ArtandCulture
====Creation becoming Destruction
==
From Instant Karma, by Mark Swartz:
- After dreaming of the American flag in 1954, Jasper Johns began painting it, laying stripe after stripe until the creation became a kind of destruction. He painted old glory with the wrong number of stripes, painted it green, pineed i down flat so that it couldnot ripple. He dragged it into the musuems, where the ceilings are too low for it; hanging there are half mast, it imposes a perpetual state of grief on the nation. But when people stopped going to museums, the flags turned back into paintings.
22 May 2003 : Abstract Painting and High Geometry
Excerpts from:
- Not Even Wrong, By Sylvere Lotringe, editor of Semiotext(e)
Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe and Sylvere Lotringer: A Conversation
http://www.artandculture.com/magazine/context.html
Richard's comments are below.
"I think that if you want to talk about French Theory and my painting, then I think it would have to do, not with Barthes, not with Baudrillard, but with Derrida first. He gives you a language with which you can talk about surfaces that are not bodies. You can talk about deferral. Derrida's seventies writing on deferral is tremendously exciting for abstract painters."
"[...] But perspective is about movement, and that's why it stays deep. It's got to have space for things to move. So it can't be flat. That's obviously where Derrida comes in. It's Derrida's deconstruction of Heidegger which gets you into the way of actually thinking about what you're doing, thinking about what might be involved here, because what Derrida does to Heidegger is that he shows the difference between writing and speaking. And so, yes, this gets us away from expressionism in painting, while continuing to be painting, well, if that's the right word -- discontinuing, maybe. And at the same time, the very things that Derrida wants to privilege, to use that word, the things he works with, are things that are readily recognizable for the painter. They are the questions of: How one can begin anywhere? They are the questions of how continuity is a condition of fragmentation. Derridian deferral offered a way out of fragmentation as always invoking a prior condition of unity or wholeness. They are the questions of parataxis, and this, by the way, is how later -- because I came to all this later -- this is how I also found that Gilles Deleuze similarly could become interesting, or useful. Deleuzian singularity and multiplicity also avoid the nostalgia inherent in the idea of fragmentation, and more importantly for me, Deleuze speaks about the possibility of surfaces without insides, and at the same time of surfaces that, in being surfaces, are spatially mobile in ways that again are indescribable in terms of the language of solids and voids. And I could say here that underlying what a non-representational painter would be thinking about is the remark that Greenberg made about Pollock. Whether you like him or not, Pollock is the first painter ever to use line without dividing the world into solids and voids. This resonates among abstract painters, and therefore it connects up with Deleuze. In a certain sense it is conceivably misleading, but at the same time quite useful, and I would say that the monad idea is also attractive for similar sorts of reasons."
From: Richard Cochinos
Date: Thu, 22 May 2003 13:31:20 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: Re: painting, art, philosophy, and math
umm. all this sounds like is someone spent a bit of time in art school. All the philosophy he/she references is pretty standard stuff for a fine art background. Its actually all comes out of one school of french philiosophy, in fact derrida, barthes, foucault, deleuze all attended the same college. I can understand your feelings about it, I was pretty blown away the first time i encountered it, now I just grow bored. It is just a pool of the cannon reflecting back on you that puts the twinkle of the stars in the sky.
and the line about pollock being the first painter to 'use line' that way is total bullshit. pleanty of greek(mesopotamian) pottery has the same effect (also achieved in eastern ink paintings and their division of space). Maybe he was the first american to do so, but i bet you could even refute that if you looked closely at folk art (which I dont know much about)
On Thu, 22 May 2003, Jeremy Avnet wrote:
> This kind of talk is pretty amazing to me. Is this a bit of insight into
> the connection betwen math and art that you see?
no, not really, but it is pointing to direction of manifolds, and i see the reference.
Last Edit: Thu, 31 Jul 2003 07:32:24 -0700 Revisions: 4