Thursday, June 18, 2009
Anni Albers
A friend sent me this quote from Anni Albers:"The inarticulateness of the artistic person is interpreted easily as a lack of intelligence while it is rather an intelligence expressing itself in other means than words. Our intellectual training affects our analytic--art work our synthetic ability. We are used to thinking of art work as developing taste or a sense for beauty if not as training artists. We think more of its aesthetic qualities than its constructive ones. But the constructive forces are the ones we will need today and tomorrow. We will have to construct, not analyze or decorate." Anni Albers was a weaver from the Bauhaus who with her husband Joseph fled Nazi Germany and taught at Black Mountain College.
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That inarticulateness more likely comes from words not being able to express what an artist is thinking or envisioning.
ReplyDeleteMario
Compare Alber's comment to what we now know about gesture... that gesture often leads in the formation of new ideas... exploring concepts which can not yet be put in words, and you begin to see the relationship between hand and mind... that it is stronger and more deeply rooted than mind and speech. As we grow and develop as human beings, the hands become active in exploring physical reality long before speech is developed. Why would we be so foolish as to expect an artist to be able to explain himself?
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