Josse Ford :: Art Journeys and Conversation ::

Robert Smithson at the Whitney

Recently I visited the Robert Smithson exhibition at the Whitney. Smithson believed that art existed beyond the confines of the museum. His work covered a wide range: earthworks, sculpture, photography and film. His themes were the landscape, language, the monument and site specific artworks. He was fascinated by industrial landscapes. He was self-taught as an artist, although he did attend the Arts Students League. He loved to read - he had more than a thousand books in his library.

Like me, he had a love of travel and journeys in search of his artistic inspiration and settings. His writings tied together mythology, science. It wasn't so much his art that excited me about this exhibition but the torrent of ideas, and connections pursued, the traces of which he left behind in his journals and essays. Normally conceptual art leaves me unmoved, bored, cold, even insulted that the pure, rigorous discipline of seeking ever economies of visual description should have been replaced by such a pretentious impostor. But Robert's ideas electrified, made me think, opened inviting worlds. Poet/Philosopher/Artist he was a living testament that being an artist is a state of consciousness, a calling, a journey into the unknown, a "what if".

Here's his words on his most famous work, "The Spiral Jetty":

"Chemically speaking, our blood is analogous in composition to the primordial seas. Following the spiral steps we return to our origins, back to some pulpy protoplasm, a floating eye adrift in an antediluvian ocean. On the slopes of Rozel point I closed my eyes, and the sun burned crimson through the lids. I opened them and the Great Salt Lake was bleeding scarlet streaks. My sight was saturated by the color of red algae circulating in the heart of the lake, pumping into ruby currents. No they were veins and arteries sucking up obscure sediments. My eyes became combustion chambers, churning orbs of blood blazing by the light of the sun. All was enveloped in a flaming chromosphere."

At that place he had a vision of an immobile cyclone and "Spiral Jetty" was born. A counter clockwise spiral that took 600 tonnes of earth and rock and suggested new ways of looking at art. The "Spiral Jetty" has undergone many changes. In 1970 it went underwater and reemerged 20 years later. It's surface changed from black to white. It has become akin to a national monument. People who otherwise have never heard of Smithson, make the journey over forlorn, rough roads to stare in wonder at it's monumental strangeness. After all, what was he thinking. A giant spiral, in the middle of nowhere, connecting our ancient path with it's neighbor, the post-industrial jetty - his favorite preoccupation.

Photo © Estate of Robert Smithson.

Resources

• New York Times review
• New Yorker review
• Robert Smithson website

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Cezanne, Pissarro, Gauguin Symposium at Moma

A couple of weekends ago I spent a day listening to different ideas on what motivated the intense friendship between the artist Cezanne and his master and friend, Pissarro. The keynote lecture was given by Richard Brettell, Professor of Art and Aesthetics, University of Texas at Dallas.

Here's what I learned from Richard:

CEZANNE AND PISSARRO
Cezanne and Pissarro were friends for 15 years. Pissarro was a generous man and was always a central figure in all the various artistic groups of his day. He was also different from the other artists, older, fiercely intelligent, he came from a larger world. He was also friends with Gauguin. Courbet was important an important influence to all of the impressionists.

Pissarro and Cezanne spent many a day painting side by side plein air. Their relationship was convivial but also competitive. The impressionists painted not only in response to a motif but also in response to their companion artist. Through the conflict of opposition in ideas and style, they struggled to find their voice as an artist through opposition to the other.

They also painted recurring motifs such as houses and farms. But it was more than just a reworking of a recurring idea, it was a way of communicating visually with the other artist. The paintings were painted with the idea that the other artist would see it and would respond. As a result, studying the paintings tell us a huge amount about the relationship between Cezanne and Pissaro which is why the exhibition at the MoMA with the paired paintings was such an excellent opportunity to see into the worlds of these two great artists.

PISSARRO AND GAUGUIN
Pissarro and Gauguin spent six years together. In 1879 Cezanne invited Gauguin to join his first impressionist exhibition. Gauguin exhibited a sculpture. Gauguin had made a lot of money as a businessman and he collected a lot of art. Even in his early paintings there's a pecularity about them, a bit like Daumier on acid.

One of Pissarro's great gifts to his fellow artists is that he pushed other artists to be strong and to be themselves while he would push himself to be different from them. Both Cezanne and Gauguin painted pictures in "response" to Pissarro. Both Gauguin and Pissarro were obsessed with painting upward, "making patterns of the world vertically".

Another interesting detail about their relationship is that they needed to paint apart from each other, when they painted side by side the paintings generally failed. Pissarro was obsessed with his own failures as an artist. He was often correcting and redoing his own paintings.

PISSARRO AND SEURAT
in 1885 Pissarro met Seurat. It was a revelation for him. He discovered a new approach to uniform pictorial surface and color theory. They had a short working relationship.

Of all the artists, only Van Gogh didn't have a strong interaction with Pissarro.

RESOURCES

• Selected audio recordings of the symposium can be downloaded here.
• An online version of the exhibition can be seen here.

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Kermit The Frog on Art

Priceless wisdom from Kermit.......

How important are the visual arts in our society? I feel strongly that
the visual arts are of vast and incalculable importance. Of course I
could be prejudiced. I am a visual art.


Kermit the Frog, muppet

Many thanks to Art Educators of New Jersey

The Greatest Thing a Soul Ever Does.......

From John Ruskin: British artist, scientist, poet, environmentalist, philosopher, and art critic.

The greatest thing a soul ever does….. is to see something and tell what it saw in a plain way

............John Ruskin (1819 - 1900)

John Ruskin (1819-1900)

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The American Sublime - a review of Robert Smithson's "Spiral Jetty" by Arthur Danto

There is an excellent review of Robert Smithson by Arthur Danto in an essay entitled The American Sublime over at "The Nation" (link thanks to Amy at the ARTery). Danto has this to say:

"One of the most famous works of art in America, Robert Smithson's Spiral
Jetty transcends the "earth art" genre to which critics have consigned
it, and has become an emblem of the American sublime."

"An autodidact, widely read in science fiction, amateur geology and
crystallography, Smithson was a singularly original thinker who brought
to bear in his art and writing as many of his intellectual pursuits as
he could. His master concept was entropy--a statistical measure of
energy disorder or randomness--which gripped him much as the concept of
blind will gripped Arthur Schopenhauer, as the ultimate reality against
which form and order crumple and collapse. He connected the coolness of
contemporary sculpture with the inevitable cooling down of physical
systems. Thus, he suggested, the most important new works in American
sculpture "bring to mind the Ice Age rather than the Golden Age"--an
allusion that suddenly vests his abstract ice crystals with a certain
prophetic meaning."

In the essay Dante sites Robert Smithson as more of an influence for today's young artist than Picasso: "anti-institutional, in touch with the environment, hospitable to myth and ritual, alive to the poetry of the wilderness, ambitious in his desire to touch the public through a vision of monumentality that throws the world of the shopping mall and the parking lot into a moral perspective."

Robert Smithson's work can be seen at the Whitney Museum of American Art until October 23.

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