earthistory

Skipping around a bit, I guess. This has been my favorite Van Gogh since I went to the Van Gogh museum last summer. Painted near the end of his life, this still-life really tells the viewer about the painter’s mental state at the time. Some parts are overly lined and detailed, while others are more impressionistic and carefree. There’s no true coherence and it seems as if Van Gogh was unable to really perceive the branch as a whole, instead opting to focus on tiny parts at a time, while over-looking others. The main branch at the bottom seems very recognizably Van Gogh in style, while other areas seem completely unlike him (in person, I noticed a small bud that was simply a white splotch outlined in red, in stark contrast with its surroundings and context.) The background also mimics the movement and shape of the branch beautifully. The barren part of the branch which sticks out in the lower left-hand corner is also one color, surrounded on all sides by the white of the page: totally irresponsible and, ultimately, revealing of the artist’s mindset at the time. I stared at this piece for a full half-hour and would love to go back again.

This should be formaldehyde, clearly. It would greatly benefit

What makes this art?? I’ve never really gotten Hirst at all; I started out by hating him (the yuck-factor always overwhelmed my desire to spend more time looking at his work when I was younger,) then was intrigued by him, and now kind of hate him again. I think he just isn’t as smart as he gets credit for. At first, I understood the merit in the questions he raised by putting an object fit for a natural history or science museum in an art museum, but he doesn’t really do it in any interesting way (Maurizio Catalan at least puts his Pigeons in conceptual locations— on top of museums and in the rafters in galleries, for example: there’s a type of anticipation and whimsy in his choices which is lacking in Hirst’s.)

I can, however, thank Hirst for inspiring me in two ways— the curation of his Shark in the Met, surrounded by paintings of the sea, led me to think about how I could curate something better; and, when walking through MoMA a few years ago, hating Hirst’s approach to his found-art made me wonder what would happen if we installed dinosaur skeletons in an art museum: a study in architecture, context, and intelligent design, perhaps. Not that different from his choices, and yet so much more interesting to me! All cool ideas coming from a guy who I really think just doesn’t have the extra Artist gene in him. And if there was any doubt in my mind, his polka dot paintings really pushed me over the edge. He’s an idiot!

Since I’ve been doing and thinking about so much dancing recently, I thought I might as well spend some time talking about Degas. I love his work because he captures what was unseen before the invention of Free and Modern dance: the imperfection. Ballet is all about hiding things we do naturally (breathing, making noise, relaxing, enjoying ourselves, eating) and Degas brilliantly highlights the parts before/after performance, where we see personality reignited in the dancers. Though their hair, dresses, and colors are all the same, the women are in unique poses which tell us something about them as individuals, even if it’s just where they’re itchy or what muscle feels tense. The fact that the bottom dancer’s face is half-obscured by the frame makes the painting feel candid, which I really like. There’s no acknowledgment of the viewer; it’s as if we’re peaking in through a hole in the wall to the backstage of a performance, where the dancers are stripped of anonymity and show their bare selves. 

And, to complete the circle: Cindy Sherman as me!

Cindy Sherman as a renaissance lady, just like I made myself as a renaissance lady. She’s so funny and it’s really quite amazing how much she made herself look like the original portraits. When I was making my self portrait, I had a hard time finding a balance between making it actually look like me and making it look like all of the portraits of the time (which are quite similar looking.) Somehow Sherman avoided that problem by making herself look like the anonymous women in real life… cool!

I really love this painting so much. Pontormo’s use of color is so unique and off-putting, as is the lack of any actual cross imagery in the work. Similarly off-putting is the placement of hands throughout the piece, which make it recognizably mannerist. I also love the single cloud looming over the head of Christ; one part makes me think of his connection to the sky, and the other makes me think of a cloud raining down on only him, like in cartoons. A special connection I find I have to this piece is due partly to the fact that it reminds me a lot of a passage from one of my favorite books, Miss Lonelyhearts, in which the main character describes a figure of Christ someone has hanging on his wall, without the cross, so that he looks, as is written in the book, “calmly decorative” instead of “writhing.” I think that’s exactly what Pontormo achieves here. There’s something so eerie to the whole thing; I’m not sure exactly how to feel when I look at it, and I can’t tell exactly what the subjects are feeling, either. 

Also this

I love that the Last Supper was painted in a dining room for monks. There’s something so significant about the context of art— not just its context in terms of time period (the Reformation is a big one we’ve been talking about, for example), but the physical context of the work. I remember the first time I saw the image of the Last Supper was in a pizzeria by my elementary school, above the door. I always looked at it as I sat, eating at a long table with my friends. I never thought it was that different than my every day life, which is what intrigued me so much: what made the subject of the painting worth capturing, but not the subject of my friends and I eating pizza after school? I think that was one of the first times I really thought about religion’s significance, in art specifically. It took comparing myself to Christ and his “friends” in a casual setting for me to really begin to compare myself to Christ and his words and teachings. As a cynical (/Jewish) kid, I took all things Christian with a grain of salt, but the image of the Last Supper always stuck in my head as something honest and believable.

Context is something I think about a lot when I look at paintings, especially as an aspiring curator. Putting the Last Supper in a dining room is the antithesis to the Mona Lisa being isolated from all other works in the Louvre, yet each serves a kind of similar purpose. I always try to steer away from thinking that art has a “responsibility” to the viewer, but in the case of such monumental works as these, sometimes art comes with expectations. I haven’t really reached a conclusion about these things, and I’m not sure if I ever will, but these are topics about which I think a lot. What’s the difference between a solitary room in the Louvre and a solitary dorm room at Oberlin? What does the context of the work signify to the viewer? What does it imply? Food for thought.