abstract images & meaning

[PilotX]

Originally posted by Amukidi
http://www.findarticles.com/cf_dls/m...le.jhtml?term=
This would be a good starting point - especially as it's Sean Scully writing it as his work is such a natural chronological follow on from Mark Rothko. Forgive my laziness - well busy here!

cheers Amukidi, have bookmarked it and will read it over the next week.. that looks like a superb website in general though, never seen it before

[Amukidi]

The wonders of the web - getting guys like Sean Scully (really really worth checking out if you don't already know his work) writing on Rothko - too good to be true. Pollock is also worth pursuing - his work is pure drawing, if you don't believe me, try copying his work! Both artists suffered for their work, as ever - not happy stories either of them.

[vjpixylight]

Originally posted by Lara
I completely reject the modernist idea that any work HAS to have this elusive 'internal justification.' For me that is typical high modernist elitist arrogant prose, alluding to some sort of higher power working through the artists as hero and his art. But that is my stance as committed postmodernist.
You go girlll!

Barthes explodes the idea that there is any original work in his essay 'The Death of the Author' saying "The Text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumberable centres of culture." Old processes of art-making supported this ideal- where the painter started with a blank canvas and brought into being a world of his own. We are in the digital age, and methods of industrial production have long since entered the world of art in the form of collage- where work is made from pre-assembled cultural 'parts'.

Manovich says we are in the age of the 'logic of selection' now and I fully agree with him. p123

www.manovich.net/LNM/Manovich.pdf

this is truely the way the 'postmodernist's would see art as history, as art being made in this postmodern society is built upon a thought or expression previously conjured up in our subconcious mind, but in a slightly delayed fashion; mainly because forward thinking has to stop, now and again, to let the rest of us catch up.

Abstration is really the way an artist releases their individual expression, which can get them close enuf to that blank canvas, as to imprint something new on it..

[vjpixylight]

Originally posted by fALk
problem is when the viewer is not rewarded because he can not get the implied meaning. or the resources he used to understand are in no relation with the reward (he thought about it too long to hard just to find out its a picture of some horses) I think he can get frustrated but before getting frustrated he might get bored. That is what I am experiencing on myself when looking at those abstrakt visuals. I get bored very fast wether its because I try to reach an understanding on the art just to figure out there is none or the one implied is simple "music visualisation" seems not matter, I just get bored very fast. I have yet to see a vj piece that is nonnarrative nonabstrakt that can hold my attention span longer then 2-5 minutes. And ones I am bored I don?t even bother to look at it again. And I want to stress that we are talking about the art of live "visual mixing" where the attention span is already stretched out between the music inside you the people around you and the beer in front of you. Not a picture on a wall in a quite room with 3 people all looking quitely at the picture and having tons of time at hand to be philosophic about it.
I find it hard to accept that the average attention span of my gigs is about 10% of the whole time but I try to work my way around this by not making all my visuals a big puzzles that must be deciphered in seconds. So for me this is the big question and as said before the abstrakt can open the mind but you need to feed it with something more obvious if you want to communicate with your visuals, something I for one implying to do...

I guess it is the difference between thoughtless meditation, and say 'focused intent'..

I often observe the stranger's around me when I go to an art museum, more than the art it's self, and often because the real art is, what the stoic art that's displayed there, bring's out of it's spectator's..

Art has always been a 2 way process, and for you Falk, it seems to me that your need for art, is to relate to your "focused intent process" IE where your want your perception's to be..

Unfortunately this may also lead's to the art critic's response to abstract art that doesn't hold their interest, as being non-meaningful, which as many of us here feel, is a bit oxymoranical..

[PeterRubin]

Sincere apologies for dropping out of this thread temporarily. I love this thread and will participate further but I've got three VMP deadlines before 1 April (including AVIT UK), to say nothing about preparing for our first Dutch VMP meeting on the 4th, and this thread is too good for me to just whip off quick comments. So, I'm afraid that until ! April, I will not be participating.
:-/
After 1 April is a different story.
;^)
It's a super thread and until I'm back I wish you all the best.
Peter

[shjiemon]

I personally think the link with (electronic) music is important for the understanding of meaning in the video mix. I am sorry, but I am not that much interested in who "the author" of meaning is, so I will not go into that here....

Bernd Herzogenrath has written an article about Techno called "Stop making Sense: Fuck 'm and their law (It's only I and O but I like it!)" and the content of the article is as cool as its title.

He sees elctronic music as neccesary deviant because it doesn't go by the rules of instrumental music, or even our society. He explains an individual piece of techno music as a pure signifier (sign) which has no worldly signified (referent). It only points to other signifiers that point to even more signifiers in a collage of signifiers. Techno, then, is a signifying chain only refering to itself in an infinite loop and in this way has no subject-matter. Techno's sounds of noises, shrieks, chirps, creaks, and whizzes - easily associated with madness - are in that way, sounds beyond meaning.

The question I find myself facing at this very moment is whether the VJ-images are caught up in the same sort of infinte loop, also not obeying any rule (eg. cinematic/poetic/social) or whether they bring a "signified" to the music, thus adding meaning to the music. The music, in that way, being a signifier, would thus be subordinate to the image (and not the other way around).

Simon.