Comments for Henri Art Magazine

Comment on Dream Catcher – Giles Lyon by Carla

Carla — Tue, 08 May 2012 03:01:07 +0000

I really appreciate this post on Giles work. So often it just takes the revelations of another’s eye/mind to reveal news ways to comprehend.

Comment on Vision – Provocation by George Hofmann

George Hofmann — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 17:35:51 +0000

I doubt that few people “got” Pollock at the time – and, as we agree, that made his life very difficult. That far out is very isolating, and who wants to go the distance with you?
Re power and art: I think you have to decide if you are talking about aesthetic power or cultural power. These don’t always coincide, obviously: is Bernini a greater artist than Duccio, or Rubens than Breughel? And what of the genius of an obscure printmaker, Herkules Seghers, unknown to almost all – compared to Rembrandt? Of course sometimes things come together: Velasquez at the height of Spain – but maybe that is more the exception than the rule. Great art is not bound to periods of cultural power, I don’t think, and in recent times Pollock and artists like Gottlieb perfectly illustrate how separate these can be.

Comment on Vision – Provocation by admin

admin — Mon, 23 Apr 2012 17:56:06 +0000

Thanks George – as always you’re very kind!

I think you’re right about Greenberg being one of the few to get Pollock’s real achievement, but ironically, Pollock also complained that Greenberg did not get his work. I guess that goes to show how alone he must have felt. There’s something about those years and something in the American character that produced that kind of problematic anxiety in its artists. The generation that followed was much more gregarious and cosmopolitan. They had a confidence and insouciance about themselves and their Art that the AbExers did not have. Different times and circumstances create different solutions! I would like to agree that art should be larger than the Nations that produce it, but I find that my views align with the historical examples. As power rises for a nation so does the art around it. A nation will export that culture to other nations – that is how Empires are formed. In America’s case our Art quickly fell in line with the Corporate model. America is unique, historically, in its disposition toward business. Our Nation was formed FOR business interests rather than business forming out of the Nation’s interest. Still, I’m of the opinion that Nations are a relic of an older dialog. Today the true power, those institutions that wield power, are the Multinational Corporations – Energy, Technology, Pharmaceutical, Financial, Weaponry, AeroSpace, etc. Nations tend to serve the needs of those Corporations, and I think the Global Depression that we are still experiencing has made that point clear again and again. And the Art that we see, the Art that we experience in the fairs, galleries and media tends to affirm Corporate values like production, replication, reproduction, outsourcing, technology etc.

This weekend in the Times there was a photographic essay on Jeffrey Deitch’s house in Hollywood. He’s made the mansion over into an installation gallery space in order to conduct business while “entertaining.” The photos lead one to believe that he’s promoting a kind of monetized Corporate Surrealism that provides an experience of Art for the well to do Museum Contributor/Collector. It’s pure marketing genius – Cary Grant’s bachelor pad (Hollywood glamour) decked out in 21st Century Art Fair Luxury Goods (the current institutional style.) Money, Power and Art all colliding in one pure experience of KapitalKulture in the Living Room of a Museum Director. The melding of corporate gallery and corporate institution is complete. I don’t mean to sound cyncial because I’m not trying to be, but the Cultural winners of any age are those that manage to mix with Power, that manage to convince those with access that the work they are doing explains and glorifies the age that they are living in. These artists quickly become an adjunct to those power classes – like Jeff Koons, Richard Serra or Gerhard Richter.
I happen to think there are other interesting things going on in painting and in Art. Things that others are not necessarily seeing and not necessarily discussing.

By the way to any readers that may be following this comment thread – check out George’s new works! Amazing, exciting and difficult work!

Comment on Vision – Provocation by George Hofmann

George Hofmann — Tue, 17 Apr 2012 19:36:59 +0000

If I may add, Mark: Pollock’s achievement was such that he couldn’t “reside” in it, really; and who could? Not even analysts had gone as far – and it may have been only Greenberg who “got” it.
But I think the very tensions between the European background and American newness of the AbEx period were what helped to produce great work. Art needs those tensions…
And searching, now, is not a problem – it is a path, of course.
Your writing about Brady is inspired, and answers many latent questions for me. These are views that should be published – they will have a lasting effect on the discourse.
But I must add, I am leery of the implications of linking national power and art; great art is sometimes stimulated by periods of wealth and power, but not always.
Many thanks, Mark!

Comment on Vision – Provocation by admin

admin — Wed, 11 Apr 2012 20:10:06 +0000

Thanks anon, you’re very kind! I have to say that I was a bit taken aback by the strong theoretical similarities between Brady and Warhol. Granted there’s a 100 years and an electronic matrix between them, but basically they are covering the same beat so to speak – the presentation and glorification of the celebrity classes and the infamy and disasters born by the ordinary citizenry. I felt this entrenchment of visual theoretics was important to bring up as it opens the conversation on a host of other broader societal issues in addition to the aesthetic ones. It seems we are still living through the consequences and outcomes of the civil war – the beginnings of a corporatized government and the formation of a different kind of artistic avant garde. Both have been and still are fascinated with the power of mechanization, quantification and replication.

Comment on Vision – Provocation by anon

anon — Wed, 11 Apr 2012 12:05:27 +0000

as an aside, let’s not forget it was lincoln’s demand act of 1862 that authorized salmon chase to print the ‘greenbacks’ that funded the civil war, a first step towards the fiat currency colloquially known today as ‘dead presidents’. you’ve broken some very interesting ground here sir, with an almost subconscious archeology of the american corporate image, from brady to warhol, as a picture of disaster and displacement.

Comment on Vision – Provocation by admin

admin — Tue, 10 Apr 2012 11:53:17 +0000

Pollock certainly. Not for his paintings, but the way he made paintings, the way he changed the game of vision. The second generation of AbEx painters all came from De Kooning’s brush and they failed. They could not top the master and AbEx fizzled. Pollock’s struggle with vision continues all through Postmodern America, but unfortunately for us painters, not in paint. As I tried to make clear, it’s not in our nature to paint, to see like painters. Our current path was determined through the lens/machine, the electronic world, through Hollywood and the explosion of singular “isms” that came with Postmodernism. That collaborative film by Namuth of Pollock painting lays out (once again) a plethora of aesthetic issues and theoretical questions that artists would have to face over the next forty years. Even today we see this same kind of engagement in the documentation of process, the extended field, relational aesthetics and even the life of the studio careerist and the art fair. All of it comes from Pollock. His beautiful paintings remain inscrutable. We can not take from them nor can we “see” them. We can only experience them.
But again the triumph of American-type painting has for many of us created the uneasy feeling that some important part of us as painters has been lost. It did for Pollock and it has for the artists that I mention in the post – Stella, Hockney and Reed. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not lamenting the change, nor am I nostalgic for days gone by. What we are in the process of doing today is creating something new from these realizations, laying the groundwork for a more involved and complex kind of seeing. We’ll have more to say about that in our final post in this series. Thanks for your comment Brian!

Comment on Vision – Provocation by anon

anon — Tue, 10 Apr 2012 11:46:48 +0000

brilliant writing here. locating the genesis of postmodern american state while linking it to the appearance of a technocratic image as its corollary is genius. the establishment of corporate personhood precedes the outbreak of the civil war by about forty years, and the recent citizens united decision consolidates its ‘voice’ under the first amendment. painting has never mattered for much in american culture, as its relationship to the viewer is found within the dynamics of this question which perpetuates the myth of the individual while protecting the rights of private property and the security state. this is the fundamental reason american art made since the end of the second world war looks and operates the way it does. bravo, mark.

Comment on Vision – Provocation by brian edmonds

brian edmonds — Mon, 09 Apr 2012 21:54:07 +0000

Great article. Funny how hindsight is 20/20. Do you feel Pollock or De Kooning has had more of an affect on contemporary art?

Comment on I didn’t get a Harumph outta that guy… by George Hofmann

George Hofmann — Sat, 31 Mar 2012 11:21:17 +0000

Definitely, on Paul Corio. He is morphing into a positive leader, qualities that were latent are coming to the fore – and he is going to teach us all – by example….by just being more of himself – albeit a worked-on version. Working (see Facing) is a very big deal….