Ulgen Semerci

Stop Posturing

Ulgen — Sat, 21 Aug 2010 07:52:31 +0000

“I wish there would be a nonconservative turn away from the habits of looking and making that new popular conceptual art has introduced. I think there should be a turn to visual art. The move has got nothing to do with current fake polarities in art world posturing. For example, the trendy thing to say at the moment is that you are interested in subtle art as opposed to loud art, which in effect only means you are interested in posturing of one kind as opposed to posturing of another kind. But when I talk about “visual art,” I mean dropping posturing altogether.

The visual in art is always philosophical. Nothing is visual in a void. To be interested in substantially visual art at this point in time doesn’t mean rejecting conceptual art in any real or serious way, just the label conceptual as it’s currently applied and the posturing that typically goes with it.

Really, all visual art is abstract in that its abstract values are what makes the rest of it worth having. The contexts of the forms that historical art comes up with -the context of social background, artist biography, and so forth- matter only if you want to find out about what matters in the first place, which is form itself, the richness of the look of the thing. This is rare and meaningful and constitutes a way of communicating something about the world that is worth attending to.

If it weren’t art, it really would be mad to think like this; it would be a form of blindness in which only the seeable registers, as if what you see were ever divorced from meaning, designation, language, names, concepts, morals, and so on. Form in art, and the means by which artists who are genuinely visual arrive at new combinations of forms, are in fact philosophical. To think visually is to think philosophically.”

Matthew Collings, “Chris Ofili and Beauty: Thinking Philosophically About Visually Great Stuff.” Modern Painters, April 2010

We founded an artist initiative!

Ulgen — Sun, 23 May 2010 21:09:40 +0000

www.amongotherthings.org

I do.

Ulgen — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 20:32:55 +0000

“One has to believe in what one is doing, one has to commit oneself inwardly, in order to do painting. Once obsessed, one ultimately carries it to the point of believing that one might change human beings through painting. But if one lacks this passionate commitment, there is nothing left to do. Then it is better to leave it alone. For basically painting is total idiocy.”

Gerhard Richter, 1973

belief

Ulgen — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 20:27:03 +0000

“Picturing things, taking a view, is what makes us human; art is making sense and giving shape to that sense. It is like the religious search for God. We are well aware that making sense and picturing are artificial, but we can never give them up. For belief (thinking out and interpreting the present and the future) is our most important characteristic.”

Gerhard Richter, 1962

a joke

Ulgen — Sun, 12 Apr 2009 14:14:05 +0000

Question: Why did the Conceptual artist start painting?
Answer: Because he heard it was a good idea.

“One of us made that up 30 years ago. It was really funny then.”
David Salle

I read this on the subway the other day and could not stop giggling…

Linda Yablonsky, “Photo Play: The Story of the Pictures Generation,” Art in America, April 2009: no.4