Mondrian’s (D)evolution

Piet Mondrian: a name associated with straight lines and primary colors, whose famous compositions many would consider as the epitome of abstract art. Today we can buy Mondrian furniture, tablecloths, T-shirts – you name it. He’s widely considered one of the most important somewhat contemporary painters in the Dutch tradition. But he didn’t always work with the vigorous control and machine-like technique of his later years, which has been brought to attention by the Amsterdam Museum’s current exhibition of the artist’s early work.

 molenmillmillinsunlightbypietmondrian

Mondrian had his beginnings in the Impressionist era, resulting in paintings that could be likened to Van Gogh or Cezanne. His colors were bold, his strokes gestural – yet even here we can see a kind of foreshadowing in his stress on vertical and horizontal lines that segment the representational composition, as well as the use of primary colors.

Avond(evening) Red Tree

But he didn’t focus on integrated landscapes for very long, quickly turning to the singular tree for inspiration. Here the use of color is still based on dramatic contrast between complementaries like blue and orange, and the negative space of the tree becomes the central motif of this time period for the artist.

Gray Tree

Even without bold colors, we can see that ordered segmentation of space within the web of branches is clearly what drives each painting. These interior pockets begin to look geometricized, imposing what is still clearly a tree onto a suggested framework that shows the beginnings of a grid-like format.

Trees

And that’s about the last we see of real trees from Mondrian. His work continues to evolve (or devolve, depending on your point of view) by way of breaking down the composition into shapes that look more and more geometric. Curved, black lines suggesting organic form delineate most of these color swatches, but those on the outskirts of the canvas are allowed to bleed and blend into one another.

tableauno.2compositionno.vii

It is here that any semblance to natural representation is lost, and Mondrian’s paintings begin to look decidedly abstract. The majority of lines have been straightened out, and each canvas is made up of variations on two or three central colors. Yet these compositions are still dynamic, coming into focus towards the center of the almost-grid, and a sense of space is apparent.

compositionwithgrayandlightbrownbypietmondrian

The last few changes that had to occur before he’d reach the most “Mondrian-esque” paintings happen surprisingly slowly. First was the introduction of a complete grid made up of only vertical and horizontal lines containing quadrilaterals in solid colors:

compositionabypietmondrian

Followed by the disappearance of any color besides red, blue, yellow, black, white, and grey.

compositionwithred,blue,yellowbypietmondrian

This change was further constricted by the use of primary colors for squares, black for the lines that separated them, and white for seemingly “empty” boxes in the composition. It is here that Mondrian reaches his most well known form in the search for the perfect abstraction.

 

trafalgarsquarebypietmondrian

Further development resulted in more lines and boxes of color that didn’t have to be surrounded by black.

broadwayboogiewoogiebypietmondrian

The last painting created by the artist marked a proportionally huge jump in this fundamental structure that had become his bread and butter. The black lines that had functioned as the spine of each painting were finally omitted in favor of colors differentiated only by the contrast between adjacent squares.

And thus, we have the evolution from natural representation to purely abstract form, demonstrated by a collection of paintings that represent the real evolution of Mondrian’s perception. While it can be said that his work grew more visually simple as his ideas developed, it was a necessary transition as well as the only path to painting accurate generalities rather than specific gestures. By breaking down each composition into its most basic elements of line and color, Mondrian strove to make work that would be understood by everyone, whether they knew why they “got it” or not. This evolution was also representative of his ideas that modern man would become more and more disconnected from nature, something as obvious in today’s society as it was in his paintings. Regardless of at what stage his work was most interesting to look at, it must be said that he clearly wasn’t wrong in his understanding of simplification as abstraction, nor of the logical connections that take place inside the human mind.

Bringin’ Disney Back: Aladdin in Toronto!

OMG. Like my nineties kid-self (inside my about to graduate, 21 year-old body) is so excited for the new Aladdin stage musical, I could jump onto a magic carpet and go to the moon.

Yes, Aladdin I will always accept

Aladdin is being revamped for Broadway, but is pre-showing in Toronto.  Finally, my proximity to the moose and maple leaf country pays off!  The show runs at the Ed Mirvish theater in Toronto for nine weeks (Nov. 1 – Jan. 5) before heading to Broadway in 2014.

At the bottom of this post is a teaser featuring Alan Mencken (the artistic genie-us behind ‘A Whole New World’) and the rest of the cast and crew.  It will please everyone to know that Jonathan Freeman who originally voiced Jafar, will be reprising his infamous villain role for the stage.  There are few sounds in the world that I would love to hear live, but the real voice of Jafar saying, “Prince Ali Abu-bu” is one of them.

Some other sounds that I am looking forward to hearing are the deleted songs from the film that have been reworked into the story line.

Aladdin, Jasmine, and the genie have new cast members, but judging by their enthusiasm and energy in the teaser, I’d say this show is going to be a win for all of us.  I don’t know when I’m going (I am hoping to convince my sister and brother-in-law to road-trip it through the wild Canadian landscape) but this will happen.

The original movie came out the year I was born.  Hard to imagine that prior to 1992, we lived in a world without ‘One Jump’ and ‘Friend Like Me’.

The next Aladdin stage show that I would LOVE, LOVE, LOVE to see, would be Robin Williams performing the 16 hours of extra material for the genie.  Okay, maybe not all 16.  But I would definitely attend a ‘Aladdin Genie: Live!’ performance put on by Robin Williams.

Would LOVE to see this
Would LOVE to see this

And now, without further ado…the Aladdin Teaser!

Ost trifft West / 中西合璧 / East Meets West

Pictograms are the most efficient modes of visual communication. They distill the essentials of the message that needs to be conveyed and arrange them on a 2D surface in a direct way. Since it doesn’t waste any time in getting to the message, pictograms are usually used for signs or warning symbols, to communicate to people in situations when not a lot of time can be used to interpret messages. Some artists have used pictograms to re-imagine familiar images, like the movie posters below:

the road

inception

psycho

jaws

In a new book, Chinese-German artist Yang Liu uses pictograms to express the two parts of her identity. Liu was born and raised in China until 14, when her family moved to Germany. She has a unique sense of cultural duality that allows her to feel neither Chinese nor German; she “feels [herself] as more of a person, who belongs to all the places [she’s] been to.” It’s interesting how she approaches her cultural background as something that helps her to view herself more as a citizen of the world rather than only a part of a specific culture. Growing up in two cultures allowed her to examine her place within a society in a larger context, which is a fresh way to look at it because it’s such a mature point of view.

And her approach is definitely reflected in her pictograms, so effective in their simplicity: some of them definitely have a wry code of humor embedded in them, and all of them observe the world from a person standing at the boundary of the two cultures, one who is able to move from one to the other effortlessly. Liu’s work and her approach to cultural identity really inspired how I want to look at the world someday, as a person fluent in many cultural dialects of the world.

eastwest_sound
-Noise levels in a restaurant, West vs. East

eastwest_line
-How people line up, West vs. East

eastwest_germanchinese
-How people view each other

eastwest_problem
-Problem-solving methods, West vs. East

eastwest_ego
-Size of ego, West vs. East

More articles:
East Meets West: An Infographic Portrait

Interview with Yang Liu

Buy the book here!

Art in Non-Art Settings

As I sat waiting to begin a study for one of my courses, I began to look all around me. I had never been in this area of the building before, and I was taken aback by how full of art the walls were. It wasn’t a building dedicated to any artistic profession, but it captured this aura of serenity and culture through its snapshot images placed vertically along the wall. I’ve always been fascinated by how businesses choose to decorate their offices, eating areas, and hallways. Is the art supposed to match the theme of the business? Who chooses what art should go up? Will the artist get their deserved recognition if their pieces are well-received by the customers?

Wynwood Kitchen and Bar

Sometimes what makes a cafe or a restaurant so yummy is the atmosphere that is created by the decor. While we wait for our food, we are drawn to the setting around us, and it becomes our entertainment during our time of hunger. I find it very beneficial for an artist to display their work within restaurant settings because for many people, the desire to eat out is not solely based on the food, but also on the intrigue that the setting brings. An artist’s piece may be so eye-catching and original, like the Wynwood Kitchen and Bar backdrop above, that many people may inquire about who did this piece, and how they can contact them for more work.

 

New York College of Health Professions

I often see art within an educational or professional setting, and to be honest, I’m usually not impressed. I’m not sure if it is the fact that I’m in a dentist’s office or waiting to take an exam, but I rarely connect with the pieces because my thoughts are elsewhere. Some educational institutions may realize this and opt for the still life of a bowl of fruit or flowers, opposed to something more stimulating.

Chicago Dental and Dentist Services

With this in mind, I wonder what the relationship with art that colleges and businesses truly have. Is it for the love of the field or is it more about filling space with simplistic pieces?

Save Money’s #2 Voice

Vic Mensa is no Chance The Rapper, despite what many of their lyrics may tell us. The pair grew up in the same circle of friends and created the Chicago MC group “SaveMoney” together, but Vic (born Victor Mensah) is not at the same lyrical or aesthetic levels as Chance. Like his counterpart, he cultivated his artistic talent at Chicago’s YouMedia program that offers open mic’s and other instruction in the arts. There, and through the emerging young Hip Hop scene, Vic helped start the briefly famous seven-member group Kids These Days that bleneded rock, hip hop, jazz and soul into their own distinctive sound. The group incorporated other incredibly talented artists like Nico Segal, a trumpet player who recently toured with Frank Ocean, and Macie Stewart who has one of the loveliest female voices around today. After the band produced its first major work “Traphouse Rock” they disbanded to allow the blossoming of individual careers. Shortly before the official end of the band, Vic had already begun working on his biggest project to date, Innanetape.

The mixtape, which has been downloaded over 40,000 times from the site datpiff, is a top-heavy collection of tracks with decent samples, moderately good features and creative melodies. It lacks consistency, lyrical depth and polish. To put it in perspective, Chance’s Acid Rap came out over six months ago and I still jam to any track that appears on my music shuffle. Innanetape dropped only one month ago and I have already had my fill. The truly outstanding songs: “Orange Soda,” “Lovely Day,” “Tweakin’” and “Holy Holy” only sustained my attention for a few weeks before they became stale; I don’t feel the burning desire to hear every musical note and distinguish every hidden word like I do when listening to Chance. Vic Mensa is a gifted MC, but he has yet to find an aspect of his music that will separate him from the very competitive pool of rising artists.

He shows a tremendous amount of promise in the first handful of tracks. When my friend started playing the song “Orange Soda” in the car before the entire Innanetape project came out, I was convinced he was playing an old N.E.R.D. song I had never heard. It mimics the exact same soulful, drum-heavy, call and response and melodically complex sound that Pharrell’s group perfected a few years ago. On an aesthetic level, this is where Vic reaches his maximum potential, and where he can really soar in the future. The same is true for “Lovely Day” and “Tweakin’,” tracks that offer solid lyricism, quick rapping and a unique sound. However, only one song really stands out as a tremendous, album-worthy track. The only song of the mixtape’s second half I enjoy, “Holy Holy” featuring Ab-Soul and BJ The Chicago Kid is stylistic, intricately introspective and astutely socially conscience. BJ The Chicago Kid supplies wonderful harmonies over a soft drum/shaker beat, and Vic finds his true gift for flowing between rap and song. This track is powerful, and is the only one on Innanetape that I would listen to lying on my bed, eyes closed, attempting to really connect with the piece of art. The other tracks are too insubstantial to listen to more than a dozen times without getting bored.

To be clear, Innanetape is in no way a bad mixtape, but Vic Mensa clearly has a lot of work to do before he can climb the ranks as quickly as his friend Chance. The partnership between the two is undoubtedly a wonderful advantage for the MC; the two collaborate on almost every individual project they have, and continually make references to their sibling-like competitiveness, oftentimes alluding to their equal levels of talent. Respectfully, I utterly disagree with this evaluation (Chance is just too many strides ahead of Vic) but respect the support and companionship the two display. Neither has signed to a major label yet, and they seem perfectly content to remain SaveMoney artists for the immediate future– a decision that I for one consider this a very fortunate thing indeed.

Orange Soda

Essential Viewing

We learn about slavery in America from the time we are in elementary school, starting with almost cheerful overcoming-adversity adventure stories about the underground railroad, and progressing to the story of the transatlantic slave trade. After an overview of the slave trade, we generally leave off on slavery, focusing on manifest destiny until the Civil War and Reconstruction. If you’re lucky, you might encounter a high school AP US history teacher who emphasizes much more than names, dates and geographical locations, but generally history courses try so hard to get facts across that they deprive those facts of any real substance. So although we know that slavery was ‘evil,’ it’s almost difficult to be viscerally shocked or horrified by it when we’ve known about it since we were little kids. 12 Years a Slave breathes life, and horror, back into slavery.

12 Years a Slave, directed by Steve McQueen, tells the true story of Solomon Northup, a free born African American who lived with his family and worked as a concert violinist in Saratoga Springs, New York. In 1841, lured by an offer of employment, Northup was tricked, kidnapped and sold into slavery in New Orleans. The rest of the movie tells the story of his suffering under slavery with real historical nuance, brutal intimacy, and stunning cinematography. McQueen’s film probes certain realities of southern slavery that I’ve never seen come to life on a screen before.
In the midst of Northup’s suffering, the director includes several interesting and important pieces of history. In contrast to the mythic southern luxury shown in ‘Gone with the Wind,’ the film illustrated the great variability in economic fortune of the slaveholders, many of whom struggled to turn a profit – owners and overseers consider mortgages and debts, and when a plantation is blighted by cotton worms, Northup is leased to a different owner. The film also explores the unpredictability of slave owners. Northup’s first owner is the benevolent Master Ford (Benedict Cumberbatch), who expresses sympathy with the mother who is sold away from her children, takes Northup’s engineering ability seriously, and gifts him a violin for a job well done. However, as his fellow slave, (Adepero Oduye, the sobbing, bereft mother from the auction) points out, Ford is still a slave owner, and despite his appearance of kindliness he is still depriving them of their freedom and exploiting their labor. Indeed, when Ford presents Northup with the violin he mentions that he hopes the music will bring both of them happiness ‘over the years.’ Northup is caught off guard by the benevolence, but you can see him absorb the painful implication of life enslavement in the casual remark, even as he caresses the instrument.
Another fact of slavery that the film explores, in heartbreaking detail, is the institutionalized sexual exploitation and abuse of enslaved black women. When Northup assaults an overseer he is sold to a harsher master and known ‘slave-breaker’ named Edwin Epps, who is played as a cruel, crazed alcoholic, by a Southern-accented Michael Fassbender. As Northup suffers under the unpredictable rule of Epps and the whims of his icy wife, he witnesses Epps’s growing sexual fascination with a slave girl named Patsey (Lupita Nyong’o). Patsey’s case exemplifies that of many slave women –she suffers sexual assault and rape from Epps and physical assault and hatred from Epps’s wife, without recourse, gradually beginning to despair under a regime of abuse that promises to last for the rest of her life. McQueen uses Northup’s story to show how slavery cruelly interrupted a rich life, but Patsey and the other slaves show us a different, more common tragedy – the tragedy of human beings who were born into, and will die in slavery, with no hope of realizing their potential.
McQueen lingers both on the Southern scenery and on the character’s faces – the sun sets on the bayou, trees move in the breeze, Patsey makes dolls from corn husks while a whip cracks in the background, Northup stares into the camera, hopeful and hopeless, for long minutes. Ejiofor brings an incredible dignity to the role, and the performances of the rest of the ensemble are magnified in his often wordless reactions. The strange humans that surround Northup are intelligent, stupid, primitive, cruel, kind, righteous, moral, morally bankrupt – Ejiofor’s performance helps us to keep reacting, to understand that the pain caused by the institution of slavery was real and terrible, undiluted by historical distance from the present..

12 Years a Slave is, as a sum of its parts, one of the most engaging, important, and accurate depictions of American slavery that has ever hit the big screen. But why is it being described as ‘essential viewing?’ Why can’t the past be the past? And why should ordinary Americans, looking for entertainment, spend their money and time watching Solomon Northup’s suffering? Why, to be blunt, is legacy of American slavery so special?

Many people have tried to make the case that it isn’t. Epps points out righteously, slavery is in the bible – “that’s scripture,” he says, after quoting a biblical passage about whipping slaves. We know that slavery existed the world over, including in ancient Rome, in the Slavonic tribes, within African empires, and in Russia in the form of serfdom. But American slavery was different than these other forms of slavery; it was definitively worse, and it was worse largely because it was the first race-based form of slavery in the world. Throughout human history, humans have enslaved other humans due to conquest, debt, or war, but never based solely on physical difference. Race-based slavery is perceived (consciously or unconsciously) as a tragic, but inevitable extension of some kind of human predisposition towards racial hatred, when in reality it was a system intentionally created out of the economic need of a labor shortage. In addition to its created basis in race, American slavery was also distinct from other forms of slavery in that there was no way to work out of slavery, pay debts through labor and become free again. Other American innovations to the institution included inheritability (that a slave’s children would also be slaves for the rest of their lives), the tragic separation of the families (a distinguishing factor from serfdom), and the complete lack of rights – most importantly, the lack of a right to be free from physical violence. With these distinguishing features came the brutality and horror caused by the unlimited power of one human over another.
In Jon Stewart’s recent Daily Show interview with Chiwatel Ejiofor, he meditated on the fact that both Ejiofor and McQueen are Brits – maybe, he mused, it’s too hard, too emotionally wrenching, for Americans to explore our own past. But if we’re ever going the legacy of slavery, and the enduring racial inequality in our country, we need to explore it. 12 Years a Slave is essential viewing, in every sense of the phrase.