SAM DILLEMANS - video notes

Artists always comparing themselves to other artists - seeing themselves in an art

historical context? Aware of visual legacies?
Healthily frustrated
Rembrandt wasnt before. He is tomorrow.
A white canvas is the worst thing an artist can face (Picasso) - comparison to writers
and the blank page
Controlling atmosphere in order to nurture creativity
Repetition and anxiety
I still have so much work to do as if it exists without him, before him, waiting to be
fulflled
my plastic dream
Veneration no idolization - secularization - inability to be in awe.
Desensitization/inurement. Everything is fragmented, everyone is an artist.
dif between being creative and being an artist
people who aqre partly something - people need to make the full sacrifce
trendiness
anything which isnt infuenced by time
Alberto Manguel - Reading Paintings Notes
Narrativity - reading paintings as stories. The fnding of a shared vocabulary between
painter and audience. Concept of a painting being heard - Heideggerian
understanding of arts communicability. Couching arts legibility in textual terms.
Assertion that pictures (the non-textual visual) are given privilege over the written word.
Manipulation of the viewer is dependent upon arts instantaneity, which leaves no time
for contemplation, as opposed to readings insistent, slow temporality.
Portraiture - privileged position - not concerned with communality, but instead the
unique, the particular, the power of the individual.
Iconophobia/aniconism - we are nothing but creations, and are thus not worthy of the
gift of creation/our creator. Prohibiton of vision, facial/ocular exchange. Representations
become archetypical as opposed to direct, literal representations. The representation
takes over the subjects authority - grants preeminence to the symbol over the reality,
the wood and stone over the fesh and blood. Example of ancient Greek theatrical
masks - they do not merely represent the god, they become the god.
Portraiture as open mirror - how does that afect readability/legibility? Picassos
multiplicity of faces within his portraits - Weeping Woman. Time stood still for Picasso -
total loss of identity of the sitter - perceived fctionality of real women. Picassos portraits
are never in fact representations of his subject, but rather representations of himself.
The unimportance of others, his mastery over others. Sitters as canvases upon which
he projects and creates his own image. Given this upending of the sitter-painter
relationship, what part does Picasso allow the viewer to play?
Relationship between Picasso and Dora Maar. Would make her cry just to sketch/paint
her - John Berger - Picasso was interested in representation the idea of sufering, not its
actual expression. Completely unconcerned with the human experience of sufering,
only his own ability to represent it symbolically. For all the times that she modeled for
him, his portraits are all Picasso, not one is Dora Maar. Art as noble cause - utilitarian
treatment of others becomes acceptable in service to it.
Trope of weeping women throughout Western art history. Female sufering/feminization
of sufering>aestheticization of female sufering (versus the stoic sufering of the male,
such as in Laocoon and representations of saints). Hiddenness of male grief, as
opposed to the open display of women.
Picassos disgusting treatment of the women in his life - forcing them into relationships
with one another, instigating fghts between them. Maars total breakdown, treatment by
Lacan. Lacans analysis that she is like a medieval vanitas - half seductive woman, half
corpse. Akin to Picassos depictions of her - fractured canvas, broken identities. He
broke the identifes of the women around him in order to reassemble them on the
canvas, to reconstruct them as a lovers fantasy. Shattering of self-made image. An
object of violence, a readymade victim. She would become an absence.
Alientation is how we fundatmentally understand ourselves. The ego is the inauthentic
agency functioning to conceal its lack of unity.