Friday, 17 April 2015

Research

Today I finally got around to starting my research paper, this is where I got to today.

Aesthetic Choices and Meaningful Dialogue
This essay is going to look at artists that make aesthetic choices to entice the viewer to look into the deeper meaning within their work. I will also explore how I seek to accomplish this in my own work. The two artists that I have chosen to write this essay about are Kazimir Malevich and Daniel Buren. Both have made minimalistic work in the past that appears to have no meaning beyond the fact that it is interesting to look at.  However this is not the case.

It is impossible to talk about the work of Malevich without first talking about Suprematism, an art movement that he founded in 1913[i], which sought to give over artworks to the highest point of expression, whilst simultaneously ignoring the familiar appearance of objects[ii]. When he created his Black Square[iii] there was no figurative basis there, at the time it was considered to be a desert[iv], with no meaning or aesthetics to speak of. What critics didn't realise is that it's simplistic beauty was the start of a movement that utilised basic geometric shapes[v]  and conformed to a rigid set of rules[vi].

So one could argue that Malevich himself made no real conscious aesthetic choices whilst creating his work, he simply allowed his feelings and emotions to take over, whilst using a small selection of shapes and colours to represent his thoughts. The aesthetic decisions that happened before creating the work is another story however, when he and his fellow artists devised the rules of Suprematism they chose the use of simple shapes to be a key factor, so that the work could be solely about the expression of feelings. But it could also be said that they chose those shapes in the beginning because of aesthetics, so that  whatever they went on to create it was guaranteed to be beautiful and interesting to look at.


[i] http://www.tate.org.uk/learn/online-resources/glossary/s/suprematism
 Kasimir Malevich, The Non - Objective World, 1959
[ii] http://www.theartstory.org/movement-suprematism.htm
[iii] http://www.tate.org.uk/context-comment/articles/five-ways-look-Malevich-Black-Square
[iv] Kasimir Malewitsch, Malewitsch, 1981
[v] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suprematism
[vi] http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/574754/Suprematism

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