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Good Art, Bad Art
Let’s
Talk Art A Series
of Lectures by Norman Geske on the
Permanent Collection of the Sheldon Art Museum Lecture
One of Five October
1, 2006 Good
Art, Bad Art Video and
Editing: Laurie Richards At 24:40: Camera is focused on Geske He
finishes describing examples of bad art and says Lincoln is fortunate right
now to have an excellent community of artists at work. At 25:22:
"Now, turn your chairs around and look at that wall," and the camera pans from
Norman to Dan Howard’s painting. "Here are three radically different images.
Let’s start with Marjorie Mikasen’s on the right," and the camera pans to
Mikasen’s painting Action Potential. "One of the basic traditions of modern painting was
probably initiated by the Dutch painter Piet Mondrian." He talks about
Mondrian, his influence, his focus on the abstract, and his early work. At 25:26:
The camera zooms onto the label for Mikasen’s painting At 25:44:
The camera pans back to Mikasen’s painting 27:44 to 29:35: Image of Geske describing Mondrian’s
work then Mikasen’s painting "That
tradition has had a great influence, not only in Europe but in this country
as well. And, in the case of Marjorie Mikasen’s picture, I think we have a
descendant. Her picture is not, God knows, is not as simple as Mondrian but
it is the same kind of thinking. Admittedly, and I think significantly, she
is an artist who has undertaken to use the computer as a means of creative
expression and she has found ways of manipulating the computer to achieve
what she wants in terms of painting. The paintings are complex. There are all
kinds of things going on in them. Forms, differing kinds of forms, differing
directions of movement, differing ideas even as regards foreground, background,
and so on. They are paintings full of, you might say, that are full of
mechanical, but mechanical in a good sense of the word, understanding of the
complexity of contemporary life. I don’t know what she calls this. Her titles
frequently escape me entirely as far as the meaning anything is concerned. I
have the scantiest understanding of the computer. Believe me, I find my means
of escape saying I don’t really care whether the computer was involved in
this or not but what I am concerned with is the finished product. Now here,
certainly, is a demonstration of skill. It is a demonstration of serious
intent and it also is a challenge to understanding. A challenge to my
appreciation of what can happen in, you might say, in a two-dimensional
space." 29: 35 to
29:46: Quick fade back to the painting "The
picture seems to hover on the surface; the forms at least. And yet there are
intimations, suggestions, hardly more than that, of depth. Now Mondrian’s
pictures are, you might say, 'on the surface' pictures." 29: 46 to
30:09: Quick fade back to Geske "I’ve
seen - there’s one wonderful one where I’ve seen one that was unfinished at the
time of this death which still had some of the masking tape on it, whereby he
controlled the construction of his lines and bars and so on. This kind of
painting, I think is, very characteristic of our time. It represents our
concern for technological order." 30:09 to
30:27: Quick fade back to the painting "We can
hardly escape it nowadays, whether we want to or not. You might say it is the
guiding, dominating, point of view of our times. We are obliged to live with
it. And I find this painting extremely invigorating in that sense because of
its complexity." 30:27 to
30:38: Quick fade back to Geske "And, as
I say, I can take for granted how it came about. It seems to me quite a
performance in terms of painting, of creating an image." ©
Marjorie Mikasen, All Rights Reserved
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