#I hate traditional art bc I have to take the photo at EXACTLY the right angle or it looks funny

[raveartts]

Might draw sth more conceptually interesting later (?) but for a first try at a relatively complex character like Azusa, I think I absolutely nailed it :D

[mcmansionhell]

McMansion Hell Does Architectural Theory (Part 3): British Palladianism

Hello Friends! Today we’re going to talk about a rather short-lived movement in late 17th, early-18th century architecture: British Palladianism, which is v “Palladio is great and I, an aristocrat, will only pay you if you design in reference to his style.” Of course it goes deeper than that, so, let’s begin! 

Background

In previous installations of this series, we’ve talked about the Italians and the French, but what the heck was happening in Britain all this time? Well, the answer is:

Seriously. The dang Brits were at war all the time - colonializing everything, sinking all of Spain’s ships, creating their own cool church bc their king wanted a son etc. 

Because of all this dang war, architecture in Britain for a long time was a messy hodgepodge of stylistic elements. Examples range from Henry VIII’s Windsor Castle Gatehouse (OG Tudor, though ostensibly Gothic) to the more classically-oriented but still rather Gothic Old Somerset House (completed in 1552) (demolished).  According to Mallgrave’s Architectural Theory (a great anthology), most of the classically inspired elements on pre-17th Century British buildings can be traced to Italian or French artisans. Oh well. 

Early English Classicism (Late 17th Century)

It wasn’t until the 17th century (v late) that classicism became a big deal in England. The first real-deal English classicist was the badass-ly named Inigo Jones, who actually went to Italy for a year (1613-14) where he encountered the work of Palladio for the first time -- which, needless to say blew his damn mind. Jones became the first British architect to have designed buildings in accordance to Vitruvian teachings and classical proportions.

The Dude Jones got into architecture through a weird angle: he was first a prominent set and costume designer for several English theatres. His Italian journey proved fruitful for him career-wise - many of the higher-ups were impressed with Jones’ knowledge of Italian aesthetics, and he was shortly appointed as the Surveyor to the Prince of Wales, before hella upgrading to being Surveyor of the King’s Works in 1615.

Jones’ earliest known architectural work (appropriately called Queen’s House), built for James I’s wife, Anne (who died before it was finished), was the first ever classically styled building in England. I mean, it’s great - just look at it. 

Photo by Bill Bertram (CC-BY-SA 2.5)

While Jones would go on to design a smattering of buildings, a great deal of his work was lost both in the English Civil War and in the 1666 Great Fire of London. Despite these minor setbacks, Jones’ is still considered to be among England’s greatest architects whose influence would span two centuries worth of British architectural technique.

Get it? It’s lit? Because half of his stuff got torched? I’m sorry.

As far as architectural theory goes during this era of budding classicism, the closest clue we have is the work of Henry Wotton, the British ambassador to Venice, who got so hellaciously sloshed on Italian architecture while he was there that he decided to write a book about it called The Elements of Architecture (1624), outlining his special interpretation of classical architecture. 

Wotton’s book was mostly a translation of Vitruvius with a little bit of Renaissance thought (a la Alberti and Palladio) thrown in. The most well-known snippet is his translation of the Vitruvian triad as “firmness, commodity, and delight” - an architectural catchphrase that often finds its way into contemporary architectural histories, though more accurate translations have been proposed:

Change in this line of thought came with Jones’ later successor, Christopher Wren. Unlike Jones who was rather rigorous in his classicism, Wren was a bit more...capricious. In fact, he even built in the Gothic style at the end of his long career (the dude built 45 churches alone) - a move that would have likely put Perrault and Blondel both in an early grave. 

Dude doesn’t even need the sunglasses, he’s throwing so much shade in this pic.

Wren’s ideas about architecture, encapsulated in his Tracts on Architecture (1670s) are varied. In Tract I, Wren opens up with the ballsy af statement: “Architecture has its political Use,” - that is, buildings form the national identity of a country and inspire patriotism amongst its citizens. This itself is a hot take, but it gets even hotter.

Like Perrault, Wren’s ideas about beauty are split into what he calls “natural” and “customary” beauty. Natural beauty consists of geometry, aka Proportions, following in the Platonic tradition® of an absolute beauty or harmony, inherently pleasing to all of us. Customary beauty, however, is more vague - Wren describes it as: “the use of our Senses to those Objects which are usually pleasing to us for other Causes, as Familiarity or particular Inclination breeds a Love to Things not in themselves lovely.”

Basically, we like certain things for some dumb reason like feelings and stuff.

In his second Tract, Wren gripes about architecture being “too strick and pedantick.” This makes sense, because Wren was really into blending a variety of interesting styles together, which was perhaps problematic to some.

Enter the Moralists

One person who was particularly sick of Wren’s sh*t was Anthony Ashley Cooper, Third Earl of Shaftesbury, who, in addition to being an Earl, was also a writer and philosopher. (He was notably taught at a young age by none other than John Locke, the guy you learned about in Civics class once.)

Shaftesbury hated (!!!) the Baroque stylings of Wren’s late work, as well as the next generation of architects including John Vanbrugh and Nicholas Hawksmoor, deeming the pair’s Baroque-leaning Blenheim Palace “a new palace spoilt.” In fact, he wrote a very amusingly scathing essay in 1712 basically saying that Britain was literally *THE BEST* at all of the other arts except for architecture, after which he proceeds to take a huge dump all over the architecture of the day.

Photo by Derova, (CC-BY-2.0)

Shaftesbury tried to sniff out a philosophical basis for Platonic thought regarding absolute beauty and harmonic proportions. What he came up with is essentially moralism, claiming that in order to be able to perceive the naturally good and beautiful ideas in art, one must themselves be naturally good and beautiful on the inside.™ Good taste comes from good inner resolve® to be true to what we know is true beauty and not be swayed by the evils of fashion™ blah blah blah.

The Height of British Palladianism 

This line of thought continued within what was now deemed British Palladianism (a movement whose discourse consisted mostly of wealthy Earls tutting at each other). British Palladianism saw several architects (Colin Campbell, Nicholas Du Bois, and William Kent, specifically) launch their own careers by releasing translations or new editions of works by Vitruvius, Palladio, and Jones, respectively with some pithy bits in the introductions haranguing the “ridiculous mixture of Gothick and Roman” of the previous generation thrown in for good measure.

Like all movements, the Palladian movement had its own shadowy figurehead, who funded the work of several of the architects working in the 1720s - Richard Boyle, Third Earl of Burlington.

Burlington was extremely wealthy, and spent most of his time being a total dilettante architect, traveling to Italy to collect manuscripts of Palladio and the like. In fact, Burlington fired Colin Campbell (the English Vitruvius!!) from working on his Piccadilly Villa because apparently Campbell’s classicism was **just not pure enough** for the good Earl, who decided he should just build his damn villa himself.

Burlington’s ruthless aesthetic commitment had a huge impact on the contemporary architects of the day, most of whom he fired. Of the ones he did not fire (aka he did not hire them in the first place), Robert Morris, the most prolific writer of the Palladian movement, is perhaps the most significant. Morris’s work chronicles not only the dawn and spirit of the movement but also its decline.

Morris’s 1728 essay “An Essay in Defense of Ancient Architecture” is about exactly what you would expect:

(((Tutting intensifies)))

The essay of course devolves from tutting critique to legit 17th century fanfiction:

I-Inigo-sama!!! <3

The End of an Era, I Guess

Jokes aside (yours truly used to ship historical figures back in my 7th grade fanfiction days and is not proud), Morris would take a rather different tone in 1739, in an essay commonly cited as a hint to the movement’s end, “An Essay upon Harmony.”

This essay breaks away from the Platonic ideas of absolute beauty, and instead breaks beauty up into several different categories - a relativist aesthetics coming from a contemporary movement (mostly in landscape architecture) called the picturesque, or picturesque theory, which will be the subject of next week’s post.

“In Harmony,” writes Morris, “there are three general Divisions, which may be distinguish’d by the Terms, Ideal, Oral, and Ocular.”

The Ideal is of course numbers and, duh, proportions. Oral harmony is how things are related to each other, with a v Plato allusion to musical harmony. Old news, right? 

But it’s Ocular harmony that offers a glimpse into what will ultimately be a much more powerful movement, spanning (serious, not dilettante) philosophy, art, and of course architecture: the picturesque and the sublime, supported by John Locke & Co.’s empiricism (but we’ll get to that).

Ocular harmony is the harmony of nature in its natural state - both “Animate” (animals, insects, also beauty and perfection, apparently) and “inanimate” (hills, woods, valleys, scenery - “noble, rural, and pleasing.”)

Morris’ ideas are ones of subjectivity, blind sensation to what is and is not lovely, rather than dictated ideas of aesthetic morality. He later goes on to say that in architecture, “The Proportion should be with respect to the Situation; the Dress, Decoration, and Materials should be adapted to the Propriety and Elegance of the Situation and Convenience…”

If that’s not the antithesis to Burlington’s objective classicist purity, I don’t know what is. And so, the bell finally tolls on British Palladianism.

Photo by Chris Nyborg, (CC-BY-SA 3.0)

I hope you enjoyed this bit of (admittedly long-overdue) tutting. Stay tuned for Wednesday’s Maine McMansion, and next Sunday’s installment where I trash talk a bunch of dudes who are way too into gardens.

If you like this post, and want to see more like it, consider supporting me on Patreon! Not into small donations and sick bonus content? Check out the McMansion Hell Store - 30% goes to charity.

Copyright Disclaimer: All photos without captioned credit are from the Public Domain. Manipulated photos are considered derivative work and are Copyright © 2017 McMansion Hell. Please email kate@mcmansionhell.com before using these images on another site. (am v chill about this)

[birchsblog]

Appropriation art analysed through the three frameworks of Art History, Originality and Formalism

"While appropriation art is critical to art, it’s an ambiguous art form in the world of the Supreme Court."

                                                                 - Lawrence Lessig

 I have chosen to carry on, on my journey of discovery of Appropriation art as it's a movement I find myself very passionate about. The frameworks I have chosen to concentrate on in this essay is the way my chosen artists and their work have used manipulation by either the way they changed the art to make it their own or the viewpoint and by so questioning the artist’s originality, is it something new that they've done? or just copying other artists work, and copyright issues appropriation art faces in their journeys of making the art and how the world outside or inside the art world has dealt with such controversial art of its time and finally I will be looking at art in a Formalism viewpoint, and how formalism came to be and how it affects Appropriation. In conclusion, my chosen frameworks are Art History, Originality and Formalism.

Art History  

Throughout art history appropriation has been everywhere, as art has progressed ideas and forms have been translated by different artists using media but the same ideas still stand from the original sources, basically, everything is a copy of a copy in a weird way. I have chosen three artworks to prove my point, the first art piece is Six Nudes of Neil by Edward Weston (above left) this is a series of photographs Weston produced in 1925, though for his time this piece was quite extortionary, but in reality, he wasn’t doing anything no one had done before really. Weston was a traditional artist in a sense, classical nude in art is a very common factor and by the forms of photography and using his son in ways was very inspired by work like Donatello's David sculpture (above right) that dates back to the 1430s, they both depicting a young boy in a very nude way, at the time of Weston's work I suppose using photography was quite a revolutionary media for an art form such as Donatello using bronze in his sculpture, but Donatello’s piece was just another appropriation of Praxiteles marble sculpture Eros (bottom right) who was apparently one of the most renowned of the Attic sculptors of the 4th century BC, which really is interesting because you have three very different mediums with very similar outcomes through art history, as they say, history repeats itself and it’s always been that way. But then comes along Marcel Duchamp in 1917 with his very controversial Fountain and puts a whole new spin on Appropriation art.

"Fountain, 1917"

It would be hard for me to talk about this art movement without talking about this piece, in the world of appropriation art Duchamp was revolutionary with his band of "ready-made's". Duchamp liked the shock factor almost of people instantly hating his work of slow minded people who thought art was just a platform for still life paintings that looked nice, which it was for a very long time till the camera came along, art was having an identity crisis. Why spend hours upon hours painting when you could just take a photo, paint and in a way sculpture had become unneeded. So, when Duchamp got the chance to enter a piece of art (under a mock name) and presented the fountain people went crazy no one had ever done such a thing, the original even destroyed because of how out of its time it was, so was born the “ready-mades” And the facts are that there is nothing special at all about this urinal, it was manufactured in mass and bought at a store by him, which is why this piece is so ground-breaking because it had made a whole new appropriation, appropriation of mass production. Taking something man made and changing it, just like other artists had done in the past such as Weston, but on a much larger scale and helped pave the way for many artists and is still a controversial piece today.

Originality

Entitled "Untitled" (after Edward Weston, Ca. 1925). 1980-81

Sherrie Levine is a great artist to start within the terms of Appropriation movement goes, the reason I love Levine's work is because so much like other artists in appropriation, her work expresses the art of questioning whether the art is well art?

And the questioning of this piece is, is this really a photograph by Sherrie Levine? And the answer is well complicated, in the sense of looking at different viewpoints. Levine has done something staggering of her time, and even though looking at it from a viewpoint of today’s technology all she has done is re-photographed someone's photo, but that's sort of the beauty in its simplicity. 

She's very much following in the footsteps of a great co-founder of this movement of Marcel Duchamp of what makes a great artist, skill? Making? Creativity? And then spitting on it, but also doing something so simple but so very perfected craft, and I’d like to raise the point that people don’t bring up about this piece, it’s how beautifully painstakingly re-photographed this photo is, it’s not an easy task to undertake to take a photo of an image in a catalogue, of the original photo. To my understanding that is, but producing such prints that are nearly meticulously identical to the viewer and that’s where the manipulation comes in, rather not the manipulation of the art because she hasn’t touched the original but the manipulation of the viewer. By putting two nearly identical pieces of art in front of the viewer and saying they are by two different artists is just incredible in itself, and telling the truth too. Because in my views that is her work, she took the photo that makes it her work?  

But that's where copyright comes in and raises the question of where do you draw the line? Which comes up a lot when talking about Appropriation art. And it's true in this instance I believe it’s her art  and I’m not the only one that believes it’s her work Dr Shana Gallagher-Lindsay and Dr Beth Harri make an interesting point “if is a copy of what someone else did, and there’s no original thought involved, or thinking through things on her part, then what makes this art?” in which they answer “exactly that’s part of the question, that I think that’s really what she wants to raise to some degree” (Smarthistory. art, 2012) and I think that’s the point she wasn’t looking to answer whether it was right or wrong it was more so her wanting people to ask questions that should be raised. But then I also am on the fence about taking someone's work and claiming it as their own, like in my day and age it's so easy to print screen on our devices and claim as our own on our social media sites, but that’s when we need copyright. I feel that Levine's work was very revolutionary of her time and something no one had ever done before, and now something as an artist would be incredibly hard to do with such defined copyright laws, so in that way she will always be classically original.  

New Portraits, 2015, inkjet on canvas, 65 3/4 × 48 3/4 inches (167 × 123.8 cm). 

But now we go on to someone who has gotten away with Appropriation Art in the modern day and is a truly interesting collection by Richard Prince, and is known for his appropriation art and controversy has done something artists in our day and age would be scared to do because of the backlash of copyright and the world of suing but with such a well-known artist that has a lot of money he pretty much took his style of art into the present day, which can be really hard to do well, and in my eyes I feel he has pulled it out the bag for this one. Prince has changed the game in a sense and made the everyday people famous, and when I say famous I mean each print sold for around $100,000 a pop. But even Prince’s work made it on to MSNBC which is an American news network where they covered the piece in question stating “kind of a jerk move really sums it up Chris, I mean whether or not this is legally fair use is to me kind of beside the point. It’s okay to be a jerk on the internet or in the art world but is a cardinal sin to be a boring jerk, in my opinion, that’s kind of what Richard Prince is here.” (MSNBC, 2015) But this whole cover story makes me laugh because people who aren’t in the art world just hate Appropriation art. 

But how has Prince got away with the copyright laws on this one, one of the biggest ones is that he's using a world renown social media site and just print screened and cut out the name of the site "Instagram" and by doing so cleverly Instagram hasn’t really got the right to sue him for copyright, even though everyone knows that’s the site he used. The second big copyright issue is the people and photographers and artists he technically stole work off and I use that term loosely, mainly because different people have taken this platform different ways, he's manipulated the viewer like Levine, but by using the viewer in his work, and by doing so has created a new type of copyright, an Transformative art, and by achieving that he has done so by creating an Instagram account by the name richardprince1234, and by commenting on the photos he has used, so putting his name on the work is almost like signing the piece? By putting richardprince1234 on the print does that now make it his work?

Because this is a really recent collection when it was presented it blew up around the world especially with one company "suicide girls" in which Prince used one of their images from their account, their site themselves is like a self-model site where you pay monthly to upload photos and sign a contract to prevent you to posted anywhere else with chances of being chosen the best and getting a $200 award, but in this instance the owner of the company came forward with displeasing views on the piece  “My first thought was I don’t know anyone who can spend $90,000 on anything other than a house,' Selena explained. 'Maybe I know a few people who can spend it on a car.' She continued: 'As to the copyright issue? If I had a nickel for every time someone used our images without our permission in a commercial endeavour, I’d be able to spend $90,000 on art.' Selena went on to say that she was once annoyed by mass retailer Forever 21 selling shirts which featured slightly altered images taken from the Suicide Girls. (TEMPESTA, 2015)

Personally, I think it's because they didn’t get any of the $90,000 it went for, instead they went on their own site and made replicas of the original and sold them for $90 each and stated on their website “Do we have permission to sell these prints? We have the same permission from him that he had from us ;)” which is crazy in an art viewpoint, because it’s like Levine did but using a copy of Prince's original screenshot, it's an appropriation of an appropriation made by a large-scale company trying to profit off Prince's collection, even though I should mention they claimed the money went to charity. 

Then, on the other hand, you have the smaller people that he used such as small town artist Sean Fader and his post went for $40,000 and instead of getting mad and listening to his friends saying to sue him he took an artist’s viewpoint on the matter and treated Prince as the curator to his artwork. Which is such a great way to look at it. He used the free platform that Prince gave him a chance to have a moment in the spotlight and made it completely work for him, even going to lengths to go see it and take a selfie in front of it to then re-post back on Instagram, it's like a crazy modern day internet cycle. (Trending, 2015)

The question of originality is that yes he is totally original because he was one of the first artists to take appropriation into the modern day world and also win the copyright side of things too, unlike artists such like Damien Hirst's Hymn, who recreated a child's toy of human body, but enlarged it by tenfold then got a slap in the face by Humbrol Limited, maker of the Young Scientist Anatomy Set who won the copyright battle and sued Hirst but then “settled for contributions by Hirst to two children's charities, Children Nationwide and the Toy Trust, in lieu of royalties on the £1m sale.” Even the original sculptor of the toy “Mr Emms, 57, made the original model for the toymakers Bluebird, which sold the rights to Humbrol. He said: "It is an exact copy, completely and utterly exact - even the hair, the eyebrows."” (Dyer, 2000) Which is funny because it’s just another company doing appropriation art to get money back from artists making money. Prince's collection has so much controversy and that's one of the reasons I love appropriation art much like Duchamp and Levine it's doing something no one had done before in their time and inspiring and offending the close-minded people that don’t get it at the same time just by using the beauty of simplicity... and winning copyright cases. 

Formalism

Formalism is taking the phrase “don’t read a book by its cover” and shoving it back in your face and saying instead “judge the book only by its cover” which in a sense is a weird way of talking about art because often we like to know every little piece of detail that went into making the piece, like what the artists intent was, the culture behind it and the techniques used to make it. It’s like a philosophy of making and judging art, to formalism this info was deemed unnecessary for the understanding of the work but instead, all of that is removed and you are left with it based solely on what it looks like to the viewer. Such as line, symmetry and colour. And that’s why it’s an interesting framework for appropriation art, I feel that it has its pros and cons, the thing is with this art movement is that it’s all to do with the back story, what does Duchamp’s fountain become without Duchamp, it becomes a crudely signed urinal-based strictly on looks, which isn’t always bad, it helps the art in a way that makes it about the art again and not the backstory, it makes you appreciate what’s put in front of you and you’re made to focus on what the artist has actually created, because although appropriation art is all about the shock factor, the artists still went out their way to create it, and by doing so we should still respect their craft. “Whereas one tends to see what is in an Old Master before seeing it as a picture, one sees a Modernist painting as a picture first. This is of course, the best way of seeing any kind of picture, Old Master or Modernist, but Modernism imposes it as the only and necessary way, Modernism’s success in doing so is a success of self-criticism.” (Greenberg, 1909-1994) Through reading his ‘Modernist Paintings’ this passage stood out the most to me as he realises that you should just look at the art as art before latching it on to its backstory of how it became art or how controversial it is, even though I don’t find myself thinking about appropriation art in that manner a lot of the time because I get very caught up in such aspects of the shock factor I feel art should be sometimes just viewed on looks firstly to see what the artist has actually achieved, and then move on to how it came to be or how it affects people. Greenberg also mentioned about artists such as Paul Cezanne and how he realised he didn’t want to make art that was something he wanted to make art that expressed something, he went from painting landscapes that looked realistic to landscapes that slightly resembled landscapes because it was all about the medium he used to create the piece and that’s thinking in a formalistic artist. “Basically, what modernism is painters using paint on canvases and not caring about the objects they are painting, if they are painting objects at all anymore, but instead caring the texture and the colour and the application on the canvas” (SneakyMister, 2011)

Conclusion

In conclusion I feel very strongly about all three of my frameworks and Appropriation art never stops amazing me, but I also strongly agree that there is no right and wrong or where to draw the line when it comes to this movement, as an artist myself I found myself arguing about with myself and finding myself loving such art pieces I’ve talked about such as Levine and Prince but at the same time I myself have had people take my work without permission and posting it on their social media without credit, and that upsets me, but then I contradict myself because with them two art pieces they did exactly the same, is it because they are famous artists I’m more accepting of their work of being in the right? Or because they have done something no one had done before on a larger scale. But it seems not to be a problem unless the artist puts the work in the public’s eye and up for sale because everyone feels they deserve the money from the big price tag these works go for. But as I said at the start of the essay, how Appropriation art has been around since art started so it’s hard to come to a conclusion that has such a wide radius of art that is involved, but all the same I feel that’s why I love it so, because it’s something no one really knows the answer to and different viewpoints mean everything, from viewing a piece and the medium they’ve used to the way taking a photo of a photo to just the classical nude that’s been around since the dawn of time. You just can’t have one without the other.  

 By Emily Birch.