aesthesis

Heck of a job there, it asobltuley helps me out.

someone should bring this blog back from the dead

You really need to start Blogging again..you had some great blogs going in 2004...

Just My 2 Cents...

SC

But does the artist has to have a meaning in his work. Does he/she has to explain it? I think you necessarily have something to show, maybe just an impulsion, a though. But do you have to understand it completly to be an artist. Or is it non-artist that try to understand art and rationalize it by asking us "what did you want to tell with that piece of art"?

Please email me regarding whether I can publish some of your thoughts on our swanktrendz website. Hopefully it will give your circle a wider readership as well as recriprocally giving us a new take on the fine arts.

I guess you could also say that there was proof that Giotto didn't really paint his paintings since he worked with a studio of artisans.

'"God" is humankind's oldest bad idea.'

?We should instead choose Nitsche's clever, human-centered, assumptions about the universe that led to a particularly vile strain of totalitarianism?

"So, while scholars wrangle over whether Becket’s notes or his published plays ought to be taken as the final received text, we can trust in the reliability of God’s word and start to develop an artistic definition based on the First Cause."

Um, there is no evidence whatsoever -- in fact there are mountains of evidence to the contrary -- that "God" wrote the bible. Humans wrote it, and unless they were insane, they would be the first ones to admit that they neither heard nor saw "God" dictate these words, but they merely made them up out of whole cloth based on their own ignorance and superstitions (as people still do today when they talk about "God's will").

"God" is humankind's oldest bad idea.

You nailed it. Colors themselves are concrete on a certain level. People have all experienced red and specific reds can be concrete images of something. Pattern too could be concrete. The difficulty though with color or pattern is that they may not be concrete enough to spark an immediate response.

I have moved away from completely non-objective art in the past couple of years because I didn’t feel like people could really connect with the colors and shapes I had been using. They instead connected with the abstract as abstract art and so never bothered to think any deeper than that level. I love the abstract and my compositions are still abstract but I feel like if an artist wants to connect with their audience in a non decorative way they have to find some connection with the concrete world that their audience lives in.

Keep going on your non-objectivity though. These thoughts are not a recipe for good art just my thoughts about it.

To Matt:
I spoke with someone else recently on a similar vein. Not every art maker is conscious of their connection with their audience during the making process. I personally stay fairly conscious of that but I know that others don’t work the same way. The ZAD/ZPD connection is still valid as an art theory even if the artist only applies it in the first stages of cognitive conception.

Whether or not these zones are clinically analyzed or not seems to me to be beside the point. In life drawing, the clinical observation doesn’t have to negate the emotional spiritual aspects of the work. This came up recently in conversation and I believe that the art/science divide is a construct that developed in the age of enlightenment and the industrial revolution. Before that time period art and science were inseparable and daVinci is a wonderful example of how the two were unified.

To Tim:
Sorry for the delay.

I think art has the potential for functioning in the same way that poetry does. Think of some of the surrealists, particularly Magritte and his series about light—there the images function in a very poetic way. I think part of the difficulty is to relinquish depiction as a goal and substitute the goal of signification.

I think about the northern renaissance painters who used everyday objects as symbolic devices. These objects (cups, mousetraps, butterflies…) connect immediately with people because people have experienced them. These objects represent the ZAD. But then, through a poetic connection of these concrete images together as a unit they can pull people from simply looking at the objects as objects into the ZPD of looking at the objects as carriers of a meaning greater than the objects themselves.

How does this apply to non-objective art? Would the visual vocabulary include concrete colors or patterns in place of concrete images? I'm trying to avoid the "expected greeting" to my paintings. Currently, I moved to an objective painting format (stylized landscapes with heavy thematic colors) to create what I had been doing with composition and color non-objectively. So, I'm interested in how your concept would apply to non-objective art.