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Tag: Arnold Schönberg

August 30, 2014

a reply to BookInhabiter, a.k.a. Brain (2)

Wolf Kahn - "Orange Cloud Over the Adriatic Sea" (1996)

“Orange Cloud Over rhe Adriatic Sea” (1996)

Wolf Kahn

_______

a reader writes, about “Poème d’amour“,
Hans Hofman

“This is a bizarre painting. It bewilders me. I can’t make sense of it. But maybe that’s the point.”

below is my answer

Richard

______

with the invention of the camera, Brain,
representational art became irrelevant,
unable to present the accuracy a
photograph would it had to discover
for itself an alternate purpose, which
is to say, reinvent itself

the medium became the message,
as Marshall McLuhan would’ve
put it, art began to study itself, it
reached for its sinews, arteries,
its colours, textures, its planar,
dimensional, limitations, limits

its form, in other words, was
becoming its substance

Abstract Expressionism was the
nadir of this movement, after the
less ethereal, more visceral,
German Expressionism, and up
to Andy Warhol, who brought us
back down to earth again with
pictures of Campbell Soup cans,
Marilyn

more matter, less theory

note the residual attachment to flat
colour fields nevertheless

that said, what part of Hofman‘s
“Love Poem“ is indeed a love poem,
search me, I think it’s just pretentious,
failed Miro

but do read the sidebar on the upper
left at the site for less partisan perhaps
insights, just click “Show details” there

I don’t either much like Schönberg,
who did the same kind of thing to
music, eviscerated it, I want to see
the body, not the entrails, these
should be studied at art school,
the conservatory, creative writing
classes

but that is of course just what I think

Schönberg and Abstract Expressionists,
however, have left their indelible marks
on art history, commendable marks for
their theoretical underpinnings, rigours

see for instance the marvellous Wolf
Kahn above for the evolution of these
ideas, you get it in less than a minute,
and delight in it

that is what real art does

thanks for asking

Richard

psst: Wolf Kahn was a student of
Hans Hofman, incidentally, he
just put everyday references
back into the picture, I call it
heart, something organic

2 Comments
April 4, 2008

1, e. e. cummings

among poets one of my favourites is e. e. cummings, who famously eschewed – gesundheit – capitals, even in the spelling of his own name

for years for my own reasons I did the same, I felt that capitals usurped a power, an authority, they too often could not justify, I was left with “God” and “I” as worthy and warranted entities, often even “God” wouldn’t cut it, and was relegated to the more pedestrian lower case “god”, which led of course to “gods”, and incidentally to a more luxuriant and panoplied pantheon, a heaven richer in colour and idiosyncracies than our own culture’s usual abnegations

this process had me probing each item’s validity in order to make some sense of my too fleeting world

there are still not many capitals in my compositions
 

e. e. cummings does many more things with language than I do, but I cannot tell you where any of his impulses come from, I am left with only his poems

but a poem should need nothing else

most of his poems for me don’t, in order to enchant
                                                                                                                                                                      here’s something I came upon serendipitously as I waited on a friend in a bookstore, I thought I’d pass the few minutes I had to wait browsing through books of poems, one takes just that much time to savour a poem, not much more usually than a glass of wine, sometimes they’re even memorable

this poem is taken from a chapter entitled “Erotic Poetry” in a collection edited by Richard Kostelanetz called “AnOther”

which I  bought

it is the first poem in that section, and titled merely “1”

                                                                                                                                                                         1
                                                                                                                                                                        out of bigg

est the knownun
barn
‘s
on tiptoe darkne

ss

boyandgirl
come
into a s
unwor

ld 2 to

be blessed by
floating
are
shadows of ove

r us-you-me a

n
g
el
l

s
 

e. e. cummings  (1894-1962)

                                                                                                                                                                     

this kind of thing has a precedent of course in the work of James Joyce (1882-1941), his “Finnegan’s Wake” goes on for several hundred pages in this manner, and left me for one in the dust

in music Arnold Schönberg (1874-1951) was also deconstructing his medium, breaking down musical notation into seemingly random organizations of sound, atonality eschewed – gesundheit – most all of the rules of earlier composition, presciently making way however for everything from the shrieking guitar
meanderings of Jimi Hendrix to the vocal pyrotechnics and eccentricities of Prince through the clanging and oracular pronouncements of Pink Floyd

neither Joyce nor Schönberg can be easily dismissed

nor e. e. cummings
 

all the very best

richibi

  

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