I spent last week at the Ad:Tech interactive advertising and technology conference in San Francisco talking to people about where they see the Web heading and what life online is going to look like in a few more years. The range of future views I heard was, as expected, diverse. While I do not have […]
Art
Breasts, Bodies, Canvas
I found a wonderful blog about all things Aboriginal–Will Owen’s Aboriginal Art & Culture: an American eye. He’s been at it for some time, so there is a lot of material to review and well worth the time. In a recent posting Owen reviews a new book by Jennifer Biddle, Breasts, Bodies, Canvas: Central Desert […]
The Body, and Beyond
One more excerpt from Fred Myers’ Painting Culture: Myers highlights the distinctions between the paintings of the Pintupi tribe and the art from Balgo, just south of the Pintupi land: Pintupi culture valorizes some dimensions of painting–a painting’s truth in relation to the Dreaming, the right of expression as part of one’s identity–but gives no […]
Saffron Goddess
Frequent Slow Muse commenter and friend Elatia Harris has written yet another memorable piece on 3 Quarks Daily. Her topic this time: Saffron. And because she is both a writer and an artist, she has woven the history of this delicate spice with an image track of beautiful prehistoric paintings, a few sampled here. Here’s […]
Real Estate, and Context
In a sense art has been a space race at least since the onset of Cubism, which shattered the calm of one-point perspective and, with collage, punctured the barrier between art and reality. Art’s spaces really started multiplying in the 1960s, with the successive splinterings of Fluxus, Happenings, Pop, Minimalism, Arte Povera and Neo-Concrete and […]
Sol LeWitt
Sol LeWitt’s passing yesterday has had me reviewing with gratitude the delight I have experienced with his handiwork. He lived outside of categorization, moving effortlessly as his desires morphed from Conceptualism to Minimalism to his own brand of glorious and retinally rich expressionism. His collaborative wall murals always felt fresh, immediate and irresistibly upbeat. My […]
Landscape and Contemporary Art: Joan Mitchell
Joan Mitchell’s work straddles the line between abstract expressionism and landscape more than almost anyone else. Her paintings, many of them quite large, create a sense of place of their own while referencing our collective sense of land and the space surrounding us. On a personal level, Mitchell–in spite of all the horrific stories of […]
Painting, in the Larger Context
In her essay, ‘Moorditj Marbarn (Strong Magic)’, Aboriginal artist Julie Dowling quotes Jean-Paul Sartre who described the role of painting as ‘the painter paints the world only so that free men may feel their freedom as they face it’. Her belief that painting is her means of cultural and personal survival provides an important perspective […]
Landscape and Contemporary Art: Diebenkorn’s Ocean Park
Diebenkorn has been a flagship artist for me. I saw the first showing of his Ocean Park series while I was still in college, and seeing those luminous paintings was a turning point in my aesthetic education. I have never lost interest in this work, and every time I find one hanging in a museum–they […]
Landscape and Contemporary Art: Brice Marden
In a conversation with Brice Marden, Denise Green asks if he responds to one kind of landscape more than another: I’ve been more drawn toward the trees than the landscape space. I’m more interested in picking up the energy, rather than the details of the landscape. I want to transmit that kind of energy that […]