This is one cool musician: Lajko Felix

So he may not be Romanian, but I stillthink he is pretty cool. He is actually the one providing the soundtrack to the second youtube video on Romanian art:



And actually he reminds me a lot of Bang on a Can, the summer music institute at Mass Moca. Bang on a Can is this really corky interesting project that basically brings together these talented musicians and makes them create music. The results are either fascinating, grating but fascinating, or just plain grating. And, at the end of the summer they perform a 6-hour long marathon which is not for the faint-hearted :-P

What do you get if you type "Arta Romaneasca" (=Romanian art) on youtube search?

Here are the top two results I got:



And:

Dan Perjovschi: Art or Caricature?

I actually first stumbled upon this artist while working at MoMA in the Prints and Illustrated Books curatorial department and I must say, I don't feel it. I could talk about it in artsy terms and point out all the reasons why people should consider this valuable art (let's see: it questions the canons of art and attempts to show the beauty in the non-art, it sends a political message that it's powerful precisely because of the formal simplicity, it conforms to a minimalist aesthetic unhindered by the burden of artistic decorations, etc) but subjectively speaking, I don't feel any attachment to this guy's work.This goes along with my many issues with some contemporary artists whose art is interesting only in as much as it jades your sense of beauty (all of a sudden I have Beaudelaire in my head). Yes it's funny, but for me, that does not make it art. Oh how I hate the glorification of the extreme mundane....

Romanian painter reminds me of Pollock and Jasper Johns

In my quest to find out how the Romanian art scene looks like, I stumbled upon this guy: Costin Craioveanu. I find his home webpage cheesy as hell, but still his art has something of that old school modern glamour that I like so much in Pollock and playful obviousness I like in Jasper Johns. I always found Pollock's drips to have a textural musicality and a rhythmic elegance. I am and will always be intrigued by the command he had on the unexpected, allowing the colors to superimpose in unexpected patterns, while also guiding the general look of composition (I remember in my 102 Art history class the prof showed us that if you pay close attention you will see how Pollock's work always have more color on the bottom and the drips would follow a general left to right directionality so that the entire composition is more readable). On the other hand, Jasper Johns' works can be passed off as banale. What could be so special about a map of the US or a flag? Or even numbers? But by eliminating the need to read into the subject matter, you can just focus on his remarkably versatile technique: bold strokes of the brush, thick application of color, the meticulous reproduction of the lines and stars of the US flag and then the tumultous composition of the map. To me, they both speak of the fabric of art and not about the need to find some hidden meaning behind the painting.

Craioveanu's works like Che Guevarra's or Marilyn Monroe's portrait remind me of that sense of guided surprise I get from Pollock's works, but especially the focus on the artistry that I get from Johns. One critic I read talked a lot about the Warholian similarity of his works, but I think that Warhol's intention is different from Craioveanu's. With Warhol, the emphasis lied more on the blurred distinction between mass-produced imagery and high art, while with Craioveanu there is a distinct painterly attitude present in his works. The colored spots, short brushstrokes and the spiral lines speak of the ABC of painting, while the bold colors thickly applied reference the art of the impressionists. The subject matter is easily recognizable, but the technique, well I could just stop and stare in awe at that technique for hours.

Countdown to the Whitney Biennial

Through a series of random thoughts, I remembered that this year’s installment of the Whitney Biennial is going to start very soon so I checked out the Whitney website to see who’s who in the Biennial this year.

The first thing I found out is that the Whitney has a „Collecting Biennials” show running as a preview for the show and looking at the list of artists I became nostalgic. My favorite works by far last year were John Baldessari’s cut up people (imagine this image very large and with superimposed colored blocks) and Leslie Thornton’s hybrid short-movie about the atomic bomb (click here for a movie still). For me, these two works were LOUD: large-scale contraptions that played on your senses, perception and eyesight (I distinctly remember a „can you spot the city through that blue hole” game while watching Leslie’s movie and a „how many different images can you make out from one Baldessari image” game). I like art to be more than a pretty (or ugly as it is currently fashionable) image, I like it to stimulate me intellectually. I like to have to flatten an image only to find out that I am still far from getting the full picture. And I like to have to imagine a 3D world from the 2D movie screen in order to start to understand the intricate connections between people and intentions through time and space. This is probably why I feel cheated by purist Minimalist works like Robert Morris’ „L-Shape”. To me they lack the sense of visual intrigue, the play on trompe l'oeil. More on other Minimalist works I like in other posts.

I am slowly catching the blog bug...

And I will probably write about random stuff so feel free to comment away. :-D

Today' "daily addiction": Romania's "purple flame" (I bought some purple jeans today hence the addiction :-P).

Check out this video, the X-Files soundtrack to the AP article is awesome!!!

And so it begins....

Welcome to Tic-for-Tac, an op-ed blog where for every action there should an equal reaction. It will mostly allow me to share my opinions about what see, what I like, what I dislike, basically about everything. Since I am primarily an art geek, my posts will involve discussions about art, artists and the art world as I see it. But then again when I am in a Venitian mood, I'll do what the Venetians do: write about what I feel like.