Excerpt from Other Criteria: The Flatbed Picture Plane (Leo Steinberg)

Excerpt from Other Criteria:

The Flatbed Picture Plane (Leo Steinberg)

My peers and I spent some time reading and discussing this text as relevant material for our course. It has proven to be very influential for me. Here are points that stood out, inspired me, and nuanced my perspective on a couple of issues.

• What is the difference between a sculpture and painting? Especially if both are 3-dimensional. In light of discussion that arose around this text I feel my understanding of this question/relationship is: that even a 3-dim. painting still might operate with a front and a back. It might stand in the middle of a room and invite you to walk around it, but if it still offers an angle that gives you more information than another, in a fairly obvious way, that it is still working as, and with principles of a painting/image. A sculpture has just as much information to be accessed from every angle and doesn't have a front and a back as such.
  
  (This was very useful for me because I've been struggling a bit between wanting to work with images and wanting my work to be something you can walk around, kneel down too, look up at etc. This was distinction helped not because I need to know the difference between sculpture and painting, but because understanding the subtle difference tells me more about work that treats images, drawing, painting 3-dimensionally). Um, sorry if that doesn't make sense hehe. 

• Jean Dubuffet. This was an artist I was very happy to come across that I didn't know of before. I find myself in between high and low culture quite a lot, and I like how he took influences from pulsating urban visual language and art to make huge drawing installations that one could walk around in. It must have created quite a physical and narrative situation for the viewer.