M.C. Escher: An Enigma Behind an Illusion
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Re: M.C. Escher: An Enigma Behind an Illusion
#2The bit in the article about Escher being approached by Kubrick to work on "2001"- that would have been quite the Chang rig he had said yes. I always felt the abstract visualizations at the end of the film lacking something. While it's fairly obvious that Bowman is going through something formless and indescribable, trading it for the surreal visual vocabulary of Escher would have made an much more memorable statement.
Re: M.C. Escher: An Enigma Behind an Illusion
#3My favorite aspect of Escher's art is seen in Belvedere, Ascending and Descending, and Waterfall. I love how it ties in with arguments about the Coherence Theory of Truth:
Consider two propositions which do not belong to a
specified set. These propositions could both be
consistent with a specified set and yet be inconsistent
with each other. If coherence is consistency, the
coherence theorist would have to claim that both
propositions are true, but this is impossible.[1]
When looking at an entire system through a keyhole (the way we edit code bases), it's possible that what we see at every possible view may well be coherent, and yet the entire system may still not be consistent.
Re: M.C. Escher: An Enigma Behind an Illusion
#4[deleted]
Re: M.C. Escher: An Enigma Behind an Illusion
#5I've always felt that people didn't really regard Escher as an artist because his works are too straight forward. He manages to take his thoughts on infinity, beginning and end, dimensions and other philosophical and mathematical concepts and put them into drawings in a very clear way.
To me, this feels like incredible talent. But perhaps the artist world balks at such straight forwardness. Things need to be more abstract for them; more room for imagination about the work itself, rather than its subject.
Take his work "Hand with Reflecting Sphere". To most people it is a very well executed drawing, but not much more. But it is much more. The reflection in the sphere is infinite. It encompasses the entire room; the entire world even. A two-dimensional drawing of an entire room projected onto a tiny surface. Those properties recur in his "Circle Limit III" piece.
I'm not sure I would regard him as an artist. Perhaps he's more a philosopher that chose drawings to express his thoughts rather than writing. Regardless of which label we put on him, his works are fascinating to me in an almost Zen-like way.
Re: M.C. Escher: An Enigma Behind an Illusion
#6I've always felt that people didn't really regard Escher as an artist because his works are too straight forward. He manages to take his thoughts on infinity, beginning and end, dimensions and other philosophical and mathematical concepts and put them into drawings in a very clear way. To me, this feels like incredible talent. But perhaps the artist world balks at such straight forwardness. Things need to be more abs…
My ex-wife Bonita Hatcher is an abstract video artist; that is, she doesn't make TV shows, she makes videos that often don't make a whole lot of sense to anyone.
What you describe is "Didactic Art" that is, art whose message is plainly apparent. My take is that Didactic Art is in fact quite important, it serves society in many profoundly important ways.
That Napoleon was eventually defeated was the result - in part - of a painting that depicted a giant, rather inattentive, absent-minded giant eating a human corpse like a candy bar.
However, the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design is heavily into what Bonita calls "Art with a Capital 'A'". More or less, that's art that only other artists understand, as well as art historians. I learned a great deal about art history while she studied there, and attended a few lectures, spent time in its small but excellent library; again there are many important reasons why we have Art with a Capital "A".
Escher was reviled by the other artists of his day because they regarded his work as revoltingly ugly. Consider that at the time we had stuff like Bauhaus and Art Deco.
I at one time had the email escher@apple.com
Hilarity ensued because everyone thought I was Christopher Escher, Apple's chief public spokesman. In reality I was hired as a contract script monkey for MacTCP, but I worked my way up by debugging its broken test tool strm_echo.
Re: M.C. Escher: An Enigma Behind an Illusion
#7I've always felt that people didn't really regard Escher as an artist because his works are too straight forward. He manages to take his thoughts on infinity, beginning and end, dimensions and other philosophical and mathematical concepts and put them into drawings in a very clear way. To me, this feels like incredible talent. But perhaps the artist world balks at such straight forwardness. Things need to be more abs…
Abstract art has a high degree of pretentiousness and fakeness to it. What makes Escher's art attractive is that it is purely what it is. It's impressive on its own, and there is no need to elevate it into something that it is not.
Re: M.C. Escher: An Enigma Behind an Illusion
#8Quote from OA
“Although he created something absolutely new,” says Piller, “Escher has not directly influenced any artists.”
No school, no younger artists working with the Master, and no teaching in the modern way in an art school, hence no tradition. I'm not sure the artist was especially worried about that mind you.
Re: M.C. Escher: An Enigma Behind an Illusion
#9The bit in the article about Escher being approached by Kubrick to work on "2001"- that would have been quite the Chang rig he had said yes. I always felt the abstract visualizations at the end of the film lacking something. While it's fairly obvious that Bowman is going through something formless and indescribable, trading it for the surreal visual vocabulary of Escher would have made an much more memorable statemen…
Not so sure. Escher's worlds strike me as locally coherent and tidy if globally impossible (as a commenter remarks above). My interpretation of the end of 2001 suggests that everything was being chaotically dismantled.
Re: M.C. Escher: An Enigma Behind an Illusion
#10I've always felt that people didn't really regard Escher as an artist because his works are too straight forward. He manages to take his thoughts on infinity, beginning and end, dimensions and other philosophical and mathematical concepts and put them into drawings in a very clear way. To me, this feels like incredible talent. But perhaps the artist world balks at such straight forwardness. Things need to be more abs…
My ex-wife Bonita Hatcher is an abstract video artist; that is, she doesn't make TV shows, she makes videos that often don't make a whole lot of sense to anyone. What you describe is "Didactic Art" that is, art whose message is plainly apparent. My take is that Didactic Art is in fact quite important, it serves society in many profoundly important ways. That Napoleon was eventually defeated was the result - in part -…
That Napoleon was eventually defeated was the result -
in part - of a painting that depicted a giant, rather
inattentive, absent-minded giant eating a human corpse
like a candy bar.