I do like a good Henry Moore sculpture
In our recent and fleeting January thaw, our once noble snowman lost quite a bit of his bulk and has become an homage to Henry Moore's sculpture work.
I think it bares a striking resemblance to this 1957 sculpture entitled "Woman". (Gotta love simplicity.)
Now admittedly, I don't always "get" modern art. I mean I get the rage against the urban jungle forms where art is constructed of metal castoffs or even shocking images that are meant to be challenging because they break social taboos. But there is a genre of modern are that seems to be largely random organic shapes and blotches of color. For example, in the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto, there is a nearly completely blank canvass, it has a few shades of white painted across it, about 12in by 12in that the placard says is called "untitled". And, ok, is it "untitled" to reflect the blankness of the canvass or is there another deeper meaning I'm just completely missing or is it "untitled" simply because the artist just didn't really want to bother thinking up a name? Still in all, my in depth analysis is...that I like it. (I should probably work on my in depth analysis.) I find walking through a gallery of organic shapes and blotches of color completely enjoyable and satisfying even if I don't think I really "get" it.
One of my favorite sculptures was in the Sculpture Garden in front of the Hirshhorn (What kind of name has two consecutive h's??!!!)museum on the Mall in Washington, DC. It was a series of five giant bronze "spores" and I just couldn't get enough of looking at them. I was completely bummed when on our last visit to DC, they weren't there any more but I did find pictures on the Hirshhorn web site. They are a series of sculptures called "Spatial concept: Nature" by Lucio Fontana. So if you see these guys sitting around some green space somewhere, please let me know. I would love to have a look at them again.
Oh, one more I found another sculpture on the Hirshhorn website by Fernando Botero (say that name out loud -- it just rolls of the tongue) and the title for this is the very definition of truth in advertising...
It's more than 3 feet tall and almost 2 feet across. You wanna guess the title of the piece?
The Big Hand.
I love it!
It doesn't appear that Mr. Botero continued in this series with the Big Foot (potentially trite) or the Big Nose (potentially gross).
(More knitting next time.)
I think it bares a striking resemblance to this 1957 sculpture entitled "Woman". (Gotta love simplicity.)
Now admittedly, I don't always "get" modern art. I mean I get the rage against the urban jungle forms where art is constructed of metal castoffs or even shocking images that are meant to be challenging because they break social taboos. But there is a genre of modern are that seems to be largely random organic shapes and blotches of color. For example, in the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto, there is a nearly completely blank canvass, it has a few shades of white painted across it, about 12in by 12in that the placard says is called "untitled". And, ok, is it "untitled" to reflect the blankness of the canvass or is there another deeper meaning I'm just completely missing or is it "untitled" simply because the artist just didn't really want to bother thinking up a name? Still in all, my in depth analysis is...that I like it. (I should probably work on my in depth analysis.) I find walking through a gallery of organic shapes and blotches of color completely enjoyable and satisfying even if I don't think I really "get" it.
One of my favorite sculptures was in the Sculpture Garden in front of the Hirshhorn (What kind of name has two consecutive h's??!!!)museum on the Mall in Washington, DC. It was a series of five giant bronze "spores" and I just couldn't get enough of looking at them. I was completely bummed when on our last visit to DC, they weren't there any more but I did find pictures on the Hirshhorn web site. They are a series of sculptures called "Spatial concept: Nature" by Lucio Fontana. So if you see these guys sitting around some green space somewhere, please let me know. I would love to have a look at them again.
Oh, one more I found another sculpture on the Hirshhorn website by Fernando Botero (say that name out loud -- it just rolls of the tongue) and the title for this is the very definition of truth in advertising...
It's more than 3 feet tall and almost 2 feet across. You wanna guess the title of the piece?
The Big Hand.
I love it!
It doesn't appear that Mr. Botero continued in this series with the Big Foot (potentially trite) or the Big Nose (potentially gross).
(More knitting next time.)
I find "The Big Hand" unsettling.
But the answer to the real question embedded in your post is that a lot of modern art is a reaction to the declamation, pronounced for sure once every generation, that ____ is dead. That ____ might be "the novel" or "painting" or "music," whatever. But every generation, art has allegedly reached its limits. Heidegger asked questions like "What is thinking?" and, in volumes, never managed to satisfactorily answer them. Much of modern art--see Pollockian abstraction, too--is either replies to the accusation that ____ is dead, or attempts to answer the question "What is art?" Often, both--they're not mutually exclusive issues.
Try this: http://www.moma.org/collection/browse_results.php?object_id=80385. It's the sort of thing that makes people's heads explode. If I recall correctly, it delightfully enraged Rob. BY a Russian named Malevich, it's called "White on White" and it is, well, white on white. But there IS a deeper idea at play here. And it IS rather clever and insightful. While your pods (burst ova? wombs?) play with Jungian archetypal images, they also answer the question, What is art?, in the Pollockian way: it's what you find aesthetically pleasant. It doesn't have to be representative (they're not necessarily) and, more importantly, it doesn't have to be intended to mean anything (the artist may not have MEANT "burst ova")--the audience of any art form generally supplies most of the meaning anyay--check Wikipedia for literary Reader Response theory. But "White on White" goes a step further. How much meaning can the audience supply before art isn't art but raw imagination?
In other words, if art usually doesn't really exist in the artist, on the canvas, or entirely in the reader (it starts in the first, a gesture is made on the second, and that gesture allows the third to try and replicate the thoughts of the first), but instead in the ether somewhere, how much of it is required to be physical, tangible? How little something can there be before it's really "nothing"--no longer art?
There're equivalently minimal works of modern music and literature that do this sort of thing--challenge the idea of what it takes to differentiate art from the mundane or nothingness. There's a "poem" by a famous poet, found postmortem and published, adored, then later suspected and confirmed to be a rather lyrically composed grocery list (is it still a poem)?
There's a whole genre of neo-classical music, largely computer/synthesizer-based, called "ambient" which tackles the question "What's noise and what's music?" There are other related varieties of music which specifically tackle the question, is this atonal/cacophonic noise musical, or the negative space, so to speak, which makes music possible? Check Amazon's mp3 store and try the thirty-second samples of my favorite, Nine Inch Nails--type into the search box "25 Ghosts III" for his answer to the former question, and "The Beauty of Being Numb" for the latter.
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