GARISAN SENI KONTEMPORARI

The Definition of Art : Traditional

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Traditional Definitions

Traditional definitions, at least as commonly portrayed in contemporary discussions of the definition of art, take artworks to be characterized by a single type of property. The standard candidates are representational properties, expressive properties, and formal properties. So there are representational or mimetic definitions, expressive definitions, and formalist definitions, which hold that artworks are characterized by their possession of, respectively, representational, expressive, and formal properties. It is not difficult to find fault with these simple definitions. For example, possessing representational, expressive, and formal properties cannot be sufficient conditions, since, obviously, instructional manuals are representations, but not typically artworks, human faces and gestures have expressive properties without being works of art, and both natural objects and artifacts produced for the homeliest utilitarian purposes have formal properties but are not artworks.

But the ease of these dismissals serves as a reminder of the fact that traditional definitions of art are not self-contained. Each traditional definition stands in (different) close and complicated relationships to its system's other complexly interwoven parts — epistemology, ontology, value theory, philosophy of mind, etc. For this reason, it is both difficult and somewhat misleading to extract them and consider them in isolation. Two examples of historically influential definitions of art offered by great philosophers will suffice to illustrate. First, Plato holds in the Republic and elsewhere that the arts are representational, or mimetic (sometimes translated “imitative”). Artworks are ontologically dependent on, and inferior to, ordinary physical objects, which in turn are ontologically dependent on, and inferior to, what is most real, the non-physical Forms. Grasped perceptually, artworks present only an appearance of an appearance of what is really real. Consequently, artistic experience cannot yield knowledge. Nor do the makers of artworks work from knowledge. Because artworks engage an unstable, lower part of the soul, art should be subservient to moral realities, which, along with truth, are more metaphysically fundamental and hence more humanly important than beauty.

Beauty is not, for Plato, the distinctive province of the arts, and in fact his conception of beauty is extremely wide and metaphysical: there is a Form of Beauty, of which we can have non-perceptual knowledge, but it is more closely related to the erotic than to the arts. (See Janaway, and the entry on Plato on Rhetoric and Poetry.) Second, although Kant has a definition of art, he is for systematic reasons far less concerned with it than with aesthetic judgment. Kant defines art as “a kind of representation that is purposive in itself and, though without an end, nevertheless promotes the cultivation of the mental powers for sociable communication.” (Kant, Critique of Judgment, Guyer translation, section 44)). The definition, when fully unpacked, has representational, formalist and expressivist elements. Located conceptually in a much broader discussion of aesthetic judgment and teleology, the definition is one relatively small piece of a hugely ambitious philosophical structure that attempts, famously, to account for, and work out the relationships between, scientific knowledge, morality, and religious faith. (see the entry on Kant's Aesthetics and Teleology) For treatments of influential definitions of art, inseparable from the complex philosophical systems in which they occur, see, for example, the entries on 18th Century German Aesthetics, Arthur Schopenhauer, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Dewey's Aesthetics.

Functional Art

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Functional (mainly aesthetic) definitions

Functional definitions take some function(s) or intended function(s) to be definitive of artworks. Here only aesthetic definitions, which connect art essentially with the aesthetic — aesthetic judgments, experience, or properties – will be considered. Different aesthetic definitions incorporate different views of aesthetic properties and judgments. See the entry on aesthetic judgment.

As noted above, some philosophers lean heavily on a distinction between aesthetic properties and artistic properties, taking the former to be perceptually striking qualities that can be directly perceived in works, without knowledge of their origin and purpose, and the latter to be relational properties that works possess in virtue of their relations to art history, art genres, etc. It is also, of course, possible to hold a less restrictive view of aesthetic properties, on which aesthetic properties need not be perceptual; on this broader view, it is unnecessary to deny that abstracta like mathematical entities and scientific laws possess aesthetic properties.)

Monroe Beardsley's definition holds that an artwork: “either an arrangement of conditions intended to be capable of affording an experience with marked aesthetic character or (incidentally) an arrangement belonging to a class or type of arrangements that is typically intended to have this capacity.” (Beardsley, 1982, p. 299. For more on Beardsley, see SEP, Beardsley's Aesthetics)Beardsley's conception of aesthetic experience is Deweyan: aesthetic experiences are experiences that are complete, unified, intense experiences of the way things appear to us, and are, moreover, experiences which are controlled by the things experienced. (SEP Dewey's Aesthetics). Zangwill's aesthetic definition of art says that something is a work of art if and only if someone had an insight that certain aesthetic properties would be determined by certain nonaesthetic properties, and for this reason the thing was intentionally endowed with the aesthetic properties in virtue of the nonaesthetic properties as envisaged in the insight. (Zangwill, 1995)Aesthetic properties for Zangwill are those judgments that are the subject of “verdictive aesthetic judgments” (judgements of beauty and ugliness) and “substantive aesthetic judgements”, (e.g., of daintiness, elegance, delicacy, etc. ). The latter are ways of being beautiful or ugly; aesthetic in virtue of a special close relation to verdictive judgments, which are subjectively universal. Other aesthetic definitions are easily obtained, by grafting on a different account of the aesthetic. For example, one might define aesthetic properties as those having an evaluative component, whose perception involves the perception of certain formal base properties, such as shape and color. (De Clercq, 2002).

Views which combine features of institutional and aesthetic definitions also exist. Iseminger, for example, builds a definition on an account of appreciation, on which to appreciate a thing's being F is to find experiencing its being F to be valuable in itself, and an account of aesthetic communication (which it is the function of the artworld to promote). (Iseminger, 2004) Another definition that combines features of institutional and aesthetic definitions is David Davies'. Davies adopts Nelson Goodman's account of symbolic functions that are aesthetic (a symbol functions aesthetically when it is syntactically dense, semantically dense, syntactically replete, and characterized by multiple and complex reference, which he takes to clarify the conditions under which a practice of making is a practice of artistic making. (Davies 2004; Goodman 1968)

Aesthetic definitions have been criticized for being both too narrow and too broad. They are held to be too narrow because they are unable to cover influential modern works like Duchamp's ready-mades and conceptual works like Robert Barry's All the things I know but of which I am not at the moment thinking - 1:36 PM; June 15, 1969, which appear to lack aesthetic properties. (Duchamp famously asserted that his urinal, Fountain, was selected for its lack of aesthetic features.) Aesthetic definitions are held to be too broad because beautifully designed automobiles, neatly manicured lawns, and products of commercial design are often created with the intention of being objects of aesthetic appreciation, but are not artworks. Moreover, aesthetic views have been held to have trouble making sense of bad art. (see Dickie, Art and Value, and Stephen Davies, Philosophy of Art, p. 37) Finally, more radical doubts about aesthetic definitions center on the intelligibility and usefulness of the aesthetic. Beardsley's view, for example, has been criticized by Dickie, who has also offered influential criticisms of the idea of an aesthetic attitude. (Dickie 1965, Cohen 1973, Kivy 1975)

To these criticisms several responses have been offered. First, the less restrictive conception of aesthetic properties mentioned above, on which they may be based on non-perceptual formal properties, can be deployed. On this view, conceptual works would have aesthetic features, much the same way that mathematical entities are often claimed to. (Shelley 2003, Carroll 2004) Second, a distinction may be drawn between time-sensitive properties, whose standard observation conditions include an essential reference to temporal location of the observer, and non-time-sensitive properties, which do not. Higher-order aesthetic properties like drama, humor, and irony, which account for a significant part of the appeal of Duchamp's and Cage's works, on this view, would derive from time-sensitive properties. (Zemach 1997) Third, it might be held that it is the creative act of presenting something that is in the relevant sense unfamiliar, into a new context, the artworld, which has aesthetic properties. Or, fourth, it might be held that (Zangwill's “second-order” strategy) works like ready-mades lack aesthetic functions, but are parasitic upon, because meant to be considered in the context of, works that do have aesthetic functions, and hence constitute borderline cases. Finally, perhaps heroically, it can be denied that Duchamp's Fountain is a work of art. (Beardsley1982).

As to the over-inclusiveness of aesthetic definitions, a distinction might be drawn between primary and secondary functions. Or it may be maintained that some cars, lawns, and products of industrial design are on the art/non-art borderline, and so don't constitute clear and decisive counter-examples. Or, if the claim that aesthetic theories fail to account for bad art depends on holding that some works have absolutely no aesthetic value whatsoever, as opposed to some non-zero amount, however infinitesimal, it may be wondered what justifies that assumption.

Aesthetics of Art II

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Ancient aesthetics

We have examples of pre-historic art, but they are rare, and the context of their production and use is not very clear, so we can little more than guess at the aesthetic doctrines that guided their production and interpretation.

Ancient art was largely, but not entirely, based on the seven great ancient civilizations: Egypt, Mesopotamia, Greece, Rome, Persia, India and China. Each of these centers of early civilization developed a unique and characteristic style in its art. Greece had the most influence on the development of aesthetics in the West. This period of Greek art saw a veneration of the human physical form and the development of corresponding skills to show musculature, poise, beauty and anatomically correct proportions. Furthermore, in many Western and Eastern cultures alike, traits such as body hair are rarely depicted in art that addresses physical beauty.[citation needed] More in contrast with this Greek-Western aesthetic taste is the genre of grotesque.

Greek philosophers initially felt that aesthetically appealing objects were beautiful in and of themselves. Plato felt that beautiful objects incorporated proportion, harmony, and unity among their parts. Similarly, in the Metaphysics, Aristotle found that the universal elements of beauty were order, symmetry, and definiteness.

Islamic aesthetics

Islamic art is not, properly speaking, an art pertaining to religion only. The term "Islamic" refers not only to the religion, but to any form of art created in an Islamic culture or in an Islamic context. It would also be a mistake to assume that all Muslims are in agreement on the use of art in religious observance, the proper place of art in society, or the relation between secular art and the demands placed on the secular world to conform to religious precepts. Islamic art frequently adopts secular elements and elements that are frowned upon, if not forbidden, by some Islamic theologians.

According to Islam, human works of art are inherently flawed compared to the work of God; thus, it is believed by many that to attempt to depict in a realistic form any animal or person is insolence to God. This tendency has had the effect of narrowing the field of artistic possibility to such forms of art as Arabesque, mosaic, Islamic calligraphy, and Islamic architecture, as well as more generally any form of abstraction that can claim the status of non-representational art.

The limited possibilities have been explored by artists as an outlet to artistic expression, and has been cultivated to become a positive style and tradition, emphasizing the decorative function of art, or its religious functions via non-representational forms such as Geometric patterns, floral patterns, and arabesques.

Human or animal depiction is generally forbidden altogether in Islamic cultures because it is said to lead to sculptural pieces which then leads to worship of that sculpture or "idol". Human portrayals can be found in early Islamic cultures with varying degrees of acceptance by religious authorities. Human representation for the purpose of worship that is uniformly considered idolatry as forbidden in Sharia law. There are many depictions of Nabi Muhammad, Islam's prophet, in historical Islamic art.

The calligraphic arts grew out of an effort to devote oneself to the study of the Quran. By patiently transcribing each word of the text, the writer was made to contemplate the meaning of it. As time passed, these calligraphic works began to be prized as works of art, growing increasingly elaborate in the illumination and stylizing of the text. These illuminations were applied to other works besides the Quran, and it became a respected art form in and of itself.

Indian aesthetics

Indian art evolved with an emphasis on inducing special spiritual or philosophical states in the audience, or with representing them symbolically. According to Kapila Vatsyayan, "Classical Indian architecture, sculpture, painting, literature (kāvya), music, and dancing evolved their own rules conditioned by their respective media, but they shared with one another not only the underlying spiritual beliefs of the Indian religio-philosophic mind, but also the procedures by which the relationships of the symbol and the spiritual states were worked out in detail."

In the Pan Indian philosophic thought the term 'Satyam Shivam Sundaram' is another name for the concept of the Supreme. 'Sat' is the truth value, 'Shiv' is the good value & 'Sundaram' is the beauty value. Man through his 'Srabana' or education, 'Manana' or experience and conceptualization and 'Sadhana' or practice, through different stages of life (Asramas) comes to form and realize the idea of these three values to develop a value system. This Value-system helps us to develop two basic ideas 1) that of 'Daksha' or the adept/expert and 2) of Mahana/Parama or the Absolute and thus to judge anything in this universe in the light of these two measures, known as 'Adarsha'. A person who has mastered great amounts of knowledge of the grammars, rules, & language of an art-form are adepts (Daksha), where as those who have worked through the whole system and journeyed ahead of these to become a law unto themself is called a Mahana. Individuals idea of 'Daksha' and 'Mahana' is relative to one's development of the concept of 'Satyam-Shivam-Sundaram.' For example, Tagore's idea of these two concepts should be way above any common man's and many perceive Tagore as a 'Mahana' Artist in the realm of literature. This concept of Satyam-Shivam-Sundaram, a kind of Value Theory is the cornerstone of Indian Aesthetics.

Of particular concern to Indian drama and literature are the term 'Bhava' or the state of mind and rasa referring generally to the emotional flavors/essence crafted into the work by the writer and relished by a 'sensitive spectator' or sahṛdaya or one with positive taste and mind. Poets like Kālidāsa were attentive to rasa, which blossomed into a fully developed aesthetic system. Even in contemporary India the term rasa denoting "flavor" or "essence" is used colloquially to describe the aesthetic experiences in films; "māsala mix" describes popular Hindi cinema films which serve a so called balanced emotional meal for the masses, savored as rasa by these spectators.

Rasa theory blossoms beginning with the Sanskrit text Nātyashāstra (nātya meaning "drama" and shāstra meaning "science of"), a work attributed to Bharata Muni where the Gods declare that drama is the 'Fifth Veda' because it is suitable for the degenerate age as the best form of religious instruction. While the date of composition varies wildly among scholars, ranging from the era of Plato and Aristotle to the seventh century CE. The Nātyashāstra presents the aesthetic concepts of rasas and their associated bhāvas in Chapters Six and Seven respectively, which appear to be independent of the work as a whole. Eight rasas and associated bhāvas are named and their enjoyment is likened to savoring a meal: rasa is the enjoyment of flavors that arise from the proper preparation of ingredients and the quality of ingredients. What rasa actually is, in a theoretical sense, is not discussed and given the Nātyashāstra's pithy wording it is unlikely the exact understanding of the original author(s) will be known.

The theory of the rasas develops significantly with the Kashmiri aesthetician Ãndandavardhana's classic on poetics, the Dhvanyāloka which introduces the ninth rasa, shānta-rasa as a specifically religious feeling of peace (śānta) which arises from its bhāva, weariness of the pleasures of the world. The primary purpose of this text is to refine the literary concept dhvani or poetic suggestion, by arguing for the existence of rasa-dhvani, primarily in forms of Sanskrit including a word, sentence or whole work "suggests" a real-world emotional state or bhāva, but thanks to aesthetic distance, the sensitive spectator relishes the rasa, the aesthetic flavor of tragedy, heroism or romance.

The 9th - 10th century master of the religious system known as "the nondual Shaivism of Kashmir" (or "Kashmir Shaivism") and aesthetician, Abhinavagupta brought rasa theory to its pinnacle in his separate commentaries on the Dhvanyāloka, the Dhvanyāloka-locana (translated by Ingalls, Masson and Patwardhan, 1992) and the Abhinavabharati, his commentary on the Nātyashāstra, portions of which are translated by Gnoli and Masson and Patwardhan. Abhinavagupta offers for the first time a technical definition of rasa which is the universal bliss of the Self or Atman colored by the emotional tone of a drama. Shānta-rasa functions as an equal member of the set of rasas but is simultaneously distinct being the most clear form of aesthetic bliss. Abhinavagupta likens it to the string of a jeweled necklace; while it may not be the most appealing for most people, it is the string that gives form to the necklace, allowing the jewels of the other eight rasas to be relished. Relishing the rasas and particularly shānta-rasa is hinted as being as-good-as but never-equal-to the bliss of Self-realization experienced by yogis.

Chinese aesthetics

Chinese art has a long history of varied styles and emphases. In ancient times philosophers were already arguing about aesthetics. Confucius emphasized the role of the arts and humanities (especially music and poetry) in broadening human nature and aiding “li” (etiquette, the rites) in bringing us back to what is essential about humanity. His opponent Mozi, however, argued that music and fine arts were classist and wasteful, benefiting the rich but not the common people.

By the 4th century A.D., artists were debating in writing over the proper goals of art as well. Gu Kaizhi has 3 surviving books on this theory of painting, for example, and it's not uncommon to find later artist/scholars who both create art and write about the creating of art. Religious and philosophical influence on art was common (and diverse) but never universal; it is easy to find art that largely ignores philosophy and religion in almost every Chinese time period.

African aesthetics

African art existed in many forms and styles, and with fairly little influence from outside Africa. Most of it followed traditional forms and the aesthetic norms were handed down orally as well as written. Sculpture and performance art are prominent, and abstract and partially abstracted forms are valued, and were valued long before influence from the Western tradition began in earnest. The Nok culture is testimony to this. The mosque of Timbuktu shows that specific areas of Africa developed unique aesthetics.

Western medieval aesthetics

Surviving medieval art is primarily religious in focus and funded largely by the State, Roman Catholic or Orthodox church, powerful ecclesiastical individuals, or wealthy secular patrons. These art pieces often served a liturgical function, whether as chalices or even as church buildings themselves. Objects of fine art from this period were frequently made from rare and valuable materials, such as gold and lapis, the cost of which commonly exceeded the wages of the artist.

Medieval aesthetics in the realm of philosophy built upon Classical thought, continuing the practice of Plotinus by employing theological terminology in its explications. St. Bonaventure’s “Retracing the Arts to Theology”, a primary example of this method, discusses the skills of the artisan as gifts given by God for the purpose of disclosing God to mankind, which purpose is achieved through four lights: the light of skill in mechanical arts which discloses the world of artifacts; which light is guided by the light of sense perception which discloses the world of natural forms; which light, consequently, is guided by the light of philosophy which discloses the world of intellectual truth; finally, this light is guided by the light of divine wisdom which discloses the world of saving truth.

Saint Thomas Aquinas's aesthetic is probably the most famous and influential theory among medieval authors, having been the subject of much scrutiny in the wake of the neo-Scholastic revival of the late 19th and early 20th centuries and even having received the approbation of the celebrated Modernist writer, James Joyce. Thomas, like many other medievals, never gives a systematic account of beauty itself, but several scholars have conventionally arranged his thought—though not always with uniform conclusions—using relevant observations spanning the entire corpus of his work. While Aquinas's theory follows generally the model of Aristotle, he develops a singular aesthetics which incorporates elements unique to his thought. Umberto Eco's The Aesthetics of Thomas Aquinas identifies the three main characteristics of beauty in Aquinas's philosophy: integritas sive perfectio, consonantia sive debita proportio, and claritas sive splendor formae. While Aristotle likewise identifies the first two characteristics, St. Thomas conceives of the third as an appropriation from principles developed by neo-Platonic and Augustinian thinkers.
Lorsch Gospels 778–820. Charlemagne's Court School.

With the shift from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance, art likewise changed its focus, as much in its content as in its mode of expression.

Modern aesthetics

From the late 17th to the early 20th century Western aesthetics underwent a slow revolution into what is often called modernism. German and British thinkers emphasised beauty as the key component of art and of the aesthetic experience, and saw art as necessarily aiming at absolute beauty.

For Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten aesthetics is the science of the sense experiences, a younger sister of logic, and beauty is thus the most perfect kind of knowledge that sense experience can have. For Immanuel Kant the aesthetic experience of beauty is a judgment of a subjective but similar human truth, since all people should agree that “this rose is beautiful” if it in fact is. However, beauty cannot be reduced to any more basic set of features. For Friedrich Schiller aesthetic appreciation of beauty is the most perfect reconciliation of the sensual and rational parts of human nature.

For Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, the philosophy of art is the "organon" of philosophy concerning the relation between man and nature. So aesthetics began now to be the name for the philosophy of art. Friedrich von Schlegel, August Wilhelm Schlegel, Friedrich Schleiermacher and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel have also given lectures on aesthetics as philosophy of art after 1800.

For Hegel all culture is a matter of "absolute spirit" coming to be manifest to itself, stage by stage, changing to a perfection that only philosophy can approach. Art is the first stage in which the absolute spirit is manifest immediately to sense-perception, and is thus an objective rather than subjective revelation of beauty.

For Arthur Schopenhauer aesthetic contemplation of beauty is the most free that the pure intellect can be from the dictates of will; here we contemplate perfection of form without any kind of worldly agenda, and thus any intrusion of utility or politics would ruin the point of the beauty. It is thus for Schopenhauer one way to fight the suffering.

The British were largely divided into intuitionist and analytic camps. The intuitionists believed that aesthetic experience was disclosed by a single mental faculty of some kind. For Anthony Ashley-Cooper, 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury this was identical to the moral sense, beauty just is the sensory version of moral goodness. For Ludwig Wittgenstein aesthetics consisted in the description of a whole culture which is a linguistic impossibility. That which constitutes aesthetics lies out side the realm of the language game.

For Oscar Wilde the contemplation of beauty for beauty's sake was not only the foundation for much of his literary career but was quoted as saying "Aestheticism is a search after the signs of the beautiful. It is the science of the beautiful through which men seek the correlation of the arts. It is, to speak more exactly, the search after the secret of life.".

Wilde famously toured the United States in 1882. He travelled across the United States spreading the idea of Aesthetics in a speech called "The English Renaissance." In his speech he proposed that Beauty and Aesthetics was not "not languid but energetic. By beautifying the outward aspects of life, one would beautify the inner ones." The English Renaissance was, he said, "like the Italian Renaissance before it,a sort of rebirth of the spirit of man".For Francis Hutcheson beauty is disclosed by an inner mental sense, but is a subjective fact rather than an objective one. Analytic theorists like Henry Home, Lord Kames, William Hogarth, and Edmund Burke hoped to reduce beauty to some list of attributes. Hogarth, for example, thinks that beauty consists of (1) fitness of the parts to some design; (2) variety in as many ways as possible; (3) uniformity, regularity or symmetry, which is only beautiful when it helps to preserve the character of fitness; (4) simplicity or distinctness, which gives pleasure not in itself, but through its enabling the eye to enjoy variety with ease; (5) intricacy, which provides employment for our active energies, leading the eye on "a wanton kind of chase"; and (6) quantity or magnitude, which draws our attention and produces admiration and awe. Later analytic aestheticians strove to link beauty to some scientific theory of psychology (such as James Mill) or biology (such as Herbert Spencer).

Post-modern aesthetics and psychoanalysis

Early twentieth century artists, poets and composers challenged existing notions of beauty, broadening the scope of art and aesthetics. In 1941, Eli Siegel, American philosopher and poet, founded Aesthetic Realism, the philosophy that reality itself is aesthetic, and that "The world, art, and self explain each other: each is the aesthetic oneness of opposites."
Various attempts have been made to define Post-modern aesthetics. The challenge to the assumption that beauty was central to art and aesthetics, thought to be original, is actually continuous with older aesthetic theory; Aristotle was the first in the Western tradition to classify "beauty" into types as in his theory of drama, and Kant made a distinction between beauty and the sublime. What was new was a refusal to credit the higher status of certain types, where the taxonomy implied a preference for tragedy and the sublime to comedy and the Rococo.

Croce suggested that “expression” is central in the way that beauty was once thought to be central. George Dickie suggested that the sociological institutions of the art world were the glue binding art and sensibility into unities. Marshall McLuhan suggested that art always functions as a "counter-environment" designed to make visible what is usually invisible about a society.[page needed] Theodor Adorno felt that aesthetics could not proceed without confronting the role of the culture industry in the commodification of art and aesthetic experience. Hal Foster (art critic) attempted to portray the reaction against beauty and Modernist art in The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture. Arthur Danto has described this reaction as "kalliphobia" (after the Greek word for beauty - 'kalos').André Malraux explains that the notion of beauty was connected to a particular conception of art that arose with the Renaissance and was still dominant in the eighteenth century (but was supplanted later). The discipline of aesthetics, which originated in the eighteenth century, mistook this transient state of affairs for a revelation of the permanent nature of art.Brian Massumi suggests to reconsider beauty following the aesthetical thought in the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari.

Daniel Berlyne created the field of experimental aesthetics in the 1970s, for which he is still the most cited individual decades after his death.

Pneumaist aestheticism is a theory of art and a highly experimental approach to art negating historical preconceptions of the aesthetic.

Jean-François Lyotard re-invokes the Kantian distinction between taste and the sublime. Sublime painting, unlike kitsch realism, "...will enable us to see only by making it impossible to see; it will please only by causing pain."

Sigmund Freud inaugurated aesthetical thinking in Psychoanalysis mainly via the "Uncanny" as aesthetical affect.Following Freud and Merleau-Ponty,Jacques Lacan theorized aesthetics in terms of sublimation and the Thing .

IMPORTANT IN VISUAL ART DESIGN

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Elements of Art

Form is an element of art that is three-dimensional and encloses volume. Cubes ,spheres,and cylinders are examples of various forms. Line is an element of art which refers to the continuos mark made on some surface by a moving point. It may be two dimensional, like a pencil mark on a paper or it may be three dimensional(wire) or implied( the edge of a shape or form) often it is a outline,contour or silhouette. Shape is an enclosed space defined by other elements of art. shapes may take on the appearance of two-d or three- objects. Color Is an element of art with three properties1) Hue, the name of the color, e.g. red, yellow, etc. 2) Intensity or the purity and strength of the color such as bright ness or dullness. And 3) value, or the lightness or darkness of the color. Texture refers to the surface quality or "feel" of an object, such as roughness, smoothness, or softness. Actual texture can be felt while simulated textures are implied by the way the artist renders areas of the picture. Space refers to the distance or area between, around, above or within things. It can be a description for both 2 and 3 dimensional portrayals. Value describes the lightness or darkness of a color. Value is needed to express Volume.

Principles of Art
Emphasis in a composition refers to developing points of interest to pull the viewer's eye to important parts of the body of the work. Balance is a sense of stability in the body of work. Balance can be created by repeating same shapes and by creating a feeling of equal weight. Harmony is achieved in a body of work by using similar elements throughout the work, harmony gives an uncomplicated look to your work. Variety refers to the differences in the work, You can achieve variety by using difference shapes, textures, colors and values in your work. Movement adds excitement to your work by showing action and directing the viewers eye throughout the picture plane. Rhythm is a type of movement in drawing and painting. It is seen in repeating of shapes and colors. Alternating lights and darks also give a sense of rhythm. Proportion or scale refers to the relationships of the size of objects in a body of work. Proportions gives a sense of size seen as a relationship of objects. such as smallness or largeness. Unity is seen in a painting or drawing when all the parts equal a whole. Your work should not appear disjointed or confusing.

Art criticism:

The skills of art criticism

Examine any object we are willing to call art. In order for it to exist someone had to produce it. Skills of observation, representation and interpretation had to be joined with skills of rendering and creation to bring this work into existence. These are the skills associated with art production. In order to fully understand the symbols, subjects and themes affiliated with this work and how the work relates to the culture and times in which it was produced, one must be familiar with its heritage; seeking answers to the who, when, what and why questions. These are issues associated with art history. But in order to appreciate the significance of this work, one must be able to identify, describe and interpret what is actually in the work in terms of its expressive properties, and to assess, or make judgments about, the work's personal and social values. This is, of course, within the realm of art criticism.

Identifying and describing -- if one is to respond to a work of art as fully as possible, it is essential that effort be invested in carefully examining every aspect of the work. Specific shapes, colors, values and textures, and where these visual qualities are located need to be identified. Illusions of form, space and gesture must be observed. One should look for what is obvious as well as nuances and subtleties. In addition, what is observed needs to be articulated. This can be done intuitively and/or analytically, silently with oneself or in discussion with others. The key point is the necessity to elucidate what has been experienced in order to verify the validity of one's observations; e.g., describing the range of colors, variations in dark and light qualities, the width of lines, and tactile and visual textures, as well as the extent to which organic and/or geometric shapes and illusions of deep and shallow space exist. If qualities within the art work are not observed, than one's response will be stunted and appreciation will be limited. If qualities are ascribed to the work that do not actually exist within it, than one's response will be invalid.

Analyzing -- another objective activity is to contemplate how the characteristics of the work that have been identified and described are organized. Are visual qualities arranged primarily symmetrically or asymmetrically? Are there colors, textures or shapes that are clearly dominant because of their relative size or repeated use? What kind of implied or actual movements can be identified? Are their large sinuous curves or staccato-like gradations or transitions? Are contrasts among and between visual qualities very obvious and conflicting, or subtle and harmonious? It is essential to analyze as carefully as possible how visual qualities are arranged because the nature of these qualities and their distribution are the best and most legitimate indicators of what is being expressed both overtly and covertly.

Interpreting -- making an accurate assessment of the formal "objective" qualities in works of art is critical to discerning what the work expresses. The emotions and thoughts evoked by our contemplation of the work should be based upon what can actually be observed. If we say we are saddened by the work or that we experience a sense of tranquillity, we ought to be able to identify the sources in the work for these responses. What we must not succumb to is allowing our predisposition's to bias our reactions. For instance, we may believe that weakness and resignation are associated with old age. When we observe a painting by Van Gogh of an old peasant we assume that he is a frail old man, even though he is painted in very vibrant and forceful and conflicting colors. Weakness and resignation are not associated with these colors, therefore, such a response would be invalid. Biased response do not allow the work to speak for itself.

Making judgments -- all of the foregoing types of responses are necessary prerequisites to making informed judgments about the value of visual phenomena including works of art. Judgments, however, do not exist in isolation; they are relative to a variety of criteria, which also need to be clarified. If one declares that a particular painting is an extraordinary masterpiece, what is the basis for this judgment? Is the work being compared to other works that are similar in style and/or theme? Or, does the work evoke such profound personal reactions that one is moved to call it great?

Making comparative judgments requires that one possess a background that is relative to what is being evaluated. For example, questioning whether a work is an ordinary or an extraordinary example of a particular artistic style requires some acquaintance with other works in the same style. Styles can vary in terms of time and/or place (Song Dynasty ceramic vessels from China), the character of a work's formal organization (baroque forms from various times and places), or the unique approach of a particular artist (Modigliani, for example).

BINOCULARS

2010-10-26T00:27:00.019+08:00

MALAYSIAN CERAMIC ARTIST : Mohd Al-Khuzairie Ali
The artists Binoculars borrow its title from the optical instrument and symbolizes, the artist act looking into the distant future with his eighteen ceramic work, which in turn consist of three discernable series: Reborn,Mind Machine and Xerox.Across the three, forms take on space-age guises as body parts mingle with machine components and human flesh fraternizes with nuts and bolts.And altogether, the humble, ultilitarian medium of ceramic is given a futuristic facelift to represent Khuzairie's observations of socio-cultural changes caused by our ever-increasing dependence on science and technology.

REALIST PAINTINGS

2010-09-22T01:19:00.012+08:00

Realist Paintings by David Kassan As an expression of his own calculated observation and visual consumption of surrounding environment, introspective glimpses of reality imbue the art of David Jon Kassan. By immersing himself into his subject matter, Kassan is able to infuse his painting with life and realism. Kassan’s direction of realism follows the philosophies emplyed by the Ashcan School of American Realists.

Artist Statement

My work is a way of meditation, a way of slowing down time though the careful observation of overlooked slices of my environment. It is the subtlety of emotion in my acquaintances that inhabit the aforementioned environment which intrigues me. My paintings strive for reality, a chance to mimic life in both scale and complexity. The viewer is given an eye level perspective of the subject. A view that is unbiased and in its most raw condition. It is my intent to control the medium of oil paint so that it is not part of the viewer to subject equation. The image stands alone without evidence of the artist. I displace textures from their natural environment by moving them out of the context they exist in. Taking the abstract form from the streets where they get lost and moving them into the gallery space where they can be contemplated as accidental abstractions.
The technical aspect of my work is a means to an end; an end rooted in the viewer's experience. I am interested the concept of a painting's technical and transformative powers. By turning an ordinary painting surface into a textured trompe l'oeil documentation of the city or turning the surface into a life sized representation of a figure in space that transmits feeling this technical process allows for the viewer's experience to be altered.
The thoughts behind my chosen subject matter, the scale at which it is presented, my search for understanding what I observe, and my effort to constantly learn to document reality with a naturalistic, representational painting technique allows for pieces to be inherent contradictions; paintings that are both real and abstract. My influences are understandably just as contradictory as they have fed and connected my perspective on painting. I am constantly seeking out work that is congruent with my own which has led me to explore the work of life size old master paintings, urban stencil and graffiti street art, Marcel Duchamp's found objects, abstract paintings by Robert Rauschenberg, and finally the sheer conceptual and executed realism of Caravaggio.
Time is the most valuable thing that we all have, the one aspect of daily life that we can not get back once its gone. I want to use time while trying to understand the world around me. Painting is my notebook, my sounding board.

Sculpture Artists

2010-09-22T01:07:00.007+08:00

Pencil Carving Art By Dalton Getty

What do you see in this picture? Pencils? Look again. They’re sculptures. Dalton Getty has been patiently carving sculptures from pencils for 25 years. He creates amazing miniature pieces of art, including linked hearts, keys, and an alphabet project completed over a steady 2.5 year period. Incredible.Dalton Getty is a 45-year-old resident of Bridgeport who turns ordinary pencils into miniature sculptures, without using a magnifying glass
He works very slowly and does not use any special tools: for he needed only a blade, a sewing needle and a very bright light. To protect their vision, the author works for one and half hours a day. One tiny sculpture may take several months, and one creation may take Dalton 2 and a 1/2 years.Dalton believes that his sculptures are forcing people to stay for at least a few moments to escape from the mad rhythm of modern life and see the beauty in miniature detail.

Performance and Installation art

2010-09-22T00:54:00.004+08:00

MEET : Rebecca Belmore

Born in Upsala, Ontario, Rebecca Belmore is an artist currently living in Vancouver, British Columbia. She attended the Ontario College of Art and Design in Toronto and is internationally recognized for her performance and installation art. Since 1987, her multi-disciplinary work has addressed history, place and identity through the media of sculpture, installation, video and performance. Belmore was Canada’s official representative at the 2005 Venice Biennale.Her work has appeared in numerous exhibitions both nationally and internationally including two solo touring exhibitions, The Named and the Unnamed, Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, Vancouver (2002); and 33 Pieces, Blackwood Gallery, University of Toronto at Mississauga (2001). Her group exhibitions include Houseguests, Art Gallery of Ontario (2001); Longing and Belonging: From the Faraway Nearby, SITE Santa Fe, Santa Fe, New Mexico (1995); Land, Spirit, Power, National Gallery of Canada (1992); and Creation or Death: We Will Win, at the Havana Biennial, Havana Cuba (1991).

NEW ART:Photo realistic artwork

2010-09-22T00:27:00.006+08:00

Paul Roberts

Paul Roberts was brought up by artist parents in Wales. Gaining early recognition in the 1970s, his career as a painter was interrupted when he had worldwide success with the rock band, Sniff ’n’ The Tears, in 1978 (whose cover artworks were all his creation). In 1988, he moved with his family to Somerset, where he has continued to paint and make music. His work can currently be seen at the Plus One Gallery London.
Paul Roberts (born in Tiverton, Devon, 1948) is the former lead singer and songwriter of Sniff 'n' the Tears. He is also known for his work as a photorealistic painter. He recorded a number of albums under his own name, with music very similar to that of Sniff 'n' Tears. The key albums were City Without Walls (1985) and Kettle Drum Blues (1987). The album Slowdown (1992) is a mainly a compilation of the two albums stated before.

Roberts was brought up in Wales by his parents, both themselves artists. Having studied at Newport College of Art, Cardiff College of Art and Goldsmiths College of Art, he gained early recognition as a painter in the 1970s before his career was interrupted by worldwide success with the rock band Sniff 'n' the Tears in 1978. Around 1980 he was exhibited by Nicholas Treadwell, who then wrote:

"Paul's work explores and parodies the glamorous way of life with seductive and dramatic effect, accentuated by an excellent sense of colour and powerful abstract values. The influence of cinema can clearly be seen in his paintings and his appreciation of Visconti and Hitchcock is often apparent".In 1988 he moved with his family to Somerset. Until 2000, his music commitments limited the time he had available to develop as a painter.

Art Issue

2010-09-21T05:42:00.002+08:00

Criticisms of modernism

The most controversial aspect of the modern movement was, and remains, its rejection of tradition. Modernism's stress on freedom of expression, experimentation, radicalism, and primitivism disregards conventional expectations. In many art forms this often meant startling and alienating audiences with bizarre and unpredictable effects, as in the strange and disturbing combinations of motifs in surrealism or the use of extreme dissonance and atonality in modernist music. In literature this often involved the rejection of intelligible plots or characterization in novels, or the creation of poetry that defied clear interpretation.

After the rise of Stalin, the Soviet Communist government rejected modernism on the grounds of alleged elitism, although it had previously endorsed futurism and constructivism. The Nazi government of Germany deemed modernism narcissistic and nonsensical, as well as "Jewish" and "Negro" (see Anti-semitism). The Nazis exhibited modernist paintings alongside works by the mentally ill in an exhibition entitled Degenerate Art. Accusations of "formalism" could lead to the end of a career, or worse. For this reason many modernists of the post-war generation felt that they were the most important bulwark against totalitarianism, the "canary in the coal mine", whose repression by a government or other group with supposed authority represented a warning that individual liberties were being threatened. Louis A. Sass compared madness, specifically schizophrenia, and modernism in a less fascist manner by noting their shared disjunctive narratives, surreal images, and incoherence.

In fact, modernism flourished mainly in consumer/capitalist societies, despite the fact that its proponents often rejected consumerism itself. However, high modernism began to merge with consumer culture after World War II, especially during the 1960s. In Britain, a youth sub-culture emerged calling itself "modernist" (usually shortened to Mod), following such representative music groups as The Who and The Kinks. The likes of Bob Dylan, Serge Gainsbourg and The Rolling Stones combined popular musical traditions with modernist verse, adopting literary devices derived from James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, James Thurber, T. S. Eliot, Guillaume Apollinaire, Allen Ginsberg, and others. The Beatles developed along similar lines, creating various modernist musical effects on several albums, while musicians such as Frank Zappa, Syd Barrett and Captain Beefheart proved even more experimental. Modernist devices also started to appear in popular cinema, and later on in music videos. Modernist design also began to enter the mainstream of popular culture, as simplified and stylized forms became popular, often associated with dreams of a space age high-tech future.

This merging of consumer and high versions of modernist culture led to a radical transformation of the meaning of "modernism". First, it implied that a movement based on the rejection of tradition had become a tradition of its own. Second, it demonstrated that the distinction between elite modernist and mass consumerist culture had lost its precision. Some writers[who?] declared that modernism had become so institutionalized that it was now "post avant-garde", indicating that it had lost its power as a revolutionary movement. Many have interpreted this transformation as the beginning of the phase that became known as postmodernism. For others, such as art critic Robert Hughes, postmodernism represents an extension of modernism.

"Anti-modern" or "counter-modern" movements seek to emphasize holism, connection and spirituality as remedies or antidotes to modernism. Such movements see modernism as reductionist, and therefore subject to an inability to see systemic and emergent effects. Many modernists came to this viewpoint, for example Paul Hindemith in his late turn towards mysticism. Writers such as Paul H. Ray and Sherry Ruth Anderson, in The Cultural Creatives: How 50 Million People Are Changing the World (2000), Fredrick Turner in A Culture of Hope and Lester Brown in Plan B, have articulated a critique of the basic idea of modernism itself — that individual creative expression should conform to the realities of technology. Instead, they argue, individual creativity should make everyday life more emotionally acceptable.

In some fields the effects of modernism have remained stronger and more persistent than in others. Visual art has made the most complete break with its past. Most major capital cities have museums devoted to 'Modern Art' as distinct from post-Renaissance art (circa 1400 to circa 1900). Examples include the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Tate Modern in London, and the Centre Pompidou in Paris. These galleries make no distinction between modernist and postmodernist phases, seeing both as developments within 'Modern Art'.

Sculpture Artists

2010-09-21T05:24:00.009+08:00

Martin Puryear

Martin Puryear was born in Washington, D.C., in 1941. In his youth, he studied crafts and learned how to build guitars, furniture, and canoes through practical training and instruction. After earning his BA from Catholic University in Washington D.C., Puryear joined the Peace Corps in Sierra Leone, and later attended the Swedish Royal Academy of Art. He received an MFA in sculpture from Yale University in 1971. Puryear’s objects and public installations—in wood, stone, tar, wire, and various metals—are a marriage of Minimalist logic with traditional ways of making.

Puryear’s evocative, dreamlike explorations in abstract forms retain vestigial elements of utility from everyday objects found in the world. In “Ladder for Booker T. Washington,” Puryear built a spindly, meandering ladder out of jointed ash wood. More than thirty-five feet tall, the ladder narrows toward the top, creating a distorted sense of perspective that evokes an unattainable or illusionary goal. In the massive stone piece, “Untitled,” Puryear enlisted a local stonemason to help him construct a building-like structure on a ranch in Northern California. On one side of the work is an eighteen-foot-high wall—on the other side, an inexplicable stone bulge.

A favorite form that occurs in Puryear’s work, the thick-looking stone bulge is surprisingly hollow, coloring the otherwise sturdy shape with qualities of uncertainty, emptiness, and loss. Martin Puryear represented the United States at the São Paolo Bienal in 1989, where his exhibition won the Grand Prize. Puryear is the recipient of numerous awards, including a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Award, a Louis Comfort Tiffany Grant, and the Skowhegan Medal for Sculpture. Puryear was elected to the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters in 1992 and received an honorary doctorate from Yale University in 1994. Martin Puryear lives and works in the Hudson Valley region of New York.

"Desire" 1981
Pine, red cedar, poplar, and Sitka spruce, 116 x 240 x 288 inches
Collection of Panza di Buono, Varese, Italy
Courtesy Courtesy McKee Gallery, New York

"Vessel"
1997-2002
Pine, mesh and tar, 18 1/2 x 84 x 68 inches
Collection of the artist
Courtesy Courtesy McKee Gallery, New York

"The most precise work is generally done by hand, with hand tools. Some people rely on machines for their precision, and my way of working is backwards. I rely on the machines for doing the gross stock removal and then, when it comes to the final refinements and fitting of joints and things, making things work together, I rely more on sharp-edged tools that I push by hand."

SENIKINI

2010-06-13T00:28:00.004+08:00

Penulisan Akhbar Seni Malaysia dari BALAI SENI LUKIS NEGARA MALAYSIA

Seni Catan Moden Malaysia

2010-05-20T21:59:00.003+08:00

PENGARUH IDEOLOGI SENI LUKIS BARAT

Jika dihalusi, aliran dan falsafah seni yang diaplikasikan di dalam karya-karya catan tempatan telah diadaptasi daripada ideologi senimlukis Barat terutamanya dari benua Eropah.Fenomena ini berlaku disebabkan oleh aliran seni catan di Malaysia telah diperkenalkan oleh pihak Inggeris ketika era penjajahannya di Semenanjung Tanah Melayu.Menurut Mohd Khairi Baharom (2007) :

"Memang tidak dinafikan kebanyakkan karya yang dihasilkan berlandaskan ideologi Barat kerana kita masih berpegang teguh kepada prinsip dan peraturan asal yang diperkenalkan oleh Barat.Walaupun begitu, karya-karya yang dihasilkan telah diolah dan disesuaikan dengan budaya Malaysia.Cuma falsafahnya sahaja yang masih dikekalkan.Oleh itu, identiti Malaysia menjadi keutamaan.Sebagainya contoh karya Syed Ahmad Jamal berjudul Angin Dingin.Walaupun karya ini dihasilkan menerusi pendekatan Barat, namun subjek utamanya bercirikan budaya Malaysia.Disamping itu terdapat segelintir pelukis yang mengenepikan prinsip Barat contohnya Chuah Thean Teng dan Khalil Ibrahim yang terkenal dengan catan batik.Ini menjelaskan bahawa identiti Malaysia merupakan dominan utama di dalam karya yang dihasilkan"

(Temu bual: Pensyarah Universiti Teknlogi MARA, UITM / 20hb Mac 2007 )

Seni catan moden malaysia perlu mempunyai identiti serta nilai-nilai keistimewaanya yang tersendiri tanpa dipengaruhi oleh ideologi Barat.Terutamanya dari segi falsafah, teori, aliran, nilai-nilai estetika, teknik pengkaryaan dan persembahan karya serta pendekatan seni dan sebagainya.Aspek ini amat penting kerana ia mencerminkan keunikkan identiti seni rupa malaysia.

Namun pada hari ini, minda masyarakat malaysia dipengaruhi dan terdedah secara total kepada budaya barat, yang kadangkala disalahtafsirkan sebagai proses pemodenan.Justeru, ancaman terhadap identiti seni catan moden malaysia kian meruncing apabila dasar langit terbuka menguasai minda.Oleh itu, sebagai sebuah negara yang telah mencapai taraf kemerdekaan, kesedaran untuk memelihara dan mengelakan identiti seni catan tempatan wajar dibentuk dan dipupuk menerusi proses pendidikan yang sempurna.

ART COMPETITION 2010 / PERTANDINGAN MELUKIS 2010

2010-03-06T02:52:00.004+08:00

PERTANDINGAN MELUKIS CITRA TERENGGANU 2010

Transkripsi Tema.

Citra Terengganu – merujuk kepada gambaran dan imej khusus tentang perilaku, aktiviti manusia , kehidupan lain yang menjadi lambang, simbol atau ikon yang merujuk kepada kehidupan berbudaya masyarakat Terengganu dan persekitarannya merangkumi aspek pemikiran seperti pengetahuan, kepercayaan, kesenian, undang-undang, moral serta apa jua yang diwarisi dari dulu hingga kini menerusi sejarah dan budaya yang diterima pakai , diakui telah menjadi budaya dan imej Negeri Terengganu.

Contoh:

a. Kehidupan nelayan dan aktivitinya
b. Penyu dan hidupan laut
c. Perahu dan bot nelayan
d. Kesenian seperti ukiran, ulik mayang dan rodat

Terengganu Dalam Kenangan merujuk kepada peristiwa, aktiviti, gerak, perilaku manusia, landskap, monumen dan persekitaran yang merangkumi perkisahan lisan, mitos, lagenda melalui bukti, fakta atau imaginasi yang berlaku pada masa lalu yang diterimapakai serta diakui menerusi rakaman sejarah dan budaya di Negeri Terengganu.

Contoh-contoh peristiwa dan monumen

a. Lawatan Munshi Abdullah di Kuala Terengganu - pertengahan abad ke 19
b. Peristiwa Sam Po Kong di Jeram – abad ke 16
c. Perang Besut – 1870 an
d. Bah Merah - 1926/27
e. Orang Hanyut Vietnam Pulau Bidong - 1975
f. Pelabuhan Kuala Terengganu – abad ke 16
g. Pelabuhan Foloan – abad ke 12
h. Kota Lama, Kuala Terengganu – 1730an
i. Kota Batang Mahang, Tg Baru, Kuala Berang - 1708

MORE INFO VISIT : http://museum.terengganu.gov.my/maxc2020/agensi
/index_borang.php?cid=43

2nd Penang International Print Exhibition 2010

Call for submissions
2nd Penang International Print Exhibition 2010
Penang State Museum and Art Gallery together with The School of the Arts, Universiti Sains Malaysia (USM) will hold the Second International Penang Printmaking Exhibition at The Penang State Art Gallery as well as at The Tuanku Fauziah Museum and Gallery, Universiti Sains Malaysia, Penang, Malaysia, from 16 September to 15 October 2010.

Participation to the exhibition is open to all printmaking artists from around the world. Each artist may submit a maximum of four prints. Participation is free of charge, each artist must donate at least one print to our permanent collection.

All form and variations of two-dimensional printmaking techniques are acceptable.

The size of the paper may not be smaller than 20 x 30 cm and not larger than 60 x 80 cm.

Submission Deadline:
30 June 2010

More information and contact:
2nd Penang International
Printmaking Exhibition 2010
c/o Rahman Mohamed
School of the Arts
Universiti Sains Malaysia
11800 Penang
Malaysia

www.usm.my/art/penangprint2010/penangprint2010@gmail.com

Melihat Seni Cetakan

2010-03-02T20:39:00.006+08:00

Cetakan Tamadun Melayu

GALERI Petronas pada tahun lepas melancarkan pameran pertamanya untuk tahun 2009 yang bertajuk: Go Block: Five Contemporary Malaysian Printmakers.Pameran tersebut merupakan satu pertunjukan yang meraikan amalan-amalan baru dalam seni cetak di Malaysia melalui hasil karya baru oleh lima orang seniman iaitu Juhari Said, Kim Ng, Izan Tahir, Zulkifli Yusoff dan Shahrul Jamili.Kesemua mereka banyak memberi sumbangan besar kepada perkembangan seni cetak kontemporari dalam gerakan seni tanah air.Seniman Malaysia dan ahli akademik yang disegani, Prof. Dr. Sulaiman Esa telah menyempurnakan majlis pelancaran pameran tersebut, termasuk buku iringan pameran yang mempunyai judul yang sama pada 17 Februari lalu.

Go Block dikurator oleh Badrolhisham Mohamad Tahir dengan mengetengahkan 15 hasil karya terbaru artis tempatan yang bertujuan mengajak orang ramai meneroka seni cetak sebagai satu bahan tara berciri dinamik dan inovatif yang memberikan kesan besar terhadap pergerakan kesenian di Malaysia hari ini.Konsep asas pameran itu adalah bagi menyedarkan orang ramai bahawa wujudnya satu bentuk alternatif pada proses seni cetak biasa yang selalunya terhad pada penggunaan dakwat, blok cetak, kertas dan tindakan menghentak atas permukaan kertas.Melalui pameran itu, ia menggalakkan penggunaan bahan tara selain dakwat yang boleh diacu dan dibentuk kemudian dipadukan bersama bagi menghasilkan satu hasil karya seni baru yang unik.

Idea asas sebenar pameran itu ialah untuk memberikan definisi baru tentang seni cetak. Pameran tersebut turut menerokai penggunaan pelbagai bahan harian seperti konkrit, kayu, tanah dan lapisan logam sebagai bahan tara, selain menggunakan dakwat yang diacu ke dalam bentuk-bentuk tertentu secara berulang-ulang bagi mendapatkan hasil seni muktamad yang diinginkan.Ketika secara tradisinya seni cetak berada pada tahap sekunder dalam konteks gerakan seni kontemporari di Malaysia, teknik-teknik serta cara penataan dalam seni cetak selalunya digunapakai dalam penghasilan rupa bentuk seni lain, misalnya lukisan, arca dan instalasi.

Peminjaman atau pertukaran teknik dan penataan itu menjadi bukti tentang pengaruh berterusan yang dimiliki oleh seni cetak dalam amalan seni kontemporari kini. Dalam pada itu, batasan atau sempadan peraturan-peraturan atau cabang-cabang seni yang dahulunya lebih jelas dan tersendiri kini menjadi semakin kabur.Walaupun seni cetak dianggap mudah untuk orang ramai menghasilkannya serta tidak mahal kerana alatan dan bahan yang digunakan dikeluarkan secara besar-besaran, namun masih terdapat segelintir seniman Malaysia yang mampu mengguna pakai bentuk seni itu secara berkesan dan menjadikannya sebagai satu keistimewaan.Golongan seniman yang menyertai pameran Go Block itu merupakan antara yang berpengaruh dan berdedikasi dalam amalan seni kontemporari iaitu mereka bertanggungjawab untuk memecah batasan bagi menjadikan seni cetak lebih relevan pada masa kini.Menurut Pengarah Galeri Petronas, Tengku Nasariah Tengku Syed Ibrahim, Go Block merupakan satu pameran yang membuka jalan baru dalam memperkembang seni cetak kepada satu tahap terkini.

"Ia merupakan satu amalan seni yang berkesan kerana mudah bagi orang ramai mengaitkannya dengan pengalaman mereka. Bagaimanapun, kami ingin mencabar pemikiran orang ramai terhadap kefahaman mereka tentang seni cetak, bukan sahaja cetakan blok atas selembar kertas, maksudnya kini lebih luas dan hanya terhad kepada daya imaginasi," katanya.

SECARA tradisinya seni cetak berada pada tahap sekunder dalam konteks gerakan seni kontemporari di Malaysia.Di Malaysia cetakan dihasilkan dengan menggunakan pelbagi teknik dan media. Antara media yang biasa digunakan ialah lino, syelek, lekar dan media campuran. Manakala teknik yang biasa dihunakan hádala seperti teknik timbulan, kolagraf dan cetakan saring. Proses menghasilkaan cetakan timbul ialah dengan
Meletakkan dakwat atau warna pada permukaan yang biasanya terdiri daripada blok
kayu atau lino. Hasil permukaan acuan merupakan imej yang dikehendaki.Langkah menghasilkan cetakan stensil

– Sediakan sebuahpemidang skrin. Lukis dan gunting imej atas kertas pendua.
Semasa mencetak,letakkan iime yang telah dipotong di atas
kertas permukaan dasar yang hendak dicetak.
Pemidang skrin diletakkan di atasnya sebelum dituangkan dakwat atau warna.
Gunakan sekuji untuk meratakan warna diatas pemidang skrin.
Angkat perlahanlahan pemidang skrin.
Biasanya imej yang dipotong itu akan terlekat pada belakang pemidang skrin.
Cetakan ini tidak boleh menghasilkan edisi yang banyak kerana
kertas pendua yang dipotong itu akan lembap dan
menyebabkan dakwat atau warna terkeluar.

Cetakan Tamadun Islam

Cetakan Tamadun Islam lebih berunsurkan Islamik seperti ayat suci al Quran dan unsur geometri. Dalam tamadun islam, kebanyakan hasil seni amat menjauhkan lambang/simbol perantaraan antara manusia dan Tuhan. Hampir semua karya menggunakan unsur dalam motif hiasan. Kegiatan cetakan ketika itu, kebanyakannya berasaskan kayu dan setengahnya dicetak dengan pencetak seperti penghasilan ayat suci al-Quran. Reka corak cetakan adalah kaligrafi (menekankan keseimbangan pola positif dengan negatif) dan berunsurkan kehidupan Islam. Kebanyakan corak adalah menegak ke atas dan bermula dari bawah kerana menggambarkan Tuhan Yang Esa dan Satu. Cetakan dalam tamdun ini tidak menjadikan objek manusia sebagai subjek kerana insan Kamil tidak menampilkan dirinya kepada Tuhan secara tampak. Seni cetakan dihasilkan bertujuan sebagai panduan kepada seluruh umat Islam serta kebanggaan kerana keunikan dan kehalusan pembuatannya. Unsur seninya adalah kontemporari iaitu campuran pelbagai media dan agak moden. Namun begitu, setiap hasil karya yang dihasilkan mestilah berlandaskan kepada unsur tauhid dan akidah umat Islam. Garisan dalam kaligrafi menghasilkan ruang tertentu dalam setiap karya. Banyak karya cetakan menekankan penggunaan garisan dan fungsinya. Unsur geometri seperti segi empat tepat dan sama banyak digunakan beserta dengan ayat suci al-Quran. Ia menjadikan cetakan yang dihasilkan mempunyai kombinasi selain terdapat unsur pengulangan pada motif corak.

Cetakan Tamadun China

China telah menjadi tempat penghasilan cetakan terawal sekali iaitu bermula abad ke 7 Masihi. Cetakan menjadi satu lagi ciptaan budaya China yang penting yang bermula pada 500 S.M. dengan percetakan blok di atas kertas dengan menyapu dakwat ke atas blok yang diukir pada muka surat, meletakkan kertas di atasnya dan menyapu belakang kertas hingga rata. Teknologi percetakan dengan mesin taip dicipta oleh Bi Sheng pada abad ke 11 S.M.

Penciptaan seni cetakan

Tahun sebenar tentang bila seni cetakan di China mula wujud masih lagi diperdebatkan dalam lingkungan akedemik kerana tiada bahan artifak atau peninggalan dokumen yang dapat dikaitkan dengan cetakan terawal yang telah dijumpai. Namun begitu, berdasarkan pengamatan daripada aspek perkembangan sosial dan budaya dan fakta-fakta serta bukti dokumen yang relevan untuk dikaitkan, kita boleh melakarkan secara kasar bahawa cetakan blok kayu mula digunakan dalam Dinasti Sui (581---18) dan menjadi popular dalam Dinasty Tang. Kebanyakkan rekod dokumen tentang cetakan blok kayu dalam Dinasti Tang (618---07), amat sukar untuk dipersembahkan.

Cetakan pada pertengahan dan akhir pemerintahan Dinasti Tang

Pada akhir zaman pemerintahan Dinasti Tang, cetakan telah menjadi semakin popular sejak awal penciptaan. Jauh daripada ajaran Buddha yang telah menggunakan cetakan secara aktif, ajaran Taoisme juga telah menggunakan cetakan untuk menghasilkan buku.Pusat perkembangan cetakan juga semakin berkembang dari ibu negeri di Chang'an dan Luoyang ( ibu negeri wilayah timur) sehingga keke tempat seperti Sichuan, Huainan, dan Dunhuang. Tempat-tempat yang dijadikan untuk membuat cetakan juga semakin bertambah maju.

Cetakan dalam lima Dinasti dan Dinasti Song

The printing industry thrived during the Song Dynasty (960---279). Government departments from the central to the local levels engaged in printing activities. The private printing industry expanded, leading to the existence of printing houses throughout the country, and the cre-ation of a few areas of concentration.
All types of texts were printed including Confucian classics, history, philosophy and belles-lettres. The scale of Buddhist publications was considerably larger then ever before. Apart from the printing of books, new items appeared including the printing of paper money and trademark advertisements.
An important revolution in printing technology during the Song Dynasty was the invention of mov-able type printing. A commoner by the name of Bi Sheng used movable-type blocks for printing during the Qingli years (1041---048) of the Northern Song. This invention ushered in an era of movable-type printing and is a significant milestone in the history of printing.

Cetakan di Liao, Barat Xia dan Jin

Sezaman dengan Dinasti Song yang telah menjadi ikutan cara hidup etnik minority di Liao, Barat Xia dan jin, peringkat cetakan di kawasan ini juga pada tahap yang sama dengan kawasan di tengah dan Selatan China.
Dalam tahun 1991, Sembilan jilid ayat-ayat suci Buddha bertajuk Propitiousness telah tersebar ke merata tempat di Kouhebenxu. Tulisan tersebut telah ditulis dalam simbol dan tulisan daripada Barat Xia dan dibatasi mengikut format rama-rama, telah dijumpai di lingkungan pagoda di Baishigou yang terletak di negeri Helan, Ningxia, wilayah Auton-omous. Ahli arkeologi dan pakar telah menjelaskan bahawa jilid ini telah dicetak sekitar tahun di Barat Xia iaitu setengah abad dalam abad ke 21 dengan menggunakan kayu jenis mudah alih. Ayat-ayat suci ini telah diambil sebagai penemuan terawal tentang cetakan kayu mudah alih dan ia telah menduduki tempat terpenting dalam sejarah cetakan China.

Cetakan Tamadun Jepun

Cetakan blok kayu di Jepun di kenali sebagai Ukiyo-e. Pada asalnya ia dibawa masuk ke Jepun seiring kemasukan agama Buddha. Stail dan gaya cetakan blok kayu Jepun yang unik berkembang maju pertengahan abad ke 17 hingga pertengahan abad ke 19. Perkataan ‘Ukiyo’ berasal dari perkataan Buddha bermaksud dunia sedih. Aspek yang digambarkan dalam Ukiyo-e, adalah tentang dunia terapung merujuk kepada perasaan dan kebebasan yang tidak abadi atau tidak kekal. e’ pula bermaksud gambar atau lukisan. Pada zahirnya, Ukiyo-e menceritakan kekayaan sejarah zaman Edo di bawah pemerintahan Shogun yang terasing dari dunia luar. Kegiatan dilakukan berkisar persembahan teater, restoran, kedai minum, geisha dan rumah pelacuran kelas atasan. Tahun 1650, ilustrasi buku cetak dari blok kayu pertama dihasilkan oleh Ise Mongatari. Awalnya ilustrasinya agak kasar dan tidak penting berbanding teks yang dikeluarkan. Akhirnya gambar jadi penting yang dihasilkan sekumpulan artis seni. Tokoh artis seperti Utamaro dan Sharaku menghasilkan poster, iklan persembahan teater dan rumah pelacuran atau potret idola seperti aktor Kabuki (drama tradisi Jepun).

Secara amnya mereka menggambarkan kehidupan seharian waktu itu yang sesuai dijadikan cetakan poskad. Awal abad ke 18, perubahan pada kualiti kertas, rupa bentuk dan saiz cetakan bertambah dan pelbagai. Teknik cetakan lebih moden. ‘Urushi-e’ bahan pengilat, ditambah pada kawasan hitam tertentu menjadikannya berkilat melalui campuran gam dan dakwat. Dari awal cetakan warna dilakukan dengan tangan. Pertengahan abad ke 18, Okumara Masanobu(penerbit &pelukis) telah membuat eksperimen dengan menggunakan lebih daripada satu kayu blok untuk menghasilkan beni-e’ atau gambar merah. Tokoh artis Suzuki Harunobu antara yang cemerlang dan terkenal di Edo yang dapat mencetak dan menghasilkan beberapa siri cetakan blok kayu yang halus & serupa dengan figura lelaki dan perempuan dengan gaya sungguh menarik. Kecantikan ukiyo-e hanya dapat dikecapi oleh warga dunia selepas Laksamana Perry ke Jepun tahun 1854 selepas dasar ‘buka pintu’. Malangnya banyak hasil ukiyo-e rosak kerana gempa bumi, kebakaran dan terlalu usang.

Shunga merupakan karya seni bergaya ukiyo-e (seni lukis di atas woodblock yang penggarapannya melalui cetakan). Kadang-kadang shunga dicetak pula di atas gulungan kertas perkamen. Lukisan pada kerya shunga biasanya adegan percintaan. Seni Shunga bermula sejak era Muromachi (1336-1573) dan dipengaruhi pelukis erotik dari dinasti Tang di China, Chou Fang. Seni Shunga dibuat dan dijual dalam bentuk lembar atau dalam bentuk buku dinamakan “enpon”. Selain itu, karya ini juga dalam bentuk gulungan(hand scroll format) dinamakan “kakemono-e”. Karya shunga yang dibuat di Osaka & Kyoto warnanya lebih kaya dibandingkan dari Edo kerana digunakan “gofun” (bubuk kulit kerang putih yang dicampur dengan berbagai bahan hingga menjadi pigmen beraneka warna.

Ketika era pemerintahan Kaei (1848-1854), banyak kapal pedagang asing datang je Jepun. Seni cetakan Ukiyo-e ketika itu telah banyak mengalami perubahan dari segi budaya.
Diikuti oleh zaman keagungan Meiji sekitar tahun 1868, jepun mengamalkan dasar terbuka kepada bahan import dari luar termasuklah hasil photografi yang telah menggantikan seni Ukiyo-e secara keseluruhannya. Pengaruh barat ke atas Jepun telah berkembang dalam era Meiji. Ukiyo-e ketika itu jatuh dan menjadi amat tidak bernilai sehingga hasil cetakan ini hanya dijadikan sebagai kertas pembalut bahan dagangan. Ketika masyarakat barat melihat dan menjumpai kertas cetakan ini, ia telah menjadi sumber ilham penting kepada pengkarya-pengkarya daripada aliran impresionisme, kubisme, dan post-impresionis seperti Vincent Van Gogh, James Abbott, McNeill Whistler, Claude Monet dan lain-lain, pengaruh ini telah dikenali sebagai Japonisme di Barat.

Proses penghasilan Ukiyo-e

Secara tradisi proses penghasilan ukiyo-e melibatkan 3 bidang dan orang yang berbeza. Bidang tersebut ialah,
- Kerja melukis (pelukis/artis)
-Kerja mencetak, memilih warna, mengeluarkan modal (pengeluar/penerbit)
-Kerja mengukir blok kayu (pengukir)
Proses dimulakan dengan menggunakan blok dakwat hitam dan diikuti blok warna di akhir cetakan. Kemudian ‘hansita-e’ dilekatkan ke atas blok kayu yang kering. Kemudian diukir berhati-hati supaya garisan timbul. Cetakan terhasil dari permukaan timbul yang ditinggalkan, bila bahagian lain diukir keluar. Setiap warna memerlukan blok kayu yang berasingan. Garis panduan diukir secara berhati-hati atas kayu blok untuk memastikan warna dicetak mengikut garisan yang betul. 2 bentuk cetakan timbul yang paling biasa menggunakan kayu dan lino. Selain itu termasuklah getah atau styrofoam.

Cetakan Tamadun India

Cetakan di India dijadikan sebagai alat untuk membuat salinan. Latihan mencetak sebagai satu bentuk seni yang serius, mampu berdiri tanpa sebarang konsesi, tidak lebih 100 tahun sasarannya. Sempadan antara bahasa dan teknik cetakan adalah kabur, seni cetakan telah masuki laluan utama latihan visual. Latihan sokongan proses mencetak muncul ketibaan untuk menjadi luas dengan cara perbandingan oleh sebilangan kecil pelukis. Bentuk alam semulajadi/ tuntutan rejimnya, desakan dan dorongan menyebabkan kebanyakan pelukis lebih menonjol berbanding kurangnya jalan disekat dan seni perkataan mutunya rendah. Bagi memahami medianya, kita perlu mengetahui sejarah permulaan dan perkembangannya terlebih dahulu. Konsep salinan dan pengeluaran semula, yang merupakan asas cetakan, diketahui oleh India sebelum tertubuhnya mesin pencetak tahun 1956 di Goa. Tamadun Lembah Indus bukti rekod tentang alat pengesahan cop materai diguna secara besar-besaran. Anugerah tanah direkod oleh pengukir menggunakan tangan dan berimaginasi untuk tujuan agama dan duniawi . Kemahiran mengores atas permukaan tulang , kayu, kulit kerang, gading merupakan kraf popular. Rekod tamadun Lembah Indus dihasilkan dengan menekan blok ke atas tanah liat telah dijumpai. Untuk buat cetakan blok dan bahan warna seperti habuk pasir atau serbuk hitam atau sayuran merupakan selalu digunakan, bermula zaman Vedik. Cetakan Calica terhasil dengan ukiran blok kayu dan pengukir dengan warna dari sayuran dan ditekan pada kain dan urat. Awal kurun ke 16,orang Portugis membuka kilang di Calicus, Cochin dan Goa serta cetakan dikuasai oleh penguasha asing. Ahli Society of Jesus Portugis Missionaries di Goa merupakan orang pertama mencetak buku sebagai media berkesan untuk propaganda ideology Kristian. Pada 6 sept. 1556, 2 pencetak kayu tiba di Goa dan menetapkan di bawah penguasaan Joan de Busta Mante

Cetakan Tamadun Barat

Seni cetakan di barat mula berkembang selepas kemunculan seni cetakan di China. Pada abad ke 14 Masihi, industri cetakan mono telah berkembang di negara Barat.
Ketika itu, cetakan digunakan bagi tujuan propaganda, pendidikan dan bahan keagamaan. Penggunaan warna bermula pada abad ke 15. Bermula dengan cetakan pakaian seawal kurun 60 an. Kelewatan teknologi kertas di negara Timur menyebabkan cetakan kertas lebih lewat diperkenalkan. Tahun 1511, kertas mula diperkenalkan di Jativa, Sepanyol. Cetakan kayu yang pertama dicetak di atas kertas adalah di German seawal abad ke 15. Goresan dihidupkan oleh pelukis Belanda pada kurun ke 17 dan Rembrant telah membuat cetakan pertamanya pada 1626. Dia lebih cenderung menghasilkan cetakan sendiri berbanding kepada teknik cetakan professional. Beberapa dari cetakannya memaklumkan teknik cetaka mengalir tetapi melalui pengalaman dan uji kaji, dia mengasah dan membentuk kemahirannya, lalu menjadi mahir dan kreatif dalam seni cetakan.

Engraving

Proses ini dikembangkan di Jerman sekitar tahun 1430 dari engraving (ukiran halus) yang digunakan oleh para tukang emas untuk mendekorasi karya mereka. penggunaan alat yang disebut dengan burin merupakan ketrampilan yang rumit.
Pembuat engraving menggunakan alat dari logam yang diperkeras yang disebut dengan burin untuk mengukir corak ke permukaan logam, tradisionalnya memakai plat tembaga. Alat ukir tersebut memiliki bermacam-macam bentuk dan ukuran menghasilkan jenis garis yang berbeza-beza.
Seluruh permukaan plat disapu dakwat, kemudian dakwat dibersihkan dari permukaan, yang tertinggal hanya dakwat yang berada di garis yang diukir. Kemudian plat ditaruh pada alat tekan bertekanan tinggi bersama dengan lembaran kertas (seringkali dibasahi untuk melunakkan). Kertas kemudian menyerap dakwat dari garis engraving (bahagian yang diukir), menghasilkan karya cetak.

Etsa

Etsa adalah bahagian dari kelompok teknik intaglio bersama dengan engraving, drypoint, mezzotint dan aquatint. Proses ini diyakini bahawa penemunya adalah Daniel Hopfer (sekitar 1470-1536) dari Augsburg, Jerman, yang mendekorasi baju besinya dengan teknik ini. Etsa kemudian menjadi tandingan engraving sebagai medium seni grafis yang popular. Kelebihannya adalah, tidak seperti engraving yang memerlukan ketrampilan khusus dalam pertukangan logam, etsa relatif mudah dipelajari oleh seniman yang suka berkhayal dan menggambar.Hasil cetakan etsa umumnya bersifat linear dan seringkali memiliki perincian dan kontur halus. Garis bervariasi dari halus hingga ke garisan yang kasar. Teknik etsa berlawanan dengan teknik cukil kayu, pada etsa bahagian permukaan tinggi bebas daripada dakwat. Bahagian permukaan rendah menahan dakwat. Mulanya selembar plat logam (biaanya tembaga, zink atau baja) dilitupi dengan selapisan minyak atau lilin. Kemudian pengkarya akan menggores lapisan tersebut dengan jarum etsa yang runcing, sehingga bahagian logam kelihatan.plat tersebut kemudiaannya dicelupkan dalam larutan cuka atau hanya disapukan ke atasnya.bahagian logam yang tenggelam akan dihakis oleh larutan asid tersebut. Setelah itu, lapisan yang tersisa dibersihkan dari plat. Dan proses pencetakan selanjutnya sama dengan pencetekan selanjutnya sama dengan prosen pencetakan engraving.

Mezzotint

Salah satu cara lain dalam teknik intaglio di mana plat logam terlebih dahulu dibuat kasar permukaannya secara merata; gambar dihasilkan dengan mengerok halus permukaan, menciptakan gambar yang dibuat dari gelap ke terang. Mungkin juga menciptakan gambar hanya dengan mengkasarkan bahagian tertentu saja, bekerja dari warna terang ke gelap.
Mezzotint dikenal kerana kualiti tonnya yang kaya: pertama, kerana permukaan yang dikasarkan secara merata menahan banyak dakwat, menghasilkan warna cetak yang padu; kedua, kerana proses penghalusan tekstur dengan menggunakan burin, atau alat lain menghasilkan gradasi halus untuk mengembangkan tone.
Metode mezzotint ditemukan oleh Ludwig von Siegen (1609-1680). Proses ini dipakai secara luas di Inggeris mulai pertengahan abad lapan belas, untuk mereproduksi foto dan lukisan.

Aquatint

Adalah variasi dari etsa. Seperti etsa, aquatint menggunakan asid untuk membuat gambar cetakan pada plat logam. Pada teknik etsa digunakan jarum untuk menciptakan garis yang akan menjadi warna dakwat gelap, aquatint menggunakan serbuk resin yang tahan asid untuk menciptakan kesan ton.Kebanyakan karya-karya grafis Goya menggunakan teknik aquatint.

Drypoint
Merupakan variasi dari engraving, dikerjakan dengan alat runcing, bukan dengan alat burin berbentuk "v". Sementara garis pada engraving sangat halus dan bertepi tajam, goresan drypoint meninggalkan kesan kasar pada tepi garis. Kesan ini memberi ciri kualitas garis yang lunak, dan kadang-kadang berkesan kabur, pada drypoint. Karena tekanan alat press dengan cepat merusak kesan tersebut, drypoint hanya berguna untuk jumlah edisi yang sangat kecil; sekitar sepuluh sampai duapuluh karya. Untuk mengatasi ini, penggunaan electro-plating (pelapisan secara elektrik dengan bahan logam lain) telah dilakukan sejak abad sembilanbelas untuk mengeraskan permukaan plat.
Teknik ini kelihatannya ditemukan oleh seorang seniman Jerman selatan abad limabelas yang memiliki julukan Housebook Master, di mana semua karya-karyanya menggunakan drypoint. Di antara seniman old master print yang menggunakan teknik ini: Albrecht Dürer memproduksi 3 karya drypoint sebelum akhirnya berhenti menggunakannya; Rembrandt sering menggunakannya, tapi biasanya digabungkan etsa dan engraving

litogaf

Litografi adalah teknik yang ditemui pada tahun 1798 oleh Alois Senefelder dan didasari pada sifat kimiawi minyak dan air yang tidak boleh bercampur. Digunakan permukaan berpori, biasanya sejenis batu yang disebut limestone/batu kapur; gambar dibuat pada permukaan batu dengan medium berminyak. Kemudian dilakukan pengasidan , untuk memindahkan minyak ke batu, sehingga gambar 'terbakar' pada permukaan. Lalu dilapisi gum arab, bahan yang larut air, menutupi permukaan batu yang tidak tertutupi medium gambar (yang berbasis minyak). Kemudian batu dibasahkan, air akan berada pada bagian permukaan yang tidak tertutup medium gambar berasas minyak tadi; selanjutnya batu di-roll dengan dakwat berasas minyak ke seluruh permukaan; kerana air menolak sifat minyak pada dakwat maka dakwat hanya menampal pada bagian gambar yang berminyak. Kemudian selembar kertas lembab diletakkan pada permukaan, image/gambar dipindahkan ke kertas dengan menggunakan alat tekanan. Teknik litografi terkenal dengan kemampuannya menangkap gradasi halus dan detail yang sangat kecil.
Variasi dari teknik ini adalah adalah foto-litografi, di mana gambar ditangkap lewat proses fotografis pada plat logam; kemudian pencetakan dilakukan dengan cara yang sama.
Seniman yang menggunakan teknik ini:

George Bellows, Pierre Bonnard, Honoré Daumier, M.C. Escher, Ellsworth Kelly, Willem de Kooning, Joan Miró, Edvard Munch, Emil Nolde, Pablo Picasso, Odilon Redon, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and Stow Wengenroth.

Seni Cetakan-Print Making

2010-03-02T20:27:00.002+08:00

Seni Cetakan

Cetakan merupakan kesan daripada gubahan yang dihasilkan oleh pelukis pada permukaan blok atau plat. Untuk menghasilkan cetakan, biasanya permukaan blok diukir atau diguris sehingga imej terbentuk pada blok atau plat tersebut sebelum dapat dipindahkan ke atas kertas, kain atau bahan lain. Blok yang sama dapat menghasilkan beberapa keping karya yang serupa. Cetakan yang berulang kali ini disebut edisi/ siri. Cetakan juga merupakan proses menghasilkan karya atau imej yang sama berulang kali. Dalam aktiviti ini, semua karya cetakan dalam sesuatu edisi dianggap karya asli.

Sejarah cetakan ialah apabila cetakan blok kayu buatan tangan muncul pada abad ke 7 Masihi di China. Seterusnya industri cetakan mono bok kayu buatan tangan muncul dan berkembang di negara barat menjelang abad ke 14 Masihi. Ketika itu, kemahiran mencetak digunakan untuk mencetak bahan keagamaan, hiasan ilustrasi buku, poster untuk komunikasi, propaganda, dan bahan pendidikan. Penggunaan warna dalam cetakan diperkenalkan pada pertengahan abad ke 15. Sejarah cetakan di Malaysia dibawa masuk dari Singapura pada tahun 1940 an melalui Nanyang Akademi. Rakyat Malaysia yang belajar di Institut Seni di Singapura telah mempelopori teknik seni cetakan dan memperluaskannya. Menjelang tahun 1960 an, teknik cetakan telah dimasukkan ke dalam sukatan pelajaran seni lukis secara rasmi di institusi perguruan seperti Institut Perguruan Ilmu Khas. Di Malaysia, cetakan kayu digunakan untuk mencetak kain sarung sebelum kaedah lilin dari Jawa diperkenalkan. Seni cetakan di Malaysia telah muncul sebagai satu cabang seni halus yang unik.

Media

Pembuat cetakan berkarya menggunakan berbagai jenis media, termasuklah dakwat berasaskan air, cat air, dakwat berasaskan minyak, pastel minyak, dan pigmen padat yang larut dalam air seperti crayon Caran D'Ache. Karya seni cetak dilakarkan di atas permukaan yang disebut dengan plat. Teknik dengan menggunakan kaedah digital menjadi semakin popular saat ini. Permukaan atau hamparan yang digunakan dalam menciptakan karya cetakan meliputi papan kayu, plat logam, lembaran kaca akrilik, lembaran linoleum atau batu litografi. Teknik lain yang disebut dengan serigrafi atau cetak saring (screen-printing) menggunakan lembaran kain berpori yang direntangkan pada sebuah kerangka, disebut dengan screen. Cetakan kecil juga boleh dihasilkan dengan menggunakan permukaan kentang atau ketela.

Warna

Pembuat karya grafis memberi warna pada cetakan mereka dengan menggunakan banyak cara. Seringkali pewarnaannya -- dalam etsa, cetak saring, cukil kayu serta linocut -- diterapkan dengan menggunakan plat, papan atau screen yang terpisah atau dengan menggunakan pendekatan reduksionis. Dalam teknik pewarnaan multi-plat, terdapat sejumlah plat, screen atau papan, yang masing-masing menghasilkan warna yang berbeza. Tiap plat, screen atau papan yang terpisah akan diberi tinta dengan warna berbeza kemudian diterapkan pada tahap tertentu untuk menghasilkan keseluruhan gambar.biasanya hampir 3 hingga 4 plat digunakan, tapi adakalanya seorang seniman grafis menggunakan sampai tujuh plat. Tiap penerapan warna akan berinteraksi dengan warna lain yang telah diterapkan pada kertas, jadi sebelum menerapkan warna, pemisahan antara warna perlulah difikirkan dahulu.Biasanya warna yang paling terang diterapkan lebih dulu kemudian ke warna yang lebih gelap.

Pendekatan reduksionis untuk menghasilkan warna dimulai dengan papan kayu atau lino yang kosong atau dengan goresan sederhana. Kemudian seniman mencukilnya lebih lanjut, memberi warna lain dan mencetaknya lagi.Bahagian lino atau kayu yang dicukil akan mengekspos (tidak menimpa) warna yang telah tercetak sebelumnya.
Pada teknik grafis seperti chine-collé atau monotype, pegrafis kadang-kadang hanya mengecat warna seperti pelukis kemudian dicetak.
Konsep warna subtraktif yang juga digunakan dalam cetak offset atau cetak digital, di dalam software vektorial atau bitmap ditampilkan dalam CMYK atau ruang warna lain

Jenis cetakan

Jenis cetakan klasik merangkumi :
a) cetakan timbul ( relief )
b) cetakan benam ( intaglio )
c) cetakan datar ( planography/litography )
d) cetakan stensil/ saring sutera ( seriography )

MENCARI KEMURNIAN ETIKA DALAM KRITIKAN ANTARA PENGKARYA DAN PENGKRITIK

2010-02-04T17:32:00.005+08:00

Dalam kita berkarya ada yang mengkritik dan dalam kita mengkritik ada kritikan lain. Sebahagian yang baik dalam berkarya dan dalam kritikan itu harus diingat nilai etika yang boleh membantu meletakkan nilai kritikan dan nilai karya itu sesuai untuk dihayati, saksama untuk diapresiasi dan berada dalam perbincangan yang sihat.

Kebiasaannya etika difahami dalam bentuk yang mudah sebagai garis panduan supaya antara artis dan pengkritik itu saling bantu membantu dan hormat menghormati. Mengikut Ku Seman dalam ruangan blog beliau(http://kayangdailypost.blogspot.com/) bertajuk “Blog, Adab dan Topeng” bertarikh 26 Mei 2009 menyatakan ada sumbangan intelektual yang dapat disebarkan dalam suasana mencintai ilmu, menghormati pemikiran orang lain seperti menghormati pemikiran sendiri. Suasana yang murni dan beretika dalam kritikan itu melahirkan pembuat karya itu terangsang untuk terus berkarya dan tahu bercakap serta berfikir tentang karya yang dihasilkan. Manakala pengkritik mendapat maklum balas positif bagi meningkatkan ilmu, membaiki fakta yang tertinggal dan menambahbaik elemen yang dapat menceliksenikan orang ramai.

Kritikan yang tidak beretika, nampak berat sebelah dan tiada dorongan bagi meningkatkan hasil karya dan boleh membawa interpritasi yang negatif. Ada lanjutan dari kritikan itu oleh pihak kedua dan berterusan untuk terus membunuh secara senyap nilai karya dan kreativiti pengkarya. Jika ada pihak ketiga yang mengamalkan kritikan beretika mungkin ianya dapat membantu mengharmonikan suasana kritikan itu dan suatu dailog ilmu yang sihat berkembang yang disebut oleh Ku Seman “mewujudkan nilai intelektual.”

Menurut Edmund Burke Feldman 1994, kita mesti mengelak dari konflik sewaktu membuat kritikan. Antaranya, elakkan membuat kritikan pada kerja-kerja sendiri atau rakan yang terdekat atau sahabat karib. Ini tidaklah bermaksud kritikan tidak boleh dilakukan kepada seseorang artis atau kawan sesama artis. Yang sepatutnya merapatkan perhubungan di mana dapat melahirkan kritikan yang adil dan saksama.
Selain itu Edmund menghuraikan bahawa pengkritik tidak boleh menggunakan komen yang boleh merosakkan reputasi seseorang atau sesuatu kumpulan. Semua hasil karya seni boleh menjadi senjata kepada seseorang atau kumpulan tertentu untuk melemahkan semangat kumpulan lain yang merupakan suatu tindakan yang kurang sihat.
Bila kita menulis perihal artis, kritikan dibuat bagi mencari kekuatan dan kelebihan di sebalik kekurangan yang ada.

Dengan cara ini pengkritik melakukan kerja ikhlas dan tidak didesak atas sebab kewangan atau oleh mana-mana pihak dari sebelah pihak artis. Kritikan sepatutnya tidak berdasarkan wang atau saguhati daripada pembeli atau pengedar seni atau sebarang egen yang mengendalikan urusan artis. Pengkritik tidak harus menerima hasil dari karya yang diberikan oleh artis walaupun pemberi itu rasa tidak bersalah. Pengkritik tidak boleh menerima hasil kerja seni sebagai hadiah daripada artis atau yang dihantar sebagai hadiah tanpa diketahui siapa pemberinya.
Sebagai pengkritik perlu ada suatu sikap untuk mencetuskan idea membina. Pengkritik cuba mengelak dari terlalu banyak mencari kesilapan, sebaliknya cuba mencetuskan sebanyak idea dengan mengutamakan tumpuan pada mengcungkil kekuatan dari setiap elemen dalam karya yang ada.

Kritikan tidak seharusnya menerima sebarang komisen daripada hasil jualan karya seni yang berkaitan dengan kritikan tersebut.
Apabila menerima kritikan anggaplah segala pendapat itu bertujuan memperbaiki kualiti atau nilai sesuatu karya, fakta tentangnya harus bersandarkan hujah dari rujukan yang boleh diperakui atau sekurang-kurangnya dari rujukan buku yang boleh menarik perhatian orang ramai.

Kritikan perlu jujur dari hal fakta tentang tarikh, sejarah, harga jualan dan sebagainya dan dipertimbangkan semula sama ada relevan atau sebaliknya. Secara umumnya banyak lagi etika yang sesama kita tidak mengendahkan kerana menganggap ianya kurang penting seperti :

• Kritikan juga tidak seharusnya bersandarkan kritikan yang lain seperti tuan punya galeri, pernyataan muzium secara rasmi yang bertujuan mempromosikan karya-karya artis atau dari mana-mana institusi tempat artis itu dilahirkan.
• Kritikan tidak sepatutnya menjadi nasihat peribadi atau sebagai perbincangan awam yang merujuk pada kenyataan-kenyataan berbentuk nasihat.
• Kritikan yang dibuat tidak harus menjadi laporan. Kritikan bersandarkan kepakaran seni dan tidak patut ada elemen nasihat antara penjual dan pembeli.
• Kritikan tidak harus menggunaan komentar untuk memburukkan artis atau persoalan bermotifkan sesuatu yang ditambah.
• Kritikan tidak harus diasingkan di antara satu krtikan dengan kritikan yang lain dengan maksud mencela nilai peribadi dan latarbelakang artis.
• Kritikan juga tidak harus dibuat berdasarkan interpritasi dari lain-lain kritikan kecuali munasabah dan ada kesesuaian.
• Akhirnya kritikan tidak harus menjadi ruang untuk mengenengahkan perkara yang tersembunyi di sebalik sesuatu yang pernah didengar.

Berdasarkan etika kritikan yang disyorkan oleh Edmund Burke Feldman 1994 ini, ia boleh menyedarkan pengkritik akan tugas mereka yang sebenar ke arah lebih positif untuk membina suasana yang sihat. Dengan kritikan yang bersandarkan kesedaran dapat mengaitkan hujah-hujah pada fakta, teknikal, sejarah dan stail yang tergolong sebagai kritikan yang membina dan boleh dijadikan sesi polimik yang sihat.
Kritikan yang positif boleh mencerminkan nilai peribadi tetapi tidak sepenuhnya boleh menjadi pengganti secara langsung kepada artis. Biarlah kritikan itu sebagai pengalaman yang asli dan baik berdasarkan hasil dan kesan estetik yang dimiliki oleh artis.

Kritikan yang melampau dan mendekati hal-hal politik, ideologi boleh menjadi penilaian yang berat sebelah. Sebagai suatu perbandingan, kritikan harus ada pertalian dengan kerja seni yang mempunyai persamaan dengan kerja-kerja seni yang lain dan membawa kesan secara keseluruhan. Keutamaan kritikan yang standard boleh dilakukan secara luaran dari kesan permulaan yang membawa pada konteks seterusnya dan memberi kesan-kesan positif.

Dengan nilai positif, kritikan yang dibuat mengikut merit menjadikan prinsip bagi melihat kekuatan atau kelemahan yang disempurnakan oleh bukti dan fakta. Ada kes yang menjadikan krtitikan secara sedar boleh mewakili hak orang ramai dan sebahagian hak artis dan yang bakinya kepunyaan dunia seni.
Perlu diingatkan juga, setiap karya seni dalam perkembangannya ada meninggalkan kesan yang menghampirkan diri artis dengan rahsia diri dan ada hubungkaitnya dengan pengalaman dalam karya.

Dalam pergerakan seni lukis di Malaysia, persoalan yang menjadi perbahasan berpanjangan telah dijadikan alasan yang baik namun masih berhati-hati. Inilah perkembangan yang berlaku di bidang seni tampak Malaysia dengan adat dan budaya yang saling hormat menghormati sesama artis dan pengkrtik seni. Dengan kehormatan yang diberi kepada golongan muda telah membawa semangat antara kritikan dan berkarya. Sebagai contoh, Redza Piyadasa dan Salleh Ben Joned yang memulakan semangat kritikan telah membawa suatu perkembangan dalam seni lukis Malaysia. Walaupun nampak suatu polimik yang tak berkesudahan tetapi sekadar riak-riak dalam cawan kopi dan tidak membawa kesan kontroversi yang berpanjangan.Dalam konteks tanggungjawab sosial, kritikan seni menurut Dr. Tan Chee Kuan menyatakan ramai di kalangan penulis, kolektor seni, artis, kurator berganding bahu mengangkat karya-karya seni tampak menjadi bernilai sebagai khazanah budaya. Melalui jalinan erat, maklumat yang tepat dan fakta-fakta yang betul, sumber-sumber seni diterokai bersama. Ada yang menyentuh hal kontroversi dalam kritikan dan sejarah seni yang tercatat itu dimanipulasikan dengan berhati-hati mengikut sudut pandangan peribadi yang saling menghormati.

Jika budaya membalas kembali kritikan dengan ayat dan perkataan yang tidak melambangkan nilai intelektual dan sebagainya maka samalah kita dengan apa yang pernah berlaku antara Ruskin dan Whistler. Berlaku saman menyaman antara pengkritik dengan artis dan terbongkar segala gosip serta perbincangan yang melanggari peraturan sehingga hilang rasa hormat menghormati antara artis dengan pengkritik. Walaupun nanti keputusan mahkamah akan memenangi seseorang kesannya berpanjangan. Jika salah seorang itu menang perbicaraan dan mendapat pengikhtirafan yang tinggi dan memberi signifikan yang baik ke atas kerjayanya tetapi semuanya akan rugi di akhir nanti.
Sepanjang perjalanan meneroka kehidupan seorang pelukis dan tempoh masa yang dilalui perlu dicatat dengan penuh tanggungjawab. Hal ini cuba dilakukan oleh Dr. Tan Chee Kuan. Tentu jawapannya adalah dari rasa tanggungjawab sosial dalam melaksanakan tanggungjawab berwibawa. Menerusi analisis dokumentasi yang bersesuaian dengan esei bagi menyangkal isu-isu yang samar-samar atau andaian bagi mencari kebenaran.
Dr. Tan Chee Kuan menggunakan pendekatan sejarah untuk mempengaruhi pembaca. Misalannya dalam isu siapakah yang patut mengangkat seniman Yong Mun Sen sebagai bapa seni lukis Malaysia telah menimbulkan perdebatan antara beliau dengan Piyadasa. Beliau mempengaruhi pembaca dari sudut kaca mata seorang kolektor seni dengan fakta-fakta sejarah. Hujahan beliau menyentuh esei-esei Piyadasa berhubung perkembangan pelukis-pelukis Pulau Pinang di sekitar tahun 1920 hingga 1990 dikatakan suatu analisis yang kurang mantap. Hujah Piyadasa dikatakan banyak bersandar kepada kenyataan yang dipetik melalui surat khabar dan bergantung pada penulisan-penulisan yang lepas. Dr. Tan beranggapan status seniman Yong Mun Sen sebagai bapa seni lukis Malaysia perlu disemak kembali dari kaca mata seorang pembeli dan kolektor seni kerana mereka mengetahui perjalanan sejarah seni dan tokoh seni. Hujah Dr. Tan disokong dengan cerita yang berkait dengan memori lama dari surat-surat, artikel-artikel yang dipetik dari akhbar sampai ke katalog pameran.
Begitulah isu dan kontroversi dalam kritikan seni memerlukan hujah yang meminta pengkritik kembali kepada sejarah, individu-individu yang terdekat dengan artis, ahli keluarga dan orang yang masih hidup dengan merujuk bahan dan surat yang masih ada.
Dalam melaksanakan peranan mencari kemurnian etika dalam kritikan kedua-dua pihak perlu menerima dengan jelas bahawa antara artis dan pengkritik berada pada dasar yang adil. Penerimaan yang jelas ini boleh membantu khalayak mengenali karya-karya seni dan pembuatnya, boleh mengetahui pembongkaran fakta sejarah dan perkembangan seni yang berkait-kait dalam lingkungan yang sangat luas. Ada dua motif utama secara adil yang menjadi dasar dalam mencari kemurnian etika antara pengkarya dan pengkritik iaitu :

• Menerapkan nilai adil pada asas-asas yang munasabah dalam menampakkan perbezaan antara kritikan melulu dengan kritikan berbantukan penglihatan dan tafsiran minda.
• Menerapkan nilai saksama bagi menunjukkan kenapa seni itu penting dalam aktiviti kehidupan manusia.

Apabila interpritasi dan penilaian karya seni dibuat, kritikan sepatutnya menekankan apa yang dapat diketahui oleh artis tentang dirinya. Artis pula memerlukan penganalisis, pengkritik sekaligus pendorong memotivasikan artis mengetahui segala kekuatannya. Gambaran visual sebagai saksi dokumentasi yang sah menjadi terbitan kata-kata dari mulut yang sah dan laporan sejarah dengan fakta yang betul. Nasihat akhir, apabila melakukan kritikan harus diyakini dan menjadi persediaan untuk membantu nilai estetik mengambil tempat dan nilai moral serta budaya tidak dilanggari. Manakala artis terus menglahirkan karya bertaraf unggul, menjadi karya penyambung tamadun, artifak sejarah budaya bangsa yang kekal sebagai khazanah harta intelek negara.

APRESIASI SENI

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DEFINISI

Apresiasi bolehlah didefinisikan sebagai kajian mengenai pelukis-pelukis atau pandai
tukang mengenai hasil-hasil seni mereka, faktor yang mempengaruhi mereka, cara
mereka bekerja, bagaimana mereka memilih tema dan ‘subject matter’ serta gaya dan
stail mereka .Semua ini berkait rapat dengan aspek pemahaman mereka dari aspek-
aspek kognitif. Ianya juga sebagai satu penghargaan terhadap penilaian dan perasaan terhadap sesuatu hasil seni itu. Ia boleh dikatakan sebagai pembentukan sikap, minat dan
kebolehan membuat pilihan dan ini berkait rapat dengan aspek-aspek afektif.

Menurut Smith (1966), apresiasi seni ini memerlukan
“logical operation such as defining, valuing and explaining”

Pendidikan seni harus dilihat dalam skop yang lebih luas. Umumya, para pendidik seni
beranggapan Pendidikan Seni di sekolah bukan sekadar meningkatkan kemahiran dan
teknik menghasilkan karya seni sahaja.

Menurut Chapman (1978)
“if treatart ifit were only a matter of learning acts an mastering technique, we deny its value and character”

Kebanyakan pendidik seni percaya bahawa melalui apresiasi karya seni, pelajar-
pelajar dapat memahami adat, tradisi dan nilai sesuatu masyarakat.

Macfee (1961) menegaskan bahawa
“…every culture, differences in value and belief are expressed through language an art
forms such as dress, architecture an decoration…”

Apresiasi seni melibatkan sepenuhnya deria rasa/sentuh dan deria pandang. Karya
seni seperti catan, lukisan, cetakan dipandang sementara acra dan binaan disentuh.
Apresiasi seni secara aktif melibatkan penggunaan bahasa untuk berkomunikasi
dengan orang lain apa yang difikirkan dan dirasakan. Dalam konteks ini pengetahuan
mengenai seni serta perbendaharaan kata yang cukup mengenai seni yang diperlukan.

OBJEKTIF APRESIASI

a) Memahami dan bertindak terhadap aspek seni
b) Mengetahui pentingnya nilai seni dalam kehidupan
c) Menghasilkan karya (produk seni)
d) Memahami seni dan hubungannya
e) Membuat dan menggunakan pertimbangan estetik dan kualiti karya seni

TUJUAN APRESIASI DAN KRITIKAN SENI

Apresiasi seni membolehkan pelajar memahami aspek-aspek nilai estetika, pengertian
unsur-unsur seni dan nilai-nilai sosio budaya yang terkandung dalam hasil seni dan
kraf. Ianya juga dapat menghubungkaitkan diri dan hasil sendiri dengan hasil-hasil lain berdasarkan persepsi visual.Begitu juga dengan aktiviti apresiasi seni, kita dapat melihat perhubungan antara kerja
sendiri dengan kerja-kerja orang lain di mana kita dapat membentuk keyakinan dan
kefahaman penghargaan terhadap bidang seni
Pendekatan apresiasi dan kritikan seni:

Mengikut John A. Michael dalam bukunya “art and adolescence” ada dua pendekatan
dalam apresiasi seni iaitu:

a) Pendekatan secara logik
b) Pendekatan secara psiklogi

PENDEKATAN SECARA LOGIK

Pendekatan ini adalah berbentuk tradisional dan memerlukan pemahaman intelek
semata-mata dan banyak berfaktakan kepada aspek andaian dan munasabah pada
yang melihat sesuatu karya seni tersebut:
Cadangan aktiviti pendekatan secara logik:

Secara penerangan - Membaca, mengkaji, bila dihasilkan,
tujuan/teknik pelukis, media, proses, nilai-
nilai estetika dan pengaruh

Secara pemerhatian - Balai seni, pameran, filem, slaid,
mengumpul dan menyusun gambar-
gambar

Secara perbandingan - Analisa, penilaian, perbandingan antara
satu dengan yang lain serta menimbulkan
kesedaran

Secara penghasilan - Membuat mengikut gaya artis/stail,menimbulkan kefahaman masalah nilai- nilai khas, kepuasan, menghubungkan diri
dengan pelukis/pandai tukang gaya
konsep dan zaman.

PENDEKATAN SECARA PSIKOLOGI

Pendekatan ini merangkumi perkara-perkara yang lebih menjurus kepada perasaan
peribadi, lebih bersifat emosi dan perasaan dalaman kepada penghasilan dan
penghayatan sesuati karya seni.
Pendekatan ini akan dapat meninggalkan satu pengalaman yang amat berkesan dan
mendalam. Secara ini akan lebih realistik dan dapat menerima ‘response’ dan pendapat
orang lain. Kesan tindakbalas akan lebih terserlah terhadap bahan serta alat yang
digunakan.

Cadangan aktiviti pendekatan secara psikologi:

1. Secara perbincangan dan perbandingan
2. Secara proses inkuiri penemuan (discovery)
3. Secara kritikan mengenai lukisan/hasil kerja seni
4. Secara menyediakansetting/set induksi
5. Secara membesarkan gambar
6. Secara mengolah bahan-bahan sebenar
7. Secara aktiviti permainan seni
8. Secara lawatan/pameran
9. Secara koleksi buku-buku skrap dan lakaran

KAEDAH MELIHAT SENI

Kaedah-kaedah melihat seni terdiri daripada kaedah:

a) Hedonistic
b) Kontekstualistik
c) Organistik
d) Normistik
e) Elektik

a. KAEDAH HEDONISTIC

Kaedah ini hanya satu luahann perasaan secara spontan seperti kesukaan, pernyataan
perasaan, gemar, menarik dan benci.
Penilaian dibuat secara serta merta iaitu:

• Suka/tidak
• Tertarik/tidak
• Pernyataan spontan

Kaedah ini tidak sealiran dengan isme pengkritik dan ahli psikologi menyatakan kaedah
ini tidak diterjemahkan oleh otak (pemikiran) Cuma berdasarkan maklumat kendiri.
Ianya tidak dapat di ukur bilangan sebenar dan terdapat pelgabai citarasa.

b. KAEDAH KONTEKSTUALISTIK

Kaedah ini lebih praktikat di mana pemerhatian dibuat secara lebih ilmiah, sistematik
dan kefahaman serta kejelasan. Ianya berkait dengan pengetahuan sejarah, falsafah
dan prinsip rekaan.Lebih rujuk kepada perincian/spesifikasi dari aspek persoalan fahaman, rentak pengkaryaan, interaksi pemerhati, konsepsi, hujah dan penilai karya.
Ianya akan menyediakan pengetahuan mantap dalam pengamata karya, kefahaman
konsep, kepelbagaian bandingan dan seni akan menjadi suatu pendekatan yang
menarik oleh pemerhati.

c. KAEDAH ORGANISTIK

Kaedah ini menjurus kepada aturan yang mempunyai satu sistem yang teratur dan
terancang. Penilaian dibuat serata melihat konteks seni secara harmoni, menentuh
intuisi dan menyenangkan. Penekanan kriteria kapada aspek tata letak, tata atur, ruang
dan penataan cahaya.
Ini akan dapat membentuk kesatuan cara melihat sesuatu karya dari segi warna,
jalinan, unsur-unsur seni , imbangan, perulangan, kesinambungan serta kepelbagaian.

d. KAEDAH NORMISTIK

Kaedah ini merujuk kepada kriteria dan norma sesuatu karya dari aspek nilai
masyarakat, agama dan budaya. Ia seakan-akan ada kaitan dengan pendekatan diri
kepada Allah, rasa takwa, tidak ada unsure sensasi. Cntohnya lukisan agama Kristian
yang berkaitan unsur ikonografi, naratif dan nilai-nilai akhlak.
Kaedah ini menolak peradaban moden di mana pelukis telah melampaui batas yang
dibenar dalam budaya dan agama.

e. KAEDAH ELEKTIK

Kaedah ini lebih berbentuk cara bersepadu dan holistic, ianya aalah gabungan persepsi
penilai seni tentang tanggapan positif dan negatif. kriteria penilai menekankan unsur
asas prinsip, struktur organisasi dan alat dan bahan.
Kaedah ini untuk pemerhatian secara rawak, tidak menjurus kepada aspek
kronologinya. Wajaran hanya secara baik, sederhana dan kurang baik.

PROSES APRESIASI SENI
Terdapat berbagai cadangan oleh beberapa pakar pendidikan seni mengenai proses
apresiasi. Feldman (1967) dan smith (1967) mencadangkan aktiviti-aktiviti apresiasi seni berasaskan kepada proses persepsi dan intelektual melalui empat tahap:

a) Menggambarkan
b) Menganalisa
c) Tafsiran
d) Penilaian

A. MENGGAMBARKAN
Mengamati hasil seni dan menggambarkab sifat-sifat tampak seperti warna, garisan,
bentuk, rupa, jalinan dan elemen-elemen gubahan iaitu prinsip dan struktur

B. MENGANALISA

i. Menganalisa perhubungan sifat-sifat tampak seperti unsure-unsur seni, prinsip
dan stuktur
ii. Menganalisa kualiti ekspresif seperti mood dan suasana
iii. Menghauraikan stail sesuatu karya

C. TAFSIRAN

i. Mencari makna-makna yang tedapat pada sifat-sifat tampak seperti subjek,
symbol, unsure-unsur seni, prinsip, strktur, corak dan bahan
ii. Mencari metafora-metafora (ibarat/kiasan) an analogi-analogi (persamaan) untuk
menjelaskan makna tersebut.

D. PENILAIAN

i. Membuat penilaian berdasarkan kepada criteria yang bersesuaian seperti
keaslian, gubahan, teknik dan fungsi
ii. Menilai hasil seni berdasarkan kepada pengertiannya dari segi individu, social,
keaagamaan dan kepercayaan, sejarah serta keseniaannya.

SENI ARCA

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Sculpture, Arca

Maksud Arca

Arca merupakan hasil seni berbentuk 3 dimensi ( 3D ). Arca berasal daripada perkataan ‘ sculpture ’ yang beerti mengukir, memotong, menebuk atau melarik. Biasanya arca diletakkan di dalam suatu ruang untuk tujuan pameran. Nilai estetiknya dapat dihayati dengan pancaindera. Permukaan arca boleh dipegang dan arca boleh dipandang dari pelbagai sudut pandangan. Arca juga terdapat dalam bentuk realistik atau bentuk abstrak.

Banyak arca dicipta melalui tempahan untuk memperingati sesuatu peristiwa bersejarah, atau kehidupan seorang tokoh. Arca bertujuan sebagai seni awam yang dipamerkan di luar, tetapi kekadangnya juga dipamerkan di dalam bangunan awam untuk menegaskan sesuatu dengan cara yang lebih ketara daripada apa yang boleh ditekankan melalui penggunaan perkataan.
Menjelang abad ke dua puluh, apabila seni mencapai dimensi baru, arca berubah kepada ciri abstrak dan membuka era baru dalam peradaban arca. Kategori arca boleh dibahagikan kepada dua iaitu arca estetik dan arca berfungsi.
Ciri-Ciri Arca yang baik dan kreatif

Arca yang kreatif dan baik haruslah dihasilkan menepati tema dan tajuk yang ingin diketengahkan oleh pengkarya. Kebiasaannya pengkarya ingin berkongsi tema bersama dengan pengarca yang lain. Tema yang ingin diketengahkan seperti perkongsian maklumat, dokumentasi, lonjakan paradigma, cetusan emosi dan perasaan. Semua persoalan yang ingin diketengahkan haruslah ada pada arca yang dihasilkan dan mampu menonjolkan persoalan berkenaan melalui hasilan pengkarya.

Bahan binaan arca juga haruslah sesuai dengan tujuan hasilan. Dalam pengkaryaan arca, asemblaj mewakili karya yang agak bebas dan pelbagai penggunaan bahan dan media. Maka dengan itu kesepaduan dalam pelbagai penggunaan bahan dan media dapat menjadikan sesuatu arca yang kreatif dan menepati ciri-ciri sebuah arca bersesuaian denga tema.
Arca yang baik haruslah kukuh, kuat, selamat dan tahan lama. Sejarah arca membuktikan bahawa sebuah arca yang baik menggunakan alat dan bahan terdiri daripada kombinasi yang padat dan kukuh.

Pengkarya arca akan dianggap dapat menghasilkan sebuah arca yang baik apabila berjaya mempelbagaikan bahan yang diadun atau dipasang dengan baik. Arca khususnya asemblaj mengadunkan pelbagai bahan lalu membentuk kesatuan komposisi yang artistik.Arca yang baik dan kreatif juga haruslah berjaya mengaplikasikan asas seni reka, estetika dan etika pengkaryaan. Objek akan digubah berdasarkan asas seni reka. Apabila asas seni reka ini diaplikasikan dengan baik dan betul, penampilan karya akan menjadi lebih terancang dan rapi.

Akhir sekali yang paling penting dalam menhasilkan sebuah arca yang baik dan kreatif ialah arca berkenaan haruslah bebas daripada ciplakan atau plagiat. Sebagai pengkarya yang memahami hakikat keaslian, ciplakan adalah satu kelemahan lebih-lebih lagi jika penghasilannya bertujuan komersial. Arca yang dihasilkan haruslah hanya satu dan tiada ditempat lain.

MENIKMATI DAN MENGHAYATI SENI ARCA

JIKA arca boleh dinikmati di sekeliling ruang, boleh dihayati dan disentuh seluruh permukaannya, tentu arca itu suatu objek yang istimewa. Ia menawarkan kepada penikmat untuk menghayati bentuk, kepadatan, saiz, isipadu di samping meletakkan emosi rasa bersamanya. Tentu lebih istimewa lagi, apabila arca dijadikan penghias laman. Menggubah ruang menjadi lebih indah dan bermakna. Arca boleh diletakkan pada lantai, digantung, pindah alih, dibiarkan tetap atau dapat dipasang dan dibuka.

Fungsi arca dan manfaat kepada orang ramai juga tidak dapat dinafikan di samping keindahannya. Itulah interpritasi yang meletakkan nilai arca sebagai suatu objek seni dan berfungsi.

Perkataan arca yang berasal dari perkataan Latin ‘sculpere’ merujuk makna pada proses ukiran dan potongan. Dalam zaman Greek, bentuk tubuh manusia juga dianggap arca yang meliputi susunan fizikal iaitu harmonis, seimbang dan perhubungan jitu dalam keseluruhan bahagian. Segalanya ini adalah konsep penyusunan artistik yang menjadi sebahagian daripada definisi apa itu arca.

Peralihan masa, merubah perkembangan seni arca ke arah moden yang melihat perubahan sains dan mesin sebagai teknologi hinggakan arca distrukturkan menjadi abstrak dalam seni. Manakala fungsinya turut berubah dari nilai indah digabung kepada sifat yang berfungsi seperti automotif, telefon, peralatan industri, perabut dan bangunan. Namun sifat-sifat asli sesebuah arca itu masih kekal mengikut prinsip harmoni, kadar banding, keseimbangan dan kepelbagaian.

Jika demikian apakah perbezaan antara arca dengan sebuah kerusi? Arca boleh diolah daripada objek lain menjadi satu rupa wajah yang baharu. Himpunan objek-objek sedia ada atau komponen-komponen sebahagian daripada objek asal dieksploitasi dan diolah sebagai untuk kewujudan satu objek baharu. Jika kerusi diletakkan pada situasi ini, maka ia diberi tafsiran sebagai arca. Dengan kedudukannya yang boleh berfungsi serta sekaligus membawa nilai-nilai estetika dari segi reka bentuk, keseimbangan, pengisian ruang dan pembikinannya boleh membantu kita menjadi jelas.

Sejauhmanakah kerusi itu diterima sebagai arca? Ini merupakan persoalan penghayatan dan kefahaman konsep yang boleh dirujuk pada Joseph Kosuth yang menafsir kerusi dalam karyanya “One and Three Chaire”. Di dalam karya tersebut dijelaskan tiga perbezaan realiti pada sebuah kerusi. Pertamanya ialah realiti pada kerusi sebenar yang boleh disentuh dan boleh dilihat dalam fotografi dengan imej yang sama serta satu definisi, apa itu kerusi, petikan dari kamus, dicetak dan ditampal pada dinding. Realiti kedua ialah fotografi tentang kerusi sahaja, tetapi imejnya dalam ilusi. Realiti ketiga ialah definisi secara lisan yang jelas menerangkan tentang sebuah kerusi.

Kesimpulan yang dinyatakan oleh Joseph ialah idea tentang bentuk yang diberi definisinya telah meletakkan makna kerusi itu dalam minda dan ia adalah realiti berhubung konsepsual. Karya ini menonjolkan idea tentang sebuah kerusi menerusi pendekatan makna atau ‘signifying’. Dari hujahan ini kerusi boleh ditafsir sebagai arca dan cara Joseph berkreatif menyampaikan ideanya yang menjurus kepada seni yang dipanggil seni konsepsual. Aliran seni konsepsual mula diperkenalkan pada awal 1960-an yang mengenengahkan falsafah artistik secara ekspresif yang menjadi penerokaan kepada penganut seni Dada.

Contoh karya yang mengeksploitasikan objek-objek seni sedia ada yang digelar objek ‘ready-mades’ telah mengangkat seni arca ke arah dimensi baru. Seniman Marcel Duchamp telah mempelopori penerokaan ini melalui objek mangkuk tandas. Manakala di Malaysia, contoh terdekat ialah Piyadasa yang menjadikan kerusi sebagai arca dan digabungkan bersama sifat dan ciri-ciri dua dimensi. Melalui cara ini penampilan dan peragaan sebuah hasil seni arca boleh dikaitkan dengan pendekatan seni konsepsual.

Seniman seni konsepsual begitu taksub dengan idea atau konsep sebagai permulaan yang dianggap penting dalam sesebuah karya. Segala perancangan dan keputusan yang dibuat sebelum berkarya dianggap idea yang bernilai seperti sebuah mesin yang menghasilkan karya seni dengan meletakkan idea dalam minda itu lebih penting sebelum objek seni sebenar wujud.

Sebagai objek yang tergolong bercirikan seni arca proses pembikinannya menggabungkan kemahiran pertukangan sebagai kemahiran menghasilkan kraf yang sama seperti dilalui dalam proses membuat sebuah kerusi. Kepingan dan batang-batang kayu dipotong untuk djadikan sebuah kerusi. Dengan teknik pertukangan, pengalaman membuatnya melibatkan kemahiran bersama ilmu estetik.

Keyakinan ini meletakkan objek-objek kraf bertambah dan mengalami perubahan reka bentuk sama seperti lukisan dan arca. Objek-objek ini dipilih untuk menghiasi ruang dalaman bagi mengisi sebahagian daripada persekitaran. Objek seni arca ini dihormati dan diberi peluang selain melihat ia juga boleh disentuh sama seperti kita menghayati objek-objek seni halus yang lain. Kesimpulannya, kerusi itu adalah objek kraf yang sekaligus sebagai objek arca. Juga tidak perlu dipertikaikan kerana kerusi itu memiliki rupa bentuk tiga dimensi maka ia juga adalah sebahagian daripada arca.

Lebih jelas lagi dalam menghubungkan kerusi sebagai sebahagian daripada arca dapat dibuktikan melalui salah satu dari empat cara tradisi dalam mencipta sesuatu objek arca, iaitu:

• Mengukir ke atas bahan yang keras dan pejal.
• Membentuk model dari bahan lembut.
• Tuangan cecair lebur yang terbentuk objek keras.
• Pemasangan bahan yang boleh disambung.

Maka jelas di sini, kempat-empat cara mencipta tadi telah menepati cara merekacipta sebuah kerusi sekaligus sebagai sebuah arca. Untuk pemasangan perlu kemahiran pertukangan seperti membuat tanggam dan sebagainya yang ada pada seorang kraf, juga perlu ada pada seorang pengarca. Jika ia sebuah kerusi kayu, maka perlu ditanggam atau dipaku. Jika ia sebuah kerusi besi, perlu kemahiran memotong dan megimpal.

Bagi Frank Lloyd Wright pengamal seni Bauhaus, beliau mengabungkan binaan, kejuruteraan dan seni ke dalam reka bentuk yang berhubungan dengan persekitaran. Kesatuan dalam idea diekspresikan menjadi kerusi dan Wright meletakkan objek kerusi dengan keseimbangan formal bersama unsur-unsur yang ada di dalam arca seperti pengulangan, kadar banding dan kehalusan.

Manakala ciptaan kerusi oleh Michael Coffey pada tahun 1975 dapat dirumuskan sebagai sebahagian daripada bentuk-bentuk kerusi yang disusun semula secara bebas bagi melahirkan sesuatu yang baharu. Bentuk baharu yang menjadi objek arca masih berdiri dengan ciri-ciri sebuah kerusi yang dibantu sebahagiannya dengan konsep seni arca kontemporari.

Kesimpulannya tidak banyak beza antara arca dengan sebuah kerusi. Secara langsungnya kerusi begitu mudah dieksploitasi menjadi arca sehingga nilai kerusi itu lebih tinggi dari sifatnya yang asal. Segala-galanya menjadi realiti apabila dalam minda itu terbina idea dan konsep untuk menjadikan kerusi itu raksaksa, kerusi antik, kerusi eletrik, kerusi Yang diPertuan Agong, kerusi malas, kerusi roda dan sebagainya. Jika begitu adakah boleh arca juga dimanipulasikan menjadi sebuah kerusi?

Arca dari sudut psikologi terbina daripada kesedaran dan pengalaman yang berkaitan dengan hidup. Apresiasi terhadap seni arca bergantung kepada kebolehan mengamati dan mentafsir bentuk tiga dimensi itu sendiri. Cara ini, arca dapat diterangkan dengan mudah. Jika sebelumnya dianggap salah satu seni yang sukar untuk dijelaskan, lebih sukar lagi dalam membuat apresiasi berbanding seni-seni yang lain yang mana seni lain melibatkan bentuk-bentuk rataan dalam dua dimensi. Bagi kita yang penting ialah belajar melihat hasil seni arca bukan sekadar untuk memahami rupa bentuknya, tetapi perlu memahami jarak kedalaman bentuk arca itu dan secara ilusinya memperkayakan pengamatan. Di sebalik karya tiga dimensi, unsur apresiasi perlu diperkembangkan terutama makna dalaman yang setiap satunya berbeza makna.

Pada asasnya untuk mendapatkan kepuasan apabila menatapi sesebuah arca memerlukan sentuhan selain melihat dari dekat dan mengelilingi arca tersebut. Fikiran yang menggambarkan sesuatu bentuk itu rata dan persepsi tersebut sahaja tidak mencukupi tanpa penghayatan. Jika tidak, ramai lagi yang bukan sahaja ‘buta bentuk’ malah langsung tidak menggunakan fikiran dan emosi sebagai keperluan membantu memahami bentuk-bentuk tiga dimensi dalam keseluruhan karya seni arca.

Arcawan perlu memikirkan bentuk-bentuk di setiap sudut yang membawa pengertian dan saling berkait. Bentuk-bentuk dan bentuk dalam bentuk yang membawa fungsi secara keseluruhan, mudah atau sukar untuk diterjemahkan bergantung kepada cara menikmati dan menghayatinya. Untuk mendapatkan rupa bentuk yang padu seperti bentuk yang asli, perlu difikirkan saiz dan perkadarannya serta kesempurnaannya apabila dipegang. Secara zahirnya kesan visualisasi yang kompleks dari bentuk ke bentuk yang berada di sekeliling arca itu memerlukan setiap sudut itu boleh dilihat. Cara ini membuahkan kesan apresiasi yang bukan mata sahaja menjadi penat, tetapi minda turut letih berfikir tentang titik pusat graviti, berat isipadu, kesedaran tentang satahnya dan ruang yang diisi oleh rupa bentuk dan udara.

Pemerhati yang peka perlu juga belajar merasai satah-satah yang mudah di dalam rupa bentuk dan memikirkan aspek luaran dan dalaman isipadunya. Contoh sebiji telur, secara ideanya adalah signifikan kepada permakanan dan telur simbol kepada melahirkan zuriat. Begitu juga kepaduan kulit siput, cendawan, gunung, tulang dan sebagainya yang apabila dihayati dan diperhalusi dengan mendalam suatu pengalaman berguna tentang bentuk dan kombinasi beberapa bentuk, dapat membuka langkah yang lebih jauh dan lebih sukar dalam membuat apresiasi.

Manakala bagi Brancussi, sebahagian daripada nilai tanggapannya telah menjadi pegangan penting dalam sejarah perkembangan arca kontemporari. Beliau mempunyai misi yang istimewa melalui penumpuan awal pada rupa bentuk yang sederhana untuk menglahirkan sebuah arca. Dari bentuk selinder, beliau meneliti bentuk yang satu itu untuk menjadi sebuah arca yang bernilai. Cara beliau melihat satu unit bentuk yang kaku dan diubah menjadi hasil yang tersendiri dan unik. Satu unit bentuk yang statik perlu dipecah-pecahkan dan mengalami kombinasi bersama beberapa bentuk-bentuk lain dalam pelbagai saiz, arah dan bahagian dalam keseluruhan bentuk.

Contoh figura manusia dianggap objek yang menjadi tarikan. Boleh diamati lebih mendalam tentang setiap bentuk yang wujud secara semulajadi. Antaranya tulang belulang, otot-otot, perkadaran yang unik dan sebagainya. Apabila dihayati dan diperhalusi maka pengalaman yang sangat berguna tentang perihal bentuk dapat membuka minda untuk terus menjelajah, meneroka setiap rupa bentuk yang baru dari cipta Ilahi.

Manakala Henry Moore menganggap lubang dalam sesuatu arca sebagai sebahagian daripada olahan seni. Bagi Henry Moore apabila beliau memungut batu-batu berlubang di pantai inilah permulaan pengalamannya yang membuatkan beliau menghormati batu-batu itu. Ia ditipu oleh batu dan menyedari bahawa setiap permukaan dan lubang pada batu ada mempunyai rahsianya dan ada tenaga kuasanya yang tersendiri.

Sebenarnya Brancusi dan Moore, dua arcawan yang berada dalam zaman moden pada umumnya dianggap sebagai pencipta asas arca berkriteria organik. Walaupun kedua-duanya berbeza, tetapi mempunyai pendekatan yang serupa dalam meletakkan tujuan dan asas estetika dalam seni arca.

Dalam menikmati dan menghayati seni arca, semangat yang ditunjukkan oleh seniman adalah semangat daya cipta yang kuat dan dapat meluaskannya dalam kehidupan bangsa. Hasilan seni arca memberi manfaat tersendiri selain untuk tatapan umum, ianya merakam dan menyimpan kembali hasilan seni untuk khazanah generasi akan datang. Melaluinya dapat dikenali tamadun bangsa, penggunaan bahan-bahannya yang merefleksikan kesan sejarah.

Kombinasi seni dan sejarah membantu memperkukuhkan jati diri menjadi bangsa yang berjiwa halus dan menyayangi hasil seni. Sumbangan mengangkat seni arca oleh mana-mana negara bangsa adalah sumbangan positif terhadap daya kreatif seni dalam penampilannya. Dua unsur antara seni dan sejarah saling berkaitan dan melengkapi bagi penyempurnaan pembinaan peribadi sebagai satu bangsa. Bermula dengan generasi kini yang berusaha menggarap dan mengabadikan seni arca di persekitaran jabatan kerajaan, institusi kewangan, bangunan-bangunan sektor swasta dan korporat dapat membantu generasi akan datang menghayati dan mencintai seni arca. Mencintai khazanah seni sebagai bahan artifak sejarah, budaya dan kesenian bangsa adalah penghormatan yang termulia. Justeru itu penyediaan ruang dan penghormatan kepada arcawan mengabadikan hasil seni arca di persekitaran masyarakat dapat membantu mengangkat martabat seni. Biarpun arca yang simbolis, kelihatan simple tetapi cukup memberi erti kepada kesedaran seni.

Seni Impressionism dan Post-Impressionism

2009-10-06T00:52:00.003+08:00

Impressionism

Impresionisme adalah suatu gerakan seni dari abad 19 yang dimulai dari Paris pada tahun 1860an. Nama ini awalnya dikutip dari lukisan Claude Monet, "Impression, Sunrise" ("Impression, soleil levant"). Kritikus Louis Leroy menggunakan kata ini sebagai sindiran dalam artikelnya di Le Charivari.

Karakteristik utama lukisan impresionisme adalah kuatnya goresan berus, warna-warna cerah (bahkan banyak sekali pelukis impresionis yang mengharamkan warna hitam kerana dianggap bukan bagian dari cahaya), komposisi terbuka, penekanan pada kualiti pengcahayaan, subjek-subjek lukisan yang tidak terlalu menonjol, dan sudut pandang yang tidak biasa.

Seniman impresionisme pada awalnya terinspirasi oleh teori-teori Eugene Delacroix yang mulai merasakan ketidakpuasan terhadap perkembangan seni akademik pada masa itu yang terlalu berkonsentrasi kepada mahzab seni lukis klasik. Ia berpendapat bahawa lukisan tidak selamanya dibentuk dengan pengolahan garis secara berlebihan seperti dikembangkan oleh Inggeris selama bertahun-tahun. Sebaliknya pengolahan pengetahuan warna-warna dengan penuh teliti akan menghasilkan bentuk lukisan yang lebih menarik.

Namun Delacroix sendiri boleh dianggap gagal melepaskan diri dari pengaruh pakembangan seni lukis akedemik kerena bagaimanapun lukisannya sendiri masih berkonsentrasikan pada bentuk-bentuk secara ideal.

Kemudian beberapa pelukis secara radikal melanggar peraturan-peraturan akademik dalam pembuatan lukisan. Lukisan ini tidak lagi berkonsentrasi pada bentuk secara mendetail dengan mementingkan kontour, volume, dan garis. Juga meninggalkan pengamatan struktural bentuk suatu objek. Sebaliknya, suasana didapatkan dengan menangkap kesan (impresi) cahaya yang ditangkap sekilas oleh mata. Akibatnya bentuk objek menjadi lebih sederhana, tidak seperti lukisan naturalisme atau realisme.

Pada awalnya tidak hanya lukisan still life dan potret saja yang dibuat di dalam ruangan, tetapi juga pemandangan. Hal inilah yang kemudiannya mendorong seniman impressionism untuk menemukan bahawa ada kesan yang berbeza didapatkan jika lukisan dibuat di secara terbuka dengan suasana visual langsung bagi mengamati objek yang dibuat. Mereka menggunakan goresan warna-warna pendek, pecah, dan sekaligus murni (dengan erti tidak disengajakan untuk dicampur di atas palet) untuk memberikan nyawa kepada lukisan. Penekanan lukisan kemudian bergeser kepada kesan keseluruhan daripada detail-detail objek tertentu.

Perkembangan selanjutnya dari impresionisme adalah penemuan bahawa yang lebih penting daripada teknik impresionisme sendiri adalah perbezaan dalam sudut pandang. Impresionisme sebenarnya adalah seni pergerakan, pose, dan komposisi dari permainan kesan cahaya yang dituangkan dalam warna-warna cerah dan bervariasi.

Pada akhir abad 19, masyarakat mulai mempercayai bahwa impresionisme adalah cara pandang yang jernih dan jujur terhadap kehidupan, meskipun secara artisitik bukanlah pendekatan yang benar dalam pembuatan karya.Puncak gerakan seni impresionisme di Perancis terjadi hampir bersamaan dengan di negara lain, antara lain di Itali dengan pelukis Macchiaioli, dan Amerika Syarikat dengan pelukis Winslow Homer.
Impresionisme menjadi pelopor berkembangnya aliran-aliran seni modern lain seperti Post-Impresionisme, Fauvisme, and Kubisme.

Post-Impressionism

1885-1905 Post impressionism yg bergerak dari perancis.Tempoh post impressionism telah dicipta oleh pengkritik seni inggeris iaitu Roger Fry.Paul Cezanne,Georges seurat,Paul Gauguin adalah antara pelukis yang b’asal dari perancis kecuali Van Gogh dan kbykn mereka adlh bermula sbgai impressionist.stiap org drpd mereka menegaskan kesan figutif warna dan cahaya.

Teknik

Aliran ini adalah lanjutan daripada aliran impressionisme yg memilih perkara di persekitaran mereka sebagai hal benda.Bagaimanapun,ia mengadunkan eleman saintifik dan kajian analitikal thdp wrna dan cahaya.Ia lebih kpd warna-warna
simbolik,terangdan tidak begitu neutral.warna diaplikasikan secara pertindihan,kombinasi beberapa warna.teknik ini dgunakan untk mghasilkan warna ilusi kepada audian yg lihat.

Sebagai contoh: Teknik yang digunakan oleh Georges Seurat dalam “A Sunday Afternoon On The Island Of A La Grande Jatte”.Kalau Impressionisme pelukisnya menggunakan teknik yang serupa kapada tema ringan serta komited dengan tema sosial.Hal ini telah mempengaruhi aliran Kubisme dan Ekspresionisme.Ia juga dibawa dari Perancis pada tahun 1884.Pelukis menggunakan semua warna termasuk warna hitam.Hal benda yang telah di ubah akan di abadikan.

Gaya Seni

Tempoh post impressionism di cipta oleh pengkritik seni inggeris iaitu Roger Fry.
Paul cezanne, georges seurat,paul gauguin adalah orang perancis kecuali Van Gogh.Antara pelukis lain ialah Henry de toulouse-lautrec,paul gauguin,
camille pissarro,Henry rousseau.

Kebanyakkan daripada mereka bermula sebagai impressionists.Dimana segala hasil karya telah menerima kritikan yang hebat kerana menggunakan teknik dimana mereka merakamkan imej dengan mementingkan rakaman cahaya dan campuran warna yang menggambarkan kesan cahaya yang jatuh pada sesuatu imej yang dilukis..

Kemudian semasa aliran post impressionism, Gauguin bersama pelukis muda yang bernama Emile Bernard telah bersama-sama mencari kebenaran yang lebih mudah dan keindahan yang lebih tulen dalam seni.Berubah jauh dari dunia seni yang canggih di paris,dia sebaliknya mencari inspirasi dgn kaum2 luar bandar dgn nilai2 tradisional.Dia bersama Emile mengkaji warna buram,garis berat dan kualiti berhias kaca berwarna dan manuskrip kuno pencahayaan.

Mereka menjelajah dan mengkaji dengan bersungguh-sungguh dengan penuh perasaan tentang warna tulen dan garis.Gauguin menggunakan warna eksotik dan rasa keharmonian untuk mencipta puitis tahitians.Dari brushstrokes dia telah menggunakan baris-baris yang berlengkok2 serta warna yang bertenaga ke dalam catannya(berbanding pada masa impressionisme).Gauguin mewarna dengan penuh perasaan dan menggunakan warna yang bertenaga dan banyk menghasilkan catan nya dalam benuk lanskap semula jadi.

Antara Tokoh aliran seni ini:-

VINCENT VAN GOGH:
Name:Vincent willem van gogh
Born: 30 march 1853,Zundert,The Nethrelands
Died:29 july 1890. FRANCE
Nationality:Dutch
Field: Painter.
Movement: Port Impressionism
Works: The Potato Eatert, Sunflowers, The Starry Night, Irief, Potrait Of Dr Gachet

Van gogh telah menghabiskan masa remajanya dgn bekerja di sebuah Syarikat Seni Dealers.Selepas itu dia telah bekerja sebagai guru dalam masa yg singkat dan kemudianya telah menjadi seorang pekerja mubaligh dlm 1 daerah perlombongsn yang miskin.Dia tidak memulakan kerjayanya sebagai seorang artis sehingga lah pada tahun 1880 dia telah mula mengkaji warna-warna suram sehingga memasuki aliran impressionism dan neo impressionism di Paris.Van gogh telah mengeluarkan lebih 2000 hasil karyanya termasuk 900 hasil warna dan 1100 hasil lukisan dan lakaran.dia akhirnya telah memotong sebahagian telinganya kerana gagal dalam prsahabatannya dgn paul gauguin.

Clement Greenberg

2009-09-07T16:11:00.002+08:00

ART CRITIC

"... At this same party [a] friend introduced the then comparatively young art critic Clement Greenberg... Marianne seemed to be familiar with his writing and said, on shaking hands, "Oh, the fearless Mr. Greenberg."

-- Elizabeth Bishop in Efforts of Affection: A Memoir of Marianne Moore

Clement Greenberg (January 16, 1909 – May 7, 1994) was an influential American art critic closely associated with Modern art in the United States. In particular, he promoted the abstract expressionist movement and was among the first critics to praise the work of painter Jackson Pollock.

Greenberg was a graduate of Syracuse University who first made his name as an art critic with his essay "Avant-Garde and Kitsch," first published in the journal Partisan Review in 1939. In this article Greenberg claimed that avant-garde and Modernist art was a means to resist the leveling of culture produced by capitalist propaganda. Greenberg appropriated the German word 'kitsch' to describe this consumerism, though its connotations have since changed to a more affirmative notion of left-over materials of capitalist culture. Modern art, like philosophy, explored the conditions under which we experience and understand the world. It does not simply provide information about it in the manner of an illustratively accurate depiction of the world. "Avant Garde and Kitsch" was also a politically motivated essay in part a response to the destruction and repression of Modernist Art in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union and its replacement with state ordained styles of "Aryan" art and "Socialist realism."

In December 1950, he joined the CIA fronted American Committee for Cultural Freedom. Greenberg believed Modernism provided a critical commentary on experience. It was constantly changing to adapt to kitsch pseudo-culture, which was itself always developing. In the years after World War II, Greenberg pushed the position that the best avant-garde artists were emerging in America rather than Europe. Particularly, he championed Jackson Pollock as the greatest painter of his generation, commemorating the artist's "all-over" gestural canvases. In the 1955 essay "American-Type Painting" Greenberg promoted the work of Abstract Expressionists, among them Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Hans Hofmann, Barnett Newman, and Clyfford Still, as the next stage in Modernist art, arguing that these painters were moving towards greater emphasis on the 'flatness' of the picture plane. As part of his program to promote the principle of medium specificity in the arts, Greenberg stressed that this flatness separated their art from the Old Masters, who considered flatness an obtrusive hurdle in painting. Greenberg argued for a method of self-criticism that transported abstract painting from decorative 'wallpaper patterns' to high art. Greenberg's view that, after the war, the United States had become the guardian of 'advanced art' was taken up in some quarters as a reason for using Abstract Expressionism as the basis for Cultural Propaganda exercises. He praised similar movements abroad and, after the success of the Painters Eleven exhibition in 1956 with the American Abstract Artists at New York's Riverside Gallery, he travelled to Toronto to see the group's work in 1957. He was particularly impressed by the potential of painters William Ronald and Jack Bush, and later developed a close friendship with Bush. Greenberg saw Bush's post-Painters Eleven work as a clear manifestation of the shift from abstract expressionism to Color Field painting and Lyrical Abstraction, a shift he had called for in most of his critical writings of the period.

Greenberg's taste led him to reject the Pop Art of the 1960s, a trend clearly influenced by kitsch culture. Through the 1960s Greenberg remained an influential figure on a younger generation of critics including Michael Fried and Rosalind E. Krauss. Greenberg's antagonism to 'Postmodernist' theories and socially engaged movements in art caused him to lose influence amongst both artists and art critics.Such was Greenberg's influence as an art critic that Tom Wolfe in his 1975 book The Painted Word identified Greenberg as one of the "kings of cultureburg", alongside Harold Rosenberg and Leo Steinberg. Wolfe contended that these critics influence was too great on the world of art.

Eventually, Greenberg was concerned that some Abstract Expressionism had been "reduced to a set of mannerisms" and increasingly looked to a new set of artists who abandoned such elements as subject matter, connection with the artist, and definite brush strokes. Greenberg suggested this process attained a level of 'purity' (a word he only used in quotes) that would reveal the truthfulness of the canvas, and the two-dimensional aspects of the space (flatness). Greenberg coined the term "Post-Painterly Abstraction" to distinguish it from Abstract Expressionism, or Painterly Abstraction, as Greenberg preferred to call it. Post-Painterly Abstraction was a term given to a myriad of abstract art that reacted against gestural abstraction of second-generation Abstract Expressionists. Among the dominant trends in the Post-Painterly Abstraction are Hard-Edged Painters such as Ellsworth Kelly and Frank Stella who explored relationships between tightly ruled shapes and edges, in Stella's case, between the shapes depicted on the surface and the literal shape of the support and Color-Field Painters such as Helen Frankenthaler and Morris Louis, who stained first Magna then water-based acrylic paints into unprimed canvas, exploring tactile and optical aspects of large, vivid fields of pure, open color. The line between these movements is tenuous, however as artists such as Kenneth Noland utilized aspects of both movements in his art. Post-Painterly Abstraction is generally seen as continuing the Modernist dialectic of self-criticism.

This is Greenberg's last essay on modernism. In it he recants his "elegant" definition of the 1960 essay, and adds the conviction that modernism constitutes a kind of holding operation again the levelling and relaxing tendencies of middlebrow taste. In this it recalls (if memory serves) a remark by Samuel Johnson that criticism seeks to maintain standards in the face of their continual tendency to deteriorate.
-- TF

REFERENCE: - William Dobell Memorial Lecture, Sydney, Australia, Oct 31, 1979Arts 54, No.6 (February 1980)

"POSTMODERN" IS A RATHER NEW TERM. It's a catchy one and has been coming up more and more often in talk and writing about the arts, and not only about the arts. I'm not clear as to just what it points to except in the case of architecture. There we know more or less definitely what "modern" means, so we're better able to tell what "post" means when prefixed to "modern." Modern architecture means -- to put it roughly -- functional, geometric rigor and the eschewing of decoration or ornament. Buildings have been put up or projected lately that break with these canons of style, and therefore have gotten called postmodern. Everybody concerned knows what's meant, including the architects themselves.

Can postmodern be identified in an equally agreed upon way in any of the other arts? I haven't yet seen or heard the term applied in earnest to anything in recent literature. It's come up in connection with music, but haphazardly and with no agreement about what it means there. And from what I can tell it comes up hardly at all in talk about the dance or the movies. Away from architecture, it's in the area of painting and sculpture that I've mostly heard and seen postmodern used -- but only by critics and journalists, not by artists themselves.

There are reasons and reasons here. One possible reason is the return to the foreground of figurative or representational pictorial art. But there's been enough precedent, since De Chirico and surrealism and neoromanticism, for including figurative art in the modern. There have to be other, less obvious, and at the same time more general reasons for the currency of postmodern in talk about recent painting and sculpture. All the more because no critic or journalist I'm aware of who makes free with postmodern points to any specific body of work he or she feels really confident in calling that.

Now the post in postmodern can be taken in a temporal chronological sense. Anything that comes after something else is "post" that something else. But this isn't quite the way in which postmodern is used. It's supposed, rather, to mean or imply art that supersedes, replaces, succeeds the modern in terms of stylistic evolution, the way that the baroque succeeded mannerism and the rococo succeeded the baroque. The corollary is that the modern is over and done with, just as mannerism was over and done with when superseded by the baroque. But the problem for those who claim this becomes to specify what they mean, not by post, but by modern. Anything in its own time can be called modern. However, what we usually mean by modern is something considered up-to-date, abreast of the times, and going beyond the past in more than a temporally or chronologically literal sense.

Well, how are you to decide what is and what isn't modern in present-day art in a sense that goes beyond the literal one? There's no rule, no principle, no method. It comes down to a question of tastes, or else a terminological quibble. Different stylistic definitions of the modern have been proposed in every generation since the word first came into circulation as applicable to painting and sculpture in more than a merely temporal sense, and none of them have held. Nor have any of those offered by the proponents of the postmodern, whether stylistic or not.

I want to take the risk of offering my own definition of the modern, but it will be more in the nature of an explanation and description than a definition. First of all, I want to change the term in question from modern to Modernist -- Modernist with a capital M -- and then to talk about Modernism instead of the modern. Modernism has the great advantage of being a more historically placeable term, one that designates a historically -- not just chronologically -- definable phenomenon: something that began at a certain time, and may or may not still be with us.

What can be safely called Modernism emerged in the middle of the last century. And rather locally, in France, with Baudelaire in literature and Manet in painting, and maybe with Flaubert too, in prose fiction. (It was a while later, and not so locally, that Modernism appeared in music and architecture, but it was in France again that it appeared first in sculpture. Outside France later still, it entered the dance.) The "avant-garde" was what Modernism was called at first, but this term has become a good deal compromised by now as well as remaining misleading. Contrary to the common notion, Modernism or the avant-garde didn't make its entrance by breaking with the past. Far from it. Nor did it have such a thing as a program, nor has it really ever had one -- again, contrary to the common notion. Nor was it an affair of ideas or theories or ideology. It's been in the nature, rather, of an attitude and an orientation: an attitude and orientation to standards and levels: standards and levels of aesthetic quality in the first and also the last place. And where did the Modernists get their standards and levels from? From the past, that is, the best of the past. But not so much from particular models in the past -- though from these too -- as from a generalized feeling and apprehending, a kind of distilling and extracting of aesthetic quality as shown by the best of the past. And it wasn't a question of imitating but one of emulating -- just as it had been for the Renaissance with respect to antiquity. It's true that Baudelaire and Manet talked much more about having to be modern, about reflecting life in their time, than about matching the best of the past. But the need and the ambition to do so show through in what they actually did, and in enough of what they were recorded as saying. Being modern was a means of living up to the past.

But didn't artists and writers before these two look to the past for standards of quality? Of course. But it was a question of how one looked, and with how much urgency.

Modernism appeared in answer to a crisis. The surface aspect of that crisis was a certain confusion of standards brought on by romanticism. The romantics had already looked back into the past, the pre-eighteenth-century past, but had made the mistake in the end of trying to reinstall it. Architecture was where this attempt became most conspicuous, in the form of revivalism. Romantic architecture wasn't all that slavish, it wasn't the dead loss it's supposed to be, but still it didn't sufffice; it may have maintained a look of the past, but not its standards. It wasn't revised enough by later experience, or revised in the right way: as Baudelaire and Manet might have put it, it wasn't modern enough. There ensued finally an academicization of the arts everywhere except in music and prose fiction. Academicization isn't a matter of academies -- there were academies long before academicization and before the nineteenth century. Academicism consists in the tendency to take the medium of an art too much for granted. It results in blurring: words become imprecise, color gets muffled, the physical sources of sound become too much dissembled. (The piano, which dissembles its being a stringed instrument, was the romantic instrument par excellence; but it is as if precisely because it made a point of dissembling that it produced the wonderful music it did in romantic times, turning imprecision into a new kind of precision.)

Modernism's reaction against romanticism consisted in part in a new investigating and questioning of the medium in poetry and painting, and in an emphasis on preciseness, on the concrete. But above all Modernism declared itself by insisting on a renovation of standards, and it effected this by a more critical and less pious approach to the past in order to make it more genuinely relevant, more "modern." It reaffirmed the past in a new way and in a variety of new ways. And it belonged to this reaffirming that the balance was tipped toward emulation as against imitation more radically than ever before -- but only out of necessity, the necessity imposed by the reaffirmed and renovated standards.

Innovation, newness have gotten themselves taken as the hallmark of Modernism, newness as something desired and pursued. And yet all the great and lasting Modernist creators were reluctant innovators at bottom, innovators only because they had to be -- for the sake of quality, and for the sake of self-expression if you will. It's not only that some measure of innovation has always been essential to aesthetic quality above a certain level; it's also that Modernist innovation has been compelled to be, or look, more radical and abrupt than innovation used to be or look: compelled by an ongoing crisis in standards. Why this should be so, I can't try to account for here; it would take me too far afield and involve too much speculation. Let it sufffice for the moment to notice one thing: how with only a relatively small lapse of time the innovations of Modernism begin to look less and less radical, and how they almost all settle into place eventually as part of the continuum of high Western art, along with Shakespeare's verse and Rembrandt's drawings.

That rebellion and revolt, as well as radical innovation, have been associated with Modernism has its good as well as bad reasons. But the latter far outnumber the former. If rebellion and revolt have truly belonged to Modernism, it's been only when felt to be necessary in the interests of aesthetic value, not for political ends. That some Modernists have been unconventional in their way of life is beside the point. (Modernism, or the avant-garde, isn't to be identified with bohemia, which was there before Modernism, there in London's Grub Street in the eighteenth century, there in Paris by the I830s, if not before. Some Modernists have been bohemians more or less; many more others haven't been at all. Think of the impressionist painters, of Mallarme, of Schoenberg, of the sedate lives led by a Matisse, a T. S. Eliot. Not that I attach a particular value to a sedate as against a bohemian life; I'm just stating a fact.)

By way of illustration I'd like to go into a little detail about how modernism came about in painting. There the proto-Modernists were, of all people, the Pre-Raphaelites (and even before them, as proto-proto-Modernists, the German Nazarenes). The Pre-Raphaelites actually foretold Manet (with whom Modernist painting most definitely begins). They acted on a dissatisfaction with painting as practiced in their time, holding that its realism wasn't truthful enough. It seemed to belong to this want of truth that color wasn't allowed to speak out clearly and frankly, that it was being swathed more and more in neutral shading and shadows. This last they didn't say in so many words, but their art itself says it, with its brighter, higher-keyed color, which marks off Pre-Raphaelite painting in its day even more than its detailed realism (to which clearer color was necessary in any case). And it was the forthright, quasinaive color, as well as the quasi-innocent realism of fifteenth-century Italian art that they looked back to in calling themselves Pre-Raphaelite. They weren't at all the first artists to go back over time to a remoter past than the recent one. In the later eighteenth century, David, in France, had done that when he invoked antiquity against the rococo of his immediate predecessors, and the Renaissance had done that in appealing to antiquity against the Gothic. But it was the urgency with which the Pre-Raphaelites invoked a remoter past that was new. And it was a kind of urgency that carried over into Modernism proper and remained with it.

How much Manet knew of Pre-Raphaelism, I can't tell. But he too, ten years or so later than they, when he was starting out, became profoundly dissatisfied with the kind of painting he saw being done around him. That was toward the end of the I850s. But he put his finger on what dissatisfied him more "physically" than the Pre-Raphaelites had, and therefore, as I think, to more lasting effect. (From the seventeenth century on the English anticipated ever so much, in culture and the arts as well as in politics and social life, but usually left it to others to follow through on what they'd started.) Seeing a "Velazquez" in the Louvre (a picture now thought to be by Velazquez's son-in-law Mazo), he said how "clean" its color was compared to the "stews and gravies" of contemporary painting. Which "stews and gravies" were owed to that same color-muffling, graying and browning shading and shadowing that the Pre-Raphaelites had reacted against. Manet, in his own reaction, reached back to a nearer past than they had in order to "disencumber" his art of those "halftones" responsible for the "stews and gravies." He went only as far back as Velazquez to start with, and then even less far back, to another Spanish painter, Goya.

The impressionists, in Manet's wake, looked back to the Venetians insofar as they looked back, and so did Cézanne, that half-impressionist. Again, the looking back had to do with color, with warmer as well as franker color. Like the Pre-Raphaelites, like so many others in their time, the impressionists invoked truth to nature, and nature on bright days was luminous with warm color. But underneath all the invocations, the explanations, and the rationalizations, there was the "simple" aspiration to quality, to aesthetic value and excellence for its own sake, as end in itself. Art for art's sake. Modernism settled in in painting with impressionism, and with that, art for art's sake. For which same sake the successors in Modernism of the impressionists were forced to forget about truth to nature. They were forced to look even more outrageously new: Cézanne, Gauguin, Seurat, van Gogh, and all the Modernist painters after them -- for the sake of aesthetic value, aesthetic quality, nothing else.

I haven't finished with my exposition and definition of Modernism. The most essential part of it comes, finally, now. Modernism has to be understood as a holding operation, a continuing endeavor to maintain aesthetic standards in the face of threats -- not just as a reaction against romanticism. As the response, in effect, to an ongoing emergency. Artists in all times, despite some appearances to the contrary, have sought aesthetic excellence. What singles Modernism out and gives it its place and identity more than anything else is its response to a heightened sense of threats to aesthetic value: threats from the social and material ambience, from the temper of the times, all conveyed through the demands of a new and open cultural market, middlebrow demands. Modernism dates from the time, in the mid-nineteenth century, when that market became not only established -- it had been there long before -- but entrenched and dominant, without significant competition.

So I come at last to what I offer as an embracing and perdurable definition of Modernism: that it consists in the continuing endeavor to stem the decline of aesthetic standards threatened by the relative democratization of culture under industrialism; that the overriding and innermost logic of Modernism is to maintain the levels of the past in the face of an opposition that hadn't been present in the past. Thus the whole enterprise of Modernism, for all its outward aspects, can be seen as backward-looking. That seems paradoxical, but reality is shot through with paradox, is practically constituted by it.

It also belongs to my definition of Modernism that the continuing effort to maintain standards and levels has brought about the widening recognition that art, that aesthetic experience no longer needs to be justified in other terms than its own, that art is an end in itself and that the aesthetic is an autonomous value. It could now be acknowledged that art doesn't have to teach, doesn't have to celebrate or glorify anybody or anything, doesn't have to advance causes; that it has become free to distance itself from religion, politics, and even morality. All it has to do is be good as art. This recognition stays. It doesn't matter that it's still not generally -- or rather consciously -- accepted, that art for art's sake still isn't a respectable notion. It's acted on, and in fact it's always been acted on. It's been the underlying reality of the practice of art all along, but it took Modernism to bring this out into the open.

But to return to postmodern. A friend and colleague had been to a symposium about postmodern last spring. I asked him how the term had gotten defined at that symposium. As art, he answered, that was no longer self-critical. I felt a pang. I myself had written twenty years ago that self-criticism was a distinguishing trait of Modernist art. My friend's answer made me realize as I hadn't before how inadequate that was as a conveying definition of Modernism or the modern. (That I hadn't the presence of mind to ask my friend just how self-critical art could be told from art that wasn't self-critical was only incidental. We both understood, in any case, that it hadn't to do with the difference between abstract and figurative, just as we also understood that the modern wasn't confined to particular styles, modes, or directions of art.)

If the definition of Modernism or the modern that I now offer has any validity, then the crucial word in "postmodernism" becomes "post." The real, the only real, question becomes what it is that's come after and superseded the modern; again, not in a temporal sense, but in a style-historical one. But it's no use, as I said in the beginning, asking the critics and journalists who talk "postmodern" (which includes my friend); they disagree too much among themselves and resort too much to cloudy generalizations. And anyhow there's nobody among them whose eye I trust.

In the end I find myself having to presume to tell all these people what I think they mean by their talk about the postmodern. That is, I find myself attributing motives to them, and the attributing of motives is offensive. All the same, I feel forced to do so, by the nature of the case.

As I said, Modernism was called into being by the new and formidable threats to aesthetic standards that emerged, or finished emerging, toward the middle of the nineteenth century. The romantic crisis, as I call it, was, as it now seems, an expression of the new situation, and in some ways an expression of the threats themselves insofar as they worked to bring about a confusion of standards and levels. Without these threats, which came mostly from a new middle-class public, there would have been no such thing as Modernism. Again as I said earlier, Modernism is a holding operation, a coping with an ongoing emergency. The threats persist; they are as much there as they ever were. And right now they may have become even more formidable because more disguised, more deceptive. It used to be the easily identifiable philistines who did the threatening. They are still here but hardly matter. Now the threats to aesthetic standards, to quality, come from closer to home, from within it were, from friends of advanced art. The "advanced" used to be coterminous with Modernism, but these friends hold that Modernism is no longer advanced enough; that it has to be hurried on, hurried into "postmodernism." That it will fall behind the times if it continues to be concerned with such things as standards and quality. I'm not manipulating the evidence here in order to make a rhetorical point; just take a look at what these "postmodern" people like and at what they don't like in current art. They happen, I think, to be a more dangerous threat to high art than old-time philistines ever were. They bring philistine taste up-to-date by disguising it as its opposite, wrapping it in high-flown art jargon. Notice how that jargon proliferates nowadays, in New York and Paris and London, if not in Sydney. Realize, too, how compromised words like "advanced," as well as "avant-garde," have become of late. Underneath it all lies the defective eye of the people concerned; their bad taste in visual art.

The making of superior art is arduous, usually. But under Modernism the appreciation, even more than the making, of it has become more taxing, the satisfaction and exhilaration to be gotten from the best new art more hard-won. Over the past hundred and thirty years and more the best new painting and sculpture (and the best new poetry) have in their time proven a challenge and a trial to the art lover -- a challenge and a trial as they hadn't used to be. Yet the urge to relax is there, as it's always been. It threatens and keeps on threatening standards of quality. (It was different, apparently, before the mid-nineteenth century.) That the urge to relax expresses itself in changing ways does but testify to its persistence. The "postmodern" business is one more expression of that urge. And it's a way, above all, to justify oneself in preferring less demanding art without being called reactionary or retarded (which is the greatest fear of the newfangled philistines of advancedness).

The yearning for relaxation became outspoken in presumedly avant-garde circles for the first time with Duchamp and dada, and then in certain aspects of surrealism. But it was with pop art that it became a fully confident expression. And that confidence has stayed in all the different fashions and trends of professedly and supposedly advanced art since then. What I notice is that the succession of these trends has involved, from the first, a retreat from major to minor quality; and a cause for concern about the state of contemporary art is just that: the retreat from the major to the minor, the hailing of the minor as major, or else the claim that the difference between the two isn't important. Not that I look down on minor art, not at all. But without the perpetuation of major art, minor art falls off too. When the highest levels of quality are no longer upheld in practice or taste or appreciation, then the lower levels sink lower. That's the way it's always been, and I don't see that way changing now.

The notion of the postmodern has sprouted and spread in that same relaxing climate of taste and opinion in which pop art and its successors thrive. It represents wishful thinking for the most part; those who talk about the postmodern are too ready to greet it. Yes, if the modern, if Modernism, is over and done with, then there'll be surcease, relief. At the same time art history will have been kept going, and we critics and journalists will have kept abreast of it. But I happen to think that Modernism isn't finished, certainly not in painting or sculpture. Art is still being made that challenges the longing for relaxation and relief and makes high demands on taste (demands that are more taxing because deceptive: the best new art of latter years innovates in a less spectacular way than the best new art used to under Modernism). Modernism, insofar as it consists in the upholding of the highest standards, survives -- survives in the face of this new rationalization for the lowering of standards.

SENI LUKIS DI MALAYSIA

2009-09-05T03:53:00.002+08:00

PERKEMBANGAN SENI LUKIS DI MALAYSIA

Tahun 1930-an dan 1940-an
Seni halus (lukisan, catan, cetakan, arca dll) bermula pada tahun 1930-an dengan terciptanya catan awal oleh Yong Mun Sen, Abdullah Ariff. Pelukis Malaysia bebas daripada sebarang kongkongan kerana belum terdedah kepada aliran dari barat. Pendedahan hanya tertumpu kepada penghasilan rakan seperjuangan. Karya mereka mentah dan tidak halus kerana tiada bimbingan.

Tahun 1950-an
Awal tahun 1950-an, Malaysia mula mempunyai pelukis yang berkedudukan dan dedikasi seperti Yong Mun Sen, Abdullah Ariff, Cheong Soo Pieng, Khaw Sia. Alam seni halus Malaysia masih suram dan kurang memberangsangkan. Ketibaan Mohammed Hoessein Enas dari Indonesia telah membawa era baru dalam aliran naturalis dengan melukis figura manusia kepada pelukis tempatan.Tay Hooi Keat yang baru pulang dari United Kingdom memperkenalkan asas seni lukis seperti bentuk, garisan, rupa, warna, jalinan dan sebagainya.

Tahun 1960-an
Era 1960-an dikatakan merupakan penghasilan karya yang matang dari pelukis-pelukis Malaysia. Pelukis-pelukis bukan sahaja menganut aliran impresionis malah lebih berani dalam aliran ekspresionis, pop, konseptual, op dan lain-lain.

Tahun 1970-an
Pelukis seperti Redza Puyadasa, Sulaiman Haji Esa, Chong Kam Kow, Tan Teong Eng dan Joseph Tan telah menggegarkan dunia seni lukis tempatan dengan ungkapan-ungkapan yang mencabar.Catan hard-edge yang menegaskan kedataran dan tanpa isyarat yang dipelopor oleh Chong Kam Kow, Tan Teong Eng dan Tong Tuck Kan telah menjadi ikutan. Abdul Latif Mohidin telah menghidupkan pendekatan baru dalam lukisan.Karya catan masa ini mengandungi nilai ikon dengan tegasan monolitik.

Tahun 1980-an
Awal tahun1980-an mengemukakan bidang kanvas yang lebih luas dan menarik dengan munculnya catan pemandangan yang naïf, sambungan akademik aliran realisme dan karya-karya yang berprinsipkan mitos dan legenda yang kaya di rantau ini. Terdapat juga pelukis yang mendekatkan diri kepada subjek-subjek yang berkaitan dengan keadaan dan peristiwa yang berlaku dalam negara, warisan budaya serantau, sosial dan politik yang berkontekskan Islam.

OUT OF NOW

2009-08-18T11:22:00.008+08:00

Fineart Photo: ZHANG PENG

Zhang Peng, Yi Fan No.1, 2006, Photograph, 120 x 120 cm

Zhang Peng's photographs look like stills from fantasy animation films; they are in fact documents of elaborate sets featuring little girls. Originally trained as a painter, Zhang approaches his compositions with a heightened sense of drama, using intense colours, theatrical props, and obscure angles of perspective to create a sense of artifice and illusion from reality.

Zhang uses the medium of photography to subvert its archetypal associations of perfect representations and sentimental keepsakes. Portraits of children that would normally convey hope and aspiration, through Zhang's lens, transform to grotesque distortions. In Gui Fei, a child dressed as a traditional bride appears manufactured and doll-like, her identity moulded and objectified by parental and social expectation. As in many of Zhang's photos, her eyes have been manipulated to enhance her 'flawless' appearance, referencing the 'westernised' feminine ideals disseminated in Asian media, as well as the increasing trend in plastic surgery.

Underlying themes of psychological pressure and alienation run throughout Zhang's work. His Yi Fan series pictures prepubescent girls in opulently beautiful yet ominous environments. Zhang draws from the devices of science fiction to create an aura of exotic premonition: entrapped by a barrage of arrows or wandering through a field with their heads encased in plastic, his futuristic youths become evocative terrains of vulnerability and corrupted innocence.

David Noonan

Beginning each of his screen prints by making a collage, David Noonan brings together an eclectic array of found imagery – sourced from film stills, books, magazines, and archive photos – to create dramatic scenes that suggest surreal narratives. These collages are then photographed and turned into large-scale screen prints, a technique remarkable for its sumptuous finish that relates to both artistic authenticity and mass media. Printed in harsh contrast black and white, Noonan’s images encapsulate the romanticism of golden age cinema, and its associations to memory, fiction, and modern mythology.

Approaching image making with an auteur’s indulgence, Noonan presents a fabricated vision that is awesome in its complexity. Using the liturgy of art itself as a departure point for invention, Noonan conceives his work as ‘documentation’ of plausible performances: his cast of characters are positioned as participators in highly elaborate artworks, invoking covert and futuristic ritual. Stylistically referencing Surrealism and experimental film, Noonan’s work poses as the aesthetic remnants of ‘lost masterpieces’, weaving his own extravagant fantasies into fabric of collective consciousness.

Piecing together plausible narratives from his readymade motifs, Noonan renders the intimacy of psychological space as indistinguishable from public cognisance. Using the qualities of photomontage to replicate the linear aspects of film, Noonan’s disparate imagery collates to convey a transient sense of time and space that is both theatrical and strangely insular. Through his process of screen printing, Noonan capitalises on the effects of transluscent layering and exaggerated lighting to replicate the flickering chimera of cinematic projection; an intangible illusion simulating the abstraction of dreams.

UNVEILED: NEW ART FROM THE MIDDLE EAST

2009-08-18T10:09:00.004+08:00

Selected artworks by Kader Attia

Kader Attia, Ghost, 2007, Aluminium foil, Dimensions variable

In Ghost, a large installation of a group of Muslim women in prayer, Attia renders their bodies as vacant shells, empty hoods devoid of personhood or spirit. Made from tin foil - a domestic, throw away material - Attia’s figures become alien and futuristic, synthesising the abject and divine. Bowing in shimmering meditation, their ritual is equally seductive and hollow, questioning modern ideologies - from religion to nationalism and consumerism - in relation to individual identity, social perception, devotion and exclusion. Attia’s Ghost evokes contemplation of the human condition as vulnerable and mortal; his impoverished materials suggest alternative histories or understandings of the world, manifest in individual and temporal experience.

Minimalism in visual art

2009-07-03T20:41:00.005+08:00

Minimalism

Minimalism in visual art, sometimes referred to as literalist art and ABC Art emerged in New York in the 1960s. It is regarded as a reaction against the painterly forms of Abstract Expressionism as well as the discourse, institutions and ideologies that supported it. As artist and critic Thomas Lawson noted in his 1977 catalog essay Last Exit: Painting, minimalism did not reject Clement Greenberg's claims about Modernist Painting's reduction to surface and materials so much as take his claims literally. Minimalism was the result, even though the term "minimalism" was not generally embraced by the artists associated with it, and many practitioners of art designated minimalist by critics did not identify it as a movement as such.

Kazimir Malevich Black Square, 1913, Oil on Canvas, State Russian Museum, St.Petersburg

In contrast to the Abstract Expressionists, Minimalists were influenced by composers John Cage and LaMonte Young, poet William Carlos Williams, and the landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted. They very explicitly stated that their art was not self-expression, in opposition to the previous decade's Abstract Expressionists. In general, Minimalism's features included: geometric, often cubic forms purged of all metaphor, equality of parts, repetition, neutral surfaces, and industrial materials.
Robert Morris, an influential theorist and artist, wrote a three part essay, "Notes on Sculpture 1-3", originally published across three issues of Artforum in 1966. In these essays, Morris attempted to define a conceptual framework and formal elements for himself and one that would embrace the practices of his contemporaries.

Dan Flavin, Site-specific installation, 1996, Menil Collection

These essays paid great attention to the idea of the gestalt - "parts... bound together in such a way that they create a maximum resistance to perceptual separation." Morris later described an art represented by a "marked lateral spread and no regularized units or symmetrical intervals..." in "Notes on Sculpture 4: Beyond Objects", originally published in Artforum, 1969, continuing to say that "indeterminacy of arrangement of parts is a literal aspect of the physical existence of the thing." The general shift in theory of which this essay is an expression suggests the transitions into what would later be referred to as Postminimalism. One of the first artists specifically associated with Minimalism was the painter, Frank Stella, whose early "stripe" paintings were highlighted in the 1959 show, "16 Americans", organized by Dorothy Miller at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The width of the stripes in Frank Stellas's stripe paintings were determined by the dimensions of the lumber, visible as the depth of the painting when viewed from the side, used to construct the supportive chassis upon which the canvas was stretched.

The decisions about structures on the front surface of the canvas were therefore not entirely subjective, but pre-conditioned by a "given" feature of the physical construction of the support. In the show catalog, Carl Andre noted, "Art excludes the unnecessary. Frank Stella has found it necessary to paint stripes. There is nothing else in his painting." These reductive works were in sharp contrast to the energy-filled and apparently highly subjective and emotionally-charged paintings of Willem De Kooning or Franz Kline and, in terms of precedent among the previous generation of abstract expressionists, leaned more toward less gestural, often somber coloristic field paintings of Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko. Although Stella received immediate attention from the MOMA show, artists like Kenneth Noland, Ralph Humphrey, Robert Motherwell and Robert Ryman had begun to explore stripes, monochromatic and Hard-edge formats from the late 50s through the 1960s.

Because of a tendency in Minimalism to exclude the pictorial, illusionistic and fictive in favor of the literal, there was a movement away from painterly and toward sculptural concerns. Donald Judd had started as a painter, and ended as a creator of objects. His seminal essay, "Specific Objects" (published in Arts Yearbook 8, 1965), was a touchstone of theory for the formation of Minimalist aesthetics. In this essay, Judd found a starting point for a new territory for American art, and a simultaneous rejection of residual inherited European artistic values. He pointed to evidence of this development in the works of an array of artists active in New York at the time, including Jasper Johns, Dan Flavin and Lee Bontecou. Of "preliminary" importance for Judd was the work of George Ortman, who had concretized and distilled painting's forms into blunt, tough, philosophically charged geometries. These Specific Objects inhabited a space not then comfortably classifiable as either painting or sculpture. That the categorical identity of such objects was itself in question, and that they avoided easy association with well-worn and over-familiar conventions, was a part of their value for Judd.

In a much more broad and general sense, one might, in fact, find European roots of Minimalism in the geometric abstractions painters in the Bauhaus, in the works of Piet Mondrian and other artists associated with the movement DeStijl, in Russian Constructivists and in the work of the Romanian sculptor Constantin Brâncuşi.

This movement was heavily criticised by high modernist formalist art critics and historians. Some anxious critics thought Minimalist art represented a misunderstanding of the modern dialectic of painting and sculpture as defined by critic Clement Greenberg, arguably the dominant American critic of painting in the period leading up to the 1960s. The most notable critique of Minimalism was produced by Michael Fried, a Greenbergian critic, who objected to the work on the basis of its "theatricality". In Art and Objecthood (published in Artforum in June 1967) he declared that the Minimalist work of art, particularly Minimalist sculpture, was based on an engagement with the physicality of the spectator. He argued that work like Robert Morris's transformed the act of viewing into a type of spectacle, in which the artifice of the act observation and the viewer's participation in the work were unveiled. Fried saw this displacement of the viewer's experience from an aesthetic engagement within, to an event outside of the artwork as a failure of Minimal art. Fried's opinionated essay was immediately challenged by artist Robert Smithson in a letter to the editor in the October issue of Artforum. Smithson stated the following: "What Fried fears most is the consciousness of what he is doing--namely being himself theatrical."

Other Minimalist artists include: Richard Allen, Walter Darby Bannard, Larry Bell, Ronald Bladen, Mel Bochner, Norman Carlberg, Erwin Hauer, Dan Flavin, Sol LeWitt, Brice Marden, Agnes Martin, Jo Baer, John McCracken, Paul Mogensen, David Novros, Ad Reinhardt, Fred Sandback, Richard Serra, Tony Smith, Robert Smithson, and Anne Truitt.
Ad Reinhardt, actually an artist of the Abstract Expressionist generation, but one whose reductive all-black paintings seemed to anticipate minimalism, had this to say about the value of a reductive approach to art: "The more stuff in it, the busier the work of art, the worse it is. More is less. Less is more. The eye is a menace to clear sight. The laying bare of oneself is obscene. Art begins with the getting rid of nature."

Art Exhibition at Cemeti House,Indonesia

2009-06-30T16:49:00.003+08:00

Pameran Tunggal Handiwirman Saputra
27 Juni - 18 Juli 2009
Objects, Installation and Paintings
Handiwirman Saputra

Dalam tampak luar" silicon rubber dan cat akrilik, 30 x 30 x 10 cm, 2009

Deklarasi Estetik Ala Handiwirman

(Pameran Seni Rupa karya Handiwirman
27 Juni sampai dengan 15 Juli 2009)

Kurator : Asmudjo Jono Irianto

Mengusung kembali pergulatan artistik karya-karya Handiwirman ke Rumah Seni Cemeti, harus kita mulai dengan meneropong jauh ke belakang, kembali ke pameran tunggalnya bertajuk ‘Broken Heart’ - Desember 2002 lalu. Pagelaran tunggal dengan individualitas yang kuat, menebarkan aura inovatif yang segar, dan menjanjikan kepeloporan statement baru bagi seni rupa ‘object’.
‘Broken Heart’ Handiwirman kala itu merupakan deklarasi estetik, yang telah dengan jitu membongkar ulang pemahaman tradisi kriya, sekaligus menjadi tonggak kepeloporan statement seni rupa ‘object’ dalam wacana seni rupa Indonesia kontemporer.
Satu hal kongkrit yang selalu menonjol pada puluhan ‘object’ Handi kala itu,
adalah estetis.
Rekonstruksi tradisi kriya ala Handi tidak dilakukan dengan mengisi, menghias atau apalagi dengan mengolah dan menerapkan patron. Handi bermain dengan benda sebagai bahan, dan bahan sebagai semacam benda. Handi jelas tidak mendesain / merancang namun menggugat persepsi sosial benda dan bahan. Handi memprovokasi logika materialistik dan fetis. Merusak sekaligus menggandakan utilitas.
Dengan jujur benda-benda itu dikembalikan pada kodrat dasar bahannya, mendekatkan mereka pada proporsi dan intimitas keseimbangan gestur tubuh manusia, membongkar dan mengkonstruksi ulang logika-logika penyejajaran, pemaduan dan pembalikan serta perlawanan.
Dalam perkembangan yang radikal Handi acapkali menutup bahkan menyudahi pergulatan artistik bahan dan kebendaannya dengan mencampakkan ‘permainan’ ini jauh ke belakang, ke dalam jenjang revitalisasi tradisi modernisme : dengan melukis ‘still life’ seluruh permainannya.
Kini, mencermati sekilas, mempergunakan perspektif kesuburan eksplorasi dan ‘perayaan’ senirupa ‘object’, yang lagi getol diikuti bersama oleh puluhan perupa segenerasi, maka kepeloporan Handiwirman dalam deklarasi estetik ‘object’ di sini kabur! ‘Pengikut-pengikut Handi’, ramai-ramai menebarkan aksi produksi/reproduksi masal; dengan menjiplak ulang persepsi sosial kebendaan yang telah ada, ’set back’ kembali menuju semangat mengisi dan menghias belaka!
Industri Massal dengan ‘sovenirisasi’ benda-benda keseharian melalui pengerdilan ukuran-ukuran yang digantung bersama kunci motor, mobil dan handphone bermerk.

Di dalam politik senirupa sebaliknya, yang pernah tampil dengan gagasan menggelembungkan ukuran-ukuran benda tiruan sehari-hari tersebut secara ekstrim, telah dilakukan oleh Claes Olddenburg tahun 1970, perupa Amerika kelahiran Swedia yang terkenal dengan karya ‘public installation’nya.
Karya-karya Handiwirman yang baru, di tengah-tengah seakan-akan arus ‘set back’ gelombang produksi ini digelar di Rumah Seni Cemeti bulan Juni 2009. Rumah Seni Cemeti mengetengahkan Asmudjo Jono Irianto, sebagai analis yang suka-suka mendampingi dan menjadi partner ‘ngobrol’ uji coba pemikiran karya-karya Handiwirman.

Handiwirman, lahir di Bukittinggi Sumatra tahun 1975. Masuk ke pendidikan Seni Rupa Jurusan Seni Kriya ISI Yogyakarta dan aktif menjadi seniman perupa sejak itu.

Nindityo Adipurnomo 2009

THE HISTORY THAT YOU MUST KNOW

2009-06-30T16:02:00.002+08:00

Pliny the Elder and ancient precedents

The earliest surviving writing on art that can be classified as art history are the passages in Pliny the Elder's Natural History concerning the development of Greek sculpture and painting. From them it is possible to trace the ideas of Xenokrates of Sicyon, a Greek sculptor who was perhaps the first art historian. Pliny's work, while mainly an encyclopaedia of the sciences, has thus been influential from theRenaissance onwards. (Passages about techniques used by the painter Apelles have been especially well-known.) Similar, though independent, developments occurred in 6th century China, where a canon of worthy artists was established by writers in the scholar-official class. These writers, being necessarily proficient in calligraphy, were artists themselves. The artists are described in the Six Principles of Painting formulated by Xie He.

Vasari and artists' biographies

While personal reminiscences of art and artists have long been written and read (see Lorenzo Ghiberti for the best early example), it was Giorgio Vasari, the Tuscan painter, sculptor and author of the Lives of the Painters, who wrote the first true history of art. He emphasized art's progression and development, which was a milestone in this field. His was a personal and a historical account, featuring biographies of individual Italian artists, many of whom were his contemporaries and personal acquaintances. The most renowned of these was Michelangelo, and Vasari's account is enlightening, though biased in places. Vasari's ideas about art held sway until the 18th century, when criticism was leveled at his biographical account of history.

Winckelmann and art criticism

Scholars such as Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717-1768), criticised Vasari's "cult" of artistic personality, and they argued that the real emphasis in the study of art should be the views of the learned beholder and not the unique viewpoint of the charismatic artist. Winckelmann's writings thus were the beginnings of art criticism. Winckelmann critiqued the artistic excesses of Baroque and Rococo forms, and was instrumental in reforming taste in favor of the more sober Neoclassicism. Jacob Burckhardt (1818 - 1897), one of the founders of art history, noted that Winckelmann was 'the first to distinguish between the periods of ancient art and to link the history of style with world history'. From Winckelmann until the mid-20th century, the field of art history was dominated by German-speaking academics. Winckelmann's work thus marked the entry of art history into the high-philosophical discourse of German culture.
Winckelmann was read avidly by Johann Wolfgang Goethe and Friedrich Schiller, both of whom began to write on the history of art, and his account of the Laocoon occasioned a response by Lessing. The emergence of art as a major subject of philosophical speculation was solidified by the appearance of Immanuel Kant's Critique of Judgment in 1790, and was furthered by Hegel's Lectures on Aesthetics. Hegel's philosophy served as the direct inspiration for Karl Schnaase's work. Schnaase's Niederländische Briefe established the theoretical foundations for art history as an autonomous discipline, and his Geschichte der bildenden Künste, one of the first historical surveys of the history of art from antiquity to the Renaissance, facilitated the teaching of art history in German-speaking universities. Schnaase's survey was published contemporaneously with a similar work by Franz Theodor Kugler.

Wölfflin and stylistic analysis

Heinrich Wölfflin (1864-1945), who studied under Burckhardt in Basel, is the "father" of modern art history. Wölfflin taught at the universities of Berlin, Basel, Munich, and Zurich. A number of students went on to distinguished careers in art history, including Jakob Rosenberg and Frida Schottmuller. He introduced a scientific approach to the history of art, focusing on three concepts. Firstly, he attempted to study art using psychology, particularly by applying the work of Wilhelm Wundt. He argued, among other things, that art and architecture are good if they resemble the human body. For example, houses were good if their façades looked like faces. Secondly, he introduced the idea of studying art through comparison. By comparing individual paintings to each other, he was able to make distinctions of style. His book Renaissance and Baroque developed this idea, and was the first to show how these stylistic periods differed from one another. In contrast to Giorgio Vasari, Wölfflin was uninterested in the biographies of artists. In fact he proposed the creation of an "art history without names." Finally, he studied art based on ideas of nationhood. He was particularly interested in whether there was an inherently "Italian" and an inherently "German" style. This last interest was most fully articulated in his monograph on the German artist Albrecht Dürer.

Panofsky and iconography

Today's understanding of the symbolic content of art comes from a group of scholars who gathered in Hamburg in the 1920s. The most prominent among them were Erwin Panofsky, Aby Warburg, and Fritz Saxl. Together they developed much of the vocabulary that continues to be used in the 21st century by art historians. "Iconography"--with roots meaning "symbols from writing" refers to subject matter n art derived from written sources--especially scripture and mythology. "Iconology" is a broader term that referred to all symbolism, whether derived from a specific text or not. Today art historians sometimes use these terms interchangeably.Panofsky, in his early work, also developed the theories of Riegl, but became eventually more preoccupied with iconography, and in particular with the transmission of themes related to classical antiquity in the Middle Ages and Renaissance. In this respect his interests coincided with those of Warburg, the son of a wealthy family who had assembled an impressive library in Hamburg devoted to the study of the classical tradition in later art and culture. Under Saxl's auspices, this library was developed into a research institute, affiliated with the University of Hamburg, where Panofsky taught.
Warburg died in 1929, and in the 1930s Saxl and Panofsky, both Jewish, were forced to leave Hamburg. Saxl settled in London, bringing Warburg's library with him and establishing the Warburg Institute. Panofsky settled in Princeton at the Institute for Advanced Study. In this respect they were part of an extraordinary influx of German art historians into the English-speaking academy in the 1930s. These scholars were largely responsible for establishing art history as a legitimate field of study in the English-speaking world, and the influence of Panofsky's methodology, in particular, determined the course of American art history for a generation.

Marx and ideology

During the mid-20th century art historians embraced social history by using critical approaches. The goal is to show how art interacts with power structures in society. One critical approach that art historians used was Marxism. Marxist art history attempted to show how art was tied to specific classes, how images contain information about the economy, and how images can make the status quo seem natural (ideology). Perhaps the best-known Marxist was Clement Greenberg, who came to prominence during the late 1930s with his essay "Avant-Garde and Kitsch".[6]In the essay Greenberg claimed that the avant-garde arose in order to defend aesthetic standards from the decline of taste involved in consumer society, and seeing kitsch and art as opposites. Greenberg further claimed that avant-garde and Modernist art was a means to resist the leveling of culture produced by capitalist propaganda. Greenberg appropriated the German word 'kitsch' to describe this consumerism, though its connotations have since changed to a more affirmative notion of left-over materials of capitalist culture. Greenberg later became well-known for examining the formal properties of modern art.
Meyer Schapiro is one of the best-remembered Marxist art historians of the mid-20th century. Although he wrote about numerous time periods and themes in art, he is best remembered for his commentary on sculpture from the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance, at which time he saw evidence of capitalism emerging and feudalism declining. Arnold Hauser wrote the first Marxist survey of Western Art, titled The Social History of Art. In this book he attempted to show how class consciousness was reflected in major art periods. His book was controversial when published during the 1950s because it makes generalizations about entire eras, a strategy now called "vulgar Marxism". T.J. Clark was the first art historian writing from a Marxist perspective to abandon vulgar Marxism. He wrote Marxist art histories of several impressionist and realist artists, including Gustave Courbet and Édouard Manet. These books focused closely on the political and economic climates in which the art was created.

The New Emperor of No-Brow

2009-05-09T03:59:00.003+08:00

Is Takashi Murakami Japan's Andy Warhol—or its Walt Disney?

Murakami is often called the Japanese Andy Warhol. He's obsessed with celebrity and mass culture, and his art is packed with images drawn from Japan's leading popular art forms: manga and anime. And, like Warhol, he's largely hands-off, presiding over a factory staffed with assistants who fabricate what he calls his "art products": paintings, sculptures, helium-filled balloons, animated films, and wallpapered environments like this one, featuring his signature rictus-faced daisies.

But at this stage of his career, Murakami is looking less like Warhol and more like another great American artist-entrepreneur: Walt Disney. Warhol famously blurred the line between high art and mass culture, but there was always a trace of irony in his low-brow enthusiasms. With Murakami, that ironic distance is gone. He's not just commenting on consumer culture—he's creating it.

When "© Murakami" opened at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles last fall, much was made of the fully functioning Louis Vuitton boutique rudely plopped down in the middle of the exhibition. It was an intentionally provocative gesture and an unambiguous statement of Murakami's position that art and commerce can be mutually enriching activities. The boutique has been reconstructed in Brooklyn, and Murakami isn't kidding when he says that it's "the heart of the exhibition itself."

Murakami began working with Louis Vuitton in 2002, when the company's artistic director, Marc Jacobs, invited him to design his own version of the iconic LV monogram. He replaced the classic warm browns with a rainbow of pretty pastel colors and—presto!—the bags became an instant media sensation—and, for the rich and au courant, a must-have.While Vuitton was manufacturing the handbags and accessories he designed, Murakami worked with his bevy of assistants to create dozens of paintings, like this one, splattered with colorful LV monograms. This strategy of cross-branding and positioning products at different price points—a few thousand dollars for the handbags, a few hundred thousand for the paintings—is the key to Murakami's overarching vision as an artist, designer, and entrepreneur.

"Business art is the step that comes after art," Warhol wrote in 1975. "I started as a commercial artist and I want to finish as a business artist. Being good in business is the most fascinating kind of art." Warhol never truly fulfilled this ambition during his lifetime. Most of his business ventures lost money, and the widespread licensing of his images came only after his death. Now, with Murakami, the age of business art has arrived. Leaving behind the old-fashioned idea of art as an autonomous form of individual expression, Murakami has fashioned himself as a brand, a trademark, and a corporate identity.

In his as-yet-untranslated 2005 book, Geijutsu Kigyo Ron ("The Theory of Art Entrepreneurship"), Murakami attributes his spectacular international success to his business management skills and his strategic appraisal of the position of Japanese art in the Western art market. "You cannot create an art piece unless you know how to make and sell it," he writes. Elsewhere, he sums up his position with uncanny concision: "Art is the supreme incarnation of luxury entertainment."

Takashi Murakami. Tan Tan Bo, 2001. Acrylic on canvas mounted on board, 141 3/4 inches by 212 5/8 inches by 2 5/8 inches. Collection of John A. Smith and Victoria Hughes. Courtesy Tomio Koyama Gallery, Tokyo. © 2001 Takashi Murakami/Kaikai Kiki Co., Ltd. All rights reserved.

Murakami's art education started out along fairly conventional lines. He studied nihonga painting, a Japanese style that emerged in the 19th century in reaction to Western influences, and briefly tried his hand at anime. In the early 1990s, while finishing his Ph.D. at Tokyo National University, he set his sights on a career as a contemporary artist. His first successful works borrowed from otaku, the geeky male subculture of sci-fi anime, manga, and video games with an obsessive, pedophilic edge. In works like Miss ko2 (pronounced ko-ko), he borrowed otaku stereotypes—in this case, a leggy, bubble-eyed supervixen dolled up like a 1950s drive-in waitress—and rendered them as larger-than-life-size fiberglass sculptures. Hypersexual, garish, and slick, these oversized figurines owe a lot to Jeff Koons' sculptural enlargements of American kitsch icons like Michael Jackson and his pet chimp, Bubbles.

Murakami doesn't just appropriate existing characters—he also creates his own anime-style avatars. The first and most important of these was DOB, whose name is derived from the existential question that plagues toddlers everywhere: Dobojite dobojite? ("Why? Why?"). DOB has an O-shaped face and ears bearing the letters D and B. In early versions, like this painting from 1994, he looks a lot like Mickey Mouse, and that's no accident. Murakami has said that he created DOB as an "inquiry into the secret of market survival" and into the "universality" of characters like Mickey Mouse, Hello Kitty, Sonic the Hedgehog, and the anime icon Doraemon (a cuddly, catlike robot from the future). Murakami's DOB can be read as a critique of the Japanese cult of kawaii (cuteness), which he sees as an expression of postwar Japanese impotence—a retreat into infantilism. But the point was also to create a character that could successfully infiltrate that market. Like Disney, Sega, Sanrio, and other corporate "parents," Murakami has fought hard to protect his character's copyright. In 2004, he sued the children's clothing company Narumiya International for its use of a mouselike figure that resembled DOB and reportedly received a settlement of tens of millions of yen*.

Correction, April 17, 2008: The article originally stated the reported settlement was for tens of thousands of yen.

Over the years, DOB has sprouted multiple eyes and pointy fangs, morphing and mutating almost beyond recognition. (When in doubt, look for the telltale D and B on the ears.) At the Brooklyn Museum, he appears in numerous incarnations: as inflatable balloons, in paintings and sculptures, and in the form of various mass-produced gewgaws for sale in the gift shop. Though DOB started out cute, more recent variations reveal a darker, crazier, more sinister facet of cartoon cuteness.

In this painting from 2006, DOB floats on a ribbonlike wave against a mottled background that evokes traditional Japanese screen painting and lacquer ware as well as Warhol's oxidation paintings from 1977-78. Elsewhere in the show, there are recognizable references to Hokusai, Francis Bacon, Jackson Pollock, and Salvador Dalí. These high-art allusions seem calculated to appeal to a niche audience of critics, curators, and collectors who like their contemporary art to come equipped with a built-in historical pedigree. Murakami has this market pegged: Westerners don't care about "those vague, 'oh-what-a-beautiful-color' kind of impressions, as Japanese do," he writes in his book on art entrepreneurship. "They enjoy intellectual 'devices' and 'games' in art."

It's important to realize that for Murakami, museum art is only the tip of the iceberg. As critic Scott Rothkopf points out in his illuminating catalog essay, Murakami heads a multinational corporation, Kaikai Kiki Co. Ltd., that not only produces his art and art-related merchandise (plush toys, T-shirts, stickers, etc.) but also manages the careers of seven artists, operates an art fair in Japan, organizes touring exhibitions, produces animated films, pursues collaborative commercial projects (with Vuitton, Issey Miyake, and Kanye West, among others), and accepts corporate branding commissions. Kaikai Kiki now has about 100 employees, with an office in Tokyo, two studios in the Tokyo suburbs, and one in Long Island City, Queens.

Museum exhibitions like the one in Brooklyn fortify the Murakami brand, just as a gleaming flagship store on Madison Avenue helps move merchandise in mall outlets in less glamorous locales. And herein lies Murakami's genius as a marketer and art entrepreneur. As a better businessman than Warhol with more high-art credibility than Disney, he's figured out how to have his cake and eat it, too.Murakami has often argued that there is no indigenous tradition of distinguishing between high and low cultural products in Japan, where art is routinely exhibited in department stores and luxury merchandise can be seen in museums. In the 1990s, he coined the term Superflat to describe this condition of nonhierarchical flatness, linking it to the formal tendency toward two-dimensionality in Japanese art, from Edo screens to anime to his own depthless paintings, such as this DOB variation. For those of us who were reared on the idea that art is a special kind of luxury product—more contemplative, denser with meaning, somehow resistant to the status quo—Murakami's radical leveling of art and commerce can be pretty unsettling.

But there's also something exhilarating about the uncanny honesty of Murakami's approach and the sheer expansiveness of his ambition. His work feels historically important—not because of its formal innovations, which are fairly slim, but because it powerfully redefines what it means to be an artist in the 21st century. You can rail against the commercialization of art and the aestheticization of commerce. Or you can take a deep breath and bow to the new emperor of no-brow.

What is art?

2009-04-07T18:31:00.003+08:00

How best to define the term “art” is a subject of constant contention; many books and journal articles have been published arguing over even the basics of what we mean by the term “art”.Theodor Adorno claimed in 1969 “It is self-evident that nothing concerning art is self-evident.”Artists, philosophers, anthropologists, psychologists and programmers all use the notion of art in their respective fields, and give it operational definitions that are not very similar to each other. Further it is clear that even the basic meaning of the term "art" has changed several times over the centuries, and has changed within the 20th century as well.

The main recent sense of the word “art” is roughly as an abbreviation for creative art or “fine art.” Here we mean that skill is being used to express the artist’s creativity, or to engage the audience’s aesthetic sensibilities, or to draw the audience towards consideration of the “finer” things. Often, if the skill is being used in a functional object, people will consider it a craft instead of art, a suggestion which is highly disputed by many Contemporary Craft thinkers. Likewise, if the skill is being used in a commercial or industrial way it may be considered design instead of art, or contrariwise these may be defended as art forms, perhaps called applied art. Some thinkers, for instance, have argued that the difference between fine art and applied art has more to do with the actual function of the object than any clear definitional difference.Art usually implies no function other than to convey or communicate an idea.

Even as late as 1912 it was normal in the West to assume that all art aims at beauty, and thus that anything that wasn't trying to be beautiful couldn't count as art. The cubists, dadaists, Stravinsky, and many later art movements struggled against this conception that beauty was central to the definition of art, with such success that, according to Danto, "Beauty had disappeared not only from the advanced art of the 1960’s but from the advanced philosophy of art of that decade as well."Perhaps some notion like "expression" (in Croce’s theories) or "counter-environment" (in McLuhan’s theory) can replace the previous role of beauty. Brian Massumi brought back "beauty" into consideration together with "expression".Another concept, as important to the philosophy of art as "beauty," is that of the "sublime," elaborated upon in the twentieth century by the postmodern philosopher Jean-Francois Lyotard.

Perhaps (as in Kennick's theory) no definition of art is possible anymore. Perhaps art should be thought of as a cluster of related concepts in a Wittgensteinian fashion (as in Weitz or Beuys). Another approach is to say that “art” is basically a sociological category, that whatever art schools and museums and artists define as art is considered art regardless of formal definitions. This "institutional definition of art" (see also Institutional Critique) has been championed by George Dickie. Most people did not consider the depiction of a Brillo Box or a store-bought urinal to be art until Andy Warhol and Marcel Duchamp (respectively) placed them in the context of art (i.e., the art gallery), which then provided the association of these objects with the associations that define art.

Proceduralists often suggest that it is the process by which a work of art is created or viewed that makes it art, not any inherent feature of an object, or how well received it is by the institutions of the art world after its introduction to society at large. Whereas if exactly the same set of words was written by a journalist, intending them as shorthand notes to help him write a longer article later, these would not be a poem. Leo Tolstoy, on the other hand, claims that what makes something art or not is how it is experienced by its audience, not by the intention of its creator. Functionalists like Monroe Beardsley argue that whether or not a piece counts as art depends on what function it plays in a particular context; the same Greek vase may play a non-artistic function in one context (carrying wine), and an artistic function in another context (helping us to appreciate the beauty of the human figure). '

What should we judge when we judge art?

Art can be difficult at the metaphysical and ontological levels as well as at the value theory level. When we see a performance of Hamlet, how many works of art are we experiencing, and which should we judge? Perhaps there is only one relevant work of art, the whole performance, which many different people have contributed to, and which will exist briefly and then disappear. Perhaps the manuscript by Shakespeare is a distinct work of art from the play by the troupe, which is also distinct from the performance of the play by this troupe on this night, and all three can be judged, but are to be judged by different standards.

Perhaps every person involved should be judged separately on his or her own merits, and each costume or line is its own work of art (with perhaps the director having the job of unifying them all). Similar problems arise for music, film and even painting. Is one to judge the painting itself, the work of the painter, or perhaps the painting in its context of presentation by the museum workers?

These problems have been made even more difficult by the rise of conceptual art since the 1960s. Warhol’s famous Brillo Boxes are nearly indistinguishable from actual Brillo boxes at the time. It would be a mistake to praise Warhol for the design of his boxes (which were designed by Steve Harvey), yet the conceptual move of exhibiting these boxes as art in a museum together with other kinds of paintings is Warhol's. Are we judging Warhol’s concept? His execution of the concept in the medium? The curator’s insight in letting Warhol display the boxes? The overall result? Our experience or interpretation of the result? Ontologically, how are we to think of the work of art? Is it a physical object? Several objects? A class of objects? A mental object? A fictional object? An abstract object? An event? Or simply an Act?

What should art be like?

Many goals have been argued for art, and aestheticians often argue that some goal or another is superior in some way. Clement Greenberg, for instance, argued in 1960 that each artistic medium should seek that which makes it unique among the possible mediums and then purify itself of anything other than expression of its own uniqueness as a form.[16] The Dadaist Tristan Tzara on the other hand saw the function of art in 1918 as the destruction of a mad social order. “We must sweep and clean. Affirm the cleanliness of the individual after the state of madness, aggressive complete madness of a world abandoned to the hands of bandits.”Formal goals, creative goals, self-expression, political goals, spiritual goals, philosophical goals, and even more perceptual or aesthetic goals have all been popular pictures of what art should be like.

The value of art

Tolstoy defined art, and not incidentally characterized its value, this way: "Art is a human activity consisting in this, that one man consciously, by means of certain external signs, hands on to others feelings he has lived through, and that other people are infected by these feelings and also experience them."

The value of art, then, is one with the value of empathy.

Other possible views are these: Art can act as a means to some special kind of knowledge. Art may give insight into the human condition. Art relates to science and religion. Art serves as a tool of education, or indoctrination, or enculturation. Art makes us more moral. It uplifts us spiritually. Art is politics by other means. Art has the value of allowing catharsis. In any case, the value of art may determine the suitability of an art form. Do they different significantly in their values, or (if not) in their ability to achieve the unitary value of art?

But to approach the question of the value of art systematically, one ought to ask: for whom? For the artist? For the audience? For society at large, and/or for individuals beyond the audience? Is the "value" of art different in each of these different contexts?

Working on the intended value of art tends to help define the relations between art and other acts. Art clearly does have spiritual goals in many contexts, but what exactly is the difference between religious art and religion per se? The truth is complex - Art is both useless in a functional sense and the most important human activity.

It has been said, that a Vogon Starship arriving at the earth and ordering its destruction would ask what use is humanity? The only justification humanity could give would be a Shakespeare play, a Rembrandt or a Bach concerto. These are the things of value which define humanity itself.

Aesthetic universals
The philosopher Denis Dutton identified seven universal signatures in human aesthetics:

1.Expertise or virtuosity. Technical artistic skills are cultivated, recognized, and admired.
2.Nonutilitarian pleasure. People enjoy art for art's sake, and don't demand that it keep them warm or put food on the table.
3.Style. Artistic objects and performances satisfy rules of composition that place them in a recognizable style.
4.Criticism. People make a point of judging, appreciating, and interpreting works of art.
5.Imitation. With a few important exceptions like music and abstract painting, works of art simulate experiences of the world.
6.Special focus. Art is set aside from ordinary life and made a dramatic focus of experience.
7.Imagination. Artists and their audiences entertain hypothetical worlds in the theater of the imagination.

It might be objected, however, that there are rather too many exceptions to Dutton's categories. For example, the installations of the contemporary artist Thomas Hirschhorn deliberately eschew technical virtuosity. People can appreciate a Renaissance Madonna for aesthetic reasons, but such objects often had (and sometimes still have) specific devotional functions. 'Rules of composition' that might be read into Duchamp's Fountain or John Cage's 4'33" do not locate the works in a recognizable style (or certainly not a style recognizable at the time of the works' realisation). Moreover, some of Dutton's categories seem too broad: a physicist might entertain hypothetical worlds in his/her imagination in the course of formulating a theory.

Increasingly, academics in both the sciences and the humanities are looking to evolutionary psychology and cognitive science in an effort to understand the connection between psychology and aesthetics. Aside from Dutton, others exploring this realm include Brian Boyd, Noel Carroll, Nancy Easterlin, David Evans, Jonathan Gottschall, Paul Hernadi, Bracha Ettinger, Patrick Hogan, Elaine Scarry, Christine Buci-Glucksmann, Wendy Steiner, Robert Storey, Frederick Turner, and Mark Turner.

Reference:

Zangwill, Nick. "Aesthetic Judgment", Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 02-28-2003/10-22-2007. Retrieved 07-24-2008

Clement Greenberg, “On Modernist Painting”

Lacan, Jacques, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book XI), NY: W. W. Norton & Company, 1998. ISBN 0-393-31775-7.

Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Judgment

Consider Clement Greenberg’s arguments in "On Modernist Painting" (1961), reprinted in Aesthetics: A Reader in Philosophy of Arts

Aesthetics

2009-04-07T18:15:00.003+08:00

Aesthetics or esthetics (also spelled æsthetics) is commonly known as the study of sensory or sensori-emotional values, sometimes called judgments of sentiment and taste.More broadly, scholars in the field define aesthetics as "critical reflection on art, culture and nature."Aesthetics is a subdiscipline of axiology, a branch of philosophy, and is closely associated with the philosophy of art.Aesthetics studies new ways of seeing and of perceiving the world.

Judgments of aesthetic value clearly rely on our ability to discriminate at a sensory level. Aesthetics examines our affective domain response to an object or phenomenon. Many see natural beauty folded within petals of a rose. Immanuel Kant, writing in 1790, observes of a man "If he says that canary wine is agreeable he is quite content if someone else corrects his terms and reminds him to say instead: It is agreeable to me," because "Everyone has his own (sense of) taste". The case of "beauty" is different from mere "agreeableness" because, "If he proclaims something to be beautiful, then he requires the same liking from others; he then judges not just for himself but for everyone, and speaks of beauty as if it were a property of things."

Aesthetic judgments usually go beyond sensory discrimination. For David Hume, delicacy of taste is not merely "the ability to detect all the ingredients in a composition", but also our sensitivity "to pains as well as pleasures, which escape the rest of mankind." (Essays Moral Political and Literary. Indianapolis, Literary Classics 5, 1987.) Thus, the sensory discrimination is linked to capacity for pleasure. For Kant "enjoyment" is the result when pleasure arises from sensation, but judging something to be "beautiful" has a third requirement: sensation must give rise to pleasure by engaging our capacities of reflective contemplation. Judgments of beauty are sensory, emotional and intellectual all at once.

Viewer interpretations of beauty possess two concepts of value: aesthetics and taste. Aesthetics is the philosophical notion of beauty. Taste is a result of education and awareness of elite cultural values; therefore taste can be learned. Taste varies according to class, cultural background, and education. According to Kant beauty is objective and universal; thus certain things are beautiful to everyone. The contemporary view of beauty is not based on innate qualities, but rather on cultural specifics and individual interpretations.

What factors are involved in an aesthetic judgment?

Judgments of aesthetic value seem often to involve many other kinds of issues as well. Responses such as disgust show that sensory detection is linked in instinctual ways to facial expressions, and even behaviors like the gag reflex. Yet disgust can often be a learned or cultural issue too; as Darwin pointed out, seeing a stripe of soup in a man's beard is disgusting even though neither soup nor beards are themselves disgusting. Aesthetic judgments may be linked to emotions or, like emotions, partially embodied in our physical reactions. Seeing a sublime view of a landscape may give us a reaction of awe, which might manifest physically as an increased heart rate or widened eyes. These unconscious reactions may even be partly constitutive of what makes our judgment a judgment that the landscape is sublime.

Likewise, aesthetic judgments may be culturally conditioned to some extent. Victorians in Britain often saw African sculpture as ugly, but just a few decades later, Edwardian audiences saw the same sculptures as being beautiful. The Abuse of Beauty, Evaluations of beauty may well be linked to desirability, perhaps even to sexual desirability. Thus, judgments of aesthetic value can become linked to judgments of economic, political, or moral value.We might judge a Lamborghini to be beautiful partly because it is desirable as a status symbol, or we might judge it to be repulsive partly because it signifies for us over-consumption and offends our political or moral values.

"Part and Parcel in Animal and Human Societies". in Studies in animal and human behavior, vol. 2. pp. 115-195. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1971 (originally pub. 1950.) Aesthetic judgments can often be very fine-grained and internally contradictory. Likewise aesthetic judgments seem often to be at least partly intellectual and interpretative. It is what a thing means or symbolizes for us that is often what we are judging. Modern aestheticians have asserted that will and desire were almost dormant in aesthetic experience, yet preference and choice have seemed important aesthetics to some 20th century thinkers. The point is already made by Hume, but see Mary Mothersill, "Beauty and the Critic’s Judgment", in The Blackwell Guide to Aesthetics, 2004. Thus aesthetic judgments might be seen to be based on the senses, emotions, intellectual opinions, will, desires, culture, preferences, values, subconscious behavior, conscious decision, training, instinct, sociological institutions, or some complex combination of these, depending on exactly which theory one employs.

Anthropology, especially the savanna hypothesis proposed by Gordon Orians and others, predicts that some of the positive aesthetics that people have are based on innate knowledge of productive human habitats. It had been shown that people prefer and feel happier looking at trees with spreading forms much more than looking at trees with other forms, or non-tree objects;[citation needed] also Bright green colors, linked with healthy plants with good nutrient qualities, were more calming than other tree colors, including less bright greens and oranges.

Are different art forms beautiful, disgusting, or boring in the same way?

A third major topic in the study of aesthetic judgments is how they are unified across art forms. We can call a person, a house, a symphony, a fragrance, and a mathematical proof beautiful. What characteristics do they share which give them that status? What possible feature could a proof and a fragrance both share in virtue of which they both count as beautiful? What makes a painting beautiful is quite different from what makes music beautiful, which suggests that each art form has its own language for the judgement of aesthetics.

At the same time, there is seemingly quite a lack of words to express oneself accurately when making an aesthetic judgement. An aesthetic judgement cannot be an empirical judgement. Therefore, due to impossibility for precision, there is confusion about what interpretations can be culturally negotiated. Due to imprecision in the standard English language, two completely different feelings experienced by two different people can be represented by an identical verbal expression. Wittgenstein stated this in his lectures on aesthetics and language games.

A collective identification of beauty, with willing participants in a given social spectrum, may be a socially negotiated phenomenon, discussed in a culture or context. Is there some underlying unity to aesthetic judgment and is there some way to articulate the similarities of a beautiful house, beautiful proof, and beautiful sunset?Defining it requires a description of the entire phenomenon, as Wittgenstein argued in his lectures on aesthetics. Likewise there has been long debate on how perception of beauty in the natural world, especially perception of the human form as beautiful, is supposed to relate to perceiving beauty in art or artefacts. This goes back at least to Kant, with some echoes even in St. Bonaventure.

Avant Garde

2009-04-07T18:02:00.001+08:00

Avant-garde (pronounced [avɑ̃gaʁd] in French) means "advance guard" or "vanguard".The adjective form is used in English, to refer to people or works that are experimental or innovative, particularly with respect to art, culture, and politics.

Avant-garde represents a pushing of the boundaries of what is accepted as the norm or the status quo, primarily in the cultural realm. The notion of the existence of the avant-garde is considered by some to be a hallmark of modernism, as distinct from postmodernism. However, this is not true in the case of music as many pieces are still being released which are generally considered avant-garde in popular culture.Many artists have aligned themselves with the avant-garde movement and still continue to do so, tracing a history from Dada to the Situationists to postmodern artists such as the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E writers in the 1980s.

The term was originally used to describe the foremost part of an army advancing into battle (also called the vanguard) and now applied to any group, particularly of artists, that considers itself innovative and ahead of the majority.

The vanguard, a small troop of highly skilled soldiers, explores the terrain ahead of a large advancing army and plots a course for the army to follow. This concept is applied to the work done by small collectives of intellectuals and artists as they open pathways through new cultural or political terrain for society to follow.

The origin of the application of this French term to art is still debated. Some[who?] fix it on May 17, 1863, the opening of the Salon des Refusés in Paris, organized by painters whose work was rejected for the annual Paris Salon of officially sanctioned academic art. Salons des Refusés were held in 1863, 1874, 1875, and 1886.

The term also refers to the promotion of radical social reforms. It was this meaning that was evoked by the Saint Simonian Olinde Rodrigues in his essay, "L'artiste, le savant et l'industriel," (“The artist, the scientist and the industrialist”, 1825) which contains the first recorded use of "avant-garde" in its now-customary sense: there, Rodrigues calls on artists to "serve as [the people's] avant-garde," insisting that "the power of the arts is indeed the most immediate and fastest way" to social, political, and economic reform.Over time, avant-garde became associated with movements concerned with "art for art's sake", focusing primarily on expanding the frontiers of aesthetic experience, rather than with wider social reform.

Several writers have attempted to map the parameters of avant-garde activity with limited success. One of the most useful and respected analyses of vanguardism as a cultural phenomenon remains the Italian essayist Renato Poggioli's 1962 book Teoria dell'arte d'avanguardia (The Theory of the Avant-Garde). Surveying the historical, social, psychological and philosophical aspects of vanguardism, Poggioli reaches beyond individual instances of art, poetry and music to show that vanguardists may be seen as sharing certain ideals or values which are manifested in the non-conformist lifestyles they adopted, vanguard culture being shown to be a variety or subcategory of Bohemianism.

Reflecting on Charles Baudelaire's complaint that “the man of letters is the enemy of the world” and Stéphane Mallarmé's distress over the isolation of the creator in “this society that will not let him live”, Poggioli opines that beyond having habitually non-conformist postures, Avant-garde creators have historically existed in a state of mutual antagonism towards both the public and tradition.[cite this quote] As pioneers, avant-gardes have shunned popularity, seeing those who are popular as producing complacent or compromised work. This is also why avant-gardists have abhorred fashion, judging it to deal in stereotypes, falsehoods and insincere sentiments. Their iconoclasm has witnessed avant-gardes taking positions against current trends; but as pioneers they will also adopt a strong ‘down-with-the-past’ attitude. Vanguardists are committed to new ideals, seeing traditions, institutions and orthodoxies as outmoded prisons of convention.[citation needed]

Taken together, these traits mean that avant-gardes are often estranged from society. This has taken several forms, as some creators were socially alienated. It has been common for avant-gardes to declare their opposition to the bourgeoisie class in particular. Their antagonism towards accepted values and approaches has also meant that historically their audience has tended to be the intelligentsia. Poggioli further tries to classify avant-gardes according to four conceptual dispositions: Nihilism, Agonism, Futurism, and Decadence.[citation needed]

Other authors have attempted to both clarify and extend Poggioli's study. The German literary critic Peter Bürger's Theory of the Avant-Garde (1974) looks at the Establishment's embrace of socially critical works of art and suggests that in complicity with capitalism, "art as an institution neutralizes the political content of the individual work."While the title of Bürger's essay is an explicit reference to Poggioli's, he makes several useful additions to the latter's groundbreaking study, such as the distinction between "historical" (Futurism, Dada, Surrealism) and "neo" avant-garde (Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art, Nouveau Réalisme, Fluxus, etc.).[citation needed]

Bürger's essay also greatly influenced the work of contemporary American art historians such as Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, while older critics like Bürger continue to view the postwar neo-avant-garde as the empty recycling of forms and strategies from the first two decades of the twentieth century, others like Clement Greenberg view it, more positively, as a new articulation of the specific conditions of cultural production in the postwar period. Buchloh, in the collection of essays Neo-avantgarde and Culture Industry (2000) critically argues for a dialectical approach to these positions.

The concept of avant-garde refers exclusively to marginalised artists, writers, composers and thinkers whose work is not only opposed to mainstream commercial values, but often has an abrasive social or political edge. Many writers, critics and theorists made assertions about vanguard culture during the formative years of modernism, although the initial definitive statement on the avant-garde was the essay Avant-Garde and Kitsch.As the essay’s title suggests, Clement Greenberg conclusively showed not only that vanguard culture has historically been opposed to ‘high’ or ‘mainstream culture’, but that it also has rejected the artificially synthesized mass culture that has been produced by industrialization. Each of these media is a direct product of Capitalism – they are all now substantial industries – and as such they are driven by the same profit-fixated motives of other sectors of manufacturing, not the ideals of true art. For Greenberg, these forms were therefore kitsch: they were phony, faked or mechanical culture, which often pretended to be more than they were by using formal devices stolen from advanced or vanguard culture. For instance, during the 1930s the advertising industry was quick to take visual mannerisms from surrealism, but this does not mean that 1930s advertising photographs are truly surreal. It was a matter of style without substance. In this sense Greenberg was at pains to distance true avant-garde creativity from the market-driven fashion change and superficial stylistic innovation that are sometimes used to claim privileged status for these manufactured forms of the new consumer culture.

A similar view was likewise argued by assorted members of the Frankfurt School, including Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer in their essay The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass-Deception (1944), and also Walter Benjamin in his highly influential The Work of Art in the Age of Technical Reproduction (1936).Where Greenberg used the German word kitsch to describe the antithesis of avant-garde culture, members of the Frankfurt School coined the term mass culture to indicate that this bogus culture is constantly being manufactured by a newly emerged Culture industry (comprising commercial publishing houses, the movie industry, the record industry, the electronic media). They also pointed out that the rise of this industry meant that artistic excellence was displaced by sales figures as a measure of worth: a novel, for example, was judged meritorious solely on whether it was a best-seller, music succumbed to ratings charts and the blunt commercial logic of the Gold disc. In this way the autonomous artistic merit so dear to the vanguardist was abandoned and sales increasingly became the measure, and justification, of everything. Consumer culture now ruled.

Despite the central arguments of Greenberg, Adorno and others, "avant-garde" has been appropriated and misapplied by various sectors of the culture industry since the 1960s, chiefly as a marketing tool to publicise popular music and commercial cinema. It is now common to describe successful rock musicians and celebrated film-makers as avant-garde, the very word having been stripped of its proper meaning. Noting this important conceptual shift, major contemporary theorists such as Matei Calinescu in Five Faces of Modernity: Modernism, Avant-garde, Decadence, Kitsch, Postmodernism (1987), and Hans Bertens in The Idea of the Postmodern: A History (1995), have suggested that this is a sign our culture has entered a new post-modern age, when the former modernist ways of thinking and behaving have been rendered redundant.

Nevertheless the most incisive critique of the vanguardism against the views of mainstream society was offered by the New York critic Harold Rosenberg in the late 1960s.[11] Trying to strike a balance between the insights of Renato Poggioli and the claims of Clement Greenberg, Rosenberg suggested that from the mid-1960s onward progressive culture ceased to fulfill its former adversarial role. Since then it has been flanked by what he called 'avant-garde ghosts' to the one side, and a changing mass culture on the other, both of which it interacts with to varying degrees. This has seen culture become, in his words, ‘a profession one of whose aspects is the pretense of overthrowing it.’

THE END OF ART?

2009-03-25T15:58:00.001+08:00

The End of Art...

The comment made by the military officer in Vietnam that his platoon had to destroy a Vietnamese village in order to save it (i.e. from Communism), seems to have been applied to art; it became necessary to destroy art, or at least the modernist understanding of it, in order to save it. With it the whole modernist enterprise began to collapse.

In June 1970, the French writer Jean Clay observed: "It is clear that we are witnessing the death throes of the cultural system maintained by the bourgeoisie in its galleries and its museums."

In recent years, progressive modernism has seemed bent not on defining a future but in destroying the values of the present, especially as they pertained to art. It has remained largely hostile to prevailing authority-systems, though this position is no longer at all clear. In the late 60s and early 70s, conceptual art emerged as another affront to established to established values (Carl Andre, for example).

Hostility to it was intense, beyond any question of mere aesthetics. Victor Burgin states that conceptualism was a revolt against modernism. This may not seem apparent, because, true to form, orthodox art history has managed to assimilate it into the seamless tapestry of "art history" while stifling its radicalism.

However, conceptualism deliberately was an art that no aesthetic formalism could hope to embrace. It was an attempt to place art beyond all limitations and definitions, to break the stranglehold of bourgeois formalist art history and criticism. Attention was turned towards "making" and the manipulation of materials. The process of making was given importance, with the result, the final object, became secondary, often temporary (Christo and Jeanne-Claude, for example).

Conceptualism became an umbrella term (in an attempt to define and contain) under which were lumped together a whole range of difficult-to-classify art such as Performance and Earth Art.

Conceptual artists deliberately produced work that was difficult if not impossible to classify according to the old system. Some deliberately produced work that could not be placed in a museum or gallery (Robert Smithson, for example).

Art in the latter half of the 20th century deliberately placed itself beyond the limits of control. Today, art historians and critics -- we might call them the art police -- throw up their hands in dismay in the face of contemporary art. They have reached their limit - they can no longer absorb contemporary art into the system, patterns of order can no longer be applied. The critical apparatus of control has broken down; traditional art theory and traditional art history have failed along with modernism.

Modernism & Postmodernism

2009-03-25T15:13:00.001+08:00

NEW BEGIN - Modernism & Postmodernism

In the latter half of the 20th century there has been mounting evidence of the failure of the Modernist enterprise. Progressive modernism is riddled with doubt about the continued viability of the notion of progress. Conservative modernism, in the United States at least, has fallen prey in the political realm to the influences of the Church in the form of the so-called religious right which in recent years especially has seriously undermined the very constitutional foundations of the whole American experiment.

Since Suzi Gablik wrote her book, the communist experiment undertaken in the former Soviet Union has collapsed. Fundamentalism in nearly all of the world's major organized religions (Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism) has risen sharply in recent years in direct opposition to modernism. American Christian fundamentalists still agree with Martin Luther who recognized that "Reason is the greatest enemy that faith has; it struggles against the divine word, treating with contempt all that emanates from God."

A growing number of people believe the modernist enterprise has failed. In the search for reasons to explain this failure, questions have necessarily been raised about the whole Western humanist tradition.

It has become apparent to many that the worldview fostered through Modernism (and by the Western humanist tradition) is flawed, corrupt, and oppressive. Both recent events (i.e. since the World War Two), and the perception of those events, have given rise to the notion that Modernism has played itself out and is now floundering and directionless.

If Modernism is at an end, we are now facing a new period. The name given to this new period is Postmodernism.

The term postmodernism is used in a confusing variety of ways. For some it means anti-modern; for others it means the revision of modernist premises.

The seemingly anti-modern stance involves a basic rejection of the tenets of Modernism; that is to say, a rejection of the doctrine of the supremacy of reason, the notion of truth, the belief in the perfectability of man, and the idea that we could create a better, if not perfect, society. A term used by some to describe this view is deconstructive postmodernism.

An alternative understanding, which seeks to revise the premises of Modernism, has been termed constructive postmodernism.

Deconstructive postmodernism seeks to overcome the modern worldview, and the assumptions that sustain it, through what appears to be an anti-worldview. It "deconstructs" the ideas and values of Modernism to reveal what composes them and shows that such modernist ideas as "equality" and "liberty" are not "natural" to humankind or "true" to human nature but are ideals, intellectual constructions.

This process of taking apart or "unpacking" the modernist worldview reveals its constituent parts and lays bare fundamental assumptions. Questions are then frequently raised about who was responsible for these constructions, and their motives. Who does modernism serve?

From the history outlined is this essay, it should be clear that modernist culture is Western in its orientation, capitalist in its determining economic tendency, bourgeois in its class character, white in its racial complexion, and masculine in its dominant gender.

Deconstructive postmodernism is seen perhaps as anti-modern in that it seems to destroy or eliminate the ingredients that are believed necessary for a worldview, such as God, self, purpose, meaning, a real world, and truth. (This point of view, though, that we need a worldview comprised of notions of God, self, purpose, etc, is itself a modernist one.)

Deconstructive postmodern thought is seen by some as nihilistic, (i.e. the view that all values are baseless, that nothing is knowable or can be communicated, and that life itself is meaningless).

Constructive postmodernism does not reject Modernism, but seeks to revise its premises and traditional concepts. Like deconstructive postmodernism, it attempts to erase all boundaries, to undermine legitimacy, and to dislodge the logic of the modernist state. Constructive postmodernism claims to offer a new unity of scientific, ethical, aesthetic, and religious intuitions. It rejects not science as such, but only that scientific approach in which only the data of the modern natural sciences are allowed to contribute to the construction of our worldview.

Constructive postmodernism desires a return to premodern notions of divinely wrought reality, of cosmic meaning, and an enchanted nature. It also wishes to include an acceptance of nonsensory perception.

Constructive postmodernism seeks to recover truths and values from various forms of premodern thought and practice. Constructive postmodernism wants to replace modernism and modernity, which it sees as threatening the very survival of life on the planet.

Aspects of constructive postmodernism will appear similar to what is also called "New Age" thinking. The possibility that mankind is standing on the threshold of a new age informs much postmodernist thought.

The postmodern is deliberately elusive as a concept, avoiding as much as possible the modernist desire to classify and thereby delimit, bound, and confine. Postmodernism partakes of uncertainty, insecurity, doubt, and accepts ambiguity. Whereas Modernism seeks closure in form and is concerned with conclusions, postmodernism is open, unbounded, and concerned with process and "becoming."

The post-modern artist is "reflexive" in that he/she is self-aware and consciously involved in a process of thinking about him/herself and society in a deconstructive manner, "demasking" pretensions, becoming aware of his/her cultural self in history, and accelerating the process of self-consciousness.

This sort of sensitivity to cultural, ethnic, and human conditions and experiences has been ridiculed by conservatives in recent years as "political correctness."

What about art? It could be argued that several forms of art have been "post-modern" since the First World War. If the mass slaughter of the Great War, achieved through the advances made in science and technology, was the result of the modernist commitment to "progress," then one might begin to question the value of the modernist enterprise.

Nonetheless, between the wars, progressive modernism managed to sustain a vision of a better future. It continued to see tradition and the past as stifling the expression of freedom. The Surrealists before the war still clung to the modernist belief that their art could influence human destiny, that they could change the world.

After the Second World War, however, such optimism in the future was difficult to sustain. And to make things worse, with the advent of the Cold War and the constant threat of nuclear destruction, any sort of future looked doubtful.

Having rejected the past many years ago, and now with the future no longer the goal of artistic effort, many artists turned with visible distress to the present and focused their attention on contemporary popular culture.

Popular culture, however, was undergoing a tumultuous upheaval during the sixties: the Civil Rights movement, opposition to the Vietnam war, the emergence of a widespread women's movement, and the transformation of hitherto largely passive and conservative students into the cutting-edge of opposition.

Pop artist could still appear progressive under these circumstances, contributing a critique of bourgeois ideals and the American dream (for example, Richard Hamilton).

Art for Art's Sake

2009-03-24T18:43:00.002+08:00

The 20th century has focused its artistic attention on progressive modernism to the extent that conservative modernism has been neglected and, indeed, derided as an art form.
The so-called academic painters of the 19th century believed themselves to be doing their part to improve the world by presenting images that contain or reflect good conservative moral values, examples of virtuous behaviour, of inspiring Christian sentiment, and of the sort of righteous conduct and noble sacrifice that would serve as an appropriate model toward which we should all aspire to emulate. The new world order reflected in academic modernism was seen by the progressives as merely supportive of the status quo and offered a future that was little more than a perpetuation of the present.

The conservatives wished to maintain existing institutions and preferred gradual development over radical change. The progressives, on the other hand, were critical of institutions, both political and religious, as restrictive of individual liberty. Progressives placed their faith in the goodness of mankind, a goodness which they believed, starting with Rousseau in the 18th century, had become corrupted by such things as the growth of cities.
Others would argue that man had been turned into a vicious, competitive animal by capitalism, the corrosive inhumanity of which was plain to see in the blighted landscape of the industrial revolution.

Rousseau had glorified Nature, and a number of modernists idealised the country life. Thomas Jefferson lived in the country close to nature and desired that the United States be entirely a farming economy; he characterized cities as "ulcers on the body politic."
In contrast to conservative modernism, which remained fettered to old ideas and which tended to support the status quo, progressive modernism adopted an antagonistic position towards society and its established institutions. In one way or another it challenged all authority in the name of freedom and, intentionally or not, affronted conservative bourgeois values.
Generally speaking, progressive modernism tended to concern itself with political and social issues, addressing aspects of contemporary society, especially in its poorer ranks, that an increasingly complacent middle class, once they had achieved a satisfactory level of comfort for themselves, preferred to ignore.

Through their art, in pictures that showed directly or indirectly the plight of the peasants, the exploitation of the poor, prostitution, and so on, the progessives repeatedly drew attention to the political and social ills of contemporary society, conditions they felt needed to be addressed and corrected. Fundamentally, the intention was to educate the public, to keep alive in the face of conservative forces the Enlightenment ideals of freedom and equality through which the world would be made a better place.

The position taken by progressive modernism came to be referred to as the avant-garde (a military term meaning "advance-guard"). In contrast to the conservative modernists who looked to the past and tradition, the avant-garde artist consciously rejected tradition.
Rather than existing as the most recent manifestation of a tradition stretching back into the past, the avant-garde artist saw him- or herself as standing at the head of a new tradition stretching, hopefully, into the future. The progressive modernist looked to the future while the conservative modernist looked to the past.

The rejection of the past became imperative for the progressives with the advent of the First World War which signalled for them the catastrophic failure of tradition. The senseless, mechanized carnage of the "Great War" starkly showed that modernism's faith in scientific and technological progress as the path to a better world was patently wrong. For the Dadaists, World War One also signalled the failure of all modernist art. It could be claimed that Dada in fact marks the emergence of a post-modernist cast of mind.

Today, we would characterize progressive modernism, the avant-garde, as left-leaning and liberal in its support of freedom of expression and demands of equality. Since the 18th century, the modernist belief in the freedom of expression has manifested itself in art through claims to freedom of choice in subject matter and to freedom of choice in style (i.e. in the choice of brushstroke and colour). It was in the exercise of these rights that the artist constantly drew attention to the goals of progressive modernism.

As the 19th century progressed, the exercise of artistic freedom became fundamental to progressive modernism. Artists began to seek freedom not just from the rules of academic art, but from the demands of the public. Soon it was claimed that art should be produced not for the public's sake, but for art's sake.

Art for Art's Sake is basically a call for release from the tyranny of meaning and purpose. From a progressive modernist's point of view, it was a further exercise of freedom. It was also a ploy, another deliberate affront to bourgeois sensibility which demanded art with meaning or that had some purpose such as to instruct, or delight, or to moralize, and generally to reflect in some way their own purposeful and purpose-filled world. A progressive modernist painter like James Abbott McNeill Whistler, for example, blithely stated that his art satisfied none of those things.

In his 1891 essay "The Soul of Man Under Socialism", Oscar Wilde wrote:
A work of art is the unique result of a unique temperament. Its beauty comes from the fact that the author is what he is. It has nothing to do with the fact that other people want what they want. Indeed, the moment that an artist takes notice of what other people want, and tries to supply the demand, he ceases to be an artist, and becomes a dull or an amusing craftsman, an honest or dishonest tradesman. He has no further claim to be considered as an artist.
Art for Art's Sake, however, was a ploy that backfired. The same bourgeois whose tastes and ideas and prescriptions Whistler was confronting through his art, quickly turned the call of "Art for Art's Sake" into a tool to further neutralize the content and noxious effects of progressive modernist art.

In the late 19th century, we find art beginning to be discussed by critics and art historians largely in formal terms which effectively removed the question of meaning and purpose from consideration. From now on, art was to be discussed in terms of style -- colour, line, shape, space, composition -- conveniently ignoring or playing down whatever social, political, or progressive statements the artist had hoped to make in his or her work.

This approach became pervasive to the extent that artists, too, certainly the weaker ones, and even some of the strong ones as they got older or more comfortable, lost sight of their modernist purpose and became willy-nilly absorbed into this formalist way of thinking about art.
In defense of this attitude, it was argued that as the function of art is to preserve and enhance the values and sensibilities of civilized human beings, it should attempt to remain aloof from the malignant influences of an increasingly crass and dehumanizing technological culture.
Eventually there emerged the notion that modernist art is practised entirely within a closed formalist sphere, necessarily separated from, so as not to be contaminated by, the real world.
The formalist critic Clement Greenberg, in an article first published in 1965 entitled "Modernist Painting," saw Modernism as having achieved a self-referential autonomy. The work of art came to be seen as an isolated phenomenon, floating in some rarefied, ideal "Platonic" zone, governed not by human impulse so much as by the mysterious internal laws of stylistic development. Painting and sculpture stood separate from the materialistic world and the mundane affairs of ordinary people.

The underlying assumptions at work here first of all posit that the visual artist, by virtue of special gifts, is able to express the finer things of humanity through a "purely visual" understanding and mode of expression. This "purely visual" characteristic of art makes it an autonomous sphere of activity, completely separate from the everyday world of social and political life.

The autonomous nature of visual art means that questions asked of it may only be properly put, and answered, in its own terms. The history of modernism is contructed only in reference to itself, it is (or was until recently) entirely self-referential. Impressionism gains much of its art historical significance through its place within a scheme of stylistic development that has its roots in the preceding Realism of Courbet and Manet, and by its also providing the main impetus for the successive styles of Post-Impressionism. Traditional art historians and critics are fond of extending this sort of approach beyond the modernist period to other artists and periods to enhance the illusion of a history of art composed along one great thread of stylistic interconnection. The system allowed one to connect the preferred art of the present to an authentic art of the past by means of a retrospectively perceived logic of development. By this means a supposedly disinterested judgment could be justified in terms of a supposedly inexorable historical tendency.

In the hands of the conservative establishment, formalism became a very effective instrument of control over unruly and disruptive art. Many of the art movements spawned in the first half of the 20th century could be seen as various attempts to break the formalist grip on progressive modernism. The system, though, articulated by the more academic art historians and critics, operating hand-in-hand with the art market which was only interested in money and not meaning, effectively absorbed all attempts at subversion and revolt into a neutral, palatable, only occasionally mildly offensive history of art of the kind you encounter today in art history textbooks.

Unfortunately for the history of art, in the process of neutralizing progressive modernism, art history also had to neutralize all other art from earlier periods and from elsewhere in the world. The same reductionist, schematic approach was employed across the board creating a history of art largely devoid of any real meaning original to the artwork. It was generally agreed that aesthetic quality would have priority in deciding the function of art instead of its social or political relevance. It was also agreed that painting and sculpture should remain central to the concept of high art and the "Fine Arts."

Formalism, though, could also be turned to the advantage of the progressives who were able to use it in defense of modernism, abstraction in particular, which has been especially open to criticism. Formalism also neatly dovetailed in the early 20th century with another goal of progressive modernism, universalism. For art to be an effective instrument of social betterment, it needed to be understood by as many people as possible. But it was not a matter of simply articulating images, it was the "true" art behind the image that was deemed important. Art can be many things and one example may look quite different from the next. But something called "art" is common to all. Whatever this art thing was, it was universal; like the scientific "truth" of the Enlightenment. All art obviously possessed it.

Some artists went in search of "art". From an Enlightenment point of view, this was a search for the "truth" or essence of art, and was carried out using a sort of pictorial reasoning. The first step was to strip away distracting elements such as recognizable objects which tended to conceal or hide the art thing; an example of this approach would be Wassily Kandinsky.

Wassily Kandinsky, Composition VIII, 1923 Oil on canvas (Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York)

A more radical approach was then to reduce the non-recognizable to the most basic elements: line and colour. This was the approach of Piet Mondrian.

Piet Mondrian, Composition A, 1923 Oil on canvas (Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Rome)

However, it is frequently overlooked that for the artists who undertook this search, there was more at stake than the discovery of the "truth" of art. For some, abstraction was a path to another goal. Both Mondrian and Kandinsky were keenly interested in the spiritual and believed that art should serve as a guide to, or an inspiration for, or perhaps help to rekindle in, the spectator the spiritual dimension which they and others felt was being lost in the increasingly materialist contemporary world. Abstraction involved a sort of stripping away of the material world and had the potential of revealing, or describing, or merely alluding to the world of the spirit.

PERANAN KRITIKAN SENI TERHADAP PERKEMBANGAN SENI TAMPAK DI MALAYSIA

2009-03-11T05:56:00.003+08:00

Seni tampak atau seni visual telah lama berkembang di Malaysia. Adalah dipercayai lebih dari 200 tahun dulu. Namun kewujudan seni ini hanya menjadi satu kepentingan pada negara mulai tahun 1930-an saja. Melihat kepada kepentingan seni ini, tidak ada satu kajian khusus dilakukan terhadap kepentingan kritikan seni. Sudah sampai masanya bidang kritikan seni perlu dikaji dengan lebih mendalam lagi. Tujuan utama kajian ini di peringkat awal ialah untuk meninjau sejauhmanakah perkembangan kritikan seni telah berlaku dalam dunia seni tampak di Malaysia khususnya seni catan. Apakah kritikan seni dapat menyumbang ke arah kemajuan atau di sebaliknya dalam arus perkembangan seni catan. Bagaimana penerimaan artis terhadap peranan kritikan seni ini. Hasil kajian ini juga akan menjadi faktor menentukan sejauhmanakah kritikan seni dapat memainkan peranan penting dalam perkembangan seni catan di Malaysia.

Kepentingan kritikan seni di Malaysia khususnya seni tampak masih dianggap baru. Malah kemungkinan ada sesetengah artis atau masyarakat menganggap kehadirannya tidak begitu penting. Sejak kini, tidak ramai penulis dan pengkritik seni yang serius membicarakan dunia kritikan khususnya dalam seni catan. Kemungkinan mereka tidak yakin untuk menentukan arah dan tujuan sebenar peranan kritikan dalam pembangunan seni di Malaysia. Permasalahan ini mungkin timbul ialah keberkesanan tanggapan artis baru terhadap peranan kritikan seni itu sendiri. Tidak ada kursus yang ditawarkan di IPTA atau IPTS yang berkaitan dengan kritikan secara serius. Serta sejauhmana peranan bidang ini dalam perkembangan seni tampak Malaysia khususnya seni catan. Permasalahan ini timbul ialah keberkesanan tanggapan artis baru terhadap peranan kritikan seni itu sendiri. Serta sejauhmana peranan bidang ini dalam perkembangan seni tampak Malaysia, khususnya seni catan moden pada era 90-an.

Seni tampak atau seni visual telah lama wujud di Malaysia. Seni itu bergerak sealiran dengan semua bidang kehidupan manusia. Sebenarnya kepentingan seni sama pentingnya dengan ketamadunan manusia. Seni merujuk kepada sesuatu yang indah. Menurut Graham Collier (1992), Seni boleh ditakrifkan sebagai suatu hasil karya yang dicipta dengan menggunakan bakat atau kecekapan dalam penghasilan karya seni seperti sajak, lukisan, ukiran, muzik dan lain-lain bidang seni. Penghasilan karya-karya seni dapat membantu perkembangan sesuatu tamadun dalam meningkatkan tahap kebudayaan dan kesenian sesuatu masyarakat itu. Oleh itu, bidang seni semakin berkembang dari zaman dahulu hingga sekarang. Manakala seni catan pula merujuk kepada penghasilan karya seni berbentuk dua dimensi. Ia dilukis di atas permukaan kanvas. Menggunakan media cat air atau akrilik. Pemilihan tema atau subject matter pula dipelbagaikan.Menurut kajian awal, kritikan seni pernah ditulis oleh Syed Sheikh Al-Hadi (1867 – 1934) seorang ulamak terkenal Malaya yang banyak mengupas isu-isu seni dan kesusasteraan serta agama dalam majalah Al-Ikhwan. Antara kritikan beliau ialah berkaitan dengan peranan lukisan dan gambar. Ia diterbitkan dalam majalah berkenaan pada 16 April 1929.

Antara yang dipaparkan ialah:
Perkara gambar-gambar ini telah menjadi suatu daripada perkara yang sangat-sangat berguna bagi kemajuan manusia sama ada gambar-gambar yang beribu-ribu tahun dahulu atau pun gambar-gambar yang baharu-baharu diperbuat orang pada masa ini.

( Al-Ikhwan,16 April 1929, no.238, tulisan jawi)
Selain dari itu beliau juga telah menegur kalangan ibu bapa yang menimbulkan isu mata pelajaran lukisan di sekolah-sekolah Melayu pada zaman itu.
Di dalam pada ini pun ajaib kita mendengarnya banyak sangat sugutannya orang-orang konon mengajar anak-anak Melayu di dalam sekolah-sekolah melukis gambar itu ditegah oleh agama Islam.

( Al-Ikhwan,16 April 1929, no.238, tulisan jawi)
Sultan Idris Training College (SITC) yang ditubuhkan pada tahun 1922 telah menjadi penggerak utama dalam bidang Pendidikan Seni. Guru-guru lepasan SITC menggunakan Kitab Pedoman Guru Penggal Pertama terbitan tahun 1928 dan Kitab Pedoman Guru Penggal Kedua yang diterbitkan pada tahun 1929 sebagai panduan mata pelajaran termasuk lukisan. O.T. Dussek dan Mohd. Hashim bin Haji Taib yang bertanggungjawab mengumpul dan menulis serta diterbitkan oleh Pejabat Karang Mengarang SITC.

Isi kandungan kitab Pedoman Guru Penggal Pertama yang diterbitkan pada tahun 1928, merangkumi isi-isi pelajaran mengenai Kaedah Mengajar Lukisan. Di dalam kitab itu dinyatakan bagaimana cara-cara memegang pensil, pemilihan kertas, penggunaan pemadam dan pembaris. Selain itu diterangkan juga kaedah melukis bulatan, empat segi, tiga segi, teknik melukis binatang dan bunga-bungaan. Dalam Kitab Pedoman Guru Penggal Kedua yang diterbitkan pada tahun 1929, mengandungi kaedah mengajar tulisan kaligrafi rumi dan tulisan jawi.
Menurut Ahmad Suhaimi Mohd Noor (2002), kedua-dua kitab ini adalah buku terawal mengenai kaedah pengajaran lukisan yang disediakan oleh orang Melayu yang diterbitkan di Persekutuan Tanah Melayu. Mohd. Said bin Haji Hussein bukan sahaja penulis kaedah mengajar lukisan, tetapi juga penterjemah buku, pensyarah seni, pelukis serta pembentang kertas kerja. Melihat kepada peranan dan sumbangannya yang amat besar terhadap bidang ini, amatlah wajar beliau diberi satu penghargaan sebagai tokoh Pendidik Seni dan pelukis Malaya yang terawal. Hasil usahanya ini telah melahirkan begitu ramai guru yang boleh mengajar mata pelajaran lukisan di sekolah-sekolah di Persekutuan Tanah Melayu, Singapura, Sabah, Sarawak dan Brunei Darul Salam. Pada masa itu hanya SITC saja yang mampu melahirkan guru-guru seni dan berkhidmat di seluruh pelusuk Tanah Melayu.

Penerbitan majalah seperti Mastika agak aktif. Tetapi kemudiannya menjadi malap dan seterusnya terhenti akibat tercetusnya Perang Dunia Kedua. Selepas tamat perang ia diterbitkan semula pada November 1946. Ini menandakan dunia kritikan seni di Malaya mulai bertambah rancak. Majalah Mastika merupakan majalah yang memaparkan pelbagai isu seperti politik, budaya dan sastera. Ia diterbitkan oleh Utusan Melayu di Singapura (1941-57). Kritikan seni pada tahun itu kebanyakan disiarkan dalam tulisan jawi. Antara yang dipaparkan ialah polemik seni oleh saudara Mona Lisa dengan Saudara Mohd. Salehuddin mengenai pengertian seni moden. Mona Lisa cuba membahaskan pandangan Mohd. Salehuddin mengenai seni moden. Kritikan itu dijawab semula oleh Mohd. Salehuddin dalam Mastika keluaran Mac 1959. Walaupun jawapan yang diberikan oleh Mohd. Salehuddin dalam bentuk penulisan sebuah rencana seni, tetapi ia sudah cukup untuk membuktikan bahawa telah ada satu polemik seni yang terawal di Malaya disiarkan dalam media.Selain menjadi penulis Mastika, Mohd. Salehuddin juga seorang pelukis. Salah sebuah karyanya yang berjudul, “Membeli-belah Di Kampung” (1959) menjadi koleksi tetap Balai Seni Lukis Negara.

Terdapat seorang lagi pengkritik seni, iaitu Abdul Gani Hamid. Antara kritikan seni yang telah dihasilkan berjudul, “Seni Lukis Dari Kongres ke Kongres” yang telah disiarkan dalam majalah Mastika keluaran Mac 1958. Beliau telah mengulas dan mengkritik rumusan kedua-dua kongres penting iaitu Kongres Bahasa Melayu III Malaya yang berlangsung pada 16 hingga 21 September di Singapura dan Kongres Kebudayaan Melayu I yang berlangsung pada 30 Disember 1957 hingga 2 Januari 1958 di Melaka. Beliau dengan beraninya mengkritik bahawa ketetapan yang telah dibuat sebagai rumusan kepada kedua-dua kongres tersebut tidak menjadi apa-apa makna seandainya kita tidak mendapat sokongan dari pihak pemerintah. Selain daripada itu beliau juga telah mengkritik kedudukan seni lukis di Malaya yang jauh ketinggalan jika dibandingkan dengan kedudukan seni lain terutamanya kesusasteraan.

Tulisan beliau yang dikira amat pedas dan tajam berjudul, “Kita Ada Sebidang Tanah, Tak Seorang Petani Ingin Berbudi.” Pandangan dan kritikan beliau dibuat terhadap pemerintah yang membiarkan kedudukan pelukis-pelukis terbiar tanpa pembelaan. Walaupun para pelukis telah disediakan dengan Balai Seni Lukis Negara dan dirasmikan pada tahun 1958, tetapi peluang-peluang untuk melanjutkan pelajaran ke luar negara dalam bidang ini amat terbatas. Tambahnya lagi, beliau turut berminat dengan percubaan beberapa pelukis Malaya yang mengambil idea yang berteraskan keMelayuan dan pribumi dalam pengolahan karya catan. Contohnya pelukis Chuah Theng Teng dari Pulau Pinang, Nik Zainal Abidin dari Kelantan dan Abdul Hamid Alias dari Melaka.

Tugas masyarakat ialah menghayati dan menyimpan khazanah seni. Penyesuaian diri masyarakat dalam menghayati dan menghargai bidang ini bukanlah sesuatu yang mudah. Tugas dan perlaksanaannya memerlukan satu bidang pengkajian yang khusus.
Siapakah yang perlu memainkan peranan ini? Seniman dan penggiat seni berperanan sebagai penghasil karya. Tetapi, peranan pengkritik seni lebih penting ke arah memajukan karya seni itu. Pengkritik seni tidak dilihat sebagai penilai karya seni atau ‘pembunuh’ minat seniman untuk terus berkarya. Bidang kritikan seni di Malaysia amat jarang diperbahaskan. Tidak banyak penulisan yang ditemui mengenai perkara ini. Kecuali tulisan-tulisan berbentuk ringan dari majalah lama yang diterbitkan sekitar tahun 1930-an itu. Apakah yang dimaksudkan kritikan dan pengkritik seni. Pepper, Stephen C. (1996) menjelaskan, sebenarnya kritikan seni adalah satu bidang ilmu yang perlu diketengahkan. Perkembangan seni tampak tidak akan berjaya tanpa adanya kritikan. Kritikan seni amat berkait rapat dengan perkembangan seni di Malaysia. Kritikan seni juga berkembang seiring dengan bidang seni tampak yang lain.

Zakaria Ali (1989) menjelaskan pengkritik seni perlu jujur kepada dirinya sendiri, inilah prinsip yang patut dipegangnya. Kejujurannya itu kadangkala menghalangnya membuat apreasiasi bertulis dengan jujur. Dia khuatir akan menyinggung perasaan seniman yang sentiasa sensitif, tidak boleh ditegur dan mahu sentiasa dipuji. Beliau menjelaskan lagi, seniman pula sentiasa mengakui bahawa karya seni mereka itu adalah hasil kejujuran dari diri mereka sendiri. Kejujuran tidak menjamin terhasilnya karya seni yang besar. Kewujudan karya seni itu adalah merupakan sesuatu hakikat yang bebas dari pengaruh seniman dan pemerhati.
Greene, Theodore Meyer (1997) mengatakan bahawa pengkritik seni haruslah berwaspada kerana pendapat seniman itu adalah penyambungan suasana mental ciptaanya sahaja. Suasana ini boleh membantu pengkritik seni menilai kesenian karya seniman itu. Sebalikya pula, terlampau banyak pendapat yang dikeluarkan, boleh mengelirukan orang ramai yang bakal menjadi peminatnya. Lebih lagi pendapat itu diberikan pada waktu-waktu yang berbeza.
Graham Collier (1992) menjelaskan seniman yang bijak selalunya bersikap membisu sesudah karyanya disiapkan.

Namun di dalam sejarah seni, banyak sekali terdapat contoh-contoh seniman yang menulis surat-surat, diari-diari dan renungan-renungan peribadi. Penghayat seni dan pengkritik seni amat memerlukan dokumen-dokumen itu bagi menyokong mereka untuk menilai dan menikmati karya seni itu. Seniman yang masih aktif dan masih ada (hidup) boleh terus mengeluarkan buah fikiran, pendapat, kenyataan, menukarkan fikiran, mengubah pendapat, malah menafikan pendapat-pendapat awalnya tadi.M. Lansing (1996) menyatakan bahawa karya seni itu boleh mendidik masyarakat. Perlu ditegaskan bahawa bukan semua karya seni boleh mendidik masyarakat. Ia bergantung kepada pendapat pengkritik. Apa yang ditulisnya itu. Adakah untuk mendidik atau sekadar ia dianggap cukup cekap dan bernas serta mempunyai etika saja. Namun ditahap peribadi kita, apabila semua pemerhati berhadapan dengan karya seni, mereka adalah pengkritik. Walaupun dalam keadaan dan suasana senyap-senyap. Setiap penghayat seni, pemerhati seni, harus digalakkan menjadi pengkritik seni yang senyap-senyap pada mulanya dan kemudian menjadi pengkritik seni yang aktif sesudah itu.

Selaras dengan perkembangan seni yang berlaku itu, sewajarnya dunia kritikan dianggap satu bidang yang amat penting. Bidang kritikan sebenarnya telah berusia ribuan tahun. Sejarah seni membuktikan bahawa ahli falsafah klasik seperti Socrates (469 – 399SM), Plato (427 – 347SM) dan Aristotle (384 –322SM) telah menggunakan pendekatan kritikan untuk melihat seni dengan lebih mendalam. Socrates menggunakan pendekatan teori idea. Beliau menyatakan bahawa penghasilan karya seni bersandarkan dari idea atau buah fikiran. Manakala Plato pula membuat tafsiran yang seni itu hasil dari kegiatan peniruan atau imitasi. Aristotle pula melihat seni sebagai satu elemen yang mendekatkan manusia dengan alam. Dia menggunakan istilah mimesis yang merujuk kepada proses meniru atau penghasilan semula kata-kata dan gerak-geri orang lain.

Dalam perkembangan seni Eropah pun, kritikan seni telah lama wujud dan dianggap amat penting. Beberapa tokoh sejarahwan Eropah seperti Heinrich Wolflin (1864 – 1945), GiorgioVasari (1511 – 1574) dan Johann Joachim Winklemann (1717 – 1768), telah melihat bidang kritikan boleh menyemarak dan memeriahkan lagi dunia seni tampak. Contohnya, Wolflin telah membuat analisa dalam bidang kritikan. Beliau membuat perbandingan seni ini kepada beberapa bidang. Iaitu seni bina, seni arca dan seni catan. Penganalisaan ini menjadi satu disiplin dan asas kepada pengkritik seni yang lain untuk mengkritik karya. Wolflin membuat analisa perbandingan stail dan gaya seni zaman Renaissance dan Baroque. Dia menggabungkan kaedah emperikal dan saintifik. Seni menurut Wolflin ialah hasil jelmaan pengaruh sosial yang bersifat dalaman dan luaran di mana persepsi menjadi pembolehubahan yang baru dalam memperkatakan perubahan gaya dan pengkaryaan seni. Menurutnya lagi seniman perlu melakukan perubahan dan perkembangan terhadap seni dengan terus membuat penerokaan, mengkaji dan merujuk kepada sejarah. Untuk merealisasikan agar masyarakat dapat menerima seni, pengkritik juga memainkan peranan yang utama seperti yang dijelaskan oleh T.S Elliot terjemahan Dr. Wong Seng Tong (1991), “kritikan ialah mengupas dan menghuraikan karya-karya seni dengan menggunakan tulisan atau tujuan dasarnya adalah menjelaskan karya-karya seni sementara mengawal selera pembaca.”

Vasari mendefinisikan karya seni boleh dikritik dengan beberapa tahap seperti perkembangan awal, perkembangan pertengahan dan tahap kematangan. Dia yang dianggap sebagai perintis dunia falsafah moden dan kritikan seni menyenaraikan seni tampak boleh dianalisa kepada beberapa peringkat. Antaranya ialah kadar banding, nilai keindahan, jalinan, cahaya dan bayang serta objek (subject matter) yang diketengahkan oleh seniman. Vasari amat terkenal dengan Teori Imitate Nature. Wincklemann pula memberi pandangan bahawa kritikan adalah penganalisaan dari sebuah karya seni yang mengandungi nilai estetik. Selain itu beliau berpendapat karya seni itu merupakan hasil peniruan atau meniru keindahan. Beliau juga telah menemui tiga konsep peniruan atau imitasi berdasarkan kepada tiga perkara iaitu seniman meniru alam, seniman meniru bahan dan seniman meniru keindahan.

Beliau menjelaskan lagi, ‘keindahan itu mesti dinikmati oleh deria dan difahami oleh intelek, perasaan luaran dan dalaman penting untuk mengenal dan menikmati keindahan.’ Menurutnya lagi kebolehan mengkritik atau menilai keindahan adalah berbeza-beza. Oleh itu katanya lagi seniman dan penghayat seni perlu terus berlatih pancaindera mereka sehingga berupaya menikmati keindahan melalui daya intelektual. Merujuk kepada kepentingan kritikan seni, maka jelaslah bahawa kewujudan pengkritik seni amat membantu dalam usaha memartabatkan seni tampak Malaysia. Namun penglibatan pengkritik seni itu mungkin masih ditahap sederhana.
Usaha memberikan galakan dan penerangan akan kepentingan kritikan seni kepada para seniman mesti diteruskan. Seniman perlu didedahkan bahawa dunia kritikan seni boleh membantu karya seni mereka berada pada tahap kualiti yang membanggakan. Seniman juga perlu menyedari dengan adanya kritikan seni ini, perkembangan dunia seni tampak menjadi lebih bermakna dan dipandang tinggi.

Sesuai dengan perkembangan seni di peringkat antarabangsa, seni kritikan telah diterima oleh masyarakat barat sebagai sebahagian dari aktiviti seni itu sendiri. Tanpa adanya kritikan seni, maka seni itu dilihat sebagai satu kekurangan. Oleh itu sewajarnya kritikan seni mesti berada dan bergerak seiring dengan dunia seni tampak tanah air. Penyelidikan PerpustakaanMenurut Encyclopedia Britannica, kritikan seni ialah satu perbincangan ilmiah yang beralasan dan bersistem untuk menghuraikan atau menilai gaya, teknik dan cara penghasilan sesebuah karya seni itu. Kritikan seni yang terawal telah dapat dikesan dalam ‘Republic’ oleh Plato (427 – 347SM) Dalam karya tersebut, Plato telah mengemukakan teori idea yang menjelaskan bahawa objek-objek dalam dunia yang kita lihat hanyalah peniruan semata-mata. Malahan kedudukannya tidak begitu sempurna. Dari kenyataan ini, maka bermulalah dunia kritikan seni. Konsep peniruan ini dikenali sebagai seni imitasi (art imitate nature).

Selepas itu, idea ini dikembangkan dan perbaharui oleh Aristotle dengan mengatakan bahawa imitasi itu adalah satu aktiviti kreatif. Di antara tokoh penting dalam bidang kritikan dan pensejarahan pada pada abad ke-16 ialah Giorgio Vasari di Itali, Johann Joachim Winckelman dan Gotthold Ephrain Lessing dari Jerman. David S. Nateman (1994) mengatakan bahawa terdapat beberapa jenis teori kritikan seni yang dikenalpasti. Antaranya ialah kritikan impresionistik, kritikan imitationalis, kritikan ekspresif, kritikan formalis dan kritikan instrumentalis. Kritikan formalis juga dikenali dengan nama kritikan judicial atau kritikan objektif. Manakala kritikan impresionistik ialah kritikan yang melahirkan sikap dan perasaan secara spontan tanpa menghitungkan disiplin ilmu seni. Kritikan ekspresif pula ialah kritikan yang cuba melihatkan pertalian atau hubung kait antara karya dan seniman. Manakala kritikan imitationalis ialah melihat karya seni sebagai kerja seni yang terlibat dengan konsep peniruan.

Kritikan formalis adalah kritikan yang menumpukan kepada intrinsic karya. Kritikan instrumental ialah kritikan yang cuba melihat karya seni dari segi fungsi sosialnya, karya ini berbeza dengan karya lain.Selain itu terdapat beberapa jenis kritikan lagi. Antaranya ialah kritikan teori (theoretical criticism), kritikan amali (practical criticism) dan kritikan terapan (applied criticism). Kritikan teori menumpukan kepada beberapa aspek teori dan methodologi. Ia menerangkan prinsip-prinsip teori dengan jelas dan terperinci serta menekankan pemahaman yang mendalam mengenai unsur-unsur seni, prinsip rekaan dan struktur serta organisasi rekaan. Di samping itu juga ia menekankan aspek yang berkaitan dengan sosiologi, psikologi, falsafah seni dan perkembangan seni dan sebagainya. Terdapat ramai tokoh yang membicarakan kritikan teori. Tokoh yang paling awal membicarakan teori ini ialah Aristotle dalam bukunya berjudul, ‘Poetics’ yang ditulis pada abad Ke-4 Sebelum Masihi. Selain daripada itu dua buah buku teori lain yang amat berpengaruh ditulis oleh I.A. Richards (1924) dalam bukunya berjudul ‘Principle of Literary Criticism’ dan Northrop Frye (1975) dalam bukunya berjudul ‘Anatomy of Criticism.’ Manakala buku lain yang juga turut membicarakan kritikan teori ialah Jonathan Culler (1975) berjudul ‘Structuralist Poetics’ dan Roland Bartes (1972) yang berjudul ‘ Critical Essay’.

Kritikan teori lebih menumpukan kepada aspek teori dan methodologi. Prinsip-prinsip teori akan dikemukakan dengan lebih jelas dan terperinci. Penguasaan ilmu teori bukan sahaja kepada pemahaman tentang unsur-unsur seni, prinsip rekaan dan struktur rekaan semata-mata tetapi lebih jauh daripada itu. Pengkritik seni mestilah menguasai sebanyak mungkin ilmu bantu seperti pendidikan asas seni lukis dan seni reka, sosiologi, psikologi, falsafah seni, methodologi seni, perkembangan seni pra-sejarah, perkembangan seni Eropah dan Asia, seni Islam selain perkembangan seni tempatan. Malahan pengkritik seni sewajarnya melengkapi ilmu teori ini selari dengan perkembangan seni semasa sama ada berlaku di luar ataupun dalam negara. Kritikan amali atau praktikal ini bermaksud penglibatan secara langsung pengkritik dengan pengkarya seni. Pengkritik melakukan pengamatan dan penganalisaan terhadap sesuatu karya seni itu dengan lebih mendalam. Dia boleh menjelaskan sama ada pengkajiannya itu menarik atau sebaliknya. Sebahagian daripadanya mungkin dijelaskan tidak menarik perhatian. Penghayat seni pula mempunyai tahap penilaian yang amat berbeza. Mereka tidak sanggup untuk mengatakan karya itu tidak menarik, seandainya ia berada di hadapan pengkarya seni itu. Ketidakjujuran di dalam membuat penilaian oleh penghayat seni boleh dipertikaikan. Bahan-bahan seni yang kotor, buruk, kasar dan tidak menyenang dipandang mungkin dianggap tidak menarik bagi sesetengah penghayat seni atau orang ramai.

Tetapi bagi pengkritik seni yang sudah berpengalaman tentu mempunyai pandangan yang berbeza pula.T.S. Eliot adalah tokoh yang paling terkenal dan pertama dapat mempengaruhi teori dan amalan bagi pengkritik-pengkritik seni yang baru. Dalam kegiatan awalnya T.S. Eliot menjadi model bagi para pengkritik aliran ini. Beliau adalah seorang pemimpin yang alamat terpengaruh dalam mengutarakan pemikiran-pemikiran tentang teknik dan kaedah serta bahasa kritikan. Beliaulah yang mengemukakan rancangan dan pernah dilaksanakan oleh T.E. Hulme dan Ezra Pound. Kita boleh membaca eseinya yang pertama, The Sacred Wood: ‘Essay on Poetry and Criticsm’ (1920). Elliot menjelaskan penentangannya terhadap unsur-unsur ‘impressionis’ dan ‘moralisme’ yang melampau dalam melakukan sesuatu teknik pengkritikan.
Eseinya yang berjudul ‘The Perfect Critic’ mengemukakan pendapat bahawa pemikiran yang baik adalah lebih mengarah kepada melihat sesebuah karya dalam istilah-istilah struktur. Katanya, “ Criticsm is the statement in languange of this structure; it is a development of sensiblitiy.” Sesuatu kritikan yang buruk ialah kritikan yang mengandungi sesuatu pernyataan emosi yang tidak terkawal. Penilaian dan hujahan terhadap karya seni itu hendaklah dibuat berlandaskan etika moral yang betul.

Kritikan terapan (applied criticism) merupakan lanjutan dari kritikan amali. Pengkritik seni melihat dan menganalisa karya dan seterusnya mengemukakan cadangan-cadangan tertentu. Apa yang boleh dimanfaatkan dari hasil sesebuah karya seni itu terhadap kepentingan masyarakat. Saranan dan sumbangan dari kritikan itu boleh membantu seniman untuk terus memberikan sesuatu yang bermakna pada masyarakatnya.
Manakala kritikan amali pula menerangkan penglibatan secara langsung pengkritik dengan pengkarya seni. Di sini pengkritik melakukan pengamatan dan penganalisaan terhadap sesuatu karya seni itu dengan lebih mendalam. Sementara itu kritikan terapan adalah kritikan yang melibatkan pengkritik seni yang melihat dan menganalisa karya dan seterusnya mengemukakan cadangan-cadangan tertentu. Saranan dan sumbangan dari kritikan itu boleh membantu seniman untuk terus memberikan sesuatu yang bermakna pada masyarakat.

Kaedah-kaedah kritikan seni dari setiap teori tidak berdiri secara tersendiri. Ia memerlukan hubungan yang rapat dengan sejarahwan seni dan seniman. Dalam erti kata yang lain, seniman yang menghasilkan karya seni memerlukan sejarahwan untuk merakamkan peristiwa yang berlaku ketika itu. Pengkritik seni pula mengulas, menganalisa, mengkritik dan membina idea supaya menjadi lebih mantap. Ketiga-tiga penggiat seni ini sewajarnya digembeleng tenaga demi memartabatkan seni tanah air. Teori-teori seni sentiasa berkembang dari satu era ke satu era yang lain. Ia akan sentiasa diperkatakan oleh para sejarahwan seni. Tidak akan wujud satu zaman yang gemilang dalam perkembang seni andainya ada pihak yang mempertikaikan kehadiran sejarahwan dan pengkritik seni.

Seni Islam dan Estetika

2009-03-11T03:37:00.001+08:00

Perkaitan antara Islam, seni dan estetika adalah erat dan rapat sekali. Sifat dinamik ajaran Islam membolehkan penganut-penganutnya menghayati keindahan dalam pelbagai bidang; tidak tertumpu hanya dalam bidang seni sahaja. Dalam mendiskusikan tajuk ini perlu didefinisikan apakah Islam, seni dan estetika secara berasingan sebelum boleh dilihat perkaitan yang berfaedah dan yang tidak berfaedah.

Ini penting dari kita menolak secara melulu menurut dogma semata-mata, bertaklid buta atau menerima tanpa diskusi mendalam. Secara amnya, Islam adalah agama yang diwahyukan Allah s.w.t semenjak Nabi Adam a.s sehingga ke nabi dan Rasul terakhir, Nabi Muhammad s.a.w. Islam dalam sebuah hadis Rasulullah s.a.w bermaksud beriman kepada Allah s.w.t., mengimani para Nabi dan Rasul, para Malaikat, hari akhirat, qadha dan qadar dan kitab-kitab yang diwahyukan Allah s.w.t. Manusia diberi amanah melalui Islam bahawa mereka dan para jin dijadikan semata-mata untuk menyembah Allah s.w.t.

Islam juga adalah penyerahan secara mutlak melalui hati, pengucapan lisan dan tingkah laku melalui refleksi amalan dan ibadat. Seni pula punya pelbagai definisi dan tafsiran. Namun secara umumnya seni boleh didefinisi sebagai satu manifestasi dan pancaran rasa keindahan, pemikiran, kesenangan dan perasaan yang lahir daripada seniman atau pengkarya. Kebanyakkan takrif seni lebih menekan dan menjurus mengenai keinginan manusia untuk menghasilkan sesuatu aktiviti. Estetik membawa maksud kepekaan. Estetik ialah kajian tentang keindahan (science of beauty) iaitu penghujahan tentang persepsi atau pengamatan tentang bidang seni.Justeru dapat dilihat perkaitan erat antara Islam sebagai petunjuk dan wahyu dengan seni yang memaparkan rasa keindahan dan estetik yang menghuraikan rasa keindahan tersebut.

Ini amat bertepatan dengan sabdaan Rasulullah s.a.w bahawa "Allah itu indah dan sukakan keindahan." Namun apa yang penting ialah apakah tugas seseorang penseni Islam? Bagaimanakah seseorang penseni Islam dapat mengaitkan rasa kesenian dan estetik keindahan dengan cara hidup Islam? Persoalan ini teramat penting kerana sebagai individu Islam, selain dari menunaikan kewajipan dan suruhan Allah s.w.t dan RasulNya s.a.w, umat Islam turut bertanggungjawab memaparkan rasa keindahan tersebut agar kehidupan di dunia ini dapat dilestarikan sehingga ke akhirat.Rasa keindahan itu juga seharusnya selari dengan tuntutan dan perintah syariat dengan menunaikan segala kewajipan dan meninggalkan segala laranganNya.

Umat Islam juga diperintahkan agar menunjukkan segala perbuatan dan amar makruf yang baik dan terpuji selari dengan ajaran Al-Quran. Ini dapat melahirkan penseni Islam yang bertanggungjawab terhadap karya-karya mereka dan tidak terbawa-bawa oleh arus teori-teori Barat tanpa menyaring dan mengkajinya. Bagaimana yang dikatakan bertanggungjawab terhadap karya-karya mereka? Apakah penseni Islam yang memaparkan kebobrokan dan kejelikan sikap dan nilai hidup dapat dipertanggungjawabkan? Apakah nilai yang akan dibawa oleh penghayat yang menghayati karya-karya sebegitu? Apakah karya-karya mereka akan menambah nilai positif, murni dan baik dalam kehidupan bermasyarakat atau semakin menambahparah lagi keadaan sosial dan akhlak masyarakat?

Inilah persoalan yang seharusnya difikir terlebih dahulu oleh penseni Islam sebelum mereka melahirkan sesebuah karya agar selari dengan tuntutan Islam. Penseni Islam seharusnya menjadi pemangkin terhadap segala persoalan hidup bermasyarakat dan bersosial agar selari dengan tuntutan murni Islam dan bukan membelakanginya apatah lagi mencemuh. Justeru dapat mengaplikasikan tanggungjawab sebenar Muslim iaitu menyuruh yang makruf dan melarang yang mungkar dalam konteks kepatuhan penuh kepada Allah s.w.t. mengikut sunnah Rasulullah s.a.w. Wallahu'alam.

UNFOLDING Exhibition

2009-03-08T15:49:00.005+08:00

UNFOLDING,20Feb-2Mar 2009,RA FINEART GALLERY,Kuala Lumpur

A group show by emerging Malaysian Artists

Host:R A Fine Arts - The Gallery
Type:Music/Arts - Opening
Network:Global
Start Time:21 February 2009 at 20:00
End Time:02 March 2009 at 18:00
Location:R A Fine Arts - The Gallery
Street:No 6, Jalan Aman, off Jalan Tun Razak,
Phone:0321617341
Email:rafinearts@gmail.com

'UNFOLDING'• Peter Lagan Balang • Hafiz Nordin • M.Safwan Ahmad • Syafiq Fawwaz • Faiz Sukor • Syafiq Ali Am •• Yuhanis Ibrahim • Ilham Fadhli Shaimy • Faizal Sidik • Shahar Koyok • Nur Azlina Zulkafli • Taufiq Mohd • Abdul Razak Osman • Fouzia Hassan Abdullah • Noraini Ibrahim • Nor Suraya Johari •

Launched by YM Sharifah Nor Akmar Syed Nahar Director NN Gallery

On Saturday, 21 February 2009 at 8.15pmat R A Fine Arts - The Gallery (The exhibition is from 20 February - 2 March 2009)

GO BLOCK: Five Contemporary Malaysian Printmakers

2009-02-19T16:31:00.003+08:00

GO BLOCK: Five Contemporary Malaysian Printmaker

Venue: Main Gallery5 Feb 2009 - 15 Mar 2009
GO BLOCK: Five Contemporary Malaysian Printmakers celebrates contemporary printmaking

in Malaysia by showcasing new works by five artists - Juhari Said, Ng Kim Peow, Izan Tahir, Zulkifli Yusoff and Shahrul Jamili - all of whom have made significant ontributions to the developement of contemporary printmaking as well as the most importantly, its impact on the Malaysian art movement today reflects the dynamic and innovative nature of contempirary printmaking.

The exhibition publication GO BLOCK, limited edition commemorative postcards and mug are available for purchase at the GALERI Shop . Publication: RM 90 l Postcards(6): RM15 l Mug: RM20

Global Economic Crisis and the Asian Art Market

2009-02-19T15:56:00.002+08:00

Refer to :- Eddy Soetriyono

Global Economic Crisis

There is no doubt that economic factors do influence the art market, but the domino effect of the current global economic crisis leaves anyone without accurate prediction of its extent.
Though centered in North America, the sub-prime mortgage crisis in the United States in July 2007 made its impact felt globally, because loans issued in the real estate sector are linked to the world banking sector.

With the bankruptcy of 158 year-old Lehman Brothers Holding Inc., the fourth largest investment bank in the U.S., on 15 September 2008, the storm has now blown up to immense proportions a. Until recently, Lehman Brothers was known as the “professor of global finance”, it was a quality mainstay of the economic sector. However, today this “quality” has faded, with its shares nothing more than junk; not worth the paper they are printed on. Taken with a series of other cases, including the Enron energy debacle, and the Arthur Anderson bookkeeping scandal, which also sullied the names of the bankers J.P. Morgan and Merrill Lynch, the Lehman Brother bankruptcy has become a symbol of the lack of integrity in the market economy, which was analyzed in detail by 2001 Nobel Prize winner for economics, Joseph Stiglitz, in his books titled Globalization and Its Discontents and The Roaring Nineties: A New History of the World’s Most Prosperous Decade.

There is no denying it; the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers has made investors question the credibility of other such institutions, not only on Wall Street, but all over the world. All of this has vastly expanded the meaning of “investment risk”; including for those who view art objects as investment items. This bankruptcy is also sure to have a domino impact on corporations globally, meaning the world economy is teetering on the brink of disaster.
Nevertheless, in the midst of the collapse of asset value as a result of the crisis in the United States, funds from the emerging markets (including in Asia) are pouring into this distressed superpower. Billions of investment dollars are going into the bonds being sold by the Bush administration.

As a result, the bankruptcies of Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns, Fannie Mae, or even Washington Mutual, have not caused America to lose its credibility, neither have they caused investors to fear putting their funds into the United States. America’s country risk ranking has not decreased. People still prefer to hang on to U.S. dollars over any other currency, making the American dollar increasingly strong and invulnerable against the currencies of Asia - the won, rupee, peso, baht, rupiah, ringgit, and the Singapore dollar. Such a situation is certain to trigger inflation, with the result being that the public’s buying power will decrease.
In view of the importance of the above issues, C-ARTS Special Edition focuses Point of View column on the theme Global Economic Crisis and the Asian Art Market, which will seek meaning in this crisis, and, through a series of articles, put together a number of observations and opinions about what steps must be taken by auction houses and galleries in the face of this global economic crisis.

While it particularly relates to the world of art in Indonesia as a measuring rod for art circles in Southeast Asia, C-Arts regular edition (January 2009) will continue the indepth discussion. (#Special Edition)

2009-01-28T22:58:00.004+08:00

DRAWINGS

Drawing is a visual art that makes use of any number of drawing instruments to mark a two-dimensional medium. Common instruments include graphite pencils, pen and ink, inked brushes, wax color pencils, crayons, charcoals, chalk, pastels, markers, stylus, or various metals like silverpoint. An artist who practices or works in drawing may be referred to as a draftsman or draughtsman.A small amount of material is released onto the two dimensional medium which leaves a visible mark—the process is similar to that of painting. The most common support for drawing is paper, although other materials such as cardboard, plastic, leather, canvas and board, may be used. Temporary drawings may be made on a blackboard or whiteboard, or indeed almost anything. The medium has also become popular as a means of public expression via graffiti art, because of the easy availability of permanent markers.

Drawing is a form of visual expression and is one of the major forms within the visual arts. There are a number of subcategories of drawing, including cartooning. Certain drawing methods or approaches, such as "doodling" and other informal kinds of drawing such as drawing in the fog a shower leaves on a bathroom mirror, or the surrealist method of "entoptic graphomania", in which dots are made at the sites of impurities in a blank sheet of paper, and lines are then made between the dots, may or may not be considered as part of "drawing" as a "fine art."

The word 'drawing' is used as both a verb and a noun: Drawing (verb) is the act of making marks on a surface so as to create an image, form or shape. The produced image is also called a drawing (noun). A quick, unrefined drawing may be defined as a sketch.

In simplistic terms, drawing is distinct from painting, perhaps more so in the Western view; East Asian art, which generally only uses brushes, has historically made less distinction between the two. Critics may praise a painter's ability to draw well, meaning that the shapes, especially of the human body, are well-articulated, or a drawing may be considered painterly. Adding confusion, similar tools and media may be used in both tasks. Dry media normally associated with drawing, such as chalk, may be used in pastel painting. Drawing may be done with liquid media applied with brushes or pens. Similar supports likewise can serve both: painting generally involves the application of liquid paint onto prepared canvas or panels, but sometimes an underdrawing is drawn first on that same support.

Drawing is generally concerned with the marking of lines and areas of tone onto paper, but watercolor painting uses a paper support. Traditional drawings were monochrome, or at least had little colour,while modern coloured-pencil drawings may approach or cross the boundary (if there is one) between drawing and painting. The term drawing suggests a process and intent that is distinct from the traditional act of painting. While there are drawings that are finished artworks, drawing is often exploratory, with considerable emphasis on observation, problem solving and composition, often as a means of preparation for a painting. In contrast, traditional painting is often a means of execution or finishing an artwork. It is fair to note that modern painters often incorporate methods of drawing in their painting process, particarly in the early stages of a painting.

Tone in Drawing

Line drawing in sanguine by Leonardo da Vinci

Gustave Doré's drawing of Orlando Furioso defeating a sea monster

Shading is the technique of varying the tonal values on the paper to represent the shade of the material as well as the placement of the shadows. Careful attention to reflected light, shadows, and highlights can result in a very realistic rendition of the image.
Blending uses an implement to soften or spread the original drawing strokes. Blending is most easily done with a medium that does not immediately fix itself, such as graphite, chalk, or charcoal, although freshly applied ink can be smudged, wet or dry, for some effects. For shading and blending, the artist can use a blending stump, tissue, a kneaded eraser, a fingertip, or any combination of them. A piece of chamois is useful for creating smooth textures, and for removing material to lighten the tone. Continuous tone can be achieved with graphite on a smooth surface without blending, but the technique is laborious, involving small circular or oval strokes with a somewhat blunt point.

Shading techniques that also introduce texture to the drawing include hatching and stippling. There are a number of other methods for producing texture in the picture: in addition to choosing a suitable paper, the type of drawing material and the drawing technique will result in different textures. Texture can be made to appear more realistic when it is drawn next to a contrasting texture; a coarse texture will be more obvious when placed next to a smoothly blended area. A similar effect can be achieved by drawing different tones in close proximity; a light edge next to a dark background will stand out to the eye, and almost appear to float above the surface.

" 3 VIEW " -Bachelor Hons Degree Fine Art Exhibition Show

2008-12-09T11:07:00.013+08:00

" 3 VIEW"

Seni memberikan satu impak kepada pengamalnya serta kepada umum dan sekaligus menjadi sumber melontarkan pandangan tentang hal-ehwal semasa di sekeliling kita.Berikutan dengan itu,isu serta tema menjadi penyampai secara visual dalam bentuk karya seni.Ini dapat dilihat dalam karya pameran yang bertajuk ’3 View’ .Pameran ini dihasilkan oleh para pelajar semester akhir Ijazah Sarjan Muda Dengan Kepujian, Jabatan Seni Halus, Fakulti Seni Lukis dan Seni Reka, Universiti Teknologi Mara ( UiTM ), Shah Alam.

Menjenguk kembali kepada erti ‘3 View ‘ yang menjadi tajuk pameran adalah merangkumi tiga aspek disiplin yang menjadi pendekatan dalam penyampaian hasil karya seni iaitu Seni Catan,Seni Cetakan dan Seni Arca.Ketiga-tiga disiplin ini disatukan dalam pameran ini bagi menghasilkan satu komunikasi diantara karya serta pelajar dan akhirnya ia melahirkan sifat kerjasama sesama sendiri.Dengan pada itu, ’View’ pula sebenarnya gabungan maksud Variety,idea,element,work.

Jika dilihat maksud ini secara terperinci dengan lebih mendalam sebenarnya adalah bercirikan hasil karya yang dipamerkan dengan kepelbagaian gabungan idea berdasarkan elemen seni.Secara tidak langsung ia sebenarnya memberikan satu kaedah penyampai dalam bentuk seni visual.Akhirnya ia menjadi satu perkataan iaitu ‘View’ yang bermaksud pandangan nescaya ini berlaku dalam proses penghayatan dan melihat.Proses ini juga sememangnya berlaku dalam diri setiap pengkarya dengan sifat atau kaedah observation,interpretation dan judgement.Ini kita dapat lihat dalam teori falsafah seni dan estetik spertimana di ketengahkan oleh Roger Fry yang mengatakan bahawa seni itu sesuatu yang dihayati bagi kepentingan seni itu.Jelasnya lagi,memaparkan aspek bentukan sesuatu seni juga sebagai gambaran ekspresi tentang sesuatu imaginasi pelukis dan akhirnya ekspresi ini dapat memberikan persepsi yang jelas dan kebebasan emosi sepenuhnya.

Dalam pameran kali ini,para pelajar memaparkan idea-idea yang berunsurkan dan bertemakan isu semasa dengan mengaitkan makna,persoalan,provokasi dengan interprestasi yang berbeza-beza.Selain daripada itu ada juga yang berkongsi pengalaman peribadi bersama audien serta menonjolkan persepsi kepada umum dalam hasil karya seni.Dengan kehadiran idea yang berbeza ia lantas menghubungkan sesuatu bahan sebagai kaedah,medium atau subjek dalam menghasilkan karya seni sepertimana yang dipamerkan.Ini juga menjadi satu proses eksperimental dalam sesi pembelajaran bagi menghasilkan serta meghayati karya seni.

Pameran ini juga mencerminkan beberapa aliran atau stail pembawakan karya dengan gabungan moden dan tradisional seperti,Realism,Abstract,Dadaism,Surrealism,Popart,dan Islamic art.Ini adalah berikutan dalam proses mencari serta mengolah sesuatu maksud dalam erti seni.Demikianlah gambaran sepintas lalu akan pameran ‘3 View ‘ di mana para pelajar tidak hanya meghasilkan karya malah ia sebenarnya proses dalam menimba ilmu serta menimbulkan pengalaman.

Ucapan jutaan terima kasih kepada barisan pensyarah Jabatan Seni Halus serta pegawai teknikal jabatan dalam menghulurkan bantuan,penyampaian ilmu,pendapat serta tenaga.Saya mewakili para pelajar Jabatan Seni Halus,Fakulti Seni Lukis Dan Seni Reka mengucapkan sekali lagi jutaan terima kasih kepada barisan pensyarah dan pihak Fakulti serta kepada pihak yang telah berusaha keras membantu menjayakan pameran ini,sekian.

Persoalan-Seni dan Globalisasi

2008-11-10T12:31:00.001+08:00

Seni dan Globalisasi

Persoalan tentang globalisasi semakin menarik perhatian semenjak akhir-akhir ini. Globalisasi yang semakin melebarkan ufuk jajahannya ke merata dunia sebenarnya telah lama wujud. Globalisasi secara harfiahnya bermaksud sejagat atau seluruh dunia bermakna bahawa segala aspek kehidupan samada dari segi budaya, kesenian, ekonomi, sosial dan sebagainya kini tiada lagi batas sempadan antara satu bangsa, negara atau peradaban. Secara mudahnya kini tiada lagi unsur pemisah yang ketara antara sesebuah kebudayaan, kesenian, strata sosial antara satu bangsa dengan satu bangsa atau satu negara dengan negara yang lain. Wujud pula satu kampung kesejagatan untuk seluruh dunia. Maka timbullah sikap saling mempengaruhi antara satu budaya dengan budaya yang lain. Pada era ini, penapisan menjadi sesuatu yang amat mustahil.Ditinjau dari aspek tawarikh manusia, globalisasi telah bermula semenjak dahulu.

Ini dapat dilihat dari pengkajian sejarah seni terutama seni tampak apabila unsur-unsur seni arca dalam sejarah seni Roman yang mendapat pengaruh seni arca Greek Purba. Catan Van Gogh banyak mendapat pengaruh cetakan kayu Ukiyo-E Jepun. Salah sebuah catan Picasso contohnya mendapat ilham dari arca-arca kayu Afrika. Malah komposer Impresionis, Debussy (sezaman dengan Impressionist Fine Artist; Degas, Renoir, Manet & Monet) mendapat pengaruh muzik Gamelan dalam sesetengah komposisi beliau. Demikian antara contoh kecil kesan globalisasi terhadap bidang kesenian. Apabila berlakunya penjajahan maka globalisasi semakin menanjak. Ini bermakna sesebuah bangsa atau negara yang dijajah atau lemah akan ‘dimakan’ oleh sesebuah bangsa atau negara yang kuat atau si penjajah. Ini akan menghakis unsur-unsur budaya, kesenian dan kepercayaan terutamanya dan akan menyebabkan kejatidirian sesebuah bangsa akan pupus. Bangsa yang menjajah akan dipandang sebagai kuat, gagah dan lebih bertamadun. Maka berlakulah penjajahan minda secara tidak langsung. Bangsa yang terjajah sedikit demi sedikit akan mengikut segala aspek penghidupan bangsa yang menjajah. Globalisasi semakin meluas setelah berlakunya pelbagai penemuan dalam bidang sains dan teknologi dan menemui kemuncaknya dalam Revolusi Industri yang telah memecahkan sistem totem dan taboo milik sesebuah bangsa. Dengan terciptanya mesin pencetak, maka wujud pula kuasa massa di pihak Barat. Segala bentuk ilmu dari Barat dengan mudah dapat diedar kemana-mana sahaja. Contohnya jika sebelum Revolusi Industri seni muzik hanya dimain dan dapat dinikmati di dewan-dewan atau istana pembesar dan hanya berlegar dalam kelompok golongan bangsawan dan kaya-raya maka setelah revolusi ianya dapat dinikmati dan dimainkan oleh orang ramai dirumah-rumah mereka sendiri apabila manuskrip muzik dapat dicetak dan diedarkan dalam jumlah yang banyak.

Penjajahan fizikal yang berlaku juga telah banyak memecahkan sistem totem dan taboo sesebuah bangsa. Kepercayaan-kepercayaan yang menjadi anutan sesebuah bangsa telah dihapuskan oleh si penjajah dengan mencanangkan keburukan dan kehodohan sesebuah sistem milik masyarakat yang terjajah. Mereka juga membawa bersama kepercayaan, budaya dan pemikiran mereka yang kononnya lebih bertamadun dan maju. Secara tidak sedar telah berlaku globalisasi dari segi bahasa contohnya. Sehingga kini globalisasi bahasa semakin memuncak dengan kemunculan teknologi maklumat. Tidak mustahil ia akan menelan bahasa lain yang tiada keupayaan untuk maju. Kuasa massa Barat semakin berpengaruh sejak penciptaan radio, televisyen dan kini dengan perkembangan teknologi maklumat. Seni yang tercipta di Amerika contohnya kini boleh didapati dimana-mana pelusuk dunia. Dengan propaganda melalui media massa seperti media cetak dan elektronik, globalisasi kesenian mula berkembang. Bangsa yang pernah terjajah yang hilang segala akar jatidiri mereka akan mudah terpengaruh dengan bentuk kuasa baru ini. Lebih malang kita mengambil segala ideologi ciptaan mereka dan disumbatkan kedalam bentuk seni kita tanpa menapis apa yang perlu. Seni warisan sesebuah bangsa dan peradaban yang tiada keupayaan untuk berkembang atau yang masih statik akan mula hilang ditelan oleh globalisasi. Kita harus ingat seni muzik popular contohnya bukan hanya berkait dengan muzik namun membawa bersamanya pemikiran, ideologi, budaya, kostum dan gaya atau stail berbahasa, berjalan, bercakap dan sebagainya. Himpunan budaya baru ini tidak mustahil akan menelan akar budaya atau kejatidirian bangsa yang pernah terjajah. Dengan wujudnya propaganda melalui kuasa massa, globalisasi dalam kesenian dari barat akan menelan guyup segala budaya dan akar pemikiran bangsa lain.

Dengan kuasa massa, falsafah seni hiburan popular yang hanya menekankan keseronokan sementara dan tipu muslihat tersembunyi, menjadi senjata paling berkesan untuk mempengaruhi sikap dan tindak-tanduk para remaja. Apa yang dapat dilihat dan didengar oleh para remaja akan memberi kesan kepada mereka walaupun hanya dalam masa seminit dua. Para remaja yang rata-ratanya tiada kuasa saring atau sistem nilai yang kukuh antara aspek positif dan negatif akan mudah terikut. Ini akan menyebabkan mereka memandang rendah akar budaya bangsa sendiri dan menganggapnya kolot serta ketinggalan zaman. Apatah lagi untuk memperjuangkannya! Dalam seni rupa, arus gerakan modernisme, post-modernisme, pluralisme semakin berkembang pesat. Malangnya terdapat falsafah dan ideologi seni yang menghapuskan nilai agama dan sikap hidup positif. Ini menjadi semakin parah apabila timbul fahaman Art for the Art Sake atau Seni untuk Seni . Demi seni, semuanya boleh. Menurut Drs.Sidi Gazalba, ia menyebabkan segala bentuk lukisan dan filem porno boleh, ucapan-ucapan cabul boleh, cerita yang merangsang kejahatan boleh, asal untuk seni, asal semuanya itu diciptakan atas nama seni. Semuanya serba boleh. Globalisasi sebenarnya memiliki nilai positif dan negatif. Aspek positifnya ialah wujudnya budaya ilmu yang menyeluruh, sistem rujukan yang bersepadu dan kemudahan mendapatkan idea yang berharga. Namun keburukannya tetap akan wujud seperti kepupusan sistem nilai dan pemikiran sesebuah bangsa jika kita tidak berhati-hati dalam menyaring sesebuah maklumat. Kita seharusnya bijak dalam menangani isu globalisasi dan menggunakannya sebaik yang mungkin untuk kemajuan. Sudah tentulah aspek paling penting ialah ilmu. Ilmu adalah kuasa dan seharusnya penggiat dan penseni tempatan melengkapkan diri dengan ilmu yang sesuai dengan tuntutan zaman kerana kita berkarya adalah mengikut acuan zaman dan masyarakat yang kita duduki.

Pandangan seniman atau penggiat seni sewajarnya mewakili pandangan dan worldview masyarakat setempat dan seantero dunia. Namun bukanlah pula terlalu mengikut kehendak dan pasaran antarabangsa. Ini akan menghilangkan daya kreativiti dalam berkarya. Akan wujud pula masalah lain seperti isu establisment dan ‘play-safe’ demi menjaga periuk nasi. Sewajarnya penggiat seni mengambil bahagian yang cergas dalam globalisasi untuk menyebarkan pula keindahan dan kemajuan dalam kesenian dan kebudayaan kita. Jika kita bertindak menentang arus atau tidak mahu mengikut perkembangan sains dan teknologi sezaman dikhuatiri segala unsur peradaban, kebudayaan dan kesenian bangsa akan lenyap ditelan oleh arus globalisasi. Kini adalah masa terbaik untuk seniman dan penggiat seni memikiri langkah terbaik dalam menyebarkan jati jiwa kesenian kita yang berlandaskan kebudayaan dan kesenian tempatan.

Pembawaan Karya Moden Malaysia

2008-09-08T01:47:00.000+08:00

coming soon...

Pengkaryaan dan Nilai

2008-09-08T01:26:00.000+08:00

Pengkaryaan dan Nilai

Setiap karya seni yang baik seharusnya mendukung dua asas atau nilai utama dalam pengkaryaan iaitu nilai intrinsik dan ekstrinsik. Apabila berbicara berkenaan seni, pokok utama pembicaraan yang membezakan karya seni dengan bidang kebenaran lain seperti falsafah, ilmu pengetahuan (terkandung di dalamnya bidang sains, teknologi, kejuruteraan, perubatan dan lain-lain) dan agama ialah apakah nilai yang terkandung di dalamnya.Persoalan nilai tidak bisa dipersoalkan lagi di dalam agama, tambah pula agama samawi yang bersumber dari wahyu. Namun persoalan nilai membezakan seni dengan falsafah dan ilmu pengetahuan. Ilmu pengetahuan seperti bidang sains, teknologi dan kejuruteraan misalnya tidak berbicara tentang nilai. Bidang ini berbicara tentang praktikalitinya, tentang aspek kegunaan dan fizikal semata-mata. Bidang falsafah juga tidak dapat berbicara tentang nilai kerana falsafah adalah upaya manusia untuk mengenal kebenaran dan mengenal nilai, buruk atau baik. Ia hanya berupaya mengenal nilai tetapi tidak membuat pilihan. Nilai intrinsik ialah pembicaraan tentang aspek-aspek formalistik, ikonografi dan fizikal.

Mengapakah seni catan itu cantik dan enak di pandang mata, mengapakah seni muzik itu sedap didengar telinga, mengapakah lakon itu sehingga membuatkan menitis airmata, mengapakah pergerakan di dalam suatu seni tari menggugah perasaan; pendeknya nilai yang terkandung aspek-aspek fizikal yang terlihat, dapat didengar, dapat ditonton oleh indera fizikal. Itulah dia nilai-nilai intrinsik.Nilai-nilai ekstrinsik ialah diskusi berkenaan aspek kejiwaan, falsafah, psikologi iaitu nilai-nilai yang tidak dapat dinilai oleh indera yang fizikal, ianya serba noumena, transendental dan ghaib. Ia hanya bisa dirasai oleh jiwa, intuisi dan naluri dengan pendekatan ilmu, falsafah, kebudayaan setempat dan jatidiri insan. Justeru dapat dikatakan dua nilai yang berganding ini dapat membuahkan hasil yang baik dan jitu di dalam sesebuah karya seni.Namun kedapatan juga seni yang tidak mempunyai dua-dua nilai ini sekaligus didalamnya. Seringnya terjadi apabila nilai entrinsik yang terpinggir dan jarang pula nilai intrinsik tidak diberi perhatian. Ini dapat sedikit sebanyak menjawab mengapa sesebuah karya seni itu tidak bertahan lama dan mati dalam sekelip mata. Contohnya karya seni kartun atau komik yang mempunyai nilai-nilai intrinsik namun tidak punya atau terlalu kurangnya nilai ekstrinsik (perlu difahami kebanyakan kartun dan komik adalah untuk memenuhi tuntutan seni yang berbentuk popular dan menjurus kepada kanak-kanak).

Maka seni ini akan mati dan tidak akan dibicarakan lagi oleh masyarakat. Namun karya-karya kartun Datuk Lat misalnya, hidup dan diberi perhatian istimewa kerana kekayaan nilai-nilai ekstrinsik didalamnya. Karya-karya seni yang punya dua nilai tersebut juga bisa mati jika masyarakat sendiri teramat lemah pengetahuan dalam kesenian. Karya seni yang baik seperti novel sastera Hujan Pagi; teater, Tiang Seri Tegak Berlima; bidang seni halus, siri Pago-pago, Wayang, Don't Play During Maghrib, Power I & II (menyebut sekadar beberapa contoh) dan sebagainya yang kaya dengan nilai-nilai intrinsik dan ekstrinsik akan mati kerana masyarakat tidak berupaya menyelami aspek-aspek kejiwaan, falsafah, moral dan budaya yang terkandung di dalam sesebuah karya seni. Ketidakupayaan ini bersumber dari pelbagai saluran. Secara amnya kerana kurangnya bersemarak bidang kritikan dan apresiasi seni di media-media massa, pendidikan yang kurang menekankan seni dari aspek keilmuan, penonjolan besar-besaran terhadap seni hiburan yang memaparkan 'artis-artis' yang sebenarnya bukan karyawan sehingga menimbulkan kekeliruan dalam masyarakat, kelemahan pihak pentadbir dalam menyediakan dana dan peruntukan untuk karyawan, kekurangan dari aspek penyelidikan dan pembangunan dan pelbagai sebab lagi. Pendeknya pengkarya seni yang layak dipanggil seniman (tidak sekadar pelukis, penulis picisan, pembuat filem komersial) selain dari berupaya menyingkap permasalahan masyarakatnya, beliau juga harus sentiasa memperbaharui keilmuan.

Ini yang dapat membezakannya dari penseni biasa kerana seniman yang tulen seharusnya menjadi SESUNGUT MASYARAKAT dan PEMIKIR YANG BERKARYA bukan sekadar melukis seindahnya dan masyarakat pula mengagung dan mengagumi ketepatan lukisannya yang luar biasa dan seolah-olah hidup! Ini meliputi semua seniman samada sastera, teater, filem, tarian dan sebagainya. Seniman tulen adalah mereka yang berupaya MENAFSIR dan MENGHURAI bukan sekadar MENTERJEMAH.

Meninjau pameran DISCLOSURE-Ahmad Zakii Anwar

2008-09-07T23:38:00.000+08:00

DISCLOSURE – Ahmad Zakii Anwar,Gallery Petronas 10 Jul 2008 - 24 Aug 2008

This solo exhibition features the works of Ahmad Zakii Anwar, one of Malaysia's leading figurative painters. A major influence on the development of figurative realism within painting in contemporary Malaysian art practice, this exhibition traces the development as well as future direction taken by Ahmad Zakii Anwar in his career as an artist.

Pada bulan yang lalu,saya bersama pensyarah saya meninjau serta menikmati satu lagi karya seni Malaysia kontemporari.Yang dimaksudkan ialah artis tempatan negara kita iaitu Ahmad Zaki Anwar.Karya Ahmad zaki Anwar sememangnya indah dan direka dengan cantik sekali.Dari perspektif mata kasar sememangnya karya beliau amat hebat dan memartabatkan lagi seni kontemporari negara kita yang menuju kearah yang lebih moden.

Pensyarah saya(best buddies lecturer):En.Farid,Fakulti Seni Lukis dan Seni Reka,UITM

Karya-karya beliau menyentuh elemen rupa,bentuk,alam benda yang menuju kearah erotik dan menimbulkan suasana ekspresi.Dengan itu timbul beberapa watak-watak yang cuba diwujudkan.Walaupun beliau berlatar-belakangkan seorang pelajar grafik pada mulanya,namun ini tidak menghalang beliau mengembangkan sayap ke dalam bidang yang mungkin lebih sinonim dengan nama Seni Halus.Jenis Naturalisme batin yang dibawa Zakii secara semulajadi

mempunyai tempat yang agak menarik di dalam sejarah seni moden Malaysia yang masih dikuasai oleh seni catan figuratif,walaupun baru-baru ini terdapat kebangkitan media alternatif baru dalam ekspresinya.

Meskipun begitu,pelukis ini terus komited kepada karya catan yang serius dan kecatan di dalam zaman sejarah seni semasa yang dicabar oleh alam seni yang padat dengan manipulasi bahan baru dan fotografi.Justeru itu,apreasis kritikal mengenai jenis realisme Zakii adalah tepat pada masanya-bukan sahaja pada tahap estetik dan komersil tetapi juga untuk mencari konteks kontemporarinya di dalam sejarah seni Malaysia yang sedang bergelora dengan polemik teori pensejarahan.

Sudahkah Seni Halus Merdeka?

2008-09-07T22:31:00.000+08:00

MERDEKA! Merdeka! Merdeka! - Laungan yang kini telah menjadi suatu macam upacara ritual (bagi mereka yang tidak memahami erti sebenar kemerdekaan).
Hanya menjerit dan bersorak kerana setiap tahun itulah caranya kita memberi tanda bahawa kita telah pun berdiri di atas kaki sendiri tanpa penjajahan. Tak kisah sama ada itu satu pendekatan yang tepat atau tidak. Yang penting kita telah pun selesa dengan cara itu.

Dalam mendepani glokalisme, kita perlu memperkasakan diri dan akar budi kita terlebih dahulu sebelum menunjukkan keperkasaan kita agar setanding dengan tamadun luar.
Biarlah orang ekonomi bercakap fasal ekonominya. Orang politik dengan politikalnya, masing-masing individu bercakap fasal keperluan masing-masingnya.Seni halus di dalam kamus dewan bermaksud suatu hasil karya yang halus buatannya di contoh pula dengan hasil catan, arca dan ukiran.

Manakala bidang kerjanya pula termasuk pelukis, pengukir dan pengarca. Kefahaman ini nampaknya telah dijumudkan sekian lama.Mungkin kerana ilmu seni halus yang juga dikenali sebagai seni visual atau fine art dalam bahasa Inggerisnya dan di Indonesia sebagai seni murni telah melalui proses pembelajaran dan proses keilmuannya di Barat, maka makna yang diterima pakai oleh kita juga dipengaruhi Barat. Sejarah seni, suatu subjek yang perlu diketahui oleh seniman seni halus yang serius juga berlandaskan Barat.

Nama-nama seperti Leonardo Da Vincci, Salvador Dali, Jackson Pollock, Andy Warhol dan beberapa nama yang menjadi ikon dalam seni halus juga nampaknya orang-orang Barat belaka.
Mungkin saya perlu turun sedikit dalam ruang lingkup seni di Malaysia sudah memadai.
Nama-nama seperti Ibrahim Hussein, Abdullah Ariff, Syed Ahmad Jamal, Zakaria Ali dan beberapa nama yang menjadi ikon di dalam sejarah seni halus di Malaysia juga telah mengamalkan perkara yang sama. Malah terdapat pula tafsiran yang mengatakan seni halus hanyalah hasil karya yang melibatkan berus, cat minyak dan kanvas seperti mana yang telah diamalkan di dalam seni catan moden.

Sehingga ke hari ini, kefahaman ini telah membawa kepada beberapa pecahan contoh hasil seni halus yang diberi makna baru seperti kraftangan seni halus, barangan ukiran seni halus, lukisan pemandangan seni halus, lukisan potret seni halus dan sebagainya.
Semuanya kerana kita faham bahawa apa saja hasil kerja tangan yang halus itu adalah seni halus.Ada juga yang melihat seni halus sebagai sesuatu yang abstrak. Asalkan hasil seni itu tidak difahami secara lateral, maka seni haluslah ia.

Pengamal aliran Abstract Expressionist, German Expressionist dan Neo Expressionist mempunyai pegangan tertentu berdasarkan ilmu yang diamalkan.
Bukanlah semata untuk dikategorikan ke dalam ruang lingkup seni halus.
Namun, agak mengecewakan apabila terdapatnya pelukis-pelukis yang sengaja menghasilkan karya abstrak sebegitu sedangkan proses keilmuan ekspressionisnya tidak ada. Pelarian kepada kemahiran formalistik yang diajar Barat.
Dalam memperjuangkan nasionalisme, makin ramai kolektor seni halus di Malaysia, tanpa sedar menyimpan koleksi-koleksi dan mungkin sedang berangan untuk menambah lagi koleksi karya (kebanyakan catan) yang pada fahaman mereka, cukup bersifat kebangsaan.
Padahal, pengkarya yang menghasilkan karya-karya itu sedang mengamalkan fahaman Barat di dalam karya mereka.

Bukanlah saya mempersoalkan tentang boleh atau tidak pengkarya menghasilkan karya dengan kemahiran yang diperolehi dari Barat itu, cuma cukuplah sekadar memahami formalistik penghasilan karya dan bagaimana menggunakan ilmu itu untuk melihat dan memperlihatkan rupa dan bentuk akar budi kita ke dalam karya masing-masing.

Toleh ke belakang

Cuba kita toleh ke belakang sebentar, ke zaman awal tamadun manusia, zaman batu awal, zaman pra moden.Bagaimana manusia menggunakan segala yang ada di sekeliling dalam menghasilkan karya. Lukisan di gua-gua batu, penghasilan beliung, tembikar dan sebagainya dihasilkan berdasarkan rasa hati yang halus dan kepercayaan yang ada pada masa itu.
Paradigma kita pada masa itu adalah tanah. Maka tanah yang menjadi sumber karya kita. Beralih pula ke zaman moden, zaman yang dikenali sebagai zaman mesin. Bermulalah hasil-hasil karya yang berparadigma mesin. Juga saya anggap sebagai zaman kolonial dalam seni. Zaman itulah yang menjadi permulaan kepada amalan seni halus yang kebanyakan kita percaya dan masih amalkan sekarang.

Zaman kini, zaman berparadigma akan maklumat, zaman pasca moden. Segala karya juga berteraskan maklumat. Sebagai contoh multimedia, video dan grafik berkomputer. Maka wujudlah pula karya-karya yang berunsur hybrid.Walau apa pun jua zaman yang dilalui, akar budi kita masih di sini. Segala karya kita perlulah berakar budi Malaysia. Jangan pula kita menjadi penyambung penjajahan baru dalam seni halus dengan mengagung-agungkan gaya karya Barat.Cukuplah Barat menjadi tukang yang memberi makna kepada karya kita, pemberi istilah. Kalau catan dan arca telah dibanggakan-banggakan sebagai karya berasal dari Barat, kita pula perlu berbangga dengan multi media yang asalnya dari kita, Kepulauan Nusantara! Cuma juga, istilahnya ditukar lagi oleh Barat.

Bagaimanakah itu mungkin? Melihat makna multi media (media pelbagai yang dipersembahkan di dalam satu himpunan bersama media-media lain) telah mengimbas kembali kita terhadap karya seni terdahulu - persembahan wayang kulit. Terdapat unsur-unsur multi media di dalamnya. Alatan muzik (audio), paparan layar (visual) diterajui pula oleh Tok Dalang sebagai perantara interaktif dalam menjalankan dan menguasai persembahan itu. Bezanya kini, sistem multi media dijalankan oleh ramai Tok Dalang (pengguna) yang wujud dalam era Teknologi Maklumat. Saya bimbang dengan kewujudan pengkarya kolonial yang telah menyebabkan seni halus di Malaysia jatuh ke tahap jawatan sokongan bukan jawatan profesional seperti mana peguam, doktor, ahli korporat dan lain-lain. Walau pada asalnya, makna seni halus itu sendiri membawa maksud paling seni dan mikro saiznya. Sebagaimana suatu struktur itu bermula dengan satu sel yang seni, membentuk satu organ dan bergerak bersama-sama struktur yang lebih besar. Kalau kita lihat, hanya segelintir kecil pengkarya seni halus di Malaysia berkarya berasaskan pegangan akar budi masing-masing. Mungkin ada di antara mereka menggunakan pelbagai jenis media dalam menterjemahkan karya mereka.

Namun, pendirian mereka jelas terlihat melalui karya masing-masing. Nama-nama seperti Hasnul Jamal Saidon, Abdul Latif Mohidin, Ismail Zain dan Wong Hoey Cheong di samping nama-nama lain memperlihatkan pegangan akar budi di dalam kebanyakan karya mereka.
Ismail Zain dalam karya awalnya bermula dengan catan dan sutera saring sebagai alat terjemahan. Namun, pegangan akar budinya tetap tidak berubah walaupun setelah melalui angin perubahan dan menggunakan komputer sebagai media (pada ketika itu harga sebuah komputer hampir menyamai harga sebuah kereta Proton Saga).
Beliau telah menyerap penggunaan media yang sejajar dengan perubahan zaman, namun tetap memperlihatkan gaya karya Ismail Zain.

Gaya german expressionis dalam karya Abdul Latif Mohidin juga sebegitu. Walaupun teknik ekspresionis itu masih kekal, tetapi rupa karya beliau tetap memperlihatkan betapa jati diri Malaysianya masih kukuh.Beliau membuktikan bahawa ilmu yang dimiliki hanyalah sebagai asas dalam menghasilkan karya Malaysia. Ini juga dapat dilihat di dalam karya puisi beliau.
Manakala Hasnul Jamal Saidon dan Wong Hoey Cheong pula sentiasa berubah bahan untuk terjemahan karya yang difikirkan sesuai berdasarkan kajian ilmiah mereka. Belum cukup rasanya dengan terbinanya bangunan-bangunan yang menyimpan khazanah seni di negara ini jika mentaliti dan isi di dalamnya bukan milik kita. Harapan agar karya-karya yang wujud selepas merdeka ini memperlihatkan unsur kemerdekaan yang sebenar. Apakah seniman di Malaysia telah menolak ke tepi pegangan kemahiran mereka berdasarkan keselesaan kemahiran barat yang mereka peroleh?

Apakah juga seniman di Malaysia tidak mempedulikan dan mahu mendalami kaedah lain serta alatan lain dalam menterjemahkan karya? Apakah sumbangan kita dalam me-merdekakan seni halus di tanah air yang telah merdeka secara politikalnya? Mungkin seni halus di Malaysia belum lagi merdeka sejajar dengan merdekanya Malaysia selama lebih 51 tahun ini.

Dari Kuala Lumpur ke Jogja,Indonesia

2008-07-15T05:31:00.000+08:00

26hb JUN - 2HB JULAI 2008

Pada 26hb Jun hingga 2hb Julai 2008,Saya dan beberapa artis tempatan menerokai dunia masyarakat Jogja,Indonesia yang selama ini banyak melahirkan visual artis serta seniman yang berbeza dengan negara kita.Walaupun ia mrupakan negara jiran kita,namun pemahaman terhadap principal and element of art tetap sama.Perbezaan bahasa pertuturan bukan halangan bagi mereka bergaul dengan seniman luar negara.Setiap karya mereka dihalusi dengan pelbagai art method sehingga menampakkan form yang sangat unik.Ini tidak dapat dinafikan lagi apabila kami melihat dengan sendiri bagaimana proses pengkaryaan yang sangat kreatif berlaku di kalangan masyarakat tempatan Jogja,Indonesia.Dengan pembangunan yang serba kekurangan,tidak disangka terdapat pelbagai corak pemikiran atau mentality yang kreatif dalam menghasilkan pelbagai hasil seni.

Masyarakatnya agak kekok apabila dibandingkan dengan negara kita tetapi sangat agresif dalam bidang seni kontemporari.Saya bersama Husin Hourmain dan Suhaimi menemui beberapa karekter seniman Jogja selama 5 hari berada disana.Mereka kelihatan sangat peramah dan mudah berkongsi ilmu seni apabila ditemui.Terdapat beberapa Art Festival Exhibition setibanya kami disana.Dengan bantuan beberapa artis tempatan Jogja,kami dapat melihat beberapa pameran yang tengah berlangsung disana.Selain itu juga kami dapat melihat beberapa studio serta proses pengkaryaan yang dijalankan oleh para seniman muda dan juga veteran Jogja.

Kebanyakkan karya artis Jogja menonjolkan isu-isu semasa lantas dipermainkan dengan pelbagai konsep seperti sinis dan ragam rakyat.Mereka juga seperti seniman di Malaysia mempunyai aliran tertentu dari abstract,impresionist,realist,surelist,popart,minimal art dan pelbagai lagi.Namun kekuatan mereka adalah dari segi pengideaan yang out of the box thinking.Ini dapat dilihat dari rata-rata hasil karya mereka dan tidak hanya dari segi karya catan malah seni arca(atau patung dalam kata lain nama indonesia),seni cetak dan juga seni photografi.Dalam masa yang sama,saya membuat beberapa visual searching mendapati bahawa mereka sentiasa melakukan exprimental art dalam menghasilkan karya mereka.

Jika dilihat dari perspektif kasar,setiap sapuan atau hasil kerja pengkaryaan mereka amat rapi dan sangat halus walaupun bergantung dengan mana-mana gaya aliran.Saya sempat menemui beberapa artis muda di Jogja yang boleh dianggap sangat master dalam seni kontemporari.Mereka kebanyakannya tidak terpengaruh dengan aspek medium yang digunakan.Maksudnya disini,setiap proses karya tidak terikat dengan faktor bahan.Mereka lebih bebas dalam pemilihan bahan.Ini mungkin atas dasar eksprimental yang sangat kuat.Kebanyakkan karya mereka lebih kuat atau cenderung dalam aliaran realism dan surrelism. Artis-artis di Jogja juga sangat kuat dalam semangat nasiolisme dan ini diterapkan dalam setiap karya-karya mereka fanatik menggabungkan aspek-aspek kenegaraan lalu ikon kemerdekaan mereka ketika dijajah oleh belanda