More on avant garde

In the previous post I neglected to address the content referred to in the title: namely, the simultaneity of the possible and the impossible. Blake Rayne gave that as a definition of the avant garde, but also framed it as the never-ending negotiation between art and non-art that is part of every artist's daily life. BR mentioned a standard art school determinator: are you a shell artist or a nut artist? Nobody in the audience had ever heard this (but then we didn't go to CalArts) but it basically divides artists into those whose work is primarily a frame (shell) for content, possibly derived from other sources (Marcel Broodthaers), and those whose work is primarily about content (nut), like Elizabeth Peyton. About the shell and the nut and Duchamp and Beuys, my husband (John Zurier) says "it's like the metaphor of the difference between the coffin and the cadaver. Duchamp gives us the box, or the frame to use Rayne's language, the ritual of looking, and the ceremony, but what is inside the coffin, the mystery of death, remains unknown. Beuys is trying to bring the dead back to life, to reanimate inert materials, giving the dead body the aura of the living. Both mediate the infinitude of death and art in life. I guess its the difference between the ever tactful undertaker vs. the shaman of the tribe."

The Simultaneity of the Possible and the Impossible

Blake Rayne gave a talk at CCA on Thursday night. He is a painter and teaches at Columbia. The blurb for the lecture listed him as a believer "that painting is more than just physical...his particular "procedures" as he calls them, include translation, decontextualization, folding, superimposition, and the following of scripts grafted from other sites of production..." (confession: I thought I was going to hear Rochelle Steiner, the director of the Public Art Fund in NY and probably would not have gone to hear Blake, but my husband would have. So I took notes for him.) BR seemed very bright and open, but was talking the deconstructivist talk I am not so fond of. But he was actually making sense, unlike some people, and it was particularly interesting in terms of the artists he mentioned. Like the 70s French Support/Surface group, Cezanne, Manet, Malevich, Mondrian...There was something about the critique of composition, in terms of how does one deal with the abitrariness of it, giving as examples the chance operations of John Cage, the use of chance + gravity of Jackson Pollock, and probably others I missed. He defined abstraction rather nicely as "selection and displacement." Which for me, as a painter-turned-phototgrapher, summed it up quite well.