Bricked, or how Carl Andre made me an artist
I’m not sure I’m the best person to to talk about modern art, my formal art education ending some fourteen years ago, when I was 13. But now I make this bizarre comic strip people assume I know what I’m talking about.
So, what’s with the longer-than-usual title and the obscure comic this week?
Well, I’m paying homage to a man who I have never met, whose work I have never seen in real life, yet still is responsible for making me an artist, Carl Andre.
Mr Andre found fame in the UK during the early 70s when his work, Equivalent VIII (also known as The Bricks), was shown at the Tate Gallery in London. Typically, the tabloids had a field day proclaiming that British tax-payers money had been spent on an overpriced collection of building materials.
The tabloids had missed the point (The Daily Mirror’s headline was “What a load of rubbish”). They had succumbed to their horror vacui – a fear of nothingness.
Some artists cram their canvasses trying to eradicate empty space, but minimalists knew that space can be just as important when trying to communicate. Imagine trying to have a conversation with someone that doesn’t pause between words, doesn’t breathe at the end of a sentence and then keeps talking at you until you have to leave. That is art without space.
Repetition too is something frequently feared, though much less so than space. The Pop-art production line mentality softened the blow of repetition, yet still it is far more common to find an artist that talks in terms of exiting, individual and unique.
I hope you can see, and I’m sure regular readers of The Flowfield Unity will, that these two principles, the ideas of space and repetition, are integral to what I create. I need them to get my message across and without them I wouldn’t be able to communicate.
…and it doesn’t end there either. Andre also introduced me to concrete poetry. A type of poetry where the arrangement and appearance of words is just as important as the meanings they convey. Again, my readers will see where I’m going with this. Playing with words is a fascination of mine, whether it is bad puns or using words themselves as lines in my illustration.
Without Carl Andre, his work and his influence on the art world, what I do now would be seen as puerile, pointless and perhaps even offensive to some. Because of him however, it may still be seen as puerile, pointless and offensive to some, but I know that that is OK, that’s just the reaction that some people have to modern art in its various disguises.
So there you go, Bricked or how Carl Andre made me an artist.
Technorati Tags: art, modern+art, comics, webcomic, culture
I understand exactly what you are saying about words and sentences – something I must confess to falling prey to more often that I wish to admit. Silence like space has a beauty all of it’s own.
thanks for this post. i don’t have much exposure to minimalist art and haven’t really analyzed what i like and why i like it but when i look at the photograph of bricks i find something soothing about it. most often i find myself drawn to art that is more expressionist, loose and rather moody but definitely not overly worked and busy. your webcomic when i first discovered it really excited me and still does. it’s simplicity and your use and structure of words absolutely blows me away. you say so much often with very little. there is a definite rythym to the art and words that i love. reading your post helps me gain a little insight into what exactly it is about what you do that rocks my world and has also sparked an interest in learning more about concrete poetry. you are really something, adam. thanks again.
As I said, my knowledge is pretty limited, mostly to what I’ve picked up from books about other things.
I think I’ve finally reached a stage where I’ve stopped considering myself as ‘someone that draws silly things’ and started to want to learn more about what I do and its history. I’m not sure where I fit into art though… ‘modernist’, ‘minimalist’, ‘expressionist’? I just like to think of myself as an ‘ist’
(Flowfield fact; the first alternative title ‘Bricked’ is a reflection of this, meaning ‘broken’ in common Internet lingo, to signify that I’m still very much unsure about where I fit in).
Calan, I’m glad you picked up on the concrete poetry. From my understanding, haiku is fairly similar in that it too tries to use the words in a more abstract way. The limitations on the number of syllables creating an aesthetic quality.
For those of you that haven’t seen Calan’s haiku(s), you should check the following out:
Savage Garden Haiku
Misguided Empathy Haiku
I still think using haiku in comics is a little underhand. Like making you learn whilst watching TV.
At first, I thought it was from an IQ test, where you have to find the brick that is subtly different…
People aren’t nearly as easy to expose, even though they are richer in visual clues.
I think you’re a very good person to talk about modern art. You care about it, you read about it, and you’ve even contributed to it (how many other webcomic artists have taken part in art exhibitions?). Plus, you’ve explained the works of Carl Andre in a very down to earth, conversational way.
I grew up in a fairly art-infused household. My father is a graphic designer, and as such he didn’t have much respect for most modern artists. They haven’t learned their fundamentals, he’d say, but they’re trying to make art. His problem wasn’t fine art per se, but that many artists were trying to use style to disguise their lack of skill and practice.
My sister, ever the rebel, grew up to be a fine artist herself. She learned that there’s more money to be made in painting moose and landscapes than there is from the surrealist paintings she wanted to do. Recently she’s discovered that there’s way more money to be made in teaching art and hosting seminars than there is in painting at all.
Me, I’m the odd one out. In university I studied math and English, but not art.
Math and English? That’s a pretty cool combination… and fairly rare I’d wager.
Still, Maths is a fairly artistic pursuit. The abstract nature of numbers especially impinges upon the concepts of modern art… I suppose all academic subjects have artistic merit, I can’t think of any that don’t.
“many artists were trying to use style to disguise their lack of skill and practice”
*Looks sheepish* I must admit that sometimes, when given a choice between two strip ideas, I’ll go for the one that I know I can draw as opposed to the one that would require the most skill and work. But, as I get better with the pen and ink, I attempt previously discarded strips.
Your sisters case is quite sad, but all to common. Art is a subdomain of corporate culture (I could go into a lengthy discourse on capitalism, free time and artistic pursuit, but I’d bore myself). At least it lets her keep in touch with a subject she enjoys… the only thing worse being a job that prevents you from having any creativity.
I never finished my math degree, something I regretted when I started GearHead. Math definitely has a connection with art- listen to two mathematicians discussing a proof and you’ll hear everything couched in aesthetic terms. I guess it’s just that most people don’t appreciate the elegant design of the Pthagorean Theorem’s proof by area subtraction, or the beauty of e to the i*pi plus one.
Since restarting the comic I wish I had studied some art as well. Like you, I tend to go with things that I know I can draw rather than things which would challenge me. I think I am getting better, slowly… my big concern right now is with the writing.
My sister’s case isn’t as bad as I may have made it sound. When teaching and holding seminars she gets to travel and meet new people, two things she didn’t have much time for when she was just an artist. Last year she went to Denmark for an art therapy conference. I think this year she’s been invited to somewhere else in Europe, but I don’t know if she’ll be going or not. I’ve been going to ask her is she can draw some guests pages for Ataraxia Theatre when she has the time.
G’day
Just discovered Flowfield through those Blogger awards and I’m a massive fan of webcomics. Yours pretty much encapsulate what I enjoy about them: their obtuseness as well as their sly, nerdy humour. I’ve only read a few of yours and I am about to delve through the archives, but so far your work reminds me of xkcd and toothpaste for dinner (more the former than the latter so far – TFD is getting a wee bit up itself lately).
cheers.
Heya franzy,
Welcome to The Flowfield Unity. If you’re looking for sly, nerdy humour, you’re in the right place… and unlike TFD, I actively encourage my readers (though I consider most of them friends rather than ‘readers’) to tell me when I’m being full of my self.
I have a feeling that you’re on a similar wavelength to most of us:
http://franzy-writing.blogspot.com/2007/07/franzys-law-1.html
And since I see that you put a link up to my site, I’ll sort you out one back.
you
are great
i’m in a deep kind of mood of late, so this is the kind of thing i’m appreciating
observing the minds of society is a fun thing to do
do i sound much too old for my age?
carl andre threw his wife out a 34 story window across the street from where i went to school every day. he was supposedly acquited because none of his art world friends were willing to testify. the police compared it to dealing with the mob.
not that your point is any less valid…i just hope his influence will not carry over into your personal life.
Hey, Mr Sergel!
*sheepish* Yeah, he did do that, and it’s not something I condone…
I do like the sound of an art mafia though.
Though that’ll mean that you’ll be called Bobby ‘ink fingers’ Sergel.
emptiness and darkness
is like to the stars
how else could you see them