The Blues ethos as a strategy of persistence against melancholy. The Life Blues got me. I had a few slaps upside the head and they affect my art inspiration and production.
Immaturity, maturity, and the desire for the latter in art and the repression of that desire in culture at large.
An 'academicist' in the arts is someone who over-idealizes the art academy; one who follows the precepts taught there and insists others do so as well. Here is a short history of academicism and thoughts about the problem now.
Epistemology: the philosophical analysis of the search for knowledge. Does it exist in art? How and what can we know? Will it replace the ubiquitous ontological expressions in Postmodernism?
A short, yet gloomy, podcast for summer. My mother Ruth Staff Brandl passed away very recently at the age of 87. In this tough, sad time, my mind still approaches the world through art, yet I find it hard to find any comfort therein. In our artworld nowadays, it seems almost ridiculous. Grief, though, like most important and complex human emotions, has been the subject or inspiration for many great works of art
Her obituary is at: http://brandl-art-articles.blogspot.com/2019/07/ruth-staff-brandl-obituary.html
The creation of a term for one of the problems in the artworld, one very obvious around June each year when we all go to the Basel Art Fair, often the Venice Biennale, documenta etc. A phrase for the convenient conformity of (small) minds to have identical tastes in order to achieve hegemony.
Julia Kristeva, the Bulgarian-French philosopher, offers in her theorization hope for resistance against ruling ideologies within artworks themselves. Artists can produce "openings" by creating metaphors through serious play, turning rules upside down, displaying pleasure, laughter and poetry which include thoughtful critique --- delightful, anarchistic, alternative visions that are embodiments of and empower other forms of resistance.
Dr Cornel West has described himself as a "Bluesman in the life of the mind, and a Jazzman in the world of ideas." I feel similarly, I am a Bluesman of the mind, a Rock n Roller of painting and installations, a sequential-artist/comic-book penciler of art history.
FIFTY! Petr Brandl, the once very famous Baroque painter from Bohemia/Czech Republic and my distant ancestor. And a Festival Brandl with Geisslers Hofcomoedianten in Prague!
Peaceable Kingdom, Georama, Kamishibai. Edward Hicks, John Banvard, Toba Sojo. Inspirations and antecedants for my Dr Great Art performance-lecture paintings.
This podcast episode concerns something important to many artists, yet seldom openly discussed. That is, what "side jobs" artists have to do to stay alive. Many do not want to admit to this AT ALL.
The future art is not posthistorical, but rather polyhistorical, plurogenic (multistrand), not monogenic (single strand). There are various models and/or master narratives of art history, from the immensely limited discussion of the traditional narrow canon to timorous avoidance of any timeline due to postmodern guilt, treating artworks as mere stand-ins for particular ideologies. The late art critic John Perreault and I have created a new, more transparent model: the Braid, or Braided Rope. See additional content for an image of the Braid Model.
Some scattered reflections on the complex role of color in art including several things that bother me regularly in purportedly theoretical discussions of it. Color is wonderful, and necessary, but it is a happily difficult entity for theory.
It’s difficult to look into the future with any hope. What IS the role of hope in art? To me, it is all important.
Bakhtinian notions which could serve as great inspiration for visual art include his sense of the living fluidity of expression; his concepts of heteroglossia, polyphonic form, and dialogic form; his insight that these may engender the liberation of alternative voices; and his presentation of the carnival as a suggestive metaphor.
This episode's artecdote clarifies the historical terminology for the dominant Postmodernist art movement since circa 1985: 'Neo-Conceptualism.' Neo-Conceptualists themselves generally try to refer to themselves with the earlier term as 'Conceptualists,' but this is a political ploy, an ahistorical part of a powerplay, pretending that they are a part of the movement form which they derive.
This episode, I give my definition of visual metaphor. This is a new area of scholarly interest, and there have been few attempts to clearly describe visual metaphor or trope. This is an important foundational action and idea for the book on visual metaphor and contemporary art I am in the process of writing.
Conceptual Artist Lawrence Weiner is quite fond of formulating statements in which he claims to have dismissed metaphor from his artwork. He is completely wrong. No matter what is claimed, Lawrence Weiner's art, and most Conceptual Art and Neo-Conceptual Art, whether good or bad, is deeply grounded in interlocking base metaphors; metaphors commonly ignored because they are so transparent.
Goya's amazing speech to the newly founded Spanish Art Academy School. He was invited to speak to them as he was well-respected and was interested in helping other artists learn. Yet he had a profound dislike and fear of Academicism. Not only one of the best artists of all history, but was an independent and socially critical thinker, although he was court painter. Academics are scholars, and he and I are not criticizing them or their practice, rather AcademICISM, which is the worship of the Academy, the belief in Rules for Art and Creativity. And that these can be memorized.
The phenomenon of artists copying each other and themselves (not forgeries, copies). Something thoroughly disdained since Modernism, yet an activity that was important before that, for learning, out of admiration, for expanding an audience, for additional income. And some thoughts about the situation now.
New Historicism or alternately Cultural Materialism, and how its ideas are auspicious for visual metaphor, art history and conceptions of context in visual art. Art History consists of multiple histories, discontinuous and contradictory ones. The heretical response to authoritarian demand is important. Works of art express the problems and alienation of our or any time and place, but also frequently offer expressions of fullness that attack that alienation and help shatter the incrustations of belief forced upon us. Art History should discuss both.
Does originality in art even exist? A Matt Ballou listener request. "Make it new!" has certainly become old. Yet, the Postmodernist demand that a lack of originality be heralded as something new is duplicitous. A discussion of originality in art.
Paintings and novels, far from being hidebound, as is often squawked, are quintessentially antithetical: excellent disciplines for new metaphoric thought. They are ideally adversarial. They incorporate, use and criticize. They have achieved a condition of being perpetually "genres undermined." They have been in a permanent state of crisis for a minimum of several hundred years. What more could one ask for as a difficult, challenging and rewarding fray?
Metaphor is the basis of thought, which importantly arises from bodily, cultural and environmental experience. It is embodied in the body, in the world and in the expressions of it, such as visual art. Metaphors we live and create by.
Artists are directly responsible for fashioning their own tropes through the processes of extension, elaboration, composition and/or questioning. They must wrestle with their precursors, who inspired them to be creators in the first place, to do this. Such dialectical struggle, called an 'agon,' is more than simply oedipal. The African spirit Eshu, the trickster patron saint of crossroads, and Jacob, who struggled with God in the Bible, make better metaphoric models than Oedipus.