![[0405] The Archer](/comics/2012-08-23-0405-the-archer.png "[0405] The Archer")
Inspired by art class in 7th grade where he had to interpret a Kandinsky painting. Of course only the “official” interpretation was accepted as the correct one.
I was unsure whether to convert the painting to grey as well, but decided against it so that one can have a better look at its features.
- Caption: Sandra and Larisa at the Museum of Modern Art.
- Larisa: I’m a big fan of Vasily Kandinsky. In the “Picture with an Archer,” he conceives a nostalgic view of rural life in his Russian homeland, clearly visible in the traditional clothing of the peasants and the typical onion domes.
- Visitor: Interesting.
- Larisa: Kandinsky created the “Archer” in his red period, during which he was tormented by apocalyptic visions. The horseman of the Apocalypse brings death and destruction to Europe, as if Kandinsky anticipated the horrors of the First World War.
- Visitor: A true visionary!
- Larisa: Kandinsky’s “Archer”, created during his blue period, symbolizes the concept of progress. On his mission to tear down traditional structures in rural Russia, the horseman won’t let anyone stop him. Just like Kandinsky broke new ground with his art.
- Visitor: A powerful image.
- Larisa: This is one of my favorite paintings. It tells us a lot about the nature of art… and people.
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It figures that Larisa would give four different explanations on a subject and that the BS free one would be to her best friend.
All i see is a evil king, and a brave hero thats on this way to make justice.
The evil king is trying to use the force to strangulate the hero, and is flying using his Fish Jetpack.
You can note the stair case that leads to the boss chamber.
That painting is the only thing that survived the dreaded color purge of August 2, 2012.
Interpret a Kandinsky. Okay. Random shapes plus random colors = ? + posthumous fame. Class dismissed!
I need Larisa as my phycology teacher.
so complicated made my head explode! but it grew back so no worries! 😉
Well, that is the nature of modern art. By which I mean, it’s all in the interpretation. You can fling paint at a canvas, name the result “Arrangement IV (INCIDENTAL)”, and call it art, but you do have to come up with an explanation of what the art means, and it can’t just be “paint flung at a canvas, looks sort of arty”. You also have to be able to keep a straight face when you do this.
The ultimate expression of this, IMHO, comes with Michael Craig-Martin’s conceptual work An Oak Tree. As the article explains, the artwork consists of a glass of water on a glass shelf, and a printed text in which the artist explains that the glass of water is really a fully-grown oak tree, transformed in nature (although not in appearance) by the declaration of the artist that this is so. (However, this provocative dissection of the concept was trumped in a number of aspects when Tracey Emin declared her unmade bed to be be a fully-fledged artwork, entitled My Bed, and got it shortlisted for a Turner Prize.)
However, a much simpler explanation of the concept, and the process that drives it, can be found in the short story The Emperor’s New Clothes.
Lol Liar Larisa is at it again! XD
@ Petah-Petah:
And what do you mean by the “color purge of August 2, 2012”?
hahaha I’m taking arts, so I once had a class where I had do these things. It’s mainly saying the right words in the right place, making it sound complicated and you get a ten.
Hah. I did this once in college. An art club was having an exhibition in an old high school. I stood next to a cabinet of science tools and talked about the contrast of the natural wood encompassing symbols of man’s modernity. It was quite fun.
A spoon full of truth helps the fake made-up gibberish go down
And this is why I don’t understand art.
One would expect that the “official” explanation was achieved by scholarship, you know, like reading the artists comments on his own work, comparing it with his other work, reading comments by other artists and critics, etc. That is usually about as close as you can get to that scene from the Woody Allen movie “You know nothing of my work.”
@ Greenwood Goat:
Sadly that is the exact truth. ‘Modern’ art stopped being about creating an image that people could identify (and hopefully identify with) a long time ago. Probably the reason why I just don’t get ‘Modern’ art, not to say that I do all that well with the classical paintings, but at least with them you don’t need an ‘interpreter’ to help you see the image.
I LOVE this one, whenever I go to exhibitions, sycophants abound… this is very familiar.
This is also true for English teachers (contains an F-bomb, unrelated, “f-bomb” is now considered a real word) and in my personal experiences, poetry.
This is what drove me nuts as a Art History major, my professors only excepting one interpretation of a painting based on the ‘excepted’ methods of study regardless of all the different ways a painting could be interpreted by different people.
Powree and Oliver…
I think you did the right thing by -not- converting the painting to gray!
Looks better, draws attention more to the painting and makes Larisa’s explanations more understandable. Good job!
Oh, I love those projects. Not to mention the ones where it seems like the teacher only considers it art if it does the same damned thing as half the paintings in the local gallery…
Only the official interpretation counted? Holy crap. In my school you could say whatever the heck you wanted and so long as it was eloquent it was “correct”. It makes your comic a double-joke for me, as all of Larissa’s comments would have gotten her an A in my school…
@ Neospector:
Now that comes under another concept, usually referred to as The Death of the Author. Many authors are actually content or in favour of this (read the quotes page), but this has also led to cases of people arguing with authors face-to-face, insisting that some absolutely prosaic and mundanely-inspired detail in their works actually holds some deep emotional, symbolic or mystical significance which the author just won’t acknowledge for some reason. E.g. in the case of the blue curtains, no matter how many times the author explained that the room, and its curtains, were based on a hotel room in which he stayed during a particularly nice holiday, the teacher would carry on arguing that the blue curtains must be tied to depression somehow.
Proof that even complete claptrap can make sense if it seems to be in context.
@illeatyourself That, I think, is the date Sandra and Woo went back to black and white. 🙁
I like Kandinsky simply because he was synesthetic. You can bet that those colors and shapes meant something unique to him; even other synesthetes wouldn’t experience them the same.
thumbs up if you have done this or if you wont to do this
go Larisa!
Kandinsky was the inspiration behind the excellent game Rez (so much the game was just known as “Kandinsky Project” at one point), so I really can’t knock it.
“And this is Kadinsky when he was painting a picture for Sigmund Freud.”
“And this is Kadinsky during his ‘LensCrafters’ period, when he really was painting what he saw…before his glasses were done in about an hour.”
Checked out the painting and I could swear there are “Blue Meanies” in it. 🙂
Lol, Larisa’s so clever.
I’m actually really interested in this Kandisky guy that I dream of one day travelling through plane to Russia to visit him and ask him what the fries are like in Russia.
“The only two occupations that have more liars, frauds and charlatans in them than modern art are Politics and Religion.” – Anonymous art critic
While this comic hasn’t been in color recently, I really like the usage of color in the painting while leaving everyone else in black and white form.
The gag was perfect but I really do enjoy seeing how an artist’s experiments with their work.
Larisa looks great in this Tshirt
All I have to say on that painting: There’s an archer in that collection of colors? {Turns head sideways} Wait, I think I see it.
@ illeatyourself:
he means thats the only thing in color in the comic. on august 2 it went back to black and white…
With photography becoming relatively cheap and easy at the time, artists had to figure out what their new role in society was going to be now that they couldn’t make a living on portraits and realism-ism paintings. They fooled the pretentious and gullible for a time, but became a joke in the long run.
The 3-D stuff is fast putting artists into a similar crisis all over gain.
@ James:Lower right, yellow horse galloping leftward, archer on its back aiming rightward.
I looked at the picture on the MOMA site, and everything Larissa described (horseman/archer, peasants, onion domes) is there.
The interpretations (nostalgia/apocalypse/progress) are totally subjective though.
“As the boy walks out of his house, he brushes past the blue curtains, which flow freely until the door is closed by the boy”.
How your English teacher interprets it: The blue curtains symbolize a state of the depression the protagonist must overcome to succeed in his goals.
What the author meant: The curtains were fucking blue!
The painting is crap.
That is all the interpretation it needs.
People see what they want to see.
Modern abstract art capitalizes on this. Instead of objective realism with a little room for interpretation, there is only subjective abstractionism with only interpretation, with one interpretation being as good as another.
“Official” interpretations of art are ridiculous. There’s no way anyone can know for sure what the artist meant if they even meant anything consciously. By only accepting their one and only interpretation they discourage other people from appreciating the art for themselves, and discourage people from becoming artists.
Even if the artist told the art professor what their piece was supposed to mean, I’d wager a 50/50 chance they were making stuff up to screw around with this so-called institution. It’s what I’d do. 😀
Hell, I’ve had my own writing and music interpreted once or twice. I won’t deny that these interpretations have some cool ideas, but they’re always influenced by the interpreter’s own experience of the world — it’s ridiculous for someone else to say what the artist meant.
I mostly have very little time for this hard-to-interpret art. Interpretations, shminterpretations.
And yet – I do remember one time where a bit of information about what something was supposed to represent, really transformed my experience. My parents had dragged me in to an art gallery. I said something scornful about this huge wooden pink comb thing. And my dad said, it’s about the hookers in Kings Cross.
And then I saw it – long skinny legs, skin on display, in parade, rough and uncomfortable – wow! I went back and looked at it again and again, each time seeing something more that I could relate to the possible experiences of people in such a situation.
So I’m no longer prepared to dismiss everything immediately. But I’m still no fan of art galleries. If the experience is all in your imagination, it can still be a very real and powerful experience – but I prefer to exercise my imagination differently.
@ Greenwood Goat:
pollock was a physical worker, and i’d expect him not to be one of the overexplainers. an oak tree i believe is about faith in the artist, or indeed “bullshit”. if craig-martin exclusively said it was a tree outside of the art, instead of stipulating a placard be included, it wouldn’t be as impactful. the text serves to expand the landscape by predicting reactions to the piece, by “bullshitting”. this is the process of faith. the destruction of signifiers. the treachery of images taken into the physical. interesting excerpt here: “Q. Isn’t this just a case of the emperor’s new clothes? A. No. With the emperor’s new clothes people claimed to see something that wasn’t there because they felt they should. I would be very surprised if anyone told me they saw an oak tree.” tracy emin i haven’t read up on much, but if i were to just throw something out there, she seems to make “open/honest/personal” art, and the place you rest and go to sleep at the end of most every day would be very personal.
here’s the full text included in an oak tree: https://web.archive.org/web/20020806040321/http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~ig206/oak_tree.html
@ Greenwood Goat:
there was a comic of that “blue curtains” meme floating around with edgar allan poe as the author, and i think it’s interesting that someone would think poe would put something in his stories for no reason. people who don’t make art for a living assume that art is a process of happy accidents, that things in the frame are only there because it “looks cool”, that the position of the camera is random, and that details in a book are tied to nothing. the blue curtains meme rewards not thinking about things. if you google image search “blue curtains english teacher”, you’ll see that the results that rally against it are from tumblr and blog posts, while the regurgitations and remakes are dank memes from reddit. think about what this says about the audience for the meme.
…who am i kidding, you’ll never see this. no one will. i’m arguing with 12 year spirits in the comment section for a webcomic about some lady and her cartoon skunk. if anyone is reading this, buy an album from here: https://erstwhilerecords.bandcamp.com/
@ Neospector:
if there is a detail in a poem, it is not a waste of time to analyse it through any means. poetry is economy (of words). a detail in a novel can slip by unnoticed where in a poem it will be captured and studied.