Feb

18

New Ideas in Art: Square the Circle

Filed Under Art Fart 

Rubik Sid Vicious

Details, in art history, have always occupied a unique space. Leonardo Da Vinci sketched drawing after drawing of any specimen, real or imagined, until the details no longer held mystery, and its meaning was understood. Georges Braque, if you’ll permit me, appreciated the essence of the details, so that still lifes rendered in segments could only be distinguished by key elements–marks, lines, forms–placed strategically on canvas.

Both artists are examples of the details studied and magnified, enlarged and deconstructed in service to best representing the spirit or underpinnings of object or image, idea or beauty. However, many years throughout the history of art, particularly painting, has seen the details shrink to size, so as not to offer a larger perspective, but just smallness in itself. A kind of reductivism that has found its own charm in being so hyper-focused, on its own, is unintelligible. Deconstruction–what it is to represent details–has long since surpassed parts into elements; molecules even. It has gone straight for the atom, and for the longest time, it has been represented as a circle too.

Pointillism, pioneered by Georges Seurat, is probably one of the earlier examples of details coming into a fine point. Rendered in a multitude of dots in various colours, pointillist paintings really create an atmosphere of where an image appears. Another example, Roy Lichtenstein’s signature Benday dots, exaggerated the texture of newsprint so the invisible became visible and the aesthetic became superior instead of simple.

Exceptions to the deconstructing details in dots are really disguised as other processes in painting; primarily the grid. Without the grid, Jennifer Bartlett’s dots and circles would have no unifying element to her work. Neither would Chuck Close’s ovals, amygdaloids, and spirals. Cubism? Could not exist. Cubism is really the grid, in chaos.

In recent years however, the famed dot, has surfaced with sharp corners and crisp edges. A global technological environment may be responsible. Points have become pixels with opposite effect. Where dots described, pixels, blur. The big picture, is wholly nullified. Process is undetectable.

Moreover, the aesthetics of machine is obscuring the human hand from impression. The pixel becomes a mitigating filter of everyone and everything which is now reduced to being the same, which is not, what details, initially was set out to do. Gerhard Richter demonstrates the dialectic in the stained glass windows –a superimposition of Richter’s 4096 Colours–created for the Cologne Cathedral. Man’s interaction with God, through a stained-glass, scrambled screen. The irony is so obvious, redemption becomes grossly silly.

A refreshing approach to the squared dot is made by the artist who goes by the name of Invader. Invader has created a series of works, he calls RubikCubism, where Rubik’s Cubes are stacked one on top of the other, side by side, to create a Rubik’s-Cube-ilated image. Portraits and places depicted are ones established in culture. The Mona Lisa, the Twin Towers, and Frankenstein are some examples. Invader is aware a limiting palette of red, yellow, orange, green, blue, and white, without any secondary results of mixed colours, requires easily identifiable images if the big picture is to be grasped.

In this way, the details, the coloured squares of the Rubik’s Cube are not really details at all, but are a tool. The medium and process are fused. Like merging paint and dots in pointillism. The resulting affect is not deconstructive, magnified, or observed. It’s structural, dependent on the altered impression of machine made by hand–twisted, turned, taken apart and put together. A new kind of reductivism or deconstruction where the part is a whole, and the whole is a whole, and the essence becomes how the “canvas” lends itself to the small, coloured squares.

Invader’s medium and process is highly unorthodox. It’s too soon to tell if his RubikCubism will be adopted and interpreted by other artists, on a prominent scale. No less, it still secures a place in art history: hanging on the gallery wall.

IMAGE | Invader | Rubik Arrested Sid | 2008 | Rubik’s Cubes on Board | 115×154x5,5 cm

Comments

One Response to “New Ideas in Art: Square the Circle”

  1. JM on February 18th, 2009 2:00 pm

    Now what if he starts using the new Rubik’s TouchCube and the whole thing lit up?

    What if Vanna White starting creating random images, ignoring the contestant’s choices?

    What if I’m rambling, but am totally inspired by this post?

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