Hollow.
Craving hunger, burning in the pit of my stomach. No, don’t give in. Be strong. More duct tape on the fridge. Close the door. Always closed. Someone look in and see her; save me from myself. No, it’s not self pity it’s empowerment. Control. Don’t succumb. So weak. So afraid to eat. Exhale. Press in. Fear: food, the devil; food, the only comfort. Fill up my wracked and empty self with something. ANYTHING. Stuffing in pieces. Dribbling out onto the floor. Trance. Can’t stop it. No control. Why is she doing that. Stop eating. STOP.
Consciousness fades back in too fast. Despair. Crumbs. Clean it up. Throw it all away. It didn’t happen. I didn’t slip. I'm strong. Stronger than food. Get it out. Out of me. JUST GET IT OUT. I just want to be free. I can see me. So light. Free. What am I now? Just trapped by my own neurosis. My own doing. Look in and see me. Save me from myself. Don’t let me succumb.
Obsession exposed.
My semester-long photography project started out as a cliché printed image of a peach sitting in the warm August light and ended up as a hand bound book that investigated an overpowering struggle with weight and food. The process of digging for a concept that I was passionate about and wanted to explore in great detail with no fear of what I might find and finally executing it is almost more important to me than the work itself. Creating that book was extremely cathartic, and allowed me to step outside of my obsession and approach it in an artistic manner that still incorporated all of the angst and hollowness that I felt. The book was successful as a series of photographs in the end result because I was so tied to the work and my whole self was in the process and execution. Art to me can never be half-hearted; it has to be an internally wrenching ordeal that sucks every bit of life out of your soul and puts it on paper, exposing your most vulnerable parts to strangers. However, I rarely start at this deep revealing level but instead slowly (and painfully) progress there.
I started the project i am trying with an undefined concept of expressing narrative through photos that explored the relationship between humans and inanimate objects, but with a lack of human form. This concept was very vague and had no grounding in something that I was passionate about or that was an issue that I could really delve into and get to the guts of. I started making photographic sketches of my concept to try and ground it into something more concrete, which is how I arrived at the horribly cliché and trite picture titled “Peach on a Staircase”. This would become my nickname in my photography class for the rest of the semester and would be referenced every time someone made bullshit art. However, this image holds great weight for me, for it was the marker in a change of thought -- of having the drive to search for something that held meaning and I was deeply tied to. Another one of the photographic sketches was of my hand smushing a tomato on my dirty and mismatched kitchen tile floor, which was the photo that pushed me into developing my project. I realized at that point that I kept moving back towards images that were self-portraiture and incorporated the concept of food or eating. Only when I moved outside of an aesthetic approach to making an image and instead captured a confrontation of my self with my self did the image hold significance. My obsession with food was unavoidable and I recognized that photographically exploring that obsession would be the strongest series I could make.
I continued with my photographic sketches, since that method of working allowed me to be able to get away from the technicalities of photography and not worry about the validity of the photo as art but instead as a tool to explore a concept. In the sketches I did over the next 4 weeks I pushed myself to reveal more and more to the camera about my neurosis. I photographed myself in my underwear, clutching folds of skin and pressing them against each other. I photographed myself sitting on the toilet after taking laxatives and pressing my stomach in in pain. I photographed myself screaming at my refrigerator. I photographed myself stuffing cake into my mouth and crying. I photographed my three scales. These sketches became a point from which I could concretely grasp the concept I almost had in order to start making decisions on how to focus it. I could then look through the sketches and pick out which elements were working in the photos to convey the struggle with weight and food and the resulting approach to my body.
All while I was working on these sketches I was referencing artists that dealt with body image. Researching the explorations that have preceded mine is always an important step in my artistic creation, for the work that I make will be viewed in reference to the existing work. I find that it also pushes me to explore other avenues of presenting the concept and innovative new ways of art making. Marilyn Minters photographs deal with sensuality and the underside of glamour, and in an indirect manner reference body image. Photographs such as Stuffed (2003) and Drool (2003) pushed me to investigate photographing my mouth;s relationship with food in an intensely uncomfortably personal manner. Without looking at her work, I wouldn’t have come up with extreme close-up’s of stuffing marshmallows into my mouth and gagging with my mouth full of lettuce. Her work also informed me of aesthetic decisions not to take to sexualize the documentary of eating/not eating. Messy porn (food fetish) formed a bracket on the other end of the spectrum of all the decisions not to take in completely fetishizing food and making it about sex, not a neurosis. However, looking at sites like www.sploshme,com showed me that fetishizing food could help me accomplish my goal of life revolving around food and the conflict of loving it, but being ashamed of it. These two components of my research were invaluable and the most influential on my finished product, for it formed a continuum on which I could place my own work and have it operate within an existing context but in an original manner.
Other artists that I looked at helped me to make more aesthetic decisions and less conceptual investigation. Cindy Sherman’s photos of vomit, referencing bulimia from the mid to late 1980’s, pushed me to explore images that were unsaleable to the viewer and intensely disturbing to view in their rawness and veracity. Her photos have a grittiness that I tried to incorporate into my own cleaner aesthetic to help reveal in a purely visual manner my concept of the conflict within the self. Jenny Saville’s work, which deals with the painterly depiction of folds of flesh in unnatural angles, helped me to see the path I could take in making an overweight body look even more disgusting. Combining these artists’ aesthetics with my more conceptual research, I had a firm foundation on which I could build my own project.
Once I finished exploring the information derived from my photographic sketches and research, I was ready to embark on making the final aesthetic decisions in expressing my concept that had become concrete. I chose from the start to present the final series of photos in a book format, for that format is much more personal than a print on a stark gallery wall. I decided upon the title of i am trying to make the subject matter more open-ended and accessible to more viewers. I think that the unfinished title sentence adds a dimensionality to each photograph that it would not have if I had titled it (for example) obsession. I knew that this project had to be a series of photos, for the repetitiveness is important; it visually represents the overwhelmingly inescapable obsession that invades my entire life. I was aiming for between 10 and 20 images, which would work in a narrative manner -- with a beginning, climax, and ending. I knew the images needed to have an interplay of zooming in and out, and display emotions that conflicted with one another in order to portray the complicated reality.
In order to successfully display all of these specifics, I needed a blank canvas with very few visual stimuli in order to purposefully focus the viewer. For that reason I chose white seamless with studio lighting, and decided to wear the same pink underwear in all the shots with minimal makeup, simple earrings and necklace, and no specific hairdo. At this point I was already visualizing how the images would work in the book and had decided on a specific size. I had also determined that the images would be cropped to the bleed on the fore-edge of the book in order to conceptually show that the book cannot completely encase the images. I also consciously chose each of the foods that would be portrayed in the shots; nothing that was photographed was to be accidental, for this project was intensely conceptual. In that manner, all the work had been done at this point, and execution was the only step left in realizing my vision.
The actual execution of i am trying took about 3 weeks, during which I was shooting, printing, reviewing, and re-shooting constantly. I immersed myself so completely in the process that I began to only be able to eat when I was shooting. To get the perfect shot of hungry eyes I fasted for three days and then shot myself in a state of utter exhaustion and unrefined hunger. During the process I was continually pushing myself to dig a little deeper, to reveal a bit more to the audience and completely rip off my protective shell. This wrenching confrontation was so personal that I found that I could only get to a deep personal level when I was completely alone, so all of the images were shot with a remote shutter release. Being in my apartment studio without any judging eyes allowed me to supercede conventions and norms and reach a point where the images because powerful in their rawness and originality.
When I had finished shooting, revising the images, laying them out in a format that conveyed the narrative I wanted, printed the images, and hand-bound the book I reached a point where I felt stronger than my neurosis. I had been able to take as much as I could out of me and present it visually for the world to see. Due to that I earned my second nickname in my photography class: balls of titanium steel. My professor commended me on being able to fearlessly expose my (in very many ways usually cliché) disorder in a fresh way that chronicled an obsession in a way that everyone could relate to.
The process of making the book, albeit painful, was therapeutic and cathartic in a way for it allowed me to jump headfirst into my neurosis and explore it objectively and emotionally through my photography. Also upon the completion of i am trying I felt a partial release of the pain and exhaustion and an inner torment that had completely enveloped me for an entire semester. My neurosis that for so long I hadn’t been able to acknowledge or explore had emerged in a powerfully emotional photography narrative. I finally reached a point in my development of an artist where I could reach that raw visceral part of my soul and expose it artistically. The development of reaching that point became intrinsically tied to I am trying through the process of developing my concept. The result book i am trying represented a huge leap in my artistic development as well as a raw exposure of an eating disorder and the accompanying neurosis.
4.25.2007
BREAKING VIOLINS IS FUN
I hate rules.
I hate uniformity and conformity and the fact that so many people believe that there is just a ‘wrong’ and a ‘right’ way to do things. I started playing the violin when I was four, and hated it with a passion from the moment I started. According to my teachers there was only ONE way to play correctly and I needed to perfect the art of mimesis. Even as a young and relatively obedient child, I thought that this was utter crap, and that I shouldn’t have to just regurgitate the bars of music in a dull and unoriginal manner. I wanted to dance with the violin, screech behind the bridge, and whack the belly to create a unique cacophony of sound. I hated how all of the Suzuki books had the same boring design on the cover of whirlie circles, and how all of the songs were the same as what everyone else played. My older sister played the violin and thrived on it, so my parents thought that I would as well. They bribed and cajoled me into practicing, giving me a doll if I could memorize a whole piece, a marshmallow for every bar I played correctly, and stickers for not throwing a temper tantrum. The only part I remember enjoying about the violin was making the most hideous sounds possible and breaking it.
Yes, I took that tiny childlike violin and leaned with all my weight on it, mesmerized as the fingerboard slowly cracked and the bridge snapped in half, a piece flying under the nearby table. Caught up in the destructive moment, I threw the violin against the wall and watched as it shattered into splintering pieces all over the carpet, making the whole scene look like a decimated village seen from far above. Now THAT was interesting to me; the jagged forms precisely summed up my antagonism to practicing. The act of breaking it was almost cathartic in retrospect, for after that day I was quite clear, even for a 6 year old, as to exactly how much I despised the violin. Breaking that violin was so liberating that I just had to add a little more oomph to that act, an encore to announce that it wasn’t a mistake or just an act of rebellion, but that I abhorred playing violin, so I broke not one, but two bows. Breaking the rules (and the instrument and accompanying parts) worked, because my parents finally let me quit.
My parents enrolled me in weaving, painting, ceramics, and sculpture classes through the local art center in an attempt to keep my life enriched with the arts, something that they apparently succeeded. I found that there was no right or wrong way to draw something, that experimentation and doing things the ‘wrong’ way was actually in many people’s eyes the ‘right’ way. Even within the more constructed disciplines, I saw technique not as a limitation or a rule, but as a tool to help me achieve my greater goal of expressing my concept. My life as a youngster was filled with artsy endeavors (I can’t really call myself an artist at the age of 10; I was no child prodigy) for fun, to distract myself from the atrocity of school. I dropped out of junior high twice, and although I wasn’t a rebellious teen with run-ins with the law, I was thoroughly fucked up in the head. Art was what helped me mature, to have a vent for all the teenage angst and raw pain that was constantly filling up my being. Art at that point was cathartic, personal, and for the sake of release, rather than creation within the realm of being an artist. Now I am an artist (or becoming one? I’m not quite sure) because it is the only way I can see my life. A lot of the work that I do is utter crap, just more visual noise. Occasionally, however, I create something that touches someone, which makes them understand something on a level that only art can.
It wasn’t until I came to college that my specific interest and a purpose to my art developed. My love for painting and its ability to ignore the physicality of real life drew me in immediately, and now most of my work is abstract and figurative. After a year of focusing my efforts on painting, I became drawn to digital photography partly because I learned to appreciate music and eventually love it in a way that intrinsically tied into visual arts. Music to me is uniquely artistic because it is creating a moment in time using time, and is amazing because a live performance (unless it is taped) will never occur in the exact same way ever again. Painting creates and captures a moment of time while photography selectively freezes an existing millisecond of time and lets it live on through eternity, and something insignificant becomes meaningful just through the choice to recreate it or capture it. This to me made my work more grounded and the content more available to the viewer. I began to explore street photography, and the process of charging a photo with narrative in a subtle and yet meaningful manner. My love of photography traces back to the first camera that my parents gave me around the time that I quit cello. It was a small red and blue rattly plastic point and shoot, but I loved it. I took pictures of everything, transfixed by the ability to compress anything onto a three by five piece of glossy paper. My focus and intent with photography has morphed over the years, but that feeling of peace and release when shooting hasn’t changed.
I suppose my art is a bit self-centered, for most of it deals with my own issues, insecurities, and events in my life. I try to make it ambiguous (but sometimes fail and make it atrociously vague- how dare an artist make vague work- oh the horror of it!) enough as to appeal to a wider audience, for a viewer to be able to find an element that they can identify with and walk away with a slightly different understanding of life. This purpose of my art to me is hugely different than it was a few years ago, when the purpose of my art was to shock, to hit the viewer over the head and acknowledge my teenage angst and rebellion. Now (at my mature and ripe age of 20-ha) I see that breaking of rules and doing things the wrong way just for the sake of itself is obnoxious and accomplishes nothing. Teenage angst and rebellion gets old after a few years, and is quite repetitive in its lack of originality. Visual art reveals what a viewer would not otherwise see, and has the ability to capture an element of emotion and life (conversely death) that connects the viewer and artist and opens up their consciousness.
I don’t even know how much I should reveal about myself, or about my motivation in making a lot of my art. Part of what I think makes some of my work interesting is that the meaning is ambiguous, my motivation for making it is a mystery, and that combination keeps the viewer’s gaze longer than if they knew all the answers. To me, the beauty of art is that it doesn’t readily present clear-cut black and white answers and easy resolutions, but instead probes the viewer to look more carefully at the issue or emotion and begin to be able to make their own personal opinion with the assistance of the art. If a viewer knows all of the artist’s motivations and understands clearly and articulately their stance and development from an incident to a specific piece of art then all of the ambiguity and probing of the viewer is lost. The art can still be ‘good’ (what defines good anyway—something with a complicated and deep conceptual basis or perhaps it is visually stimulating or maybe its just something that can stir the viewer in some manner) and can still evoke some response in the viewer, but it is not on the same level of lifting up the viewer to a new consciousness.
Graphic and web design doesn’t fit perfectly into the matrix created by my photography and oil painting, but instead I consider it an addendum. Graphic design takes everything else I do and compresses it into a more consumable product which many times is unfortunately also, constrained by the aesthetic and business needs of the client (I never did play well with others or really learn the beauty of compromise). I guess that I can justify my love for graphic design through the way that it is adding beauty and in short a pleasurable experience for the eye. The amount of advertising, logo design, magazine layout, product design, et cetera that we imbibe every day is overwhelming, and most of it is stupid and ugly. I guess that I am aiming to improve that, to give people something beautiful to look at that is part of their life and not set apart into the ‘art category’. In this way it is more accessible for people to consume art, and as like most artists, I want everyone to see my art. Art and creativity pervades almost every aspect of our life, and it is the goal of the artist to create something that accomplishes something, that moves a viewer, makes a space more beautiful, raises awareness, challenges the norms, or provides a cathartic release.
Breaking that violin was the first piece of art I created that accomplished something. This allowed me to make a statement and break away from convention. As an artist, I am always curious as to how my art affects the viewer, that is, if it makes any sort of impact on their self. For such a pivotal moment in my life, I had never gotten any feedback on my first ‘performance’ art, so I asked my mother what her reaction at the time had been (six year old memories aren’t always the most reliable accounts!). According to her recollection of events, I had leaned on the violin when putting it away (after a very uneventful hour of practicing for once!) and it just cracked a little, and was later fixed. However, she said that the bows that I broke were definitely cracked because of my hatred for practicing. She said that I would start throwing a temper tantrum, and then at the climax of screaming, whip my bow around until it whacked on the edge of the music stand, splintering the narrow rod of wood.
All this time, I had based my induction into the arts on that rebellious act of purposefully breaking the violin. Does that negate my whole development as an artist? Art to me is like a love affair - it doesn’t matter how I found it - but what happened afterwards. I can’t imagine existing without the cathartic release that art gives me, and the purpose and drive I have because of an almost primal need to create and express myself through visual art. Being an artist is integrated into every part of my life, and it is the one thing that wakes me and puts me to sleep. Sometimes at 2 am I will be lying in bed, trying to sleep, and an inexplicable urge will come over me to paint, to make something that describes a fleeting emotion or thought. If I couldn’t express that, and channel my creativity into something tangible and lasting, I feel like that I would start spinning and screaming. I wouldn’t be able to stop until I passed out from the sheer pain of not being able to let something out by flinging it onto the canvas, a tangible realization of life that nothing but art can bring out.
I hate uniformity and conformity and the fact that so many people believe that there is just a ‘wrong’ and a ‘right’ way to do things. I started playing the violin when I was four, and hated it with a passion from the moment I started. According to my teachers there was only ONE way to play correctly and I needed to perfect the art of mimesis. Even as a young and relatively obedient child, I thought that this was utter crap, and that I shouldn’t have to just regurgitate the bars of music in a dull and unoriginal manner. I wanted to dance with the violin, screech behind the bridge, and whack the belly to create a unique cacophony of sound. I hated how all of the Suzuki books had the same boring design on the cover of whirlie circles, and how all of the songs were the same as what everyone else played. My older sister played the violin and thrived on it, so my parents thought that I would as well. They bribed and cajoled me into practicing, giving me a doll if I could memorize a whole piece, a marshmallow for every bar I played correctly, and stickers for not throwing a temper tantrum. The only part I remember enjoying about the violin was making the most hideous sounds possible and breaking it.
Yes, I took that tiny childlike violin and leaned with all my weight on it, mesmerized as the fingerboard slowly cracked and the bridge snapped in half, a piece flying under the nearby table. Caught up in the destructive moment, I threw the violin against the wall and watched as it shattered into splintering pieces all over the carpet, making the whole scene look like a decimated village seen from far above. Now THAT was interesting to me; the jagged forms precisely summed up my antagonism to practicing. The act of breaking it was almost cathartic in retrospect, for after that day I was quite clear, even for a 6 year old, as to exactly how much I despised the violin. Breaking that violin was so liberating that I just had to add a little more oomph to that act, an encore to announce that it wasn’t a mistake or just an act of rebellion, but that I abhorred playing violin, so I broke not one, but two bows. Breaking the rules (and the instrument and accompanying parts) worked, because my parents finally let me quit.
My parents enrolled me in weaving, painting, ceramics, and sculpture classes through the local art center in an attempt to keep my life enriched with the arts, something that they apparently succeeded. I found that there was no right or wrong way to draw something, that experimentation and doing things the ‘wrong’ way was actually in many people’s eyes the ‘right’ way. Even within the more constructed disciplines, I saw technique not as a limitation or a rule, but as a tool to help me achieve my greater goal of expressing my concept. My life as a youngster was filled with artsy endeavors (I can’t really call myself an artist at the age of 10; I was no child prodigy) for fun, to distract myself from the atrocity of school. I dropped out of junior high twice, and although I wasn’t a rebellious teen with run-ins with the law, I was thoroughly fucked up in the head. Art was what helped me mature, to have a vent for all the teenage angst and raw pain that was constantly filling up my being. Art at that point was cathartic, personal, and for the sake of release, rather than creation within the realm of being an artist. Now I am an artist (or becoming one? I’m not quite sure) because it is the only way I can see my life. A lot of the work that I do is utter crap, just more visual noise. Occasionally, however, I create something that touches someone, which makes them understand something on a level that only art can.
It wasn’t until I came to college that my specific interest and a purpose to my art developed. My love for painting and its ability to ignore the physicality of real life drew me in immediately, and now most of my work is abstract and figurative. After a year of focusing my efforts on painting, I became drawn to digital photography partly because I learned to appreciate music and eventually love it in a way that intrinsically tied into visual arts. Music to me is uniquely artistic because it is creating a moment in time using time, and is amazing because a live performance (unless it is taped) will never occur in the exact same way ever again. Painting creates and captures a moment of time while photography selectively freezes an existing millisecond of time and lets it live on through eternity, and something insignificant becomes meaningful just through the choice to recreate it or capture it. This to me made my work more grounded and the content more available to the viewer. I began to explore street photography, and the process of charging a photo with narrative in a subtle and yet meaningful manner. My love of photography traces back to the first camera that my parents gave me around the time that I quit cello. It was a small red and blue rattly plastic point and shoot, but I loved it. I took pictures of everything, transfixed by the ability to compress anything onto a three by five piece of glossy paper. My focus and intent with photography has morphed over the years, but that feeling of peace and release when shooting hasn’t changed.
I suppose my art is a bit self-centered, for most of it deals with my own issues, insecurities, and events in my life. I try to make it ambiguous (but sometimes fail and make it atrociously vague- how dare an artist make vague work- oh the horror of it!) enough as to appeal to a wider audience, for a viewer to be able to find an element that they can identify with and walk away with a slightly different understanding of life. This purpose of my art to me is hugely different than it was a few years ago, when the purpose of my art was to shock, to hit the viewer over the head and acknowledge my teenage angst and rebellion. Now (at my mature and ripe age of 20-ha) I see that breaking of rules and doing things the wrong way just for the sake of itself is obnoxious and accomplishes nothing. Teenage angst and rebellion gets old after a few years, and is quite repetitive in its lack of originality. Visual art reveals what a viewer would not otherwise see, and has the ability to capture an element of emotion and life (conversely death) that connects the viewer and artist and opens up their consciousness.
I don’t even know how much I should reveal about myself, or about my motivation in making a lot of my art. Part of what I think makes some of my work interesting is that the meaning is ambiguous, my motivation for making it is a mystery, and that combination keeps the viewer’s gaze longer than if they knew all the answers. To me, the beauty of art is that it doesn’t readily present clear-cut black and white answers and easy resolutions, but instead probes the viewer to look more carefully at the issue or emotion and begin to be able to make their own personal opinion with the assistance of the art. If a viewer knows all of the artist’s motivations and understands clearly and articulately their stance and development from an incident to a specific piece of art then all of the ambiguity and probing of the viewer is lost. The art can still be ‘good’ (what defines good anyway—something with a complicated and deep conceptual basis or perhaps it is visually stimulating or maybe its just something that can stir the viewer in some manner) and can still evoke some response in the viewer, but it is not on the same level of lifting up the viewer to a new consciousness.
Graphic and web design doesn’t fit perfectly into the matrix created by my photography and oil painting, but instead I consider it an addendum. Graphic design takes everything else I do and compresses it into a more consumable product which many times is unfortunately also, constrained by the aesthetic and business needs of the client (I never did play well with others or really learn the beauty of compromise). I guess that I can justify my love for graphic design through the way that it is adding beauty and in short a pleasurable experience for the eye. The amount of advertising, logo design, magazine layout, product design, et cetera that we imbibe every day is overwhelming, and most of it is stupid and ugly. I guess that I am aiming to improve that, to give people something beautiful to look at that is part of their life and not set apart into the ‘art category’. In this way it is more accessible for people to consume art, and as like most artists, I want everyone to see my art. Art and creativity pervades almost every aspect of our life, and it is the goal of the artist to create something that accomplishes something, that moves a viewer, makes a space more beautiful, raises awareness, challenges the norms, or provides a cathartic release.
Breaking that violin was the first piece of art I created that accomplished something. This allowed me to make a statement and break away from convention. As an artist, I am always curious as to how my art affects the viewer, that is, if it makes any sort of impact on their self. For such a pivotal moment in my life, I had never gotten any feedback on my first ‘performance’ art, so I asked my mother what her reaction at the time had been (six year old memories aren’t always the most reliable accounts!). According to her recollection of events, I had leaned on the violin when putting it away (after a very uneventful hour of practicing for once!) and it just cracked a little, and was later fixed. However, she said that the bows that I broke were definitely cracked because of my hatred for practicing. She said that I would start throwing a temper tantrum, and then at the climax of screaming, whip my bow around until it whacked on the edge of the music stand, splintering the narrow rod of wood.
All this time, I had based my induction into the arts on that rebellious act of purposefully breaking the violin. Does that negate my whole development as an artist? Art to me is like a love affair - it doesn’t matter how I found it - but what happened afterwards. I can’t imagine existing without the cathartic release that art gives me, and the purpose and drive I have because of an almost primal need to create and express myself through visual art. Being an artist is integrated into every part of my life, and it is the one thing that wakes me and puts me to sleep. Sometimes at 2 am I will be lying in bed, trying to sleep, and an inexplicable urge will come over me to paint, to make something that describes a fleeting emotion or thought. If I couldn’t express that, and channel my creativity into something tangible and lasting, I feel like that I would start spinning and screaming. I wouldn’t be able to stop until I passed out from the sheer pain of not being able to let something out by flinging it onto the canvas, a tangible realization of life that nothing but art can bring out.
“Even my teeth are a little phallic” -Aubrey Beardsley
Decadent. Grotesque. Perverse. Voyeuristic. Inimitable. Satanist. Erotic. Groundbreaking. No number of words will ever be able to encompass the eccentricity of Aubrey Beardsley both as a character and an artist. Aubrey Beardsley’s “art is the principal product of the time, perhaps the only characteristic product of which we never weary, the suggestions ad beauty being as inexhaustible as the resource that created them. His fame as an artist is uncontestable, and it owes less to legend and a tragic ending than that of the others” (Burdett 99). Considered to be le enfant terrible of the Art Nouveau movement, an imp of the perverse, an eclectic voyeur, he achieved the fame and legend of being a revolutionary perverse artist. He lived a short life, yet made a lasting mark on not only the art of the time but also the culture of the 1890’s. His artwork infiltrated the art world and popular culture of Europe at the time and made a distinct statement about culture and sexuality. He saw the world through a lens of sexual tension and obsession, and created intricate drawings that magnified the fetishism of voyeurism and exploited the powerful draw that sexual perverseness holds over us. “I have one aim – the grotesque. If I am not grotesque I am nothing” (Aubrey Beardsley). And grotesque he was.
In order to understand Beardsley’s art one has to know the artist himself, for his character was intimately tied to his work. His artistic development and production was condensed into his short life-span, causing him to start commissions as young as 9 years old and produce a myriad of illustrations, publications, books, and other commissioned artwork before he died at the young as of 25. He knew from the age of 7 that he would die at an early age from tuberculosis, and approached life with a vigor and fervor to produce and live as much as possible. “He lived his adult life in dread of immediate death and in a terrible artistic hurry: to discover his proper medium and create his individual style (both of which proved revolutionary in their effects) and then simply, in obedience to his imagination, to create – in time” (Brophy 5). He worked at a feverish pace, spurred on by his desire to reveal a grotesque and ‘unmentionable’ version of eroticism that would shock, intrigue and captive viewers over a century later.
Beardsley was a self made artist, starting commissions at the early age of 9 and never having more than a few months of formal art training. It is due to this (and his eccentricities) and his unique perverse way of viewing the world that he was able to produce such aesthetically and conceptually revolutionary work. “[He] so cultivated this aspect of his persona [that is, erotic mania so noticeable in gifted consumptives] that eroticism became the dominant emotion and significance in life to him” (Calloway 160). This partly arose from the fact that he was diagnosed with tuberculosis as a young child, ad “he lived in feverish fantasies arising from illness and from deprivation, and had, he realized, an obsessive intellectual interest in sexual matters” (Weintraub 135). Beardsley was an eccentric character, an aspect of his personality that he flaunted and exploited to an extreme. His art and his life almost became one in a sense, because both were obsessed with the grotesque and unabashed to reveal its true nature (or himself). He was self educated and well read on the erotic arts of ancient Greece, Japan, and 18th century France (Calloway 160). Eroticism fascinated him, and he immersed his life in it (sleeping with prostitutes and having an ambiguous sexual orientation/genitalia) while exposing it to the public through his illustrations for books, publications, and general commissions. Many considered his work to border on Satanist, due to its elaborate imagery of evil creatures and amoral narratives. That people thought this of his work amused Beardsley, for he loved exploiting his knowledge of the perverse by exposing it (Calloway 168).
Beardsley stands apart from other artists with work that is highly eroticized and sexualized because of his aesthetic and presentation. He was able to take pornographic material and concepts and depict it in such a way that it could be lifted up and argued for being ‘fine art’ (Pease 73). Beardsley might have been young and untrained, but no critic doubted his complete “formal mastery over the material” that he worked with (Pease 73). His aesthetic of working almost entirely with black ink on white paper and incorporating sensuous details and graphic motifs that were avant-garde. As one of his close friends stated, “he has decorated white sheets of paper as they have never been decorated before” (Calloway 219). He created narratives that were perverted beyond what most people at the time would ever admit to imagining and depicted them in such a way that were grotesque and captivating simultaneously. It is largely due to this that his “imagery, unlike that of almost any other ‘historic’ artist … was perceived as something subversive in itself and fascinating, not least for the way in which his characters seemed to offer role-models of over sexuality, sexual ambiguity, and self-proclaiming decadence” (Calloway 218). His work was controversial, but it was artistic and developed thoroughly to the point where it was “art” and accessible to more than just the ‘scum of the earth’ who look at pornographic material. It made its way into the mainstream of media being distributed to society, which shows how desperate the public was for an artist such as Beardsley who revealed voyeurism, perversity, obscenity, and fetishism for their true innate qualities.
Although perversity burrowed its way into most of his work, Beardsley’s Lysistrata drawings are exacerbated in their sexualized and obscene imagery. This group of eight images that were commissioned to accompany a play displayed a freerer side to Beardsley, one less contained by ornamentalism but that displays “an extraordinary frank and free sexuality with a bold simplified, almost abstracted quality of drawing” (Calloway 171). Influence can be seen in this work from his studies of Greek vases and the sexualized imagery depicted on them. These illustrations display enlarged genitalia, women masturbating, sodomy, and women stroking one another. These works were so highly controversial that they were not published until 1966, and by that time one of the drawings had burned in a fire, and no sketches of that work were left. As much as these drawings were free and full of Beardsley’s character, they still adhered to the content of the play, for “we can still catch glimpses of the ribald melancholy, the significant buffoonery, and the grotesque animality which are among the ingredients of the play” (Calloway 174). This shows his prowess at picking elements from plays or texts and illustrating them with his own voyeuristic style, which demonstrates how he was able to financially survive as an artist but also not lose his soul and creativity to his clients. Especially with these illustrations his voyeurism is exceedingly present, while “permits him to observe more clearly and above all to address his images to his audience” (Fletcher 27). He thus makes his perversity available and open to the viewer.
Lysistrata shielding her Coynte; illustration for Lysistrata. Pen and Ink. V&A, Harari Collection.
Beardsley takes all of the concepts and exaggerations presented in the Lysistrata illustrations and pushes them farther in The Impatient Adulterer, one of Beardsley’s works that critics consider to be the most perverse in nature. This drawing, like many of his others, reveals a narrative of voyeurism that is sleazy and of questionable morality. However, as with all of his work it is “beautifully executed in such technique and medium as only [he] was master of, yet devilish in subject” (Calloway 180). The man’s features are distorted to an extent where he is sleazy and foul, obscene in his voyeurism and masturbation. This work differs from Lysistrata and other similar works by Beardsley because among those even with morally questionable fetishes exposed the pictures hold an elegance and beauty that makes the narrative less vulgar. In this illustration though the man’s toes are deformed, his legs are awkwardly shaped, his penis is semi flaccid, and his facial structure resembles that of a caveman. Beardsley imparts almost no decadent ornamentation to the illustration, stripping the work to the bare essentials of nastiness and vulgarity.
The Impatient Adulterer, 1896; illustration for the Sixth Satire of Juvenal. Pen and Ink. V&A, Harari Collection.
Beardsley’s highly sexualized work is important not only for its artist value but its worth as a means of examining the artist himself and the culture surrounding him. His work shows how the culture of the 1980’s idealized the strong man with a large erect penis and eroticized the masturbating young female, and how starkly differentiated the gender roles were in society. However he appears to be mocking those roles, enlarging men’s genitalia to enormous proportions and overly sexualizing groups of young women. He saw the world through his own lens, and one can see that in merely his choice of imagery in depicting narratives. “Images such as fetus, dwarf, hermaphrodite; satyr and satyra; effeminized men; aggressive women; Pierrots; the toilet scene, always from the point of the voyeur – all those stress isolation, exclusion, passivity; and much criticism relates them to Beardsley’s sense of his own exclusion from life’s feast” (Fletcher 27). Due to his poor health his a large part of his life was spent in confinement or in a sickbed Beardsley was eclectic and isolated, yet took that isolation and managed to create thought provoking and groundbreaking work that showed a completely avant-garde aesthetic view towards society. As critic Fletcher says, “Beardsley was essentially eclectic: He had no facility, no admiration for nature-pantheism, the superstition of the cultivated classes (21). Beardsley was a true voyeur, a true outsider looking in and seeing things from a perspective that no artist in Europe at that time could even imagine. He was able to reach his audience by presenting such innovative and controversial work because of its highly sexualized aesthetics. Society at that time was fascinated yet still in fear of the power of ‘sex’. Beardsley’s work satisfied this primal need within them to find and see the true nature of perversity and fetishism.
An eccentric to his death, Beardsley’s work and attitude towards overtly sexual and grotesque work changed when he knew that his death was imminent and within sight. Three years before working on the Lysistrata series and other highly grotesque works such as The Impatient Adulterer he was given five years to live by his doctors, and he worked frantically. As one friend remarked, he saw “his ambitions trapped in the coffin of his worn-out young body” (Weintraub 121). In those last five years of his life Beardsley lived and created work that addressed the whole spectrum of sexuality. He stayed strongly attached to one specific vantage point for short periods of time, mimicking his new artistic habit of “taking up new projects with enormous enthusiasm, only to tire of them quickly and abandon all thought of seeing them through” (176 Calloway). Early in his career he was condemned as a Satanist, and then at the end of his life he “felt the inescapable pull of a strongly developed religious sentiment… and the Catholic Church” (Calloway 160) and he joined the Church before his death. This complete turnaround in his view towards morality and sin is seen in his plea for his editor to destroy all of his vulgar works:
“Jesus is our Lord & Judge
Dear Friend
I implore you to destroy all copies of Lysistrata & bad drawings. Show this to Pollitt & conjure him to do same. By all that is holy – all obscene drawings.
Aubrey Beardsley
In my death agony” (Weintraub 258).
One cannot know if this was truly how he felt or if it was a delusion caused by the tuberculosis and his imminent death, yet the fact remains that he wanted to obliterate a lifetime of work. Beardsley was a true eccentric up to the very end, creating an unforgettable aura of artistic unconventionality and avant-garde genius.
Upon Beardsley’s young death at the age of 25 art critics and the art community as a whole saw the tremendous influence he had had on the Art-Neauveau movement in Europe. Immediately upon his death critics began to categorize him, and “he was simultaneously perceived by some critics to be an ornament to the increasingly wholesome and respectable catalogue of … publications, whilst for others he remained an arch-degenerate, a Decadent forever mired” (Calloway 208). For some his turnaround in the last years of his life vindicated him and made his art therefore less controversial and forgivable for its lack of morality. Others still saw him as a master of the medium and innovative in his vision but overly grotesque and darkened by his eccentric life that so often led to rumor and scandal.
Most critics agreed on the fact that with Beardsley’s death the art community and art as a movement had been drastically changed. The most radical and leading figure was gone, and his work was so unique that no one could come close to producing the avant-garde work that he illustrated. “Dandyism is the last glimmer of heroism amid decadence, like the sunset of a dying star, it is glorious, without heat, and full of melancholy” (Baudelaire). When Beardsley died, much of the decadence seen in the art at that time disappeared, for he so embodied the entire Aesthetic Movement. Beardsley was the epitome of a dandy in his day, and when he died, so did that “star” of heroism, that essence of radical society at the time. With his death and in the years that followed, critics and the public alike came to recognize the deep imprint he made upon art and appreciated him not only as an eccentric and almost mythic figure in the art world but as a true master and creative genius.
Aubrey Beardsley blew open the possibilities for expression of perversity and fetishism by coupling it with his unique aesthetic and producing avant-garde images. His work is still relevant to today’s society, as it still comments on gender roles and forces viewers to establish their opinions regarding grotesque sexual imagery. His work has sustained its power because his “reputation never suffered that near total eclipse that dimmed the glorious figures of the Victorian era” (Calloway 216). Beardsley as a man is almost mythic due to the extent of his eccentricity, mysterious aura surrounding his sexuality, his short life, and his self proclaimed grotesque interests. However interesting he is as a character though, his work has the depth and clarity to stand alone without the presence of an esteemed and respectable artist. His work was revolutionary at the time, and he completely shifted the direction of image aesthetics because his work and subject matter became so popular. Controversy always draws attention and inspection, and Beardsley’s work at its nascence did just that and over a century later they can still spark the same debate. Beardsley went through so many cycles and periods throughout his short life and produced such a range of work that it is even more of a shame that his life was ended at 25. We can only wonder what lens he would have seen later society through and how that art would have affected us.
Works Cited
Beardsley, Aubrey. The Story of Venus and Tannhauser: A Romantic Novel. London: Tandem Books. 1967.
Brophy, Brigid. Beardsley and his world. New York: Harmony Books. 1976.
Burdett, Osbert. The Beardsley Period: An Essay in Perspective. New York: Boni and Liveright. 1925.
Calloway, Stephen. Aubrey Beardsley. New York: Harry N. Adams Inc., Publishers. 1998.
Fletcher, Ian. Aubrey Beardsley. Boston: G.K. Hall & Co. 1987.
Pease, Allison. Modernism, Mass Culture, and the Aesthetics of Obscenity. UK: Cambridge University Press. 2000.
Reade, Brian. Aubrey Beardsley. London: Victoria & Albert Museum. 1967.
Weintraub, Stanley. Aubrey Beardsley: Imp of the Perverse. USA: Stanley Weintraub. 1976.
In order to understand Beardsley’s art one has to know the artist himself, for his character was intimately tied to his work. His artistic development and production was condensed into his short life-span, causing him to start commissions as young as 9 years old and produce a myriad of illustrations, publications, books, and other commissioned artwork before he died at the young as of 25. He knew from the age of 7 that he would die at an early age from tuberculosis, and approached life with a vigor and fervor to produce and live as much as possible. “He lived his adult life in dread of immediate death and in a terrible artistic hurry: to discover his proper medium and create his individual style (both of which proved revolutionary in their effects) and then simply, in obedience to his imagination, to create – in time” (Brophy 5). He worked at a feverish pace, spurred on by his desire to reveal a grotesque and ‘unmentionable’ version of eroticism that would shock, intrigue and captive viewers over a century later.
Beardsley was a self made artist, starting commissions at the early age of 9 and never having more than a few months of formal art training. It is due to this (and his eccentricities) and his unique perverse way of viewing the world that he was able to produce such aesthetically and conceptually revolutionary work. “[He] so cultivated this aspect of his persona [that is, erotic mania so noticeable in gifted consumptives] that eroticism became the dominant emotion and significance in life to him” (Calloway 160). This partly arose from the fact that he was diagnosed with tuberculosis as a young child, ad “he lived in feverish fantasies arising from illness and from deprivation, and had, he realized, an obsessive intellectual interest in sexual matters” (Weintraub 135). Beardsley was an eccentric character, an aspect of his personality that he flaunted and exploited to an extreme. His art and his life almost became one in a sense, because both were obsessed with the grotesque and unabashed to reveal its true nature (or himself). He was self educated and well read on the erotic arts of ancient Greece, Japan, and 18th century France (Calloway 160). Eroticism fascinated him, and he immersed his life in it (sleeping with prostitutes and having an ambiguous sexual orientation/genitalia) while exposing it to the public through his illustrations for books, publications, and general commissions. Many considered his work to border on Satanist, due to its elaborate imagery of evil creatures and amoral narratives. That people thought this of his work amused Beardsley, for he loved exploiting his knowledge of the perverse by exposing it (Calloway 168).
Beardsley stands apart from other artists with work that is highly eroticized and sexualized because of his aesthetic and presentation. He was able to take pornographic material and concepts and depict it in such a way that it could be lifted up and argued for being ‘fine art’ (Pease 73). Beardsley might have been young and untrained, but no critic doubted his complete “formal mastery over the material” that he worked with (Pease 73). His aesthetic of working almost entirely with black ink on white paper and incorporating sensuous details and graphic motifs that were avant-garde. As one of his close friends stated, “he has decorated white sheets of paper as they have never been decorated before” (Calloway 219). He created narratives that were perverted beyond what most people at the time would ever admit to imagining and depicted them in such a way that were grotesque and captivating simultaneously. It is largely due to this that his “imagery, unlike that of almost any other ‘historic’ artist … was perceived as something subversive in itself and fascinating, not least for the way in which his characters seemed to offer role-models of over sexuality, sexual ambiguity, and self-proclaiming decadence” (Calloway 218). His work was controversial, but it was artistic and developed thoroughly to the point where it was “art” and accessible to more than just the ‘scum of the earth’ who look at pornographic material. It made its way into the mainstream of media being distributed to society, which shows how desperate the public was for an artist such as Beardsley who revealed voyeurism, perversity, obscenity, and fetishism for their true innate qualities.
Although perversity burrowed its way into most of his work, Beardsley’s Lysistrata drawings are exacerbated in their sexualized and obscene imagery. This group of eight images that were commissioned to accompany a play displayed a freerer side to Beardsley, one less contained by ornamentalism but that displays “an extraordinary frank and free sexuality with a bold simplified, almost abstracted quality of drawing” (Calloway 171). Influence can be seen in this work from his studies of Greek vases and the sexualized imagery depicted on them. These illustrations display enlarged genitalia, women masturbating, sodomy, and women stroking one another. These works were so highly controversial that they were not published until 1966, and by that time one of the drawings had burned in a fire, and no sketches of that work were left. As much as these drawings were free and full of Beardsley’s character, they still adhered to the content of the play, for “we can still catch glimpses of the ribald melancholy, the significant buffoonery, and the grotesque animality which are among the ingredients of the play” (Calloway 174). This shows his prowess at picking elements from plays or texts and illustrating them with his own voyeuristic style, which demonstrates how he was able to financially survive as an artist but also not lose his soul and creativity to his clients. Especially with these illustrations his voyeurism is exceedingly present, while “permits him to observe more clearly and above all to address his images to his audience” (Fletcher 27). He thus makes his perversity available and open to the viewer. In this example of Lysistrata shielding her Coynte (1896) one can see almost all of Beardsley’s prowesses and eccentricities as an artist present in the imagery. There is less ornamentalism in the piece, allowing it to breathe and more meanings to reside within the image. He leaves some of the narrative oven to the viewer to fill in, which leads to its relationship to pornography. Lysistrata is touching a giant erect penis while masturbating, which in a modern pornography magazine would be obscene and graphic; however, with Beardsley’s aesthetics and manner of depicting the image, it strikes the viewer as eccentric and grotesque fine art. His attention to detail and the overall flow of the composition makes the piece deliberate in every aspect, which in a manner authenticates the image as art. As with almost all of his voyeuristic pieces Lysistrata’s gaze doesn’t meet the viewer, instead she is caught in a moment of her own, making us as viewers voyeurs as well.
Lysistrata shielding her Coynte; illustration for Lysistrata. Pen and Ink. V&A, Harari Collection.
Beardsley takes all of the concepts and exaggerations presented in the Lysistrata illustrations and pushes them farther in The Impatient Adulterer, one of Beardsley’s works that critics consider to be the most perverse in nature. This drawing, like many of his others, reveals a narrative of voyeurism that is sleazy and of questionable morality. However, as with all of his work it is “beautifully executed in such technique and medium as only [he] was master of, yet devilish in subject” (Calloway 180). The man’s features are distorted to an extent where he is sleazy and foul, obscene in his voyeurism and masturbation. This work differs from Lysistrata and other similar works by Beardsley because among those even with morally questionable fetishes exposed the pictures hold an elegance and beauty that makes the narrative less vulgar. In this illustration though the man’s toes are deformed, his legs are awkwardly shaped, his penis is semi flaccid, and his facial structure resembles that of a caveman. Beardsley imparts almost no decadent ornamentation to the illustration, stripping the work to the bare essentials of nastiness and vulgarity.
The Impatient Adulterer, 1896; illustration for the Sixth Satire of Juvenal. Pen and Ink. V&A, Harari Collection.
Beardsley’s highly sexualized work is important not only for its artist value but its worth as a means of examining the artist himself and the culture surrounding him. His work shows how the culture of the 1980’s idealized the strong man with a large erect penis and eroticized the masturbating young female, and how starkly differentiated the gender roles were in society. However he appears to be mocking those roles, enlarging men’s genitalia to enormous proportions and overly sexualizing groups of young women. He saw the world through his own lens, and one can see that in merely his choice of imagery in depicting narratives. “Images such as fetus, dwarf, hermaphrodite; satyr and satyra; effeminized men; aggressive women; Pierrots; the toilet scene, always from the point of the voyeur – all those stress isolation, exclusion, passivity; and much criticism relates them to Beardsley’s sense of his own exclusion from life’s feast” (Fletcher 27). Due to his poor health his a large part of his life was spent in confinement or in a sickbed Beardsley was eclectic and isolated, yet took that isolation and managed to create thought provoking and groundbreaking work that showed a completely avant-garde aesthetic view towards society. As critic Fletcher says, “Beardsley was essentially eclectic: He had no facility, no admiration for nature-pantheism, the superstition of the cultivated classes (21). Beardsley was a true voyeur, a true outsider looking in and seeing things from a perspective that no artist in Europe at that time could even imagine. He was able to reach his audience by presenting such innovative and controversial work because of its highly sexualized aesthetics. Society at that time was fascinated yet still in fear of the power of ‘sex’. Beardsley’s work satisfied this primal need within them to find and see the true nature of perversity and fetishism.
An eccentric to his death, Beardsley’s work and attitude towards overtly sexual and grotesque work changed when he knew that his death was imminent and within sight. Three years before working on the Lysistrata series and other highly grotesque works such as The Impatient Adulterer he was given five years to live by his doctors, and he worked frantically. As one friend remarked, he saw “his ambitions trapped in the coffin of his worn-out young body” (Weintraub 121). In those last five years of his life Beardsley lived and created work that addressed the whole spectrum of sexuality. He stayed strongly attached to one specific vantage point for short periods of time, mimicking his new artistic habit of “taking up new projects with enormous enthusiasm, only to tire of them quickly and abandon all thought of seeing them through” (176 Calloway). Early in his career he was condemned as a Satanist, and then at the end of his life he “felt the inescapable pull of a strongly developed religious sentiment… and the Catholic Church” (Calloway 160) and he joined the Church before his death. This complete turnaround in his view towards morality and sin is seen in his plea for his editor to destroy all of his vulgar works:
“Jesus is our Lord & Judge
Dear Friend
I implore you to destroy all copies of Lysistrata & bad drawings. Show this to Pollitt & conjure him to do same. By all that is holy – all obscene drawings.
Aubrey Beardsley
In my death agony” (Weintraub 258).
One cannot know if this was truly how he felt or if it was a delusion caused by the tuberculosis and his imminent death, yet the fact remains that he wanted to obliterate a lifetime of work. Beardsley was a true eccentric up to the very end, creating an unforgettable aura of artistic unconventionality and avant-garde genius.
Upon Beardsley’s young death at the age of 25 art critics and the art community as a whole saw the tremendous influence he had had on the Art-Neauveau movement in Europe. Immediately upon his death critics began to categorize him, and “he was simultaneously perceived by some critics to be an ornament to the increasingly wholesome and respectable catalogue of … publications, whilst for others he remained an arch-degenerate, a Decadent forever mired” (Calloway 208). For some his turnaround in the last years of his life vindicated him and made his art therefore less controversial and forgivable for its lack of morality. Others still saw him as a master of the medium and innovative in his vision but overly grotesque and darkened by his eccentric life that so often led to rumor and scandal.
Most critics agreed on the fact that with Beardsley’s death the art community and art as a movement had been drastically changed. The most radical and leading figure was gone, and his work was so unique that no one could come close to producing the avant-garde work that he illustrated. “Dandyism is the last glimmer of heroism amid decadence, like the sunset of a dying star, it is glorious, without heat, and full of melancholy” (Baudelaire). When Beardsley died, much of the decadence seen in the art at that time disappeared, for he so embodied the entire Aesthetic Movement. Beardsley was the epitome of a dandy in his day, and when he died, so did that “star” of heroism, that essence of radical society at the time. With his death and in the years that followed, critics and the public alike came to recognize the deep imprint he made upon art and appreciated him not only as an eccentric and almost mythic figure in the art world but as a true master and creative genius.
Aubrey Beardsley blew open the possibilities for expression of perversity and fetishism by coupling it with his unique aesthetic and producing avant-garde images. His work is still relevant to today’s society, as it still comments on gender roles and forces viewers to establish their opinions regarding grotesque sexual imagery. His work has sustained its power because his “reputation never suffered that near total eclipse that dimmed the glorious figures of the Victorian era” (Calloway 216). Beardsley as a man is almost mythic due to the extent of his eccentricity, mysterious aura surrounding his sexuality, his short life, and his self proclaimed grotesque interests. However interesting he is as a character though, his work has the depth and clarity to stand alone without the presence of an esteemed and respectable artist. His work was revolutionary at the time, and he completely shifted the direction of image aesthetics because his work and subject matter became so popular. Controversy always draws attention and inspection, and Beardsley’s work at its nascence did just that and over a century later they can still spark the same debate. Beardsley went through so many cycles and periods throughout his short life and produced such a range of work that it is even more of a shame that his life was ended at 25. We can only wonder what lens he would have seen later society through and how that art would have affected us.
Works Cited
Beardsley, Aubrey. The Story of Venus and Tannhauser: A Romantic Novel. London: Tandem Books. 1967.
Brophy, Brigid. Beardsley and his world. New York: Harmony Books. 1976.
Burdett, Osbert. The Beardsley Period: An Essay in Perspective. New York: Boni and Liveright. 1925.
Calloway, Stephen. Aubrey Beardsley. New York: Harry N. Adams Inc., Publishers. 1998.
Fletcher, Ian. Aubrey Beardsley. Boston: G.K. Hall & Co. 1987.
Pease, Allison. Modernism, Mass Culture, and the Aesthetics of Obscenity. UK: Cambridge University Press. 2000.
Reade, Brian. Aubrey Beardsley. London: Victoria & Albert Museum. 1967.
Weintraub, Stanley. Aubrey Beardsley: Imp of the Perverse. USA: Stanley Weintraub. 1976.
4.16.2007
David Meyer! Tali Tadmor!
Let me start out by saying that this is a very biased review of David and Tali's performance tonight. David is one of my dearest friends and I consider him to be an amazingly talented cellist. The program was varied and emotional, with a depth and clarity that showcased both performer's talent. My favorite piece was Paganini's Variations on One String, which I found to be absolutely silly and ridiculous, while still embedding some deep emotional phrases that gives the piece brevity. The interplay between pianist and cellist was superb on this piece, and it was a fabulous finale to the concert.
As always during classical concerts I found myself scribbling down ideas for art projects and epiphanies (of sorts) about my life. Good classical music always brings things out in me that i would not otherwise discover.
Here's the flyer for their concert (by yours truly!)
4.12.2007
an art vent session....
Lately in Roski there has been disagreements within students and faculty about the merit of graphic design work in comparison to more traditional "fine art". This argument quite honestly pisses me off because people get so high and mighty on their "fine art" pedestal that they limit the directions that art can take just because of a (quite weak in reality) historical precedent.
I am not personally involved in the debate or matter so will not directly reference it because that isn't the point. The importance of this argument still being had at this point in art's history is ridiculous to me. to not think that a Fine Art show couldn't have graphic work in it is preposterous. If the complexity and innovativness of the visual matter, the cocneptual grounds on which the work lies, the style and how it relates to form and back to the concept is EQUAL in two works and one is a painting and anohter is a graphic text layout, but the graphic peice gets left out because it isn't "Fine Art".
I think its a good thing that when im mad i dont fester. I do something to fix it. It's grandiose but dammit im gonna try.
I am not personally involved in the debate or matter so will not directly reference it because that isn't the point. The importance of this argument still being had at this point in art's history is ridiculous to me. to not think that a Fine Art show couldn't have graphic work in it is preposterous. If the complexity and innovativness of the visual matter, the cocneptual grounds on which the work lies, the style and how it relates to form and back to the concept is EQUAL in two works and one is a painting and anohter is a graphic text layout, but the graphic peice gets left out because it isn't "Fine Art".
I think its a good thing that when im mad i dont fester. I do something to fix it. It's grandiose but dammit im gonna try.
www.shinyshiny.tv
at first look shinyshiny doesnt look like it is in any way connected to art in any manner. However, the way that I visually asess the world is by critiquing the design of objects in our environment. I can't count how many times I have almost rearended someone because I was gawking at some awful lettering on a store or being entranced by a store facade design. Design to me is an art form that searches for ways to artistically express a concept in a way that is easily accessible to the viewerm, ergonomical, and innovative in its styling and function. And so often its so awful, and in many ways that has become my mission in my life - to rid the world of bad design.
This site picks out the top gadgets in Europe (some in the US) and writes short blogs about them. One in particular stood out to me as a classic example of how a designer takes the world as its happening around him, thinks of a problem with a specific event, topic, object, or style and fads and put their own twist on it. They take something preexisting and make it better - that's essentially all designers do. We must take what is the eseence of X that is marketable and put our own creative twist on it to make it fresh and BETTER.
My little example :)
(retro is cool and quirky and mp3 player is marketable and hot - the combination makes each new and exciting)
Ok the picture won't post but heres a link to it:
http://www.shinyshiny.tv/0%2C1425%2Csz%3D1%26i%3D157160%2C00.gif
This site picks out the top gadgets in Europe (some in the US) and writes short blogs about them. One in particular stood out to me as a classic example of how a designer takes the world as its happening around him, thinks of a problem with a specific event, topic, object, or style and fads and put their own twist on it. They take something preexisting and make it better - that's essentially all designers do. We must take what is the eseence of X that is marketable and put our own creative twist on it to make it fresh and BETTER.
My little example :)
(retro is cool and quirky and mp3 player is marketable and hot - the combination makes each new and exciting)
Ok the picture won't post but heres a link to it:
http://www.shinyshiny.tv/0%2C1425%2Csz%3D1%26i%3D157160%2C00.gif
4.11.2007
NYC Whitney Museum of Art
When I was in NYC over spring break on a design tour with my FA499 class we went to various museums and galleries, but by far the most intruiging and insipiring exhibits were at the Whitney. Lorna Simpson's work is so powerful that it took me an hour to finish just a small room of photographs. Her work focuses on African Americans, especially women. She examines what it means to be black, the past injustices and present struggles between races.
There was also an extensive exhibit of Gordon Matta Clark's work, which enthralled me. His work has always fascinated me, I mean honestly who thinks of cutting houses apart and saying its 'fine' art? To be so close to those roofs and to view the top of a doorframe from above is disorienting. He forces you to look at things in a way that you couldnt without his assistance, which is what has made is art so lasting.At the very end when I was rushing through the museum to get out before it closed I got to see some early work from Alexander Calder. I barely recognized it because the quality of the shapes is so much rougher and unrefined than his later more well known mobiles.
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AYS 42nd Gala Benefit
Two Sundays ago I went to see AYS perform at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in Downtown LA. AYS stands for the American Youth Symphony and is comprised mainly of music students from UCLA, USC, and nearby CalState Universities. This was their gala benefit (which meant all the old ladies were wearing hats - always funny) and had an outstanding programme of
ROSSINI | Barber of Seville Overture
MENDELSSOHN | Symphony No. 4 "Italian"
BEETHOVEN | Piano Concerto No. 5 "Emperor"
The esteemed Andre Watts was playing piano, and it was a truly mezmerizing experience. I have never loved the piano as much as other instruments, because so often I feel that the sound is dead and less expressionistic than a cello for example. However, his playing infused Beethoven with a vigor and emotion that I have never heard it played with before. In addition to his complete mastery of the technical and emotional aspects of playing the piano, he is quite silly looking when he plays the piano. He stomps his feet and sings along under his breath, adding yet another dimension to the performance.
They are playing a concert this month at Disney Hall - here's the link if anyone is interested:
http://wdch.laphil.com/tix/performance_detail.cfm?id=3038
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