All 6 entries tagged Van Gogh

The chaos in Van Gogh

Follow-up to Klee and the separation of painting and music from Transversality - Robert O'Toole

Notice how the painterly diagram, the method of brush-strokes, applied by Van Gogh is applied in the same way to both the figure and the background. The figure emerges from the materiality of the background, and threatens to dissolve back into it. Accentuating the matter of the painting is a deliberate attempt to make this more obvious.

Robert O'Toole : 01 Oct 2004 08:35 |  Tags: Deleuze Deleuze And Art Diagram Figuration Painting Paul Klee Philosophy Research Transversality Transversality Van Gogh |  Comments (3) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Klee and the separation of painting and music

Follow-up to Van Gogh and painterly diagrams from Transversality - Robert O'Toole

Note – this is academic work. If you know about Deleuze's aesthetics, Klee, Bacon etc, you are very welcome to comment.

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Painting, as with Van Gogh, establishes a rhythmic pattern. Through an additive synthesis, painting intensifies the body, leads it into chaotic relations with the rest of the material world, provides it with a depth of simultaneous connections, nearing chaos.

For some time painters have been concerned with the relationship between the rhythmic essence of painting and that of music. Deleuze, in a consideration of Cezanne and Bacon, attempts to clarify this relation:

Rhythm appears as music when it invests the auditory level, and as painting when it invests the visual level. Francis Bacon:Logic of Sensation, Continuum, 2004, p.44

Certainly music traverses our bodies in profound ways, putting an ear in the stomach, in the lungs, and so on. It knows all about waves and nervousness. But it involves our body, and bodies in general, in another element. It strips bodies of their inertia, of the materiality of their presence: it disembodies bodies. In a sense, music begins where painting ends, and this is what is meant by the superiority of music. It is lodged in lines of flight that pass through bodies, but which find their consistency elsewhere, whereas painting is lodged farther up, where the body escapes from itself. ibid p.54

Music then acts to disembody, make abstract, deterritorialize onto a distinct plane. As if pulling the spirit out of the body . The incessant seriality of music acts to concentrate and overwhelm the body in anticipation of perception.¹

Paul Klee was concerned with this distinction. As both an accomplished violinist and a painter it would necessarily be an issue. Duchling seems to claim some connection between Klee and the ideas of Nietzsche and Bergson on rhythm in fine arts. Did Klee read Bergson? Anyhow, in the face of attempts by critics to say that Klee's painting was musical, used the same structure as music, Klee responded strongly by emphasising that both arts are rhythmic, but in entirely different ways. Deleuze also had an interest in Klee (will look into that more).

This is the starting point for Duchling's book on Paul Klee, Painting Music. I've just discovered this, and it seems to be fascinating.

In comparison to the Romantics, Klee sought the actual basis for the analogy in the most inner being of music – rhythm – which in his opinion not only marks the movement of time in music, but also in art. Paul Klee: Painting Music, Hajo Duchting, Pegasus, p.14

Notes:

¹Consider here Klee's rejection of Hausenstein's Kantian analysis of finality and purposiveness in Klee - Paul Klee: Painting Music, Hajo Duchting, Pegasus, p.12.

Robert O'Toole : 01 Oct 2004 08:24 |  Tags: Abstraction Bergson Deleuze Deleuze And Art Deterritorialization Diagram Disembodiement Figuration Finality Francis Bacon Hausenstein Kant Logic Of Sensation Music Nietzsche Painting Paul Cezanne Paul Klee Philosophy Research Rhythm Transversality Van Gogh |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Capitalism, schizophrenia, the artist

Anti-Oedipus Page 245–255 Capitalism as the relative limit of society, schizophrenia as the absolute limit. The artist stands between them, scrambling the codes.

The 'diagram' introduced by Van Gogh is deliberately a return to the body, rediverts representation through the body, to slow and deflect it away from the blinding imediacy of the camera. Decelerated representation.

Robert O'Toole : 07 Sep 2004 08:36 |  Tags: Anti Oedipus Art Capitalism Deleuze Deleuze And Art Diagram Guattari Philosophy Research Transversality Transversality Van Gogh |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Bacon's malerisch, Van Gogh's diagram, and the baroque fold

Follow-up to The artistic diagram and its relation to the statistical diagram from Transversality - Robert O'Toole

Preventing the artistic object from becoming a symbol by expressing its emergence from a common materiality. Van Gogh's swirls and hatchings. Bacon's curtain. Bacons turn against the figural is a turn against the figure becoming symbolic, against the nonsense of a logic of sensation that is seperate from its emergence from materiality.

The baroque material, Deleuze, The Fold. The monad. Composibility.

Robert O'Toole : 29 Aug 2004 08:08 |  Tags: Baroque Diagram Francis Bacon Malerisch Philosophy Research The Fold Transversality Transversality Van Gogh |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Van Gogh and painterly diagrams

Van Gogh's technique was also to apply a diagram to the figure in order to divert it from purposiveness into an unlocking of sensation. You can see in this work just how, as Deleuze says, for the painter the hand becomes a second eye and the canvas becomes a second mind.

The painter sees the figure. Seeing in this case is just the repetition of singular affects on the complex assemblage of planes of the mind. The eyes and their movement overlay a rhythmic action on this repetition of affects. Secondarily, the painter diverts this rhythm (of movement and light) to the hands, which have corresponding ways of moving, characteristic means of applying paint (and other painterly movements). This is what Deleuze calls the diagram. Van Gogh developed new diagrams of his own, of his own hands, which you can see clearly in this painting. With the application of sensation through the diagram and through the material of the painting, the canvas is built up into zones, lines, contours, planes, thicknesses, colours etc. At this point the painting faces a great danger, as described by Cezanne, the danger of becoming chaotic, of the sensations on the canvas failing to form a balanced and self-sustaining resonance: chaos. Adding new sensations to the canvas inevitably pushes it towards chaos. The greatness of the painter, as you can see in Van Gogh, is the ability to push the canvas towards this catastrophe, only to rescue it and restore the balance and resonances.

In this way, as Kant would have agreed, the adventure of painting is an adventure of the kind experienced in thought itself, an engagement with catastrophe and a subsequent return.

Robert O'Toole : 18 Aug 2004 07:09 |  Tags: Body Without Organs Catastrophe Cezanne Chaos Deleuze Deleuze And Art Diagram Dynamical Model Kant Painting Philosophy Research Sensation Singularity Transversality Transversality Van Gogh |  Comments (2) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

On art and the art of war – Bacon and Cezanne

Some principles of successful military command:

• Recruit and train forces, divide them up, and arrange them according to the terrain in which they will operate and the opposing arrangements of enemy forces. This requires intelligence, strategy, and imagination.
• Identify a sufficiently distant goal so as to allow for a wide range of local conditions to emerge on the path to that goal.
• Provide the forces with time and space in which to operate with relative autonomy in order to explore and adapt to local conditions so as to move towards the objective. This requires diplomacy, political guile, and a certain charm in dealing with those who demand results.
• Encourage the different individual divisions of the forces to advance with speed or caution as required so as to co-ordinate with each other.
• Maintain the necessary lines of supply and communication to and between the divisions (resource going to the front).
• Maintain the necessary lines of supply and communication from the divisions (resource returning to the command).

On art and the battle ground of the canvas:

As i think Deleuze indicates in his book on Bacon, these artists had a deeply strategic understanding of how to enable, command even, their artistic powers. Each of these principles of good command can be seen in their practices. For example, Deleuze describes how for these artists the terrain is sensation, the enemy is figuration (the figural locked to representation), and the relatively autonomous forces are the artistic diagram (a difficult term, capturing a technique in its relation to the figural but not at the mercy of representation). The diagram is unleashed into unanticipated and dangerous territories of sensation:

The diagram is indeed a chaos, a catastrophe, but it is also a germ of order or rhythm. It is a violent chaos in relation to the figurative givens, but it is a germ of rhythm in relation to the new order of the painting. As Bacon says, it "unlocks areas of sensation." Deleuze, Francis Bacon: Logic of Sensation, p.102

Deleuze describes in great detail Francis Bacon's strategy for painting, for creativity, for achieving all of the above for the cause of the campaign, creating paintings that each unlock sensation in a new way. He sees this in all great painters, citing Van Gogh and Klee as well, and of course Cezanne, who was prior to Bacon the most effective documentor of the battle ground of the canvas.

Robert O'Toole : 18 Aug 2004 00:00 |  Tags: Asymmetrical Warfare Autonomous Lines Cezanne Deleuze Deleuze And Art Diagram Figuration Francis Bacon Logic Of Sensation Paul Klee Philosophy Research Sansation Transversality Transversality Van Gogh |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem