Sunday, January 29, 2006
Good Violence
This young artist (Barnaby Furnas) was being critiqued by Carrol Dunham when I visited Columbia University many years ago. I was impressed with his watercolors back then, and am now happy to see his recent success. I can’t help but to like these depictions of extreme cartoonish violence dissolving into very formal compositions (make sure to click on the image above for good detail). This painting depicts two politicians blowing each other away at point blank range with fireworks in the background. It is as if the figures are falling apart back into the materials that made them (marks and colors). Why is it that we like depictions of violence so much? Even non-human violence has gravity, like gathering to see a building get demolished. Certainly there is the sense of spectacle and curiosity, but I think there is something more “academic,” like the urge to take something apart to see how it works (dissection). It is a state when things are in a limbo between having their objectness and only having their materiality (a state that lends itself to imagine within). A very aesthetic experience.
By the way, at the critique Dunham kept on trying to peg down Barnaby’s “idea,” and he couldn’t. I really admired that Barnaby was keeping the work open, and resisting the contemporary trend for paintings to be overdetermined by idea.
posted by chrisjag at 05:02pm
3 Comments Add your own
1. stephen r. | January 31st, 2006 at 7:35 am
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2. stephen r. | January 31st, 2006 at 7:46 am
There’s always the subtle notion, if not an academic one, that there is an aesthetic value of destruction. Jacques Derrida critics called his theory of literary deconstrution, nihilism, which was something that was far from what the core idea.
Is it really the gravity of violence? Or is it the natural impulse of destruction? Think about “Erased de Kooning Drawing” by Rauschenberg in 1953. Without delving into the Freudian relationship here, let’s be a bit more to the point. The “erasing,” the act of creating a piece of art, by reducing someone elses work, speaks volumes. By it’s destruction, something else emerges. He is, for all purposes, destroying a work my a master from the previous generation. Perhaps that is the aesthetic experience.
3. chrisjag | January 31st, 2006 at 8:47 am
I understand what your saying, but I think what your are talking about is a slightly different thing.
I was trying emphasize the artist’s relationship to his medium/material as a primary thing as apposed to being totally reliant on iconography. In this way, I was trying to support the constructive impulse that takes place within the “techni.” The weakness of most art today (in my humble opinion) is the lack of a technical model. Good material techniques open up the field for richer interpretations, so I like the Derrida reference, very true!
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