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 printAt 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
Walker Evans, Floyd Burrough's Shoes, 1936René Magritte, The Red Model, 1934
No comments:
Post a Comment