An Essay as a Response to the Article

Artist: Lucio Fontana, Born Argentina, 1899 -1968

Work titled: ‘Waiting’, 1964, Tempera on Canvas

From the article titled ‘The Cut in Collage Pollock, Fontana, Matta-Clark, Ono’

by Matthew Ryan Smith, artUS, 22 Spring 2008

For me, this article represents its audiences how art works of these four artists can relate to the definition of ‘collage’. Collage is a popular technique of making art that created by adhering the flat elements, such as newspaper, photographs, and illustrations, to another flat suface, and it is normally a technical term used only for two dimensional art works. This article broadens my perspective of ‘collage’, a French word meaning ‘to paste’, especially from its example of Lucio Fontana’ s art works.

Fontana is a well known artist for his cutting the canvas. Different from other artists, Fontana uses a knife instead of a paintbrush to slash the canvas from top to bottom, so, in his works, audiences can see the tracks of his slicings in the middle of the picture planes distinctively. By using an example from Fontana’s art piece, this article also uncovers the historical procedures of collage and expands its idea by paying attention to the cutting process, which usually stays behind the established meanings of collage. Fontana’s works shows the idea of using cutting process in the method of editing and recontextualizing materials of collage. In addition, his cutting remains fundamentally time-based, expresses both elegantly and violently, and represents his spatial concepts as well. 

In my view, this article reinterprets the definition of collage rooted from the natural and fundamental practice mentioned above. It is a reasonable and helpful article that can help its audiences to understand the possibilities of making collage in another dimension.

Vocabularies from Three Labels

Andy Warhol
American, 1928-1987
Rade Riot, 1968
Oil and silkscreen ink on canvas

Mass-printing
Printed material, such as newspapers and magazines, that can communicate to the people at large.
(Industrial printing)

Value
Monetary or material worth

Original
A unique quality of art pieces that shows new ideas, innovative thinking, and special characteristics. Sometimes, it is a source from which a copy, reproduction, or translation is made, such as the reproduction painting of Mona Lisa, one of the master pieces of Leonardo Da Vinci.

Commercial
On this context, commercial means something unoriginal. People can see and buy them in their everyday life very easy. They spread out everywhere, and they are an effect of commercial purposes of industrial world.
(Mass products)

Benday screen of dots
Dot patterns to mechanically produce shading effect for mass-printing techniques.
This process was invented by Benjamin Day (1839-1916)
Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein usually used this element in their works.

Skintones
A coded representation of the skin color or surface.
Often the canvases were hand-painted with colors that Warhol thought matched the depicted image such as ‘skin tones’ and vibrant magenta eye shadow before the screened image was applied. Occasionally Warhol painted on top of his silkscreen images but usually the silkscreen served as a final defining layer.


David Hockney
British, resides U.S.,B 1937
Plastic Tree Plus City Hall, 1964
Acrylic on canvas

Variety of past styles
Qualities of traditional forms of art before Pop Art movement
(Qualities of traditional forms)

Pop Art
Pop Art is a visual art movement that emerged in the mid 1950s in Britain and in parallel in the late 1950s in the United States. It focuses on popular mass culture, such as advertising, and comic book.

Inspiration
Somebody or something that stimulates a person to a high level of feeling, to creative thought, or to achieve the making of art. On this context, inspiration means Hockney’s environment in Los Angeles.
(Stimulation)

Juxtaposing naturalism and artificiality

Juxtaposition (n.)/juxtapose (v.)
The state or position of being placed close together

Naturalism
It is a theory that all phenomena can be explained in terms of natural causes and laws.

Artificiality
Something made or produced as a copy of something natural.
(Imitation/unnatural/not real)

A ‘brushy’ abstract background
The background of the painting that cannot consider what it is, and it resembles shaggy tracks of artists’ brushstrokes.

Archetypal (adj.)/Archetype (n.)
An original models
Other meaning is that archetypes are recurring motifs in mythology and the arts, According to the theories of psychiatrist, Carl Gustav Jung.


Roy Lichtenstein
American, 1923-1997
Pyramids II, 1969
Oil and acrylic on canvas

High art
Fine art, also known as beaux-arts, art that is of universal transcendence, having withstood the test of time and representing the epitome of artistic achievement, as opposed to low art, which is also known as mass culture.

Art-historical subjects
The topic of one set of Lichtenstein’s works created by choosing the forms of some famous architecture around the world and simplified them to be his paintings in his own styles.

Simplified outlined images
A painting or drawing created by using the simple line to draw just on the outer area or periphery. The simplified outlined images are reduction in complexity or extent.

Vibrant
Full of life and energy

Cape Cod

The Kugel/Gips House and Stingrays’ Egg Purses

 

 

Our trip to Cape Cod was on the last Thursday.  We set off the journey at 8.30 am, from RISD, and we arrived there at around 10.30 am.  Cape Cod is a peninsula, in Massachusetts, jutting out into the Atlantic Ocean.  Although we had heard that Cape Cod was popular for Americans to spend their Summer time with outdoor activities such as beach walking, kayaking, and fishing, our aim of this trip was to visit the Cape Modern Houses.  It was a special time for us to visit this place with the guidance from a specialist of this field, and it helped me to broaden my perception about this style of building more correctly.  For me, the most two favorite things from this trip were the Kugel/Gips house and Stingrays’ egg purses.

 

The Kugel/Gips house was one of the Bauhaus buildings we visited this time.  For me, it had some special different characteristics from other houses.   First, it was a small and simple house located nearby the water.  The next quality was that it had a harmony of using two different forms.  When I first saw this building on its North side, it was very solid and stood calmly with approximately 5-6 planes.  It was made by concrete blocks, wood, and mirror, but from this side, almost of the materials we saw were concrete blocks.  Thus, the quality of materials made the building on this side more solid than other houses we saw here.  After that when we went to its South side, the form of the house was open and connected to its environment especially the water beside.  In addition, on the west side, we could see its structure and cantilever, which was similar to the composition of abstract painting in modernist movement in term of using rhythm, plane, and space.  Also, the structure was not weight down by the gravity.  It stayed like a floating form in space.  The last one was that this building was created by Charlie Zehnder, a RISD alumni, with suggestion from Frank Lloyd Wright.  Both of them came here and spent two nights talking about the plan with each other.  Frank Lloyd Wright was well known as a master architect with the concept of Organic architecture, which concerned about form and function were one, and every building should grow naturally from its environment.

 

Stingrays’ egg purses were protective cases for Stingrays’ eggs.  In the beginning, it was difficult to everybody to know what it was.  It was a very extraordinary creature for two reasons.  First, every part of its form were functional.  The case was for protection the egg inside.  Also, it could be floating or buoyed up on the sea. Its tendrils from each corner could help to anchor itself with the seaweed and rocks for protection the embryos developing inside.  When the embryos hatched out from the case.  The empty cases would wash up on beaches.  The other one was that its form had some abstract qualities and related to its environment.  It was organic, but nobody knew what it was.  It might come from the ocean, or it might be a kind of seed from the tree.  Each case could stay harmoniously both in the ocean and shoreline.  I used to think that the tamarind fruit was a very special product design by nature, but the Stingrays’ egg purses made me to rethink about that.

 

In conclusion, my trip to Cape Cod was very interesting because I could use this opportunity to learn something from both aesthetic development of human beings and creativity of nature mentioned above.  Without any knowledge in this world, what we could do and learn.  I hoped that I could use this experience to rethink about myself and continued to learn and respect one another more.