Art punctuated by emotions
When I go to the harbor at Olympia my view is filled with sailboats and yachts touched by rays of the sun shimmering off the water, but having grown up in Florida, afterwards my memories are filled with the scene being framed by those majestic Olympic Mountains. In his essay on photography Camera Lucida the cultural and media theorist Roland Barthes referred to photographic images being punctuated by these emotional elements.
Photo ©2007 Gordon Campbell
“It is this element which rises from the scene, shoots out of it like an arrow, and pierces me. A Latin word exists to designate this wound, this prick, this mark made by a pointed instrument… A photograph's punctum is that accident which pricks me (but also bruises me, is poignant to me.”
– Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida (pdf)
This idea of the punctum is what the artist Hank Willis Thomas says he had in mind when conceptualizing and then building the sculpture The Embrace, a tribute to Martin Luther King and Coretta Scott King on the Boston Common unveiled this year.
Hank Willis Thomas, The Embrace
In one of their typically outstanding profiles of artists and their work, Art 21 reveals how Thomas, who is also a photographer, researched and developed the idea for the sculpture based on a sense about the Kings in his heart, from a photo. And then came the work of collaborating with bronze workers at the Walla Walla Foundry in Washington to realize his vision.
MITCHELL JOHNSON - IT TAKES TIME
Menlo Park painter Mitchell Johnson creates a surreal visual tension between color, form, abstraction and figuration in his work that has a uniquely California feel. In fact his work has exhibited alongside Richard Diebenkorn and Wayne Thiebaud. His works are created from long, laborious processes that begin with sketches on locations and can take years to complete. He wants viewers to take time to study his careful arrangement of shapes and color, which evoke similar concepts shown in Kandinsky’s work a century earlier.
Mitchell Johnson, Orange Boat, 2020-2023 58x75 inches oil/canvas
Art critic Donald Kuspit writes:
Like all of Johnson’s works, a latent conflict is built into the scene, in the form of often abrupt contrasts of space and form. Strange as it may seem to say so, they are implicitly psychodramas disguised as physical drama. I am arguing that they have an emotional cutting edge, making them more than matter-of-factly descriptive and ingeniously abstract.
Johnson is a master of abstraction, as his oddly constructivist paintings show, but of unconscious feeling, for his geometry serves to contain and with that control the strong feelings implicit in his strong colors. Apart from that, his paintings are art historically important, because they seamlessly fuse abstraction and realism.
Johnson’s work is on display at 229 Hamilton Avenue gallery in Palo Alto, California through August 3rd.
Humanoid AI robot 'Ameca' at the summit. (Fabrice Coffrini/AFP)
SOUL CRUSHING AI ROBOTS!!
One artist told ARTnews that it feels like AI art generators that scrape the internet for their image data sets are appropriating his art.
“You develop this language that can work with many different projects because you bring something from yourself into the equation, a piece of your soul that somehow finds an angle, an atmosphere. And then this [AI-generated art] comes along. It’s passable, it sells. It doesn’t just replace you but it also muddies what you’re trying to do, which is to make art, find beauty. It’s really the opposite of that.”
A US District court judge is hearing motions in a suit filed by multiple artists against companies that have developed AI text to image generating tools like Stability AI, Midjourney and DALL-E. But based on a comment at a hearing last week the judge doesn’t sound like he’s inclined to rule in favor of the artists.
“I don’t think the claim regarding output images is plausible at the moment, because there’s no substantial similarity [between the images by the artists and images created by the AI image generators],” – Judge William Orrick
The judge seems to be skeptical that the few artists who have filed the suit could have affected the large language models used in the image sets made up from billions of images. Legal questions surrounding AI created imagery are certain to be addressed in future policy from the US Copyright Office.
