Magdalena Fernandez and the ethos of digital geometric abstraction

This paper deals with the work of the Venezuelan artist Magdalena Fernandez whose practice emerges in the 1990s to explore the potentiality of the language of geometric abstraction at the intersection of visual arts and design. Whilst revisiting the legacy of Modernism through a Minimalist aesthetics, Fernandez contributes to the formulation of a grammar of geometric abstraction which articulates by means of digital and multimedia practices. In this regard, emblematic is the mobile painting, 2iPM009, 2009, in which Fernandez extends the canons of formal composition through a multiplicity of registers that integrates spatial, structural, and graphic investigations, all supported by a system of computation that uses digital animation techniques in analogy with sound and light effects through the format of a video-installation. This paper examines the artist’s interest in rethinking the pictorial language of modernist geometric abstraction through a multimedia language, questioning about agency and legacy

Inheritance and Innovation : A Study of the Animation Character Design Education Based on the Chinese Mythology

As the essential component of Chinese culture, Chinese mythology is the manifestation of ethnic heritage and epitome of 5000 years of history, which offers great resources and inspirations for animation creation and production. The design education is the base for the design of original animation. The educational model from traditional resources can not only exploit the innovative thinking but also dig deeply the core connotation of traditional culture aiming at aesthetic experience of the public, which can target the teaching practice integrating with art creation and market demand. Firstly, the study creates an animation mythological character design model according to the literature review to provide the operational theory for animation design education, which consists of three main parts: central idea, research method and conceptual model. Secondly, the research sums up the animation character creative process framework through the case of Shisa with the specific ideas of creative design. Four steps are used to design a mythological Character: set a scenario (Illustration), tell a story (Interpretation), write a script (Reaction), and design a character (Reflection). It has analyzed how to integrate the information about the mythology and stimulate the designers’ creative imagination in the animation character design in order to create the artworks with unique oriental charm.Theme II : Transnational Design in and around Asi

Painting Geometry: an abstract language in concrete form

My thesis is that geometry is an abstract and universal language that can reflect the inner being of the world in concrete form. I propose that the ideal forms of geometry, like those of harmony in music, have an aesthetic and metaphysical dimension that is capable of touching the most essential part of our being in the world. In this context, I suggest that painting geometry may be understood as an art practice that is closely aligned with the ideals of philosophical reflection, and how, as a consequence of this understanding, my approach to painting geometry is directed towards the realisation of the ideals of beauty, truth and freedom in particular; an approach that I claim shares much in common with the origins of both abstract and concrete art in post-Kantian German Idealist thought and Romantic art. On this basis, I argue that my painting practice is engaged with the possibility of the realisation of an ideal form of expression. This goal may be summarised as the achievement in painted form of a visual or spatial equivalent to the formal language of harmony of music. The paintings that I have submitted for examination may be understood as a direct consequence of my research findings, in view of which my intention is to make a contribution to the current and evolving language of abstract and concrete art. To this end, my thesis serves as an exegesis for the paintings submitted for examination in fulfilment of the requirements of my doctoral candidature

The Evening is Over, the Beauty Remains : A Semiotic Study of Piet Mondrian's Text "Natural Reality and Abstract Reality"

Abstract This study concentrates on the Dutch artist, Piet Mondrian, as a producer of a Neo-Plastic theory of art. My semiotic reading focuses mainly on one of his article series, Natural Reality and Abstract Reality (Natuurlijke en abstracte realiteit [1919-1920]), and acknowledges also the accompanying writings in the De Stijl periodical where it appeared, and a few photographs of Mondrian’s studio and motifs present in the paintings at the time when Mondrian wrote Natural Reality and Abstract Reality. Mondrian produces his ideas of non-figurative art in a way in which other external cognitive processes from science, certain esoteric streams, modern urban experience and popular culture, are to be taken as integral parts of the theory formation in his own text. This view elucidates the idea of creativity in a new way because it situates the artist’s individual activity within cultural knowledge and memory rather than just taking influences from it. I have reached these findings by relating Mondrian’s little-researched article series to the surrounding international philosophical, esoteric and technologizing cultures of the 1920s. Studying this relation in terms of significations has led to my study reflecting the paradigmatic and related meaning effects in contemporary philosophies and reflections, such as those of Henri Poincaré, Rudolf Steiner, Henri Bergson and Sigmund Freud. By reading the text as a fictive dramatic score my study relies on Roman Jakobson’s poetic function. Following in the lines of literary scholar Jørgen Johansen’s subsequent application of Charles Peirce’s semiotics this study reads Mondrian’s article series as the process of iconization; as a flow of images, as diagrammatic enactment and as metaphors of night and a stroll. To stage the route from ‘natural reality’ to ‘abstract, Mondrian gives to Natural Reality and Abstract Reality the flavour of being a form of logical inference applied by means of images. As a flow of images the text shows a stream of consciousness and, thus, the modern insight of perception, which differs from the traditional Kantian dualistic insight and the notion of the stable subject. The form of the text itself also represents meaning, which shows that Mondrian had literary ambitions. The aesthetic effect of the text as a diagram of many thematic oppositions and as the characters’ relations makes it a self-reflective icon of its own theme of modern consciousness. Metaphorically, the text presents the processual character of an artist’s creative thought as a night-time stroll, while developing the idea of Neo-Plasticism. Thus, there are definite Neoplatonic tenets in Mondrian’s text. This study shows that creative activity takes place not only in the processes of an individual mind but also by actively integrating and using cultural signs, such as the idea of evolution or the cultural text of the Euclidean derivative, the ‘point to line to plane’. By these kinds of ‘cultural artefacts’ Mondrian is able to conduct his own activity within and for the modern culture of the 1920s.Abstrakti: Tutkimukseni valottaa hollantilaisen taiteilijan, Piet Mondrianin ajattelua neoplastisen taideteorian tuottajana. Semioottisen näkökulmani keskiössä on yksi hänen artikkelisarjoistaan, Natuurlijke en abstracte realiteit [1919-1920]), unohtamatta kuitenkaan muita, rinnakkaisia artikkeleita De Stijl -lehdessä, missä Mondrianin artikkelisarja alun perin ilmestyi. Näkökulmaani tukee muutamien Mondrianin studiota esittävien valokuvien tarkastelu sekä esimerkki artikkelisarjan kirjoittamisajankohdan maalaustuotannosta. Mondrian tuotti ei-esittävän taiteen ideansa siten, että hän hyödynsi taiteen kentän ulkopuolisia tieteestä, tietyistä esoteerisista virtauksista, modernin urbaanin ihmisen kokemuksesta ja populaarikulttuurista peräisin olevia kognitiivisia prosesseja integroimalla niitä taideteoriansa olennaiseksi osaksi. Näkemykseni valaisee luovuutta uudella tavalla, sijoittamalla taiteilijan luovaa ajattelua pikemminkin kulttuurisen tiedon ja muistin alueelle kuin vain vaikutteita siitä ottavaksi. Tavoitteena on ollut Mondrianin vähän tutkitun artikkelisarjan suhteuttaminen sitä ympäröiviin 1910-luvun filosofisiin ja esoteerisiin virtauksiin sekä teknologisoituvaan kansainväliseen kulttuuriin. Näissä suhteissa välittävinä instrumentteina ovat paradigmaattiset merkitysefektit, jotka Mondrian on jakanut tekstissään esimerkiksi sellaisten reflektoivien käsitysten kanssa, joita ovat edustaneet esimerkiksi Henri Poincaré, Rudolf Steiner, Henri Bergson ja Sigmund Freud. Mondrianin teosta olen tutkinut ikään kuin fiktiivisenä näytelmänä nojautuen poeettisen funktion -käsitteeseen (Roman Jakobson) ja edennyt Jorgen Johansenin sovellusta myötäillen Charles Peircen semioottiseen ikoni-käsitteeseen. Mondrianin määrittämä ’taiteen tie’ figuratiivisesta todellisuudesta (natuurlijke realiteit) kohti abstraktia todellisuutta (abstracte realiteit) luo mahdollisuuden tarkastella hänen ajatteluaan loogisena ja kuviin perustuvana. Kuvien virtana (flow of images) Natuurlijke en abstracte realiteit esittää modernin näkemyksen havainnosta, joka eroaa kantilaisesta stabiilin subjektin ajatuksesta antamalla vaikutelman tietoisuuden virrasta. Tekstin muoto henkilöiden ja temaattisten vastakohtien suhteina (diagrams) kiinnittää huomiota ja saattaa viitata Mondrianilla olleisiin kirjallisiin tavoitteisiin. Muodon tuottama esteettinen vaikutelma tekee tekstistä itseään reflektoivan, oman tietoisuuden -teemansa ikonin. Taiteilijan luovan ajattelun prosessi on esitetty yön, tien ja valaistun kaupungin metaforina (metaphors) – samalla kun se kehittää neoplastista taideteoriaa. Tutkimukseni näyttää, että uutta luova ajattelu ei ole ainoastaan yksittäisen mielen sisäistä toimintaa, vaan uusi luodaan myös integroimalla ja käyttämällä kulttuurisia merkkejä. Mondrianin tapauksessa tämä on merkinnyt evoluution ideaa ja euklidisen geometrian ideaa ’pisteestä viivan kautta tasoon’. Tämän kaltaisten kulttuuristen ’artefaktien’ kautta Mondrian on kyennyt ohjaamaan omaa toimintaansa neoplastisen taideteorian tuottajana ikään kuin 1910-luvun modernista kulttuurista käsin ja sitä varten

Gestural Ethics: Consequences of the Mark in Contemporary Painting

The thesis considers what the difference is between generating an appearance by making something and generating it by thinking it (including naming it). By considering phenomenologies of agency in a variety of contexts, the argument questions the presumption that judgment determines the appearance. Judgment, understood as a disembodied, punctal decision-making is seen to be of little value for doing or understanding painting. Thus the (art-) theoretical acceptance of a distinction between 'craft' and 'judgment' is found to be misleading. The claim is then that painting constructs its domain of embodied thought through the gesture, and not through a disembodied act of judgment. The mark is, however, what allows painting to be commodified with a vengeance: individuated gesture as branded signature. Given the interwoven contexts of production and reception, however, - where agency resides then becomes hard to determine. The thesis takes this up this problem through a reading of Hegel's Master and Servant dialectic. The outcome is that the commodity form can neither be side-stepped nor straightforwardly assaulted; a discussion of Haim Steinbach's work is central. The proposal at this point is that artworks nonetheless retain their power according to the kinds of series they articulate; here various concepts of seriality are considered including Badiou's. It is then argued that the mark is best modelled through Derrida's notion of the trace. Barnett Newman's paintings are then re-considered through the lens of the trace, and vice versa. The argument here is that the critical gesture is the gesture that adequates itself to the trace. The painted mark is interrogated in these terms through close readings of works by Duchamp, Reed, Jorn and Brown among others. However, the limits of the Derridean vision are reached in thinking colour. For colour exceeds the logic of the mark insofar as the latter is a logic of inscription

Related trends in music and painting of the twentieth century

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The Body In Avant Garde Poetry

This thesis examines the use of the body in avant-garde poetics, relating it to both theory and contemporary culture. An outline of how the body has been depicted, represented, and formalized in modernism is made, and contemporary issues involving the body, from what Meredith M. Render calls the “alienability” of the body to posthuman hybridity and technological transcendence. Language poetry, including the works of M. SourbeSe Philip, Clark Coolidge, Steve McCaffery, Charles Bernstein, Karen Mac Cormack, Lyn Hejinian, and Bruce Andrews is then examined for the body’s fraught usage in a generally non-referential poetics. The body’s place in conceptual writing combines contemporary technologies with a look back at Antonin Artaud’s corps sans organes

The Art of Hegel's Aesthetics. Hegelian Philosophy and the Perspectives of Art History

This volume explores one of modernity’s most profound and far-reaching philosophies of art: the Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik, delivered by Georg Friedrich Wilhelm Hegel in the 1820s. The book has two overriding objectives: first, to ask how Hegel’s work illuminates specific periods and artworks in light of contemporary art-historical discussions; second, to explore how art history helps us make better sense and use of Hegelian aesthetics. In bringing together a range of internationally acclaimed critical voices, the volume establishes an important disciplinary bridge between aesthetics and art history. Given the recent resurgence of interest in ‘global’ art history, and calls for more comparative approaches to ‘visual culture’, contributors ask what role Hegel has played within the field – and what role he could play in the future. What can a historical treatment of art accomplish? How should we explain the ‘need’ for certain artistic forms at different historical junctures? Has art history been ‘Hegelian’ without fully acknowledging it? Indeed, have art historians shirked some of the fundamental questions that Hegel raised

The sublime in Rothko, Newman and Still

An important body of literature has accumulated (both primary and secondary sources) which necessitates that Rothko, Newman and Still be placed in the tradition of the sublime. In attempting this task, a background is established by a detailed summary of classical theory of the sublime in Longinus, Burke, Kant, and Nietzsche, followed by detailed summaries of major recent sublimist theory by Weiskel, Crowther, Lyotard, and Ferguson. Also, key ideas of Sartre and Jung are treated in order to round out the proper ideational context for a sublimicist analysis of these three painters. From this foundation, a working theory of the sublime is developed. Next, the painters’ crucial theoretic statement are analysed for their relevance to the sublime, and their programs and specific works are characterized in relation to theory of the sublime, and in relation to their treatments in criticism. The last two chapters treat two crucial contexts in which Rothko, Newman and Still are situated: The historically accumulated American tradition of the sublime in art and literature; and the general European context of modernism and postmodernism. Throughout the study, it is argued that various kinds of transcendence validate a set of various major modes of the sublime: The ideational, religious, moral, Burkean-Gothic, Kantian, Nietzschean, romantic, existential, Jungian-mythic, ontological, noble, and the sublime of light/color, along with negatives modes such as the comic, the ironic, the counter, the mock, and the merely rhetorical. It is argued, finally, that sublimicism will continue to be attractive for conservative, moderate, and radical points of view, that theory of the sublime has on-going power and validity into the future, and that between positive and negative modes, the positive will probably continue to dominat

Digital Embodiment in Contemporary Abstract Painting

This thesis re-investigates Clement Greenberg’s discredited abstract expressionist claim that painting should seek its own purity through the acknowledgment of its material. I argue that Greenberg’s physical, bodily determination of painting (but not its purity) is re-located as a criticality in contemporary practice because of the changes brought about by the simulacrum and the digital. By utilizing the particularities of ‘painterly’ issues such as materiality, depth and opticality into the virtual, this claim responds to Arthur C. Danto’s ‘end of history’ theories where he argues that artists are no longer bound to the dictates of grand master narratives of art. For Danto, contemporary art has irrevocably deviated from the narrative discourses which define it such as Greenberg’s. Not satisfied with either postmodern strategies of parody in painting that claim a linear end to the modernist canon, or with recent claims that contemporary painting is beyond postmodernism, I convert Greenberg’s physical determinism using Andrew Benjamin’s notion that contemporary abstract painters, through making, accept and transform the historical/modernist premise of the yet-to-be-resolved object/painting by staging a repetition of abstraction as an event of becoming. This ‘re-styling’ of abstract painting is then examined as an ontological conjoining of Greenberg with Merleau-Ponty’s claim that the painter transforms the relationship between the body and a painting by overlapping the interior sense of self with the world of external objects. I argue that contemporary painting can offer a philosophical dialogue between the painter’s subjectivity as a mirroring of the painter’s personal style through objective ornamental materiality. This dialogue is developed through Stephen Perrella’s Hypersurface theory which proposes a non-subjective, deterritorialised, architectural parallel of the digital as a transparent, fluid system of multi-dimensional signs in which the contemporary subject traverses. Consequently, I suggest, the symbolic virtual changes the body’s sensuous relation to time and space and is central to contemporary painting’s criticality