Re: neo-Pictorialism

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From: Kate Mahoney (kateb@paradise.net.nz)
Date: 10/06/03-07:31:10 PM Z


Clay said:

 Anyone looking at my
> stuff can see that I've personally taken a decisive stand and have a
> foot firmly planted in both camps.

I love this!!!! No reason not to take the whole gamut of what's available to
us and apply our own vision to it - that's what knowledge is all about isn't
it????

The only thing I've got against the tag of "neo-pictorialism" is the faint
odour of disapproval that wafts to me from "pictorialism". Being a product
of the postwar generation, when pictorialism was a no-no and we were to
stick severely to "realism", even through abstraction, neo-expressionism and
Malevich. Seems like we've finally caught on to what the painting world has
known for over a century - art is NOT about truth!!! It's about ART - and
the word artifice is rooted in the wrord ART so........is the Sistine
ceiling a lie??? Or an artifice??? Does anybody care??
And what about thoses peppers? Were they supposed to be read as
vegetables????? They may have been as sharp and real as all hell but they
were at the very least another sort of artifice in themselves.........

A short quote: "All clues. No solutions. That's the way things are. Plenty
of clues. No solutions."

                                                        Paul Auster, I think
from "City of Glass", quoted in Mark C. Taylor's "Hiding". The article is
about veiling and the shifting nature of reality....I think veiling is one
of the prime characteristics of pictorialism...idealising is another, which
in the harsh climate of post WWI must have seemed naive and ludicrous. As a
pampered child of the 50's where the land really did flow with milk and
honey, and ANY war was far away (especially from me here in the Pacific),
perhaps I was able to retrieve some of the idealism that my parents' and
grandparents' generations had lost in the trenches and the Great Depression.

Maybe the return of idealism in some form is just a rebound from the harsh
realities and hard, practical outlook of those past generations.

Kate Mahoney.


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