I was looking for an existing thread where I could insert a Thank you note for all to see. I could not find a suitable place so... it became a thread of it's own.
One of the nice things with a forum that really works is the fact that it becomes some kind of virtual community in which people do more than just voicing their opinions and sharing their knowledge.
The helping hands given to those who did not know how to insert pictures was one of these nice moments.
Today I was on the receiving end of Martin, sometimes known as M_Andersen's kind generosity. So, I would like to thank him for sending the Bruun Rasnmussen auction catalogue of Poul Kjaerholm furniture.
It is full of interesting things. One of the most interesting ones is to see all these well-known pieces but after years of use and "aging" the other ones are completety un-known pieces (at least to me) like the 1956 PK-43 table with a very original way to extend the table.
There is a great quote of Gerrit Rietveld (mis-spelled in the catalogue as Gerit). It is part of his talk at the opening of a Kjaerholm exhibition in 1963 in the Metz & Co store in Amsterdam.
"...Let me remind you that we are also facing difficulties today. Half a century ago, the big issue was the controversy between the notions of the modern and the traditional; today it is rather the difference between established ideas of the modern or modernism, in other words, between various kinds of vulgar modernism and decadent modernism..."
This being said...thanks again Martin!
Wow, thanks Koen. This thread...
Wow, thanks Koen. This thread was such a nice surprise 🙂
You know, when I was a child, I used to built small models of WW2 airplanes. Once I needed some more info about the colour sheme of a little known Japanese bomber that was put into operation in the very last months of the Pacific war. So with the help of my father, I placed an ad in a English airplane magazine. I was very pleasantly surprised to see that within a few weekes people sent me pictures, copies from books and even paint samples. It was very helpful and it's acutally something I never forgot.
So please enjoy it. I've looked through my own copy many times and I esp. like the pictures of the many different and beautiful tabletops. I also tried to find the cataloug from the Kjærholm exhibition in Louisiana but with no luck so far.
At Lauritz.com right now, there are two extremely rare and original brochures from E. Kold Christensen up for auction. Just type in "Kjaerholm" in the search box at the opening page. I believe they were designed by Kjærholm himself. The few pictures really don't do them justice. I saw one on display at Louisiana and this brochure is very skillfully designed and contains superb pictures of Kjærholm's work.
...and thanks to Koen...
Good heading, Koen! 🙂
I did put out a thank you to Koen in my own thread "Logo at no budget" as he helped me out on a "voluntary basis".
Maybe this have gone un-noticed, therefore I again send my sincere thanks to the fantastic assistance!
And as you correctly write, a forum like this really is a great community for help and communication. I am interested - but no designer myself, and this forums gives me many interesting facts and help.
Hi Jim,
Of course we can only guess what Gerrit Rietveld's intentions were, or which "decadent modern" he had in mind.
In his "Apologi der Bösen Form" Karl Pawek mentioned around the same time these three legged stools with tapered legs ending in a brass sleve that was holding a quite large conical shape. The seat was typically made quite round and couvered with almost fluorencent long hair synthetic fiber, but I think that for Rietveld it was a much wider field.
I suspect that quite a number of the pictures we see under "...can you identify this chair..." would qualify.
The phenomena of mimicry is of course part of every movement since the caves of Lascaux. Once a mouvement is well established it is easy to follow the codes. Enlarge any part of a classical building untill you can drive a bus through it and yuo have yourself a Post-modern building. A few cantivered beams over walls that go nowhere and voilà! a modern building.
At the end what makes the difference is the "Art" part in the Art+science combination.
During his first stay in pre first WW1 Germany soemone asked the 21 years old El Lissitzky what art was. His answer is well known it sounded like:
"...Wenn du mich fragst, was die Kunst sei, so weiss ich es nicht, wenn du michnicht fragst, so weiss ich er..."
"...When you ask me what art is, I do not know. When you do not ask, I know it..."
Picasso might have known that aswer because he had this variation: "...Before you asked, I knew it, now I keep it for myself..."
But I guess that that is the subject of another thread
Hi Jim,
I am not up to speed in your analogy (...in spite of all the spam messages encouraging me to re-design some of my own parts...) but there is some depth to the thought that you know it when you see it simply because it is strictly visual.
I know that conceptualism and other post-modern forms of art try to pretend that it is not and that the idea is more important than the form...but a concept, nor matter how original, funny or smart, will be looked at if it does not comply with century old rules on what is art. If I turn a large teddybear into a voodoo doll, have it chrome-plated and use it as a shield during a "performance" to protect some parts of me against some extended self-mutilation with a full size flame-thrower, I might have a concept and rejoice about it on my hospital bed, but it is not art...yet.
Art is well served by searching for new bounderies and taking down others but it still works within a certain visual canon that can only be learned by looking at art, from different times, from different parts of the world, other civilisations etc. and slowly but surely discouver what they all have in common. Unfortunately few people are prepared to train themselves and prefer an opinion over knowledge. So yes it is in the eyes of the beholder, but the difference betwen the beholders is training, much more than personal "taste" or preference.
Potter Stewart on pornography (not art)
US Supreme court justice Potter Stewart in a 60's case involving obscenity and free speech famously stated that he could not "define" obscenity "but I know it when I see it".
http://library.findlaw.com/2003/May/15/132747.html
Post Modernist Thoughts
Koen: I agree with your last post re: the current thinking in post-modernist or conceptual art. About 200 years ago Wm. Blake said that "execution is the chariot of conception". An obscure and obtuse observation in today's world I know, but maybe true.
Your thoughts always teach and never fail to inspire me.
Many thanks.
Vulgar modernism...PT.1
Every artistic movement in any of the arts that I know of is eventually vulgarized relative to its defining early precepts. Artistic movements seem to life cycles. Like the humans that create them, they are shape shifters over time. Many become so highly disfigured by the forces of context that they grow almost as unrecognizable from birth to death as a human being does. And these forces driving these changes are quite real. Movement artists inevitably find themselves needing to "change" to retain currency and attention. They change in response to pressures to escape the declining margins of oversupply. They change to avoid the pressures of trying to keep up with the often times nonrational, nonlinear leaps in consumer tastes. They change in response to the temptation of easy money printed willy nilly by central banks trying to goose inflation. They change in response to the tight money of recessions and depressions when the central banks are trying to reign in the inflation they engineered in the first place. I like to think of artistic movements as trees that are born from a seed and develop from a root/feeder system about 2-3 times bigger than the tree we see above ground. The tree we see above ground occassionally is rooted in a very benign climate with rich soil and grows steadily without much deformation along the way toward maturity and old age. But most trees, like most artistic movements, take root in contexts with many, many asymmetries acting on them. And most trees are once or twice in their life times subjected to massive environmental traumas. And sometimes trees, even the best of them, find themselves being caught up in very toxic environmental pollution. And all of these contextual influences disfigure/alter the steady, incremental growth program the tree would have followed in a benign environment. And so the tree, like the artistic movement, winds up, sometimes at a very early age, sometimes later, sometimes near its end, looking highly deformed--hardly like what it started out to be at all.
Vulgar Modernism Pt.2
What I'm saying here is that an artistic movement seems to have a life cycle in which even if the environment were utterly benign and receptive to it, it manifests youth, maturity and old age with a few rebirths along the way. PLUS as it moves through this life cycle, it is exposed to a few, or to many environmental insults deform it and alter its trajectory of development.
Vulgar (blank)ism. You fill in the -ism and I think you will see what I am talking about. If the -ism has a very short life, i.e., if it dies in youth, it changes very little until its sudden expiration. If it has a long life and survives lots of traumatic contextual events, it can become a rather bizarre caricature of itself along the way.
Think of Elizabethan Tragedy from whence Shakespeare sprang. It was an unself-conscious -ism; that is, Shakespeare and his contemporaries did not call themselves Elizabethan Tragedians, but the major dramatists of the era did all adopt the same meters, act structures, conventions about breaking the fourth wall, and so on. They knew they were a new breed and they knew they were coming out of a long tradition. But they just did not see a need, for whatever reason, to consciously page themselves as a "movement."
In any case, you see some of the pre-Shakespearean dramatists groping to find the dramatic equivalent of a form language appropriate to their time. Then with Shakespeare and his contemporaries, you find this maturing, majesterial flowering of the drama. Shakespeare and his immediate contemporaries don't have to resort to gratuitous shock value to top what has been done before. They can make all their artistic dramatic choices based on BOTH taste and technique. There is no demand from the groundlings for more exposure of the oppression of the leaders than the form can bear, or for more gratuitous violence and purpleness of language than the form can bear. Likewise, the leaders in the box seats are secure enough that they do not insist on more censorship than the form can bear, or more embedded propaganda than the form can bear. In turn, there is this magnificient progression from comedies to histories to tragedies during the middle of the Elizabethan period. But after this zenith is reached, something happens to the dramatists like John Ford that follow. On the simplest level, the audience has become accustomed to the level of violence and spectacle experienced during this great flowering period. The dramatists find they can't top the work that came before them without exaggerating the violence and spectacle to get the same level of awe, stunned feeling and applause by the final curtain. So they begin to use pigs hearts on pikes carried around on stage, rather than talk about someone having their heart cut out of their chest. And some critical thinkers of the time probably rationalize the descent into vulgarity as something virtuous, praising the latest dramatists for "showing" rather than "telling.
Vulgar Modernism Pt.3
But in retrospect, we can see this was just the critic--the gatekeeper--getting caught up in the same creeping blight of vulgarity as the dramatist. The dramatist, faced with the problem of topping what came before to keep the revenues flowing into the theater, has succumbed to the pragmatic economic need for more violence and spectacle and in the process moved these characterstics beyond what the form can bear. The critic ceases to criticize dramas in regards to the requirements of the form and begins to criticize them with regards to how well they meet the dramatic form, given the exigencies of the theater economics. It is a subtle shift at first. No one talks about it. But shortly, the Elizabethan drama matures into vulgar spectacle never to ascend to its former glory.
IMHO, you can see this same sort of trajectory in modernist art of most kinds, though modernist art has actually had a much longer shelf life as a living breathing movement, I suppose, than did Elizabethan drama.
The way to keep a movement alive and healthy is for those with great imagination and craft to keep finding paths forward to artifacts that appeal to consuming persons without exaggeration of elements of the form that tend to vulgarize it. But saying this is one thing and doing it is quite another...and quite a tall order. The way I look at it, it is better for the movement to lapse into well done repetion or even cliche for a time than than it is for it to succumb to the temptation of vulgarizing. Vulgarizing one-ups-manship. Vulgarizing seems to equate to a kind of cannabalization of the medium--a process of devouring itself. I don't recall any movements that have risen to new heights after extended, pronounced periods of vulgarization. I do see some movements that slow down their development, perhaps even to a crawl, and yet regain vitality occassionally. Compare country and western music and blue grass music. Country and western music has been so vulgarized that it is hard to conceive that it will ever produce any music comparable to Hank Williams or some of his contemporaries. Blue grass music, on the other hand, sticks closely to its form language, has avoided vulgarization, and periodically spikes in popularity and revitalizes mainstream pop music with some of its ingredients, only to recede again into the background. There is blue grass music and musicians now as good or better than what were around 50-100 years ago.
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