Personally I understand, that the point where virtuosity and subject matter intersect is where we can say each one of these two elements contributed one to the other. Of course the subject matter must be addressing contemporary question at the time in order to establish a successful dialogue.
I’m going to start with the artist Christiane Baumgartner and her large format woodcuts, at the PAFA exhibition. I personally like the work. The inclusion of a singular type of carving that open the door for a quick allusion to any kind of communication media (specially television), make a contribution in a way so precise and specific, that is hard for the message to get lost between the work and the spectator. Woodcut, which is a medium with a lot of political history and content, and also because of it own process. This at the same time making an intersection onto the new ways of looking and understanding visual images, television. Even when the image the artist used is not completely contemporary, the reading one can do from it still is, still commenting about the warfare status in which we are sink.
The main fact; the artist is able to do this without using a woodcut just by a simple manipulation in some graphic design software and then printing it from a plotter. But the medium ads certain historic aspects, or maybe talks more about the reality or situation of the artist, and all that is understandable trough the process exposed. But definitely this two aspects virtuosity and subject matter helped each other in the conversation of this work.
1 comment:
I really like Jose's pointing to the larger Christiane Baumgartner piece in answering this question. 1. Because it might have been the best example of virtuosity in the joint and 2. because I think woodcut, with its visible manual labor, really underscores the whole question of what we see when we see the human hand in art. In fact, the mere fact the image, which to me looked a lot like a radar screen because of the radial shapes emanating from the bottom of the image, is turned on its head when it is fabricated by human hands, a knife, and a big piece of wood.
The image, of what I assume to be a fleet of bomber planes, juxtaposed by, yes a historically loaded print medium, but also the most crude, most simple, most reduced of the print mediums, really makes you THINK about the fact we, as humans, building flying machines that send explosives down to earth for the purpose of killing other humans. It reduces the image the shocking, simple truth.
I don't know if I liked this piece as much as I do now having thought about this question of virtuosity. Thank you, Gerard and Jose.
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