Pies & Picasso

graphite, putty eraser & digital collage/815x1200px, drawing 20x30cm
original source: 'The Guardian' 04/08

This attraction of this particular newspaper photograph as suitable source material for transcription in the form of drawing first suggested itself through the presence of the chequered tiled floor, which, in colour, is red & pale yellow, bringing to mind very much such a work of art as Carl Andre's floor piece 'Copper Magnesium Plain' (see this post for a previous reminder of & reference to Andre & a similar work).


Carl Andre 'Copper Magnesium Plain' 1969

And then I noticed the pie: of course, it features, courtesy of its latticed pastry topping, our dearly beloved Modernist grid, but, more than this, the rim of its crust suggested a very close affinity with the rope edging Picasso applied as the finishing touch to his oval format 'Still Life with Chair Caning' - as perhaps noted previously, if one looks at enough art (which, of course, can never be achieved), visual achoes occur almost everywhere.


Pablo Picasso 'Still Life with Chair Caning' 1912
oil & pasted oilcloth on canvas, & rope/27x35cm

Having processed the drawing with this in mind, the inclusion of Picasso's object-painting within the picture came to seem imperative. By a combination of digital processes - including resizing, slight distortion of shape (narrowed to the right), conversion from colour to monochrome & then collaging onto/into the scanned image of the original drawing, with shadow drawn with a digital 'pencil' tool as a final touch - an image of 'Still Life with Chair Caning' was thus incorporated into the drawing, as 'hanging' on the rear wall, establishing a visual analogue with the pie.

Picasso's painting is a fascinating example of the ground-breaking artform of so-called 'Synthetic' Cubism (actually existing on the cusp of the 'Analytic' & 'Synthetic'), whereby actual fragments of matter from the real world & everyday life are incorporated, synthesized, into the picture: in this case, Picasso uses a piece of oilcloth onto which a pattern (grid-like!) resembling textured chair caning has been printed - a mass-produced item co-existing with, within, a unique artefact - & also frames his painting with a length of rope that is perceived both as itself, a real thing, whilst also suggesting the carved edge of a wooden table top which, of course, the viewer 'reads' when apprehending the still life collection of represented objects (or 'significant' fragments of) - including a newspaper, pipe & glass - on the picture plane.

Further to the 'game' that Picasso is playing with representation, levels of, & the various means by which it/they might be achieved in such an instance - the 'jou' of the 'journal' title of the newspaper could also suggest the French 'joue(r)' - the inclusion of the rope as a framing device might also be a little in-joke, alluding to Braque & Picasso's notion of themselves being 'mountaineers roped together', scaling new heights of pictorial exploration through Cubism, particularly the development into the realm of papiers colles & collage, where art & life meet through the inclusion of actual materials along with pictorial representations of, that serve to both exist in & as themselves or otherwise symbolically suggest something else.


In similar manner to this drawing, Bernardo Bertolucci's film 'The Dreamers' quotes from cinematic history, inserting clips from e.g. Fred Astaire, Marlene Dietrich & such examples from the French nouvelle vague as Jean-Luc Godard into the course of its narrative of the lives - in the context of the social & political upheaval of May 1968 Paris - of its three young cinephile protagonists. A gorgeous-looking piece of cinema (not least in the form of the central triumvirate of its cast), ravishingly photographed, richly sensual & decadent. The DVD also includes an excellent, extensive 'making-of' feature, among the very best of its kind, fascinating in the manner in which it describes the temporal & cultural context of the film & insightfully explains the process of its creation.

Soundtrack:


Lambchop 'Is a Woman'/'Is a Bonus'
Tunng 'Good Arrows'

It's a Mad, Ad World...

Today the opposite of tomato is 'Lost in Translation'


graphite/30x20cm
original source: ‘The Times’ 10/03/08

The appeal of this source photographic image, culled from a newspaper advertisement for men’s shaving foam, resided initially & most obviously in its incorporation of the old faithful modernist grid into its composition (see a selection of recent previous entries & drawings): in this instance the checkered background recalling something like Carl Andre’s floor piece ‘Steel-Magnesium Plain’ (once immersed in visual art, it’s impossible not to see it everywhere & thus be able to refer to it, to be living ‘the life aesthetic’).


Carl Andre ‘Steel-Magnesium Plain’

However, another pleasurable aspect presents itself: that of being able to appropriate into an art context an image from the world of advertising & commerce, & thus reverse the more familiar flow of traffic of this relationship. In such an instance, one might refer to the work of Richard Prince, who visually sampled newspaper advertisements as an act of ‘appropriation art’ & went on to rephotograph other particularly American consumer icons such as the Marlboro man , thus giving to them an ambiguous depth & unsettling, thought-provoking quality previously lacking.


Richard Prince ‘Cowboy’

Despite the acts of desecration advertising habitually, ritually visits upon images & ideas culled from art, I can’t help sometimes loving the dumbness & cheesiness of advertising images, the utter fatuous crassness of so much visual advertising, the fakery of the ideal world-to-be-aspired-to it strives, so hard in such a facile manner, to create, & this image provides a fine instance of such, not least in the sense of smug self-regard of the figure admiring his handiwork in the alluded-to mirror, etc. In the transcribed drawing, removed from the context of the product it is promoting & the lifestyle claims of the accompanying text, it seems even more absurd: this might be an aspect to be pursued…

All this seems to tie in nicely with the current TV broadcasting on BBC4 of the ‘Mad Men’ series, a thus-far (2 episodes in) interesting dramatic recreation of & peek into the murky depths (or perhaps ‘shallows’ is more appropriate in such a context) of the world of the 1960s Madison Avenue world of advertising, adding another note of topicality to this particular drawing.

And yes, I am aware of the irony of the ‘appeal’ (undeniable, sometimes) of images taken from advertising, given an innately critical attitude to the world of…
On a related matter, there’s an interesting article on the work of Richard Prince, particularly the comment upon how, acquired & displayed by wealthy collectors, thus commodified itself, such work becomes an advertisement for the brand-name of the artist himself.

Soundtrack:

Lambchop ‘Aw, C’mon’, ‘No, You C’mon’, ‘Damaged’
Belle & Sebastian ‘The Life Pursuit’
Sigur Ros ‘Takk’
‘Test Match Special’