Martin Mugar - Academia.edu (original) (raw)
Papers by Martin Mugar
Representing and Interpreting Abstraction Today, Sep 8, 2024
Representing and Interpreting Abstraction Today encompasses a variety of opinions, studies, and r... more Representing and Interpreting Abstraction Today encompasses a variety of opinions, studies, and research regarding the heterogeneity of ways to conceive and represent abstraction in contemporary times. Through two main thematic threads—one concerning representation and, more broadly, painting, and the other pertaining to the semantic and interpretative implications of the concept of abstraction in technology—the timeliness of the topic in recent years is underscored.
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Lovecraft Mugar and Houellebecq, 2024
An attempt to see my work other than in the usual framework of abstraction
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Dennis Hollingsworth, 2023
Nice piece, by the way. Text, peeking. Ground margins. Geometry tweaking." (comment from NY artis... more Nice piece, by the way. Text, peeking. Ground margins. Geometry tweaking." (comment from NY artist Dennis Hollingsworth) Martin Mugar Coinciding with the debut of my writings in 2013 on the topic of Zombie Formalism I noticed that the New York artist Dennis Hollingsworth commenced to follow my writings with the occasional but always intelligent comment. The first time he commented on my painting is in the ave statement made last year. The image to which he attached these words is also the first painting in years that I am most unequivocally happy about. For Hollingsworth it is functioning on at least three levels. (Text,Ground and Geometry). The obvious observations made by Boston critics about the gooey candy-colored sensuality is not predominant for him but rather the functionality of the spatial play. He gets it probably because we are both swimming in the same waters, sharing especially the same attitude about the mark. Dennis is attracted to a gnarly
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Universality of drawing both as a construct of nature and human volition
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Profirio DiDonna and Jake Berthot, 2013
his name. He was a talented student at AIB. The last I heard from him he was in Brooklyn making h... more his name. He was a talented student at AIB. The last I heard from him he was in Brooklyn making his way as an artist. Since I never had meaningful conversations with other faculty, he became my sounding board for discussions on the contemporary scene. He was at the stage in his life, where he wasn't worried about finding his academic niche so that art was an open book. For the faculty it was a closed book. They had solidified their styles and now wanted to solidify their academic status. Teaching was pure theatre for them, holding forth in crits and making sure discussions didn't venture too far from the script.
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Heide Hatry, 2013
Heide Hatry blends the reality of meat with the vegetable realm. She has recently done portraitur... more Heide Hatry blends the reality of meat with the vegetable realm. She has recently done portraiture with the ashes of the deceased.
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From the stories my great uncle Marvin told me to the photos and documents in the public record M... more From the stories my great uncle Marvin told me to the photos and documents in the public record Marvin was undoubtedly Arshile Gorky's teacher in Boston.
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Guston at the MFA Boston, 2023
This was not an easy review to write. Guston's connection with his Jewish roots shows up in his p... more This was not an easy review to write. Guston's connection with his Jewish roots shows up in his painting but how it does is hard to decipher.Could notions of guilt and sin work their way into the late work?
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Champing at the bit to take a bite out of the Champ, 2012
Duchamp studies are the terrain of some of the brightest minds writing about art today and his id... more Duchamp studies are the terrain of some of the brightest minds writing about art today and his ideas are so universally championed in art academia I am quite fearful of being pilloried or more likely ignored for what will appear to be pedestrian ideas about the subtleties of his thought. I can only deal with this hero of the avant-garde from my own anecdotal experience toiling in the fields of artopia and from an accumulation of observations try to sort out why his influence is probably more pervasive now than ever before. I would have liked to deal with the issue in a more scholarly fashion but am champing at the bit to get to the suffering inflicted by his acolytes on anyone who still believes in painting. Duchamp's legacy functions on multiple fronts. But philosophically it is grounded in the 20 th century project to deconstruct representation. This is not just visual representation to which it is obviously related but philosophical representation, which believes that the truth of what we represent gains its validity in the coherence of our consciousness. Originally that coherence was rooted in the onto-theological ground of God's infallibility and humanity being created in the image of God. Later the work of Descartes places that coherence in the logic of mathematics. Even then he leaves God in the picture albeit in the background. His famous dictum "Ego Cogito ergo Sum" translates: Cognition makes me who I am and everything I can think about gains its validity in the clarity of that cognition, which is most evident in mathematics. The Baroque through the beginning of the 20 th century is a period of the glory and majesty of Western egoism.
For Gagosian this Spring its Dots , 2018
Sometimes it's irony that motivates HIrst but sometimes it seems to ooze over into a stylistic Sc... more Sometimes it's irony that motivates HIrst but sometimes it seems to ooze over into a stylistic Schlock.
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This essay acknowledges the article in Art in America where Raphael Rubinstein accepts my role in... more This essay acknowledges the article in Art in America where Raphael Rubinstein accepts my role in coining Zombie Formalism. It addresses the role of theory in French Abstraction whereas in America the theory is ex post facto
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Impressions of France. A show at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston 1995, 1995
The first formal review I published . I sent a copy to England where it was considered for publis... more The first formal review I published . I sent a copy to England where it was considered for publishing in "Modern Painters". The show exhibited landscapes from the French Salon side by side with the Impressionists
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Why care about the art scene when you can watch Westerns, 2013
Why care about the art scene when you can watch Westerns I am taking a break on this blog from fi... more Why care about the art scene when you can watch Westerns I am taking a break on this blog from fine art and Western philosophy to write about the philosophy of Westerns. The ones I have seen lately have impressed me with the depth and complexity of their understanding of the human condition. I grew up with TV Westerns: Cheyenne, Maverick, Bonanza, and Gunsmoke, but I have no recollection of watching them at the movies. I do recall that during a hospitalization at the age of five for a tracheotomy I had an argument with another patient about whether to watch Howdy Doody or Hop Along Cassidy. I wanted Howdy Doody and he wanted Hop Along Cassidy. The latter with his ten-gallon hat already seemed dated to this five year old. I don't recall who won that argument. Solidarity Poster with Gary Cooper That there was something more to them than the idealization of the Marlboro man in the wide open spaces of Monument Valley became obvious to me years later, when a Polish friend in Paris, Bogdan Borkowski, a filmmaker and photographer, who went on to document the Solidarity uprising (I just found a picture of him today June 5 2020 with Lech Walesa), invited me to participate in his very private ritual, which involved a screening of Peckinpah's "The Wild Bunch".
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Impossibility of Transcendence in American Culture, 2012
Pragmatism holds sway over American Culture in this blogpost from 2012 with support from European... more Pragmatism holds sway over American Culture in this blogpost from 2012 with support from European and American thinkers
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Memories of France in the late 70's and Weltschmerz, 2022
A recollection from my youth of Picking grapes and being exposed to the sorrow of the World
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From Bourgeois aristocracy in the Belle Epoque to its demise in World War 1 as seen in Sargent's work, 2013
A socioeconomic take on the work of John Singer Sargent. The swansong of the aristocracy and the ... more A socioeconomic take on the work of John Singer Sargent. The swansong of the aristocracy and the beginning of mass culture in WW1.
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William Bailey and Donald Judd, 2015
I have written about almost all my teachers from college: Al Held on on my blog and "Artdeal", Le... more I have written about almost all my teachers from college: Al Held on on my blog and "Artdeal", Lester Johnson on "Berkshire Fine Arts", Bernie Chaet in an essay to a show I curated and Erwin Hauer in my book on drawing, but have neglected to write about the work of William Bailey. Odd since he had the most impact on my sense of what it means to be an artist. I still recall fondly his support of my work when he was my "Scholar of the House" advisor as a senior. Although I have quoted his insights throughout my blogging, his work presents itself to me as a conundrum and resists easy description. It is realist but does not partake of the history of realism from Caravaggio on, since it is not grounded in an exploration of the perceptual base of most realism. It therefore does not have the sort of optical impact of something freshly seen as in Lennart Anderson's or Al Leslie's work. It partakes of the figuration of the early Renaissance, that is typified by Perugino, which was still imbued with notions of metaphysics and correspondences between the earthly and the higher realms. where ideality dictated reality. There is a will to make the figures of his paintings real, but it is achieved through a meticulous working of the surface not through any analysis of how things are seen through the eye's optical structure. Like so much avant-garde American art of the last fifty years they jump out of the subject/object dichotomy and move into a neutral world of pragmatically made things following simple rules. There is neither a trope toward endless reduction in a search for underpinnings nor a move into the optical ambiguity of figure/ground that Held explores in his "Big N". It is as though the object is already reduced in the way that cubes in a Judd installation are, not subject to further questioning as to what stands under them. Both Midwesterners they share a workmanlike practicality, which posits pragmatically things as made and space as just the opportunity for placement.
Jed Perl on Koons, 2014
I think Perl is at his best when he goes after sacred cows like Koons
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Chuck Close passes away at 81, 2019
This essay was originally written in 2005 for Addison Parks ArtDeal. It was adapted to my Blog in... more This essay was originally written in 2005 for Addison Parks ArtDeal. It was adapted to my Blog in 2011 and finally revived recently when Close passed away. A "victim" of the #metoo backlash, he I l believe is no longer considered as famous as Warhol among the American populace.
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The Show Goes On, 2017
The Show goes on. Schnabel (fils) Walter Robinson and the end of Zombie Formalism It had all beco... more The Show goes on. Schnabel (fils) Walter Robinson and the end of Zombie Formalism It had all become a wonderfully seamless merger of theory and the art it purported to define. Modernism divided by modernism, became postmodern, became Zombie Formalism. The last remnant of self-consciousness was squeezed out. The image was often produced by machines or was so redundant of past Modernism, any notions of the authority or authenticity of the creator had exited the site of creation. Heidegger's "monstrous philosophical site", where he crosses out Being (sous rature) bringing an end to ontology or at most establishing a weak ontology, had worked its way into the creative process of contemporary artists. Has Simone Weil's cyclical trope of history hit the nadir of meaninglessness and instead of bouncing in another direction became an intensification of itself?This aesthetic nothing is not totally nothing as the market gives it significant monetary value. The correlation between such art and an economy built on zero interest rates was hard to ignore. Calculating bankers needed to launder some of their gains from the phony stock market into Culture, but the avant-garde instead of providing the usual opportunity for the bankers to slum or dabble with artists besotted of Freud or Jung was now populated by artists as savvy in their business acumen as the bankers themselves. The artists just printed more paintings on their inkjet printers to be bought up by the stockbrokers who had gotten rich on the Federal Reserve's money printing. The dialectic of history provided no zigzag, no way out just more zombification ad infinitum.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Representing and Interpreting Abstraction Today, Sep 8, 2024
Representing and Interpreting Abstraction Today encompasses a variety of opinions, studies, and r... more Representing and Interpreting Abstraction Today encompasses a variety of opinions, studies, and research regarding the heterogeneity of ways to conceive and represent abstraction in contemporary times. Through two main thematic threads—one concerning representation and, more broadly, painting, and the other pertaining to the semantic and interpretative implications of the concept of abstraction in technology—the timeliness of the topic in recent years is underscored.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Lovecraft Mugar and Houellebecq, 2024
An attempt to see my work other than in the usual framework of abstraction
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Dennis Hollingsworth, 2023
Nice piece, by the way. Text, peeking. Ground margins. Geometry tweaking." (comment from NY artis... more Nice piece, by the way. Text, peeking. Ground margins. Geometry tweaking." (comment from NY artist Dennis Hollingsworth) Martin Mugar Coinciding with the debut of my writings in 2013 on the topic of Zombie Formalism I noticed that the New York artist Dennis Hollingsworth commenced to follow my writings with the occasional but always intelligent comment. The first time he commented on my painting is in the ave statement made last year. The image to which he attached these words is also the first painting in years that I am most unequivocally happy about. For Hollingsworth it is functioning on at least three levels. (Text,Ground and Geometry). The obvious observations made by Boston critics about the gooey candy-colored sensuality is not predominant for him but rather the functionality of the spatial play. He gets it probably because we are both swimming in the same waters, sharing especially the same attitude about the mark. Dennis is attracted to a gnarly
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Universality of drawing both as a construct of nature and human volition
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Profirio DiDonna and Jake Berthot, 2013
his name. He was a talented student at AIB. The last I heard from him he was in Brooklyn making h... more his name. He was a talented student at AIB. The last I heard from him he was in Brooklyn making his way as an artist. Since I never had meaningful conversations with other faculty, he became my sounding board for discussions on the contemporary scene. He was at the stage in his life, where he wasn't worried about finding his academic niche so that art was an open book. For the faculty it was a closed book. They had solidified their styles and now wanted to solidify their academic status. Teaching was pure theatre for them, holding forth in crits and making sure discussions didn't venture too far from the script.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Heide Hatry, 2013
Heide Hatry blends the reality of meat with the vegetable realm. She has recently done portraitur... more Heide Hatry blends the reality of meat with the vegetable realm. She has recently done portraiture with the ashes of the deceased.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
From the stories my great uncle Marvin told me to the photos and documents in the public record M... more From the stories my great uncle Marvin told me to the photos and documents in the public record Marvin was undoubtedly Arshile Gorky's teacher in Boston.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Guston at the MFA Boston, 2023
This was not an easy review to write. Guston's connection with his Jewish roots shows up in his p... more This was not an easy review to write. Guston's connection with his Jewish roots shows up in his painting but how it does is hard to decipher.Could notions of guilt and sin work their way into the late work?
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Champing at the bit to take a bite out of the Champ, 2012
Duchamp studies are the terrain of some of the brightest minds writing about art today and his id... more Duchamp studies are the terrain of some of the brightest minds writing about art today and his ideas are so universally championed in art academia I am quite fearful of being pilloried or more likely ignored for what will appear to be pedestrian ideas about the subtleties of his thought. I can only deal with this hero of the avant-garde from my own anecdotal experience toiling in the fields of artopia and from an accumulation of observations try to sort out why his influence is probably more pervasive now than ever before. I would have liked to deal with the issue in a more scholarly fashion but am champing at the bit to get to the suffering inflicted by his acolytes on anyone who still believes in painting. Duchamp's legacy functions on multiple fronts. But philosophically it is grounded in the 20 th century project to deconstruct representation. This is not just visual representation to which it is obviously related but philosophical representation, which believes that the truth of what we represent gains its validity in the coherence of our consciousness. Originally that coherence was rooted in the onto-theological ground of God's infallibility and humanity being created in the image of God. Later the work of Descartes places that coherence in the logic of mathematics. Even then he leaves God in the picture albeit in the background. His famous dictum "Ego Cogito ergo Sum" translates: Cognition makes me who I am and everything I can think about gains its validity in the clarity of that cognition, which is most evident in mathematics. The Baroque through the beginning of the 20 th century is a period of the glory and majesty of Western egoism.
For Gagosian this Spring its Dots , 2018
Sometimes it's irony that motivates HIrst but sometimes it seems to ooze over into a stylistic Sc... more Sometimes it's irony that motivates HIrst but sometimes it seems to ooze over into a stylistic Schlock.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
This essay acknowledges the article in Art in America where Raphael Rubinstein accepts my role in... more This essay acknowledges the article in Art in America where Raphael Rubinstein accepts my role in coining Zombie Formalism. It addresses the role of theory in French Abstraction whereas in America the theory is ex post facto
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Impressions of France. A show at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston 1995, 1995
The first formal review I published . I sent a copy to England where it was considered for publis... more The first formal review I published . I sent a copy to England where it was considered for publishing in "Modern Painters". The show exhibited landscapes from the French Salon side by side with the Impressionists
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Why care about the art scene when you can watch Westerns, 2013
Why care about the art scene when you can watch Westerns I am taking a break on this blog from fi... more Why care about the art scene when you can watch Westerns I am taking a break on this blog from fine art and Western philosophy to write about the philosophy of Westerns. The ones I have seen lately have impressed me with the depth and complexity of their understanding of the human condition. I grew up with TV Westerns: Cheyenne, Maverick, Bonanza, and Gunsmoke, but I have no recollection of watching them at the movies. I do recall that during a hospitalization at the age of five for a tracheotomy I had an argument with another patient about whether to watch Howdy Doody or Hop Along Cassidy. I wanted Howdy Doody and he wanted Hop Along Cassidy. The latter with his ten-gallon hat already seemed dated to this five year old. I don't recall who won that argument. Solidarity Poster with Gary Cooper That there was something more to them than the idealization of the Marlboro man in the wide open spaces of Monument Valley became obvious to me years later, when a Polish friend in Paris, Bogdan Borkowski, a filmmaker and photographer, who went on to document the Solidarity uprising (I just found a picture of him today June 5 2020 with Lech Walesa), invited me to participate in his very private ritual, which involved a screening of Peckinpah's "The Wild Bunch".
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Impossibility of Transcendence in American Culture, 2012
Pragmatism holds sway over American Culture in this blogpost from 2012 with support from European... more Pragmatism holds sway over American Culture in this blogpost from 2012 with support from European and American thinkers
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Memories of France in the late 70's and Weltschmerz, 2022
A recollection from my youth of Picking grapes and being exposed to the sorrow of the World
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
From Bourgeois aristocracy in the Belle Epoque to its demise in World War 1 as seen in Sargent's work, 2013
A socioeconomic take on the work of John Singer Sargent. The swansong of the aristocracy and the ... more A socioeconomic take on the work of John Singer Sargent. The swansong of the aristocracy and the beginning of mass culture in WW1.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
William Bailey and Donald Judd, 2015
I have written about almost all my teachers from college: Al Held on on my blog and "Artdeal", Le... more I have written about almost all my teachers from college: Al Held on on my blog and "Artdeal", Lester Johnson on "Berkshire Fine Arts", Bernie Chaet in an essay to a show I curated and Erwin Hauer in my book on drawing, but have neglected to write about the work of William Bailey. Odd since he had the most impact on my sense of what it means to be an artist. I still recall fondly his support of my work when he was my "Scholar of the House" advisor as a senior. Although I have quoted his insights throughout my blogging, his work presents itself to me as a conundrum and resists easy description. It is realist but does not partake of the history of realism from Caravaggio on, since it is not grounded in an exploration of the perceptual base of most realism. It therefore does not have the sort of optical impact of something freshly seen as in Lennart Anderson's or Al Leslie's work. It partakes of the figuration of the early Renaissance, that is typified by Perugino, which was still imbued with notions of metaphysics and correspondences between the earthly and the higher realms. where ideality dictated reality. There is a will to make the figures of his paintings real, but it is achieved through a meticulous working of the surface not through any analysis of how things are seen through the eye's optical structure. Like so much avant-garde American art of the last fifty years they jump out of the subject/object dichotomy and move into a neutral world of pragmatically made things following simple rules. There is neither a trope toward endless reduction in a search for underpinnings nor a move into the optical ambiguity of figure/ground that Held explores in his "Big N". It is as though the object is already reduced in the way that cubes in a Judd installation are, not subject to further questioning as to what stands under them. Both Midwesterners they share a workmanlike practicality, which posits pragmatically things as made and space as just the opportunity for placement.
Jed Perl on Koons, 2014
I think Perl is at his best when he goes after sacred cows like Koons
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Chuck Close passes away at 81, 2019
This essay was originally written in 2005 for Addison Parks ArtDeal. It was adapted to my Blog in... more This essay was originally written in 2005 for Addison Parks ArtDeal. It was adapted to my Blog in 2011 and finally revived recently when Close passed away. A "victim" of the #metoo backlash, he I l believe is no longer considered as famous as Warhol among the American populace.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
The Show Goes On, 2017
The Show goes on. Schnabel (fils) Walter Robinson and the end of Zombie Formalism It had all beco... more The Show goes on. Schnabel (fils) Walter Robinson and the end of Zombie Formalism It had all become a wonderfully seamless merger of theory and the art it purported to define. Modernism divided by modernism, became postmodern, became Zombie Formalism. The last remnant of self-consciousness was squeezed out. The image was often produced by machines or was so redundant of past Modernism, any notions of the authority or authenticity of the creator had exited the site of creation. Heidegger's "monstrous philosophical site", where he crosses out Being (sous rature) bringing an end to ontology or at most establishing a weak ontology, had worked its way into the creative process of contemporary artists. Has Simone Weil's cyclical trope of history hit the nadir of meaninglessness and instead of bouncing in another direction became an intensification of itself?This aesthetic nothing is not totally nothing as the market gives it significant monetary value. The correlation between such art and an economy built on zero interest rates was hard to ignore. Calculating bankers needed to launder some of their gains from the phony stock market into Culture, but the avant-garde instead of providing the usual opportunity for the bankers to slum or dabble with artists besotted of Freud or Jung was now populated by artists as savvy in their business acumen as the bankers themselves. The artists just printed more paintings on their inkjet printers to be bought up by the stockbrokers who had gotten rich on the Federal Reserve's money printing. The dialectic of history provided no zigzag, no way out just more zombification ad infinitum.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Drawing and Painting, 2019
This is the project that Jerry Saltz put on Twitter without attribution. It is also one of the la... more This is the project that Jerry Saltz put on Twitter without attribution. It is also one of the last exercises I put together in my waning days of teaching at NHTI in Concord. It is a good leap from figuration to abstradtion
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This is an inside glimpse into my book on drawing and painting. My use of the research by David M... more This is an inside glimpse into my book on drawing and painting. My use of the research by David Marr was shared by Michael Baxandall and Svetlana Alpers. Also Whitney Davis who teaches at UC Berkeley thought it might be a touchstone for a new way of seeing but realized cultural issues would dominate in the postmodern era.This view was expressed in the book "Farewell to Visual Studies" edited by James Elkins
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