This is a coursework motivated post, with the aim of describing and analysing three different approaches to depicting figures/beings of my choosing (from a curated set).
The figure is an endlessly interesting subject for art, and as such has been subjected to seemingly endless treatments. As much as we may take an interest in the world around us, such is the condition of our self-obsession that we must seek to experience this world through the lenses and sensory inputs of other beings, even if those beings are merely figments of our imagination. The presence of the figure makes explicit what otherwise is only implicit: our relation to the external world.
For this post I'm interested in the depictions of figures by Antony Gormley, Christoph Niemann, and Robert Weaver.
A Few Thoughts on the Enlightenment
I took a visit to the British Museum and spent a good amount of time in the Enlightenment room. There one will find all manner of objects and books relating to the earliest period of the Museum's history, along with placards explaining and describing the thinking and knowledge of the time. There are weighty tomes sealed behind glass, some of which appear as though they might crumble if improperly handled, along with various scientific instruments, orrerys and collected artefacts from around the world. It very clearly creates the impression of a collection, as if some wealthy child grown tired of postage stamps had set out and gobbled up whatever he could find to catch his interest from the furthest reaches of the globe. What follows are a few jumbled thoughts of mine on this habit of collecting and the need to organise.
On Brutalism
Brutalist buildings are stark, dramatic, and austere. They are striking, stunning even. And how could they not be? Brutalist architecture exists not so much within its environment as it is opposed to it. It rejects the natural, replaces it with exacting artifice and confidently opposes all of the processes that made its own existence possible. The natural world is the natural enemy of brutalism, and by extension, so are humans.
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