In Warhol's art, there is a great deal "there," especially in his films. (Brian)
Okay. Now explain to me what's there in Blowjob beyond the fact I paid to watch it in early 1964. Another couple of films featured Joe Dallesandro. The trouble with those was much better gay porn was available in Hollywood `art' theaters. (CG)
The essential method was to subcontract all that messy hand work out. Warhol got somebody else to do the work. ``So did Sol LeWitt.'' (brian)
I was very influenced by Sol LeWitt, especially his early drawings which were essentially plans for larger work constructed by somebody else, usually a professional of somesort. What attracted me to LeWitt was his use of permutations. What he didn't know was a high abstract mathematical meaning attaches to finite permutations. These create or are embodied in the forms you see. I am thinking of the squares and cube period.
Here's my problem. If LeWitt had manipulated small models of these forms he would have discovered what I did, the mathematical meaning of some of these forms in space. It's a direct linkage between art and math. Unfortunately, these embedded ideas are completely unseen by the ordinary viewer. They see an ordering of some sort, but it is complex enough that they know something is there, but they can't identify it.
Back to contracting out messy hand work. In the past painters ran studios with the apprentice system. The apprentices built the panels and canvases, put on the grounds, ground and mixed the colors. The master would step in and do the underdrawing, layout and composition. Then build up part of the underpainting. One of their student masters would feather in backgrounds, and apply some of the basic underpainting. The master came back to finish painting between coats of varnish. As Rubens grew famous he did very little work except the final overpainting of some of the main figures and the detail of their faces and hands.
This system allowed for large and numerous works to be done, some pretty much simultaneously. The practical reasons were long drying times, and a lot of boring prep. You could build and prep several paintings and then work on them moving back and forth between stages.
That's a completely different set of traditions from what Warhol and the minimalists did. Carl Andre figured out a basic plan, say 9' x 9' piece composed of 81 squares of some material. He called a shop to cut the squares and had them delivered to a gallery. He laid them out, I think.
IMHO Richard Serra and Robert Morris were probably the best of that school, from the mid 60s up to the very early 70s. The `content' of both was the physics of gravity and mass in space which has a powerful presence. As they got richer, they could afford titanic scaled work. These were basically an attack on the gallery system since they were too large to show. Once the Morris show at the Whitney was taken down, it disappeared, except for the photos and plans.
Other favorites of the period Eva Hesse and Dorothea Rockburne. You really have to see the latter, to get a feel for the fine lines and folds at work with/against eachother. I based a whole series on that technique using circles and folds on paper and later highly crafted linen canvas. One of the secrets if you can call it that is to use very expensive heavy printmaking papers which form beautiful folds and do not bleed when inked. Again IMHO Rockburne is one the most overlooked big league of US modern art. You have to sit down and relax in front of her work and let it's forms engage the most abstract perceptions of your brain.
Living by proxy in that world was fantastically exciting, like putting on a Coltrane album for the first time, or watching Antonioni.
Orson Welles regretted the Italian director's use of the long take: "I don't like to dwell on things. It's one of the reasons I'm so bored with Antonioni - the belief that, because a shot is good, it's going to get better if you keep looking at it. He gives you a full shot of somebody walking down a road. And you think, 'Well, he's not going to carry that woman all the way up that road.' But he does. And then she leaves and you go on looking at the road after she's gone."[25]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michelangelo_Antonioni
I want to spend some time on this quote because Wells in some profound sense didn't understand the long take. One of the first long takes was in The Third Man, when Adia Vali walks along the cemetery road with the falling cherry blossoms toward Joseph Cotton, and keeps going off camera.
Now switch gears. I am sitting on a ledge mid-way up Lambert Dome in Tuolumne Meadows:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Lambert_Dome_from_Tuolumne_Meadows-750px.jpg
I just arrived from Berkeley late in the day. I have my climbing shorts on and a fleece jacket. It's cold on my bare legs. I watch two boys about twelve or thirteen, run up the face at a pace I could not manage. They gain a ledge above me, dressed in nearly identical outfits, tan shorts, black fleece jackets, and Teva's. They are chattering away as the sun goes down, leaving the blue grey mist after the orange Alpin Glow. The time wears on, their adventure over, they slowly hike down in the dusk and wonder over to the road, hiking toward their family camp. They never stop talking. They reach the junction to turn left into the forest, and disappear in the lingering twilight their voices lost in the gloom. I continue to stare at the turn point long after they are gone. It was a near perfect film short.
CG
ps. I'll try to think through the relationship between the fashion industry and the art industry later maybe after work
