avant-garde anachronism in old paintings

I literally lold at willendorf/frued

If you reframe these things as "avant garde anachronism" you basically fetishize the outre elements as an ahistorical prefigurement of the conclusions that art history has retrospectively drawn.

i KNEW i had a theoretical objection, thx

lol sometimes i just want a fight

If you reframe these things as "avant garde anachronism" you basically fetishize the outre elements as an ahistorical prefigurement of the conclusions that art history has retrospectively drawn.

i KNEW i had a theoretical objection, thx

― max, Tuesday, November 30, 2010 5:05 PM (5 seconds ago) Bookmark

that's not an objection, per se, you've just used the word 'fetishize' without discrimination is all

art/literary history isn't like real history, in that it always involves some scale of values

people worry too much about being teleological

http://30.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lcpjbpbOZl1qdu6dfo1_400.jpg
http://madinkbeard.com/blog/wp-content/images/vallotton1.jpg
http://madinkbeard.com/blog/wp-content/images/vallotton2.jpg

"real" history, mayne?

real history doesnt involve a scale of values!!!!!!!!!!!!!?

xxpost OMG! Who is this FV?

F. Volloin?

Ah! Félix Vallotton! Never heard of dude!

people worry too much about being teleological

― rip whiney g weingarten 03/11 never forget (history mayne), Tuesday, November 30, 2010 12:07 PM (2 minutes ago)

except that what you're doing is
a) inverting influence so that each act becomes anticipatory
b) disregarding the historical context and creating "weirdness" by mapping contemporary ideas of weirdness onto work which is coded with its own contemporary meaning.
c) teleological views of art history and "progress" are an invention of the enlightenment, modernism and "art history" and their imposition on work made outside these contexts disregards their historically specific meaning.
d) i'm kindof uncomfortable w/ the *need* for finding "historical precedents," somebody recently pointed out how much fun ppl have looking for anal sex refs in chaucer like its a way of being like "hay guy, its ok, ppl have always been doing this" like its a way of excusing yourself. Im a bit sketchy about it as a strategy is what im saying.

Wtf? How have I not heard of this guy?? New favorite painter ever = Félix Vallotton! Prolly outside the purview of this thread but mon dieu:

http://www.canvasreplicas.com/images/Child%20Playing%20Ball%20in%20the%20Park%20Felix%20Vallotton.jpg

xp would you object if the thread title/premise was changed to "surreal pre-20th C. paintings"?

thread should b renamed 'paintings we like'

except that what you're doing is
a) inverting influence so that each act becomes anticipatory

im not doing it, but also im sure this is what's being done -- ppl are saying look at the cool outlying stuff that maybe influenced later artists

b) disregarding the historical context and creating "weirdness" by mapping contemporary ideas of weirdness onto work which is coded with its own contemporary meaning.

this is absolutely legitimate behaviour, i think. context-dependent. on an internet thread i think it's ok. and artists don't have to give a fuck about the contemporary meaning of what moves them. and in a way we're all artists.

c) teleological views of art history and "progress" are an invention of the enlightenment, modernism and "art history" and their imposition on work made outside these contexts disregards their historically specific meaning.

was gonna go with YOU'RE an invention of the enlightenment, modernism and "art history", but again only in specific contexts do we need to respect the historically specific meaning, and anyway what's wrong with the enlightenment?

d) i'm kindof uncomfortable w/ the *need* for finding "historical precedents," somebody recently pointed out how much fun ppl have looking for anal sex refs in chaucer like its a way of being like "hay guy, its ok, ppl have always been doing this" like its a way of excusing yourself. Im a bit sketchy about it as a strategy is what im saying.

it's an image thread on ilxor.com

vallotin is hella hip right now

not surreal but Pieter Jansz Saenredam did some interesting minimalistic stuff with church interiors in the 1600s

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a8/Pieter_Jansz._Saenredam_006.jpg

I'm not an art student and pretty much clueless ftmp but the perspective in a lot of pre-Renaissance stuff is so strange — it's flattened to the point of there being almost no illusion of depth, but just geometric forms interacting on the same plane.

Ambrogio Lorenzetti: Effects of Good Government on City-Life (c. 1330)

http://img372.imageshack.us/img372/3892/effects20of20good20govepk0.jpg

i take image threads seriously

Thread has inspired me to Xmas list this book:

The Artist and the Camera: Degas to Picasso

it is so weird that you would go to so much trouble to point by point be like "hay, i dont really care about any of these reasons bc this is a message board?"

idk id check it out irl, i remember that book being only okay

teleological views of art history and "progress" are an invention of the enlightenment

Vasari's preface has a fairly teleological view of things, comfortable talking about improvement and decline. Don't know much about art history, but in general Greece/Rome give Renaissance Humanism its yardsticks.

http://www.oilpainting-frame.com/upload1/file-admin/images/new17/Felix%20Vallotton-243742.jpg

this valloton cracks me up

teleological views of art history and "progress" are an invention of the enlightenment, modernism and "art history" and their imposition on work made outside these contexts disregards their historically specific meaning.

gave an answer to this iirc

i think you mean that the works have "historically specific meaning" outside of our own (necessarily post-enlightenment) discourse, and that it can be reconstructed, or s.thing

i don't, and i think, basically, yes, constructing a history means seeing things as contemporaries did not see them, and im ok with that

Mmmm, romano pepper.

xpost

really like this vallotton guy

also plax <3 and yr art historicity but maybe u should ~chill~

The art history of every age is going to reflect the values of its time, obv, and it's going to privilege certain kinds of work and ignore others. When a new paradigm ensues, people find a thrill in discovering art of the past, neglected by the prior dominant mode, that better reflects the new mode of thinking about art. Sometimes in our excitement we overstate the case for some earlier artist being a "modernist" or a "surrealist" or an "impressionist" or a "postmodernist" or whatever. But I also don't agree that we have to be beholden to the context of the work, as long as we recognize the context. There's no reason not to enjoy the outright weirdness of Bosch from a contemporary sensibility even if we know that he had some kind of religious/moral understanding of his paintings. I love looking at medieval Virgin Mary w/Christ Child paintings just for the thrill of the strange and scary baby Jesuses, for example. I mean the whole reason they're in museums to begin with is already out of context, so whatever.

which is why if the thread had been called "bizarro old shit" id be totes cool w/ it

oh, i'm sure there would be some problem.

FWIW the Bosch posted at the top of the thread looks like a really fun party.

it's actually not the thread i was after but it's the thread nakhchivan started.

anyway the thread was a spin off of a discussion about Holbein's The Ambassadors.

http://umlautampersand.files.wordpress.com/2008/05/ambassadors.jpg

ok yeah that is weirdly out of time, its like that charlie chaplin movie where a woman is on her mobile

haha.

can someone explain that painting? that's wild

whereas i was sort of just after a "look at this amazing old painting which you can say something about if you wish" thread. but this can be that, maybe, or i'll make it.

what do you want explained goole?

still tho "flying tortoises! how modern!" like really?

Also it's easy to forget that people in other eras probably enjoyed the shock of the new and strange as well. Curiosities, oddities, novelties -- not entirely contemporary concepts.

ah i could have gone to wiki i guess:

Anamorphic skull
The anamorphic skull

The most notable and famous of Holbein's symbols in the work, however, is the skewed skull which is placed in the bottom centre of the composition. The skull, rendered in anamorphic perspective, another invention of the Early Renaissance, is meant to be a visual puzzle as the viewer must approach the painting nearly from the side to see the form morph into an accurate rendering of a human skull. While the skull is evidently intended as a vanitas or memento mori, it is unclear why Holbein gave it such prominence in this painting. One possibility is that this painting represents three levels: the heavens (as portrayed by the astrolabe and other objects on the upper shelf), the living world (as evidenced by books and a musical instrument on the lower shelf), and death (signified by the skull). It has also been hypothesized that the painting is meant to hang in a stairwell, so that a person walking up the stairs from the painting's left would be startled by the appearance of the skull. A further possibility is that Holbein simply wished to show off his ability with the technique in order to secure future commissions.[5] Artists often incorporated skulls as a reminder of mortality, or at the very least, death. Holbein may have intended the skulls (one as a gray slash and the other as a medallion on Jean de Dinteville's hat) and the crucifixion in the corner to encourage contemplation of one's impending death and the resurrection.[2]

xp yes, i was going to say, maybe it's not so "wild" -- from my v limited knowledge, the renaissance audience had a thing for novelty and trickery

yah but yr v. unlikely to see something like that done by hand so they seem v. definitely to be lens based. so when you see it its like spotting the millets gleaners wearing casios tho obv it isnt really

Yeah I'm pretty sure dudes been doing drugs and making all kinds of art throughout history, just most of it disappeared. It's not like what made it into the art history museum is what everybody else at the time was doing. That kind of thinking is how people paint themselves into the "there are no new ideas in art" corner.

maybe he shopped it

xp

A further possibility is that Holbein simply wished to show off his ability with the technique in order to secure future commissions.

this. and blow people's minds.

The real untold story of that picture is the guy on the right is wearing nothing but his wife's frillies under his robe.

b) disregarding the historical context and creating "weirdness" by mapping contemporary ideas of weirdness onto work which is coded with its own contemporary meaning.

this isn't about weirdness. while obv a few instances (eg bosch) are archetypally weird, the stated premise of the thread and most citations are 'old times paintings that prefigure much later developments in art', which at most implies the ~uncanniness~ of something found in an unexpected context.

the premise allows that things can be the product of accidental formal parallels. the principle of overdetermination allows that this does not invalidate a work's 'coded contemporary meaning', though that phrase forgets that nothing ever had a coherent/univocal contemporary meaning.

To be like "omg he is inventing photorealism" completely misunderstands Ingres and photorealism.

rather misunderstands kevin's

I've always found Ingres disturbing and even proto-photorealist.

which merely suggests ~anticipates~ rather than omg ingres is a photorealist a century avant la lettre. (hope he isn't going to start arguing that now).

c) teleological views of art history and "progress" are an invention of the enlightenment, modernism and "art history" and their imposition on work made outside these contexts disregards their historically specific meaning.

ilx/the world seems basically conditional upon certain enlightenment/modernist/historicist values yeah. 'disregards' does not imply 'invalidates', but yeah ppl are going to read certain things into other things. such is the world.

srsly you actually have a background in art history right? kinda disappointed in yr fetishistic disavowal of any sort of interpretative license outside of the pass/aggress cultural studies invocation of problematics/privileges when you could actually be ~enlightening~ here.

whereas i was sort of just after a "look at this amazing old painting which you can say something about if you wish" thread. but this can be that, maybe, or i'll make it.

― jed_, Tuesday, 30 November 2010 18:34 (26 minutes ago)

this was my own idea yeah, and a lateral move from 'the ambassadors' which probably wouldn't fit this thread cuz it doesn't prefigure future forms so much as exemplify a contemporary concern/invention.

the thread is fine, n.

also, this is fascinating on The Ambassadors:

http://markmeynell.wordpress.com/2009/07/21/holbein%E2%80%99s-the-ambassadors-unlocking-hidden-mysteries/

it is not a perfect square – it is 207 cm x 209.5 cm.... notice the angle of the gnomon facing us. If you draw a line tracing its angle back and forth, you come across something remarkable. It will intersect off-canvas to the right with the line where your eye should go in order to see the skull correctly. And if your eye is there, looking up this trajectory, your eye will ‘pass through’ a number of key objects. It will intersect perfectly with the horizon line on the astronomical globe on the upper shelf... But as your eye travels further, you intersect with the Ambassador’s left eye, and then, lo and behold… The crucifix – at Christ’s left eye, to be precise... The Crucifix... doesn’t quite fit into the square. As noted above, the whole image is not a perfect square. If you were to draw one, flush against the right side, it would include everything in the painting, except the crucifix.

I'm not an art student and pretty much clueless ftmp but the perspective in a lot of pre-Renaissance stuff is so strange — it's flattened to the point of there being almost no illusion of depth, but just geometric forms interacting on the same plane.

Ambrogio Lorenzetti: Effects of Good Government on City-Life (c. 1330)

http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1367/602342310_945e025e77.jpg
http://i56.tinypic.com/2u5cils.jpg
http://i356.photobucket.com/albums/oo4/NettieMuse/PompeiiWallArt.jpg

Ancient Roman painters showed a similar (mis)understanding of perspective, rendering objects stiffly in 3 dimensions without having them converge at a vanishing point. the technique didn't disappear in the Middle Ages, but artists (Western European ones, anyways) showed practically no improvement in their use of perspective until about the 1400s, mainly because they had less interest in one-upping each other in terms of realism than they had in upholding the highly stylized conventions of Christian art.

I'm not an art student either, so I'm really just stating the obvious here.

Please note that there's a world of difference between, on one hand, re-reading artworks of a paradigm past through some sort of contemporary viewpoint/apparatus/whathaveyou, and on the other, finding evidence of hypothesized avant-garde lineage within those works.

For what it's worth, I understood the thread as some sort of combination of the two: though the title might have one believe that this is about finding concrete precedents that would materialize into later avant-garde works (thereby implying some sort of teleological account - something people worry too much about for a reason). Of course there's also the "anachonism" part of the title, which which I take as a kind of "let's find instances of subsequent avant-garde practices in earlier works, which may instance just plain old coincidences, along with a potential debunking of avant-garde claims to novelty, or again, just things that seem interesting today but wouldn't have been of note back then.

prefer because the whole (who did what first in what narrative is such a tedious approach)