{"id":371,"date":"2016-10-03T09:25:37","date_gmt":"2016-10-03T16:25:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/miriamposner.com\/classes\/dh101f16\/?p=371"},"modified":"2016-10-03T09:27:48","modified_gmt":"2016-10-03T16:27:48","slug":"cubism-and-abstract-art","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/miriamposner.com\/classes\/dh101f16\/2016\/10\/03\/cubism-and-abstract-art\/","title":{"rendered":"cubism and abstract art"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.moma.org\/interactives\/exhibitions\/2012\/inventingabstraction\/?artist=13\">Inventing Abstraction<\/a>\u00a0is a project that attempts to document some of the origins of modernist abstraction between 1910 and 1925.<\/p>\n<p>The dataset that they&#8217;re using for this project\u00a0imagines 1912 as a radical break from tradition, and forms data around this thesis, naming Kandinsky, Kupka, Picabia, and Delaunay as the people who &#8220;presented the first abstract pictures to the public&#8221;, which then circulate through figures such as Duchamp, Mondrian, and Malevich. To do so, it uses images of the artists&#8217; works, information about birth and death, birthplace, regions where the artist was active, information about which artists\/writers that they encountered, and a couple of ideas that they may have been associated with, or taken inspiration from. (largely, white men)<\/p>\n<p>In terms of how the information is presented, the visual design of the site owes a lot to Alfred Barr&#8217;s curatorial\/design work from a 1936 exhibition of cubism and abstract art. <img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/67.media.tumblr.com\/acdc95e15a9878a9de33362e8dd48445\/tumblr_mgu56brrH81s3xom1o1_1280.gif\" \/><\/p>\n<p>The designers of the Inventing Abstraction page clearly use the same color palette, typeface and general strategy of linking together nodes, but they make the key change of eschewing the teleological tendencies in Barr&#8217;s chart.<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/www.russianartandculture.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/02\/MoMA_inventing_abstraction_diagram-1024x644.jpg\" \/><\/p>\n<p>Rather than flowing from past to present, from &#8220;less sophisticated&#8221; to more, it presents a rhizomatic network of relations. In doing so, it doesn&#8217;t make a key mistake of Barr&#8217;s chart, which creates hierarchies and flattens the contributions of people of color into single nodes that are only relevant\u00a0as originary sources for modern (western) art. (note\u00a0the total non-specificity of &#8220;Japanese Prints&#8221;, &#8220;Negro Sculpture&#8221;, or &#8220;Near-Eastern Art&#8221;- as if they weren&#8217;t hugely diverse bodies with competing schools of thought.) \u00a0By contrast, Inventing Abstraction does away with the use of arrows, and settles on lines as a less loaded signifier of connections. It also uses specific names instead of attempting to produce a single moment\u00a0out of an entire\u00a0ethnically-associated tradition,\u00a0and has the decency to be specific about its date range.<\/p>\n<p>As far as the interaction itself, it&#8217;s a well-designed thing. clicking on a node produces a name, works, birthplace, location, and interests,\u00a0and maps a direct network of related individuals. The information tends to be somewhat narrow, but probably encompasses most of what a layperson would want to have immediately available.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Inventing Abstraction\u00a0is a project that attempts to document some of the origins of modernist abstraction between 1910 and 1925. The dataset that they&#8217;re using for this project\u00a0imagines 1912 as a &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/miriamposner.com\/classes\/dh101f16\/2016\/10\/03\/cubism-and-abstract-art\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;cubism and abstract art&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":75,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_eb_attr":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-371","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/miriamposner.com\/classes\/dh101f16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/371","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/miriamposner.com\/classes\/dh101f16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/miriamposner.com\/classes\/dh101f16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/miriamposner.com\/classes\/dh101f16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/75"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/miriamposner.com\/classes\/dh101f16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=371"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/miriamposner.com\/classes\/dh101f16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/371\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/miriamposner.com\/classes\/dh101f16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=371"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/miriamposner.com\/classes\/dh101f16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=371"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/miriamposner.com\/classes\/dh101f16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=371"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}