Event categories

• Arts

Date
12/03/2024

7:00 PM

Location / Link:

The Southern Belle

Join us in this free online and in-person workshop where we will question how do diagrams relate to modern art? Are Modernist paintings and collages actually diagrams? How do we tell the difference between what is and isn’t a diagram? What makes something a diagram?

Using practical exercises and examples from Cubism to Surrealism, from Picabia to Kandinsky, from colour wheels to isotypes, we will explore these questions and ways that these questions might enable us to experiment with the diagram.

The session will draw upon the below quotes:

The theorum of Pythagoras is proved by a diagram. Leonardo’s drawings of light striking a sphere are diagrams, but the works of Mondrian, although made up of straight lines, are not diagrams because they are not done in order to prove or measure some experience, but to please the eye. They are cryptoblots or blots masquerading as diagrams.

Kenneth Clark, ‘The Blot and the Diagram’

The metaphorical model of Cubism is the diagram: the diagram is a visible, symbolic representation of invisible processes, forces, and structures. A diagram need not eschew certain aspects of appearances: but these too will be treated symbolically as signs, not as imitations or re-creations.

John Berger, ‘The Moment of Cubism’ p.85

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