Sunday, October 31, 2010

Lance Pearce: art object

Lance Pearce, Untitled (2010), Paper.

Conatus: an effort or force

Yves Klein, Harry Shunk, Janos Kender, Leap into the Void (1960), Gelatin silver print.



'Hence whatever moves, no matter how feeble, and no matter how large may be the obstacle it meets, will propagate its conatus in full against all obstructions into infinity, and furthermore it will impress its conatus on all that follows. For though it cannot be denied that a moving body does not proceed in its motion even when it has been stopped, it at least strives to do so, and what is more, it strives, or what is the same thing, begins to move the obstructing bodies, however large, even though they may exceed it.'
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Philosophical Papers and Letters (1956), Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989, 140.

Difference and repetition

Donald Judd, Untitled (1971), Anodized aluminum.




Lance Pearce, Untitled (2010), Photography.



'Temporality was often expressed in a modular or serial fashion - "one thing after another," in Judd's often quoted phrase. The "things" in question are sometimes identical, sometimes of extremely limited range; certain of Dan Flavin's pieces which consist entirely of fluorescent tubes in a few standard lengths are a good example of the latter. In either case they are arranged to produce gradual changes (or, sometimes, only the slightest of variation) from module to module, whether within an exhibition space (sculpture...) or across a grid or other field (painting....).'
Jonathan W. Bernard, 'The Minimalist Aesthetic in the Plastic Arts and in Music', Perspectives in New Music, 31:1 (Winter 1993) 110.

'Repetition changes nothing in the object repeated, but does change something in the mind which contemplates it. Hume's famous thesis takes us to the heart of a problem: since it implies, in principle, a perfect independence on the part of each representation, how can repetition change something in the case of the repeated element? The rule of discontinuity or instantaneity in repetition tells us that one instance does not appear unless the other has disappeared - hence the status of matter as mens momentanea.* However, given that repetition disappears even as it occurs, how can we say, "the second", "the third" and "it is the same"? It has no in-itself.'
Gillies Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, London: Athlone Press, 1994, 90.
 *Note: Deleuze refers to Leibniz's concept of mens momentanea (momentary minds). Here, the body experiences instantaneous, momentary sensations, such as pleasure and pain, yet retains no recollection of these moments. However, the mind may recall these sensations in memory. So that, only in the mind's memory may two opposite forces (the body and a contrary force) outlast an instant.



Monochrome columns

John McCracken, Kala (2005), Polyester resin, fiberglass, plywood.





Lance Pearce, Untitled (2010), Photography.

Saturday, October 30, 2010

Lance Pearce: art object

Lance Pearce, Untitled (2010), timber, hardware.

 


Lance Pearce, Untitled (2010), timber, hardware.





Lance Pearce, Untitled (detail) (2010), timber, hardware.

Trees

Lance Pearce, Untitled (2010), Photography. 




 'A tree stands in its own place. Its life is sedentary. It is a life in one place, a life without anxiety. Not only is a tree in its place; it actively contributes to its place, filling it up with its own organic substance. It knows no menacing void, even though to move from its own place is to risk the death of the organism.'
Edward S. Casey, Getting Back into Place: Toward a Renewed Understanding of the Place-World, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009, xiii.

Absence

Lance Pearce, Untitled (2010), Photography.




'What I find most important in the habitual surroundings from the point of view of aesthetics is the contrast to strangeness, the relevance of the everydayness. We take pleasure in the being in the surroundings we are used to, and fulfilling our normal routines. The aesthetics of everydayness is exactly in the "hiding" of the extraordinary and disturbing, and feeling homey and in control. One could paradoxically say that the aesthetics of the familiar is an aesthetics of the "lacking," the quiet fascination of the absence of visual, auditory, and any other kinds of demands from the surroundings.'
Arto Haapala, On the Aesthetics of the Everyday, Familiarity, Strangeness, and the Meaning of Place, Andrew Light and Jonathan Smith, eds., Aesthetics of Everyday Life. New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2005, 39.

Lance Pearce: art object

Lance Pearce, Untitled (Monochromes) (2010). Acrylic, timber, three components.

Friday, October 29, 2010

Sculptural: not sculpture

Lance Pearce, Untitled (2010), Photography.





Richard Serra, One Ton Prop (House of Cards) (1969) (refabricated 1986), Lead antimonoy, four plates.






'It does not cohere, is not fully constituted as a thing, an object. Insofar as it exists at all as a work, the One-Ton Prop exists only during the time for which it is set up. That it will eventually collapse is not its point; it is not simply a demonstration of entropy. Rather it shows us the entirely conditional nature of its existence, and it thereby denies the timelessness of art. It refuses, then, not only the classification sculpture but also the ideology by which art in our culture is consumed, the ideology of authenticity.'

Douglas Crimp, 'Richard Serra: Sculpture Exceeded.' October, 18 (Autumn, 1981), 72.

Art as experience

John Dewey (1859-1952)




'When artistic objects are separated from both conditions of origin and operation in experience, a wall is built around them that renders almost opaque their general significance, with which esthetic theory deals. Art is remitted to a separate realm, where it is cut off from that association with the materials and aims of every other form of human effort, undergoing, and achievement. A primary task is thus imposed upon one who undertakes to write upon the philosophy of the fine arts. This task is to restore continuity between the refined and intensified forms of experience that are works of art and the everyday events, doings, and sufferings that are universally recognized to constitute experience.'
 
John Dewey, Art As Experience (1934), New York: Berkley Publishing Group, 1980, 3.



'The origin of art is not to be found in the desire to become housed in a museum. Instead, art originates when life becomes fulfilled in moments of intelligently heightened vitality. When the potentialities of experience are intentionally utilized toward such a complete end, the sense of its own meaning becomes intrinsically present as a consummation of the event. This is what Dewey calls "an experience." In an experience, we genuinely come to inhabit the world; we dwell within the world and appropriate it in its meaning. The human impulsion for meaning and value is manifestly fulfilled.'
Thomas M. Alexander, John Dewey's Theory of Art, Experience, and Nature: the Horizons of Feeling, Albany: State University of New York Press, c1987, xix.


Disarticulation

Lance Pearce, Untitled (2010), Photography.

Thursday, October 28, 2010

Homes for America

Dan Graham, Homes for America, Arts Magazine, 1966-67.




Dan Graham, Homes for America, 1965, Photography.







'Large scale 'tract' housing 'developments' constitute the new city.'
- Dan Graham.1


 During the 1960s Dan Graham positioned art within the media. Thus, by integrating the art object with its social production, he negated the formalist ideology that isolated art as autonomous from social life. The piece Homes for America was published as a photo-essay in Arts Magazine in 1966. In this work, the textual explanation is not an address to an external artwork; instead, the work and the explanation appear as a singular piece of information.
The bland uniformity of the American suburban setting is composed such that it registers with the visual seriality of Minimalist sculpture. The critic Gregory Battcock in Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology claims that Homes for America demonstrates "minimal-type surfaces and structures as they are found by the artist (photographer, sculptor) in nature..."2 As such, Graham achieves a remarkable, deadpan humored commentary on both art and everyday life.
Lance Pearce


1 Dan Graham, 'Homes for America,' Arts Magazine, Dec 1966 - Jan 1967, 20-21.
2 Gregory Battcock, ed., Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology, New York: E. P. Dutton, 1968, 175.


Additional sources
Mary Bergstein, 'Lonely Aphrodites: On the Documentary Photography of Sculpture,' The Art Bulletin, 74:3 (Sep., 1992), 475-498.
Kirsten Swenson, 'Be My Mirror,' Art in America, May 2009.
Witte de With, Center for Contemporary Art, Walker Evans and Dan Graham (exhibition text). 

Lance Pearce: art object

Lance Pearce, Untitled (2010), plastic, pins.



Lance Pearce, Untitled (2010), plastic, pins.



                 

Sculpture and its index


                   
Robert Smithson, Spiral Jetty (1970), volcanic basalt rock. (Photo: George Steinmetz).
        
                


Postmodernist sculpture appeals to the medium of photography as its documentary representative. In contrast to the received notions of sculpture as permanent statuary, some postmodern sculpture is grand scale and ephemeral; it is therefore largely reliant on documentation for its meaning and interpretation. In her essay Notes on the Index: Seventies Art in America (1977), Rosalind Krauss contends that the index (the photographic medium) informs the work of many postmodern artists; “that whether they are conscious of it or not, many of them assimilate their work (in part if not wholly) to the logic of the index.”1 This is evident in site-specific postmodern sculpture, temporal and contingent works such as Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty and Christo’s Running Fence, which is dependent upon its photographic representation.2 These artists accepted the idea that their sculpture would be largely apprehended through the photographic referent.
Lance Pearce
    

1 Rosalind Krauss, ‘Notes on the Index: Seventies Art in America. Part 2’, October, 4 (Autumn 1977) 67.
2 Mary Bergstein, ‘Lonely Aphrodites: On the Documentary Photography of Sculpture’, The Art Bulletin, 74:3, (Sep., 1992) 496.

Wednesday, October 27, 2010

The image is the object itself

Lance Pearce, Untitled (2010), Photography.
                


'Painting is, after all, an inferior way of making likenesses, an ersatz of the processes of reproduction. Only a photographic lens can give us the kind of image of the object that is capable of satisfying the deep need that man has to substitute for it something more than a mere approximation ... The photographic image is the object itself, the object freed from the conditions of time and space that govern it. No matter how fuzzy, distorted, or discolored, no matter how lacking in documentary value the image may be, it shares, by virtue of the very process of its becoming, the being of the model of which it is the reproduction; it is the model.' 

Andre Bazin, 'The Ontology of the Photographic Image,' What is Cinema?, trans, Hugh Gray, Berkley University of California Press, 1967, 14.
    


Tuesday, October 26, 2010

Temporary Sculpture

Lance Pearce, Untitled (2010), Photography.
                     



An “explicit reflection on the quotidian cannot but indicate the possibility of its breakdown, since its everyday quality is interrupted by reflection”.
Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei, The Ecstatic Quotidian: Phenomenological Sightings in Modern Art and Literature, University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2007, 41.



Temporary Sculpture: An Introduction

This project explores the role of subjectivity and perception through the aesthetic consideration of everyday objects. My goal is to articulate that the world is more than 'simply there', by attending to the familiar in an effort to bring the everyday to notice. This endeavour responds to the notion that "everydayness is not a quality of the world, but of consciousness and its habitual orientation" (Gosetti-Ferencei, 14). Of relevance is phenomenology which extends the description of the world as simply matter, to being the subject of philosophical inquiry.
The author Jennifer Anna Gosetti Ferencei contends that modern art, in its attending to perception and received ideas - and to the ordinary quality of objects - privileges experiences of the sublime. Here, modern art is located as a concern with formalist art object making. However, I afford everyday things the status of art objects. As such, this project breaks with the notion of art object making as mimesis, formalism or the spectator-object relations of Minimal art. The difference rests in its reinterpretation of pre-existent things themselves. In addition, this reflection occurs outside the art institution and as such differs from the strategy of the Duchampian readymade. My additional interest is in the liminal space between the quotidian “thingness” of the selected objects and their designated status as art objects based on aesthetic judgment.

Note: this project extends my investigation into the material and formal aspects of art and its descriptions in relation to its ontological nature.

Lance Pearce


Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei, The Ecstatic Quotidian: Phenomenological Sightings in Modern Art and Literature,' University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2007.