ICONS

The comments below come from the current edition of Art Review (issue 30) (access for free at http://www.artreview.com/). The article is An Oral History of Western Art: No. 6 Icons: Mathew Collings talks to icon painter Andrei Rublev, who died in 1430 (and was officially recognised as a saint by the Moscow Patriarchate in 1988). It is not clear how Rublev was contacted for this interview - perhaps séance was used.

An icon requires a balance between just enough of that kind of energy(electric visual energy) and just enough of it's opposite:blankness, or lack of energy, a sort of flat, quiet calm. This is because the truely appropriate viewer of an icon is expected to project religious energy onto it. If the object has too much personality of its own, then that projecting process isn't going to work. You could say modern conceptual art is all about psychological projection as well, but that's a shifting, fragmentary thing, whereas icons are very concentrated and singular, they're only about holiness.

With regard to Byzantium at London's Royal Academy:

One or two (religious icons) are tremendously powerful visually, but on the whole you're looking at routine stuff. Really, with an icon there's no requirement for anything else. The rhetoric of all medieval art was about tradition, but there was always lots of innovation in the West - in manuscript art and so on - even if they didn't talk about innovation as such. Social and economic changes in that part of the world produced a much more restless, changeable aesthetic.

The icon style originally comes from pagan pictures of more or less ordinary people...from the Roman era..they're commemorative pictures, they celebrate the former earthy liveliness of someone who's no longer living - But this particular quality isn't required in a religious icon.

The icon artist paints magic beings: Jesus Christ, the saints etc. according to unalterable iconographic rules. Things like beards on certain saints; Mary always in a certain outfit. the rules exist for reasons of instant recognisability. Also, for medieval people, an icon image is divinely manifested, it somes straight from heaven. And they don't worry much about the empirical reality: that an icon is created by a trained artist, or by several artists, in a workshop (or of course that 'Jesus Christ' is a construct). And these people do the painting and they stick on the bits of metal or jewellery and so on, and they have a certain combination of skill and ecperience that causes the placing of shapes and stuck-on-objects to seem good, or good enough. And then the icon goes into a church and it becomes the focus of people's sense of holiness - the unearthly, the eternal, the absolute.

If there is an extra bit of skill or creative energy in play then you get a really good icon, in the sense that Picasso is good. For him and artist's like him the set of rules they obey are their own rules made up out of asynthesis of knowledge of certain precedents and their own hot, naive energy.

An icon only has to be a bit of wood with recognisable depiction of a divine being on it and some gold here and there; and there have to be people looking at the object who feel very pious about it. Not art lovers. with trendy conceptual art, it tends to be token objects where the real electricity, or the real idea is - not right there in the object, but floating somewhere else.

The narrative appeal of contemporary art/conceptual art, is a mixture of supposed meanings inherent in the art object and gossip surrounding the figure of the artist, plus fragments of mythic meanings that come from the history of art.

Modern people have an unconciously profound link with the religious past but otherwise (the link) tends to be sentimental.

An icon is just an instance of a type. Why do modern secular people tell themselves they like them? Because of history and because of meanings of a certain complicated kind that it is believed they possess or exude or stand for or somehow have. Why do people like contemporary art? The same. Complicated meanings. Only not complicated in the sense of deep or timeless, but in the sense of relating to a buzzing generality of fragmented modern experience.

Yvonne

Doppelcharacter

For anyone needing a refresher or question ideas, here is a copy of our powerpoint presentation.
Niamh

Doppelcharacter

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The Fetish Concept: Kant/ Marx

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Emer and Angela

The Fetish

Extract from The Two Secrets of the Fetish by Jean-Luc Nancy

"The fetish is better named than might appear. It is false, made, fabricated: it is produced. It is the production of desire based on the double genitive: produced by desire, producing desire, and in particular that of presence...It should touch us just for a single instant with its uniqueness, with its unique value. We strive toward it as we do the flip side of death, which puts on the reverse key, it, too, unique, of erasure in absence.
The fetish is not an idol and does not issue from religion. But it is value, sense, desire not for presence but as presence,...
The latin word pretium (whose sonorous syllables can be heard in precious) is likened by linguists to interpres. The relationship can work both ways: either the 'interpretation' derives from market value, or else market value derives from hermeneutics, and this latter is nothing other than the transmission and announcement of what precedes all sense and all value, the infinite price of the incredible presence."


Bernì

Micheal Landy, Breakdown, 2001

Micheal Landy, Breakdown, 2001

2001, Breakdown, an installation/event in which Michael Landy destroyed everything he owned: A particular ethical puzzle was raised by the fact that among his possessions were some original artworks by his contemporary - Chris Ofili, Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin, Gary Hume and others.

One of the last objects to be destroyed was his father's sheepskin coat. "The things I valued the most I left till last." [M. L.] The coat became a testament to his new value system as it circulated through those two weeks to its destruction. The coat assumed a kind of totemic significance during the show, and it's one loss that seems to weigh heavily on Landy.

Landy got us to think about how we feel ownership for other people's possessions, and how it's possible to think we have rights over stuff that we really don't have. And how we attach ourselves to objects as if they have a power outside the object itself.

Angela

African Masks and Fetishes: Exhibition at Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin

Installation View of Exhibition

Wall Text and Hand Outs for Exhibtion - African Masks and Fetishes

All African tribes have their own distinct cultures. But some generalisations can be made about how they view the world. Of course, there are exceptions, but generally, African tribes see their society as being pure and good. In contrast, they see the wilderness as the source of all (for want of a better word) evil. Hence illness, including insanity, poor harvest, and any other form of bad fortune is caused by the invasion of wilderness spirits, or witches, that live in the wilderness (or bush). This is the opposite assumption underpinning Western civilization, in that humanity is thought to be inherently evil and the wilderness is the pure idyll.

In order to protect itself from invasion, the tribe constructs altars. Sometimes around the perimeter of the village, in a clearing, before the bush begins. Altar figures are carved explicitly to appease the wilderness and ancestor spirits. So that the spirits will inhabit the statues and masks, and not the lives of the villagers.

Masks have the added benefit of being animated, so the wilderness spirits are able to possess them during festivals, allowing them to enact their characters. All objects are intended to be physically imposing or confrontational, in order to effectively protect the village.

Text and Images: “Courtesy to the Douglas Hyde Gallery”.

Post by: Angela