Lecture Notes - Week 4
'scivias' - know the ways of God.
Self Portrait- Hildegard receiving visions with her secretary Volmar.For Hildegard, knowing the ways of God was a very physical, Semitic experience. There is a degree of bodily presence in her work that you don't find in any other medieval work. Her visions consisted of sound and optical effects, bodily sensation of 'great joy and great pain', which were eccentric and personal. In response to these she created her own set of forms / language.
" to write not by the constraints of human composition but by what you see and what you hear."
Neither her writing, music or illustrations follow the norms. Yet at the time of creation her work was popular and well studied - neglect of her work only came later on.
-Her writing was considered, by herself, to be abysmal, hence the use of Volmar, her secretary.
-Some, now attribute her visions to migraines, such as Madeline Caviness.
- Her illustrations are closely tied to the words of the vision and also relate to the body / female sexuality and eroticism ( Hildegard's work on medical texts would have supplied similar imagery).
- Hildegard considered 'visions' and eroticism to exist within female bodies (winds existing in the womb illustrate this idea) - male sexuality was not greatly considered by Hildegard, as for her, eroticism could exist in the female body alone. Her illustrations somewhat eroticses both spiritual and sexual female experience.
- Hidegard talks of forms of gender ahead of her time- of the female becoming male and vis a versa.
- She talks of the fluidity of the body- eroticism flowing out of the female body and into other things.
- Spirituality / sexuality = pleasure and pain.
Childbirth = creation of the world / spirit compared to the Apocalypse in terms of pain levels.
This pain / pleasure relationship also present within her music - music jumping octaves (uncommon musical composition)
The 'Egg of Creation' - the universe. (From Scivias, in the Rupertsberg Codex, 12th Century,Cited in Alexander Roob, Alchemy & Mysticism, p. 120)
"Then I saw a huge object, round and shadowy. Like an egg it was pointed at the top... Its surrounding layer was bright fire (Empyreum). Beneath this lay a dark skin. In the bright fire hovered a reddish, sparkling fireball..."
Note: - earth at the centre, with flowing water and stones, Flames / winds circling the centre.
Ideas of eroticism spreading out from the womb relate to her ideas about the universe and can be seen within the above image.
'Moisture'- also very important = creation / pregnancy, 'the womb'
Creation = motion (repetition of the stars at the top create the effect of movement)
Images capture the physical experience - How do you capture noise?- the whirlwinds etc.
Stars - used in a number of ways - symbolic of those who inhabit creation.
The trinity - feathers, branches and straw' - shown as united in one column.
Order and structure in her images = layers of the universe / heaven.
Above image (ignore inserted text) - shows God at the cornerstone of heaven. An unknown being of wrath and wings- image suggests a tempestuous horrible noise.
The Creation of Eve (image not available). Hildegard still shows Eve to be created from Adams rib and is still shown to be responsible for the fall- though is clearly violated by evil.
Eve- shown as partly a cloud (containing stars)- holding all the world inside her.
Stars - stars of heaven = future race.
Hildegard talks of the fecundity of the female body and the fecundity of the creation of the universe.
"the greening coming to life"
- relation to the ground and to nature. Idea of disrupted cycles in nature disrupting humanity.
Above image = figure of the church as wisdom and body. A female form emiting a light- illuminating wings, with Virgin Mary's arms of flames.
Hildegard nutured the expression of femlae wisdom and song- she believed that men had already seen these things but failed to listen.
Lecture Notes - Week 3
-Anicia Juliana
-St Polyeuktos
-Hagia Sophia
-Pulcheria
-St Theodosia
Summary: Galla Placidia 5th century Byzantine Empress, Anicia Juliana wanted to be an empress. Hagia Sophia was built by Emperor Justinian. Pulcheria and St Theodosia like others used images one way or another to affirm or undermine class status, identity and ideology. St Theodosia was patron saint of Byzantine Iconoclasm.
Galla Placidia
- potentially a slut, potentially kidnapped by the goths. Built up a wealthy city in Ravenna.
- This week's reading explains how Placidia used the image of Helena as a symbol of importance to both men and women
Hans Namuth's Photographs of Jackson Pollock - Week 1
Namuth, Pollock in his studio, 1950The collaboration between Namuth and Pollock has its roots in Namuth's knowledge of earlier projects involving Picasso. Namuth knew about Paul Haesaert's film "Visite รก Picasso," shot in 1949 and released in spring 1950, in which Picasso paints on a vertical pane of glass, behind which the camera recorded the master in action.7 Pollock would probably not have seen illustrations from Haesaert's film, but he certainly would have seen the next best thing: Picasso's Space Drawings photographed by Gjon Mili and notonly widely published in 1950 but exhibited as well at The Museum of Modern Art. (figure 3).8
Mili's photograph of Picasso captures him drawing in space with a flashlight what appears to be a bull or a minotaur. The long exposure arrests Picasso's motions as one continuous, flowing line of light. The vertical, two-dimensional plane of the photograph, then, becomes the plane of the canvas. Picasso wears nothing but shorts and sandals, and has finished his gesticulations with the flashlight in a balanced, athletic crouch that emphasizes his physical agility. The light drawing, arrested for our eye by the long exposure, only exists by the intersection of photography, just as the gait of a running horse was proven by Muybridge to have all four hooves off of the ground simultaneously--information about movement unavailable to the naked eye. Movement through space and the duration of this movement are arrested and coded by the photograph. The phenomenological articulation of Picasso's movements become the sum of their parts; for Namuth's photographs of Pollock, this meant that the creation of art rests upon the articulation of that movement within the space of the studio frozen by the camera and reproduced in popular magazines like film stills.
Picasso’s Space Drawings, photograph Gjon Mili.Through the Surrealists, Pollock developed an acute interest in psychoanalysis. In 1939, Pollock began four years of psychotherapy that would aid him in an identification with the growing interest in the themes of Jungian thought. Pollock identified with Jung's notion of a "collective unconscious" that all human beings share at a level of archetypal recognition.17 Jung's postulation of a "phenomenology of the self" fused tenets of psychoanalysis and phenomenology into a construction of the "self" (analogous the to the Freudian ego) whose unconscious was regulated by internal and external stimuli, creating a "field" of experience and a response to stimuli of which the conscious ego is but one part.18 The other part is an "extra-conscious" psyche whose "contents are impersonal and collective...form[ing]...an omnipresent, unchanging, and everywhere identical quality or substrate of the psyche per se."19 For Pollock, Jung's thought seemed homologous with the mythic subject matter of American Indian ritual, which involved a process of engaging the tangible world to express the universal or mythological. Such a process for Pollock involved a fundamental reorientation of the role of the artist from that of the thinker to that of the "act-or."
Harold Rosenberg, for example, described this meaning as the transcription of an artist's inner emotions by means of a pictorial or sculptural "act." "A painting that is an act," Rosenberg wrote, "is inseparable from the biography of the artist. The painting itself is a moment in the inadulterated mixture of his life."20 Or, again, "Art...comes back into painting by way of psychology. As Wallace Stevens says of poetry, it is a process of the personality of the poet."21 Rosalind Krauss mentions that
For Rosenberg, the picture surface as a locus of gestural marks demanded that one look at it as a map on to which one could read the complexity of the artist's psychological condition--a physical transcription of the artist's inner self.23 Rosenberg's seminal article re-affirmed Steichen's encoding of the image of the artist as an isolated genius, but not as "le penseur," the inert and bearded demiurge. Rosenberg's "action painter" moved through his work and through the world, linking the body of the painter and his genius with the artwork itself. Thus the "inner life" of the painting is a physical register of the phenomenal experience of the painter, and a tangible articulation of his psychological, existential necessity.
http://dsc.gc.cuny.edu/part/part8/articles/gross.html
Helen Frankenthaler (1928 -) Week 1
Robinson's Wrap1974
Acrylic on canvas
5' 10" x 7' 10"
Private collection
Mountains and Sea1952
Oil on canvas
7' 2 5/8" x 9' 9 1/4"
National Gallery of Art, Washington
Seeing the Moon on a Hot Summer Day1987
Acrylic on canvas
8' 7 3/8" x 5' 4 1/4"
Private collection
Born in New York in 1928, Helen Frankenthaler first studied with Rufino Tamayo at the Dalton School. At Bennington College, Vermont, 1945-49, she received a disciplined grounding in Cubism from Paul Feeley, though her own instincts lay closer to the linear freedom of Arshile Gorky and the colour improvisations of Wassily Kandinsky's early work.
In 1950 the critic Clement Greenberg introduced her to contemporary painting. During that summer, she studied with Hans Hofmann in Provincetown, Massachusetts. In 1951 Adolph Gottlieb selected her for an important New Talent exhibition, and she had her first one person show in New York later that year.
The work of Jackson Pollock proved the decisive catalyst to the development of her style. Immediately appreciating the potential, not fully developed by Pollock, of pouring paint directly onto raw unprimed canvas, she thinned her paint with turpentine to allow the diluted colour to penetrate quickly into the fabric, rather than build up on the surface. This revolutionary soak-stain approach not only permitted the spontaneous generation of complex forms but also made any separation of figure from background impossible since the two became virtually fused a technique that was an important influence on the work of other painters, particularly Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland.
- From 125 Masterpieces from the Collection of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery
Critical Text: 'Mountains and Sea'
Text from Arthur Danto, Embodied Meanings.
The Frankenthaler retrospective opens, appropriately enough, with the famous Mountains and Sea of 1952, a painting too beautiful, to use an old fashioned word, to regard merely as a historical moment in the march forward of the modernists, and too compelling, as beauty always is, to see only as a work that influenced some important artists to begin staining canvas. It is beyond question big with a future that would have been invisible when it was made, and so for us big with a past, momentous in the style wars of thirty something years ago. But it is worth the effort to try to see it as it must have been seen before the later history happened, as a cool composition of slender loops passing in and out of diaphanous washes of color pale greens and blues and pinks distantly Cubist but feminized, without the harsh angles, aggressive edges, and dangerous vertices. It is like a dance of seven veils.
As a matter of biography, Mountains and Sea was inspired by a trip to Nova Scotia, but it could as easily be seen as a still life rather than a landscape or not read referentially at all. The picture in the catalogue looks as if it could be a reproduction of an aquarelle. The great achievement, here as in the work that followed it for nearly a quarter century, consists of Frankenthaler's adaptation of the fluidity and transparency of washes over drawn lines, and the luminosity of thin glazes without the fat opacities of oil paint, to the scale of the large canvas, then the format of the Abstract Expressionists. But it would be a wonderful painting even if it had had none of its subsequent influence, and there are passages in it I cannot see too frequently. The string of drips in the upper right corner, for example, allow an archipelago of vibrant dots to form, the brush having discharged its delicate load and then, perhaps, descended to make the streak of pale blue in which the archipelago reappears, faintly, as a dot and then another paler dot. That is as beautiful as painting gets.
M/E/A/N/I/N/G Online, Feminist Art: A Reassessment
A forum including writing and images by artists and art historians from three generations.
Irina Aristarkhova, Susan Bee, Emma Bee Bernstein, Johanna Burton, Ingrid Calame, Maura Coughlin, Bailey Doogan, Johanna Drucker, Carol Duncan, Mary Beth Edelson, Joanna Frueh, Vanalyne Green, Mimi Gross, Susanna Heller, Janet Kaplan, Tom Knechtel, Judith Linhares, Lenore Malen, Ann McCoy, Adelheid Mers, Robin Mitchell, Carrie Moyer, Beverly Naidus, Rachel Owens, Sheila Pepe, Nancy Princenthal, Carolee Schneemann, Mira Schor, Joan Snyder, Anne Swartz, Faith Wilding, and Barbara Zucker.
http://writing.upenn.edu/pepc/meaning/04/
Notes: Cockfighting and Other Parades: Gesture, Difference and the Staging of Meaning (Griselda Pollock)- Week 1
Colonel Mordaunt's Cock Match circa 1784-6
Oil on canvas
support: 1039 x 1500 x 20 mm frame: 1235 x 1695 x 85 mm painting
Summer time, Jackson Pollock
Lee Krasner, Gothic Landscape.Feminist inquiry being to: read beyond painting as discrete aesthetic objects and interrogate ‘that expanded set of relations of making and viewing, seeing and reading that the term artistic tries to encompass.’
The founding essay in cultural anthropology by Clifford Geertz ( Deep play: Notes on a Balinese Cockfight, 1973) is used as a focus point for the development of the inquiry, alongside Johanm Zoffany’s ‘ Coonel Mordaunt’s Cock Match, 1784, and the work of Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner.
Using the presence ( / absence) of Lee Krasner in Namuth’s film documenting Jackson Pollock, Griselda Pollock looks to go beyond merely noting the marginalisation of the feminine within the binaries; centre / periphery; masculine/ feminine; coloniser/ colonised.
The space for the production / process of sexual / cultural differencing is not the iconographic or compositional content within the image – it lies in the psycho- symbolic relation in which the work of the painting is engaged with by the work in the space / act of viewing.
Zoffany’s painting encodes the staging of a spectacle complete with spectator.
‘Difference is not attribute but relation; difference is not essence but play’ (in ref to Derrida)
Homi Bhabha’s double movement of governmentality highlights that it is not merely sexual difference alone that can be bought into play within this discourse. We must ‘grasp that the body is ‘always simultaneously inscribed in both the economy of pleasure and desire and the economy of discourse, domination and power.’ The play between sexual and cultural difference exists within the constructions of governmentality and desire.
The mixed economy of power and desire can be tracked in reference to ‘Colonel’s Mordaunt’s Cock Match’ and ‘Summertime’ via two pathways:
1.Gesture – as a point of comparison.
2.Consideration of the painting as text ( as staging of meanings that imply and create relations between the represented bodies and the viewing subjects, at a level beyond iconography or social decoding)
‘Paintings actively perform something on behalf of the culture that produces them.’
similarly to theatre, in which ‘thoughts are structured by narratives, performed by bodies adopting the body as the means for the evocation of deeply structured associations that inflect the formally articulated meanings’.
‘the body evokes structured associations that inflect formally articulated meanings.’
Gesture in relation to theatrical performance: 'theatrical performance changes the viewer through the play of dramatic emotions and a sequence of signifying gestures that the viewer not only sees but indentifies with in her / his own embodies person.’
‘representation has the making and remaking of subjectivity.’
Definition of subjectivity: not private and exclusive but is constantly being fashioned and reworked by encounter with representation and language through cultural practices.
Visual representation dramatises and produces issues concerning self perception and identity, as well as ideas relating to social life and conflicts.
Cultural representations of sexuality and sexual difference are never far from the relations of power, domination and discourse.
Study of the practices (gestures) of abstract painting in their aesthetic and material specificity can enable ‘a fluid and productive reading of fixing of identity and gender to artists as ‘men’ and ‘women’.’
Why were women marginalised from the movement of American Modernism?
Relativity to the era- shift in sexual difference, from the wartime working woman to the idealised homemakers of the 1950s.
Consideration of ‘the play of subjectivity through the privileging of the gesture’ with the gesture as an ‘index of both an embodiment and a psycho-sexual subjectivity, neither of which are synonymous with anatomies or socially specified genders.’
Proposition of two questions:
1.Is the gesture male?
Based upon the idea of Pollock’s drip paintings as the ‘metaphorics of masculinity’
Gesture (manner of painting and movement of bodily ego) ― fantasmatic subjectivity
Gesture should not be read as an index of what our culture already projects as typical gender characteristics of masculine and feminine behaviour or psychology.
What aspects of the differences between the fantasy worlds of sexual difference might be revealed through the art practical specificities of New York Modernism?
‘Instead of typical oppositions of phallic masculine aggressivity and smooth flowing feminine passivity, signalled by two methods of painting, the drip and the stain, I pondered what of feminine violence, anxiety, sadism, envy and desire?... How will these forces find gestures that can encompass and translate their inchoate formless pulse into visibility through an art work?’
2.Is the artist hysterical?
The hysteric: posing a radical doubt about the fixities of socially sanctioned sexual identity. The hysteric asks: "Am I a Man or a Women?", "Am I alive or dead?"
hysterical = capable of identifying across assigned bodily and linguistic gender.
Therefore,' if the artist is hysterical, creativity might be seen to stem from indentifications that transend the actual gendered embodiment of the artist.'
In order for the female to be an artist, rather than a mother, she must move away from the constructions of the femine child, culturally encouraged to identify with the mother, and identify with the masculine position of the son / artist, the patriarchal culture alone defines as Artist.
Cross gender accessibility - perhaps a key to creativity (working from greater understanding and experience of the world). New artistic forms can be created through the actions of the woman as artist.
'The femininity of the artist and the fantasy of the maternal sublimated within creative activity would be articulated through new artistic forms.'
'The point is to expose the fluidity of unconscious indentifications and relieve the apparent fixity of given social gender so as to reveal artistic practice as the site of both the ideological production of sexual difference as a set of oppositions (male/female) and as the perpetual erosion of fixed identities.'
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A painting, producing itself to be read as a (re)staging is both productive and transformative for the producer and the viewer that reads it.
How do Summertime and Colonel Mordaunt's Cockmatch relate to each other?
'Deep play: notes on a Balinese Cockfight' by Clifford Geertz allows us to read culture as a symbolic staging enactment, choreography of both sexual difference and social heirachy. Consideration of game play as a form of cultural conditioning: with cultural and social significance made apparent in forms of game play (ie. cockfighting)
- consideration of the similarities between male and female behaviour
'cocks can thus become both the real and the metaphorical signification of the masculine self.'
'the cockfight, especially the deep cockfight is fundamentaly a dramatization of status.' (Geertz)
'The fights cause daily humiliation and triumph without actually shifting anyone's real status.'- everyday experience / cultural meaning becomes more powerfully articulated through the cockfight.
'The event is thus image, metaphor, and fiction that allows what is shown, or what takes place, to represent for the masculine participants the social passions and tensions through blood, feathers and money.'
Tensions in social status that are normally obscured become visible in an aesthetic and kinetic form.
'The dramatic metaphor captures, better than the usual notions of the passively consumed visual image, the experience of 'sentimental, that is emotional and psychological, education, that is coming to some kind of knowledge'.' - the act reveals half-known, hidden inner knowledge through experience of the sentimental.
'art forms gnerate and regenerate the very subjectivity they pretend only to display.'