Rembrandt self-portrait with Leica M9

A friend on the Leica M9 forum (luf) sort of brought up the question of what makes Rembrandt great, the answer I posted follows......................

As for Rembrandt and what makes him great, easy answer - he invented the M9 of his day and used his Noctilux wide open - his was better than ours because it could focus on both near things and far things simultaneously and could infinitely vary the bokeh. Nice tool eh? He also had low light nailed! But in truth those things, fabulous as they may be, aren't the half of it, top of the list in the intangible category is his ability to create something that reminds viewers of what it means to be human. Next would be that he invented a way to show the core values of the society he lived in by democratising both subjects and composition. In the end art is just the human expression of what it means to be alive now, and as NOW is always changing art just follows suit. Contrary to popular myth no artist has ever been ahead of their time. A few have been deluded And poor old Rene takes the cake - no wonder he looks so sad!

Twentysix Gasoline Stations for Sale

Endless Present

Robert Rooney and Conceptual Art

Adverts for this exhibition made my old memory race as some years ago when I was teaching at GIAE (Gippsland Institute of Advanced Education) The Head of the Art theory department gave me the little set of Artist Books pictured above, evidently the library was clearing out dross, he'd been given them, wasn't interested in them and passed them on to me.

I located them all on one of my bookshelves coincidentally squeezed between Micheal Foucault's This is not a Pipe and Bernard Berenson's Seeing and Knowing which made me think that maybe I had been cataloguing all the loony stuff together! That's hardly fair, but I kind of have the right to say that, as I started off making an art that later was called Conceptual. Patrick McCaughy called it "Duchampian".

Whilst Foucault's views and the conceptual items gained currency the Berenson essay, first published in 1949, was dismissed and ridiculed as just an outburst of a bitter old Renaissance scholar. He did say that there is no such thing as abstract art because abstract means idea, the very opposite of a tangible thing like a painting or a sculpture. By his logic he would have said that the only abstract art was what was called conceptual. This essay has haunted me for much of my life as I've never found a way to beat it. Should be compulsory reading.

Anyway - I don't know what Twentysix Gasoline Stations are worth, or Sunset strip for that matter, or the other items, but I'm happy to consider offers!

When is book not a book? When it is art! James Collins said some interesting things about the aesthetics of conceptualism - also worth following up.

Update: Have just checked out what these things are worth, or more correctly what people are trying to get for them - so I'll add the idea of a swap into the deal and what interests me most at the moment are 24mm, 28mm or 35mm lenses for my Leica M8.

Bondage for beauty

Poor Iris has had to put up with a lot from me this week, first she was bound and gagged, then left hanging off a crane for few days and unmentionable violations were performed on her all in the name of art, beauty?

It's been a funny week, funniest thing of all, I had another of those emails from someone in China who was offering to make* my sculptures for me, maybe I'm missing something but I just can't understand why anyone would want to send their art out to be made by someone else. Its far cheaper if you do it yourself, you remain free to change and modify the work right up until the end and you never have to limit your vision to something that can be made by someone following your plans.

*make or worse fabricate, obviously from the Latin: fabricare, what's wrong with carve, sculpt or even create!