The Art of the Matter
Written by Monica Arora
Henry Charles Bukowski, a German-born American poet, novelist and short story writer has a very interesting take on creativity and art that inadvertently connects with our blog.
“Style is the answer to everything.
A fresh way to approach a dull or dangerous thing
To do a dull thing with style is preferable to doing a dangerous thing without it
To do a dangerous thing with style is what I call art
Bullfighting can be an art
Boxing can be an art
Loving can be an art
Opening a can of sardines can be an art
Not many have style
Not many can keep style
I have seen dogs with more style than men,
although not many dogs have style.
Cats have it with abundance.
When Hemingway put his brains to the wall with a shotgun,
that was style.
Or sometimes people give you style
Joan of Arc had style
John the Baptist
Jesus
Socrates
Caesar
García Lorca.
I have met men in jail with style.
I have met more men in jail with style than men out of jail.
Style is the difference, a way of doing, a way of being done.
Six herons standing quietly in a pool of water,
or you, naked, walking out of the bathroom without seeing me.”
- Art at Face Value
How seriously would you view a piece of art? For instance, if an installation artist asks audience to pour water over themselves, would you do it? Or read a book kept as a part of a larger theme. Well, it seems that this 91-year-old German lady took up “Reading-work-piece”, a 1965 piece by avant garde artist Arthur Koepcke literally as it had the phrase “insert words” written across.
The woman simply began writing on it using a ballpoint pen during a visit by senior citizens to Nuremberg’s Neues Museum. She is now under investigated for damage to property, although there was no malintent noticed in her behavior. The lady informed the police that, “She understood the English-language instruction on the artwork to insert words and took it as an invitation to fill in answers to the clues.”
The German woman began solving the crossword clues on the artwork
She added that, “This should not have come as a surprise to the museum as it had not put up a notice instructing visitors not to write on the piece.” Gerlinde Knopp, leader of the excursion for senior citizens stated that the museum was also full of other pieces of interactive art and it was easy to get confused about what one could or could not do.
Reportedly, the art work can be restored.
- Art for Peace
Brazilian political cartoonist Carlos Latuff shared this cartoon in the wake of the Bastille Day terror attack in Nice
Whilst the entire world is still grappling with the devastating attack in Nice, France at the bastille Day celebrations, which left a staggering eighty-four people dead and many more wounded after a lorry massacred a crowd watching celebratory fireworks on the waterfront of French Riviera city tributes have been pouring in from all over the world expressing myriad emotions. Some are angry, most are just sad and others are sighing in disbelief as the vile and vicious jaws of terrorism are entangling humanity more viciously each day.
Cartoon by Swaha references the truck that killed scores of people in Nice
A Centenary of Performing Arts
Second Movement, Ragnar Kjartansson’s work at The Barbican
Marking a centenary of performance art, artist Ragnar Kjartansson’s Second Movement, which featured two young women in glorious Edwardian dresses of the erstwhile Victorian England, “decorously necking” in a boat on the Barbican’s pond has set many an eyelashes aflutter at the sheer audacity of the scenario. However, art critic Mark Hudosn writes that by the standards of the glory days of early 20th-century performance art and the later events of the Sixties, it’s pretty tame stuff.
Many art lovers believe that when performance art was initiated exactly a century ago with the first Dada anti-art events at the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich, what unleashed was a frenzied anti-establishment and reality defying surrealism. Thus art for its shock value has indeed been around for a long time.
By the early Sixties performance art was coming into its own with “happenings”, a phenomenon that took roots in New York and had its first London rendition in 1964 by the American artist Carolee Scneeman, in which “performers of both sexes stripped to their underpants and rolled ecstatically in heaps of offal.” Few years hence, self-abusive Austrian “actionist” artist Gunter Brus came close to killing himself during a performance.
Recently, at a Japanese experimental theatre-cum-performance art, entitled ‘Miss Revolutionary Idol Berserker’, also held at the Barbican, water and food were hurled at the audience.
Second Movement thereby seems quite aesthetic and sober in contrast!
Reference Links
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-36796581
http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art/news/nice-attack-terror-lorry-powerful-tribute-cartoons-bastille-day-plantu-twitter-carlos-latuff-a7138091.html
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/art/what-to-see/this-lesbian-kiss-performance-art-isnt-shocking-its-beautiful/
http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/tag/art