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| Instagram's self-curate of photography is an art. |
You don't need a Pew survey to tell you how much time you've spent on Instagram today. Right off the bat, you can probably recount the number of inspiring go-to places you've also seen: Hougang Block 15? No, it's Hougang, the mortar void deck of red lead and verdant, which makes for a perfect setting for creating art, or in most cases, artistic still shots. They can go from photos of stairways to car parks to #ootd's, a sideway glance from the art-types who'd never shy away from abstraction and intelligent contours of HDB architecture.
If you think Instagram is art, you're half-right. Not only is it art, Instagram is a "movement", the vanguard of minimalism playing off space, form, and HDB void decks. Nothing that I know of how to manipulate, excepting "selfies", though, doesn't count either. (My followers are sufficient proof). Minimalism has become an inescapable influence that has crept into the way we express ourselves, while Instagram has made that free, democratic, and mostly, accessible.
But like a #throwback, you ought to know that these efforts didn't just exist when Instagram was invented, it happened before you were even born. Modern artists were into geometry just as the next blogger was into throwing out her belongings for the world to see.
We can learn a little from modernism, an age-old wisdom that involved hard-edged lines and solid colours. Less is more, right? Back then, guys like Frank Stella, and, later, Jackson Pollock with his abstract drip paint were mavericks of its art. So was Ad Reinhardt, whose famous canvases were flushed with all-blacks that could easily knock you off your Instagram page with minimalistic, thought-provoking controversy.
I assure you, there are no cats in these paintings.
Cartoonist, graphic artist, photographer, active pursuant of the Eastern mystic (depending on how you've heard about him), Reinhardt was the father of his modernist black-on-black grid paintings, each seemingly indiscriminate in color (what color?) and form. The artist, who first created cubic collages in the late 1930s and early '40s, moved toward pure abstraction by the Swinging '60s, a colourful time in opposition to the monochromatic paintings that furthered his oeuvre.
What arrests you when you lock gaze into a Reinhardt is everything the eye easily misses. Depth, the barest of primary colours lost in the sea of unwavering, still darkness, surfaces once the eyes manage to engage in the oil grids, with black paint drained out of its 5 x 5 canvas to produce a sleek, suede-like appearance. To catch the geometry here requires patience, which, compared to our age of instant gratification, really turns Instagram on its head.
With asceticism and pure joy, there is a sense of self-restraint and the confessional. A type of discipline when you stare into his paintings enmeshes your gaze. Reinhardt's subtle this way. His paintings are of a meditative experience that reveals more once your eyes uncover the green or red lines breaking each solid square, tracing lineage back to his early non-Western techniques used to create these pure, present still images of blue-black. That's why they're also vulnerable, not in the poetic hack of suicide-prone Sylvia Plath way, but, really vulnerable. Since the paintings are without visible brushstrokes, a single imprint of your fingertip could easily mar the surface. Without sounding like an art zionist, you got to see it to believe it.
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| Not mine, obviously. |
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| Flat laid like a pro. |
But like a #throwback, you ought to know that these efforts didn't just exist when Instagram was invented, it happened before you were even born. Modern artists were into geometry just as the next blogger was into throwing out her belongings for the world to see.
We can learn a little from modernism, an age-old wisdom that involved hard-edged lines and solid colours. Less is more, right? Back then, guys like Frank Stella, and, later, Jackson Pollock with his abstract drip paint were mavericks of its art. So was Ad Reinhardt, whose famous canvases were flushed with all-blacks that could easily knock you off your Instagram page with minimalistic, thought-provoking controversy.
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| What's art depends on who's looking. |
I assure you, there are no cats in these paintings.
Cartoonist, graphic artist, photographer, active pursuant of the Eastern mystic (depending on how you've heard about him), Reinhardt was the father of his modernist black-on-black grid paintings, each seemingly indiscriminate in color (what color?) and form. The artist, who first created cubic collages in the late 1930s and early '40s, moved toward pure abstraction by the Swinging '60s, a colourful time in opposition to the monochromatic paintings that furthered his oeuvre.
What arrests you when you lock gaze into a Reinhardt is everything the eye easily misses. Depth, the barest of primary colours lost in the sea of unwavering, still darkness, surfaces once the eyes manage to engage in the oil grids, with black paint drained out of its 5 x 5 canvas to produce a sleek, suede-like appearance. To catch the geometry here requires patience, which, compared to our age of instant gratification, really turns Instagram on its head.
With asceticism and pure joy, there is a sense of self-restraint and the confessional. A type of discipline when you stare into his paintings enmeshes your gaze. Reinhardt's subtle this way. His paintings are of a meditative experience that reveals more once your eyes uncover the green or red lines breaking each solid square, tracing lineage back to his early non-Western techniques used to create these pure, present still images of blue-black. That's why they're also vulnerable, not in the poetic hack of suicide-prone Sylvia Plath way, but, really vulnerable. Since the paintings are without visible brushstrokes, a single imprint of your fingertip could easily mar the surface. Without sounding like an art zionist, you got to see it to believe it.
Mind you, this was all before the Internet age. Before blogs gave everyone the license to critique freely, critics thought Reinhardt was Art. And Art is Reinhardt, indeed; the man was a kicker. A left-field player who stubbornly poked and antagonized what's meant to be Art: "I don't want to 'open up' art so that 'anything goes' or 'anything can be art' or 'everyone is an artist' or 'artist is like everyone else'."
It's no wonder why we're so anxious. As one friend used to share why he regulates tightly over what he uploads onto his own grid-themed Instagram, "I'm still figuring out my aesthetics."
Sound the death knell, it seems like somebody's going to have a he(art) attack.
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| Caption this, IG-ers. |
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