Black Square, 1913 by Kazimir Malevich

In an earlier post I made about non-objective art, the idea of monochrome paintings came up. These paintings are just what their name implies: paintings made with one color, usually in a solid form.

Art they art? I think what is more important than that question is “What exactly are they?”

First, you should understand that these monochromatic paintings are exercises or expressions made by artists who usually go in many other areas. For an example, view the artist of this piece’s work (View the gallery at the bottom of Malevich’s wikipedia entry): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kazimir_Malevich

Next, we often forget when looking at art in any form (musical or otherwise) that there is often a sense of humor involved in things. If, for example, you were a famous lyricist and everything you wrote was examined under a microsope: Every word, every line.. every imaginable intent gathered and analyzed. You might get so sick of it you would write some silly lyrics to throw everyone off and call it I Am the Walrus (as the urban legend goes, regardless of whether or not it is true). There is no reason listening to this goo goo ga joob and asking “Is this art?! Is this music?!”

DaDa was an artistic movement that sought to satirize and desconstruct every conceivable art form. But more often than not, there was a great intelligence or philosophy behind what they did. It was basically what we call “trolling,” but the trolls were really good.

What is painting? Painting is applying gobs of color onto a flat surface in certain forms. Sometimes they form the illusion of a person, sometimes they form no illusion at all. Is one more valuable than the other? That gets me back to my original point about non-objective art. Why are these gobs of color representing a person better than those gobs that aren’t? Shouldn’t I be more concerned with which gobs look more interesting? Furthermore, I’m often not interested in seeing these gobs arranged in a way that imitates real life. I see real life every time I open my eyes. Over and over and over and over again. Plus, we have cameras now so why do I need a “photo-realistic” portrait. I can take a photo. (“Photo-realistic” being an illusion in itself).

If you were to keep placing gobs of paint on the surface over and over, you could continue applying paint to the surface until form absolutely broke down. Since paint reflects light, painting blue means that red and green are ‘trapped,’ while blue reflects. Therefore, if you didn’t stop applying your gobs, eventually your surface would “trap” all colors and be black. And there you have it.

In this, you can have a philosophical question of “When do we stop?” If you apply no paint at all, you have a white surface. If you apply all paint, it is black. Therefore, the philosophy of the occupation of painting would necessitate that at some point someone would try both.

I often use this with clients in graphic design who want to add more more more to their composition. Black is purity of positive space. Negative space is the area of paper that has no elements. Positive space is the area that contains elements. I tell them that to add nothing at all would create a perfectly white design, and to add everything in the world would make a design that is perfectly black. The good designer finds the perfect balance between negative and positive.. however, there is no reason, as a practitioner, to not have fun with the two absolute extremes.

There can be further philosophical ideas. A black square can symbolize nothingness, death and emptiness. The very black square painting you view on this page was exhibited above the artist’s tomb at his funeral. What does that tell you? If I were to paint you a picture of pure nothingness, and showed it by depicting a perfectly black square, would that be any less “correct” than a scene showing 3 starving peasants sitting at a table with an empty milk bottle and a plate with no food? The black square could be the essence of nothingness, the peasant scene could be a symptom of nothingness. The peasant scene would be a narrative leading to nothingness, the black painting would be nothingness as a concept or ideal with no narrative.

Rodchenko once exhibited 3 paintings, each of the primary colors, in order to make a statement: Painting is Dead. Those canvases weren’t exactly great works of artistic ability.. They were a statement, and a much more powerful statement than simply standing on a podium and saying, “Excuse me, Ladies and Gentlemen, I would like to inform you of something: Painting is Dead.”

I mentioned earlier that artists have a sense of humor too. There can be every range of snark or humor involved in these pieces. “The Germans love me so much, I bet I could sign a canvas and hang it in the gallery and they would buy it.” We make that same statement “He did nothing, just signed the canvas!” But look at you, you’re in complete agreement with the artist! And what if you’re Babe Ruth, and you do nothing but use pen and ink to sign a white sphere with stitching, and that sphere suddenly becomes worth a million dollars (after some years). What determines an object’s value?

There are so many different concepts and reasons artists do these types of work. But this isn’t all the art in the world, this is one very small subset. It’s also usually just a small subset of the work of the artist you’re looking at. Take it for what it’s “worth.” (ha)

Also, the next time you’re at a gallery and you view hundreds of multi colored paintings showing every type of God, Saint, Crucifixion, love, lust, fairy tale, still life and everything in between.. then suddenly find yourself staring at none of this, but instead an enormous canvas that is pure black.. staring into absolute nothingness, with nothing to interpret and nothing to consider, you may find the piece has more value than you thought.

De Kooning's 'Excavation'

There’s this funny thing in the lay person’s understanding of art, where they look at abstract or non objective work and say, “Hmm. I could do that,” and then move on. In many ways, they are missing the idea that, like an orchestral piece with no lyrics, this painting is not an attempt to show a portrait or a sunset, in the same way that a symphony is not trying to recreate the sounds of a forest. It is, at one point, an exercise in the arrangement of color and form, and at a higher level, an exercise in meditation. Meditation both on the part of the artist and the viewer: The idea that you can lose yourself in pure form and color and simply “Exist” for a few moments with absolute purposelessness.

And this purposelessness is not, what we English speakers think of as “without direction/ambition” or lazy.. it is purposelessness in the same way that a river has no clear mind or purpose.. it simply exists as it is.

At the same time, philosopher Alan Watts made a great point about the mechanics of the statement “Hmmm, I can do that,” something I’ve been trying to show people for years. But here it is perfectly stated.

“There was a great Zen monk who lived shortly after 1000 AD who had a very perculiar way of painting. He had long hair, and he’d get very drunk on rice wine, and he’d soak his hair in ink and slosh it all over the paper. Then he would do a rorshack test on it and decide what kind of landscape it actually was, and then put in the finishing touches. And suddenly, out of this apparent mess, a great landscape would be evoked. But the whole art of the thing lay in putting in the finishing touches.

Also, there’s a very curious thing. If a person who is untrained in painting makes a mess with a brush it’s liable to be just a mess. Whereas if a person who has the feeling of painting in them for a long time, and they make a mess with a brush, or just do anything, it looks interesting. And that’s why if you try to copy the best people in modern abstract, non-objective painting, you find it very difficult to do. Because there is more to spontenaity than just caprice and disorder.”

Caprice is “a sudden, impulsive, and seemingly unmotivated notion or action.” So the next time you see a non-objective piece, try to look at it without thinking of form. Try to lose yourself in shape and color as if you were meditating. And if you think you can “Do that,” I whole-heartedly challenge you to try.

Stanley Donwood’s new show, El Chupacabra, opens July 10th at the Weapon of Choice Gallery in Bristol, England. In other words, anyone living in England who doesn’t go to this show is taking for granted the fact that they don’t have to buy a $1,000 plane ticket to get to Bristol.

Donwood says about the show:

“There are thirteen Pandemons in the show called ‘el chupacabra’. Thirteen ghosts at the funeral. Thirteen spectres at the feast of the goat. Loitering on the blackened cliffs of free-market economics, cackling as they raise a glass to toast Milton Friedman, Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher and Augusto Pinochet. Gallons of paint I’ve poured over them to drown their snickering. But still they laugh.”

Read about it on the Weapon of Choice Gallery blog.

To me, Vera is the central axis around which The Wall revolves. It is a sudden moment of clarity amidst the madness of Pink’s life, a life that has reached a moment of crisis. You can compare Vera to its mirror image, the 4th track from the end of Part 1, One of my Turns, which shows us a frenzied and (maybe final) encounter with whatever lover is in Pink’s life currently.

After One of My Turns, Pink regrets his actions in Don’t Leave Now, finishes the trilogy of his wall-building with Another Brick in the Wall (Part III) and contemplates suicide in Goodbye Cruel World. Obviously, he doesn’t go through with it, because he then asks, Hey You, Is There Anybody Out There? and find his answer in Nobody Home.

This final realization about his absolute isolation and impending mental collapse gives way to a simple human yearning for the one person that this broken figure was able to love, and we get the short lyric about Vera Lynn.

Does anybody here remember Vera Lynn?
Remember how she said that we would meet again
Some sunny day.

Vera, Vera, what has become of you?
Does anybody else in here feel the way I do?

It seems obvious that if Vera had come back, as she swore she would, Pink wouldn’t be in such a mess. If he still had love, then it would be impossible to be completely surrounded by a wall. Due to this loss, and the realization of its finality, the wall is complete, and we move into the climax of the album, where Pink bounces between despair (Comforably Numb) and psychosis (In the Flesh) or both at the same time (Waiting for the Worms).

I love making glue books, and collage culture in general. I try to make it to a flea market at least 5 times a year to collect old ephemra, printed matter and a book. Often, choosing the book is an excrutiating task which basically revolves around this: “Which of these books can I destroy while creating a new work of art without feeling too bad about it?” I try to remind myself that most of the books will end up in the trash if no one buys them, so I am doing no great harm. However, this relunctance continues at home, where I read and scan over the book to make sure there is nothing in it that needs to be saved.

My latest purchase was Modern Times and the Living Past, by Henry Elson. Elson was, at the time of the book’s publication (1921), a Lecturer on History at New York University. It is a history text for school kids, probably junior high or high school, and covers history from the dawn of civilization through the end of “The World War.” In scanning the book for salvagable content, I soon found myself receiving my own history lesson, though not on Alexander the Great or Mary Queen of Scots or the other condensed stories in the book. Instead, I found a lesson on the great amount of intellectual racism still present in America in 1921. And no, we’re not talking about Selma, Alabama here, so all you New York City better-than-thou’s can wake up now: racism wasn’t a deep south, redneck phenomenon. It was often packaged and waxed eloquently by the big city professors. And we all know that supporting bigotry with reasoning, oratory and persuasiveness is much scarier than being that way because that’s “how your daddy raised ya.”

Now, it is common knowledge that all cultures have ethnocentricities. The ancient Greeks believed themselves to be the chosen group, as did the Egyptians, the Persians, the Hebrews, the Chinese, the Japanese, the Assyrians, the Nubians, the Sumerians, the Mayans, the Aztecs, the Zulu,  and on and on. However, the difference between old-world ethnocentrism and the opinons of a 20th century lecturer from New York University should be quite evident.

If you read the above section, it is hard to believe Elson has even studied history. First, he claims that white civilizations have “taken the lead” and been “foremost in the world’s progress.” The “Ethiopians” are glanced over with the statement “where many have adopted the civilization of white men” to reinforce his first point. Obviously, he doesn’t really know anything about Africa here. The most laughable is the direct attack on Asian culture, where he gets more aggressive, saying “after it reached a stage that we should pronounce half-civilized, two thousand or more years ago, its growth was checked and thereafter it made little progress until very recent times.” Indeed? So nothing happened in Asia between 100 BC and modern times? I guess we must then ignore the fantastic achievements of art and poetry, the mathematics and science, the great religions and philosophies, the invention of gunpowder and printing, and the marvelous cultures and wealth that so impressed Marco Polo and other European explorers.

Then we go to the Native Americans, who are basically glanced over as were the Africans. Elson says they were still living “in the polished stone age and in the hunting and fishing stage.” I guess he never heard about Mayan calenders that were significantly more accurate than the White mens’, the continent crossing trade routes, the farming, the enormous cities full of wealth, art and architecture.

Larson’s vocals are at times loud and forceful, at other times melodic and quiet–but they always sound honest. The lyrics–inspired by love, loss and life–are introspective, always searching for meaning and value in the topics they address.

After having gained recognition doing collaborative works with El Tono, street artist Nuria finally has her own space, complete with a wonderfully cute hand-embroidery theme. Make sure to check it out at nuriamora.com.

The hand-embroidery contrasts nicely with Nuria’s geometric sculptures and paintings. As a web developer, I have to admit I’m naturally a bit on edge about the almost exclusive use of images and image maps to construct the site, but I have a feeling Nuria will do fine without any extra SEO built in.

Personally, I feel that Nuria’s drawings really stand out: they seem very free and organic; bursting with color and energy. I would love to see more of this side of Nuria’s work, I feel much more of an impact from these liberated lines and forms than from the tightly controlled squares and rectangles.

A big shout out to Benjy Russell, who is responsible for the cover photograph and concepting. Also, I want to thank Jeremy, Jim and the band for giving me the opportunity to design such a successful album.