Two

2. 13/03/13

‘A quest for a beautiful balance of signs and things’

 
The second in the series was a discussion on 'blurry and diffused bits in painterly abstraction' with the artist Anna Salamon. Anna thoughtfully provided the audience with handout of the keywords and artists that she talked about and here they are (including some very interesting texts). 

Relevant devices:

embodied vision, particular conditions of observation, mono-chrome and grid, inadequate or incompatible technology, figure+ground=vision, cloud and smoke as natural signs, harp-edged (digital) language, formlessness

Artists mentioned (in order of appearance)

Katy Moran, Varda Caivano, Phillip Guston, Katharina Grosse, Gerhard Richter, Christopher Wool, Mary Heilmann, Albert Durer, Cy Twombly, John Hollander (shaped poems), Nancy Spero, Henri Michaux, Joan Mitchell, Jonathan Lasker

Books mentioned or referred to :

Hans Belting, An Anthropology of Images: Picture, Medium, Body, Princeton University Press 2011

Albert Borgmann, Holding on to Reality. The Nature of Information at the Turn of Millenium, The University of Chicago Press 1999

James Elkins, Six Stories from the End of Representation, Stanford University Press 2008

Jame Elkins, On Pictures and the Words that Fail Them, Cambridge University Press 2011

Briony Fer, The Infinite Line: Re-making Art after Modernism, Yale University Press 2004

Georges Didi-Huberman, Confronting Images. Questioning the End of a Certain History of Art, The Pennsylvania State University Press 2005

Rosalind E. Krauss, The Optical Unconscious, MIT 1995

Arne Melberg, Theories of Mimesis, Cambridge University Press 1995

For me, Anna's talk was a reminder of the importance of the incidental in painting, I'm not sure whether I entirely believe in it but I took away the desire to be receptive to the idea. 

Below is Stephen Grant's response to Anna's talk. 

Stephen Grant Untitled

'This painting was done in response to Anna's talk. Although they are not abstract in any way I was struck by the sense of freedom through the diverse options available to the artist. I had not fully realized the restraints I had placed on myself until I had heard Anna’s talk.'SG

Oh, and the cake was chocolate and vanilla marble cake.