Documentary About Avant-Garde Pioneer Tony Conrad
"Experimental artist Tony Conrad is known for his innovative works in performance art, music, video, and fine art as well as his contribution to arts education as a longtime media professor at The University of Buffalo. A former Harvard math student himself, Conrad is widely considered to be a pioneer of minimalism, media criticism, drone pop, and noise music thanks to his lifelong dedication to deconstruction, abstraction, and self-empowerment."
(Erin Dennison, cinemathread)
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
Kazimir Malevich: non-representational, non-painterly abstractions
"In the early twentieth century, Suprematism represented a leap into a totally non–representational, non–painterly, tarantella–like dynamic. Basic geometric shapes, isolated or in groups, were being energized, propelled into an optimistic ideal soaring from lower left to upper right, the vector alone suggesting time. The limits of perception and understanding are being questioned. An aura of simultaneous ecstatic concentration and idolatry of the will pervades these works.
Experienced 'in flesh,' these formidable abstractions look 'humanized': slight wavings in texture and color, the crackled paint of the Black Square on white, the subtlest of whites upon off–whites, transport the viewer into a higher, supremely charged, inspirational state of mind."
(Ileana Marcoulesco, Art Lies)
Fig.1 Kazimir Malevich (1915) "Black Circle", "Black Cross" and "Black Square"
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
Nina Wenhart's blog on the prehysteries of new media
"this blog is nina wenhart's collection of resources on the various histories of new media art. it consists mainly of non or very little edited material i found flaneuring on the net, sometimes with my own annotations and comments, sometimes it's also textparts i retyped from books that are out of print.
it is also meant to be an additional resource of information and recommended reading for my students of the prehystories of new media class that i teach at the school of the art institute of chicago in fall 2008.
the focus is on the time period from the beginning of the 20th century up to today."
(Nina Wenhart, 26/06/2008)
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
Photorealism: a reaction to the detachment of Minimalism and conceptual art
"Chuck Close is associated with the style of painting called Photorealism or Superrealism. In this style, artists in the early 1970s created a link between representational systems of painting and photography. Photorealism developed as a reaction to the detachment of Minimalism and conceptual art, which did not depict representational images. Photorealists frequently used a grid technique to enlarge a photograph and reduce each square to formal elements of design. Each grid was its own little work of art. Many of the Photorealists used the airbrush technique.
Big Self–Portrait, in black and white, was the first of Close's mural–sized works painted from photographs. This painting took four months to complete. To make this work, Close took several photographs of himself in which his head and neck filled the frame. From these he selected one of the images and made two 11 x 14–inch enlargements. On one of the photographs he drew a grid, then lettered and numbered each square. Using both the gridded and ungridded photographs, he carefully transferred the photographic image square by square onto a large canvas measuring 107 1/2 x 83 1/2 inches. He used acrylic paint and an airbrush to include every detail.
When Close was making his painting he was concerned with the visual elements––shapes, textures, volume, shadows, and highlights––of the photograph itself. He also was interested in how a photograph shows some parts of the image in focus, or sharp, and some out–of–focus, or blurry. In this portrait the tip of the cigarette and the hair on the back of his head were both out–of–focus in the photograph so he painted them that way in Big Self–Portrait."
(ArtsNet Minnesota)
Fig.1 Chuck Close 'Big Self–Portrait', 1968 acrylic on canvas 107 1/2 x 83 1/2 in. Walker Art Center
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
Albert Exergian: Popular TV shows
"Albert Exergian designt ultra–minimalisierte Serienposter, die schöner und aussagekräftiger nicht sein könnten. Leider kenne ich nur einen kleinen Teil der Serien die visualisiert wurden. Die Serien mir bekannt sind könnten aber grafisch kaum besser reduziert werden."
(Philipp, 23/11/2009, Hundertmark)
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
