art-exchange

Wednesday, October 29, 2008

local

Tilman's next assignment is "local". A drawing about the local. Drawing local.
Local in contrast with global. Global is something that has meaning and value for everyone. But you lose something when going global. Maybe you lose everything. This can be illustrated with art. Most art nowadays is global. It is boring.
Tilman gave an example of how this is done: take a bit of german expressionism, take a bit of (also german) constructivism. Add a large sauce of esthetics. Then you have global art.
Maybe Tilman got excited last time, being a German and proud of these great German roots of expressionism and constructivism, shaping nearly all of art. He thought using these styles produces a "german work of art". I think quite the opposite: using these well explored styles he produced "acceptable global art". Luckily his own way of drawing intervened: he did not succeed in getting rid of his personal hand and failed to make real global art, which is devoid of all traces of personality. Having a personality and showing it is really bad in art nowadays.

The local: thinking about it i concluded that maybe drawing can never reach the really local, because it always refers to something. Even material drawing, showing only traces or the material refers to this fashion of minimalism in art. Without this context of minimalism nobody would recognize it anymore and everything produced by nature, on the street in a garbage dump is indeed more interesting on all levels then the works of minimalism. Nature is just more experienced in producing these works of art.

referring to local things: a meeting, going there very bodily with backpack, experience is local, the drawing of this experience isn't.

Then drawing, referencing the local. The local feeling. The feeling of being busy locally. That is you are drawing and not thinking about the big world, the future, becoming famous. Just concentrated on the drawing, the act of drawing:





Then my senses told me that smelling and touching are indeed the most local things possible. Then the brain comes in: the brains associates and refers. The brains, the rational is the culprit of becoming global. So in the act of smelling and tasting the brain must remain locally concentrated. Then drawing small modest things must be in the direction of what can be achieved in local drawing of the local. I found a shell on the beach. I made a drawing of it. This shell was indeed interesting because there was a hole in it. Something had been busy very very locally, digging in and eating the pour small defenseless creature which tried to hide locally inside a shell......


I could only refer to this local behaviour with a drawing.
After my failure to produce a German Drawing, no i failed again making a local drawing.

My assignment for november has to wait until Tilman adds his contribution. Why rush things?

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Monday, August 11, 2008

Intro

In mai Tilman Rothermel, Bremen, and bram van Waardenberg, Rotterdam started an exchange.
Each month one of us proposes a theme, and we have a month to do something with that theme.

The first theme was: the second way to read a love letter.
Actually bram van Waardenberg proposed "la deuxieme maniere de lire une lettre d'amour"
Both made drawings around this theme.

The second theme was proposed by Tilman Rothermel:

IST GROSSE LIEBE SO GROSS WIE EIN ELEPHANT?
(Is big love as big as an elephant?)

The third theme was proposed by bram van Waardenberg.
"Troya ardiendo a sus espaldas", a sentence, theme, found in at least two books of the writer Arturo PĂ©rez-Reverte ( EL PINTOR DE BATALLAS ).
The (presumed) meaning of this sentence will be explained in a later blog.

The fourth theme was proposed by Tilman Rothermel:
der Rueckweg, to be translated as: the way back, but probably the meaning of this is already shifted...



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Language plays its part in this excange: bram van Waardenberg is Dutch and has to speak several languages, like german.
Tilman Rothermel is German and speaks several languages too.

Although German is a common language between the two, clearly some interference by the language problem will be unavoidable.


This blog is written in English, because a blog is global and neither Dutch nor German are very global languages at the moment.

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