Peter Fyfe, Boy and child (1986)

Challenge – to blog consistently Purpose – to reveal what I think about, because art without thought is mere decoration. Warning – so, this is a blog, so it may be full of opinionated crap…But at least I’ll try to make it interesting crap.   I recently mentioned on Facebook that I had taken a painting, “A Boy And Child” (1986) to the city dump. By the time it hit the pile, it was not in retrievable condition, because the ‘Orillia Waste Diversion Site’ has separate piles for garbage, household wood, metal, tires (off rims), drywall etc, and I had done my duty by ripping the canvas from the frame. The wood went to the wood pile, the canvas (now torn into several pieces) went to the garbage pile. Done as an art student, the painting features an empty, wooden-framed, gothic ‘window’ in the centre, so separating the canvas from the wood without ripping it would have been difficult.  Likewise, applying gesso to the work and starting anew would have meant dealing with that centre window. But creating a new work from the old was not the point. My intent all along was two-fold. To rid myself of an artistic anchor of the past, and to clean out storage in our house. Don’t get me wrong. I liked that painting, as did several of those who responded on Facebook. But how else to dispose of it? It’s not like it’s to everyone’s taste. And being an older portrait of sorts, it’s not in keeping with my so-called ‘current work’, so exhibiting it with the intent of selling it seemed not an option. Keeping it around for a retrospective which is never going to happen, just keeps putting it in the way. So, for those of you who have never wondered, now you know of a new question to ask your local artist… What do you do with works that have never been sold? Store ‘em, or trash ‘em? (Or repurpose them if that’s an option). Sadly, there were two other works that went to the pile that same day (below). And there may be a few others on the chopping block. Please check out my older works at http://www.fyfeart.com/older-works.html (those marked with an *) before they too are gone.   Links Rauschenberg, Francis Bacon, Gerhard Richte  ​https://www.widewalls.ch/destruction-art-artists-destroy-artwork/ Michelangelo, Monet, O’Keefe… https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-6-artists-destroyed-art ​#artdestruction #studentpainting #artistswho #destroyart

Voice of Bird (1989)

Canada's Call to Women (1990), bricolage under glass

​Get Your Home in Canada (1990), bricolage under glass

(Left) The Wreck of Hope (2013) by Charles Stankievech, 
(Right) The Wreck of the Hope or The Polar Sea (1824) by Caspar David Friedrich
(Below) Sea of Ice (2011) by ​Katharina Grosse 

Challenge – to blog consistently
Purpose – to reveal what I think, because art without thought is mere decoration.
WARNING – so, this is a blog, so it may be full of opinionated crap…But at least I’ll try to make it interesting crap.
 
So, there are artists who put a great deal of thought into their work. “Conceptual” artists like Charles Stankievech. His 2013 work, "The Wreck of Hope” (from the series The Soniferous Æther)" seems to be a still from “a 35mm film installation shot at the northernmost settlement on earth -- ALERT Signals Intelligence Station -- as part of a series of fieldworks looking at remote outpost architecture, military infrastructure and the embedded landscape.” It was “shot using a computer controlled time‐lapse tracking camera during the winter months, the military spy outpost radiates within a shroud of continuous darkness under a star-pierced canopy harkening an abandoned space station." In other words, although it looks strikingly similar to “The Wreck of Hope, The Sea of Ice” painted by Casper Friedrich in 1824, and bears a title referencing that work, that connection is actually random. Stankievech’s real interest seems actually to be about mediating landscapes through stuff that is technologically interesting to him. (Likewise, in describing her work "Sea of Ice" (2011), artist Katharina Grosse tries to distance herself from the connection she made between her work (below), and its referencing title. "I am more interested in the phenomenon of Romanticism in German literature. For me, the literary movement was much more influential than the painting. Especially useful to me was Hölderlin’s effort to free language of academic stigma and to let occur all sorts of different writing genres on the same page"

Stankeivech once delivered a paper (“From Stethoscopes to Headphones: An Acoustic Spatialization of Subjectivity”) on the history of headphones, space and sound art at the World Forum for Acoustic Ecology conference held in Finland…Interesting, if you think this sounds cool:  “Working from a phenomenological position, the author investigates "in-head" acoustic localization in the context of the historical development of modern listening…”. (“The essay ends with reflections on how these sound "imaging" techniques “topologically shape our subjectivities…”).

If that all sounds pretentious, and not to your liking, you may like the more accessible podcast which he has curated, “Headphones: Sound Without Space for Architectural Association Independent Radio. I say more accessible: “The audio tracks in this collection attempt to define a body of work that is fundamentally connected to the phenomenon of headphone listening…” which seems to be a way of saying listening to stuff in a “private bubble” of sorts.

​In a way I envy the shear weight, if not manner, of this kind thinking. It’s impressive and wordy in just the right way to illicit attention from other serious thinkers. It connects this artist to other arts, and more importantly, art institutions, publications, and FUNDING. I myself am a little removed from being able to generate such passages (“topologically shape our subjectivities”), despite being a somewhat smart and gifted guy.

Links
https://www.stankievech.net/projects/aaradio/Headphones-SoundWithoutSpace.zip
https://www.stankievech.net/
https://www.artinamericamagazine.com/news-features/interviews/katharina-grosse/