Information Show - drawings by Matt Niebuhr

Notes concerning an “Information Show”

“In conceptual art, the idea or concept is the most important aspect of the work. When an artist uses a conceptual form of art, it means that all planning and decisions are made beforehand. The execution is a perfunctory affair. The idea becomes the machine that makes the art.” – Sol Le Witt -  Paragraphs on Conceptual Art, by Sol Le Witt – Artforum (June, 1967).

This collection of drawings is evidence of my explorations of a question concerning conceptual art that the idea or concept is the fundamental experiential element of a work of art.

Ideas are, strictly speaking, intangible. They exist as a mental construct and have no form. In this sense, ideas do not take up space. Ideas and concepts float only in the space of the imagination or “mind’s eye”.

Ideas can be made tangible in a number of ways. These drawings are examples of an idea for a work of art. When ideas are translated into another medium the intangible is made tangible. The idea is described through execution, a translation from the “minds eye”.

Some of the ideas executed in the exhibit are not my ideas. Some are. To me it makes no difference.

Only when the idea is translated into a physical form can it be shared. Whether an idea is spoken, sung, written, or drawn, it is only in this translation where the idea can be exchanged in some way with another person. The intangible is made tangible. The idea can be apprehended by another person.

Execution of an idea is not a perfunctory affair.

How it is made, why it is made, what it is made of – and then making (process)are essential questions and actions that must be decided upon. Each decision has a profound effect upon the execution and ultimately the form that expresses the idea. Means and methods influence the perception of the idea immensely.

“… while objects may be perishable, ideas need not be…” – Sol Le Witt.

Ideas in art (and life) are potentially useful but have little value until acted upon.

Objects in art are quite useless, but of great potential value.

Applicable thoughts below on what exactly it is that you do….  (originally found partially via “but does it float”)

The trick it seems is to recognize the things that hold your attention and then to apply all your attention possible to those things…

Excerpts from Why I write

From The New York Times Magazine, December 5, 1976. Copyright 1976 by Joan Didion and The New York Times Company.

Of course I stole the title from this talk, from George Orwell. One reason I stole it was that I like the sound of the words: Why I Write. There you have three short unambiguous words that share a sound, and the sound they share is this:

I

I

I

In many ways writing is the act of saying I, of imposing oneself upon other people, of saying listen to me, see it my way, change your mind.Its an aggressive, even a hostile act. You can disguise its aggressiveness all you want with veils of subordinate clauses and qualifiers and tentative subjunctives, with ellipses and evasionswith the whole manner of intimating rather than claiming, of alluding rather than statingbut theres no getting around the fact that setting words on paper is the tactic of a secret bully, an invasion, an imposition of the writers sensibility on the readers most private space.

I stole the title not only because the words sounded right but because they seemed to sum up, in a no-nonsense way, all I have to tell you. Like many writers I have only this one “subject,” this one “area”: the act of writing. I can bring you no reports from any other front. I may have other interests: I am “interested,” for example, in marine biology, but I don’t flatter myself that you would come out to hear me talk about it. I am not a scholar. I am not in the least an intellectual, which is not to say that when I hear the word “intellectual” I reach for my gun, but only to say that I do not think in abstracts. During the years when I was an undergraduate at Berkeley, I tried, with a kind of hopeless late-adolescent energy, to buy some temporary visa into the world of ideas, to forge for myself a mind that could deal with abstract.

In short I tried to think. I failed. My attention veered inexorably back to the specific, to the tangible, to what was generally considered, by everyone I knew then and for that matter have known since, the peripheral. I would try to contemplate the Hegelian dialectic and would find myself concentrating instead on a flowering pear tree outside my window and the particular way the petals fell on my floor. I would try to read linguistic theory and would find myself wondering instead if the lights were on in the bevatron up the hill. When I say that I was wondering if the lights were on in the bevatron you might immediately suspect, if you deal in ideas at all, that I was registering the bevatron as a political symbol, thinking in shorthand about the military-industrial complex and its role in the university community, but you would be wrong. I was only wondering if the lights were on in the bevatron, and how they looked.

A physical fact.

I had trouble graduating from Berkeley, not because of this inability to deal with ideas–I was majoring in English, and I could locate the house-and-garden imagery in “The Portrait of a Lady” as well as the next person, “imagery” being by definition the kind of specific that got my attention–but simply because I had neglected to take a course in Milton. For reasons which now sound baroque I needed a degree by the end of that summer, and the English department finally agreed, if I would come down from Sacramento every Friday and talk about the cosmology of “Paradise Lost,” to certify me proficient in Milton. I did this. Some Fridays I took the Greyhound bus, other Fridays I caught the Southern Pacific’s City of San Francisco on the last leg of its transcontinental trip. I can no longer tell you whether Milton put the sun or the earth at the center of his universe in “Paradise Lost,” the central question of at least one century and a topic about which I wrote 10,000 words that summer, but I can still recall the exact rancidity of the butter in the City of San Francisco’s dining car, and the way the tinted windows on the Greyhound bus cast the oil refineries around Carquinez Straits into a grayed and obscurely sinister light. In short my attention was always on the periphery, on what I could see and taste and touch, on the butter, and the Greyhound bus. During those years I was traveling on what I knew to be a very shaky passport, forged papers: I knew that I was no legitimate resident in any world of ideas. I knew I couldn’t think. All I knew then was what I couldn’t do. All I knew was what I wasn’t, and it took me some years to discover what I was.

Which was a writer.

By which I mean not a “good” writer or a “bad” writer but simply a writer, a person whose most absorbed and passionate hourse are spent arranging words on pieces of paper. Had my credentials been in order I would never have become a writer. Had I been blessed with even limited access to my own mind there would have been no reason to write. I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear. Why did the oil refineries around Carquinez Straits seem sinister to me in the summer of 1956? Why have the night lights in the bevatron burned in my mind for twenty years? What is going on in these pictures in my mind?

Negroes (Nuba), Gerhard Richter

Neger (Nuba)

Negroes (Nuba)
1964
145 cm X 200 cm
Oil on canvas
Catalogue Raisonné: 45
Gerhard Richter

Been reading Gerhard Richter, A life in Painting by a biography written by Dietmar Eleger.  This painting was first exhibited at a show named Neue Realisten. included Konrad Lueg, Sigmar Polke, Gerd Richter at Galerie Parnass, Wuppertal, Germany, November 20 1964 – January 01 1965 according to the artist’s information.

Rudolf Jahrling  (Gallery Parnass owner / architect ) – according to the biography – was impressed by seeing the work set up outside on the front garden of the house and gave the visiting artists the opportunity to have a group show – which turned out to be some of the earliest key and important “emerging” opportunities for exhibition for Richter.  There’s a snapshot of “tote”  or Dead, (one of my favorite pictures of Richter’s “photo paintings” propted up against a chainlink fence next to some garbage cans upon which set more paintings…  Imagine…  it puts it all into another perspective  - that of the humble beginings….  Early paintings were a bargained for $400 DM with as little as 1/3 going to artist and some paintings donated to the gallery to cover costs of exhibitions and catalogues…

Hard to imagine given the situation today, Sotheby’s reports that Neger (Nuba) 1964 just sold for a little over $5.6 million – (yeah million) as an key example of early “photo paintings” by Richter.  I wonder what someone like Richter thinks about that…?  I hope the work ends up in a public venue.  See the catalogue here.

The thing about these photo paintings and Richter at a grand scale is not to think of appropriation, but to think about perhaps that it may just be that it takes a painting to be able to really see  a documentary , or so called “objective” photograph ….  The original photograph not incidentally by photographer Leni Riefenstahl… AKA “Hitler’s favorite filmmaker“…..

Calhoun, GA, 2000_Mark Steinmetz, Gelatin silver print

Calhoun, GA, 2000 (Greater Atlanta series)
Mark Steinmetz
Gelatin silver print

Highly recommend a visit this week!  But hurry…(exhibition through June 12, 2010 - at Charles A. Hartman Fine Art, in Portland, Oregon).

Your time will be rewarded with some very nice prints from Mark Steinmetz, Greater Atlanta.  This is Steinmetz third photobook forming a visual trilogy about the area from which the series takes its name. South East, and South Central are two previous books related to the series and were released and printed through Nazraeli. With each copy, the quality is very high as can be expected, at least from everything I’ve ever seen coming from Nazraeli.


Rt. 316, Barrow County, GA, 2005_ Mark Steinmetz Gelatin silver print
Rt. 316, Barrow County, GA, 2005  (Greater Atlanta series)
Mark Steinmetz
Gelatin silver print

Having picked up my own (signed) copies of the books back in early 2009 and being able to look at them as a group for a while – it is terrific to finally get to see select prints up on the wall from the Greater Atlanta series. The prints are both stunning and modest – much like what I might project upon the people, landscape, and urban scenery that Steinmetz presents.

I have to say that having the books and being able to see how well the prints are represented in the book as compared to the prints on the wall means that for my limited means, the books are absolutely valuable and worthy representations.  I can’t stress enough how terrific it is to be able to look again and again and again through the trilogy to appreciate the photos. Each time something new seems to catch my attention.


Mark Steinmetz_Barrow County, GA, 1994 Gelatin silver print
Barrow County, GA, 1994  (Greater Atlanta series)
Mark Steinmetz
Gelatin silver print

In some ways Steinmetz’ Greater Atlanta series – recalls parallels to some work by Robert Adams – sensible, in the moment pictures, that seem to be almost too perfect in composition and with a similar sort of dignity and presence held still within the pictures. These are “candid” shots – it seems mostly that the subjects in the pictures clearly recognize a picture’s being made.

My best at describing what I like about the series (my projection) is this:  If,  I was trying to describing what my place might look like to an outsider, I’d do well to show them these books about my neck of the woods.  But, it strikes me that unless I told them where I was from before hand, the stranger might miss a lot about the locations of the pictures. Something I imagine that I probably am missing as an outsider to the south.

There is an interesting passage in “Beauty in Photography” the collection of essays by Robert Adams, published by Aperture. From the essay “Truth and Landscape”, where Adams is describing how making photographs has to be a personal matter, somehow the photographer has to be in the picture…

“…what we hope for from the artist is help in discovering the significance of a place. In this sense we would in most respects choose thirty minutes with Edward Hopper’s painting Sunday Morning to thirty minutes on the street with what was his subject; with Hopper’s vision we see more…there seem to be moments of revelation…there is a sense of comprehension.” – Robert Adams

Adams goes on a bit before this into the three elements landscapes should offer: geography, autobiography and metaphor – the intensity of which these three are present raises the artistic act of what we all “work to keep intact – an affection for life.”

Mark Steinmetz_Athens, GA, 1995 Gelatin silver print

Athens, GA, 1995,  (the Greater Atlanta series)
Mark Steinmetz,
Gelatin silver print

Mark Steinmetz work on the Greater Atlanta series, as a group of photos, presents a lot more than just a picture of the “south” – and for this reason, I keep affectionately returning to the books.


More from Mark Steinmetz – website

BP – plan “C”

May 30, 2010

untitled, (pipe, #1) 2010_03_04 charcoal on paper 30" x 43 1/2" by Matt Niebuhr

untitled, (pipe, #1)
2010_03_04
charcoal on paper
30″ x 43 1/2″
Matt Niebuhr

The oil spill continues this Memorial Day, 2010.  The plan of stopping the flow or “top-kill” of the out of control oil well in the Gulf has failed…

On to plan “C”.

Here’s to the hope that the cap / sleeve and new pipe to does the trick. (The drawing I made above,  made before any of this happened, takes on new meaning for me given the context of current events.)

There must be a public demand to ensure that we learn as much as we can from this event – and put that into service on existing and new wells…

Proposal for a wall drawing, information show by Sol LeWitt

“In conceptual art, the idea or concept is the most important aspect of the work. When an artist uses a conceptual form of art, it means that all planning and decisions are made beforehand. The execution is a perfunctory affair. The idea becomes the machine that makes the art.”  Sol Le Witt - via – Originally quoted from ” Paragraphs on Conceptual Art ” Sol Lewitt – Artforum (June, 1967).

The quote above sums up quite well, Le Witt’s notion of conceptual art. However,  I disagree that the execution is a perfunctory affair.  Given that the “work” is considered the “idea” and the piece of art merely the result is fine, but I believe that one has to “make” the idea into physical form in order to complete the process.  It is in the making that the physical world exerts it’s will and the work “becomes” independent of the mind.  It is transformed. And the “thing” made is the artifact, a record of the idea, in all it’s physical being – for as long as it may exist in a physical state.  Curiously, it seems that the object remains the thing of value around which one buys or sells or exchanges for something else of value.  Think of it this way: generally, one usually doesn’t purchase a sheet of musical notation, rather the consumer purchases the sound results of that notation… Even if you do purchase the notation – it is mostly likely so that you can (re)make the music yourself…

It seems that it is the form, a form which constitutes “physical being” which is shifting so rapidly  - sometimes only existing in a virtual presence.

a young artist in art school used to worship the paintings of cezanne. he looked and studied all the books he could find on cezanne and copied all of the reproductions of cezanne’s work he found in the books.  he visited a museum and for the first time saw a real cezanne painting. he hated it. it was nothing like the cezanne’s he had studied in the books. from that time on, he made all of this paintings the sizes of paintings reproduced in books and he painted them in black and white. he also printed captions and explanations on the paintings as in books. often he just used words. and one day he realized that very few people went to art galleries and museums but many people looked at books and magazines as he did and they got them through the mail as he did. moral: it’s difficult to put a painting in a mailbox.- the best way to do artjohn baldessari – via (courteous of the echoing chamber – tumblr)

Perhaps Baldessari had it right – it is something to think about…  I also think with time and saturation especially of the virtual experience online – there will be a demand and recognition to return to the physical object as the most rewarding experience….

Even with “make an un-straight line” and the notion that “objects are perishable and ideas need not be” – I wonder why it is that as objects become scarce they tend to increase in value….

Today, a glimpse out the office window alternates between rainfall and sunshine,  a black hearse drives slowly by and somewhere the ocean changes color…

Cy Twombly, Untitled (Bolsena) 1969

CY TWOMBLY
Untitled (Bolsena), 1969
House paint, oil, crayon and pencil on canvas
78 x 98-1/2 inches (198.1 x 250.2 cm)

Some notes on coordinate systems as a way towards a description:

“We might say that there are two sections through the substance of the world: the longitudinal section of painting and the cross-section of certain pieces of graphic art. The longitudinal section seems representational; it somehow contains the objects. The cross-section seems symbolic; it contains signs. Or is it only when we read that we place the page horizontally before us? And is there such a thing as an original vertical position for writing – say, for engraving in stone? ” Walter Benjamin (c. 1920) p. 8 – notes from Marus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (eds.) Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Vol. 1, 1913-1926, Harvard, MA, 1996.

I’ve been looking closely at some of Cy Twombly’s works in the book “Cycles and Seasons”. The passage quoted above resonated with me as I was looking at the reproductions of the Bolsena Paintings by Cy Twombly and reading the accompanying essay by Nicholas Cullinan. One of a series painted in 1969, the Bolsena series it is said records the events of 1969 that may have been on Twombly’s mind – the event of the decade perhaps as NASA’s Apollo 11 space mission unfolded before a collective world audience.  It’s an interesting consideration and connection of current events of that time influencing perhaps and recorded in Twombly’s own cryptic cypher of graphic marks and painterly splots.  What a hopeful time and sense of exploration!


Gulf Oil Spill May 17, 2010 - via NASA satellite imagery

NASA’s Terra satellite captured a visible satellite image of the Gulf oil spill on May 17 at 16:40 UTC (12:40 p.m. EDT) from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer Instrument on-board. The oil slick appears as a dull gray on the water’s surface and stretches south from the Mississippi Delta with what looks like a tail. Text Credit: NASA Goddard / Rob Gutro

I’ve been thinking about this in the context of our own current events unfolding, as reports and images trickle in on the growing disaster of the oil spill in the gulf. NASA Satellite images show the extent of the slick as is disperses – but it is too soon to know the toll and we somehow still are unsure of how to stop the bleeding. How far we have come in the last 40+ years.