I found this video interesting and eye-opening, mainly because I’m a bit numb nowadays about these theories, or I’m not thinking as much as I’d like. Also, I love systematization and cataloging, so I simply glued to the screen, waiting for it to unfold and explain.
Here’s the video by Ryan Nein, “Systematizing Art Styles”. Here are some interesting shots and thoughts for later.
It builds on Scott McCloud’s “triangle” but expands it by touching on its flaws or limitations to frame some art pieces. Below is a re-mapping of Scott’s triangle examples into Ryan’s diamond.
I like how Ryan’s perspicacity transforms the triangle into a diamond by splitting Symbolism and Abstraction by analyzing some works of art and clarifying Objectivity and Subjectivity in this context.
However, I found the analysis slightly biased and that it needs more research beyond the works of El Lissitzky. When Ryan transforms the diamond into a square, I find that the framing of “Ideal” and “Negation” conflicts and that this system may be unfinished. I believe it’s a good perspective, but it needs further research beyond the one rendered in the video and requires more evidence mapping.
The following three slides represent the conflicting perspectives I’ve just spotted. The first one summarizes that symbolistic art may be a way to define idealism. Is it? Couldn’t all examples be a way to define idealism? Let’s break this one down.
The second one shows how negation could be idealistic. Yes, it could, but maybe it’s not only negation that can achieve that. In my opinion, we need to reset the nomenclature to better frame and map more works of art.
The third one shows Rothko framed as a Negation, and I’m still unsure how to think about that — I need to return to this. There seems to be an island of work around that Negation space that I disagree with. There are too many blurred lines between Ideal, Negation, Symbolic, and Abstract that I think I could connect, for example, with Rothko’s pieces.
