I can't read about art history
3/2/06
Apparently I can't read about art history. I'm reading this book about Vasily Kandinsky's
Compositions, the book associated with this page.
Rather I should say I read about a page and a half about the "pure painting" he was trying to achieve,
when inspiration grabbed me by the neck and made me do this. So all I know about what Kandinsky was
going for with "pure painting" is that it's meant to achieve an emotional impact without being
representational of anything. That is, not looking like anything, not even being abstractions of
anything recognizable, and evoke an emotional response just with the elements of the visual medium,
like line, color and form. He called his ten compositions "compositions" because they were to do
this in the same way that musical compositions achieve emotional response just using their elements,
melody, rhythm, etc., without being representational of anything. But it occurs to me that music is
naturally more non-representational, and visual media are naturally more representational. In other
words, it seems natural to paint pictures that look like things than to simply compose colors and
shapes. Music on the other hand, seems challenged to be representational from the outset. Natural or
non-musical sounds are the only things music could be made to represent, and once you've made your
trumpet whinney like a horse and made your guitar "talk", what else is there left to do
really? The main representational element of music though is the lyrics. Lyrics basically tell
you what the music is meant to represent. But take away the lyrics, and the tune you're left with
represents nothing. So I guess what I'm saying is that music seems more naturally suited to evoke
emotions, whereas visual arts seem more naturally suited to representation. So maybe what Kandinsky
was trying to do then, was hard. Hard to conceive anyway, but I think it's been achieved. Perhaps
he first achieved it, I don't know yet after only a page and a half of the book, but I've seen lots
of emotionally evocative, completely non-representational art. Perhaps like so many great
inventions -- the lightbulb and rocketry spring to mind -- it seems simple in retrospect, greatly
obscuring the difficulty of inventing it in the first place, when no one had done it before.
