Part 1
I was watching the illustrations at Wentzel Jamnitzer's Perspectiva corporum regularum when the telephone rang. I picked up the receiver with my left hand, while a icosahedron metamorphosed obscenely into a kind of mechanical hedgehog on my right one.
—I listen.
—What do you think you are doing?—I knew the voice. It was the grey haired woman that has been talking about Art and artists the last eight weeks.— Do you think that this is a good way to do your final assignment?
—Well, I'm speaking in a first-person voice. And this is a conversation between me and Art, we could suppose.
—Don't be silly! You're mocking!
—Well, in fact, I'm not so fluent in English. If I solve this submission as a dialogue it will be easier for me to avoid the subjuntive mood and subordinate constructions.
—What? You're not expecting me to pose you the questions as a questioning machine?
—It would be great.
—Ce n'est pas possible!
She spoke French nicely. I speak French too. Once I went into a grocery in Montpellier and asked for a half kilo of pommes. The shopkeeper stared at me, raised up his arms and gave me the cash.
—Okay, —she snorted—do you remember something from this Course that helped you to establish a greater sense of your own art historical awareness?
—I remember an interesting thread by my peer Raye where the relationships between time and space in Cubism were discussed. A cubist painting showing nicely a skull and a clay jar in an elegant earthly spectrum illustrated the question. I posted an answer, the first one, telling that modern Physics—this means the Einstein's theories—is contemporary with Cubism, and, why not, artists like Picasso or Braque could have had the interest, the curiosity or the information about the new principles that mixed time and space and could have had the aim to transfer them into their works. I've read some texts supporting this ideas.
"Some days later I went back to the thread to read the contributions from other e-students. Then I realized that I have missed the point by large. People there, and the author of the thread too, did not write about time and space in absolute terms—as in Physics—but about the time and the space that the act of painting needs, and if cubist painters depicted this 'more pragmatically'—as Raye said—features in their works. Then I realized that the picture in the thread was not, contrary to what I had supposed, a minor work by Braque or Gris or, even, a youthful cubist essay by Chirico or Picabia—a classical cubist piece then—but a painting by my own peer. A cubist painting of 2014!"
—And then? Your conclusion, please.
That was the question. To make a joke or to give an answer. I took a breath.
—I thought: should a piece of art be the resume of the whole Art History? Must the artist place their works always at the end of the newest branch of the family tree that critics and Art historians use to clasify art works and artisitic movements?
I stopped again. The voice repeated, impatiently: —So, your conclusion?
I breathed one more time.
—I think that critics and Art historians have built a beautiful tree about the evolution of Art, and I believe that this tree is true. But this tree grow from the minor leaves, the present, the time when critics and historians live and do their work, to the roots. Then this tree does not reflect the act of creation an art work by artists, which is always in present tense, the time of their feelings and ideas. Of course, it is good for artists to know their ancestors, but their work must be free to place themselves wherever, and critics must be done according to, not only according to the latest fashion or contemporary tendencies.
—You are denying the evolution on Art!
—Remember the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood! They placed themselves willingly on a branch that wasn't their chrolological room in the tree.
—You do want to go back to cave painting.
—Paul Klee did. And dit it well. On the other side, Cycladic sculptures are contemporary in composition and execution to those by Brancusi.
—Today artists live in the world of today, not in the Cycladic period, nor in the inter-war years.
—Art, Art History, is not a science as Physics is. A serious scientist couldn't ignore Leibniz's Infinitesimal Calculus or General Relativity: he would be crazy if he does. But madness is welcome in art, because Art is not Mathematics. Maybe Boch or Rodchenko's strategies are better, or, at least, equally accurate in order to depict the present society than those at Cindy Sherman's.
A loud stream of French words come out of the receiver. I did not understand the most of them, but I felt that I should raise up my arms. She hung up the phone.
I stayed thinking for a while. Then I searched for Neil Young's Hey Hey, My My into my music folder and pressed the play button. And I sung over the music:
"Hey, hey, my, my
Rock and roll can never die
There's more to the picture than meets the eye
..."
