Bonus - Look With Your Ears No. 1: Abstraction

The Lonely Palette

Arts, Podcast, Art, Museum, Painting, Modern Art, Visual Arts, Art History

4.8 • 857 Ratings

🗓️ 18 May 2021

⏱️ 23 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The Lonely Palette is collaborating with the Addison Gallery of American Art in celebration of the museum's 90th anniversary! In this episode, we're using the Addison's collection to explore abstraction, i.e. the one guaranteed way to alienate your visitor. Or...maybe not? Maybe, when it comes to art without a fixed meaning, our presence is requested, and even required?

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to the Addison Gallery of American Art.
0:05.0	I'm Tamara Vishai, host of the art history podcast, The Lonely Palate, and throughout this three-episode series, Your Guide to the Addison, as we celebrate its 90th anniversary by looking at some of the most important and provocative objects in the museum's collection.
0:26.6	Join me on a thematic stroll through the galleries as we poke and probe both what these objects mean to art history and to each other. Today, exploring abstraction.
0:42.1	Want to scare someone the minute they walk into your museum gallery?
0:45.4	Tell them the show is about abstraction.
0:49.3	Now watch them turn heel and run every time.
1:00.0	What is it about this idea of abstraction, of no fixed narrative, of shapes and spatters and goop, with no discernible meaning that strikes so much fear into the hearts of people who just really want to have a pleasant day at the museum?
1:08.0	It's like those three innocuous syllables, abstraction, contain all the trepidation
1:14.3	visitors have about not understanding the art, and run counter to everything people expect art to be,
1:21.5	a canvas that disappears under its narrative, or a beautifully rendered story of stuff.
1:30.3	Abstraction on its face is about none of those things.
1:34.3	It's an experience, not a painting of something.
1:38.3	It's about the elements of painting itself, not necessarily what those elements are in the service of representing.
1:47.0	It draws attention to the presence, even the two-dimensionality of that canvas.
1:53.0	And it makes it feel like it's our fault for wanting the art to tell us a story.
1:59.0	Instead, we're stuck with this abstract painting that feels like it's sitting
2:02.4	with its arms crossed, all deliberately withholding.
2:14.6	But okay, first of all, abstraction, as we're about to discover, is really just a victim of bad PR.
2:22.5	A quick history lesson.
2:24.6	The first abstract paintings, ironically enough, were meant to be the most democratic.
2:30.7	Painted in the 19thines by Russian artists on the cusp of revolution, the suprematists, as they called themselves,
2:37.0	they were desperate to quote, free art from the burden of the object.
	...

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