Art Thoughts 2009!

No, I haven't forgotten about my promise last year, around this time, to do a weekly mini-essay on an artwork at the Barnes Foundation...called Art Thoughts. Though many weeks were really tough on my discipline, I did finally get to number 36, and I plan on plugging away on this project in the new year, until it is done (week 52: the equivalent of a year's worth of weekly essays).

So, next up is my reflections on one of the Toulouse-Lautrec paintings here at the Foundation: enjoy! I will have it up by Friday, early-afternoon at the latest.

After this project is finished (probably by mid-March), I hope to begin another series of these miniature art-essays. If anyone has read these, and thought, "I wish he'd write about ____", or "I wonder if he's ever thought of ____", please send those ideas my way, and I will consider them.

As the series went on, I realized how much I was becoming interested in how what I was seeing at the Foundation resonates with much older artwork, and conversely, more contemporary artwork (for example, the Jacques-Louis David + Bonnard, and the Vuillard + James Castle). This might be a focus of a new series. It's hard to not use such an immediate source as that right outside my office door!

In other arenas, I made some informal resolutions with myself this new year: firstly, to pursue my small business ideas; and secondly, to pursue my artwork with more gusto and determination, becoming more assertively and boldly self-promotional. I've heard too many stories, yes even in Philly, of artists who simply befriend gallery and arts professionals, talk about and ask for a project or show, and end up getting it...seems they've learned the lesson of "ask, and it shall be given you" more quickly than I have.

Additionally, I hope to be more resolute in my posting updated pictures of current work in the studio. For now, I just updated (slightly) my website www.gierschickwork.com with some new images and news items, so go and check that out.

Here's to success in 2009! >clink<

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Art Thoughts, Week 34 -- Bonnard & Writing

Young Woman Writing, Pierre Bonnard (French, 1867—1947), 1908, oil on canvas, BF 367.

Letter writing, a daily discipline for several generations, is today largely dead. Done in by email, instant messaging and other more immediate methods of communicating, it is a mode of crafting a connected intimacy that has not found a satisfactory replacement. In Young Woman Writing, Bonnard captured a woman in the midst of her various correspondences. And being the painter, often, of carefully considered interiors (much like his friend and fellow Nabis, Vuillard) Bonnard mimicked this domestic transfer of intimacies that letter-writing is, in his own favored form of communicating, painting. Writing a letter, in fact, is essentially an interior to exterior action. That is, like all writing, it emerges from the culled and organized synapses of an interior human space, and then through a recording medium, to the intended recipient – it is inside to outside; life to life.

Another French painting of a generation or two earlier, The Death of Marat by Jacques-Louis David (pronounced dah-VEED) may serve as a useful opposite of Young Woman Writing. Marat was an incendiary journalist for the cause of the 18th century revolutionary Jacobins, who was assassinated by a loyalist to the throne, to quiet the rousing clangs of his pen. David, an artist and fellow revolutionary, painted this as a tribute to Marat. In it, the stabbed writer is sprawled over the left end of his bathtub, in which he sat as treatment for a skin condition, expired with pen still in hand. It is a moving, but mythic image; a memorial’s presence in paint. It is also a painting which illustrates the exterior world collapsing back upon the interior world, from whence the revolutionizing writing emanated. When viewed alongside the David, Bonnard’s quiet interior in which light is seeping in from the outside, seems a mirror image of the artificially-lit David, the dark side of the pen’s power. And while the letters floating out into the bathtub-like table in the Bonnard likely hold everyday news and sentiments, the pen which Marat holds is still smoldering from the vitriol which it disseminated.

The two paintings also illustrate very different forms of life. In the David, life as encompassed by this man, this pen, this presence has stopped: David has carved the name like an epitaph – the air is still – a force has been extinguished. The Bonnard, though filled with the quiet of an afternoon’s duties, vibrates with life on its luminous edges – the shimmering, wiggling brushwork on the lilac and cream curtains; the lean of tensed, animal-like furniture – all point to an absorbed tautness. And while Marat’s death-clamp holds tightly the letter he was composing, emblematic of a stream blocked, the letter writer in the Bonnard continues quietly writing, sending them out onto the scarlet table like toy sailboats, wending their ways to the larger ocean; small but meaning-wrought messengers. David has painted a memorial to a life of words which ultimately collapsed upon itself. Too violent to stand forever without harming its producer, it returned from the outside, back inside; death to death. Bonnard, on the other hand, painted a scene in which the outside world (the recipient) of the letters is almost inconsequential – and at the most, implied. Between the both of them, however, it’s apparent that regardless of outcome, the complications of human life and the inevitable recording of it, must and will continue.

(below, The Death of Marat, by Jacques-Louis David, 1793)

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Art Thoughts, Week 33 -- Courbet & Pornography

Nude, Gustave Courbet (French, 1819—1877) 1864, oil on canvas, BF 810.

Mystery permeates the space between a painting and its viewer – it has always been that way. Of course, the importance of an individual’s response to a work of art has increased in the last few centuries, in the wane of more communal, pre-modern responses to art. But volumes have contemplated this numinous space – revealing the fact that what humans know little about, they’ve expended inordinate amounts of energy in investigating. Likewise, ever since the sexes were separated by a single rib bone, they’ve been incredibly fascinated in knowing more about the Other, by almost any means possible – pryingly and insistently; psychologically and physically. Betwixt these two realities of human impulse we find the painting Nude, by Gustave Courbet. A young woman, wearing little besides a knowing smirk, is reclining on her back on the ground near some woods, putting on (or is it removing?) a white stocking, revealing her thighs and buttocks to the viewer. A dalliance; fore or aft? We do not know for sure – but this is not an innocent Degas or Bonnard baigneuse scene. Courbet, later in his life, began creating erotic paintings – at least one on commission – perhaps signifying his famously intense penchant for anti-establishment action. This is one of the milder ones (the most blatant being The Origin of the World which Duchamp will later reference in a more impersonal and humorously nihilist way). It’s not immediately evident, but Courbet too had a sly, humorous bent in making this painting, not to mention cutting insight into basic human nature. Simply put, by viewing we implicate ourselves. The prime signifier in the picture is a large, implied X which lays smack-dab in the middle. It’s created by the girl’s lower leg and left arm on one side, and her left thigh and right foot on the other. The arms of this X enter the landscape through the upper right corner tree line; the shadow on the bottom right, and her red shoe pointing to the lower left-hand corner. An initial question of an X might be what is the locus? It is not, as one may imagine, the girl’s genitalia – it is rather her bowels, though obscured by her left thigh. (The bowels, incidentally, were considered by the Greeks to be the seat of human emotion.)

An X works both as a signifier (clue) and a blockage (stop) – it proverbially “marks the spot”, and also denotes “this far, but no farther”. Thus, because it simultaneously promises and rejects, this X is a major titillation, moving the picture towards what is euphemistically called “soft porn”. In pornography, there is usually – and sometimes implied – a culpable party, and here it is the viewers (i.e., after the artist, who painted and ran, leaving us with the question of responsibility). Pornography promises gratification – but here it is denied, while Courbet sniggers. Like her left thigh which obscures her genitals, so the large X prevents us from entering any further into the painting; from succumbing to the narrative. We are implicated but emasculated (for the implied viewer is male) without satisfaction; stopped in our tracks by the inapproachability of the figure, and the flaming sword of an X. We’ve tried putting our key into the lock, and it’s broken off in our hand – and now our entry’s been denied. Using our innate curiosity, Courbet has first lured us in, then denied us all meaningful and fulfilling gratification – metaphorically emasculating our desire, making the picture simultaneously saddening and maddening. In one thrust, it is the double-edged mystery of a painting and of sexuality. And ironically, if thought through carefully, it also reveals the futility of seeking further satisfaction through pornography. If we keep trying our keys in dubious locks, we may lose our ability to enter meaningfully altogether.

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