Friday, July 21, 2006

New painting term

In the CP, Capps reviews E3: Painters at Transformer and describes one of the artists' works as:

"...And Passacantando’s untitled clusterfuck of color doesn’t seem to have gained much from all the criticism—it’s static through and through, despite its technical merits."
And let me be the first one to congratulate the Texan in coining a new way to describe a painting, as Googling "clusterfuck of color" reveals that no one else on the planet has apparently ever used that art term before; and I like it!

Art history legend has it than when Greenberg came to DC in the late 50s (or was it early 60s?) to give a lecture, he stated that "painting should be thin." After that statement settled in, apparently some DC area artists actually broke out their caliphers and started measuring the thickness of their paint above the canvas. Eventually, according to Wolfe, the Washington Color School was partially borne out of that statement.

I'm keeping my fingers crossed that even as I write this, someone is considering clusterfuckism in art.

Update: An alert DC Art News reader detects that although clusterfuck of color is unique, when it is Googled at "cluster fuck of color," these entries are logged by Google's ever busy robot spiders.

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