Form and Content

Wassily Kandinsky, Composition VIII, 1923, oil on canvas--

today this image quickly became our posterchild for Elements of Design

In high school, my European History teacher, the famous and infamous Betty Seizenger strode around the room looking over our shoulders. She remains the only 60 year-old woman I've know who could wear a snug black leather skirt and tall spike-heeled boots with style and grace, and as if no one should feel surprised. At the top of her warbly high-pitched voice (think Julia Child), she'd chortle "Form and Content, Form and Content! Lack one; you have nothing." Under threat of her (figurative) whip, I experimented with ferocious turns of phrase that would demonstrate the violence of the battle that I sought to describe in my essay; for another assignment I created a black box that you could cram your hand into, inside of which dull nails pushed into your skin to demonstrate the horror of a medieval prison. I can't think about form and content without thinking of Betty, and how fiercely she fought for their union.

Here's Betty Seizenger prostrate on the ground with one of her AP European classes. A couple years before me. I don't really know how form and content come together here, but they did achieve a nice pyramidal composition.

In class today, we talked about the most basic terms to describing the form of a work of art-- or it's formal qualities, as you'll hear me say. I chose a painting by Kandinsky to help introduce a conversation on these topics largely because Kandinsky wanted to see what would happen when he asked the form to become the content. Kandinsky does not control the interpretation of his work-- he gives that task to the viewer. He just controls the lines, colors, shapes, forms, textures, and tones.

I hope that you, too, will experiment freely to find ways of expressing ideas in words and pictures that work for you. I hope that you will learn to think of form and content as always supporting each other to achieve the most powerful expression. In the case of Kandinsky, the paintings achieve power through their evocation of content, rather than their explanation of it. One of you asked whether Kandinsky had always worked in this nonrepresentational or nonobjective style. He didn't, but he always used some degree of abstraction, even when representing houses or landscapes in his earlier works.

Here's his painting Autumn in Bavaria, from 1908
Kandinsky wrote: Kandinsky wrote: "Color is the keyboard, the eyes are the harmonies, the soul is the piano with many strings."

We also talked about Synesthesia. MIT has started a website to gather and share information about synesthesia, including some very brief but interesting anecdotes from synesthetes, and a 'virtual synesthesia' experience. Here, Karen Chenauskydescribes the experience of seeing the colors of letters in quiet moments. If you get interested in Kandinsky and synesthesia, you might read this article. I said in class that Kandinsky studied the matter, but was not himself a synesthete. This article says that he did. A little more searching-- just online-- tells me that some people think he was, some do not. Someone can research the matter, if you want!

Here's a link to a site that lays out the elements and principals of design clearly and correctly. Make sure you master these basics. They will remain with us all year.

Today, we talked about portrayals of Death as a character... an allegorical figure, looking at two very different images. You had great comments about them! Here's a link to an article that discusses the important role Rousseau's War played in Picasso's development of War imagery.

Henri Rousseau, War, 1894, Paris

Stefano della Bella, The Triumph of Death on the Battlefield, 17th century

Pablo Picasso, Guernica, 1937

Making History

art•i•san: crafts(wo)man-
a skilled worker who practices
some trade or handicraft
his•tor•y: the discipline that
records and interprets past
events involving human beings
have I just started noticing, or has the word artisan proliferated rabbit-like recently... I see it everywhere, most often in food-related contexts: Artisan Chocolateries in airports, Artisan Breads at chain groceries, Artisan Coffeeshops on smalltown streetcorners. Does the popularity mark a turning away from the mass-produced, the pre-packaged, the not-local? Or is it just a random trend? I use it here both seriously and in jest.

At this site, I seek ways to feed my (idealistic) goal to create opportunities for students of Art History to drink deeply of the visual culture of the past to find flavors to enrich their own artinsanal recipes. While most evident in the sampling and copycatting of the postmodern artist, across human history, makers of visual culture borrowed from the past to create anew. One can see the practice in fertility figures from 30,000 years ago, paintings of cave bears from 15,000 years ago, in 2,000-year-old Roman uses of the Etruscan arch--itself a borrowing from Asia, in the 300-year-fresh flirtatious jokes of rococo paintings of swinging women, and in the development 100 years ago by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque of Analytic Cubism (illustrated above), during which time the two made work so similar they sometimes couldn't tell who had touched brush to which canvas. In other words: Art Past has provided one of the richest resources for Art Present.

At left: Sherrie Levine, After Walker Evans, 1981, gelatin silver print

At Right, Walker Evans, Alabama Tenant Farmer's Wife, 1936, gelatin silver print
Walker Evans, Floyd Burrough's Shoes, 1936
René Magritte, The Red Model, 1934

Commonplace Books

Beineke Library MS 84, Girdle Book, 15th century

A definition, from a digital commonplace book:

"Silva rerum they were called, commonplace books that contained a 'forest of things'. Excerpts of exceptional thought were dutifully copied into these bound books for further reflection and digestion. Commonplace books were considered necessary tools for learning that commonplacing was taught in universities such as Oxford. Milton, Hardy, Emerson, and Thoreau all kept their own commonplace books.

Commonplacing wedded reading and writing as necessary ingredients, they were inseparable. Bits and pieces from one book joined with other excerpts from elsewhere. The way the ideas were assembled revealed the personality of the commonplacer…what topics interested him, what key arguments did he find cogent that he could build upon…what turns of phrases could he learn by heart so that he, too, could express himself with clarity and winsomeness." from Lightly Locked.

Beineke Library MS 454 image of a Horse

Log Book – Termite Grid Ronald King several great artist's books

A cute, rather playful commonplace:

And another, more straightforward and elegant, and featuring just the works, from my colleague Jonathan Milner, who teaches politics at UNCSA. Looking at this collection, I can start to draw conclusions about his aesthetic. I wonder what a commonplace by Kurt Cobain, D.J. Spooky, Christian Boltanski, Barak Obama, or I might look like.

You might find commonplaces by students from 2008-2009 interesting.
Brittni Moore, Ian McClerin, Daniel Satinoff, Jenny Ford... I will share some non-digital commonplaces in class.

Jonathan Edwards, early 1700's

How might you rethink the format of a book? Jonathan Edwards did so by dint of necessity: his style called for it. That happened to Marcel Proust, too, who edited so much his manuscripts became layered and pasted.

Marcel Proust, Manuscript page from In Search of Lost Time, around 1920

Beineke Library MS 327 - Merchants Commonplace Book - Venice - 1312

Your class notebooks will be a little bit different, as you will include, at least for the first term, your class notes, class writing assignments, your sketches, notes and identifications of each key work, as well as your own bits and pieces of inspiration.