BALSE NEWSLETTER 019

 

HARMONY KORINE

AGGRESSIVE DR1FTER

15 SEPTEMBER 2023 – 14 JANUARY 2024

Hauser & Wirth, Downtown LA

 




Two weeks, at Balse.

Writing from Charles De Gaulles Airport, Paris, France. On the way to Marrakech, Morocco for photo documentary assignment. Thinking about the Moroccan rug weavers. 

First, ClassicAsobi NYC was in Boston for the wonderful Anna Vinnitskaya at Boston 11.4.2023

and just a week or so later - Symphonic Artist, Schaghajegh Nosrati, Carnegie Debut 11.13.2023

life changing performances. Should checkout his updates from the links above.

Had the chance to watch the French documentary Sur l’Adamant (On the Adamant). It was more than what I had expected. Powerful. Some quotes

I lost my freedom.

All of you are free.

You do what you want.

You can’t do what you want.

I ‘m not allowed to.

I’m sure Van Gough saw these trees. These trees, the plants.

Van Gough’s planes.

I sense the presence.

He came her, I’m sure

He came her, with an easel

He painted the barges on the Seine. Vincent did.

The plane trees, the sun, the cloud, even the sun.

The birds, the wind.

He caught the wind to paint it.

He caught the sun, he painted the drifting leaves, the wind in the trees.

In his Los Angeles cactus garden, artist Klaus Rinke’s philosophy roots his living sculptures

“when I was a young little boy, my grand mother had a cactus. When my grand mother died, the cactus went to my mother. That cactus never flowered. And one morning when my mother was really sick, suddenly that cactus was flowering, and I immediately said my mother died…and then the hospital called me and your mother is dead…...the Germans are always interested in cacti perhaps it is little similar to their soul, inside soft and romantic, and outside with a lot of needles…..the human beings are part of nature so we are not so far away from the plants. They have a soul, too...they are… earthbound, and we are earthbound, too. We are...earth creatures.”

Color Theory - color scheme, temperature, naturalistic vs unnatural

  • Color Scheme

  • Analogous

  • Complementary

  • Split-Complementary

  • Neutral

  • Monochromatic

Color as one key theme. Joseph Albers - Search Versus Re-Search: Recollections of Josef Albers at Yale, a film by Anoka Faruqee

everything he did had to do with hue. Most of the problems dealt with hue.

Albers was really a wonderful leader, keeping order and keeping eye on the ball. This may be tough, you may have to go through a lot, but don’t lose sight of why you are here and what you are doing. He was a force to be dealt with, in a good sense. You sat up or stood up when you had something to say. Since he struggled with English, you listened extra carefully. You listened very carefully, because he spoke slowly, and clearly, but sometimes looking for vocabulary ... .and in a very creative way, allowing the students, the audience he was speaking to, to finish his sentence. You can sense where he was leading you, then he paused, and let you finish the thought and the sentence, and made sure you got it. It was a very interesting technique, the way of teaching.

The story of Peter Doig

Very, quite nice house mix. Vinyl.

and

Jazz Afro Brazilian Vinyl Mix with Darsi | Kingsland Records #010

Piano, Schubert, comparisons.

Last Lecture Series: “How to Live an Asymmetric Life,” Graham Weaver

  • do hard things

  • do your thing

  • do it for decades

  • write your story

well said, and these are now part of my life guidance.

Max Cooper - Spectrum (Official video by Christian Stangl)

processing the world… time perspective, reflect a historical context, but a new meaning could be formed…attempting to access a kind of psychological space where unexpected things could creep into the process ... .our environment globally, is shifting and morphing - Anj Smith: In the Studio, as an act of rejecting the old codes.

Some techno

PLUS8132 – F.U.S.E. - F. U. (Official Audio)

and BACH - Bach - Prelude and fugue in C minor BWV 546 - Koopman | Netherlands Bach Society

and some how ended up into the world of Sitar - Yaman | Zia Mohiuddin Dagar | Rudra Veena

ronja - Nothing Makes Me Feel

and at the Metropolitan Museum of Art - Exhibition Tour—Vertigo of Color: Matisse, Derain, and the Origins of Fauvism | Met Exhibitions - here we meet our two artists, Matisse, and Derain. Summer of 1905. Two artists worked side by side on the coast of Southern France. Imaginary colors…And Matisse once said, I think around this time, that he really only works with about four or five colors and he tries to make them either clash or sort of bounce off of each other. And what we are really seeing here is both the touch, the brushwork, and I think particularly the color, is being used purely to express his own personal vision of the place, and his own feelings about it, rather than anything approaching naturalism or realism.

Toulouse Lautrec.

till next time.

Charles A. Balse

 

STEFAN BRÜGGEMANN - WHITE NOISE

November 10, 2023

Hauser & Wirth

15 SEPTEMBER 2023 – 14 JANUARY 2024

DOWNTOWN LOS ANGELES

 
 

Words of Wisdom

  • The real value of inconsistency is that it can bring about what Milan Kundera called “sudden densities” - moments when something appears in your work that gives you an opening, some oddity or mutation that sets you off in a new direction. Variability allows your work to breath; it helps you to steer clear of tyrannies and find charm in the unfamiliar. - How to be and Artist, Jerry Saltz, #34 Be Inconsistent, Zettel 164

  • Courage can’t be measured…Every good work of art has courage in it somewhere. Grant your own art that agency. Put faith in it; let it stave off cynicism and clear a path for you to proceed…Courage is a desperate gamble that will place you in the arms of the creative angels. - How to be and Artist, Jerry Saltz, #39 Have Courage, Zettel 165

  • Don’t limit your potential by presenting yourself as just one kind of maker: a potter, printemaker, watercolorist, macramist, landscape painter, … you are an artist…We’re living in an electric moment when many artists don’t define themselves by mediums at all. They say multimedia, or say all media, or they just say “artist” and let you figure out. I once heard Robert Rauschenberg describe his combine-assemblages as not “painting or sculpture” but “poetry”. That is you: a material poet. - How to be and Artist, Jerry Saltz, #40 Don’t Define Yourself by Single Medium, Zettel 166

  • If you work hard and try to be very honest with yourself, your art might tell you almost everything you need to know about yourself. - How to be and Artist, Jerry Saltz, #45 Art & Therapy, Zettel 167

  • Art is the simultaneous coexistence of change and stability. It is less an arrow than a plasma cloud, always with us never the same. - How to be and Artist, Jerry Saltz, #58 Have Courage, Zettel 168

  • At three am, demons speak to all of us. Iam old, and they still speak to me every night. And every day. They tell you that you’re not good enough, you didn’t go to the right schools, you’re stupid, you don’t know how to draw, you don’t have money, you aren’t original; that what you do doesn’t matter, and who cares, and you don’t schmooze, and have a bad neck. They tell you that you’re faking it, that other people see right through you that you’re lazy, that you don’t know what you’re doing and that you’re just doing this to get attention for money. I have one solution to turn away these demons: after beating yourself up for half an hour or so, stop and say out loud, “Yeah, but I’m a Fucking genius.” You are, too. You know the rules. They’re your tools. Now use them to go change this world. Get to work! - - How to be and Artist, Jerry Saltz, #62 Have Courage, Zettel 169

 
 

NONMEMORY

CURATED BY JAY EZRA NAYSSAN
IN COLLABORATION WITH THE MIKE KELLEY FOUNDATION FOR THE ARTS

HAUSER & WIRTH, Downtown LA

15 SEPTEMBER 2023 – 14 JANUARY 2024

 
 

Main Studies

 
 
 

APPENDIX:

 





ClassicAsobi recommends

This section features content recommended from the NYC based ClassicAsobi and his team, specializing in classical music.







 
 
 

BALSE NEWSLETTER 018

 
 




Two weeks, at Balse.

on face, face on - Botticelli

Tutor: artist Marina Abramovic, from AKADEMIE X, LESSONS IN ART + LIFE

Excerpts from her message

AN ARTIST’S RELATION TO INSPIRATION

  • An artist should not lie to himself or to others

  • An artist should look deep inside himself for inspiration

  • The deeper he looks inside himself, the more universal he becomes

  • The artist is universe

  • The artist is universe

  • The artist is universe

AN ARTIST’S RELATION TO TRANSPARENCY

  • The artist should give and receive at the same time

  • Transparency means receptivity

  • Transparency means to give

  • Transparency means to receive

  • Transparency means receptivity

  • Transparency means to give

  • Transparency means to receive

  • Transparency means receptivity

  • Transparency means to give

  • Transparency means to receive

AN ARTIST’S RELATION TO SYMBOLS

  • An artist creates his own symbols

  • Symbols are an artist’s language

  • The language must then be translated

  • Sometimes it is difficult to find the key

  • Sometimes it is difficult to find the key

  • Sometimes it is difficult to find the key

AN ARTIST’S RELATION TO SILENCE

  • An artist has to understand silence

  • An artist has to create space for silence to enter his work

  • Silence is like an island in the middle of a turbulent ocean

  • Silence is like an island in the middle of a turbulent ocean

  • Silence is like an island in the middle of a turbulent ocean

AN ARTIST’S RELATION TO SOLITUDE

  • An artist must make time for long periods of solitude

  • Solitude is extremely important

  • Away from home

  • Away from the studio

  • Away from family

  • Away from friends

  • An artist should stay for long periods of time at waterfalls

  • An artist should stay for long periods of time exploring volcanoes

  • An artist should stay for long periods of time looking at fast-running rivers

  • An artist should stay for long periods of time at horizons where the ocean and sky meet

  • An artist should stay for long periods of time looking at the stars in the night sky


Aspiration of Digging, diggers (‘often subtle and understated, they straddle the boundaries of techno and house, with an occasional tinge of electro’), to get back into digging into techno music whenever I open my eyes.

How Techno Shapes the Future

piano Hania Rani Warsaw

Evard Munch, ‘problem with boundaries…painting all these pictures trying to work out the problems…this 1940s self portrait of the window conveys a striking contrast between the human life force and the cold eternal death that lies inevitably ahead…’

the acute awareness that my time here is very brief - Artist Rachel Rossin on the Journey to Self-Creation - ‘I do feel that art saved my life’

‘a way to calibrate life’

and then the view of Antwerp with . ‘the beauty of waiting’ Fashion designer Pieter Mulier

preparing for my Marrakesh assignment, coming November 15th.

till next time. distilling.

Charles A. Balse

 
 
 

Words of Wisdom

  • If you are stymied by some artists, keep their names on a list and keep coming back to them. You might start with Rembrandt, unflinching in depicting the physical weight of the world, ever vulnerable. Or Contable, as elementally tactile as any artist who ever lived. Once an artist finally makes sense to you, take on a new one. You owe it to yourself as a seeing machine. - The Cezanne Rule, How to be an Artist, by Jerry Saltz, #31, Zettel 159

  • What upset the public about Expressionist art was, perhaps, not so much the fact that nature had been distorted as that the result led away from beauty…But the men who claimed to be serious artists should forget that if they must change the appearance of things they should idealize them rather than make them ugly was strongly resented. But (Edvard) Munch might have retorted that a shout of anguish is not beautiful, and that it would be insincere to look only at the pleasing side of life. For the Expressionists felt so strongly about human suffering, poverty, violence and passion, that they were inclined to think that the insistence on harmony and beauty in art was only born out of a refusal to be honest. The art of the classical masters, of a Raphael or Correggio, seemed to them insincere and hypocritical. They wanted to face the stark facts of our existence and to express their compassion for the disinherited and the ugly. It became almost a point of honour with them to avoid anything which smelt of prettiness and polish, and to shock the ‘bougeois‘ out of his real or imagined complacency. - The Story of Art, E.H. Gombrich, page 564, Zettel 160

  • Picasso himself denied that he was making experiments. He said he did not search, he found. He mocked at those who wanted to understand his art. ‘Everyone wants to understand art. Why not try to understand the song of a bird?’ Of course, he was right. No painting can be fully ‘explained’ in words. But words are sometimes useful pointers, they help to clear away misunderstandings and can give us at least an inkling of the situation in which the artist finds himself. I believe that the situation which led Picasso to his different ‘finds’ is very typical of twentieth-century art. - The Story of Art, E.H. Gombrich, page 577, Zettel 161

  • In the past two hundred years or so, art has been treated as something we look at in clean, white, well-lit galleries and museums. It’s been made to seem passive: another tourist attraction to take a picture in front of before your move on. For most of its entire history though, art has been active: something that does thing to, or for us, that makes things happen. Holy relics in churches all over the world are said to heal. - How to be an Artist, by Jerry Saltz, #32 Art as a Verb, Zettel 162

 
 
 
 

Main Studies

 
 
 

THE VERSUS PROJECT IV: LAYER CAKE

09/16/2023 — 10/28/2023

Subliminal Projects, LA

APPENDIX:

 




ClassicAsobi recommends

This section features content recommended from the NYC based ClassicAsobi and his team, specializing in classical music.

Thursday, November 2, 2023 7:30 PM Zankel Hall

Performers

Sergei Babayan, Piano