vast expanse of music built from randomness, from shards of sound, from an exploration of silence (digitally enabled silence), from interactive technologies, and, yes, from pre-existing source material (not just from recorded music, aka samples, but from data turned into sound). We are not at the end of musical history, nor is it in sight. Enchanted by new tools, we may be basking for the moment in that very newness, but only to make sense of them, to adopt them into our practice. We may as a culture simply be covering the past as we give those tools a test ride.

See also Daniel Albright on Poulenc and Surrealist Music: giants of second-order expression have been around for a while. Jungle drum and bass is an example of a new (now old) kind of pop music that was developed by faceless scenesters rather than first-order ubermenschen.

Greenberg Bests Rosenberg at the Jewish Museum

Comments Off on Greenberg Bests Rosenberg at the Jewish Museum

Finally caught up with "Action/Abstraction" at the Jewish Museum. A mostly well known group of abstract artists' work organized within a Harold Rosenberg vs Clement Greenberg frame. Unfortunately there's really no comparing the two critics. As I noted at Paddy's:

Rosenberg doesn’t have much of a reputation outside the art world, and his writing and theory is not as cogent as Greenberg’s. Rosenberg's "American Action Painters" essay is pretty much of a crock–-the artist as existential hero, but who must also be "serious" [i.e., not a mystic], gimme a break. Whereas Harvard modernism scholar Daniel Albright (a cross-disciplinary thinker) recently said of Greenberg’s "Towards a Newer Laocoon," which argues for separating media into areas of competence (or honesty, as Greenberg phrased it at that time): "in this essay Greenberg presents the finest statement I know of Modernist aesthetic purism."

Paired video loops of the two critics at the Jewish Museum tell the story. Greenberg talks about art after Cezanne being in some way responsive to or influenced by the rectangle that surrounds it, whereas Pollock worked on the floor to avoid this ingrained rhetorical limit. Rosenberg says nonsense along the lines of "Someone in England asked if you could have a slow action painting. I said that action painting can take an artist's entire life."

The intelligent theorizing of the former and the empty bloviating of the latter can be seen in quote after paired quote throughout the exhibit. A large chunk of the art world defined itself in opposition to Greenberg but that's because he offered something to oppose.