It was 1974, I was pregnant and suffused with the peace & contentment that I suspect is The Great Creator’s way of ensuring women are willing to undergo birth.  I was in my fourth & final year at the Vancouver School of Art and joyfully producing a plethora of pregnant forms.  My work was as round, expansive and shiny as my belly. I was fascinated with eggy shapes and anything to do with eggs. Love and life was good.

Broken Yolk, 1974, Marion-Lea Jamieson, molded Sheet Acrylic, 36”h x 48” w x 30”d

I had just discovered how to take photos & had borrowed a camera from the Art School.  The Egg Boxes were photographed in a number of configurations and locations. Unfortunately, I had not yet learned to ensure that the lens was clean.

I also choreographed & performed a couple of dance pieces during this period.  The first was called Egg-Hanger, a dance piece for 6 dancers that I choreographed and was performed at the Simon Fraser University Theatre under the direction of Iris Garland. Though I don’t have a visual record of the piece being performed, I have images of the sculpture that I made for that dance:

The photo above was taken at the New Era Social Club, an artists’ studio on Powell Street.  Other artists working there at the time included Glen Lewis, Dave Rimmer, Taki Bluesinger & Chris Dahl.

 I choreographed & performed a solo dance piece when I was about 8 months pregnant in the dance space of the Western Front Artists’ Collective in Vancouver, as part of a performance directed by Linda Rubin.

Called Amnion the piece began with me inside a large clear polyester sac that I had made with a large zipper that allowed entry & exit. The dance, was done inside the sac and in front of a large blue heart, to the accompaniment of thumping music. The piece ended in a symbolic birth with my emergence from the sac clad in flesh coloured leotard & tights

During the pregnancy I continued to create images of the fecund female body with an interest in exploring the, to me, interesting paradox that the female body is celebrated for it’s sexuality while, in the West, its amazing reproductive capability is almost an embarrassment. My theory is that reproduction is an instinctual process that unequivocally links humans to their mammalian natures and belies the assumption of our species’ separateness & superiority.

While still at art school in 1974, I created a series of sculptures using vacuum-formed sheet acrylic in the shape of a heart using the Vancouver School of Art’s fabulous Thermoplastics studio. This studio was amazing as it had a giant oven capable of hanging a 6′ x 8′ sheet of acrylic that could be heated, then formed.  For this there was a giant vacuum-form press where the heated acrylic could be either sucked onto a mold through the vacuum function or the direction of the airflow could be reversed so that the hot acrylic could be blown through a cut-out. I used heart-shaped cut-out to create 3 big acrylic hearts, 4′ x 4′, with a circular fluorescent light fixture inside. The blue heart was used in the Western Front performance. Sadly, the entire Thermoplastics studio was not moved the the School’s new campus on Granville Island that eventually morphed into the Emily Carr University of Art & Design.

Below are some other photos of the big blown acrylic hearts. A big heart shape was cut out of 3/4″ plywood and clamped over a sheet of hot acrylic.  Then the air was forced through the cut out & the heart shape bubbled into life.

I also played around with vacuum-formed female torsos in the form of heart-shaped boxes. As a pregnant woman I was interested in the concept of vessels – of things within things. These vacuum-formed acrylic, heart-shaped torso boxes were filled with various items and photographed in a number of locations & juxtapositions.

 As part of the heart-shaped container series, there was a series of heart-shaped boxes. Like the torsos, these were photographed filled with various objects;

There was a heart shaped, drop leaf table that was part of a series of red-painted wooden sculptures. These included Egg-Hanger, shown above and a piece called Brass Stand at right. Though Brass Stand was not strictly speaking a part of the pregnancy-inspired “hearts & eggs” series, it is included as it was part of the red-paint that seemed to be an important aspect of my work at the time.

Brass Stand was part of a project grant received from the Vancouver School of Art that allowed the recipient to explore beyond the capabilities of the Art School. Recipients were encouraged to pay outside trades to create all or part of the artwork. I choose to explore the potential for spun brass, and created a wooden mold to be used to form the brass. I then approached a metalwork shop and asked them to recreate the wooden forms in brass. The guys in this metalwork shop couldn’t figure out what I was doing there and why I was asking them for such outlandish work. A couple of them figured I was there because I was looking to get laid, and became so unpleasant that I was afraid to go back and pick up the remaining work. I was shy & unsure of myself at that stage and like most women of that time, blamed myself for creating the unwanted attention.

My beautiful baby girl was born soon after I graduated from art school. The birth was difficult, and I came home to an empty, ground floor apartment with no money and no help. I collected welfare and wandered around a dank apartment with no furniture, carrying my baby, with both of us weeping for the first three months.  I hadn’t really foreseen that as a penniless female artist, I would not have the leisure or resources to create artworks once I was a mother.  The isolation was also a shock as artist friends came by, saw that I was no fun and didn’t return. They couldn’t understand why I had done this to myself. But I knew why. I fell in love with that baby and have never fallen out of love with her, or the next baby, who came along 6 years later.

The first three months were the hardest and the paintings I did, shown below, were the only works created during that time. They were exhibited in a gallery in Chinatown specially set up to show the work of artists on welfare (those were the days).

Six years later, I had a second baby, my son James, even though the marriage was shaky and we were no better off financially. I often say that having my two children was the smartest move I ever made.

Many years later, my second husband Colin, my children and grandchildren and his children & grandchildren are the greatest blessings of my life and I thank the Creator for having given me the wisdom to choose love and life over good sense.

The post Love and Life first appeared on Marion-Lea Jamieson, Artist.

Though many, if not most, self-defined post-modernists would seek to differentiate their views from those of Clement Greenberg‘s, there is a clear link between his theories and post-modern attitudes toward painting.Greenberg’s theory was that the point of painting was to “… determine the irreducible working essence of art…. Under Modernism, more and more of the conventions of the art of painting have shown themselves to be dispensable, unessential…the irreducible essence of pictorial art consists in but two constitutive conventions or norms: flatness and the delimitation of flatness…” Greenberg also insisted that painting establishes a purely visual or “optical space”, one addressed to eyesight alone and unmodified or revised by tactile associations.(1)

Though disparaged and eventually de-throned, Greenberg’s views have had an overwhelming impact on contemporary art practice up to the present and they have been widely accepted as unassailably true. The creative path of artists like Mondrian or Picasso might have been the source of Greenberg’s theory that painting is on an unswerving trajectory toward perfecting itself through jettisoning the inessential.

How artists were to define what is inessential Greenberg left up to individual self-criticism, but it soon became clear that only what artists that Greenberg admired deemed inessential led to irreducibly “good” paintings.

Later, Michael Fried took on the Minimalists (whom he also refers to as Literalists) for their wholly literal approach to painting & sculpture. By that he meant that they followed Greenberg’s idea about finding the irreducible essence of art to its logical conclusion which was “the surpassing of painting (or sculpture) in the interests of literalness” or what he called “objecthood”.

Kenneth Noland, Reflections Alit, 2003, acrylic on canvas, 18-3/8″ x 51″ (46.7 cm x 129.5 cm) © The Paige Rense Noland Marital Trust / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Fried drew an analogy between the works of Henri Matisse and Kenneth Noland as both having “unbrokenness, uniform intensity and sheer breadth of colour”.

Greenberg and Fried were writing at a time when the modernist experiment still had life in it and they could see that the direction of painting could either go toward work that “deadened its expressiveness, denied its sense of humanness” or work that could “stand in comparison with the painting of both the modernist and the premodernist past & whose quality is be beyond question.” They were living & writing during a period when what was considered to be important paintings were works that they had in large part encouraged through their criticism. These were hard-edged, non-pictorial, intellectual works, some of which retained some aspects of painterlyness and others that had rejected any claims to be arty. They both assumed that the direction they had pointed to in their critiques was based on a more-or-less objective assessment of the art world in which they found themselves. But a remove of a few decades reveals that their criticism was not objective in any way but emerged from their own desires to ennoble art criticism and themselves as art critics.

Fried considered that what Nolan has done is to make work like Matisse’s “radically abstract”. This agrees with Greenberg’s assertion that progress in painting has to do with discovering its essence, its irreducibility.

But perhaps in searching for the irreducible essence of painting, the baby has been thrown out with the bathwater. What artists like Nolan may have felt were inessential were aspects of painting that convey life, the human factor, nature, a sense of place, joy, warmth, paint strokes & images to name a few of what Greenberg would term inessential “conventions”.  Because some artists &critics did not consider these “conventions” to be essential does not mean they were & are inessential. They may have been inessential to those particular artists at that particular time, but may be essential to another time & place. However, this idea of whittling away everything extraneous to reveal the essence of art took hold as the dominant paradigm until painting itself became dispensable.

This ennobling desire on their part, and on the part of most art critics today, is understandable and defensible, especially in an art world that has become increasingly focused on monetary value rather than the intrinsic values of a work of art. And at the time they were writing, Greenberg & Fried were both wrestling with the emerging permission to create anti-art or non-art and demand that it be called art.

So they felt the need to formalize their objections to these emerging trends by expressing their ideas in a quasi-theoretical, quasi-intellectual mode. Much of their cogitations appear to be long digressions with no useful result – as worthwhile as the angels-on-head-of-pin debates of yore.

But through their convoluted writings they paved the way for a new attitude toward the visual arts for artists, curators, critics and viewers. This new attitude assumes that art is primarily a cerebral activity that can only be appreciated through close mental study of an art work. In other words, it is not enough to feel enchanted with a painting through its immediate visual impact transmitted to the nerves and sinews and bypassing the analytical brain.

These assumptions have been transported to institutions of higher learning where students learn the words and phrases that will convey their superior understanding of art to the outside world as well as a belt of intellectual rather than technical tools. Universities have been transformed in the late twentieth century into emasculated centres of learning where the broadly humanist educational curricula of the past have been replaced by a free-market model of learning and where the assumptions of moral relativism is scarcely challenged.

As David Balzer explains in Curationism, It is no longer adequate to go to art school, once must have a Masters of Fine Arts to be taken seriously as someone who understands art. He describes how critical theory imported from Europe, mainly from France, became trendy in the 1980’s and colonized universities in the 1990’s. One of the main objectives of this critical theory, particularly post-structuralism, is to explode assumptions about language, tradition and privilege. These ideas are explored in more detail in the next blog,The Consolation of Philosophy. Graduates of programs based on these new theories were embraced by contemporary museum and gallery curators as a way to ostensibly break free from their image of themselves as having a stodgy, dead-white-male-focus. Artists thus came under pressure to professionalize by taking graduate degrees from the institutions that offered these new theories, especially for those working outside painting, drawing and traditional sculpture.

For instance, in my home-town of Vancouver, the Vancouver School of Art founded in1925 has morphed into the Emily Carr University of Art & Design.

This university-based approach has spawned a network of artists, critics, curators and funders who speak the same language and are comfortable that they are promoting a true appreciation of art based on Greenbergian ideas about determining the irreducible working essence of art by jettisoning technique, meaning, and especially aesthetics. Conceptualist practice in particular was readily abetted by such academic training given obvious overlaps between those working in institutions and those working in academe.

The institutions of higher learning have a stake in continuing to be the arbiters of intellectual taste in the arts and have created a new Academia whose rigid conformity to the Greenberg/Fried intellectual tradition rivals that of its predecessor in pre-modernist France. This intellectual tradition – the stripping away of anything extraneous (ie visual, visceral, sensuous) – leads to major galleries mounting exhibitions that are monotonous in the extreme

and comprehensible only to those willing to read the page of explanatory text beside each piece describing why it is important and meaningful.

This does not suggest that we should dumb-down art or that there is no place for art criticism. Instead it suggests that there is a greater-than-ever need for art criticism that can shake itself free from the overwhelming influence of A New Academy and re-examine the critical tradition inherited from the 1960’s. There is no denying the fact that writing about the visual arts is difficult, as any artists trying to describe what s/he is doing for an exhibition, grant or other application can attest.

Trying to put a purely visual/visceral/sensuous experience into words is an attempt to describe the indescribable. To paraphrase, writing about the visual arts is like dancing about architecture, a category error. A writer can either surround each thought with clouds of verbiage, as Fried has done, in an effort to finally get close to the germ of the idea struggled with or, like Greenberg, simply state that s/he has good taste, knows art and knows what’s good. In order to avoid these shoals of garrulousness and ego, later writers have acceded to the belief that art criticism is necessarily subjective and that criticism can only consist of detailed descriptions of one’s personal experience of the subject artworks. None of these approaches is ideal and finding a workable alternative is the challenge for art critics today.

Fortunately, I am an artist rather than an art critic, so the task of finding a more relevant and constructive approach to art criticism is not mine, though I assume the role of critic-of-art-critics in these blogs. But my purpose is to understand what is meaningful in my painting practice and analyze the temporal/historical space in which I work and the influence of A New Academy on the arts.

The post A New Academy first appeared on Marion-Lea Jamieson, Artist.