17^th Century Italian Baroque

The 17th century was a time in which art and religion were inextricably connected. The Counter Reformation was Catholic Church's attempt to command authority over the Christian world and battle the Protestant threat. How is this seen in the art? In the attempt to win back those that had been drawn away by Protestantism, the aesthetics of the time became dramatic, emotional, sensual, grandiose, and opulent. Religious works became imbued with sensual undertones.

Artinthepicture offers this: "The Baroque originated around 1600. The canon promulgated at the Council of Trent (1545?63), by which the Roman Catholic Church addressed the representational arts by demanding that paintings and sculptures in church contexts should speak to the illiterate rather than to the well-informed, is customarily offered as an inspiration of the Baroque, which appeared, however, a generation later. This turn toward a populist conception of the function of ecclesiastical (church) art is seen by many art historians as driving the innovations..."

In an attempt to win back those that had been drawn away by Protestantism, the aesthetics of the time became dramatic, emotional, sensual, grandiose, and opulent. Simple, right? To attract people, awe them. Religious works, like sculptures and buildings, were imbued with sensual undertones. What is more viscerally understood than sensuality, right?

Berini's Ecstasy of Saint Teresa

When talking about the Baroque, perhaps the most salient work to discuss is Berini's Ecstasy of Saint Teresa . It is, in a word, stunning.

smarthistory.org: Saint Theresa was a nun who was canonized (made a Saint by the Church) because of the spiritual visions she experienced. She lived during the middle of the 16th century in Spain—at the height of the Reformation. Saint Theresa wrote several books in which she described her visions.
This is her description of the event that Bernini depicts:


Beside me, on the left, appeared an angel in bodily form.... He was not tall but short, and very beautiful; and his face was so aflame that he appeared to be one of the highest rank of angels, who seem to be all on fire.... In his hands I saw a great golden spear, and at the iron tip there appeared to be a point of fire. This he plunged into my heart several times so that it penetrated to my entrails. When he pulled it out I felt that he took them with it, and left me utterly consumed by the great love of God. The pain was so severe that it made me utter several moans. The sweetness caused by this intense pain is so extreme that one cannot possibly wish it to cease, nor is one's soul content with anything but God. This is not a physical but a spiritual pain, though the body has some share in it—even a considerable share.

Saint Theresa describes her intensely spiritual experience in very physical, even sexual terms. Why? We know that an important goal of Baroque art is to involve the viewer. Theresa is describing this in physical/sexual terms so that we can understand. After all, being visited by an angel and filled with the love of God is no small experience. How can we ordinary mortals hope to understand the intensity and passion of this experience except on our own terms?

Compare Renaissance master, Michelangelo's David (left) with Baroque master, Bernini's David (right). The visual art of the Renaissance was about seeking balance, symmetry, and perfect optical observation. This is seen well in Michelangelo's David. He displays a calm poise, control, and determination. He is captured after the action-- his sling hangs down his back as he looks confidently onwards, almost to an unseen crowd.
Compare this to Berini's David. This David is about the tension

before the rock leaves his sling.
Its composition is dynamic, his arm extends behind his back and you anticipate its flight across his body and the explosive trajectory of the rock, through the air, and into Goliath. This is the energy that transformed the Renaissance mastery of sculpture and painting into the evocative Baroque style. Bernini is known as one of great Baroque masters, responsible for the arms added to the St. Peter's Cathedral in the 17th century that are now symbolic of the Vatican. Saint Peter's Basilica underwent a large renovation-- its purpose was to establish itself as the seat of Roman Catholicism. The plan that Michelangelo originally laid out for the structure was considerably expanded by architect Carlo Maderno to accommodate the large congregations.

Caravaggio and the Caravaggisti

Nowhere is drama more seen in Baroque art than in the work of Michelangelo Merisi, commonly known as Caravaggio. Caravaggio perfected a way to render light with a dramatic and palpable quality. 

This is known as tenebrism. This technique uses large areas of darkness to contrast sharply with brightly lit areas. The artists that followed in Caravaggio's footsteps and utilized the dramatic effects of tenebrism are known as Caravaggisiti.
(Calling of Saint Matthew, Caravaggio, above) They include in the great female artist  Artemisia Gentileschi (Judith and Maidservant with Head Holofernes, Artemisia Gentileschi, right). For Caravaggio and the Caravaggisti, light was used as a metaphor for the divine and revelation. This is the difference between tenebrism and the Renaissance's chiaroschuro. Chiaroschuro was used to simulate spatial depth through graduations of light and dark-- it is based on empirical observation of light and shadows (a technique called modeling). Tenebrism was a exaggeration of chiaroschuro and is not optically correct. The revelatory light is analogous to faith-- it changes the way one sees the world. In Conversion of Saint Paul, Caravaggio illustrates the moment when Paul, not yet Saint Paul, fall off his horse and hears God calling his name. The horse, nor the servant hear God's call. But an understanding of Caravaggio would suggest that the light in which Paul is bathed as actually the presence of God. (Conversion of Saint Paul, Caravaggio, below)

 Thought food:

Comparing Caravaggio's work to Bernini's, based on their garb and content, do they seem like they worked in period?

Giovanni Gabrieli and the canzona

  The canzona was derived from Renaissance secular music, like the madrigal, known for its distinctive LONG~short~short rhythm known as the canzona rhythm. Gabrieli designated specific instruments for specific parts (a practice known as orchestration today). He controlled the variation in volume and intensity (known as dynamics) with the designations piano (for soft) and forte (for loud). This is well heard in Canzona Duodecimi Toni. His compositions mirror Carravaggio's contrast between light and dark. Gabrieli is also responsible for the organization of music around a tonic note, or a central note that is the focus of the composition. Canzona Duodecimi Toni's resolution is on C. His compositions mirror Carravaggio's contrast between light and dark. Gabrieli is also responsible for the organization of music around a tonic note, or a central note that is the focus of the composition. Canzona Duodecimi Toni's resolution is on C.

Claudio Monteverdi and the Opera

Claudio Monteverdi was appointed musical director at saint Mark's where he proposed a very different approach to composing music. Traditionalists at the time preferred that the text served the music and Monteverdi sought to reverse this relationship-- thus, the opera was born. Although he was not the first to write an opera, as a group called the Camerata of Florence, dedicated to discovering the style of singing that the ancient Greeks used to unite their poetry and music and Caccaini, in the 16th century, wrote works that placed solo vocal lines above instrumental lines, he is known as the first to integrate music and drama successfully.

Antonio Vivaldi's Concerto

Vivaldi specialized in composing concertos, which are a secular form of instrumental music arranged in three movements. This form was in existence prior to Vivaldi but he systematized it-- the first movement usually being allegro (cheerful and quick), the second, slower and expressive, and the third, livelier than the first. Concertos usually feature one or two instruments that perform passages that contrast back and forth with the orchestra in the first and third movements. This form is called ritornello ritornello in the tonic and the solos interrupt in different keys, back and forth, until the ritornello returns in the tonic in the concluding section.

Commodity and Beauty

The beauty in man and object-- paintings, lips, breasts, sculptures, muscles-- is systematized, I am beginning to think. I am beginning to think that beauty rarely exists in objects. The power is in the people. When an object is universally esteemed with beauty, it becomes capable of convincing people of its beauty solely by name, or canon. This phenomenon is imbued in culture. Culture conditions values for beauty. For instance:

Is this beautiful?

If Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa was not universally esteemed, it quite literally would be less beautiful. What do you think?

Michelangelo's Creation of Adam

Is it beautiful?

 When something is exalted so much, when it becomes a commodity, an accessory. Its beauty becomes expected. It is no longer discovered but imposed. Michelangelo’s work is expected to be beautiful and most of the world has been convinced of it. 

Picasso's Demoiselles d'Avignon

Do you find this beautiful?

Muscular men have become accessories, expectations of beauty, not discovered, inspired beauty. Large breasts, light eyes, blond hair: expected, uninspired, and systematized, in most cases. 

Was her beauty discovered or sold? 

Or is she just a Campbell's Soup Can?

Look at her over, 

and over,

and over,

and over,

and over,

and over,

and over,

and over again.

I am attempting to ask: "What is beautiful?" And what have we been told to find beautiful. And for those that don't fit the canon for beautiful, where does it leave them?

Jen Davis/ photographer

What is real beauty?

                     

Who wants to be a Campbell's Soup Can? Who is envious?

So, should we feel bad for like what we do? Is it okay to continue to exalt and adore only our tastes, conditioned or not? Does this thinking leave other's out? Or is it just a nature, objective truth that some traits are ugly and some are beautiful? Where do you fall in the canon? Where do your children? What message are they receiving?

or

Kill Art Manifesto, 2011

Kill Art Manifesto, 2011

1.  The widespread colonialism of “art” is now dead. The past is among its victims. The discovered worlds of the Non-West are among its victims. The future is among its victims.

2.  The disgraceful word has destroyed the ability to appreciate objects and their splendor.

3.  A new consciousness has been brought to return power back to the pure experiencers—the brave beings that have the courage to see like a child and disregard classifications.

4.  The dogmas and domination over the individual is now lifted by the death of “art”.

5.  The Kill Art founders now call upon all who believe in the reformation of the now disgraced word “xxx” to annihilate its remnants from museums, galleries, culture, life, and language and discussions that in any way prevent the pure experience of our lives and its objects.

6.  The “artists” of today have been working under the imperial dominion of “xxx” and have now been set free from the implicit constraints of the categorization of “xxxxxx”.

7.  From now on, those who were formally insulted with the term “xxxxxx” will forever more been known as “makers”, “producers”, “beings”, “forms”, “live-ers”, or any other non-colonizing term by which they wish to be referred, if at all.

8.  From this moment forward, what was formerly the Kill Art Manifesto shall now be referred to as the Kill XXX Manifesto.

9.  Co-operation in this movement is possibly by:

I.      Sending critical, philosophical, literary, performance or material and immaterial articles.

II.     Translating articles into different languages or distributing thoughts published in by Kill XXX.

III.   Destroying all printed materials containing the disgraced words: “xxx” and “xxxxxx” as well as individuals that use these disgraced words, including this one.

Signatures of the present collaborators:

JAHFRE COLBERT, thinking being/ CARA PENTECOST, maker/ ANNA CRUZ,live-er / BORIS UGARTECHEA, uncategorized

A Guided Tour

In Postmodern art, meaning is often embedded beneath formal aesthetics. It is through the analysis, comparing and contrasting, or question asking that meaning in Postmodern aesthetics is articulated. The content of the contemporary art is can be esoteric when one is uninformed or unaccustomed to art evaluation outside of the formal. To practice interpreting the language of contemporary aesthetics, the following is a guided interaction with the work of two contemporary artists with useful juxtaposed images to aid in analysis and interpretation. Questions will be posed and answered with brief descriptions that include useful historical knowledge and contemporary art language. 

Renée Cox's Hott-En-Tot V.S. Wm.H. West’s Big Minstrel Jubilee

 

Do you know anything about Renee Cox? Does the name of Renee Cox's work mean anything to you? 

Do you see them both as "art"? Are they made for the same audience? What is Renee Cox wearing? Might her enhancements carry any symbolism?

Renée Cox is a popular contemporary artist that deals with numerous themes rooted mainly in race and women. The name of her photo, Hott-En-Tot, gives away its meaning. Saartje Baartman was a famous Khoisan woman from South Africa who was exhibited in human zoos (or freak show). Her display name, Hottentot Venus, is a composite of the derogatory name for the Khoi people, Hottentot, and the Roman Goddess of Love, Venus. Her body is a symbol of a racist Otherism that is now realized as tragic and regretful. Her large buttocks, elongated genitalia and large breasts are symbols for an identity (freak),that belittle her and transform her into a skeptical. Cox is recreating the symbolism in her features in a contemporary setting that is obviously jarring for their intentional fakeness and its defiant arrangement. Cox looks at you in the eyes and manipulates her identity—exaggerates her actual forms, now a brand of the fetishized African identity, to the point of ostentation. In this way, the black-faced minstrel evokes the same exaggeration of identity but from the other side of the interaction. He is exaggerating his body with another’s identity to become a spectacle himself. But of course, this is for an entertainment that the entertainer has the luxury of being in on. The skin of a black man is an object with engrained meaning itself: the tap dancing nigger, the bamboozled jester, shucking and jiving for claps and change. The minstrel makes light of this history. In a way, Renee Cox is responding to it by not allowing you to laugh. To see it on a stern, starring black woman robs it of its humor and calls attention to the seriousness of its past.

 

                       Yinka Shonibare MBE's The Swing (After Fragonard) and Fragonard's The Swing 

 

Do you know anything about the artists? Do the names of the works mean anything? 

When do you think both images were made? Does the period in which they were created change its meaning? Is there a difference in media? 

Yinka Shonibare MBE's The Swing(After Fragonard) was made in 2001. Fragonard's The Swing was made in 1767. Yinka Shonibare is a contempoary Nigerian artist and Fragonard was a French artist working in the Rococo style. 

Who makes art in both time periods? For whom were the images made, given their time periods? Does anything about the subjects carry symbolism of a people or culture? 

How might Yinka Shonibare MBE's nationality affect his art, if at all? Is his identity potentially important in the image? What about his sculpture signals his identity and other identities? Do they carry meaningful symbolism? 

Yinka Shonibare MBE is a contemporary hybrid artist. His parents are Nigerian but schooled in an exclusive boarding school in London. He straddles national identities and in the space between both influences he creates a dialogue about the identity created in Postcolonial Africa and how this informs life in the homeland of his colonizer. He calls himself a "postcolonial hybrid”. A motif used in this dialogue is the Dutch wax fabric, designed in the former-Dutch colony Indonesia and manufactured in Manchester, England. The fabric ended up being exported to Africa where it was absorbed into African cultures, creating a synthetic "African" aesthetic identity. "It's the fallacy of that signification that I like," Shonibare told Pernilla Holmes of ARTnew in 2002. "It's the way I view culture--it's an artificial construct." Shonibare MBE brings together Europe and Africa, colonizer and colonized, authentic and artificial, through his use of the hybrid "African" cloth and references to well-known European painters such as Fragonard and Goya. 

(Shinobare just recently added the MBE to his name, recently initiated as a Member of the Order of the British Empire. Even his name conjures thoughts of imperialism, globalization, and cultural confluence.)

With these ideas in mind, make light of the follow Shinobare MBE's images.

An Essay on St.Vincent and A New Generation

What you dance to is dangerous, according to Roger Scruton in his essay: The Decline of Musical Culture. The way you sway your hips, rock and dip suggest who you are and what you stand for. When you dance, you are sympathizing with the music and its messages. So what do you sympathize with? What do you think you should sympathize with? If you are unsure, philosopher Roger Scruton certainly has an answer; “Taste in music matters, and [the] search for objective musical values is one part of our search for the right way to live…”(Scruton 125). Scruton recommends the “moral refinement of Bach, Mozart, and Schubert” (Scruton 132). However, if you disagree with Scruton’s taste and would rather listen to Led Zeppelin or Nirvana, award winning philosopher, Theodore Gracyk offers an essay you may enjoy. In Music’s Worldly Uses, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and To Love Led Zeppelin, Gracyk challenges Scruton, in a “family” manner, with his belief that the exaltation of classical composers “seems to be a pretty limited thing to think about if you want to think about music” (Gracyk 142) and asserts that we use music to express our own identities and to give us an opportunity to imaginatively explore other identities. Both philosophers suggest that something can be said about your disposition and the disposition of your community based on what music you sympathize with. Were Grayck and Scruton to assess the disposition of the listening community of the popular rock artist St. Vincent, how would they characterize them? “The Bed”, off her 2009 album, Actor, offers insight into the sympathies of her community. 

                       Art matters, according to Scruton, because, “through the free play of sympathy in fiction our emotions can be educated and also corrupted.” So it is interesting that St. Vincent is influenced by popular film fiction and uses it to communicate with her audience. In an interview with the popular music magazine Pitchfork, St. Vincent described her process during the scoring of Actor: “I would just watch films on silent and think, ‘How can I score this scene?’ as a writing exercise. So I envisioned the whole thing to be a film score” (Pitchfork). Scruton would pay particular attention to the kind of films she envisioned her audience would dance to. He asserts that:

In responding to a piece of music we are being led through a series of gestures which gain their significance from the intimation of community. As with dance, a kind of gravitational field is created, which shapes the emotional life of the one who enters it. We move for a while along the orbit of a formalized emotion and practice its steps. Our truncated movements are also acts of attention: we do what we do in response to the sounds that we hear, when we attend to them aesthetically. If this is what it is to hear the meaning, then hearing the meanings is inseparable from the aesthetic experience.(Scruton 125).

According to Scruton, what matters about St. Vincent’s “The Bed” would be the meaning found in the gestures and dance that the music leads one through. So how do people dance to St. Vincent? It is important to point out that when Scruton refers to dancing, he is referring to both the performed kind as well as “the kind of dancing [resembling] our experience in the concert hall, which is itself a kind of truncated dance” (Scruton124). This can be the way we sway to music, or tap our feet, and when we do this truncated dance our “whole being is absorbed by the movement of the music, and moves with it, compelled by incipient gestures of imitation. The object of this imitation is life-- life imagined in the form of music.” He is claiming that there is a sympathy that is conveyed through the gesture that incorporates not only the dancer, but the “sympathetic space” of the entire community as well (Scruton 123). In the case of The Bed, the sympathetic space, the community, and the intimated meaning is sympathizing with the nostalgia of Disney and all that it represents. 

            Gracyk would agree that gestures to music suggest sympathy with the meaning of the music, but would add that the meaning is hinged to the “informed listener,” not every listener. It is not in the actual formal elements of the music—the tonic and harmony— that the listener is sympathizing with, but in the intentional realm. He would say that only those who are familiar with St. Vincent’s musical references to Disney would be able to be a part of the sympathetic community. In the same way that most contemporary audiences could not sympathize with Mozart or Schubert because they simply do not know how to listen to them. Gracyk says: “When I sit down to write, I have the option of working to the percussive flow of a Javanese gamelan orchestra, to the bleating trumpets of a Tibetan Tantric Buddhist ritual, or to a choir trilling traditional Chinese folk songs. But that music wouldn’t really yield a musical experience to me, because I don’t really know how to listen to it” (Gracyk 137). He might say that St. Vincent and her audience know how to listen to Disney film scores, not Milhaud, Schoenberg or Stravinsky. Gracyk gave the example of the scene from the 2000 film Almost Home in which a homesick rocker and his band mates take a sullen drive back to their little community after a tumultuous tour. The radio begins to play Elton John’s Tiny Dancer and at first, only a few sing. The protagonist joins in and then his mates and road crew follow suit. He is told: “You are home” (Gracyk 144). The same effect happens in St. Vincent’s music. When her flutes flutter and ghastly violins flurry, nostalgia and whimsy are induced in the informed listeners. She uses these devices as compositional and emotional indicators for the audience that references a strong, familiar sensation that is unexpected and fantastic. The common characteristic of this response is the defining element of the relationship within the community of listeners. It is in this way that one can begin to see how St. Vincent’s music can describe a person or community through a familiar nostalgia that one must have experienced in order to be a part of the informed community. He says that, “music does not yield its meaning to listeners outside the continuing culture that gives the music its significance” (Gracyk 142). 

             There is also juxtaposition in “The Bed” within its formal components. The music begins with the rhythmic melody of a modern, Fender Rhodes sound, and the classical percussion instrument, the tympani. Harp and clarinet enter in polyphony, yet the harp plays block chords in common tension and release often heard in Western Classical music. These progressions are considered to have their first and most prominent articulation in Bach (Bach). Gracyk would say that the song requires an ear for European harmony, and familiarity with Disney film scores and contemporary indie rock music. Although the structure and emotional landscape are arranged with the juxtapositions and theatrical freedom of indie rock, the instrumentation and arrangement are firmly rooted in classical tradition. Scruton would have to say that the sympathetic gestures that accompany this song can be paralleled with the “moral refinement of Bach “(Scruton 132). As the song continues, anchored by the tympani, woodwinds, strings, and organ accompany the leading chords that suggest deceptive cadences which pace the overall harmonic progression. Her voice leading on top leads the ear to suggest anxiety but suggests harmonic resolve on the tonic, mirroring the feeling of accompanying lyrics: “We’re sleeping underneath our beds to scare the monsters out. With our dear daddy’s Smith and Wesson. We’ve got to teach them all a lesson.” Scruton would have to admit that this is not the “brief [exhalations], which cannot develop since they are swamped by rhythm, and have no voice-leading role” (Scruton 132), as is prevalent in many styles of contemporary music.  About the aesthetic (formal) arrangement of the song, Gracyk would note that “this music is multiculturalism in action. It reveals a cosmopolitan orientation in which cultural boundaries are continually erased and then redrawn, integrating diverse traditions without erasing differences and without any expectation that one dimension of one musical culture should rule supreme” (Gracyk 142). With an understanding of “The Bed”, Gracyk would be inclined to comment that the multiculturalism and juxtaposition can be extended to describe the community that listens to this music. The audience is informed about this new tradition of mixing classical and contemporary traditions, in the same way that the grunge community was informed in the distorted, expressive style of Nirvana. “The Bed” is about freedom in compositional expression—dipping in and out of traditions at will, Disney and Bach, with no concern of expectation or musical hierarchy. A quote from Gracyk about Led Zeppelin can be used to describe this music and its audience: “It abandons the presumption that there is one musical tradition that is inherently superior to all others and with it the view that there is only one right way to live. It deflates the utopianism of Scruton’s insistence on music as a realm of pure abstraction” (Gracyk 142).
 

                 St. Vincent is showing that she and her informed listeners are not ignorant of the past or its traditions. She uses, at will, references to contemporary and Classical culture. Perhaps she and her community are telling traditionalists like Scruton that it is he who is detrimental to society because of his myopic view of music. Perhaps it is he who is detrimental to the potential of pure music and higher culture. Gracyk certainly would be reinforced by St. Vincent. For many musicians, Scruton says “tonality has become a ‘dead language’, or a language that can be used only ironically—maybe even sarcastically—so as to neutralize the banality of its overexploited terms”(Scruton 121). St. Vincent shows us the myopic nature of Scruton’s point. She shows us that she can infuse classical tonality with indie rock juxtaposition with skill; in her new community, no one musical culture rules supreme. 

Work Cited

"Bach, The Well-Tempered Clavier « Earsense Blog." Earsense—home. Web. 01 Mar. 2011. .

Gracyk, Theodore. "How I Learned To Love Led Zeppelin." Arguing about Art: Contemporary Philosophical Debates. Ed. Alex Neill and Aaron Ridley. London: Routledge, 2008. 137-48. Print.

"Pitchfork: St. Vincent Talks New Album, Aerosmith, Twilight." Pitchfork: Home. Web. 28 Feb. 2011. .

Scruton, Roger. "The Decline of Musical Culture." Arguing about Art: Contemporary Philosophical Debates. Ed. Alex Neill and Aaron Ridley. London: Routledge, 2008. 121-35. Print.