Keith Tyson - New Order (remix), 2018
I started on my fourth drawing today - even though I was supposed to be catching up with more research journal / website things (which I'm really stressed about, but you gotta draw when you gotta draw) (I actually 'scheduled' to do only research journal + website these two weeks but of course that didn't really happen...) anyway, I started the drawing... every time I start one of these I think to myself which part of the 'journey' am I on now? I sat for a minute and felt like I was in a stasis, stationary, still. like nothing was moving much, and the last drawing felt so long ago. and the ending of this degree is just slowly dawning, and it is frightening because it's a big change coming like a giant wave of water in a tsunami. but just in this moment right now, very temporarily, we get a pause. a very uncertain period of pause, but one that I almost don't want to resume playing. I dislike change but it makes us grow. its like life pushing to the next block every time you feel you settled in your place. anyway.
I wrote down 'STILL, STILL' because of that static feeling. and also the word 'still', like still, I am here, it feels like I tried so hard to move forward and I am still here. or in a more positive way, i am 'still' alive - like on kawara said in his telegrams. i don't know, sometimes I feel like one of bill viola's video works, particularly the one right at the beginning of the exhibition last year at the RA, where the figure was very slowly sinking into the water/floating back up (?) I often think about that feeling...
Nantes Triptych - 1992
(this one chilled me to the bone and it haunts me still)
https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/viola-nantes-triptych-t06854
'The Nantes Triptych was originally conceived as a commission for the Centre National des Arts Plastiques in France, to be shown in a seventeenth-century chapel in the Musée des Beaux Arts in Nantes in 1992. Viola has taken the form of the triptych, traditionally used in Western art for religious paintings, to represent, through the medium of video, his own contemporary form of spiritual iconography. The three panels of Viola’s triptych show video footage of birth (on the left), death (on the right) and a metaphorical journey between the two represented by a body floating in water (in the centre). The footage used was not originally shot for this particular project. The birth was inspired by the birth of Viola’s first son in 1988 (although it does not depict his son’s birth) and was filmed at a natural childbirth clinic in California. The artist has used this footage in several works. The floating body in the central panel was filmed in a swimming pool for an earlier work, The Passing (1987–88). Viola filmed his mother as she lay dying in a coma in 1991 as a means of confronting her death artistically. The three passages are accompanied by a soundtrack of crying, water movement and breathing in a 30-minute loop. In this compacted space birth and death eclipse the dreamy suspension which represents, in the central panel, the thinking, active human life. Here it is not life’s journey which is important, but its beginning and end.
Originally from New York, Viola has travelled widely. He studied Zen meditation and advanced video technology during a period of 18 months in Japan, before moving to southern California at the beginning of the 1980s. His experience of Eastern philosophy has informed his artistic investigation into the relationship between an individual’s inner life and the experience of his body. In his work with experimental sound and video he therefore aims to create art which operates as a complete ‘experience’. Viola believes that art has an enlightening and redemptive function. ‘Images have transformative powers within the individual self … art can articulate a kind of healing or growth or completion process … it is a branch of knowledge, epistemology in the deepest sense, and not just an aesthetic practice’ (Bill Viola 1995, p.245). For him birth and death, the markers which delineate our life-span, ‘are mysteries in the truest sense of the word, not meant to be solved, but rather experienced and inhabited. This is the source of their knowledge’ (Viola 1995, p.251). He believes that in our Western science-oriented culture ‘issues such as birth and death no longer command our attention after they have been physically explained’, and that it is essential to return to them as ‘wake-up calls’ with powerful emotional and spiritual effects (Viola 1995, p.273).'
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back to the drawing, I wrote down 'still, still' and again washed over it and erased filled back in and eventually became almost a still life flower image. and I wanted to keep pushing that... as I was trying random brush strokes one of the 'flowers' looked like an ear and, this is kind of stupid but 'ear' sort of sounded like in cogito 'ergo' sum, which was I guess at the back of my mind since I was looking at the video essay on the short story/video game I have no mouth but I must scream, where the supercomputer is called AM, and its name came from the cogito argument.
so I began to look more into this well-known phrase 'I think, therefore I am.' watched a few videos on it, and then I listened to a BBC podcast:
Cogito Ergo Sum (In Our Time)
I didn't take detailed notes as I was drawing whilst listening but from what I remember, I learnt that,
-he was a french philosopher/scientist/mathematician (and did some great work in geometry etc?)
-wanted to build a completely trustworthy foundation on which he could build his new philosophy
-had three very intense and influential dreams - the last one containing three books including Pythagoras (?) I need to relisten, but basically it gave him a clear vision on where the truth lies
-'cogito ergo sum' even doubts the fundamentals of mathematics..?
they also touched on the mind + body dilemma, if we are a mind with a body or a body with a mind - which was also linked to these videos I was watching from ted-ed and crashcourse (both channels I enjoy watching a lot because they inspire me often)
Are you a body with a mind or a mind with a body? - Maryam Alimardani
Where Does Your Mind Reside?: Crash Course Philosophy #22
PHILOSOPHY - History: Descartes' Cogito Argument
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anyway, so just thinking about cogito ergo sum, almost repeated in a mantra (like how super computer AM in the video game is like), was doing my head in, but I do think that it's valuable - the idea that the only thing you can truly trust or know exists is yourself, because you are doubting, you are thinking, there for you exist. anything beyond that, how can you say it is not a dream or simulation?... and back to the mind-body problem, I also learnt about the debate between substance dualism and reductive physicalism (from the crash course video):
so I was thinking about all this as I was sculpting out this flower thing, and then I thought about the idea of the still life historically, and I was thinking about tom's lecture about the still life, and then I thought about that one painting tom showed in his now that's what I call painting lecture, of Keith tyson's work, so I searched his work and I absolutely love the 'Life, still' show. I saw that he has had an in conversation there and I've yet to listen to it/make notes (I am growing increasingly worried about the fact that it takes me so long to take notes bc I feel I learn better when I transcribe every word down, it takes me hours to listen to an hr long thing). but the representation of these still life flowers was amazing, I was especially inspired by seeing numbers present.. reminded me of the drawing I did last time, where I put in the solar system parameters.. and numbers is really interesting bc even in the cogito argument math is not to be trusted ... (and math is inherently abstract even though they are viewed as fact - a video I was watching from the channel the art assignment about abstract art pointed this out..)
https://www.studiointernational.com/index.php/keith-tyson-interview-life-still-hauser-wirth
Veronica Simpson: What was the trigger that got you started with these flower paintings?
Keith Tyson: I’ve been doing flowers for a while. I started doing them when I started doing scrape paintings. I’d find an old painting in a junk shop and then I’d repair it and then scrape over it, Iike (Gerhard) Richter draws over his pictures with a squeegee. Then, where the ground is, I’d paint into that ground, and get some interference going in the surface. I’d started painting flowers into them because they didn’t have any other signification other than that they’re flowers. I mean, obviously they’re symbolic and they’ve got all this weight behind them, but generally they’re like, get a brush, get in there and get some sort of juice, and it sort of evolved from there. I got really fascinated with still life painting. How would you make a still life today? Those Dutch still lifes were all surrounded by (symbols of) the new world, exotic flowers and the merchant class and their cosmology of the time. I looked around me and thought we’re in this information age with all this stuff going on, everything’s decentralised, so how do you make still life now? Also, because I’ve gone back to my own hand, it’s quite a nice modest scale to work at. Each one is its own separate universe.
For this show, I set off with the idea of doing two dozen flowers … They are all paintings of flowers at first glance, you know. But there are really no paintings of flowers in the show. They are paintings of surfaces and mathematics and all sorts of other things.
VS: There may have been huge significance in flower paintings in the Netherlands, as you say, in the 17th century, but these days, flower paintings – especially ones that are relatively realistic - mainly have strong associations with kitsch. Tell me how you have handled that. Because a lot of people won’t understand that there are supposed to be all kinds of references going on.
KT: I’ve looked at it cross-culturally, (including) Ikebana from Japan, Dutch still life, outsider artists and even Buddhist mandalas. The flower is really just the subject, but it’s not the content. The content is like the diversity and juice of the world. And there’s something about a flower. It’s colour, it’s there to attract, it’s a sexual organ, it has all this stuff and it just emerges: it doesn’t see itself, but it integrates with the rest of its environment. And paint uses the same technique. It’s colours [and] you can apply it in different ways. There are different species, different methods of applying the paint. It’s a bit like flower arranging, making a painting: you’re putting things together for aesthetics, but you’re also taking radically different environmental techniques and putting them together. That’s what I was interested in, and trying to keep the work settled between all those different points and never collapsing into one thing - like just becoming kitsch flower-arranging or philosophical conceptualism - just (trying to) keep it vibrating there in this space. Also, I like the idea that you make an album of paintings and they’re informed by the ones next to them. Even though they’ll all get split up. The show is like a symphony and each painting is a note in it. They’re very diverse, not for diversity’s sake, but because each one has demanded to become what it’s become while I’ve been working on it.
Keith Tyson. Light, Mass and Acceleration, 2018. Oil on aluminium, 183 x 137 cm
VS: There may have been huge significance in flower paintings in the Netherlands, as you say, in the 17th century, but these days, flower paintings – especially ones that are relatively realistic - mainly have strong associations with kitsch. Tell me how you have handled that. Because a lot of people won’t understand that there are supposed to be all kinds of references going on.
KT: I’ve looked at it cross-culturally, (including) Ikebana from Japan, Dutch still life, outsider artists and even Buddhist mandalas. The flower is really just the subject, but it’s not the content. The content is like the diversity and juice of the world. And there’s something about a flower. It’s colour, it’s there to attract, it’s a sexual organ, it has all this stuff and it just emerges: it doesn’t see itself, but it integrates with the rest of its environment. And paint uses the same technique. It’s colours [and] you can apply it in different ways. There are different species, different methods of applying the paint. It’s a bit like flower arranging, making a painting: you’re putting things together for aesthetics, but you’re also taking radically different environmental techniques and putting them together. That’s what I was interested in, and trying to keep the work settled between all those different points and never collapsing into one thing - like just becoming kitsch flower-arranging or philosophical conceptualism - just (trying to) keep it vibrating there in this space. Also, I like the idea that you make an album of paintings and they’re informed by the ones next to them. Even though they’ll all get split up. The show is like a symphony and each painting is a note in it. They’re very diverse, not for diversity’s sake, but because each one has demanded to become what it’s become while I’ve been working on it.
Keith Tyson. Still Life with Horse Chestnut Shells, '1976' (2018). Oil on canvas, 78.6 x 63.1 cm
KT: That idea of something emerging from something deeper is very much what I’m trying to do with the work. There’s this big argument in modernism about representation versus the actuality of the paint and blah blah blah. A mark is still an object in the world. An abstract painting still hurts when you get hit over the head with it. It’s still a thing. So, in this painting here – just two hours in modern time and space. And it says on it that the exact time that I painted it – 1.30 until 3.30pm GMT. The only metric for that was the time I gave myself. It’s not a painting of the flowers that were in front of me. It’s saying, at this point in time and space, that’s what occurred. And so, again, it’s flowers, but it’s a painting of coordinates of a space. I’m trying to tap into something about that mysterious quality of how things come into being.
Entropy, Oil on aluminum
VS: Can you tell me what was going on with this one, Entropy?
KT: This was my palette while I was doing most of these paintings. Then, as I was looking at it, I thought: now I can pick out things that are beginning to look - totally accidentally – like flowers, and accentuate them. But I really got into thinking about entropy, and how the disorder of a system cannot decrease unless more disorder is created outside the system. The emergence of things that are ordered within this palette needs to have this mess outside, this pollution outside. It’s very much about entropy and a flower as entropy or a flower as romantic, or a flower as some symbol of consciousness. I’m really just exploring it. I’ve always said I find it difficult to limit myself to a style, so I have to put some restriction (around the work) and that gives me some space to explore making paintings. If they’re any good, they’ve emerged and they surprise me. They’ve informed me rather than me knowing exactly what I’m up to.
Keith Tyson. These are the Greatest Times of our Lives, 2019. Oil on aluminium, 78.6 x 63.1 cm
VS: You said you might be working on several pieces simultaneously, but has the flower theme been your sole preoccupation over the past couple of years?
KT: Pretty much. I’ve been doing studio wall drawings and a few other bits and bobs. I’ve had an intense few years. The (paintings) were quite modest in scale so I could take them wherever I was and work on them. But, also, it’s like an apprentice piece. I had to relearn becoming a craftsman again. Before, I had many years of having loads of assistants and making huge pieces of work. I completely lost touch with the making. And I found it really hard. This was a way of me going: OK, I’ve got to learn to paint again.
VS: Where was the pressure coming from to make huge pieces with loads of assistants?
KT: There was a big sculpture piece I made that required lots of and lots of people working on it. I guess I got caught up in the whole … you start making a few big pieces and you take people on, and then you don’t want to get rid of them because you get to know them.
VS: Some artists find it liberating, because you can work at a certain scale and speed.
KT: No, I never found it pleasant. I was always thinking: what am I going to give them to do? And it wasn’t natural to me to do it. Before, 90% of my work was made with assistants and now 90% of my work has been made by me, and it becomes more fascinating for me to do. Now I’ve got the ability to do what I’ve always wanted to do. I was always envious of my assistants who could go home to their studio and make work. I don’t know, it was a bit art market as well: galleries and everyone wanting something for an art fair, and you just get caught up in it all.
Keith Tyson. Spirals, 2018. Oil on canvas, 78.6 x 63.1 cm
KT: I don’t know. For me, that kitsch thing is a very minor part of flower painting. I know there are many hobbyists. And actually some of the techniques I’ve used in the paintings have come off middle- American women on YouTube who do crafting. A mark is a mark, and what makes one painting look one way and another look like another? I’ve always said that paint is programmable material. You can apply to it the mythology of gestural abstraction and get your synaesthesia going and you’ll get one type of painting, and you can be Sol LeWitt and apply a different rule and get a different type of painting. The paint is transforming dependent on these different filters you’ve got going on and not all of it is conscious. And it’s vast. I’m always playing with the way something comes into being. Then you’re halfway through a painting and something else happens. They range from incredibly precise – this one is a procedurally generated rose, made mathematically on a computer, according to an equation and then put through a series of filters – to totally whimsical.
Keith Tyson. My Ever Changing Moods, 2019. Oil on canvas, 78.6 x 63.1 cm
This one is called My Ever Changing Mood, and it pretty much is that: it’s just me working with the physicality, with the paint itself, what emerges, and what reminds me of a flower. It’s literally putting paint on, re-scraping it, putting stuff on like an abstract painting. And these flowers have emerged literally from that process. Even the ones that look quite realistic, it’s just because a splat of paint reminded me of a lily or a rose or something. And then I’ve gone and found a picture of a lily and converted it. It’s like you’ve read this bouquet out of a process that’s a bit like reading tea leaves. It’s a completely emergent thing.
There are a few of them I did which I called Cyborgs, because they’re half digital and half painting. I’d take some flowers and photograph them, stick them into Photoshop and paint digitally all this stuff, and then bring them back and paint over the print, and put glazes and re-photograph it. They weren’t in the real world, or the digital world, they were somewhere between the two.
Keith Tyson. Seed of Consciousness, 2019. Oil on canvas, 78.6 x 63.1 cm
When you go in looking for references, you’ve got Van Gogh and Picasso and the old masters, and you see how flowers have been dealt with over different eras. They’ve got this symbolism: they are transient, we anthropomorphise them, they really explore our condition in that way. Despite the fact of death, they do blossom. When you’re making a painting, you set off with this blank canvas, something’s going to emerge out of the dirt, the crap that you put up there. You’ve just got to have faith that it’s going to come. It’s a very celebratory thing. I’m not ashamed of that. I wanted to do a body of work that didn’t apologise for that aspect of painting - especially for someone who’s done some pretty nerdy art.
Keith Tyson. Ikebana - Waterfall Stage (Boss Level), 2018. Oil on aluminium, 247.7 x 171.5 cm
VS: How did this Ikebana-inspired painting come about?
KT: It was probably 18 different paintings before it was this one. It was at a time when I wasn’t really sure what I was doing anyway. I started doing this gestural thing, this reading in it. And then I started seeing a form and that’s when I thought Ikebana, which is a complex form of Japanese flower-arranging, and got some maths for Ikebana, and put it in and got it to grow organically from the root. This one’s called Ikebana Waterfall Stage Boss Level. Waterfall stage is obviously the background. Then it reminded me a lot of the kind of Chinese ancient allegorical paintings about enlightenment. I went and found some of those.
VS: Who is this tiny figure that crops up at various points?
KT: It is taken from something called, I think, the Hunting of the Bull, it’s a set of Chinese plates from the sixth century. This guy is travelling along, he goes past a waterfall, sees a bull, chases the bull, then he transcends the bull. The bull would represent enlightenment. As an analogy with the painting, it’s about when you get to a point where you’re not trying any more and the painting is painting itself. But it was also a bit like a video game, with Super Mario and this (the top of the painting) is the boss level. What I’m trying to do is collide a series of different worldviews on to one canvas. I’m using the language of abstract expressionism, Ikebana, Chinese enlightenment to see if something comes out of that.
Keith Tyson. The Missing Piece, 2019. Oil on canvas, 78.6 x 63.1 cm
KT: What I like about it is that it doesn’t look like anyone else’s. It is what it is. That, to me, is exciting.
Someone once said to me, you’ve got lots of ideas. I said, ideas are easy if you’re willing to let go of the first one you had, and not identify it with who you are. I’m quite happy for the world to seep through me and for the work to just emerge.
VS: Have you got more flower paintings in you, or have you exhausted the topic?
KT: No, I’ve got a long way to go on this. I will do something until I’m not learning from it any more. The second that I’m going through the motions, I’ll stop.
VS: That’s very counter to the way some artists play the art market.
KT: Sure. I’ve never really been very good at that. I always changed it up when it was going well. But not out of any kind of stubborn resistance, just because I haven’t got any choice. I am literally incapable of going through the motions. I did four years in a shipyard, that’s it for me. I’m never going to do factory work again. And at the moment I’m still fascinated by the possibilities for what a still life painting could be. As soon as I think they’re not interesting any more, I’ll stop doing them and I’ll do something else.
^^^I think I basically pasted all of the interview here because it was all inspiring (but to refer back I should read the whole thing esp the beginning where he talked about his 'unconventional' way of going into the art world, not through art school or qualifications) but I just really liked how he talked about his work, and I felt like I related to how some works emerged - especially 'my ever changing moods' (that's exactly how Im doing my drawings right now) and also the mish-mash of ideas behind Ikebana Waterfall Stage (Boss Level) (I love the reference to gaming and borrowing from other images..) this interview was definitely encouraging/inspiring.
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and finally, in the midst of all this, I was also inspired by a video from the channel the art assignment (which is hosted by Sarah urist green who is an art curator and also the spouse of john green who hosts crash course, anyway both people I appreciate because I learn a lot from them) it was a video on the painting 'the dream' by Henri Rousseau, and what stood out to me in the video that makes me think about my own drawings is the overwhelming number of Things in this paintings, the way Sarah uncovers the several different animals and foliage in the work, is sort of how I wish people would look at my paintings, like there's always something to discover in the shadows, cause that's how I found those things in the first place... I also admired how Sarah describes that he was constantly being mocked or laughed at by his technique or unrealistic rendering, but he kept to it and this is how we ended up with these masterpieces, reminds me to just keep believing in what I feel is right for my work... its inspiring and I love the way artist and author craig daniel describes his style 'as if he paints in the language of nouns'..
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in terms of direct imagery in the drawing (not yet done at this point) I drew from two screenshots of the creature biting down on her finger in the film nausicaa, and the giant extinct moa from NZ because I was showing olive it as we were discussing giant extinct creatures/birds. anyway, I'll probably add images of that in my process post when I finish the drawing..
below is what it looks like now:
Why is this Woman in the Jungle?
The Dream, Henri Rousseau, 1910
in terms of direct imagery in the drawing (not yet done at this point) I drew from two screenshots of the creature biting down on her finger in the film nausicaa, and the giant extinct moa from NZ because I was showing olive it as we were discussing giant extinct creatures/birds. anyway, I'll probably add images of that in my process post when I finish the drawing..
below is what it looks like now:
Still, Still (cogito ergo sum)