My job is to look. I want no subject to be taboo. If it is a face, I will look. If it is death, I will look. Looking is how I peacefully confront, learn, maintain engagement. This blog thread is how I share. The images below are fine art paintings of gun violence. I hope I do not contribute to the aestheticization of it. My feelings about them are mixed. Forgive me. There was another shooting. I could not post a landscape today.
Wiki: History of Aestheticization of Violence in Art
Antiquity
Plato proposed to ban poets from his ideal republic because he feared that their aesthetic ability to construct attractive narratives about immoral behavior would corrupt young minds. Plato’s writings refer to poetry as a kind of rhetoric, whose “…influence is pervasive and often harmful.” Plato believed that poetry that was “unregulated by philosophy is a danger to soul and community.” He warned that tragic poetry can produce “a disordered psychic regime or constitution” by inducing “a dream-like, uncritical state in which we lose ourselves in …sorrow, grief, anger, and resentment.” As such, Plato was in effect arguing that “What goes on in the theater, in your home, in your fantasy life, are connected” to what you do in real life.
Aristotle, though, advocated a useful role for music, drama, and tragedy: a way for people to purge their negative emotions. Aristotle mentions catharsis at the end of his Politics, where he notes that after people listen to music that elicits pity and fear, they “are liable to become possessed” by these negative emotions. However, afterwards, Aristotle points out that these people return to “a normal condition as if they had been medically treated and undergone a purge [catharsis] … All experience a certain purge [catharsis] and pleasant relief. In the same manner cathartic melodies give innocent joy to men” (from Politics VIII:7; 1341b 35-1342a 8).
Semiotic analysis
Still images
When a person views an isolated painting, photograph or cartoon, they are viewing a static image. If a photographer takes a still photo of a police officer’s struggle to arrest a young man, for example, the denotative meaning might be “there was a man dressed as a police officer placing his hand on the shoulder of another man of a certain age whilst a photographer took a picture.” On the other hand, the connotative meanings might range from, “law enforcement in action” to “a heroic fight to subdue a dangerous terrorist about to releasesarin gas,” to “police use excessive force to arrest non-violent protesters,” to “fancy dress party ends badly.” The attribution of the specific subtext is left to the caption writer, the text accompanying the photo, and the audience.
Critic Susan Sontag argued that, through repeated exposure, certain well-known photographs have become “ethical reference points,” such as the many images depicting the victims and liberation of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp (1977). From this perspective, the subtext of such images, though still connotatively open to interpretation, has been somewhat restrained by familiarity, predominant cultural beliefs regarding the Holocaust, and perhaps by overusage.
It has taken me some time to realize the artistic benefits of figure drawing online vs in the studio, but I’m getting it. Whereas large fluid physical gestures with movement and energy will likely wait until we are back in the studio, drawing online puts the model within a screen, and that screen is moveable. …
1914-1955 Nicolas de Staël was a French painter of Russian origin known for his use of a thick impasto and his highly abstract landscape painting. He also worked with collage, illustration and textiles. After suffering from depression, in the wake of a disappointing meeting with a disparaging art critic on March 16, 1955 he committed …
[image_with_animation image_url=”9795″ alignment=”center” animation=”None” box_shadow=”none” max_width=”100%”] In the early 1960s, Jasper Johns made a series of 12 artworks playing with a sequence of numbers. The numbers gave him an excuse to play with figure and ground, line and color. Sometimes the simplest challenges are the most fun. Today, overlap the numbers 0-9. Invent a typography, …
Alan Saret is an American sculptor, draftsman, and installation artist, best known for his Postminimalism wire sculptures and drawings. Saret was born in 1944, and is currently living and working in Brooklyn. Each of these “Gang Drawings” as he called them, were made by marking the page with a fistful of color pencils in seemingly …
Gun Violence
Another shooting. Artists, help me grieve.
My job is to look. I want no subject to be taboo. If it is a face, I will look. If it is death, I will look. Looking is how I peacefully confront, learn, maintain engagement. This blog thread is how I share. The images below are fine art paintings of gun violence. I hope I do not contribute to the aestheticization of it. My feelings about them are mixed. Forgive me. There was another shooting. I could not post a landscape today.
Wiki: History of Aestheticization of Violence in Art
Antiquity
Plato proposed to ban poets from his ideal republic because he feared that their aesthetic ability to construct attractive narratives about immoral behavior would corrupt young minds. Plato’s writings refer to poetry as a kind of rhetoric, whose “…influence is pervasive and often harmful.” Plato believed that poetry that was “unregulated by philosophy is a danger to soul and community.” He warned that tragic poetry can produce “a disordered psychic regime or constitution” by inducing “a dream-like, uncritical state in which we lose ourselves in …sorrow, grief, anger, and resentment.” As such, Plato was in effect arguing that “What goes on in the theater, in your home, in your fantasy life, are connected” to what you do in real life.
Aristotle, though, advocated a useful role for music, drama, and tragedy: a way for people to purge their negative emotions. Aristotle mentions catharsis at the end of his Politics, where he notes that after people listen to music that elicits pity and fear, they “are liable to become possessed” by these negative emotions. However, afterwards, Aristotle points out that these people return to “a normal condition as if they had been medically treated and undergone a purge [catharsis] … All experience a certain purge [catharsis] and pleasant relief. In the same manner cathartic melodies give innocent joy to men” (from Politics VIII:7; 1341b 35-1342a 8).
Semiotic analysis
Still images
When a person views an isolated painting, photograph or cartoon, they are viewing a static image. If a photographer takes a still photo of a police officer’s struggle to arrest a young man, for example, the denotative meaning might be “there was a man dressed as a police officer placing his hand on the shoulder of another man of a certain age whilst a photographer took a picture.” On the other hand, the connotative meanings might range from, “law enforcement in action” to “a heroic fight to subdue a dangerous terrorist about to releasesarin gas,” to “police use excessive force to arrest non-violent protesters,” to “fancy dress party ends badly.” The attribution of the specific subtext is left to the caption writer, the text accompanying the photo, and the audience.
Critic Susan Sontag argued that, through repeated exposure, certain well-known photographs have become “ethical reference points,” such as the many images depicting the victims and liberation of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp (1977). From this perspective, the subtext of such images, though still connotatively open to interpretation, has been somewhat restrained by familiarity, predominant cultural beliefs regarding the Holocaust, and perhaps by overusage.
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It has taken me some time to realize the artistic benefits of figure drawing online vs in the studio, but I’m getting it. Whereas large fluid physical gestures with movement and energy will likely wait until we are back in the studio, drawing online puts the model within a screen, and that screen is moveable. …
Nicolas de Staël
1914-1955 Nicolas de Staël was a French painter of Russian origin known for his use of a thick impasto and his highly abstract landscape painting. He also worked with collage, illustration and textiles. After suffering from depression, in the wake of a disappointing meeting with a disparaging art critic on March 16, 1955 he committed …
SAL Challenge: 0 through 9
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Alan Saret is an American sculptor, draftsman, and installation artist, best known for his Postminimalism wire sculptures and drawings. Saret was born in 1944, and is currently living and working in Brooklyn. Each of these “Gang Drawings” as he called them, were made by marking the page with a fistful of color pencils in seemingly …