THE ILLUSTRATION ACADEMY

This week I played hooky for a few days to sit in on lectures at the Illustration Academy in Sarasota, Florida. The Academy assembles some of the most talented and successful illustrators in the country to discuss their work and teach young artists in hands-on sessions.

I had the pleasure of listening to presentations by Mark English:



Sterling Hundley:



Gary Kelley:



Anita Kunz:



and George Pratt:



If you tried to single out some distinguishing characteristic that accounted for the success of these illustrators, it was certainly not the way they marketed their services. (They had very different techniques.) Nor did they work in a common style-- they used a wide variety of approaches. It was not the stage of their careers (their ages range from 33 to 76) or the medium they used (some painted with computers and some painted with roofing tar). It was not their geographic location (they came from all around the US and Canada) or their gender or their politics. Yet, this group repeatedly won top awards and received choice assignments from the premiere publications.

So what did they all have in common?

It seemed to me that they all shared a deep curiosity about images and the interplay of form and content. Each of these illustrators had the enthusiasm and energy to cast their net again and again for fresh inspiration, exploring new themes and media. This, more than any career roadmap or promotional strategy, seemed to be their common ingredient. Not one of them lapsed into using a repetitive formula. I was surprised at how much of their work was self-generated; one persuaded a symphony orchestra to team with him in an experimental show of projected images to accompany Gustav Holst's The Planets. Another went on a pilgrimage to the backwoods of the Mississippi delta to develop a project on the blues. Their broad intellectual curiosity added a richness to their illustrations that seemed to distinguish them from illustrators who took a more perfunctory approach.

Finally, I would like to add one other observation about my experience at the Illustration Academy. I've spent enough time around the New York art gallery scene to develop an extreme distaste for the phony hocus pocus that often accompanies the creation and sale of art. Sure, I respect the mystery of the muse-- my skin has tingled at the feel of her breath on the back of my neck-- but I can't stand it when her mystery is exploited to inflate a price or glamorize a particular artist. Many artists and art galleries today operate like the high priests in ancient times who cloaked sacred activity within a mystic tabernacle to keep the uninitiated awestruck.

The artists at the Academy, on the other hand, de-mystified everything they could legitimately de-mystify. They had a healthy respect for the role of the muse in creating art, but they did not expand her role for their own self-aggrandizement. Instead, they spoke in honest and functional terms about the genesis of ideas and the ways that art communicates. It was as clean a discussion of the making of art as I've heard in a long time, by people with a sincere interest in passing along helpful information to younger artists, and it reminded me why I like illustration so damn much.

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New Russian art, AD 1909

These color photographs were all taken in the Russian Empire between 1909 and 1918.





Sergei Prokudin-Gorskii was a Russian photographer born in 1863. After studying chemistry with Mendeleev and later with Adolf Miethe - one of the crucial figures in the invention of color photography - Gorskii started developing his own techniques and processes of color photography, giving it a quality that even impresses even today.
In 1909, he convinced the tsar Nicolas II to send him on a trip across the Russian Empire, to document its impressive diversity. It was a 10-year project, during which Gorskii took over 10 000 pictures, and it ended up outlasting the tsar himself, and the Empire for that matter, as the October Revolution swept away the monarchy. In 1918, he emigrated to Paris, where he died in 1944.

The image archive of 1902 negatives which were left was bought by the Library of Congress a few years after the artist's death, and was put online in 2004. You can find it here.




Prokuda-Gorskii's most famous photo is of Leo Tolstoy, dated 1908.


But I prefer this monumental, megalomaniac and modest project of documenting Imperial Russia, which at the time was larger than the USSR ever came to be. The diversity of the people, and the shockingly modern colors of their portraits, make them impossible to forget. They are our contemporaries, now that they stopped hiding between the unfocused black-and-whiteness.
They are almost too present.

Austrian (probably meaning also Polish and of other origins) prisoners somewhere in Russia. It's really worth seeing a high-resolution image.


Here he is, Sergei Prokudin-Gorskii. In a landscape that is (eerily?) ours.
PS. The amazing color bars that appear on some of the pictures are the result of Prokudin-Gorskii's ingenious process, which consisted in taking three subsequent, monochromatic photographs, one with a green filter, one with blue and one with red. He then superimposed the three projections using lamps with a corresponding filter system. I adore these frames, unfortunately some of the images needed additional computer editing (by the Library of Congress) and in this version were cropped.
You can find an extended biography of Gorskii here. Read more "New Russian art, AD 1909..."

SELLING OUT

Norman Rockwell recalled quite clearly the first time he sold out.

Humiliated by his family's poverty, Rockwell resolved to make money any way he could. It didn't take long for him to learn about "the depths of commercialism:"

Jack Arnold, my cousin, came home from Annapolis one holiday and offered me fifty cents to take my girl and him out in my boat. And I did it; I rowed facing the front of the boat while Jack and my girl hugged on the rear seat.

Rockwell quickly realized there were things he should not trade for money. Perhaps he was still smarting over his loss when he began sketching concepts for Saturday Evening Post covers a few years later:

Many people are quick to accuse commercial artists of selling out (unlike true artists who never compromise their art for money). Personally, I've never been very impressed by such claims. For one thing, charges of "selling out" are rarely leveled by people who have made meaningful contributions to the arts. Instead, it more often comes from gawkers and spectators with little understanding of survival in the market.

For another thing, "selling out" comes in all shapes and sizes but is rarely irreversible. I've never yet seen Mephistopheles assume the form of an art director and offer to buy a young artist's immortal soul. Illustrator Bob Heindel offered a far wiser and more practical view of how young artists start out making bad trade offs but can still redeem themselves:

We all got screwed around at the beginning. That’s how you learn. But you learn to protect yourself, and mostly, if you care about it you learn to protect your work. [An artist has to be] protective of his ability.... he [should] always want... the opportunities to do his very best.

Furthermore, even when an artist does succumb to crass commercial demands, the taint of commerce usually gets washed away by the passage of time. For example, nineteenth century symbolist painter Arnold Bocklin created a famous and haunting picture of the Isle of the Dead.

When a wealthy widow saw the painting in Bocklin's studio, she offered him good money to paint another version, but this time adding a woman and a coffin in the boat to represent the widow and her dear departed husband George. Bocklin responded with the German equivalent of "you betcha" and promptly painted the duplicate to satisfy her specifications. This version of Bocklin's painting is now on display in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York where nobody criticizes it as a "sell out."

Of course, some courageous artists never do compromise their art. For example, Monet refused to sell out. Rather than compromise his artistic principles to make his paintings more marketable, he lived off of others, begging money from his parents or anyone else he could persuade to give him a few francs. He was so principled that his family lived in abject poverty; his wife and children sometimes went without food so that Monet could be true to his art. Because he couldn't afford medical care, his wife Camille suffered through a long illness with tuberculosis before dying painfully at the age of 32. Some say she died of pelvic cancer, but others say she died of a botched abortion because she and Monet could not afford to raise a third child.

Don't think Monet's artistic dedication was compromised by Camille's tragic death; he told a friend that he was interested in the way Camille's face changed color after she died, so he recorded the change in a painting:

Now that's what I call principle.

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ILLUSTRATING INFINITY

"The unutterable and the formless must needs be concealed"
.................--the Pythagorean brotherhood, circa 500 BCE

Saul Steinberg

Illustration art is commonly faulted for its "low" subject matter. Critics complain that, compared to fine art, Norman Rockwell's subjects were cheap and sentimental. Illustrations for the fiction in women's magazine or for shoe advertisements could never compare with "fine" art, where the artist has the freedom to address the most profound subjects.

But of course, there is no limit to the possible subject matter for an illustration.

Michelangelo's illustration of the Book of Genesis

In fact, the subject of an illustration can be more profound than the subject of so-called "fine" art, especially in an era like ours where fine art so often gravitates toward minor themes. Here is the art of contemporary art superstar Jenny Holzer:



Holzer takes platitudes fit for a fortune cookie and converts them into art by projecting them on the sides of buildings or flashing them on electric signs. It's hard to imagine Norman Rockwell settling for such simple minded content.

When it comes to profound, challenging subject matter, you can't aim any higher than the absolute. Great writers and artists sometimes aspire to "catch a glimpse of eternity through the window of time," transcending their small vantage point in history by identifying things immutable and great. Even if the quest for universal principles and eternal truths is a hopeless one, the mere search elevates the artist because it compels him or her to step outside of the fashions and styles of their day and focus on the most permanent things they are capable of conceptualizing. It stretches an artist to create forms commensurate with great themes.

Of course, great themes can also make an artist look foolish, which is one reason most artists don't try to go there any more. If you want to transcend the limitations of your time and place, it is disastrous to get too literal:

Here are some truly lovely examples of illustrations of the origin of the cosmos. These works, which were located and described by art historians Debra Diamond and Catherine Glynn, transcend some of the limitations of their time by reaching out to abstract beauty and putting aside literal solutions:


1. A color field of gold represents "the self-luminous Absolute."

2. The first manifestation of the cosmos

3. The siddha, "exuding silvery light (jyoti) engenders the next level of cosmic light and consciousness."

Now that's what I call sequential art! The difficulty of finding shapes and colors to portray such subjects is underscored by the corresponding text from the ancient Hindu treatise, Shiva Purana:

When the present world is not in existence, the Absolute alone is present. It is incomprehensible to the mind [and] cannot be expressed by words. It has neither name nor color.... it is immeasurable, propless, unchanging, formless, without attributes, perceptible to Yogins, all pervasive and the sole cause of the universe.

This next triptych conveys "The emergence of spirit and matter at the origin of the cosmos." I think spirit is the guy on the left:





One measure of the universal adaptability of this work is that it is compatible with modern scientific theory about the big bang, where the four fundamental forces (gravity, electromagnetism, strong interaction and weak interaction) emerged from nothingness at the origin of the universe.

An artist who attempts to realize timeless ideals by making an imperfect mark on a perishable surface reminds me of the Great Gatsby preparing to kiss Daisy:

He knew that when he kissed this girl, and forever wed his unutterable visions to her perishable breath, his mind would never romp again like the mind of God. So he waited, listening for a moment longer to the tuning-fork that had been struck upon a star.

And yet, you do it anyway. Without the commitment of that mortal kiss, what's the point of all that perfection?

.

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Something Else / Asger Carlsen

"You're (really) something!" in Polish is "Ty to jesteś!"*, meaning literally "You are the one that is!".

This seems more logical than the English expression - your existence is more, your [way of] being is the right one.
Yet there is, hidden within this phrase, a sense of hierarchy that verges on arrogance - a value judgment on being. I prefer the English version - it sounds more modest, the paradox (you-thing) gives it the feel of a good fetish - you are [my] fetish.
We can also see it as edifying: I can see you objectively and that sight is grand.


You are something else: you are fundamentally unattainable.

All the photos are by Asger Carlsen, from the series Wrong, 0 and Detour.**

* The Polish expression, however, has a rather pejorative connation, while the English one usually means we are impressed with the other person. Still, both have the basic meaning of awe and amazement, and both can in some circumstances be positive or negative.
** The first two pictures are not, as someone suggested, photos of real handicapped people. See the entire Wrong series for more.
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DRAWING WITHOUT ELECTRICITY

The painter Margaret Keane married a real jerk.

Early in her career, Keane created a popular style of painting children with huge, sad eyes. Although artistically dreadful, the paintings became wildly popular in the 1950s and 60s.



Keane's domineering husband Walter boasted that he painted the pictures, and he persuaded her to go along with his lie. For twelve long years, Walter took credit for Margaret's work. When their marriage dissolved and his meal ticket seemed about to disappear, Walter insisted that he owned the rights to the art, and even challenged Margaret's legal right to continue painting using the now famous "Keane" name. In court, it was his word against hers.

Then the judge came up with the ultimate test: he asked both Margaret and Walter to paint in front of the jury. Margaret successfully painted one of her trademark portraits. Walter claimed he was unable to paint due to a sore shoulder so they kicked his ass out of court.

There is no test of an artist more unambiguous than what he or she can do all alone with a pencil or brush. Again and again, people have returned to this standard as the measure of an artist.

After World War II, Han Van Meegeren was prosecuted for having sold an important cultural treasure, a Vermeer painting, to the Nazi occupiers . Faced with long imprisonment, Van Meegeren objected that he was not guilty because he personally forged the "Vermeer" he sold.



Scholars and art experts ridiculed his claim, but the court put him to the test by demanding that he paint another Vermeer in prison under observation. The testimony of Van Meegeren's brush was more persuasive than all of the art experts and scientists combined. The prosecutor dropped his charges of collaborating with Nazis (and prosecuted him instead for forgery).

Whether an artist is locked in a jail cell or isolated in a courtroom or stranded on a desert island, they always retain the crucial ingredients for their art: their eyes, fingers and mind. These are what the judges were trying to measure by eliminating interference from assistants, collaborators, photoshop, xerox machines, mechanical crutches or other such camouflage.

I sometimes think about the relevance of this test when I am enjoying the extraordinary new fruits of digital art. I have been dazzled by the brilliance of the animation art in Wall-E:



as well as the fabulous garden scene in Coraline.

These works of art are extraordinary and consuming, but they can neither be made nor viewed without the collaboration of utility companies to provide electrical power, financial institutions to provide funding, computer companies to develop software, and hundreds of animators, visual effects experts and other art professionals. None of them as an individual could "prove" their worth the way that Keane or Van Meegeren did for earlier generations. Today the creativity of electrical engineers can be as important as the creativity of the art director.

I sometimes wonder whether in the future this marvelous art form will eclipse more antiquated art forms, such as drawing and painting. And if it does, what will be the ultimate proof of an artist then?

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Moving/Making/Growing

Start off with something nice.
Something delicate, subtle, yet not too sharp, just soft enough to create the sensation of closeness. Don't go crazy, don't look for the ambitious project. Focus on this line. This spot. This shape. Something ridiculously precious for the little space it takes, for the easiness with which one can grasp it with one blink of an eye. Like a photo. Like a brand mark. Like, say, a sign announcing a poodle.
Now. Keep it fresh, don't go for the design, don't become too sure of yourself, you've only walked that far, you've only just created a little tiny bit of reality, something enchanting, a walk in the night, maybe, a few pretty words, possibly.
Stay humble.
And if you think you're humble enough, make fun at whatever it is that isn't there quite yet. Look at the silly figure you're making, you artiste you, you and your pretty dress, and your flirtacious smile, and your bright ideas and smiling smiles.

That's it. You're moving you're making you're growing. You're growing on this other you that is not you, and which surprizingly serves you as a filter to bring about the rest. See?
And though you know there is no other self, by now the distance is your best ally, you use it like a magnifying glass, the distance is what you learn to know best, you play with it, you give it true depth, you make it resound, this distant you, like a tolling bell, and then you pretend there is nothing, you get on with your work and all the rest, until, one day, it comes back, the echo, simple and potent and clear.

Andrea Schumacher, Poodle; Belle of the Ball; and Transposed Gesture (the latter, original, gesso and gouache painting is available at the Pierogi Gallery for under $400) Read more "Moving/Making/Growing..."

FC Barcelona and the shift of aesthetic paradigms

Apparently the manager of FC Barelona, the young Josep Guardiola, prepared this film for his players before the finale against Manchester United. And before the game, instead of making the classic motivational speech, he showed them the film. And said nothing afterwards.
If I'm posting this on the New Art blog, it's because this shows a very powerful turn in the way we see film/media. Although the advent of the "TV era" has been prophetized for a long time, and many declared its beginning many decades ago. However, this event, for me, is a very important sign of a shift of paradigms. And it is not as simple as moving from a deep human experience to a superficial "screen" experience. The presence of the manager, of the person, is still crucial (it would be difficult to imagine - for the moment - that he weren't there), but his action is not. Hence, translating it into performative terms, we can say it is not about the actor-audience connection, as some sort of a mystic communion. And a possible reason so many thinkers complain is because they thought the aesthetic experience of a live event had some "added value" because of it being inter-subjective. Suddenly, it appears the inter-subjectivity is just one possible aspect. One that can be done away with - while maintaining, and that is my argument, the value of the experience. Yes, now it seems more about the show-spectacle, but this is not to say the "spectacle" is, as such, of lesser value (based on what?). For one, it appears as a surprizingly intimate event. And if the film will presumably seem kitsch to most of us, that is clearly because it was tailored for a specific audience, with specific references, under very special circumstances. Could it be that this type of intimate media spectacle is what's in the air? Read more "FC Barcelona and the shift of aesthetic paradigms..."

Aliens in Brussels - Althamer's "Common Task"

On June 4, 1989, Poland held the first (partly) free elections of the so-called Eastern Block.
It was the first time since WW2 that opposition parties could legally participate in the political process, and the result - a smashing success of the opposition - was the end of communism and the beginning of a new, free Poland. These elections are generally considered the single event that began the overcoming of the totalitarian regimes in this entire region of the world.
And among the ways in which Poland will be celebrating the 20th anniversary of these events, one is particularly interesting.

Tomorrow, the excellent Polish artist Paweł Althamer (I've written a short note about him before), will land with 160 other passengers of a Boeing 737 in Brussels. They will all be wearing golden suits that look like a combination of space suits and fairy-tale costumes. Even the plane will be specially designed and painted gold - all as part of Althamer's work Common Task (the Polish expression "Wspólna sprawa" could also mean "common issue" or "common quest"). Their first stop in the city will be the Expo 58, a modernist dream-town. A model of an atom will be a starting point of the visit to the European Parliament and "meetings with the residents of the city" (How does that work?). They will be making a tour of the city as strange, alien visitors. 160 gold-dressed aliens.
Who are they? Mainly Althamer's neighbors, family and friends, who have been joining him for other performances he organized.
Who are they? Poles. Strangers. People from outer space.
They are the winners. The visiting winners. The happy neighbors. The curious onlookers, the modernist dreamers, the naive children of freedom, the believers. They are the pure creators, the dreamed Europeans, the perfect people, they are the unexpected turn of events, where everything turns gold.


The words on the page of the entire commemoration state:

The motto of the commemoration, It all began in Poland, is a bold reference to the fact that Poland was the first European nation to oppose, in 1939, the spread of Nazism and communism, and was the first to remove their communist government from power in 1989.

The gold suits seem to fit. And yet, what I like about this social sculpture (as Althamer sometimes calls his works) is something quite opposite to that spirit of heroism and pride we so desperately claim. It's... you guessed it - the lack of pathos.
Or rather - the way pathos is masked by the gold suit.

(In the video, art critic and curator Anda Rottenberg talks about Althamer's social sculptures: "It is about involving everyone in the area of the work of art as an activity where a new reality is created together and the chain of events is directed together".)

UPDATE 05.06.09:
Althamer told the media:

There are no VIPs here. This is a grass-roots project, in which ordinary people participate. It reminds that ordinary people are the ones who can change reality. 20 years ago no one expected that Poland would be free. We thought it was impossible. Our astronauts also never expected to fly to Brussels in a golden airplane. We set to have fun and enjoy freedom.

and the project's curatorial decription tells the story in a broader context:

The participants, i.e. the residents of the Bródno district in Warsaw appear in various places in extraordinary golden spacesuits. The joint activities are aimed to cross not only the mental but also the physical barriers; in addition to the meetings which are set in everyday reality, the participants also set out on peculiar journeys offering them new possibilities and unusual experiences. Clad in extraordinary spacesuits they balance on the border of two worlds; the one that they know and the new one which is very often a projection of their imagination. The world that they know quite frequently means the unattractive space of the grey and gloomy blocks of flats. The participants are “ordinary” people who have “ordinary” jobs and who are just “people from across the street”. “Common Task” allows them to leave the twilight zone and to appear in a public space which is completely new to them. For them, it is a different world full of people communicating in a foreign language. But it is also the world in which they become visible. What is more, they become the focal point and draw attention of the other people.In this context the Project of Paweł Althamer can be viewed as a social sculpture. The sculpture which is a material object, is transformed into a common experience, a process aimed to introduce a deep going change in the registers of everyday habits. Subject to this artistic transformation is not only a physical object but also the person, consciousness and mental habits. At the same time, Common Task is a meeting and integration place of various social groups and people whose everyday realities do not merge in any way and who are often excluded from the social and cultural rites. The symbolic crossing of the borders thus occurs at many levels.

It's curious how the vectors of meaning change. The beginning of the project seems to have been indeed a venture into the unknown, a play with the modernist ideas and ideals of unity, purity, but also of exceptionality of the individual. The trip to the city of Brasilia which they undertook underlines it quite clearly. However, by now the project is huge, the date is a specific date, not a coincidence, and these "neutral" people are not neutral any more - they are the golden ambassadors of the Polish cause. They are, whether the artist wants it or not, the symbol of the Polish events in 1989. And to some extent it becomes irrelevant what their reasons for going were, as the impact of their presence puts them in a very specific role, molds them into a social sculpture quite different from the one described in such a neutral way by the artist. There is a tension between the way the work "should" be seen, and how it appears. Curiously, the media's coverage shows the ambiguity: the journalists would like to show the richness of stories and levels of the work they are participating in (they, too, have to wear the golden suits), yet the bottom line keeps bringing them back to this "gold-medal" aproach, where the Poles are the clear winners of some strange competition.
This development of the "Common Task" is a great example of how the historic identity challenges, distorts, and often overwhelms the personal-narrative-identity.

(with a little help from Polandian) Read more "Aliens in Brussels - Althamer's "Common Task"..."

Simple Stories

David Lynch's new project, Interview Project, is assumingly as simple as it gets: travel across the US. Interview people.
Here is the first episode.
First impressions? It's... nice. Potentially fascinating. Not quite yet. For the moment, it's too early to say.

This might seem like something very unfocused, as if it lacked a form, a formula, a format to support it. Compare this first episode to Kieślowski's (amazing, amazing) Talking Heads (1980):





Kieślowski has a format and sticks to it.
Seen from this perspective, Lynch's project might appear as amateurish.
But then, it goes so well with the spirit of our times, with the thirst for simple, everyday stories...
After all, we can still feel quite a heavy dose of humanist ideals and pathos in Kieślowski's approach. Even the way he films his subjects is dramatic, often painting-like.
Lynch has this capacity too, as we know so well. Yet he chooses a very different approach, different texture. Different proximity.

One small, hardly noticeable element is similar in the two projects: the music. It is heavy, dramatic, as if contradicting the simplicity of the protagonists.
Is it nostalgia for the great narratives?

Oh, and one more thing. We can only get that far asking constantly the most basic questions. After a while, I get tired. I want more. The essential stops being essential. It becomes annoyingly abstract, unaccessible. That's one reason to go beyond the existential questions, and one reason to ask other questions. One way of dealing with this is moving away from the person-as-biography to the person-as-projection. Take the famous work by Sophie Calle called Blind, where she asked people who were born blind about what is their image of beauty.

The pathos is still quite present. Yet the projection, the sensibility of the imagination, makes us... dance with empathy. Read more "Simple Stories..."