Tag Archives: Jon Anderson of Biola

FRANCIS SCHAEFFER ANALYZES ART AND CULTURE Part 15 Francis Schaeffer discusses quotes of Andy Warhol from “The Observer June 12, 1966” Part A (Feature on artist Robert Indiana plus many pictures of Warhol with famous friends and also interview with performance artist John Giorno)

April 4, 2014 – 5:58 am

Recently I got to see this piece of art by Andy Warhol of Dolly Parton at Crystal Bridges Museum in Bentonville, Arkansas:

Andy Warhol, Dolly Parton (1985)
Synthetic polymer paint and silkscreen ink on canvas
42 x 42 in. (106.7 x 106.7 cm)

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 Bianca Jagger with Andy Warhol below:

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How Should We then Live Episode 7 small (Age of Nonreason)

#02 How Should We Then Live? (Promo Clip) Dr. Francis Schaeffer

10 Worldview and Truth

Two Minute Warning: How Then Should We Live?: Francis Schaeffer at 100

Francis Schaeffer “BASIS FOR HUMAN DIGNITY” Whatever…HTTHR

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Andy Warhol Sleep

Uploaded on Jan 25, 2011

This is the theatrical trailer for Andy Warhol’s classic film Sleep.

John Giorno discusses the making of SLEEP (Warhol)

Uploaded on Nov 21, 2008

John Giorno explains how Andy Warhol made SLEEP
Panel discussion at Chop Chop Gallery in Columbus OH with Taylor Mead, Holly Woodlawn, and Penny Arcade. 11/15/08

Francis Schaeffer has written extensively on art and culture spanning the last 2000 years and here are some posts I have done on this subject before : Francis Schaeffer’s “How should we then live?” Video and outline of episode 10 “Final Choices” , episode 9 “The Age of Personal Peace and Affluence”, episode 8 “The Age of Fragmentation”, episode 7 “The Age of Non-Reason” , episode 6 “The Scientific Age” , episode 5 “The Revolutionary Age” ,  episode 4 “The Reformation”,  episode 3 “The Renaissance”, episode 2 “The Middle Ages,”, and  episode 1 “The Roman Age,” . My favorite episodes are number 7 and 8 since they deal with modern art and culture primarily.(Joe Carter rightly noted, “Schaeffer—who always claimed to be an evangelist and not a philosopher—was often criticized for the way his work oversimplified intellectual history and philosophy.” To those critics I say take a chill pill because Schaeffer was introducing millions into the fields of art and culture!!!! !!! More people need to read his works and blog about them because they show how people’s worldviews affect their lives!

J.I.PACKER WROTE OF SCHAEFFER, “His communicative style was not that of a cautious academic who labors for exhaustive coverage and dispassionate objectivity. It was rather that of an impassioned thinker who paints his vision of eternal truth in bold strokes and stark contrasts.Yet it is a fact that MANY YOUNG THINKERS AND ARTISTS…HAVE FOUND SCHAEFFER’S ANALYSES A LIFELINE TO SANITY WITHOUT WHICH THEY COULD NOT HAVE GONE ON LIVING.”

Francis Schaeffer’s works  are the basis for a large portion of my blog posts and they have stood the test of time. In fact, many people would say that many of the things he wrote in the 1960’s  were right on  in the sense he saw where our western society was heading and he knew that abortion, infanticide and youth enthansia were  moral boundaries we would be crossing  in the coming decades because of humanism and these are the discussions we are having now!)

There is evidence that points to the fact that the Bible is historically true as Schaeffer pointed out in episode 5 of WHATEVER HAPPENED TO THE HUMAN RACE? There is a basis then for faith in Christ alone for our eternal hope. This link shows how to do that.

Francis Schaeffer in Art and the Bible noted, “Many modern artists, it seems to me, have forgotten the value that art has in itself. Much modern art is far too intellectual to be great art. Many modern artists seem not to see the distinction between man and non-man, and it is a part of the lostness of modern man that they no longer see value in the work of art as a work of art.” 

Many modern artists are left in this point of desperation that Schaeffer points out and it reminds me of the despair that Solomon speaks of in Ecclesiastes.  Christian scholar Ravi Zacharias has noted, “The key to understanding the Book of Ecclesiastes is the term ‘under the sun.’ What that literally means is you lock God out of a closed system, and you are left with only this world of time plus chance plus matter.” THIS IS EXACT POINT SCHAEFFER SAYS SECULAR ARTISTS ARE PAINTING FROM TODAY BECAUSE THEY BELIEVED ARE A RESULT OF MINDLESS CHANCE.

Here is what Francis Schaeffer wrote about Andy Warhol’s art and interviews:

The pop artist man is Andy Warhol. The Observer June 12, 1966 does a big spread on Warhol. He deserves I must say a big spread. He is a very important man today in expressing this whole situation of the absurd. He is the man who paints all the Campbell Soup cans, but there is something very interesting about painting the Campbell Soup cans that I found out, and that is that he doesn’t paint them, but they have what they call the factory.

His assistants make them from a silk screen and they sell them for $8000.00 a piece.

He has been making films. His film “Sleep” consists solely of a man sleeping and lasts 6 hours. (Audience laughs.) Do you laugh or cry? I have a hunch  that it is a different kind of a sick joke. For 6 hours the camera grinds on him and he tosses in his sleep. Warhol himself says, “I haven’t thought about my films. They just keep me busy.”

I think now you are in the game of absurdity. The people who are really  in this understand that the reason they go through the motions of a game is because that is all there is. What you do is fill up time. You could do the opposite thing, it really doesn’t matter. (That is why Warhol does not direct in his films.) None of that matters.

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Picture from the movie SLEEP:

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John Giorno

John GiornospaceJohn Giorno

Left: John Giorno being shot by William Burroughs on August 31, 1965
Right: John Giorno in 2007 while in London for the showing of Sleep with Erik Satie’s Vexations

John Giorno was the star of Sleep and an early boyfriend of Andy Warhol prior to the Factory – when Warhol was using an old fire station as his studio. Giorno continues to do performances internationally and to write poetry.

The following interview with John Giorno appeared in the Guardian newspaper (London) on Thursday 14 February 2002:

My 15 Minutes

Our interviews with Warhol’s friends and collaborators continue with John Giorno, 65, poet, Aids activist, friend and confidant of Warhol and subject of his film, Sleep. Interviews by Catherine Morrison.

The first time I met Andy was at his first solo New York Pop show in Eleanor Ward’s Stable gallery in the fall of 1962, but it was at a friend’s dinner party around that time that we really got to know each other. For the next two years we were very close; we saw each other every day, or every other day.

I was a kid in my early 20s, working as a stockbroker. I was living this life where I would see Andy every night, get drunk and go into work with a hangover every morning. The stock market opened at 10 and closed at three. By quarter to three I would be waiting at the door, dying to get home so I could have a nap before I met Andy. I slept all the time – when he called to ask what I was doing he would say, “Let me guess, sleeping?”

We used to go to Jonas Mekas’s Film-makers’ Cooperative in 1962 to watch these underground films. Andy saw them and said, “Why doesn’t somebody make a beautiful film?” So he did.

On Memorial Day weekend in 1963 we went away for a few days and I woke up in the night to find him staring at me – he took a lot of speed in those days. That’s where the idea for the movie came from – he was looking for a visual image and it just happened to be me. He said to me on the way home: “Would you like to be a movie star?” “Of course,” I said, “I want to be just like Marilyn Monroe.”

He didn’t really know what he was doing; it was his first movie. We made it with a 16mm Bolex in my apartment but had to reshoot it a month later. The film jumped every 20 seconds as Andy rewound it. The second shoot was more successful but he didn’t know what to do with it for almost a year.

The news that Warhol had made a movie triggered massive amounts of publicity. It was absurd – he was on the cover of Film Culture and Harper’s Bazaar before the movie was finished! In the end, 99% of the footage didn’t get used; he just looped together a few shots and it came out six hours long.

You either really loved it or you hated it; I thought it was brilliant and daring. But then I loved so much of Andy’s work. I remember walking into the first Factory in 63 and seeing the silkscreen silver Elvises for the first time. They were like these jewels, radiating life and joy, and they were just lying on a dirty floor in an old firehouse! It was so exhilarating.

He transformed my life. He wasn’t afraid of anything – if he had an idea, he acted on it. If it turned out lousy, so what? If it turned out well, then that was great.

I didn’t see him much after 1964 although in the last year of his life, I saw him a lot, about a dozen times in seven months. I’m so glad now that I did see him and talk to him before he died.

Andy Warhol said, “What I was actually trying to do in my early movies was show how people can meet other people and what they can do and what they can say to each other. That was the whole idea: two people getting acquainted. And then when you saw it and you saw the sheer simplicity of it, you learned what it was all about. Those movies showed you how some people act and react with other people. They were like actual sociological ‘For instance’s. They were like documentaries, and if you thought it could apply to you, it was an example, and if it didn’t apply to you, at least it was a documentary…” –

For Andy Warhol (1928-1987)

“The world outside
would be easier
to live in if we
were all machines.
It’s nothing in
the end anyway.
It doesn’t matter
what anyone does.
My work won’t
last anyway.
I was
using
cheap paint.”

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Andy Warhol with his friend Marco Bodenstein in the famous Club Nachtigal pictured below:

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This video below from Jon Anderson was very helpful to me concerning Andy Warhol’s art.

[ARTS 315] Art in an Age of Mass-Media: Andy Warhol – Jon Anderson

Published on Apr 5, 2012

Contemporary Art Trends [ARTS 315], Jon Anderson

Art in an Age of Mass-Media: Andy Warhol

September 23, 2011

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File:Andy Warhol and Tennessee Williams NYWTS.jpg

Original file ‎(2,670 × 2,126 pixels, file size: 756 KB, MIME type: image/jpeg)

This file is from Wikimedia Commons and may be used by other projects. The description on its file description page there is shown below.

Description
English: Andy Warhol (left) and Tennessee Williams (right) talking on the SS France, in the background: Paul Morrissey.
Date 1967
Source Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division. New York World-Telegram and the Sun Newspaper Photograph Collection. LC-USZ62-121294
Author James Kavallines, New York World-Telegram and the Sun staff photographer

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Warhol, Andy – by James Romaine

Transubstantiating the Culture: Andy Warhol’s Secret
 
More than one seemingly religious person’s secret sins have been exposed at their death; Warhol’s secrets were that he went to church and served at a soup kitchen.
 
by James Romaine
The works of our century are the mirrors of our predicament produced by some of the most sensitive minds of our time. In the light of our predicament we must look at the works of contemporary art, and conversely, in the light of contemporary art we must look at our predicament. Paul Tillich in “Each Period Has Its Peculiar Image of Man”
In his final self-portrait, Andy Warhol’s gaze is both perplexed and perplexing. Like the artist, everything about this work is suspended in a haze of mystery. Warhol probably had no expectation that this would be his final self-reflection, yet it’s hard to imagine him treating himself differently even if he had known.
Warhol treated everything the same. Cool detachment was as much a trademark for Warhol as Campbell’s was for soup. Warhol’s coolness has often been read as cynicism, and it did involve a degree of distance, but only out of a perceived need for self-protection. The seeming contradiction of Warhol’s Self-portrait, and indeed all of his work, is that he expresses himself without revealing anything about himself; he is at once alienated and self-alienating.
There is scarcely a person in America whose life has not been affected—whether or not they know it—by the way Warhol transformed our understanding of our culture. Certainly there is no serious artist working today who has not been influenced by Warhol’s conversion of the banal world of consumer culture into the sacred realm of art. We see ourselves and our world reflected in the mirror of Warhol’s art, but the image has still not come into full focus. By the time he painted this last Self-portrait, Warhol had become the most famous artist in the world; but more than a decade later his art remains enigmatic.
Warhol began his career in New York as an illustrator of women’s footwear, under his real name, Andrew Warhola. The darling of magazine editors, Warhol acquired the nickname “Candy Andy.” Perceptions of Warhol today have not changed much since then.
We may think of sex and drugs (two things Warhol mostly abstained from) or fame and fortune (two things Warhol abounded in) as Andy’s candies. Yet Warhol’s persona, with his fast parties and white wigs, differed greatly from the private identity he both concealed and revealed in his art. Sly as a fox, Warhol played dumb with comments meant to set us off track, such as, “If you want to know about Andy Warhol, just look at the surfaces of my paintings and films and me, and there I am. There’s nothing behind it.”
There is, in fact, a great deal concealed beneath the surface of Warhol’s art. The surfaces of his works appear to be mechanical — an appearance Warhol emphasized by calling his studio “the Factory” and claiming to make art that could be done by anyone. The smooth veneer of silk-screening not only created a mechanical appearance, but his practice of reproducing already-reproduced images published in magazines and newspapers allowed Warhol to increase the degrees of separation between himself and his subjects.
Nevertheless, Warhol continued to use imagery that had personal significance to him. Many of these images were spiritual ones, influenced by the Catholicism that permeates Warhol’s art. Despite reports that he went to church almost daily, some doubt the credibility of Warhol’s faith and even consider his work anti-Christian. Warhol’s life was, admittedly, filled with contradictions. He was always trying to protect his true intentions, especially regarding his Catholicism. Many of Warhol’s friends did not know of his religious life until after his death.
More than one seemingly religious person’s secret sins have been exposed at their death; Warhol’s secrets were that he went to church and served at a soup kitchen. In his eulogy for Warhol, John Richardson outed him from the confessional when he said:
I’d like to recall a side of his character that he hid from all but his closest friends; his spiritual side. Those of you who knew him in circumstances that were the antithesis of spiritual may be surprised that such a side existed. But exist it did, and it’s key to the artist’s psyche. Although Andy was perceived—with some justice—as a passive observer who never imposed his beliefs on other people, he could on occasion be an effective proselytizer. To my certain knowledge, he was responsible for at least one conversion. He took considerable pride in financing his nephew’s studies for the priesthood. And he regularly helped out at a shelter serving meals to the homeless and hungry. Trust Andy to have kept these activities in the dark. The knowledge of this secret piety inevitably changes our perception of an artist who fooled the world into believing that his only obsessions were money, fame, glamour, and that he could be cool to the point of callousness. Never take Andy at face value….
With family roots in Byzantine-Slavic Catholicism, Warhol kept a homemade altar with a crucifix and well-worn prayer book beside his bed. He frequently visited Saint Vincent Ferrer’s Church on Lexington Avenue. The pastor of Saint Vincent’s confirmed that Warhol visited the church almost daily. He would come in mid-afternoon, light a candle, and pray for fifteen minutes, sometimes making use of the intimacy of the private chapels. The pastor described Warhol as intensely shy and private, especially regarding his religion. Warhol’s brother has characterized him as “really religious, but he didn’t want people to know about that because [it was] private.” For someone so bent on self-protection, Warhol’s efforts to keep his religious life a secret may indicate just how important his faith was to him.
Do these religious revelations offer insight into Warhol’s art? They do; perhaps more than has yet been appreciated by either the art or Christian worlds. Warhol’s consumer imagery at first seems obsessed with the external world of contemporary culture to the exclusion of the internal life of faith. But there is also a persistent longing for something more, a hunger that is evident in the last Self-portrait and, most famously, in those cans of Campbell’s soup.
In order to see this religious dimension, we must regain our sense of the sacramental—the use of material things as vehicles for encountering the divine and enabling eternity to break into time and space. Warhol’s pop art, often criticized as mere regurgitation of advertising, actually displaces images from their original context in the commercial world, transporting them to the realm of art, collapsing the distance between the two, and creating new associations and meanings.
The Campbell’s soup can, one of Warhol’s most famous motifs, thus becomes another self-portrait of the artist. The can, like Warhol’s public persona, is cool, metallic, machine-made, impenetrable, a mirror of its surroundings. These qualities, superficial though they are, nevertheless seduce the eye.
But what completes this self-portrait are the can’s contents; they should be the most significant part, but actually have very little in common with the can’s exterior. Soup, a warm source of nourishment, is a sensitive element that will not survive long outside of a protective container. Hidden beneath supermarket imagery, Warhol’s faith is sealed for protection.
While carefully keeping himself secure inside, Warhol succeeded in making everyone believe that the soup can should be the focus of attention. Some have become enraptured by their own reflection on its metallic surface. Others have complained that Warhol and his art are hollow. Very few have attempted to open the can and find out what’s inside.
Warhol’s creative gift was an ability to bring subjects into spiritual equilibrium. He treated ultra-glamorous movie stars and anonymous police arrest photos with the same combination of contempt and envy. Warhol used consumer items more than just as mirrors of his time.
What seems to have attracted him to Coca-Cola bottles and Campbell’s soup cans, as in 200 Campbell’s Soup Cans, was a sense of comfort, belonging and equality.
Warhol admitted that one reason he was attracted to the imagery of Campbell’s soup was that he had eaten Campbell’s soup nearly every day as a boy. Soup, of course, is a nearly global icon of home, but Campbell’s is a distinctly American icon.
For Warhol, growing up in a poor immigrant family struggling to find its place in a new homeland, Campbell’s soup probably offered a reassuring sense of belonging.
Warhol loved mass consumer imagery because of its equilibrating powers. “Coke is Coke,” he once said, “and no matter how rich you are you can’t get a better one than the one the homeless woman on the corner is drinking.”
Living in New York City, Warhol undoubtedly experienced the way cities have of exaggerating the distance between wealth and poverty even while juxtaposing them. Perhaps reinforced by the piety and poverty of his childhood, Warhol may have looked forward to the equality of heaven, with the mechanical nature of his work forecasting an eternal destiny.
Warhol’s strategy of representing heaven by repeated images has been linked to Byzantine icons, which limit individual creativity in favor of a standardized form. Warhol’s work has a certain hypnotic rhythm, not unlike the rosary. This repetition also suggests that the image could extend infinitely, giving us a glimpse into eternity through everyday reality.
200 Campbell’s Soup Cans celebrates more than social egalitarianism. But in a critique of America’s emergent consumer religion, 200 Campbell’s Soup Cans also joins a long artistic tradition of vanitas images, in which lavish displays of wealth are offset by reminders of life’s fleeting nature and the inevitable final judgment.
Warhol’s references to religious themes increased throughout his career, culminating in his most overtly religious and plainly sacramental works, patterned after Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper. Warhol made more than one hundred works based on Leonardo’s image, but until recently these works received very little attention.
Many things may have drawn Warhol to the Last Supper, including the fact that Warhol’s own art often dealt with food as a symbol of heaven.
Warhol’s Catholicism asserted the miracle of transubstantiation, in which food—bread and wine—becomes a heavenly substance. Warhol may have accessed Leonardo’s imagery to set himself within a certain tradition of religious art.
Leonardo brought out the classical and realist artist in Warhol, even though the meaning of “classical” and “real” had radically changed in the five hundred years separating them. Leonardo’s breakthroughs in artistic perspective had radically brought the Christ figure into the viewer’s world; Warhol brought Leonardo down off the wall, and in so doing brought Christ and the sacrament of the Eucharist into his world.
Indeed, Warhol’s interest in Campbell’s soup and the Last Supper are linked. Remember, Warhol said that his attraction to Campbell’s soup was that he had eaten it every day as a child. Warhol’s brother recalled that a reproduction of the Last Supper hung on their family’s kitchen wall. As Warhol sat eating his soup, he ate under the watchful presence of Christ.
Another reason Warhol turned to the Last Supper was that it reminded him of his mother, Julia Warhola. Mrs. Warhola had a prayer card with an image of the Last Supper that she kept in her Bible. After her death, Warhol kept this card as a reminder of his mother’s faith. He was very close to his mother, who came to live with him in New York. Warhol’s brother noted that Andy and their mother had a small altar in their New York apartment and that “Andy wouldn’t leave unless [she] would come into the kitchen and kneel down with him and pray.”
Mrs. Warhola’s prayer card bears a remarkable resemblance to Warhol’s art, for it has reworked its subject significantly: the figure of Matthew is shifted, and Christ is given a golden halo — changes probably made to invigorate the viewer’s devotion. Is it too unlikely to suppose that Warhol’s art had the same intent?
Works like Last Supper (Dove) bring together brand name products from the supermarket and the sacramental imagery of the church, asserting that modern life and faith are neither separate nor contradictory. Each makes the other more real and meaningful. The dove, descending from above Christ like a halo, represents the Holy Spirit; the General Electric sign (with its own halo) is a symbol of the Son. It doesn’t take much imagination to connect GE with the light of the world, but there is an even subtler meaning to this sign: GE’s slogan, “We bring good things to life,” points to the resurrection and eternal life.
Warhol died of unexpected complications from routine surgery on February 22, 1987, making the Last Supper images a fitting, if unintentional, conclusion for Warhol’s art. They show Christ in a creative and transformative action. Artistic transubstantiation allowed Warhol to identify with Christ, to see Christ as an artist and to see art as a sanctifying activity.
Indeed, Warhol’s approach to art and Christianity exemplify what H. Richard Niebuhr, in Christ and Culture, famously called “Christ the Transformer of Culture.” Just as Christ transformed common bread and wine into the holy sacraments, Warhol transformed everyday imagery into art.
The popularity of Warhol’s work is a reflection of our own hunger for such transformation. Like all art, it raises questions: Are we hungry enough to accept anything offered to us? How are we to be discerning? Was Warhol discerning? If we are to “test each spirit,” should we filter out Warhol? Was Warhol so hungry for something divine that he too easily accepted substitutes for the one thing that would satisfy him?
If we consider the disreputable company Warhol kept, our answer to the last question might be yes. Maybe Campbell’s soup was no more than a commercial substitute for a spiritual hunger. But the spiritual sincerity and artistic complexities of his last works suggest that Andy Warhol’s faith and art cannot be so easily dismissed.
November 12, 2003
James Romaine is an art historian who lives in New York, and the author of “Objects of Grace: Conversations on Creativity and Faith.”This article originally appeared in Regeneration Quarterly. Copyright 2003, James Romaine.All rights reserved.

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We went to see Dr No at Forty -second Street. It’s a fantastic movie, so cool. We walked
outside and somebody threw a cherry bomb right in front of us, in this big crowd. And there was
blood. I saw blood on people and all over. I felt like I was bleeding all over. I saw in the paper
last week that there are more people throwing them —it’s just part of the scene—and hurting
people. My show in Paris is going to he called“Death in America.” I’ll show the electric-
chair pictures and the dogs in Birmingham and car wrecks and some suicide pictures.
Why did you start these“Death”pictures?
AW:I believe in it. Did you see the Enquirer this week? It had “The Wreck that Made Cops Cry”—
a head cut in half, the arms and hands just lying there. It’s sick, but I’m sure it happens all
the time. I’ve met a lot of cops recently. They take pictures of everything, only
it’s almost impossible to get pictures from them.Why did you start with the “Death” series?
AW:I guess it was the big plane crash picture, the front page of a newspaper: 129 DIE. I was
also painting the Marilyns. I realized that everything I was doing must have been Death. It was
Christmas or Labor Day —a holiday—and every time you turned on the radio they said
something like,“4 million are going to die.”
That started it. But when you see a gruesome picture
over and over again, it doesn’t really have any effect.

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Today I started off by posting some comments that Andy Warhol made about his films and Schaeffer noted that there was no directing of these films because it doesn’t matter in the end anyway because it is all left to time and chance. One of those films is called EAT and it stars Robert Indiana eating for a hour and a cat gets on his shoulder at one point and he pets the cat. Robert is the artist that I am featuring today and at the end of this post I am taking him to task for his view that we can have hope in a materialistic world without God in the picture. 

Robert Indiana and Andy Warhol at the opening of Americans 1963

Published on Jan 25, 2013

Robert Indiana and Andy Warhol at the Opening of Americans 1963, Museum of Modern Art, New York

Kennedy was at the beginning of his notable career as a freelance photojournalist in New York in 1963 when he met the two rising stars of Pop art, the 34-year-old Robert Indiana and the 33-year-old Andy Warhol. This photograph was taken at the opening of the exhibition Americans 1963, which featured several works by Indiana and fourteen other contemporary artists, though none by Warhol. The exhibition was organized by the Museum of Modern Art, to which Indiana had sold a painting two years earlier. Shortly thereafter Indiana would go on to design a Christmas card for that museum, which marked the debut of what would become the painter’s iconic image, LOVE.

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Robert Indiana: A Map of Indiana

Uploaded on Sep 14, 2011

Robert Indiana, elusive Pop-Art legend, offers a private view into the events, people and places that have shaped his art. Filmed on location at Indiana’s island home, the film, narrated by Indiana in an exclusive interview, details the pictorial memoir he has assembled about his long life, from his origins in the state he made his namesake to his role in the creation of the Pop- Art movement in downtown New York through his involvement in the Museum of Modern Art, his eventual disillusionment with the New York art scene, and the great resurgence of interest in his work both in Europe and the United States, as he takes stock of his life and legacy.

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Inside New York’s Art World: Robert Indiana, 1978

Uploaded on Dec 15, 2008

Interviewer: Barbaralee Diamonstein-Spielvogel Part of the Diamonstein-Spielvogel Video Archive in the Duke University Libraries: http://library.duke.edu/digitalcollec…
Diamonstein-Spielvogel interviews Indiana about his life and works

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New York City

Robert Indiana, who was born Robert Clark in 1928, first emerged on the wave of Pop Art that engulfed the art world in the early 1960s. Bold and visually dazzling, his work embraced the vocabulary of highway signs and roadside entertainments that were commonplace in post war America. Presciently, he used words to explore themes of American identity, racial injustice, and the illusion and disillusion of love. The appearance in 1966 of what became his signature image, ‘LOVE’, and its subsequent proliferation on unauthorized products, eclipsed the public’s understanding of the emotional poignancy and symbolic complexity of his art. This retrospective will reveal an artist whose work, far from being unabashedly optimistic and affirmative, addresses the most fundamental issues facing humanity—love, death, sin, and forgiveness—giving new meaning to our understanding of the ambiguities of the American Dream and the plight of the individual in a pluralistic society.

Robert Indiana

Whitney Museum of American Art

September 26, 2013 – January 5, 2014
945 Madison Avenue at 75th Street
New York, NY 10021
USA

Calendar

Robert Indiana

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Robert Indiana Full Circle

Published on Sep 22, 2013

An 8-minute preview of American INSIGHT’s half-hour documentary-in-progress celebrates the artistic ingenuity of American Pop artist Robert Indiana, who considers Philadelphia his spiritual home. Creator of one of the world’s most famous statues, Indiana remains virtually anonymous to younger generations, yet highly prolific. Since 1969, he has lived and worked on an island 15 miles off the coast of Maine.

Inventing, but never patenting, the iconic LOVE statue, Indiana continues to use words and typographic forms to define his distinctive approach to both language and art. Exploring the boundaries of shape, line, color theory, and meaning within letters and signs, he challenges our traditional conventions of language and art. From large sculpture installations to hard-edged paintings, Indiana incorporates the lyrical nature of poetry while expanding the boundaries of our visual thinking.

American INSIGHT has captured hours of rare footage containing both intimate conversations with him and several public appearances during the past decade: the only such footage taken of this intensely private man during that time.

American INSIGHT

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Schierholt’s Conversations with Robert Indiana – an excerpt

Uploaded on Jun 29, 2011

An excerpt from the Dale Schierholt film – A Visit to the Star of Hope: Conversations with Robert Indiana

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Conversations with Robert Indiana, Trailer

Uploaded on Jan 14, 2011

Trailer from the film by Dale Schierholt, Conversations with Robert Indiana

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Andy Warhol – Eat (1963)

Uploaded on Jun 9, 2010

This is Andy Warhol’s movie, “Eat”
This movie was made in 1964. This is, the entire movie.

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Eat (film)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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Eat
Directed by Andy Warhol
Starring Robert Indiana
Running time 45 minutes
Country United States
Language English

Eat (1963) is a 45-minute American film created by Andy Warhol.

Eat is filmed in black-and-white, has no soundtrack, and depicts fellow pop artist Robert Indiana engaged in the process of eating for the entire length of the film. The comestible being consumed is apparently a mushroom. Finally, notice is also taken of a brief appearance made by a cat.

See also

External links

Andy Warhol filmography

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The following are the films directed or produced by Andy Warhol. Fifty of the films have been preserved by the Museum of Modern Art.[1]

Year Film Cast Notes
1963 Sleep John Giorno Runtime of 320+ minutes
1963 Andy Warhol Films Jack Smith Filming Normal Love
1963 Sarah-Soap Sarah Dalton
1963 Denis Deegan Denis Deegan
1963 Kiss Rufus Collins, Johnny Dodd, Freddie Herko, Jane Holzer, Naomi Levine
1963 Rollerskate/Dance Movie Freddie Herko
1963 Jill and Freddy Dancing Freddie Herko
1963 Elvis at Ferus Irving Blum
1963 Taylor and Me Taylor Mead
1963 Tarzan and Jane Regained… Sort of Taylor Mead, Dennis Hopper, Naomi Levine,
1963 Duchamp Opening Irving Blum, Gerard Malanga
1963 Salome and Delilah Freddie Herko
1963 Haircut No. 1 Billy Name
1963 Haircut No. 2 Billy Name
1963 Haircut No. 3 Johnny Dodd, Billy Name
1963 Henry in Bathroom Henry Geldzahler
1963 Taylor and John John Giorno, Taylor Mead
1963 Bob Indiana, Etc. John Giorno
1963 Billy Klüver John Giorno
1963 John Washing John Giorno
1963 Naomi and John John Giorno
1964 Screen Tests
1964 Naomi and Rufus Kiss Naomi Levin, Rufus Collins
1964 Blow Job DeVeren Bookwalter, Willard Maas (offscreen) Shot at 24 frame/s, projected at 16 frame/s
1964 Jill Johnston Dancing Jill Johnston
1964 Shoulder Lucinda Childs
1964 Eat Robert Indiana
1964 Dinner At Daley’s
1964 Soap Opera Jane Holzer, Rufus Collins, Gerard Malanga
1964 Batman Dracula Gregory Battcock, Rufus Collins, Henry Geldzahler, Jane Holzer, Naomi Levine, Ivy Nicholson, Gerard Malanga, Taylor Mead, Mario Montez
1964 Three Walter Dainwood, Gerard Malanga, Ondine
1964 Jane and Darius Jane Holzer
1964 Couch Gregory Corso, Allen Ginsberg, Gerard Malanga, Naomi Levin, Henry Geldzahler, Taylor Mead
1964 Empire Runtime of 8 hours 5 minutes
1964 Henry Geldzahler Henry Geldzahler
1964 Taylor Mead’s Ass Taylor Mead
1964 Six Months
1964 Mario Banana Mario Montez
1964 Harlot Gerard Malanga, Mario Montez
1964 Mario Montez Dances Mario Montez
1964 Isabel Wrist Isabel Eberstadt
1964 Imu and Son Imu
1964 Allen Gerard Malanga, Taylor Mead
1964 Philip and Gerard Phillip Fagan, Gerard Malanga
1964 13 Most Beautiful Women assembled from Screen Tests
1964 13 Most Beautiful Boys assembled from Screen Tests
1964 50 Fantastics and 50 Personalities assembled from Screen Tests
1964 Pause
1964 Messy Lives
1964 Lips
1964 Apple
1964 The End of Dawn
1965 John and Ivy Ivy Nicholson, John Palmer
1965 Screen Test #1 Philip Fagan
1965 Screen Test #2 Mario Montez
1965 The Life of Juanita Castro Marie Menken, Mercedes Ospina, Ronald Tavel
1965 Drink Emile de Antonio
1965 Suicide
1965 Horse Gregory Battcock, Larry Letreille
1965 Vinyl Gerard Malanga, Ondine, Edie Sedgwick
1965 Bitch Gerard Malanga, Marie Menken, Edie Sedgwick
1965 Poor Little Rich Girl Edie Sedgwick
1965 Face Edie Sedgwick
1965 Restaurant Bibbe Hansen, Donald Lyons, Ondine, Edie Sedgwick
1965 Kitchen Donald Lyons, René Ricard, Edie Sedgwick, Roger Trudeau
1965 Afternoon Dorothy Dean, Donald Lyons, Ondine, Edie Sedgwick
1965 Beauty No. 1 Edie Sedgwick
1965 Beauty No. 2 Gerard Malanga, Gino Piserchio, Edie Sedgwick, Chuck Wein
1965 Space Edie Sedgwick
1965 Factory Diaries Paul America, Billy Name, Ondine, Edie Sedgwick
1965 Outer and Inner Space Edie Sedgwick
1965 Prison Bibbe Hansen, Marie Menken, Edie Sedgwick
1965 The Fugs and The Holy Modal Rounders The Fugs, The Holy Modal Rounders
1965 Paul Swan Paul Swan
1965 My Hustler Paul America, Ed Hood
1965 My Hustler II Paul America, Pat Hartley, Gerard Malanga, Billy Name, Ingrid Superstar
1965 Camp Jane Holzer, Gerard Malanga, Mario Montez, Paul Swan
1965 More Milk, Yvette Mario Montez
1965 Lupe Billy Name, Edie Sedgwick
1965 The Closet Nico
1966 Ari and Mario Mario Montez, Nico
1966 3 Min. Mary Might
1966 Eating Too Fast Gregory Battcock
1966 The Velvet Underground and Nico: A Symphony of Sound The Velvet Underground, Nico
1966 The Velvet Underground A.K.A. Moe in Bondage Moe Tucker, John Cale, Sterling Morrison, Lou Reed
1966 Hedy Gerard Malanga, Mario Montez, Ingrid Superstar, Ronald Tavel, Mary Woronov
1966 Rick Roderick Clayton Unreleased
1966 Withering Heights Charles Aberg, Ingrid Superstar Unreleased
1966 Paraphernalia Susan Bottomly
1966 Whips
1966 Salvador Dalí Salvador Dalí, Gerard Malanga
1966 The Beard Gerard Malanga, Mary Woronov
1966 Superboy Susan Bottomly, Ed Hood, Mary Woronov
1966 Patrick Patrick Fleming
1966 Chelsea Girls Brigid Berlin, Susan Bottomly, Eric Emerson, Gerard Malanga, Marie Menken, Nico, Ondine, Ingrid Superstar, Mary Woronov
1966 Bufferin Gerard Malanga
1966 Bufferin Commercial Jane Holzer, Gerard Malanga, Mario Montez
1966 Susan-Space Susan Bottomly
1966 The Velvet Underground Tarot Cards Susan Bottomly
1966 Nico/Antoine Susan Bottomly, Nico
1966 Marcel Duchamp
1966 Dentist: Nico Denis Deegan
1966 Ivy Denis Deegan
1966 Denis Denis Deegan
1966 Ivy and Denis I
1966 Ivy and Denis II
1966 Tiger Hop
1966 The Andy Warhol Story Edie Sedgwick, René Ricard
1966 Since Susan Bottomly, Gerard Malanga, Ondine, Mary Woronov
1966 The Bob Dylan Story Susan Bottomly, John Cale
1966 Mrs. Warhol Richard Rheem, Julia Warhola
1966 Kiss the Boot Gerard Malanga, Mary Woronov
1966 Nancy Fish and Rodney Nancy Fish
1966 Courtroom
1966 Jail
1966 Alien in Jail
1966 A Christmas Carol Ondine
1966 Four Stars aka **** runtime of 25 hours
1967 Imitation of Christ Tom Baker, Brigid Berlin, Pat Close, Andrea Feldman, Taylor Mead, Nico, Ondine
1967 Ed Hood Ed Hood
1967 Donyale Luna Donyale Luna
1967 I, a Man Tom Baker, Valerie Solanas, Ingrid Superstar, Ultra Violet, Viva
1967 The Loves of Ondine Ondine, Brigid Berlin, Viva
1967 Bike Boy Viva, Brigid Berlin, Ingrid Superstar
1967 Tub Girls Viva, Brigid Berlin, Taylor Mead
1967 The Nude Restaurant Taylor Mead, Allen Midgette, Ingrid Superstar, Viva, Louis Waldon
1967 Construction-Destruction-Construction Taylor Mead, Viva
1967 Sunset Nico
1967 Withering Sighs
1967 Vibrations
1968 Lonesome Cowboys Joe Dallessandro, Eric Emerson, Viva, Taylor Mead, Louis Waldon
1968 San Diego Surf Joe Dallessandro, Eric Emerson, Taylor Mead, Ingrid Superstar, Viva,
1968 Flesh Jackie Curtis, Patti D’Arbanville, Candy Darling, Joe Dallessandro, Geraldine Smith
1969 Blue Movie Viva, Louis Waldon
1969 Trash Joe Dallessandro, Andrea Feldman, Jane Forth, Geri Miller, Holly Woodlawn
1970 Women in Revolt Penny Arcade, Jackie Curtis, Candy Darling, Jane Forth, Geri Miller, Holly Woodlawn
1971 Water
1971 Factory Diaries
1972 Heat Joe Dallesandro, Pat Ast, Eric Emerson, Andrea Feldman, Sylvia Miles, Lester Persky
1973 L’Amour Jane Forth, Donna Jordan, Karl Lagerfeld
1973 Flesh for Frankenstein Joe Dallesandro
1974 Blood for Dracula Joe Dallesandro
1973 Vivian’s Girls Brigid Berlin, Candy Darling
Phoney Candy Darling, Maxime de la Falaise
1975 Nothing Special footage Brigid Berlin, Angelica Huston, Paloma Picasso
1975 Fight Brigid Berlin
1977 Andy Warhol’s Bad Carroll Baker, Perry King, Susan Tyrrell

References

External links

andy warhol – sleep (1963)

Andy Warhol: BBC Radio 4 Interview (March 17th 1981)

Uploaded on Apr 16, 2011

Andy Warhol talks to Edward Lucie Smith about portrait painting, his choice of subject, his work process, wanting to paint as many pictures as he can, his love of his Sony Walkman, his favourite subject, his dislike of feelings and emotions, his sense of time and ageing and his affection for everyone.

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Andy Warhol interview 1966

Published on Feb 13, 2013

Extended interview with Andy Warhol (1966)

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Andy Warhol och hans Factory – Clip 01-12

Uploaded on Dec 26, 2010

Factory People, episode 1, clip 1 out of 4. The Swedish title is Andy Warhol och hans Factory, and it is in English with Swedish subtitles.

This was recorded from free DVB-T television using an Elgato EveTV Hybrid receiver. I used the rudimentary editor within the EyeTV software and exported the clips in H.264/MPEG-4 format, usually four snippets per episode.

if this violates any copyright law, then I am sorry. Just remove the clip, block it or ask me to remove the clip and I will promptly take it down. I am just a fan, not in the business of making any money or anything else from this.

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Robert Indiana “Hope & the New Year

Uploaded on Jan 13, 2010

Artist Robert Indiana “Hope & The New Year” Rosenbaum Contemporary

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Robert Indiana’s new message in 2010 was the word “Hope,” but how can that be attained without bringing God back into the picture? What hope does man have if we are just a product of chance? The people who are promoting this idea in the framework of a materialist worldview are taking a leap into the area of nonreason.

Episode VII – The Age of Non Reason

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Review by W.M.R.Simpson in 2005 of Escape from Reason  by Francis Schaeffer

Francis A. Schaeffer (1912-1984), philosopher, theologian
and the founder of L‟Abri Fellowship, believed he had the
answers to the dilemma of modern man. In Escape from
Reason, Schaeffer traces the development of his despair
of finding any meaning and purpose in life, culminating in
the irrational “leap of faith” promoted by religious and
secular existentialists in an effort to escape the intolerable
futility of an empty, deterministic universe.

When we began to see the intellect as autonomous, and „nature‟ set free
from „grace‟, Schaeffer argues, nature “ate up grace”, removing the
„upper story‟ (God the creator, heaven and heavenly things, the unseen
and its influence on earth, man‟s soul, unity) from the rational sphere.
Thinking independently of God‟s revelation, rationalistic man was unable
to find any „universals‟ (grace) which would give meaning and unity to
all the „particulars‟ (nature). Once the particulars were set free, it proved
impossible to hold them together. The results of man‟s failure came to a
head in what Schaeffer called “the line of despair”; a point in history in
which the philosophers abandoned their age-old hope of finding a
unified answer for knowledge and life. The relativism that followed has
shaped our thinking, our culture, and our theology….

Following Hegel, Kierkegaard (1813-55) is Schaeffer‟s symbol of “the
real modern man” who has finally abandoned the hope of a unified field
of knowledge. The original problem, which had been formulated in
terms of „nature‟ and „grace‟, and then „freedom‟ and „nature‟, has at last
(under Kierkegaard) degenerated into a dichotomy between „faith‟ and
„rationality‟, separated by a vast chasm that no amount of rational
thinking can bridge. Meaning and truth are now disconnected from
reason and knowledge; if we are to attain them, we have no alternative
but to make an irrational “leap of faith”.

The new philosophy – or anti-philosophy – wasn‟t kept bottled up in an
ivory tower. Hegellian relativism and Kierkegaardian irrationalism filtered
down to the masses in three different ways; it spread geographically
from Germany outward, penetrating Holland and Switzerland, then
reaching England, taking some time to arrive in America; it spread
through the classes, beginning with the intellectuals and then, through
the mass-media, infiltrating the workers ranks (but failing to penetrate
the middle-classes); it spread through the disciplines, beginning with
philosophy (Hegel), then art (the post-impressionists), then music
(Debussy), then general culture (early T.S. Eliot), and finally theology
(Karl Barth). The hope of finding a unified field of knowledge is gone.
Modern man now lives in despair – “the despair of no longer thinking
that what has always been the aspiration of men and women is at all
possible”.

But all this proves too much for man; “he cannot live merely as a
machine”, and this new way of thinking slices him into a cruel

dichotomy, where any meaning, values and hope can only be obtained
irrationally. “What makes modern man modern”, Schaeffer observes, “is
the existence of this dichotomy and not the multitude of things he
places, as a leap, in the upper story.” Since no one can live consistently
within this system, they must steal things from elsewhere, in order to
live their lives, often plucking them (out of context) from a Christian
worldview.

This escape from reason was objectified in the secular and religious
existentialism that followed. On the secular side, Jean-Paul-Sartre
(1905-80) talked about „authenticating‟ yourself by an act of the will.
What you actually do, however, is neither here nor there – so long as
you do something! Jaspers (1883-1969), on the other hand, pointed to a
„final experience‟ that somehow imparts a certainty that you are really
there and gives some hope of meaning. But being an irrational
experience, it cannot be shared, and is difficult to retain. Heidegger
(1889-1976) spoke of angst – a vague feeling of dread – as something
upon which to hang everything. And on the religious wing, Karl Barth
(on Schaeffer‟s interpretation) held that, whilst the Bible contains
mistakes (the so-called „higher criticism‟), there was actually no rational
interchange between the upper and lower spheres and we should
believe it anyway, expecting a „religious word‟ to be imparted
nevertheless.

___________

The irony of modern man, according to Schaeffer, is that this autonomous intellectual enterprise initiated through man’s self-confidence in his power to independently reason his way to the answers, has ended, not in the triumph of rationality, but in its actual abandonment. By clinging to his autonomy, man has lost his rationality. His reason has been engulfed by his rationalism. Man remains at the center of the universe, still clinging to a hope, but without any rational basis.

______

Schaeffer‟s solution is simple: Christianity has the answer to the very
thing modern man has despaired of ever finding: a unified answer for
the whole of life. True, it demands that we abandon our rationalistic
autonomy and return to the reformation view of the Holy Scriptures, but
in so doing we get back our rationality, our meaningfulness, and
ourselves. Authentic Christianity is no existential leap into an irrational
upper sphere; Schaeffer insists that the Bible speaks truth “both about
God Himself and about the area where the Bible touches history and the

cosmos.” Man can have his answers to life “on the basis of what is open
to verification and discussion”. And a unified answer to life is, Schaeffer
asserts, what man really wants. “He did not accept the line of despair
and the dichotomy because he wanted to. He accepted it because, on
the basis of the natural development of his rationalistic presuppositions,
he had to. He may talk bravely at times, but in the end it is despair.” In
truth, “Modern man longs for a different answer than the answer of his
damnation”. Christianity, with its reasonable and consistent framework
for understanding the world we live in, can put an end to this despair by
putting man right with God.

_____________________________

Related posts:

Francis Schaeffer’s “How should we then live?” Video and outline of episode 10 “Final Choices” (Schaeffer Sundays)

E P I S O D E 1 0   Dr. Francis Schaeffer – Episode X – Final Choices 27 min FINAL CHOICES I. Authoritarianism the Only Humanistic Social Option One man or an elite giving authoritative arbitrary absolutes. A. Society is sole absolute in absence of other absolutes. B. But society has to be […]

Francis Schaeffer’s “How should we then live?” Video and outline of episode 9 “The Age of Personal Peace and Affluence” (Schaeffer Sundays)

E P I S O D E 9 Dr. Francis Schaeffer – Episode IX – The Age of Personal Peace and Affluence 27 min T h e Age of Personal Peace and Afflunce I. By the Early 1960s People Were Bombarded From Every Side by Modern Man’s Humanistic Thought II. Modern Form of Humanistic Thought Leads […]

Francis Schaeffer’s “How should we then live?” Video and outline of episode 8 “The Age of Fragmentation” (Schaeffer Sundays)

E P I S O D E 8 Dr. Francis Schaeffer – Episode VIII – The Age of Fragmentation 27 min I saw this film series in 1979 and it had a major impact on me. T h e Age of FRAGMENTATION I. Art As a Vehicle Of Modern Thought A. Impressionism (Monet, Renoir, Pissarro, Sisley, […]

Francis Schaeffer’s “How should we then live?” Video and outline of episode 7 “The Age of Non-Reason” (Schaeffer Sundays)

E P I S O D E 7 Dr. Francis Schaeffer – Episode VII – The Age of Non Reason I am thrilled to get this film series with you. I saw it first in 1979 and it had such a big impact on me. Today’s episode is where we see modern humanist man act […]

Francis Schaeffer’s “How should we then live?” Video and outline of episode 6 “The Scientific Age” (Schaeffer Sundays)

E P I S O D E 6 How Should We Then Live 6#1 Uploaded by NoMirrorHDDHrorriMoN on Oct 3, 2011 How Should We Then Live? Episode 6 of 12 ________ I am sharing with you a film series that I saw in 1979. In this film Francis Schaeffer asserted that was a shift in […]

Francis Schaeffer’s “How should we then live?” Video and outline of episode 5 “The Revolutionary Age” (Schaeffer Sundays)

E P I S O D E 5 How Should We Then Live? Episode 5: The Revolutionary Age I was impacted by this film series by Francis Schaeffer back in the 1970′s and I wanted to share it with you. Francis Schaeffer noted, “Reformation Did Not Bring Perfection. But gradually on basis of biblical teaching there […]

Francis Schaeffer’s “How should we then live?” Video and outline of episode 4 “The Reformation” (Schaeffer Sundays)

Dr. Francis Schaeffer – Episode IV – The Reformation 27 min I was impacted by this film series by Francis Schaeffer back in the 1970′s and I wanted to share it with you. Schaeffer makes three key points concerning the Reformation: “1. Erasmian Christian humanism rejected by Farel. 2. Bible gives needed answers not only as to […]

“Schaeffer Sundays” Francis Schaeffer’s “How should we then live?” Video and outline of episode 3 “The Renaissance”

Francis Schaeffer’s “How should we then live?” Video and outline of episode 3 “The Renaissance” Francis Schaeffer: “How Should We Then Live?” (Episode 3) THE RENAISSANCE I was impacted by this film series by Francis Schaeffer back in the 1970′s and I wanted to share it with you. Schaeffer really shows why we have so […]

Francis Schaeffer’s “How should we then live?” Video and outline of episode 2 “The Middle Ages” (Schaeffer Sundays)

  Francis Schaeffer: “How Should We Then Live?” (Episode 2) THE MIDDLE AGES I was impacted by this film series by Francis Schaeffer back in the 1970′s and I wanted to share it with you. Schaeffer points out that during this time period unfortunately we have the “Church’s deviation from early church’s teaching in regard […]

Francis Schaeffer’s “How should we then live?” Video and outline of episode 1 “The Roman Age” (Schaeffer Sundays)

Francis Schaeffer: “How Should We Then Live?” (Episode 1) THE ROMAN AGE   Today I am starting a series that really had a big impact on my life back in the 1970′s when I first saw it. There are ten parts and today is the first. Francis Schaeffer takes a look at Rome and why […]

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FRANCIS SCHAEFFER ANALYZES ART AND CULTURE Part 8 “The Last Year at Marienbad” by Alain Resnais (Feature on artist Richard Tuttle and his return to the faith of his youth)

February 13, 2014 – 7:59 am

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Alain Resnais Interview 1

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Last Year in Marienbad (1961) Trailer

 

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My Favorite Films: Last Year at Marienbad Movie Review – WillMLFilm Review

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Alain Resnais, NYC, 12/12/80

Alain Resnais, NYC, 12/12/80

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Francis Schaeffer pictured below:

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Francis Schaeffer below in his film series shows how this film “The Last Year at Marienbad”  by Alain Resnais was appealing to “nonreason” to answer our problems.

In the book HOW SHOULD WE THEN LIVE? Schaeffer notes:

Especially in the sixties the major philosophic statements which received a wide hearing were made through films. These philosophic movies reached many more people than philosophic writings or even painting and literature. Among these films were THE LAST YEAR AT MARIENBAD by Alain Resnais (1961), THE SILENCE by Ingmar Bergman (1967), JULIET OF THE SPIRITS by Federico Fellini (1965), BLOW UP by Michelangelo Antonioni (1966), BELLE DE JOUR by Luis Bunuel (1967), and THE HOUR OF THE WOLF by Ingmar Bergman (1967).

They showed pictorially (and with great force) what it is like if man is a machine and also what it is like if man tries to live in the area of non-reason. In the area of non-reason man is left without categories. He has no way to distinguish between right and wrong, or even between what is objectively true as opposed to illusion or fantasy….One could view these films a hundred times and there still would be no way to be sure what was portrayed as objectively true and what was part of a character’s imagination. If people begin only from themselves and really live in a universe in which there is no personal God to speak, they have no final way to be sure of the difference between reality and fantasy or illusion (pp. 201-202). 

In the book ESCAPE FROM REASON Schaeffer notes that modern man has come to the place that he truly believes that rationality is downstairs and faith is upstairs in the area of non-reason. What does man do at this point but take a leap from downstairs to upstairs. Schaeffer notes:

The leap is common to every sphere of modern man’s thought.  Man is forced to the despair of such a leap because he cannot live merely as a machine . . . If below the line man is dead, above the line, after the non-rational leap, man is left without categories.  There are no categories because categories are related to rationality and logic.…The most startling cinema statement was not that man is dead downstairs, but the powerful expression of what man is above the line after the leap. The first of these films was THE LAST YEAR AT MARIENBAD. This is not my guess. The films’s director explained that this is what he wanted the film to show. That is the reason for the long, endless corridors and the unrelatedness in the film. If below the line man is dead, above the line, after non-rational leap, man is left without categories. There are no categories because categories are related to rationality and logic. There is therefore no truth and no nontruth in antithesis, no right and wrong–you are adrift.

____________________

Francis Schaeffer has written extensively on art and culture spanning the last 2000 years and here are some posts I have done on this subject before : Francis Schaeffer’s “How should we then live?” Video and outline of episode 10 “Final Choices” , episode 9 “The Age of Personal Peace and Affluence”, episode 8 “The Age of Fragmentation”, episode 7 “The Age of Non-Reason” , episode 6 “The Scientific Age” , episode 5 “The Revolutionary Age” ,  episode 4 “The Reformation”,  episode 3 “The Renaissance”, episode 2 “The Middle Ages,”, and  episode 1 “The Roman Age,” . My favorite episodes are number 7 and 8 since they deal with modern art and culture primarily.(Joe Carter rightly noted, “Schaeffer—who always claimed to be an evangelist and not a philosopher—was often criticized for the way his work oversimplified intellectual history and philosophy.” To those critics I say take a chill pill because Schaeffer was introducing millions into the fields of art and culture!!!! !!! More people need to read his works and blog about them because they show how people’s worldviews affect their lives!

J.I.PACKER WROTE OF SCHAEFFER, “His communicative style was not that of a cautious academic who labors for exhaustive coverage and dispassionate objectivity. It was rather that of an impassioned thinker who paints his vision of eternal truth in bold strokes and stark contrasts.Yet it is a fact that MANY YOUNG THINKERS AND ARTISTS…HAVE FOUND SCHAEFFER’S ANALYSES A LIFELINE TO SANITY WITHOUT WHICH THEY COULD NOT HAVE GONE ON LIVING.”

Francis Schaeffer’s works  are the basis for a large portion of my blog posts and they have stood the test of time. In fact, many people would say that many of the things he wrote in the 1960’s  were right on  in the sense he saw where our western society was heading and he knew that abortion, infanticide and youth enthansia were  moral boundaries we would be crossing  in the coming decades because of humanism and these are the discussions we are having now!)

There is evidence that points to the fact that the Bible is historically true as Schaeffer pointed out in episode 5 of WHATEVER HAPPENED TO THE HUMAN RACE? There is a basis then for faith in Christ alone for our eternal hope. This link shows how to do that.

Francis Schaeffer in Art and the Bible noted, “Many modern artists, it seems to me, have forgotten the value that art has in itself. Much modern art is far too intellectual to be great art. Many modern artists seem not to see the distinction between man and non-man, and it is a part of the lostness of modern man that they no longer see value in the work of art as a work of art.”

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Francis Schaeffer pictured below:

 

How Should We then Live Episode 7 small (Age of Nonreason)

#02 How Should We Then Live? (Promo Clip) Dr. Francis Schaeffer

10 Worldview and Truth

Two Minute Warning: How Then Should We Live?: Francis Schaeffer at 100

Francis Schaeffer Whatever Happened to the Human Race (Episode 1) ABORTION

Francis Schaeffer “BASIS FOR HUMAN DIGNITY” Whatever…HTTHR

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The above clip is from the film series by Francis Schaeffer “How should we then live?”  This film  discusses surrealist films like THE LAST YEAR OF MARIENBAD  that mixes our reality with our day dreams.

 

Alain Resnais Interview 2

Alain Resnais

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Alain Resnais
Alain Resnais Césars.jpg
Alain Resnais with Ariane Ascaride, Juliette Binoche and Agnès Jaoui at the 23rd César Award ceremony, 1998.

Born3 June 1922 (age 91)
Vannes, Morbihan, Brittany, FranceYears active1946–present

Alain Resnais (French: [alɛ̃ ʁɛnɛ]; born 3 June 1922) is a French film director whose career has extended over more than six decades. After training as a film editor in the mid-1940s, he went on to direct a number of short films which included Night and Fog (1955), an influential documentary about the Nazi concentration camps.[1]

He began making feature films in the late 1950s and consolidated his early reputation with Hiroshima mon amour (1959), Last Year at Marienbad(1961), and Muriel (1963), all of which adopted unconventional narrative techniques to deal with themes of troubled memory and the imagined past. These films were contemporary with, and associated with, the French New Wave (nouvelle vague), though Resnais did not regard himself as being fully part of that movement. He had closer links to the “Left Bank” group of authors and filmmakers who shared a commitment to modernism and an interest in left-wing politics. He also established a regular practice of working on his films in collaboration with writers usually unconnected with the cinema, such as Marguerite Duras, Alain Robbe-Grillet and Jorge Semprún.[1][2][3][4]

In later films Resnais moved away from the overtly political topics of some previous works and developed his interests in an interaction between cinema and other cultural forms, including theatre, music, and comic books. This led to imaginative adaptations of plays by Alan Ayckbourn, Henri Bernstein and Jean Anouilh, as well as films featuring various kinds of popular song.

His films have frequently explored the relationship between consciousness, memory, and the imagination, and he is noted for devising innovative formal structures for his narratives.[5][6] Throughout his career he has won many awards from international film festivals and academies.

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1959–1967[edit]

Resnais’s first feature film was Hiroshima mon amour (1959). It originated as a commission from the producers of Nuit et brouillard (Anatole Dauman and Argos Films) to make a documentary about the atomic bomb, but Resnais initially declined, thinking that it would be too similar to the earlier film about the concentration camps[22] and that it presented the same problem of how to film incomprehensible suffering.[23] However, in discussion with the novelist Marguerite Duras a fusion of fiction and documentary was developed which acknowledged the impossibility of speakingabout Hiroshima; one could only speak about the impossibility of speaking about Hiroshima.[24] In the film, the themes of memory and forgetting are explored via new narrative techniques which balance images with narrated text and ignore conventional notions of plot and story development.[25] The film was shown at the 1959 Cannes Film Festival, alongside Truffaut’s Les Quatre Cents Coups (The 400 Blows), and its success became associated with the emerging movement of the French New Wave.[26]

Resnais’s next film was L’Année dernière à Marienbad (Last Year at Marienbad) (1961), which he made in collaboration with the novelist Alain Robbe-Grillet. The fragmented and shifting narrative presents three principal characters, a woman and two men, in the opulent setting of a grand European hotel or château where the possibility of a previous encounter a year ago is repeatedly asserted and questioned and contradicted. After winning the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival, the film attracted great attention and provoked many divergent interpretations of how it should be understood, encouraged by interviews in which Robbe-Grillet and Resnais themselves appeared to give conflicting explanations of the film. There was little doubt however that it represented a significant challenge to the traditional concept of narrative construction in cinema.[27]

At the beginning of the 1960s France remained deeply divided by the Algerian War, and in 1960 the Manifesto of the 121, which protested against French military policy in Algeria, was signed by a group of leading intellectuals and artists who included Alain Resnais. The war, and the difficulty of coming to terms with its horrors, was a central theme of his next film Muriel (1963), which used a fractured narrative to explore the mental states of its characters. It was among the first French films to comment, even indirectly, on the Algerian experience.[28]

(Francis Schaeffer comments on Sartre’s statement on the Algerian War at this link.)

Personal life[edit]

In 1969 Resnais married Florence Malraux (daughter of the French statesman and writer André Malraux); she was a regular member of his production team, working as assistant director on most of his films from 1961 to 1986. His second wife is Sabine Azéma, who acted in the majority of his films from 1983 onwards; they were married in the English town of Scarborough in 1998.[76]

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Last Year at Marienbad

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Last Year at Marienbad
Marienbadposter.jpg
Directed by Alain Resnais
Produced by Pierre Courau
Raymond Froment
Written by Alain Robbe-Grillet
Starring Delphine Seyrig
Giorgio Albertazzi
Sacha Pitoëff
Music by Francis Seyrig
Cinematography Sacha Vierny
Editing by Jasmine Chasney
Henri Colpi
Release dates
  • June 25, 1961
Running time 94 minutes
Country France / Italy
Language French

L’Année dernière à Marienbad (released in the US as Last Year at Marienbad and in the UK as Last Year in Marienbad) is a 1961 French film directed by Alain Resnais from a screenplay by Alain Robbe-Grillet.[1]

The film is famous for its enigmatic narrative structure, in which truth and fiction are difficult to distinguish, and the temporal and spatial relationship of the events is open to question. The dream-like nature of the film has fascinated and baffled audiences and critics; some hail it as a masterpiece, others find it incomprehensible.

Plot[edit]

At a social gathering at a château or baroque hotel, a man approaches a woman. He claims they met the year before at Marienbad and is convinced that she is waiting there for him. The woman insists they have never met. A second man, who may be the woman’s husband, repeatedly asserts his dominance over the first man, including beating him several times at a mathematical game (a version of Nim). Through ambiguous flashbacks and disorienting shifts of time and location, the film explores the relationships among the characters. Conversations and events are repeated in several places in the château and grounds, and there are numerous tracking shots of the château’s corridors, with ambiguous voiceovers. The characters are unnamed in the film; in the published screenplay, the woman is referred to as “A”, the first man is “X”, and the man who may be her husband is “M”.

Cast[edit]

Style[edit]

Still from L’année dernière à Marienbad; in this surreal image, the couples cast long shadows but the trees do not

The film continually creates an ambiguity in the spatial and temporal aspects of what it shows, and creates uncertainty in the mind of the spectator about the causal relationships between events. This may be achieved through the editing, giving apparently incompatible information in consecutive shots, or within a shot which seems to show impossible juxtapositions, or by means of repetitions of events in different settings and décor. These ambiguities are matched by contradictions in the narrator’s voiceover commentary.[7] Among the notable images in the film is a scene in which two characters (and the camera) rush out of the château and are faced with a tableau of figures arranged in a geometric garden; although the people cast long dramatic shadows, the trees in the garden do not.

The manner in which the film is edited challenged the established classical style of narrative construction.[8] It allowed the themes of time and the mind and the interaction of past and present to be explored in an original way.[9] As spatial and temporal continuity is destroyed by its methods of filming and editing, the film offers instead a “mental continuity”, a continuity of thought.[10]

In determining the visual appearance of the film, Resnais said that he wanted to recreate “a certain style of silent cinema”, and his direction as well as the actors’ make-up sought to produce this atmosphere.[11] He even asked Eastman Kodak if they could supply an old-fashioned filmstock that would ‘bloom’ or ‘halo’ to create the look of a silent film (they could not).[12] Resnais showed his costume designer photographs from L’Inhumaine andL’Argent, for which great fashion designers of the 1920s had created the costumes. He also asked members of his team to look at other silent films including Pabst’s Pandora’s Box: he wanted Delphine Seyrig’s appearance and manner to resemble that of Louise Brooks. Most of Seyrig’s dresses in the film were designed by Chanel.[13] The style of certain silent films is also suggested by the manner in which the characters who populate the hotel are mostly seen in artificial poses, as if frozen in time, rather than behaving naturalistically.[14]

The films which immediately preceded and followed Marienbad in Resnais’s career showed a political engagement with contemporary issues (the atomic bomb, the aftermath of the Occupation in France, and the then taboo subject of the war in Algeria); Marienbad however was seen to take a completely different direction and to focus principally on style.[8] Commenting on this departure, Resnais said: “I was making this film at a time when I think, rightly, that one could not make a film, in France, without speaking about the Algerian war. Indeed I wonder whether the closed and stifling atmosphere of L’Année does not result from those contradictions.”[15]

Reception[edit]

Critical response to the film was divided from the outset and has remained so.[16][17] Controversy was fuelled when Robbe-Grillet and Resnais appeared to give contradictory answers to the question whether the man and woman had actually met at Marienbad last year or not; this was used as a means of attacking the film by those who disliked it.[18]

In 1963 the writer and film-maker Ado Kyrou declared the film a total triumph in his influential Le Surréalisme au cinéma,[19] recognizing the ambiguous environment and obscure motives within the film as representing many of the concerns of surrealism in narrative cinema. Another early supporter, the actor and surrealist Jacques Brunius, declared that “Marienbad is the greatest film ever made”.[20]

Less reverently, Marienbad received an entry in The Fifty Worst Films of All Time, by Harry Medved, with Randy Dreyfuss and Michael Medved. The authors lampooned the film’s surrealistic style and quoted numerous critics who found it to be pretentious and/or incomprehensible. The film critic Pauline Kael called it “the high-fashion experimental film, the snow job at the ice palace… back at the no-fun party for non-people”.[21]

The movie inspired a brief craze for the Nim variation played by the characters.[22]

Interpretations[edit]

Numerous explanations of the ‘story’ have been put forward: that it is a version of the Orpheus and Eurydice myth; that it represents the relationship between patient and psychoanalyst; that it all takes place in the woman’s mind;[23] that it all takes place in the man’s mind, and depicts his refusal to acknowledge that he has killed the woman he loved;[24] that the characters are ghosts or dead souls in limbo;[25] etc.

Some have noted that the film has the atmosphere and the form of a dream, that the structure of the film may be understood by the analogy of a recurring dream,[26] or even that the man’s meeting with the woman is the memory (or dream) of a dream.[27]

Others have heeded, at least as a starting point, the indications given by Robbe-Grillet in the introduction to his screenplay: “Two attitudes are then possible: either the spectator will try to reconstitute some ‘Cartesian’ scheme – the most linear, the most rational he can devise – and this spectator will certainly find the film difficult if not incomprehensible; or else the spectator will let himself be carried along by the extraordinary images in front of him […] and to this spectator, the film will seem the easiest he has ever seen: a film addressed exclusively to his sensibility, to his faculties of sight, hearing, feeling.”[28]

Robbe-Grillet offered a further suggestion of how one might view the work: “The whole film, as a matter of fact, is the story of a persuading [“une persuasion“]: it deals with a reality which the hero creates out of his own vision, out of his own words.”[29]

Resnais for his part gave a more abstract explanation of the film’s purpose: “For me this film is an attempt, still very crude and very primitive, to approach the complexity of thought, of its processes.”[30]

Awards[edit]

The film won the Golden Lion at the 1961 Venice Film Festival. In 1962 it won the critics’ award in the category Best Film of the Syndicat Français de la Critique de cinéma in France. The film was selected as the French entry for the Best Foreign Language Film at the 34th Academy Awards in 1962, but was not accepted as a nominee.[31] However, it was nominated for the 1963Academy Award for Writing Original Screenplay (Alain Robbe-Grillet)[32] and it was also nominated for a Hugo Award as Best Dramatic Presentation.

The film was refused entry to the Cannes Film Festival because the director, Alain Resnais, had signed Jean-Paul Sartre‘s Manifesto of the 121 against the Algeria War.[33]

Influence[edit]

The impact of L’Année dernière à Marienbad upon other film-makers has been widely recognised and variously illustrated, extending from French directors such as Agnès Varda, Marguerite Duras, and Jacques Rivette to international figures like Ingmar Bergman and Federico Fellini.[34] Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining[35] and David Lynch’s Inland Empire[36] are two films which are cited with particular frequency as showing the influence of Marienbad.

Peter Greenaway said that Marienbad had been the most important influence upon his own filmmaking (and he himself established a close working relationship with its cinematographer Sacha Vierny).[37]

The film’s visual style has also been imitated in many TV commercials and fashion photography.[38]

The music video for “To the End“, a 1994 single by British rock group Blur, is based on the film.

This film was the main inspiration for Karl Lagerfeld‘s Chanel Spring-Summer 2011 collection.[39] Lagerfeld’s show was complete with a fountain and a modern replica of the film’s famous garden. Since costumes for this film were done by Coco Chanel, Lagerfeld drew his inspiration from the film and combined the film’s gardens with those at Versailles.

Donald Draper, the antihero of Mad Men, is shown watching this film and La Notte in season 2; themes of each film resonate with Draper’s storylines.[40]

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Here is a portion of a review by Roger Ebert:

LAST YEAR AT MARIENBAD

 

 

 

Last Year at Marienbad Movie Review
  |  Roger Ebert

May 30, 1999  

Yes, it’s easy to smile at Alain Resnais’ 1961 film, which inspired so much satire and yet made such a lasting impression. Incredible to think that students actually did stand in the rain to be baffled by it, and then to argue for hours about its meaning–even though the director claimed it had none. I hadn’t seen “Marienbad” in years, and when I saw the new digitized video disc edition in a video store, I reached out automatically: I wanted to see it again, to see if it was silly or profound, and perhaps even to recapture an earlier self–a 19-year-old who hoped Truth could be found in Art.

Viewing the film again, I expected to have a cerebral experience, to see a film more fun to talk about than to watch. What I was not prepared for was the voluptuous quality of “Marienbad,” its command of tone and mood, its hypnotic way of drawing us into its puzzle, its austere visual beauty. Yes, it involves a story that remains a mystery, even to the characters themselves. But one would not want to know the answer to this mystery. Storybooks with happy endings are for children. Adults know that stories keep on unfolding, repeating, turning back on themselves, on and on until that end that no story can evade.

The film takes place in an elegant chateau, one with ornate ceilings, vast drawing rooms, enormous mirrors and paintings, endless corridors and grounds in which shrubbery has been tortured into geometric shapes and patterns. In this chateau are many guests–elegant, expensively dressed, impassive. We are concerned with three of them: “A” (Delphine Seyrig), a beautiful woman. “X” (Giorgio Albertazzi), with movie-idol good looks, who insists they met last year and arranged to meet again this year. And “M” (Sascha Pitoeff), who may be A’s husband or lover, but certainly exercises authority over her. He has a striking appearance, with his sunken triangular face, high cheekbones, deep-set eyes and subtle vampirish overbite.

The film is narrated by X. The others have a few lines of dialogue here and there. On the soundtrack is disturbing music by Francis Seyrig, mostly performed on an organ–Gothic, liturgical, like a requiem. X tells A they met last year. He reminds her of the moments they shared. Their conversations. Their plans to meet in her bedroom while M was at the gaming tables. Her plea that he delay his demands for one year. Her promise to meet him again next summer.

A does not remember. She entreats X, unconvincingly, to leave her alone. He presses on with his memories. He speaks mostly in the second person: “You told me … you said … you begged me … .” It is a narrative he is constructing for her, a story he is telling her about herself. It may be true. We cannot tell. Resnais said that as the co-writer of the story he did not believe it, but as the director, he did. The narrative presses on. The insistent, persuasive X recalls a shooting, a death. No–he corrects himself. It did not happen that way. It must have happened this way, instead … .

We see her in white, in black. Dead, alive. The film, photographed in black and white by Sacha Vierny, is in widescreen. The extreme width allows Resnais to create compositions in which X, A and M seem to occupy different planes, even different states of being. (The DVD is letterboxed; to see this film panned-and-scanned would be pointless.) The camera travels sinuously; the characters usually move in a slow and formal way, so that any sudden movement is a shock (when A stumbles on a gravel walk and X steadies her, it is like a sudden breath of reality).

The men play a game. It has been proposed by M. It involves setting out several rows of matchsticks (or cards, or anything). Two players take turns removing matchsticks, as many as they want, but only from one row at a time. The player who is left with the last matchstick loses. M always wins. On the soundtrack, we hear theories: “The one who starts first wins … the one who goes second wins … you must take only one stick at a time … you must know when to … .” The theories are not helpful, because M always wins anyway. The characters analyzing the stick game are like viewers analyzing the movie: You can say anything you want about it, and it makes no difference.

“I’ll explain it all for you,” promised Gunther Marx, a professor of German at the U. of I. We were sitting over coffee in the student union, late on that rainy night in Urbana. (He would die young; his son Frederick would be one of the makers of “Hoop Dreams.”) “It is a working out of the anthropological archetypes of Claude Levi-Strauss. You have the lover, the loved one and the authority figure. The movie proposes that the lovers had an affair, that they didn’t, that they met before, that they didn’t, that the authority figure knew it, that he didn’t, that he killed her, that he didn’t. Any questions?”

I sipped my coffee and nodded thoughtfully. This was deep. I never subsequently read a single word by Levi-Strauss, but you see I have not forgotten the name. I have no idea if Marx was right. The idea, I think, is that life is like this movie: No matter how many theories you apply to it, life presses on indifferently toward its own inscrutable ends. The fun is in asking questions. Answers are a form of defeat.

It is possible, I realize, to grow impatient with “Last Year at Marienbad.” To find it affected and insufferable. It doesn’t hurtle through its story like today’s hits–it’s not a narrative pinball machine. It is a deliberate, artificial artistic construction. I watched it with a pleasure so intense I was surprised. I knew to begin with there would be no solution. That the three characters would move forever through their dance of desire and denial, and that their clothing and the elegant architecture of the chateau was as real as the bedroom at the end of “2001: A Space Odyssey”–in other words, simply a setting in which human behavior could be observed.

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Is Roger Ebert correct when he states, “No matter how many theories you apply to it, life presses on indifferently toward its own inscrutable ends. The fun is in asking questions. Answers are a form of defeat.” I don’t think Ebert is right because it is my view that God has spoken to us and we can know the truth about why we were put on this earth. Also we can know that our lives will not end forever when we die but we do have an afterlife with God. That is the reason I have chosen our next artist and his work to look at closely. I am very interested in his emphasis on the subject of transcendence. James Tuttle is his name below he is pictured with his wife Kyung-Lim Lee who is a poet.

Featured Artist Today is James Tuttle:

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James Turrell and his wife, Kyung-Lim Lee

James Turrell – Skyspaces

Our current exhibition, The Ecstasy of Knowing, has us thinking about master of light, James Turrell.

James Turrell (b. 1943) is an American artist and Quaker who often describes himself as a sculptor of light. His work mixes architecture, sculpture and atmosphere to communicate feelings of transcendence and mediation.

Skyspace, James Turrell, Photo by Florian Holzherr

Turrell is known for his amazing Skyspaces, enclosed rooms where he subtly changes the light around an aperture in a roof, manipulating the viewer’s perception of the sky from a flat to three-Dimensional space.

Sky Pesher by James Turrell, Walker Art Center

Visitors are encouraged to spend contemplative time in his spaces as each one provides an array of changing colors throughout the day.  There are several skyspaces in the United States and around the world.

Meeting (Skyspace) by James Turrell, MoMA PS1

Original file ‎(3,872 × 2,592 pixels, file size: 1.04 MB, MIME type: image/jpeg)

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[ARTS 315] Working in the Expanded Field, part 3: Axiomatic Structures – Jon Anderson

Published on Apr 5, 2012

Contemporary Art Trends [ARTS 315], Jon Anderson

Working in the Expanded Field, part 3: Axiomatic Structures

November 4, 2011

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At the 25 minute mark in the above lecture from Jon Anderson of Biola there is a 12 minuted section on the art of James Turrell. Anderson points out that Turrell is trying to give us “a strong dose of the immaterial, the spiritual, and the transcendent and his work is trying to get us thinking about the spiritual or transcendent.”

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Richard Tuttle: Reality & Illusion | Art21 “Exclusive”

Uploaded on May 14, 2009

Episode #056: Artist Richard Tuttle installs the work “Ten Kinds of Memory and Memory Itself” (1973) at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

Richard Tuttle commonly refers to his art as drawing rather than sculpture, emphasizing the diminutive scale and idea-based nature of his work. He subverts the conventions of modernist sculptural practice by creating small, eccentrically playful objects in decidedly humble materials. Influences on his work include calligraphy, architecture, and poetry.

Learn more about Richard Tuttle: http://www.art21.org/artists/richard-…

VIDEO | Producer: Wesley Miller and Nick Ravich. Interview: Susan Sollins. Camera & Sound: Sam Henriques and Merce Williams. Editor: Jenny Chiurco. Artwork Courtesy: Richard Tuttle. Special Thanks: The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

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You will notice in the interview of Richard Tuttle by the reporter Chris Martin that Tuttle talks about grasping for immortality. Of course, that is not possible with a material base. The famous atheistic philosopher Jean Paul Sartre at the end of his life said:

“I do not feel that I am the product of chance, a speck of dust in the universe, but someone who was expected, prepared, prefigured. In short, a being whom only a Creator could put here; and this idea of a creating hand refers to God.”

You will notice in the interview that Tuttle knew Agnes Bernice Martin (March 22, 1912 – December 16, 2004) who was a famous artist, but he refers to her as though she still communicates to him even after her death. Without the belief in God people will always try to reach out and make a connection beyond this life. No wonder Richard Tuttle thinks this life is too short. In this video below by ART 21 called “Art and Life”  Richard Tuttle notes:

In some sense the artist is like Plato might call a “true philosopher.” You can go to the limit  of any or all disciplines that might be touched upon in our whole lifetime , for example, doesn’t seem enough to reach all those doors…Art is life and has to be all of life.

Now there is another point I want to demonstrate from Richard Tuttle’s life and work. Tuttle was raised in the Quaker faith and many Quakers hold the view that Christ has revealed himself in the Bible to us and He is the only way to heaven. In fact, their mission papers state, “Scripture calls us to account and helps us know God’s will. The Bible, as interpreted by the Holy Spirit, shows us what God requires of us and provides authoritative and unfailing spiritual guidance for our lives today.” However, Tuttle left his faith for over 25 years and then he came back to it. During this whole time he was searching for the transcendence in his art work. Currently Turrell is involved with the Quaker Fellowship which is called the 3rd Haven Friends Meeting in Easton, Maryland. I do not know if they hold to the traditional Christian views or not.

I have posted many times before about the pop singer Chris Martin of Coldplay (this is a different person than the reporter Chris Martin mentioned earlier) who was raised as an evangelical but he left his faith when he was 20, but he has not been able to totally shake his former beliefs (including his belief in hell) and they keep showing up in his songs. Deep down Martin knows that God created him for a purpose and that God has communicated to him truths about death and the afterlife that he can’t ignore. JUST LIKE TUTTLE IS CHRIS MARTIN BEING NUDGED BACK TO THE FAITH OF HIS CHILDHOOD BECAUSE HE CAN’T GET AROUND THE ISSUE OF “TRANSCENDENCE” IN HIS LIFE? Let’s look at the evidence that Martin keeps coming back to in his songs.

On June 23, 2012 my son Wilson and I got to attend a Coldplay Concert in Dallas. It was great. We drove down from our home in Little Rock, Arkansas earlier in the day. I wish they had played “Cemeteries of London” at the Dallas concert since I like that song a lot. Let me show you two points from the Book of Romans:

God reveals Himself in two Ways 

Lets take a look at the lyrics from the song “Cemeteries of London:”

God is in the houses
And God is in my head
And all the cemeteries of London
I see God come in my garden
But I don’t know what He said
For my heart, it wasn’t open
Not open

Romans chapter one clearly points out that God has revealed Himself through both the created world around us  and also in a God-given conscience that testifies to each person that God exists.
Notice in this song that the song writer notes, “I see God come in my garden” and “God is in my head.” These are the exact two places mentioned by the scripture.  Romans 1:18-20 (Amplified version)

18 For God’s [holy] wrath and indignation are revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who in their wickedness repress and hinder the truth and make it inoperative.

19 For that which is known about God is evident to them and made plain in their inner consciousness, because God [Himself] has shown it to them.

20 For ever since the creation of the world His invisible nature and attributes, that is, His eternal power and divinity, have been made intelligible and clearly discernible in and through the things that have been made (His handiworks). So [men] are without excuse [altogether without any defense or justification],(B)

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Chris Martin of Coldplay pictured below:

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Concerning these verses Francis Schaeffer said:

The world is guilty of suppressing God’s truth and living accordingly. The universe and its form and the mannishness of Man speak the same truth that the Bible gives in greater detail.

This is what Chris Martin is having to deal with and he  is clearly searching for spiritual answers but it seems he have not found them quite yet. The song “42“: “Time is so short and I’m sure, There must be something more.” Then in the song “Lost” Martin sings these words: “Every river that I tried to cross, Every door I ever tried was locked..”
Solomon went to the extreme in his searching in the Book of Ecclesiastes for this “something more” that Coldplay is talking about, but he found riches (2:8-11), pleasure (2:1), education (2:3), fame (2:9) and his work (2:4) all “meaningless” and “vanity” and “a chasing of the wind.” Every door he tried was locked.

Solomon is searching for the meaning of life in the Book of Ecclesiastes and that reminds me a lot of the search that Chris Martin is currently in.  By the way, the final chapter of Ecclesiastes finishes with Solomon emphasizing that serving God is the only proper response of man. My prediction: I am hoping that Coldplay’s next album will also come to that same conclusion that Solomon came to in Ecclesiastes 12:13-14:
13 Now all has been heard;
here is the conclusion of the matter:
Fear God and keep his commandments,
for this is the whole duty of man.

14 For God will bring every deed into judgment,
including every hidden thing,
whether it is good or evil.

Kerry Livgren of Kansas found Christ eventually after first trying some Eastern Religions. I remember telling my friends in 1978 when “Dust in the Wind” was the number 6 song in the USA that Kansas had written a philosophical song that came to the same conclusion about humanistic man as Solomon did so long ago and I predicted that some members of that band would come to know the Christ of the Bible in a personal way. (Some rock bands  such as the “Verve“, claim that change is not possible, but it is when Christ comes in and changes someone.) You can hear Kerry Livgren’s story from this youtube link:

(part 1 ten minutes)

(part 2 ten minutes)

In the song Poppyfields” Chris Martin sings, ” People burying their dead…I don’t wanna die on my own here tonight.” That fatalistic view can also be seen in “Dust in the Wind.”

Here are the lyrics from the Kansas song “Dust in the Wind”:”

I close my eyes Only for a moment and the moment’s gone All my dreams Pass before my eyes with curiosity
Dust in the wind All they are is dust in the wind
Same old song Just a drop of water in an endless sea All we do Crumbles to the ground, though we refuse to see
(Aa aa aa) Dust in the wind All we are is dust in the wind Oh, ho, ho
Now don’t hang on Nothin’ last forever but the earth and sky It slips away And all your money won’t another minute buy
Dust in the wind All we are is dust in the wind (All we are is dust in the wind)
Dust in the wind (Everything is dust in the wind) Everything is dust in the wind (In the wind)

Coldplay – Cemeteries of London ( FULL VIDEO)

The brilliant video for Cemeteries of London. It’s the perfect mix between music and image, Coldplay sold around 8 million albums with Viva La Vida.

Rare picture: Elusive couple Gwyneth Paltrow and Chris Martin are photographed together at a beach party in the Hamptons

Elusive: Gwyneth Paltrow and Chris Martin in a rare shot together at a beach party in the Hamptons

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Richard Tuttle: Art & Life | Art21 “Exclusive”

Uploaded on Jul 2, 2009

Episode #063: Richard Tuttle discusses his philosophical relationship to art and life in his New Mexico studio.

Richard Tuttle commonly refers to his art as drawing rather than sculpture, emphasizing the diminutive scale and idea-based nature of his work. He subverts the conventions of modernist sculptural practice by creating small, eccentrically playful objects in decidedly humble materials. Influences on his work include calligraphy, architecture, and poetry.

Learn more about Richard Tuttle: http://www.art21.org/artists/richard-…

VIDEO | Producer: Wesley Miller and Nick Ravich. Interview: Susan Sollins. Camera & Sound: Bob Elfstrom and Ray Day. Editor: Jenny Chiurco. Artwork Courtesy: Richard Tuttle.

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ART JANUARY 1ST, 2005

In Conversation

Richard Tuttle

by Chris Martin

Photo of Richard Tuttle courtesy of Sperone Westwater.

Throughout his impressive 40 year career, Richard Tuttle has pursued an artistic practice that is not easily categorized, incorporating drawing, painting, and sculpture into an idiosyncratic, intensely personal hybrid. With two successive solo installations at the Drawing Center in New York, a new show at the Wolfsonian-Florida International University in Miami, and an upcoming retrospective opening at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in July 2005 and traveling to the Whitney Museum of American Art in the fall, Tuttle’s work has become highly visible recently, despite its sometimes miniscule scale. The Rail spoke with Tuttle at the TriBeCa loft he shares with his wife, poet Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, and their daughter, Martha.

 

Rail: Somehow in the middle of all this you met Agnes Martin. Can you talk about how you met her and what she meant to you as a young artist?

Tuttle: Well, when I enlisted to be a pilot, I thought they would keep me for years. I felt that I had thrown my life away and that actually gave me courage to call Agnes. After I enlisted I went to the streets, and there was a phone booth and she was living near there, and so I just called her up and she invited me by.

Rail: You called because you knew who she was—you had seen her work?

Tuttle: I called because I had actually seen her and I had had a sort of intuitive response, she had something to say to me about whatever it is I am. So I knew I didn’t need my savings, my little bit of savings, so I thought I’d buy art with it. So I went to Agnes and said I would like to buy a drawing. And I looked at drawing after drawing after drawing, and finally the one I found was in the pages of a telephone book where it was being flattened. When I found it I knew that that was the drawing I wanted. As the years go on, it is just a phenomenal drawing. It is really like the first drawing of the true grids, and that is such an enormous step in terms of art. It is incalculable, that if one did try to calculate it, there are so many different points of view in which you can offer a calculation. I think Agnes is truly an artist who is going to take 100 years for the world to catch up to what she is actually doing.

Rail: Was Agnes encouraging of your work?

Tuttle: Sometimes, not always. There was a period, like there was a group of work I made called “The Tin Pieces,” and she really didn’t go for that at all. But then I remember when I made the first really octagonal cloth piece, and just at that moment Agnes came by and she approved of the piece. That was important; she just thought the others were slipping backwards, which they were.

Rail: Well, how wonderful of her. She was able to give you this clarity and encouragement.

Tuttle: I think we all see differently, yet being able to see is a gift or a talent that we develop, and there are certainly people who are extremely developed in seeing. But a child can also come along and see as well as somebody who has been training their entire life to see.

Rail: Right—it is not about progress or your credentials, but about being open and perceptive in that moment.

Tuttle: Yeah, and the values that emerge from that.

Rail: You’ve stayed close to Agnes Martin and maintained a dialogue over the years?

Tuttle: Yes. I had Agnes on a drive two days ago. Many people feel bad when people get old and they can’t do this or they can’t do that. Actually, we go into these higher levels of illumination. We are not leaving; we are gaining, in fact. Agnes was such an extraordinary human being, and to be around her as she is going through to these higher levels of illumination—I just ask her questions. And the nurses there are like, who is this? But her answers, the freshness! One question I asked her was if she thought Picasso was a good artist. And I didn’t get an answer because she forgot the question [laughs]. But the fact that she didn’t have an answer is also an answer. I asked Agnes, “Is there a special relation between women and abstraction?” And she said, “Without women, you’ll never know what abstraction is.” One issue that we talked about is this difference between men and women. I think that men’s art is read from left to right and women’s art is read from right to left. I faced this any number of times going to art school when I would walk in and try to see what was there. Zero was coming in, and then I would see that this was a woman’s art. So I would go up and read it from right to left, and then I would see. So this happened many times. And finally I went to Agnes and asked her about it because she does this type of painting that seems to be non-gender specific, and maybe for that reason she really didn’t like the question. After a few moments she said, “My paintings have always been read from right to left.” It’s fascinating when you actually look at them that way you get this heart-touching delicacy and poignancy. With Agnes’s work, that is all played against this other formality, this toughness, this structure. She does make such an effort to make it even all over. Where does that come from? I am reading an essay written by Kathryn Tuma, who works at the Drawing Center, who says that Agnes is on record somewhere as saying that when people go to a museum, they have many different emotional responses; they can be happy or angry, but those responses are not connected to the paintings in the museum. And Kathryn says, like any logical person would, “Well, if they’re not connected to the paintings, what are they connected to?” She made a great litany of all the people who have looked at Agnes’s paintings and felt the beauty and all the aesthetic emotional qualities as a kind of proof that Agnes is not correct in saying that one’s response is not connected to the art. I know it is dangerous, but I am kind of for Agnes.


© Richard Tuttle
The Duck IV, 1987
Corrugated cardboard carton.Wood, string, paint and other materials
Private collection, Munich

Richard Tuttle at work

Uploaded on Oct 12, 2010

Artist Richard Tuttle creates a wire drawing in SFMOMA’s galleries. Learn more about Tuttle at http://www.sfmoma.org/multimedia/inte…

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Rail: When I go to a Richard Tuttle show, I never quite know what to expect. Your work has an element of surprise that seems to be pretty consistent. Are there certain techniques that you use to constantly reinvent what you are doing?

Tuttle: Well, I like to think of myself as a very hard worker, but it is very rare and unusual for me to be able to get to do the real stuff. One of the ways I know of that is when it’s an occasion where we feel that we didn’t make something, that it just came through.

Rail: Do you draw or paint on a daily basis?

Tuttle: Yeah. I was very proud of something Adam Weinberg said once. He said, “When you talk to Richard, you always feel like he’s working.” I think I actually carry that too far sometimes. I think that there is a certain energy, and I just make something on a day-to-day basis. Then there’s the question of whether the work is the rare masterpiece or whether it is the day-to-day thing. And when it comes time to show, you know—what is the work? The quandary is whether to show something that’s exceptional or to show that work that you think of as invisible, like invisible daily life.

Rail: Well, the size of your work seems to mirror the invisible intimacy of daily life. Have you ever been tempted to make really large-size pieces?

Tuttle: Well, I guess the issue isn’t size; it’s scale. And each of us has our scale, which I find also quite remarkable. Early on, part of my thinking was economic because I just said I’ll sacrifice, I’ll live cheaply, I’ll make all the sacrifices I need to as long as I can make my art. And the small size kind of came, out of those parameters, to be connected to my scale. But I actually have an idea at the moment that my scale, which I think is much more important than size, also has a relation to supersize: really, really big stuff. I have been doing some projects that are supersize, and they have been very successful, but that is even more paradoxical because when you get to supersize, people don’t know that it becomes invisible.

 

MORE ARTICLES BY THE AUTHOR

Chris Martin

CHRIS MARTIN is an abstract artist based in Brooklyn, NY.

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Richard Tuttle’s work below:

At the 9:00 mark below Richard Tuttle said, “I have a very hard time believing anything and that doesn’t make life that happy.” Many artists before have come to a place of sadness and despair because they as sensitive men know that we have been put on this world for a purpose they can’t find it. 

Conversations | Premiere | Artist Talk | Richard Tuttle

Published on Dec 12, 2012

Richard Tuttle, Artist, New York/New Mexico
In conversation with Chris Dercon, Director of Tate Modern, London

Thursday | December 6 | 2012

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Richard Tuttle

Home » Artists » Richard Tuttle

About Richard Tuttle

Richard Tuttle was born in Rahway, New Jersey, in 1941, and lives and works in New Mexico and New York. He received a BA from Trinity College, Hartford. Although most of Tuttle’s prolific artistic output since the beginning of his career in the 1960s has taken the form of three-dimensional objects, he commonly refers to his work as drawing rather than sculpture, emphasizing the diminutive scale and idea-based nature of his practice. He subverts the conventions of Modernist sculptural practice—defined by grand, heroic gestures; monumental scale; and the “macho” materials of steel, marble, and bronze—and instead creates small, eccentrically playful objects in decidedly humble, even “pathetic” materials such as paper, rope, string, cloth, wire, twigs, cardboard, bubble wrap, nails, Styrofoam, and plywood. Tuttle also manipulates the space in which his objects exist, placing them unnaturally high or oddly low on a wall—forcing viewers to reconsider and renegotiate the white-cube gallery space in relation to their own bodies. Tuttle uses directed light and shadow to further define his objects and their space. Influences on his work include calligraphy (he has a strong interest in the intrinsic power of line), poetry, and language. A lover of books and printed matter, Tuttle has created artist’s books, collaborated on the design of exhibition catalogues, and is a consummate printmaker. Richard Tuttle received a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship and the Skowhegan Medal for Sculpture. He has had one-person exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia; Kunsthaus Zug, Switzerland; Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea, Santiago de Compostela; and Museu Fundação Serralves, Porto. San Francisco Museum of Modern Art organized a 2005 Tuttle retrospective.

Links
Sperone Westwater, New York
Richard Tuttle on the Art21 Blog

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Richard Tuttle | Art21 | Preview from Season 3 of “Art in the Twenty-First Century” (2005)

Uploaded on Oct 14, 2008

Richard Tuttle commonly refers to his work as drawing rather than sculpture, emphasizing the diminutive scale and idea-based nature of his practice. He subverts the conventions of modernist sculptural practice and instead creates small, eccentrically playful objects in decidedly humble materials such as paper, rope, twigs, and bubble wrap. Tuttle also manipulates the space in which his objects exist, forcing viewers to reconsider and renegotiate the white-cube gallery space in relation to their own bodies.

Richard Tuttle is featured in the Season 3 episode “Structures” of the Art21 series “Art in the Twenty-First Century”.

Learn more about Richard Tuttle: http://www.art21.org/artists/richard-…

© 2005-2007 Art21, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

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