Today’s Art Rebel is Yesterday’s Conformist - Part 2

In the Twentieth Century Western Art dramatically veered away from the focus of all past centuries, which had basically been on narrative art.

Although the Impressionists of the nineteenth century laid the ground for many of the movements that followed when they proclaimed their focus on painting the light itself, their works remained generally focused on their subjects and narrative. Still, the idea and the freedom of abstraction was born.

When the Cubists decided to focus on all sides of a thing and represent that this inevitably lead to the DaDaists who challenged the previous foundations of art totally, or at least as far as they envisioned.

The progression of modern and contemporary art history is more of a zig zag than a straight line as art ideas and movements draw on each other, mutate and give birth to newer understandings.

Conceptual art is supposed to basically be an offshoot of DaDa, but for me it owes a great deal to Abstract Expressionism, where what is depicted is not as important as the feeling the work evokes. The strokes of Conceptual art, the letters in words are important, just as the strokes and methods of handing the materials are in Abstract Expressionism. Again, for me, this harkens back to what I saw in van Gogh's works, especially his works on paper where the amazing marks of dots and dashes, a kind of Morse code of strokes create the image.

The movement that UnGraven Image is closest to, even directly stems from is Conceptual art, especially Word Art. UnGraven Image is a next step. Understanding the theory of Conceptual art more than looking at the work itself will explain why this is so.

“Conceptual art is based on the notion that the essence of art is an idea, or concept, and may exist distinct from and in the absence of an object as its representation” --. Guggenheim web site.

According to the Tate's web site, “Like Minimalism, Conceptual art challenged the existing structures for making, disseminating and viewing art. Both argued that the importance given to the art object was misplaced and led to a rigid and elitist art world which only the privileged few could afford to enjoy .”

Googling along, the definition found for Conceptual Art in the Collins English Dictionary (with the permission of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd), "... conceptual art n., art in which the idea behind a particular work, and the means of producing it, are more important than the finished work."

My personal favorite statement comes from artist Sol Lewitt, “Conceptual artists are mystics rather than rationalists. They leap to conclusions that logic cannot reach .”

In UnGraven Image theory the focus is on the strokes, the 22 original Hebrew letters (which are used in Bible texts) that represent elementary physic's membranes, also called strings or wave-like motions. The actual imagery that these strokes seem to create is secondary to the strokes (letters) themselves, which as the come from Biblical texts have create an intrinsic meaning or idea for each painting or work. Of course, using words as strokes, words where the idea is the focus and even primary meaning of the painting is absolutely stemming from Conceptual (also called Word) Art.

And yet, this newest contemporary art movement has strong roots is all religious art, all religious art going back to the cave at Lascaux because religious art seeks to communicate spiritual experience and understandings. As all religious artists have worked to convey the mystical, and/or spiritual and/or theological stories of their beliefs, Post Conceptual UnGraven Image theory takes the words of the Bible itself, uses their letters to symbolically represent the very essential stuff that the physical universe derives from as strokes and creates images that are secular, such as landscapes, because the meaning and presence of the Word is intrinsic in the strokes.

Although the theology is ancient the art theory is radical and new. That the strokes themselves are the focus of an artwork, and what gives the work it's intrinsic meaning and even worth is radically new – yet, one knows that it has always been the strokes that make a painting great art -- Rembrandt's strokes, Da Vinci's strokes, Vermeer's strokes, Monet's strokes, van Gogh's strokes, etc.

December 6, 2006

[part 1 of this article is here ]