Art?

[Beanz]

I've been watching a documentary called 'The Architecture of Doom' about how art & artists(mainly failed ones) shaped the Nazi party & Nazi Germany. Hitler being a art school reject, Goebbles having been an author, and some other high ranking Nazi's were also fond of poetry, art, architecture, opera, etc. It is very interesting yet horrifying what those people accomplished using flowery rhetoric & propaganda. They used abstract & avant-garde art to degrade and dehumanize Jews, Gypsies, the mentally ill, Bolsheviks/Socialists, and anyone who did not believe in a "pure Germany". They used film, they used music, they used anything and everything to mold the minds of their public. With the attention to detail those guys paid to what they were going to build in Berlin and Linz no wonder they lost the war. I had no idea guys like Wagner played so big a role in inspiring such an awful person as Hitler.

It is interesting how much art even when used as propaganda can be reinterpreted over time too. Russian artists often suffered working in silence unless they worked for the state but much of what was highly politicised communist rhetoric has now been adopted by western advertising agencies in creating capitalist advertisements.

[Beanz]

Fuck it when is there going to be another chance to introduce Wagner into the proceedings.

Many people are not familiar with this piece from Wagner's Lohengrin

[Beanz]

but have heard it a myriad times in this format

[El Kabong]

but have heard it a myriad times in this format

Wagner was anti-semetic & the Nazis used his music in the concentration camps, so in Israel his music is not welcomed. And considering his Bridal March & what thoughts that conjures to most who are not aware of what his music inspired that is very odd. To some his music means love, hope, togetherness and to others it means hate, death, torture.

[Fenster]

@Greenbeanz - Posts 31-35 (bear in mind I am totally ignorant of anything to do with art)

I can understand the brilliant skill involved to create the picture but see nothing other than their literal form. They have no emotional impact on me whatsoever.

What do you see?

[Beanz]

@Greenbeanz - Posts 31-35 (bear in mind I am totally ignorant of anything to do with art)

I can understand the brilliant skill involved to create the picture but see nothing other than their literal form. They have no emotional impact on me whatsoever.

What do you see?

For me they represent particular moments in English painting and while none of them move me, on a lump in the throat level like some works, they do none the less make me feel something. Take the first portrait of Edith Sitwell as an example. There is the poet herself and the painter in the room but there is also a third presence and that is the canvas itself. Please excuse me if this sounds pretentious and long winded because it is something very difficult to explain with words. The point of a painting is to acquire a life of it's own. It is not a photograph and many people who see it will not even know what the person it depicts looks like, or who they were, or what happened to them. The artist can never hope to capture all the qualities of the person or scene in front of them but they are nevertheless endeavouring to capture the aura or essence of both the moment in time that they have spent painting, the subject and their own emotional response to it.

Edith Sitwell was an odd looking women with a beak like nose and a propensity to dress eccentrically. She had a terrible abusive childhood but exuded a great deal of empathy and was not judgemental toward others, even those like her parents who treated her appallingly. What Lewis(the painter) manages to convey brilliantly is this humanity while at the same time making her almost ordinary. She always saw herself as distinct, odd and apart from the crown but the painter has seen through this and even with his metallic intellectual and angular approach softened her appearance. He started it in 1923 and did not finish until 1935. Post first world war when abstraction, futurism ,cubism etc had thrown the art world into turmoil. Here is Sitwell speaking





She was a lovely old bird and her poetry was pretty full on. The angular nature of all the paintings is a natural response to the mechanisation of the world and the brutality of international war as evidenced in Wyndham Lewis Shell shocked and Nevinson's gunner so the paintings are interesting from that point of view too. They are an articulation of soft vulnerable bodies in a hard steel world. I may be projecting all of this but like music I believe that paint is just a medium that artists can use to express emotion. We are emphatic creatures and when we hear someone like Johhny Cash sing of loss with a crack in his voice we feel a little of that pain. When I see a great painting like this one of Francis Bacon by his close drinking and gambling buddy Lucian Freud




I can see not only Bacon's world weary cynicism and a small resemblance to a young Harry Redknapp, but also Freud's empathy for him, his willingness to be unflinching and unflattering in his depiction of him, his frustration at not being able to capture the danger of him.

[Fenster]

I understand the art looks entirely different with meaning. I'm not sure I understand the "canvas" bit?

I decided to take a good look at the Peter Blake self-portrait (I didn't know who he was). His denim clothing, colours, converse, Elvis mag and badges made me think it has an American theme. That's all I got.

I then read he was fascinated with America. So although blatantly obvious, I was on the right track ()

[Kirkland Laing]

I think comparing Ahmadinejad to Obama like this is quite offensive to Mahmoud, peace be upon him. Mahmoud isn't the one who's bombed eight other countries in the past few years and at least Ahmadinejad doesn't try and hide the fact that he's a Muslim.

[Kirkland Laing]

None of these cunts can produce art on as grand and epic scale as myself. None of their art is as highly sought after as mine is. My installation art kicks the shit out of anything any of these fuckers has ever done.

[Beanz]

another Peter Blake with which most of us are familiar

[Beanz]

Here is some work by the great American surrealist photographer Clarence John Laughlin

[Beanz]

Elliot Erwitt

[Beanz]

Another Erwitt