Theory of art and aesthetic principles

Art

Visual Text

The purpose of this paper is to introduce and analyze the visual text "Arts: Anselm Kiefer Retrospective at SF MOMA" by Peter Selz. Specifically, it will contain a discussion of the text. This text is interesting because it illustrates the many different parts of art, along with a writer's impression of the work.

Kiefer's work is highly visual and textual at the same time. It is dark, often sinister, and unsettling, and it is sometimes difficult to look at. Keifer's elements include realistic pictures of people and landscapes, but there is always something frightening or different about them. The writer includes an image of Kiefer's work, but also includes several descriptions of works that help the reader "see" them, which shows that visual texts can bring works to life, almost as if you viewed them on their own. A different genre might have made the works even more alive, such as a video of the works, but the text is still valid in its own right.

There is a code in the text that helps anchor the entire text, and that is the image of "Falling Stars." To read about this image, it would seem to be a religious image, but there is nothing religious about the image at all. Instead, it is bleak and forlorn, the landscape is dead and so, it appears, is the person. If anything, this signifies that he will go to Heaven, and leave the Hell that seems to Earth in the image. That is specific to this image, but the thoughts and ideas of this image make up much of Keifer's work, and the text makes that quite clear. The conventions of the genre of painting are obvious in the text, from the way the author describes the "thick, heavy" materials the artist works with, to the way the artist puts the paint on thickly to create texture. It is clear the artist wants to communicate his feelings to his audience, and the text makes this clear in using codes and thoughts to convey these feelings.

There are cultural assumptions assumed by this text, especially that everyone is familiar with the history of World War II and the Holocaust. It seems many of the images of the artist are related in ways to this, and it assumes that everyone will understand the meaning and the history, without having to ask questions. The artist, in that, seems to depart from dominant culture values, not because his work is dark and disturbing, but because somehow, the works seem to convey the dark side of life that many people want to ignore. He takes a dim view of humankind it seems, and that is not so common in cultural values, because most people want to hope for the best, and Kiefer seems to only see the worst in life. There is another cultural assumption in the text when it discusses the mediums the artist uses, as well. The author mentions the artist paints with semen, and then moves on without comment as if this is a very normal thing. This is really not common, and helps make the reader stop, read the sentence again, and think about it. It changes the flow of the article and makes the reader uncomfortable or at least confused, for a second or two, and it shows how cultural assumptions (namely, that people don't paint with semen) can change the mission and value of text.