CURSOR 6
CURSOR6: On comparing media continued (The girl and the window)
Paul McLean
For a presentation in Humanities 340 (Research Tool for the Digital Humanities)
INTRODUCTION
Over the weekend I took a few paintings to a place where a group of friends were meeting to show them my new work. Previously I has spoken with one of them, and asked her what kind of painting she preferred. She replied, approximately, “landscapes with a hidden valley, like purple mountain majesty; children playing on a beach; and the girl looking out a window – you’re wondering: ‘what is she thinking?”
When I presented the fairly abstract landscape paintings I had brought with me to this particular friend, she turned away from them almost immediately, and tried to explain, to communicate a refined vision of what her painting preference is. Again, approximately, she said, “For landscapes, I like prints, photographs. With paintings, I like still images. Remember I told you about the kids on the beach, the girl looking out the window? You’re wondering: ‘what is she thinking?”
It took a good night’s sleep to digest what my friend was telling me, and to translate that information, so it would be helpful in a dimensional framework. Here are some interesting, important and valuable deductions that arose from that exchange:
1. Painting as a format for perceptual exchange is mobile. Mobility, or transportability, is valuable with regards vehicles for the transfer or stimulation of sentience. Paintings at one time were embedded objects, and Frank Stella has written and lectured about this, from a painter’s perspective. This is a seminal paragraph from Stella’s book on the subject, Working Space (1986):
But, after all, the aim of art is to create space – space that is not compromised by decoration or illustration, space in which the subjects of painting can live. This is what painting has always been about. Sadly, however, the current prospects for abstraction seem terribly narrowed; its sense of space appears shallow and constricted. This seems ironic when we remember that painting had to work so hard to create its own space, or perhaps more accurately, had to work so hard to free itself from architecture. This latter effort is, in effect, the drama that began to play itself out in the sixteenth century; it began with Leonardo’s Mona Lisa and ended with Caravaggio’s Calling St. Matthew. By becoming more of an artist than a craftsman, more of an individual professional – what we now call self-employed – the Renaissance artist began to direct himself away from decoration and illustration, away from altarpieces and fresco cycles, toward his newfound responsibility: the creation of his own space. This is the task to which Caravaggio addressed himself with amazing success.
NOTATIONS
To extrapolate from Stella’s argument, for the purposes of our dimensional discussion of old and new media: the mobilization of painting as a medium for perceptual exchange, or social networking, was a consequence of technical and logistical advances in painting, innovations in painting formats and exchange. Painting, findings suggest, therefore might be thought of as Western Civilization’s first mobile (visual media) communication tool, an early ancestor of the iPhone, if you will, intricately related to developments in linguistic transmission methods and devices.
The touring exhibition descends through this progression. Tours of paintings and collected artworks emerged, as productions of immense popularity, shaping Western ideas of entertainments, in intervening centuries. Artworks and exhibits to the present have packed (as in the current concept of packaging cultural or educational data for sale or other purposes) tremendous social import and impact. To angle the subject, the touring exhibition was Western Civilization’s first modern social network tool. The production could be formatted for private or public presentation. Picasso’s “Guernica” is a good 20th Century example. To trace the painting’s movements and effects is highly illustrative of the medium’s potential cultural force and value. Also worthwhile to consider is “Guernica” in relation to the town, historical events, ancillary works and reproductions, and political ramifications, throughout the painting’s lifespan through to the present. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guernica_(painting) for a helpful documentation, set of links.
The phenomenal evolution in painting space Stella describes as a duo-dimensional construct (I would argue for great complexity) provided the dimensional foundation for these advances. The connections Stella makes between Leonardo/Caravaggio and Mondrian/Newman are correct, and point to dimensional phenomena (the “window” or plane and its peculiar pictorial/perceptual qualities and the animation of space through the use of color in shaped or 3D planes in space). To understand Stella’s theoretical associations and discoveries is to witness his own artistic progression, as in sequences and patterns evolving over time.
Another significant consequence of the mobile medium - as a multidimensional, multi-faceted progression evolutionary in nature (waveform, more specifically, and wovenform) - is the emergence of Western Civilization’s art market. Stella’s argument focuses on players (artists of note) who demonstrated what are recently termed best practices. Therefore, Stella’s argument skews the discussion towards the technical, and away from the economics of productivity that a dimensional study would address.
The European art markets first blossomed in a timeframe that contains both Leonardo and Caravaggio, and has with some interruptions continued to flourish through the present, beyond Mondrian and Newman. The reader might return to Cursor 5 for a refresher on Mondrian’s “second life,” as represented in the links I provided. Today, the art market is undergoing a major transformation, as these links evidence, which to some degree will obviate the structural realities that facilitated the initial and subsequent flowerings of the European art market. For one thing, the field of play is now as global as the telecommunications structure, or even further, as global as the satellite array in the space enveloping Earth. However, to divorce the relationship between the art (in all its facets) to which Stella refers, from the phenomena we are witnessing (and participating in) today, is wrong, or at least incorrect. To fail to attribute the success of today’s innovations to those successes is simply disingenuous as it is consequential, which is not to say that there are not forces who endeavor to do just that.
During the timeframe to which Stella refers initially (Leonardo/Caravaggio, the art auction takes form. Complex job descriptions, parameters and affiliations for art, artists and their representatives develop, including guilds, dealerships and the regulation of the exchange of artworks. (See “The History of Art Markets,” Handbook of the Economics of Art and Culture, especially Section 6). Trade in paintings necessitates a very sophisticated system of transport, navigation and negotiation.
To argue that the contemporary phenomenon of iTunes is unrelated to these developments would be specious. In fact, art has pushed all aspects of modern perceptual technology and social economy from the time art migrated off the altar and into the rest of the community (in material form). The real problems confronting stakeholders in the old versus new media conundrum really impact the corporations that have occurred, especially since the early 1800’s. These modern corporations have managed to glean significant percentages of profits from almost all social activities, including those defined as artistic or creative. Copyright law has reinforced this corporate hegemony, since the 1920’s. To suggest that the obstacles posed to perceptual progress by corporate control of media are prodigious is to understate.
2. The camera has displaced the traditional documentary function of the artist’s eye/hand/technique. The hinge is “Manifest Destiny landscape painting,” which was displaced by photographers like Anselm Adams and Curtis. I won’t spend more time here on this rich topic, but would suggest the reader Google “Manifest Destiny landscape painting,” Anselm Adams and Edward G. Curtis. One thing I would add is a suggestion to consider the Panorama.
3. My friend’s attraction to “The Girl Looking Out the Window painting” is buttressed by a Google search. Granted, the prowess of a painter could be metered in his ability to render 3D/light effects on canvas in paint, and the girl gazing out the window is as good as any subject as a test of painterly representational skill. The icing on this cake, the difference between an “A” or “A+” would be whether the painting/painter could get the viewer to wonder what the girl was thinking. The genius of Leonardo and his “Mona Lisa” is revealed by his reconfiguration of this normative formula. Leonardo established the picture surface plane as the window and the viewer as the object of the subject’s thoughts, a magical accomplishment of artistic animation. This dimensional rotation changed the pictorial world. To comprehend the advances of Caravaggio (color animating movement of 3D form within pictorial space), Mondrian (infinite lines, configurations, modular formations, color combinations, etc. existing beyond the canvas edge, so the window reveals a “snapshot”), and Newman (color fields animating architecture) is to recognize how art helped everyone imagine worlds and technologies that did not exist when the painting was executed by the artist.
