Artwork Critique « POETICKS

Archive for the ‘Artwork Critique’ Category

Entry 910 — My Bad Artwork Again

Friday, November 2nd, 2012

Here’s my bad artwork again.  I’m dead in the head, again, and have had a busy day–5 hours helping set up a local Arts & Humanities council show–a bunch of tables for craftspeople and painters, etc., to display and try to sell wares, and organizations trying to sell tickets and/or memberships like our local theatre group.  A way of circulating, and fun, but tiring.  Anyway, I’m just going to say a few things about the work–which I’ll call “mp” for the time being.

First off, let me say that it’s as hard, and important, to show why an artwork is a failure as it is to show why it is a success.  Against some views, I hold that one way to show that a work is bad is to point out what it does not have.  This one, for me, does not have what I consider the most important thing any work must have, a unifying principle.  Many artists sneer at the need for one, but their best works always have one, and I believe they  recognize that intuitively.  “MP” has no design focus that I can see.  No conceptual center, either.  If it had both, would they be in the same place?  I don’t know.

This thing makes me think of golf, and I don’t like gold.  What do the red lines say?  Nothing, to me.  I do like the 9 repeating in the nearby g but it’s momentarily interesting  without connecting to the rest of the piece.  I like the climb of the m’s, but–again–where are they going and why?  I’m seeing random graphics, nothing more. 

Pointing out what’s bad helps us better experience the absence of those thing in good art; having what a bad work lacks pointed out helps us better expreience what is in a good work that makes it good.  Now, I am not contending that some bad in a work would be bad in any other work.  Although some bads, like lack of a unifying princile, I consider universally bad.  Tone is part of any good work’s unifying principle, and some elements of the work which seem bad in some respects may, if necessary for tone, prove good.  A clumsy syntactical step in a formal poem becomes more good than bad if it is required by the meter.

Gad, I’m sleepy. 

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Textual Designage « POETICKS

Archive for the ‘Textual Designage’ Category

Entry 1551 — 2 by Nico Vassilakis

Wednesday, August 27th, 2014

The following are from the same issue of Kalligram that the Poem poems I’ve been featuring here are from:

 

Shifted A

Shifted L

I call these textual visimages–visual art whose subject is the visual appearance of language.  These are much more than simple designs, but I can’t quite put what they do into words yet.  Something about alteration. Or are they about building simple things that will prove to have vast consequences?  Of course, they are also “just” variations, highly elegant variations, on letters.

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Entry 1478 — The Beach!!

Sunday, June 8th, 2014

The latest issue of Bill DiMichele’s always excellent netzine, Tip of the Knife, is out. Among my many favorites in it was this, by Ali Znaidi (who is new to me):

Stop! It's the beach. An Asemic Writing by Ali Znaidi

Stop! It’s the beach. An Asemic Writing

It swept Bill into “a seascape with shiny pebbles and beach umbrellas. There are sand castles rising from the shore, aiming for that Sunday blue sky above us all, for those playful children enjoying cotton candy and drawing pictures with driftwood.”  Bill goes on the speak of loving “the soul Ali empties into the depths of the ocean, the swimmers riding peaceful currents, doing a high dive, dallying with mermaids among their coral language homes,” and I know just what he means, although the details of my interpretation of this multi-interpretable work differ from his.  The work is clearly an inspired celebration of the beach as, well: “!!”

I hope to return to this tomorrow with a few better words for what I get from it than I have right now.

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Entry 1110 — Commercial Visiotextual Art

Tuesday, June 4th, 2013

One of my very lazy entries, just two steals from ARTnews.

MoeBroker1

This one is an example of what many Spidertangle artists would call “asemic poetry,” but which, unlike just about everything with that tag, gets into New York galleries or the equivalent.  Why?  It certainly is no better than much of the pieces shown at Spidertangle, although I do like it–the colors and shapes much more than the scribbling.  Is it only because made by certified painters rather than people coming out of, or too associated with, poets.  For one thing, artists like Brooker never think of their work as poetry of any kind.

ArtTalkJune2013

A related example that I don’t at all like.  In the spirit of Jenny Holzer.  Yeah, makes yuh think but who in the world would hand it on their walls?  On the other hand, like the Weatherly Dixie Cups, these bookspines could work as elements of my long divisions.  That, needless to say, would complicate them beyond all possibility of being written up in ARTnews.

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Entry 1093 — Thoughts Regarding Minimalism

Saturday, May 4th, 2013

I suppose the minimalist artwork below is not bad, but seeing it in the latest issue of ARTnews depressed me, reminding me that minimalist painters, even mediocre ones like Hanne Darboven seemed from this one example to be, were continuing to make big bucks forty or more years after the birth of minimalism while someone like me is making the most money of his life after fifty years or so of adulthood because of food stamps. . . .

Note from 1 February 2014 when I was reviewing the past year.  Apparently the computer problem mentioned in my next entry screwed up this entry.  The reproduction of the Darboven visimage got deleted and all my further comments.  No doubt they had to do with the following specimens of much better specimens of minimalism I found by bp Nichol (the top one) and Irving Weiss the other two:

WaterPoem5

 

 

WaterIntoWordX

 

WateryWords

 

I’m sure I had fascinating things to say about them.

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Entry 1091 — Waves

Thursday, May 2nd, 2013

I had all kinds of trouble getting the following images into this post, and I’m exhausted, so won’t say much about them until tomorrow.  I will say that I consider the top one an example of what has been wrong with the arts world for the past 40 or more years.

Darboven01x.
WaterPoem5

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WaterIntoWord

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WateryWords

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Entry 1014 — “Haiku #53″

Thursday, February 14th, 2013

Once again, I’m too out of it tp do more here today than post a poem.  No matter that the poem I’m posting isn’t a poem but a pen&ink visimage of a poem.  It’s from Scott Helmes’s ongoing series of translations of haiku into what I call textual designs.  This one arrived with a mail art project he invited me to contribute to and I hope to, if my brain will only revive enough to help me.

 

It seems to me the epitome of haiku-elegance.  So many wonderful touches, like the only image of the nine the piece consists of that is nowhere curved is the central one.  The bird I see at the top left is its “season word.”  If even the quarter-mind I’ve been operating on of late can see even those things, how much must be there for those with fully-functional (observing) brains–and is there, even for me, but only in pieces in different parts of my brain, unintegrated, ununderstood in the fullest sense of “understood.”

Note: at first I posted this image cropped; I realized that it worked better with its margins restored so restored ‘em.

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Entry 1009 — One More from Do Not Write

Saturday, February 9th, 2013

This one is by Carlyle Baker:

 

I find this image fascinating.  It’s not a poem, for me, but–for one thing–a visualization of a mind’s attempt to find an answer to some unknown but worthy question.  One of the mind’s tactics is a doubling back over what it is diagramming, stolidly diagramming.  It also employs a white abstract map it briefly scribbles notes toward some sort of understanding that fails to emerge–but it does pin down the location of the unknown involved (the X).    I also read in it (less compellingly) the narrative I read in almost all asemic works, the struggle of language to emerge, in this case from thick-lined networks forming layers away from what the language is struggling to speak of, with an abstract outline of what it apparently must include above it.  Or the map of a big city, or a close up of a side of such a city . . .

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Entry 956 — “Not Worth a Title, No. 1″

Tuesday, December 18th, 2012

I’ve finally returned to Paint Shop to fool around, something I’ve been too blah to do for several weeks.  The result is nothing I’d want considered part of my oeuvre, but I’m too nowhere to find anything better to take care of this entry with, so here it is:

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Entry 910 — My Bad Artwork Again

Friday, November 2nd, 2012

Here’s my bad artwork again.  I’m dead in the head, again, and have had a busy day–5 hours helping set up a local Arts & Humanities council show–a bunch of tables for craftspeople and painters, etc., to display and try to sell wares, and organizations trying to sell tickets and/or memberships like our local theatre group.  A way of circulating, and fun, but tiring.  Anyway, I’m just going to say a few things about the work–which I’ll call “mp” for the time being.

First off, let me say that it’s as hard, and important, to show why an artwork is a failure as it is to show why it is a success.  Against some views, I hold that one way to show that a work is bad is to point out what it does not have.  This one, for me, does not have what I consider the most important thing any work must have, a unifying principle.  Many artists sneer at the need for one, but their best works always have one, and I believe they  recognize that intuitively.  “MP” has no design focus that I can see.  No conceptual center, either.  If it had both, would they be in the same place?  I don’t know.

This thing makes me think of golf, and I don’t like gold.  What do the red lines say?  Nothing, to me.  I do like the 9 repeating in the nearby g but it’s momentarily interesting  without connecting to the rest of the piece.  I like the climb of the m’s, but–again–where are they going and why?  I’m seeing random graphics, nothing more. 

Pointing out what’s bad helps us better experience the absence of those thing in good art; having what a bad work lacks pointed out helps us better expreience what is in a good work that makes it good.  Now, I am not contending that some bad in a work would be bad in any other work.  Although some bads, like lack of a unifying princile, I consider universally bad.  Tone is part of any good work’s unifying principle, and some elements of the work which seem bad in some respects may, if necessary for tone, prove good.  A clumsy syntactical step in a formal poem becomes more good than bad if it is required by the meter.

Gad, I’m sleepy. 

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Entry 909 — A Bad ArtWork

Thursday, November 1st, 2012

I made the following myself and think it stinks.  The question is why?  What’s wrong with it?  I hope to return to it tomorrow.  It’s here, by the way, for the usual reason: I had nothing better to post today.

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Nina Katcadourian « POETICKS

Archive for the ‘Nina Katcadourian’ Category

Entry 1110 — Commercial Visiotextual Art

Tuesday, June 4th, 2013

One of my very lazy entries, just two steals from ARTnews.

MoeBroker1

This one is an example of what many Spidertangle artists would call “asemic poetry,” but which, unlike just about everything with that tag, gets into New York galleries or the equivalent.  Why?  It certainly is no better than much of the pieces shown at Spidertangle, although I do like it–the colors and shapes much more than the scribbling.  Is it only because made by certified painters rather than people coming out of, or too associated with, poets.  For one thing, artists like Brooker never think of their work as poetry of any kind.

ArtTalkJune2013

A related example that I don’t at all like.  In the spirit of Jenny Holzer.  Yeah, makes yuh think but who in the world would hand it on their walls?  On the other hand, like the Weatherly Dixie Cups, these bookspines could work as elements of my long divisions.  That, needless to say, would complicate them beyond all possibility of being written up in ARTnews.

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Entry 161 — A Huthian Fidgetglyph « POETICKS

Entry 161 — A Huthian Fidgetglyph

In one of his recent mailings to me, Geof Huth sent a folded card with the interior of ther First reformed Church of Schenectady, New York, shown on its 300th birthday in 1980.  I’m showing it here because it sets up the fidgetglyph Geof had drawn across the inside of the card and given the title “The Fervent F.”  I’m showing that because it seems to me how good a calligrapher Geof is at his best.  The original is much better than the image shown here, by the way.

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Entry 603 — c’est mon dada « POETICKS

Entry 603 — c’est mon dada

Geof Huth recently sent me a Christmas package with a bunch of neat things in it, including the 4-inch by 6-inch hardbound book whose cover is shown directly below:

The first three images within were “Vers t ehen,” by Klaus-Peter Dencker, “Chretiens,” by Pierre Garnier and “Word Theatre,” by Theo Breuer.

I very much liked just about all of them.  I thought they were photographs taken by Geof of text-fragments and things that Geof thinks look like typography, for he has taken a good deal of such photographs over the years.  On the last page of the book, however, its contents are described as “collection of visual poetry, experimental texts and works influenced by Dada and Fluxus” followed by a list of works by title and author.  But there are fifteen or twenty fewer works shown in the book than listed so I’m not sure who did what.  And I noticed just about nothing that had any particular artist’s stamp on it.  I guess that’s what Dada is s’posed to be. 

Oops, now I have it: the collection is no doubt of some 65 (!) little collections like this one that the redfoxpress (of Ireland) published!  Geof is #65, which is stamped on the back cover.  So I was right to begin with.  I’ll leave my errors uncorrected–examples of dada criticism. 

New dogma of mine: a photograph whose subject is a word or words is a photograph of a word or words, not a visual poem.  I’m not sure that’s right, though.  I will have to think about it. 

Diary Entry

Friday, 23 December 2011, 3:30 P.M.  I haven’t felt like running for ages but forced myself to do a mile this morning.  I took off when my watched was at the zero seconds mark but forgot to see how many minutes past seven it was when I took off.  My finishing time was X:02.  I’m guessing it was 11:02 since my last time was 11:17, and I felt I was a little better this time out–though still horrible.  I only ran about twenty yards before having to really push every step to keep going.   It’s a mystery to me why I’m so off–I feel reasonably untired playing tennis, and I don’t just stand on the court.  As for my cultural productivity today, I puttered around in my response to Jake Berry’s essay but didn’t catch fire.  I was, as usual, feeling too tired to do much.  I may work some more on it.  (Later note: I didn’t.) Right now, though, I’m going to lie down again.

 

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Entry 286 — Successful Textual Design « POETICKS

Entry 286 — Successful Textual Design

The image below is the first textual design in my series that I really like.  It’s a detail from the sixth frame of the work.  What makes it succeed, in my opinion, is that I found a nice focal point for part of it, which I cropped to.

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I had a lot of trouble getting what I had on my laptop screen, my laptop being where I work with Paint Shop, to look the same on the screen of the computer I used for this blog.  Who knows how it looks on others’ screens, but it’s close to right on the one I’m looking at now.

I have no idea what to make of it.  I just like it visually.  I’m now wondering what the product would be if I found another image I liked of the same style and multiplied it by that.  I do believe I’ll use it in a mathemaku.

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Entry 288 — Two More Textual Designs « POETICKS

Entry 288 — Two More Textual Designs

The upper image below is most of the eighth frame of my series of textual designs, reduced to less than half-size.  I thought it passable, certainly better than most of the other frames to this point, and much better than the two after it, which don’t even have a detail worth extracting.  The other piece is a detail from the upper one.  I don’t know which version I prefer.  Probably the detail, slightly.

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Entry 289 — A Labeled Textual Design « POETICKS

Entry 289 — A Labeled Textual Design

It’s the 11th frame of my series (reduced by a fourth).  I consider it mildly amusing.

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Entry 287 — More Textual Designs « POETICKS

Entry 287 — More Textual Designs

The following are all details from the seventh frame of my series of textual designs.

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Entry 291 — Frame 14 « POETICKS

Entry 291 — Frame 14

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