thanks for that interesting take on Rothko, Danese. minimalism in visual art, can be often mistaken, for a smart con-job. And particularly for the early modernist masters like Malevich, one almost seems warranted to ask, "what's so great about that black square on white background? Even I could do that on MS Paint?"
Now, the thing is that for artists like Malevich or Mondrian (http://www.artchive.com/artchive/m/mondrian/mondrian_blue_plane.jpg) you cannot just see them just in terms of plain geometry – their formal language has to be contextualised within the larger history of 20th (as well as late 19th) century art. Being continually immersed in a media saturated environment, it might get a little difficult for us to appreciate the revolutionary impact that the formal experiments of Malevich or Mondrian had on 20th century visual language. How it freed painting from the tyranny of representation ( a painting that looks like a bridge on the river, or a bunch of grapes and apples) and in thus opening up the space for abstraction, significantly expanded our visual vocabulary. A visual vocabulary that is now very much a part of our everyday 'colloquial' usage. For example, look at the Economist cover with its grey band on top and the red rectangle on the upper left corner. Now squint your eyes, defocus on the black text, and just concentrate on that grey and red rectangle. I will not get into questions of "balance", "(a)symmetry" etc here, but just alternate your gaze between the Economist rectangles and some more Malevich paintings and you will soon get a sense of the complex genealogy that binds the two. cheers, abhishek On 4/25/07, Rishab Aiyer Ghosh <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
On Tue, 2007-04-24 at 18:39 +0430, Deepa Mohan wrote: > That was SUCH a good description of Rothko's work Danese. yes... and it's clearly a more complex than malevich's "black square on white" which is (brilliantly) ... a black square on white [1]. -rishab 1. http://www.russianpaintings.net/articlepics/malevich_black.jpg
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