Bite 152: Jasper Johns - Map, 1961

Map, 1961, oil on canvas, 198.1 x 312.7 cm, MoMA, New York

The idea of a map is broken apart and revealed in its absurdity - America as paint, a country in its entirety represesnted by oil on canvas.

The states are barely legible and the outline of the nation even less so. Colours blends from one region into another. Text is integral to the collage. Stecilled letters are signifiers for massive areas of land divided up - scattered populations, statistics, differing politics, generalisations. Under this mass of data Johns' map becomes like his flag - referring to everything, and, at the same time, to nothing but the paint and canvas itself.

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Bite 125: Bridget Riley - Cataract 3, 1967

Cataract 3, 1967, emulsion on canvas, 222 x 223 cm, British Council, London

Painstakingly applied emulsion in a strict mathematical pattern gives the optical illusion of movement and depth. The work, impossible to see for what it is ('merely' paint on canvas), tricks the brain into seeing its waves and colours as regressions, an alive surface.

'Representation' itself is called into question. Our eyes cannot be trusted.

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Bite 124: Barnett Newman - Midnight Blue, 1970

Midnight Blue, 1970, oil & acrylic on canvas, 193 x 239 cm, Museum Ludwig, Cologne

A light blue rod grounds the painting. A section of white on the extreme left provides contrast. Between: a balanced ocean of dark, vibrant colour - midnight blue indeed.

A painting to get lost in.

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Bite 106: Francisco de Goya - The Dog, 1819-23

The Dog, 1819-23, oil mural transferred to canvas, 132 x 79 cm, Prado

Appearing to sink into the sand behind a dune, a dog, only its head showing above the surface, pleads desperately with its eyes, gazing up ominously. Filled with human emotion the animal is the epitome of helplessness, lost and alone, silent in its agony. 

The empty space above, minimal, a precursor to abstraction (Rothko before Rothko), further emphasises the fate of the animal, and, it its sublimity, the work is a powerful comment on the human condition. Have we not all been where this simply but effectively painted dog is, at some point in our lives?

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Bite 88: Piet Mondrian - Trafalgar Square, 1939-43

Trafalgar Square, 1939-43, oil on canvas, 145 x 120 cm, MoMA

"This melancholy London - I sometimes imagine that the souls of the lost are compelled to walk through its streets perpetually. One feels them passing like a whiff of air."

                                                            - William Butler Yeats

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Bite 87: Joseph M. W. Turner - Van Tromp, Going About to Please His Masters, 1844

Van Tromp, Going About to Please His Masters, 1844, oil on canvas, 91 x 122 cm, Getty Center, LA

The sea is alive with Turner's quick, slanting brushstrokes. A flimsy ship is buffeted by violent waves, emphasised by dark contours in the bottom right.

Cornelius Van Tromp, the subject of the title, is a Dutch naval officer who 'submitted' to his superiors. He is shown on the deck of the ship, dressed in white and waving with confidence, barely holding on.

Sources:

www.getty.edu

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Bite 84: Jackson Pollock - Autumn Rhythm (No. 30), 1950

Autumn Rhythm (No. 30), 1950, oil on canvas, 267 x 526 cm

The eye moves around the canvas as Pollock's body did, the canvas on the floor of his studio as opposed to against a gallery wall. I have often wondered what it would be like to view the canvas in this way, looking down on the work. It would be that much easier to reenact the artist's dance around the canvas, Pollock's enacted performance. Our body would be in relation to the work as his was.

None-the-less the eye can do this, retracing where the paints of different colours have been poured and dripped.

Black is dominant here, across the plain, while the white is more to the outside of the canvas appearing to begin and end near the top right (as we see it - but I wonder if Pollock indeed intends from the start for any canvas to be viewed any particular way, moving around it as he does).

Pollock is a painter to be experienced, not just seen. I sat before this monumental painting, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, for a while, letting its world enfold me, embracing the abstraction. The work is comfortable in a sense, aesthetically pleasing and interesting in the way a good pizza is - texture evening distributed.

I say this not to diminish the work but to praise it. Lacking compositional complexity - in the traditional sense - it is easier to be in it. 

This is painting as painting - the ultimate goal of the programme of abstraction.

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Bite 77: Christian Eckart - White Painting #606, 1987

White Painting #606, 1987, formica on birch plywood with 23 carat gold

Through Abstraction and the emergence of Conceptual Art, painting, in exploring the medium of painting itself, became reduced to its simplest form - the blank canvas. Here Christian Eckart takes this deconstruction a step further still, questioning the confines of the canvas and its frame, presenting a gold frame as the dominant subject - an art object in itself. The frame even becomes its own composition, shifted against the wall, breaking the confines of the painting. 

The painted surface remains neutral, overly glossed. The gold frame becomes malleable, rising and falling, disrupting the integrity of the rectangle traditionally containing the artwork. 

This frame - not merely a frame, but rather the very concept of a frame, standing-in for all others - becomes a metaphor for the ability of art to reach beyond its confines, to touch the viewer. If they will let it.

On exhibition in the show Color and Form at the Broad Contemporary Art Museum at LACMA, Los Angeles.

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Bite 75: Roberto Matta - Burn, Baby, Burn, 1965-66

Burn, Baby, Burn, 1965-66, oil on canvas, 298 x 981 cm

A key work of peripatetic Chilean-born artist Roberto Matta, Burn, Baby, Burn was created following the violence of the Vietnam War and the 1965 Watts Race riots in Los Angeles. The title refers to the phrase coined by a radio DJ which was shouted by rioters in the streets of LA in anger over continued racial discrimination and police brutality.

A monumental and visceral response to the destructiveness of human beings, in the tradition of Picasso's Guernica, this epic work features Matta's characteristic 'webs' of paint across the canvas, which he referred to as  “psychological morphologies” or “inscapes”. Futuristic and mechanical, the violent abstraction of the piece combined with bright contrasting colours and heavy grays, grips the viewers attention, dragging them throughout the work. 

Catalytic to Abstract Expressionism, Burn, Baby, Burn uses the scale of the canvas and Surrealist techniques to demand a response from the viewer. There is no realistic figuration to tie the atmospheric composition down. Instead it appears to change before you as strange objects and figures - or rather non-objects and non-figures - advance and recede, Matta's unique use of line and colour giving the illusion of depth.

To sit before a Matta work is to get lost in a whole new universe. In this case it is one in which atrocities are abundant and hope is only in the distance. This 'universe' is very much our own world.

Currently in the Art of the Americas Building at LACMA, Los Angeles.

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Bite 65: Kegan Fisher - Earthquake, 2006

Earthquake, 2006, acrylic on canvas, 213 x 152 cm

Christchurch, New Zealand has been torn apart again by a devastating earthquake. This time dozens have died.  The total effect and lives lost is yet to be determined. It is, however, no doubt, New Zealand's worst disaster in over 30 years.

My thoughts are completely with the people of Christchurch at the moment. I can only imagine the horror of the earth beneath your feet continually shaking from the quake and its aftershocks. We will never forget this day.

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Bite 58: Barnett Newman - Broken Obelisk, 1963-9

Broken Obelisk, 1963-9, Cor-Ten steel, 750 x 319 x 319 cm

The top of a broken off obelisk 'kisses' the top of a pyramid. Both symbols from Egyptian art, they are borrowed here, combined in a kind of 'surrealist' object, becoming a monument to nothing, a monument to everything, a monument to monuments themselves. 

The point of meeting in the work - mathematical triangles barely touching yet one mass holding up the other - creates a sense of tension, ambiguity in an otherwise solid object. But this 'solidity' is an illusion. The work, in its abstraction and lack of apparent purpose tends to float - the concept as well as the obelisk itself, uprooted from the ground. 

Inverted and aimless, this monument speaks not of grand ambitions or successful lives lived, but rather of unfulfillment, of banality and futility.

It explores similar themes to Steve Woodward's sculpture Step Touch Stone.

In the collection at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York.

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Bite 56: Lucio Fontana - Spatial Concept: Expectations, 1959



Spatial Concept: Expectations, 1959, synthetic polymer paint on slashed burlap, 100 x 82 cm



Q: By slashing the canvas does the artist turn this painting into a sculpture?


In the collection at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York

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Bite 55: Jackson Pollock - Full Fathom Five, 1947

Full Fathom Five, 1947, oil on canvas with nails, buttons, key, coins, cigarettes, etc., 129 x 76 cm 

"Imagine a man brought up from birth in a white cell so that he has never seen anything except the growth of his own body. And then imagine that suddenly he is given some sticks and bright paints. If he were a man with an innate sense of balance and colour harmony, he would then, I think, cover the white walls of his cell as Pollock has painted his canvases. He would want to express his ideas and feelings about growth, time, energy, death, but he would lack any vocabulary of seen or remembered visual images with which to do so. He would have nothing more than the gestures he could discover through the act of applying his coloured marks to his white walls. These gestures might be passionate and frenzied but to us they could mean no more than the spectacle of a deaf mute trying to talk."

                                                                                      - John Berger, 1958


In the collection at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York.


Source:
John Berger, Selected Essays, (ed. Geoff Dyer), Vintage, 2001. 

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Bite 54: Piet Mondrian - Broadway Boogie Woogie, 1942-3

Broadway Boogie Woogie, 1942-3, oil on canvas, 127 x 127 cm

"Art is only a substitute while the beauty of life is deficient. It will disappear in proportion, as life gains in equilibrium." - Piet Mondrian

Staccato beats of colour create the illusion of line and depth: The grid of New York streets, seen from above - more taxis than other cars. The bright lights of Broadway. The organised confusion of American jazz.

As Robert Hughes points out, "once one has seen Broadway Boogie Woogie, the view from a skyscraper down into the streets is changed forever."

While strongly influenced by the urban vitality of New York, where the artist had recently emigrated, we are still solidly within the grasp of Abstraction, Mondrian's principle of reduction, an economy of means, taking a new course but still very much in control. 

Colour is painstakingly positioned, repositioned, precisely applied. Creating a harmonious composition - order referencing the seemingly random - fooling us that it was easy to come by, falling into place on its own - Art and Life in perfect sync. "Rhythm alone emerges," Mondrian explains, "leaving the planes as nothing."

This is a painting to get lost in. To become a coloured square yourself and travel around the grid, tracing new routes as you would explore a new city.

Although immediately acclaimed as a masterpiece, Mondrian himself saw it as a failure. "There is too much of the old in it," he said, referring to his grid paintings of his early career. Yet it is exactly this move 'back' to the vaguely 'figurative' which makes his final works so revolutionary, the opposition of vertical and horizontal as the "immutable" essence of all things becoming real - a total abstraction while referencing the world around him. 

In the collection at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York.


Sources:
Robert Hughes, The Shock of the New, Thames & Hudson, 1980.
Hal Foster (ed.), Art Since 1900, Thames & Hudson, 2004.

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Bite 38: Peter Panyoczki - New Zealand Sheep in Manhattan Dreaming of Home, 2010

New Zealand Sheep in Manhattan Dreaming of Home, 2010,
 inkjet and perspex on aluminum and backlight, 150 x 150 x 65 cm

The Keeper of Sheep XXXIX

The mystery of things – where is it?
Why doesn't it come out
To show us at least that it's mystery?
What do the river and the tree know about it?
And what do I, who am no more than they, know about it?

Whenever I look at things and think about what people think of them,
I laugh like a brook cleanly plashing against a rock.
For the only hidden meaning of things
Is that they have no hidden meaning.
It's the strangest thing of all,
Stranger than all poets' dreams
And all philosophers' thoughts,
That things are really what they seem to be
And there's nothing to understand.

Yes, this is what my senses learned on their own:
Things have no meaning: they exist.
Things are the only hidden meaning of things. 

Alberto Caeiro (Fernando Pessoa)

Currently on view at the Pah Homestead, TSB Bank Wallace Arts Centre, Auckland.

  
Source:
TSB Bank Wallace Arts Centre Opening Exhibition Catalogue

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Bite 35: Theo Schoon - Geothermal Study No. 6, c. 1950

Geothermal Study No. 6, c. 1950

Through extreme close-up, decontextualising geothermal pools from their surroundings, Schoon is able to draw an abstract beauty and symmetry out of unique but natural phenomena found in Rotorua,  New Zealand. Altogether transcending traditional tourist imagery of the twentieth century he had an obsessive purpose - to reach past the trite and commercial to the unique, the magical, the true beauty of these areas," as Michael Dunn explains.

Arguably true abstraction within 'straight' photography is impossible, so instead Schoon responds to an abstraction already present in nature, representing a kind of Modernist vigor. The organic compositions came from months of observation, analyzing the perfect light to illuminate the glistening mud pools for the black and white negative, and waiting for the requisite combination of bubbles and flow. 

The result here is an image where the elements seem in conversation - or at least compositional equilibrium. This is photography in a pure form of its intended purpose - to freeze a moment for deliberation, to hold-still a changing surface so as to fully comprehend its inherent beauty and abstractness.

Sources:

New Zealand Art From Cook to Contemporary, Te Papa Press, 2010.

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Bite 27: Caspar David Friedrich - The Monk by the Sea, 1808-10

The Monk by the Sea, 1808-10, oil on canvas

Insignificant before nature the small figure sits just below the horizon, visually swamped by the sea and sky before him. The 'monk', sometimes seen as the figure of the artist, appears to float on the sand. Barely grounded yet centreing the composition. Originally met with bemusement and even annoyance the work is now seen as a forerunner to abstraction, appearing almost like a Rothko if the figure is removed. 

Yet the work sits firmly within German Romanticism, presenting the Sublime in its purest form, focusing on the loneliness and ambiguity of what it is to be human faced with the magnitude of the expanse of nature and eternity.

We hear the waves crash and stare towards the distant horizon, overcome by the mystery of why we are even standing on this sand.

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