{"id":10920,"date":"2018-08-21T20:38:17","date_gmt":"2018-08-22T00:38:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.xorph.com\/jadixon\/?p=10920"},"modified":"2020-03-08T14:39:20","modified_gmt":"2020-03-08T18:39:20","slug":"precursors-have-precursors","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.xorph.com\/jadixon\/archives\/10920","title":{"rendered":"Precursors have precursors"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cWe do not analyze works of art because we want to imitate them or because we distrust them.\u201d
\n\u2014 Paul Klee
\n <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The other day the world learned about an unpublished Ernest Hemingway short story. If there had not been a Mark Twain first, would literature know Hemingway\u2019s writings at all? Could there have been an Isaac Asimov, Stan Lee, or Gene Wolfe without a Verne or Burroughs? The J.K. Rowling body of work without an Austen or Tolkien? <\/a>Similarly, all of today\u2019s rock music can be linked to direct influences \u2014 to bands such as Ramones, Led Zeppelin or the Beatles, which, of course, had their own precursors. Would jazz exist in its current form without the innovations of Armstrong and all those who inspired him? Imagine a contemporary musician saying, \u201cI really haven\u2019t paid attention to any music that was recorded before I started to play.\u201d And yet, not infrequently, collage artists will boast that they have little use for art history (all the breakthroughs of bygone creators who dug the swimming pools in which they now frolic).<\/p>\n

It is argued that modern artists were the first to decide that visual art would be about art, rather than subject matter. Nonsense. Art has always been about art, because it always has been structured on prior foundations. The idea that any artist can burst on the scene as an original is absurd. Nobody who comes out of early childhood with any level of awareness has not built an inventory of perceptions \u2014 countless images from the culture around them. Each of these individual influences involved creative activity based on another bank of stimuli, and so forth, back to the first proto-human who picked up a piece of charcoal to make interesting marks on a stone (and was probably knocked on the head by another<\/a> <\/a>who judged the action as irrelevant to group survival).<\/p>\n

Perhaps I have belabored my point. Perhaps it is a point that anyone who reads this would not need emphasized in the first place. Isn\u2019t it obvious to us that no art form is more about all these churning influences from untold visual decision makers \u2014 painters, printers, illustrators, photographers, designers \u2014 than the medium of collage itself? So, let us all continue to study the collage artworks of the explorers who came before us, to trace the direct lineage of their concepts and techniques, to recognize that valuable inheritance in the work of our peers, as well as in the composition taking shape on the surface before us, and then, fully informed, to push confidently into the second century of collage.
\n <\/p>\n

\"Tranquil<\/a><\/p>\n

Tranquil Ode (to Merz)<\/em><\/strong>
\ncollage homage by J A Dixon
\n9.5 x 11.875 inches
\n 
\nPurchase this artwork.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cWe do not analyze works of art because we want to imitate them or because we distrust them.\u201d \u2014 Paul Klee   The other day the world learned about an unpublished Ernest Hemingway short story. If there had not been a Mark Twain first, would literature know Hemingway\u2019s writings at all? Could there have been […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[273,38,1,168,29,24,84,37,14,150,36,13,18,389,5,388,76,63,46,252,55,26],"tags":[550,90,308,313,547,542,540,538,543,418,541,548,386,545,546,549,539,544],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.xorph.com\/jadixon\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10920"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.xorph.com\/jadixon\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.xorph.com\/jadixon\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.xorph.com\/jadixon\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.xorph.com\/jadixon\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10920"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/www.xorph.com\/jadixon\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10920\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11886,"href":"https:\/\/www.xorph.com\/jadixon\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10920\/revisions\/11886"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.xorph.com\/jadixon\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10920"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.xorph.com\/jadixon\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10920"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.xorph.com\/jadixon\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10920"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}