Thursday, February 26, 2009

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

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