Western art history lesson 1

A relaxing Wednesday evening, 5pm. I leisurely strolled into the 300-sitter lecture theatre with a Mocha Freeze in my hand from Coffee Club Express. This is only the 2nd time I frequented the stall outside Nanyang Auditorium throughout my 1 year in NTU. Anwz the LT is mostly empty, with only about 30 people inside. The lecturer wasn't here yet. I looked around for familiar faces. None. I sat down, enjoyed the aircon, took a sip of the aromatic coffee, and pulled out my novel to read.

 

This is life man.

 

The lecturer was fashionably late for 30 minutes. She's a westerner, around 25, quite beautiful and artistically dressed - long robe, scarf around her head, blah. She laughed alot, a bit hysterical I would say, a bit 'siao' I thought. Understandable though, since she had been teaching for the past 3 hours and will be teaching the same thing again for the next 3. If I was her I would also be hysterical.  

 

(In fact I'm a bit siao now since just now the whole entry disappeared when I clicked 'Publish Entry' and I'm typing the same old thing again! Hahahahaha...)

 

Anwz, she's a very nice lady and her lecture was enlightening. Here's the summary:

 

 

~ Art, by Garder's defination, is material delibrately manipulated.

 

~ Why? 2 reasons.

• To embody the power/ spirit of the absent object.

Imagine how will you feel if somebody tear up the photo in your wallet or delete the photo in your hp. A photo is not merely a photo.

• To make an impression, to make one's presence felt. To leave something (spirit) behind.

This's just like why we delibrately leave footprints in the sand. And I think this's also why we write blogs.

 

 

~ Art does NOT reflect reality. All art forms are Representations.

• All objects in art are not what they really are. They are presented in a way the artist sees it.


• Even a simple photo of a horse does not really really show a real horse.

 

~ History is a battleground of claims and counter claims, stories and counter stories.

• However that doesn't mean one can tell any story one like. One must say a good story.


• Or if one wants to tell a bad story, one must have a huge army behind him, just like a certain US president.

 

~ West (as in Western art) and East classification are not there naturally.

• This classification is a political construction as a result of the clashes of civilisations


• It's actually a project to create a western/eastern identity.

It seems that elective lecturers love to unplug us from the matrix - show us that things are not really what it seems. Our Chinese Cinema lecturer also told us something along this line about patriarchal society, binary culture etc etc. Anwz, let us go on to the last and most interesting point.

 

 

~ Any story is as much about Erasure or Absence as it is about Presence.

• Imagine a beautiful oil painting with a nude Turkish lady lying on the bed, eyes gazing somewhere out of the picture - our lecture example.


• To appreciate the picture, we do not only look at what's in the picture, but also what's outside the picture. So what's absent?


• Obviously, her clothes were not there. Why?


• A deeper step: the person/thing she's looking at is not in the picture. Who? What?


• Think out of box: the reason why artist drew this picture is also not in the painting. To whom did he paint it for? Why? Does it show the power of western countries over Turkey? Or does it show westerner's impression of Turkey as an exotic country?

Actually this is similar to the way we were taught to appreciate (and write) chinese calligraphy. Calligraphy is not all about how nice the words are, but also about how the words are positioned such that the white empty spaces are as nice as the black words.  

 

One learns something new everyday.

 

An enlightening and enjoyable evening.