For my final Thing To Do in Paris I am going to the Palais du Tokyo and y'all I am so excited. I have been looking forward to this all week. I hope they have pictures of squares
I love it when someone paints a picture of a rectangle. You didn't even need to do that. The canvas was already a rectangle. It makes me just assume you must have had some kind of really good reason for painting the rectangle or else you wouldn't have bothered. It makes me want to know what it was
There turns out to be two Palaises de Tokyo at the Palais de Tokyo now. I do not really understand this but it seems like a good thing because it means double the changes to see a painting of a rectangle
There's an exhibit at the modern art museum where they're just showing videos of cool skateboarding tricks and playing funk music. This rules. I love Modern Art
I found the squares!!!
Now, you'd think what you're looking at here is that this person painted some squares. But you'd be wrong. What she did was paint everything *except* the squares. The canvas is covered in white paint and the lines of the square are the places where she *didn't* paint.
@mcc ok first of all that's really clever, but to split hairs she clearly drew the squares on the canvas with graphite first and never erased it, so it's not that the squares were constructed by painting around their perimeter, but rather they were simply drawn the normal way then painted around.
@mcc I like it. I wonder if the concept here was a painting of the blank gessoed canvas upon itself, meant to maximally preserve the pristineness of the canvas so that the canvas remains largely blank while also containing a picture of itself. This makes me wonder if the canvas on the right where the square looks more broken had some defect in the way the canvas was wrapped.
@aeva what is most interesting to me about these two paintings is that in neither of them is the square connected. Each square is made of four "corners" which are slightly off-rotated so that they do not connect at the centers. It is not actually a square. I imagine a space with walls built like the lines here. You'd be able to slip through the gaps at the side midpoints, providing access to a cavernous interior space.
@mcc I love how works like this tend to pull out one of three reactions from people: The most common one might be the viewer that shrugs and goes "I don't get it" and walks away without much fanfare. The next most common one is probably the viewer that gets irate about it and it ruins their fucking day (and they learn nothing from it). And finally, there's the viewer who stands in awe in front of the work for a long time seeing many, many things that simply are not there.
@mcc and these kinds of works are usually the product of an enormous amount of iteration and forethought, which always makes wonder if I'm ever even close to seeing the same thing the artist did if I'm viewing it without any context what so ever.
@mcc I suppose there's the fourth gallery goer archetype which is the person who reads the little card next to the painting, but never do because I'm there to see pictures and in college I was one of many artists who was like "do I have to write a bunch of bullshit on card I'm here to make pictures not generate bullshit" and the professor was like "yes you do tradition demands it you must write compelling bullshit to put next to your art so people understand it's art"
@mcc writing the little card was always a slog. We'd stay up late trying to help eachother figure out how to write something the professor would accept as a reasonable good faith attempt at writing meaningless text. Except for Celina, because she was also a philosophy major so she was well equipped to write high minded stuff on short notice. I was reliably told by others in the philosophy department at the time that studying philosophy requires you write a *lot* of bullshit very fast.
