Field #2

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Cy Twombly Roman Notes VI, 1970

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An ambience is defined as an atmosphere, or a surrounding influence: a tint. My intention is to produce original pieces ostensibly (but not exclusively) for particular times and situations with a view to building up a small but versatile catalogue of environmental music suited to a wide variety of moods and atmospheres.

Whereas the extant canned music companies proceed from the basis of regularizing environments by blanketing their acoustic and atmospheric idiosyncracies, Ambient Music is intended to enhance these. Whereas conventional background music is produced by stripping away all sense of doubt and uncertainty (and thus all genuine interest) from the music, Ambient Music retains these qualities. And whereas their intention is to `brighten’ the environment by adding stimulus to it (thus supposedly alleviating the tedium of routine tasks and levelling out the natural ups and downs of the body rhythms) Ambient Music is intended to induce calm and a space to think. Ambient Music must be able to accommodate many levels of listening attention without enforcing one in particular; it must be as ignorable as it is interesting.

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Brian Eno, liner notes for Ambient 1: Music for Airports

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This week my daughter and I made an unplanned visit to The Walker Art Center. What’s the point of this? Carmen asked when we came across Sherry Levine’s Black Mirror in the permanent collection. I considered giving a clumsy lecture on Duchamp and Ad Reinhart, but just shrugged my shoulders and moved on.

More here.

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But “Kerry James Marshall” is newsworthy for another reason, a reason wholly unrelated to the work on view: This is the first time since the NGA opened in 1941 that it has organized an exhibition of a living African-American artist.

Previously the National Gallery organized an exhibition of a late African-American artist (Romare Bearden in 2003) and it hosted an exhibition of an African-American artist organized by another institution (the Museum of Modern Art’s Martin Puryear retrospective in 2008). The Marshall show is just the third exhibition of an African-American artist at the NGA.

More here.

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Sol LeWitt Isometric Forms, 1987 Gouache and pencil on cardboard 55 × 55 cm

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Eddie Murphy, "Trading Places"

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"They would say, Face the canvas and let it happen, follow your own gestures, let the painting create itself," he later recalled in an interview, but that didn't pan out for him. Ruscha had seen, reproduced in the magazine Print, a Jasper Johns collage painting called "Target with Four Faces," and it had opened up a new range of possibilities. He decided that whatever he was going to do in art would have to be "completely premeditated."

New Yorker, July 1, 2013.

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"Alien," 1979.

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Sherrie Levine, Black Mirror, 2004.

"Anyway, the point is, I love duality, and I kiss ambiguity's feet. And I am always glad to be confounded and challenged to wrestle with contradictory notions in my head. But for some reason I'm really having trouble with Levine's Black Mirror purporting to be a generic object when it's really/also a branded good."

Greg Allen here.

[free-parking-blog]

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Frank Stella by Ugo Mulas

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Robert Irwin installing his work "Scrim Veil - Black Rectangle - Natural Light" in 1977. More here.

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"The real, reality, is becoming the prospective domain of art, and art is becoming technique in a literal, 'practical' sense: making and remaking things rather than painting pictures..." (1)

This appears to be a liberal view of art away from "picture making," but "thing making" is a linear progression from "picture-making." The real change in art away from from investing abstract bodies with abstract hierarchical meanings.

The modern artist has assumed full responsibility for his art, and now for the definitions of his own consciousness, attempting to perceive how he perceives (this applies to all senses) and erasing the separateness between artistic disciplines.

(1) Herbert Marcuse, "Art in the One-Dimensional Society," Arts Magazine 41, no. 7 (May 1967), 31.

Robert Irwin, Notes Toward a Conditional Art, selection from Jan Butterfield, "Robert Irwin, Re-Shaping the Shape of Things: Part 2, The Myth of the Artist," Arts Magazine 47, no. 1 (September-October 1972), 30-32.

[infinitelist]

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Frank Stella, Astoria, 1958.

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I took it for granted that the stripe paintings came from a fairly natural adaptation of overall post-World War II painting to a landscape instinct tempered toward abstract rendering. In fact, that is the way the paintings actually developed–for example, from Coney Island to Astoria to Delta. However, when I superimposed a simple idea of banded organizational symmetry on top of landscape gestures, the resulting development changed everything. It completely changed the way I understood what I thought I knew about the painting of the past, in two significant ways: first, it gave a very clear sense of how the making of painting was sucked into the continuum of painting; how painting, especially for those who were making it, had become an amazing coherent, growing organism, much more independent of history and perhaps even of psychology than one would have thought possible. It hit me that there was an "art history" alive and well, with which the artist must make his peace. Second–and this was something that as a young man one could not say in public because it was certain to invite ridicule–once one had become part of this organism, one had the power to influence it. This was pretty heady business, but the access to power was tempered by a sense of responsibility which introduced the possibility of a new kind of failure. It was not enough to worry that in the pursuit of art one might fail to catch up to it; in addition, one had to worry about doing part of the job to keep it running.

Frank Stella, Working Space.

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Miles Davis, John Coltrane, "So What," Kind of Blue, 1959