Lessons from the High — Lichtenbergianism

Yesterday, my Lovely First Wife and I trooped up to the High Museum of Art to catch a couple of their special exhibits. Our main goal was Ryoji Ikeda’s data-verse, but we were surprised and impressed with Kim Chong Hak’s Painter of Seoraksan.

Ikeda’s installation is breathtaking. The first part of the exhibit is made up of stark projected pieces, small black disks that throb and emit light and shadows, in completely dark rooms that honestly leave you wondering if there’s an exit to another room. (There is.)

The centerpiece of the exhibit is three enormous screens with endlessly fascinating projections of… data. All kinds of data. You can spend an hour trying to figure out what the data is, but it is clearly data.

Video from Copenhagen:

The first thing you will notice is how inutterably complex it is. Our brains simply can’t organize all that, well, data.

And yet… Our brains crave that complexity. In my soon-to-be-never-written book Lessons from the Folk, written in collaboration with the Museum of International Folk Art in Santa Fe [call me], one of the Observations that are the framework of the book is “When given a choice, humans will tend to the ornate.”

And why wouldn’t we? The ever-changing images in Ikeda’s piece are from the complex data humans have collected about everything in the world: DNA, CAT scans, flight patterns, city maps, punch cards, braille, it’s all been dumped into Ryoki Ikeda’s algorithms to create moving images that we can’t comprehend but from which we cannot look away.

The work of Kim Chong Hak is a further example of our desire for complexity.

The posters for this exhibit did not inspire us, quite frankly. They gave off too much of a “look at the little old lady we found in the Ozarks whose exuberant painting style belies her simple background.”

We were way wrong. His work is just as complex as Ryoji Ikeda’s data-verse, but in a more human/sloppy kind of way. Here’s a video of his process, albeit in Korean.

One think you will note about his process is how physical it is. One of the Korean precepts of painting which he most relies on is the concept of “bone/brush, blood/ink,” i.e., let what your brush commits to paper be a direct output of your body, and that is more than evident in the video. (Also here.)

Here’s one of his large works:

Sloppy and incoherent, right? Not so much.

All those blobs of paint that he seems to throw onto the canvas willy-nilly, all that messy pushing about and swirling and muddying… somehow becomes this enormous view of nature’s complexity. And incoherent? It’s practically on a diagonal grid.

His work made even more sense when we saw his collection of traditional Korean embroidery, which they recognize is “messier” than Chinese or Japanese embroidery.

This piece took my breath away.

For one thing, it’s huge, like twelve feet across and six feet high (estimated). The diagonal composition is dizzying, and the vibrant colors are almost audible.

Appropriately for an artist whose mature career has been centered around nature in the mountainous area where he lives, the exhibit is organized around the four seasons. The river painting is from the summer section, and this one is from the winter section:

Whenever we hit an exhibit like this, we like to pick one as the piece our spouse could buy us as a present. Here’s mine, entitled “Field.”

Just simple brushstrokes, right? And then you look more closely…

Delicate brushstrokes in pale colors, throughout. Just lovely.

So what’s the Lesson here, even though neither of these artists is “folk” in any way? There are a couple, especially for visual artists.

First, give in to that desire for complexity. Add another dollop of paint, another pencil line. “But what if I ruin it?” Pish-tush. Just do it. The planet is littered with “ruined” art. Why should yours be any different? (Not all baby sea-turtles make it.) And do you think that this tidy exhibit shows any of the “failures” of Kim Chong Hak? Not a chance. This curated version of what art looks like is the main reason most people won’t even start Making the Thing That Is Not. Avoid that trap.

Second, go back and watch that video of Kim Chong Hak at work. Notice how he commits to the brushstroke or the slosh of paint — ABORTIVE ATTEMPT — and then he stands back and looks: GESTALT. Then he steps in again and nudges something around: SUCCESSIVE APPROXIMATION.

Third, get thee to thy nearest art museum or gallery. Stand a long time in front of art. Figure out how the artist “did it.” STEAL FROM THE BEST.

Here endeth the lesson.

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Lichtenbergianism