Art and Process
Lately I've been fascinated by YouTube videos of artists in their studios. How various they all are in inhabiting their space. And how diffeent their movements in their creative process!
Gerhard Richter applying layers of paint with a 10-foot squeegee-scraper.
Anselm Kiefer with hammer and chisel chipping away inches of encrusted paint from an even more monumental canvas, maybe 12 x 16 ft..
Matisse playing the Maestro, making gestures on canvas using an impossibly long brush as a wand.
Some, like Georges Matthieu, seize the moment as a performance opportunity-- in his case, painting a canvas maybe 10 by 20 ft with his lyrical abstract gestures in about 30 minutes, a tour de force. It looked pretty good, too, not the ugly mess one might anticipate.
One of the most famous, perhaps, is the video of Jackson Pollack splashing and dripping paint on large canvases on the floor. The photographer persuaded him to paint on glass, and filmed him from below. As I remember the story (I'll have to check), he was pissed off, angrily insulted the photographer and got drunk after the shoot, after several years sobriety.. and died drunk at the wheel of a car not too long afterwards. I speculate that, after he allowed the intrusion of the camera's eye, he felt violated, something precious and private revealed in the process.
The chapter on "Process Art"
Lynda Benglis
Joseph Beuys
Chris Drury
Eva Hesse
Gary Kuehn
Barry Le Va
Bruce Nauman
Robert Morris
Richard Serra
Keith Sonnier
Richard Van Buren
(list of "process artists", Wikipedia.. The only two I've looked at so far are Joeseph Beuys and Bruce Nauman, both of whom I like a lot. More treats ahead.
