Hans Richter's Abstract Rhythms

story © Michael Betancourt | published March 27, 2011 | permalink |  |  

Hans Richter (1888 – 1976) and Viking Eggeling’s collaboration was predicated on similar interests, and developed, at least initially, from Richter’s desire to work together. In the summer of 1919, he invited Eggeling to visit his family’s estate in Klein-Kölzig, Nieder Laustiz, Brandenburg in Germany. This marks the beginning of their formal collaboration, and art historian Martin Norden has noted the parallels and connections between the abstract language Eggeling and Richter produced, and similar attempt to create a formal language by other artists. After 1920, Richter worked to promote their Universelle Sprache using his relationships with other abstract artists: the De Stijl artists in the Netherlands, the Dada/Constructivists in Berlin and the Russian artist Kasimir Malevich’s Suprematism. Norden’s recognition of the formal relationship between Suprematism, the geometric painting of De Stijl artists Piet Mondrian and Theo van Doesberg, and the Universelle Sprache created by Eggeling and Richter is not simply a coincidence. Their collaboration developed because of Richter’s associations with these groups and mutual friends they shared in them.

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story © Michael Betancourt | published March 25, 2011 | permalink |  |  

The paradigm of digitality is—especially at a technological level—a reification of the modernist grid. Fundamentally a process of segmentation of ordering, its contents are essentially identical, divorced from the physical variability inherent to other material constructs by the unrelenting opperations of binary code. Once it has been rendered into a human-readable form, the meaning of these codes stands apart from the digital work—an example of the aura of information acting within our encounter. It is the transcendent dimensions of early abstraction that finds itself mirrored by encoding of physicality in data samples, paradoxically both literal in its insistence on the measurement of the discrete physical features of the world, and immaterial in how this meaning is held apart from the electro-magnetic switching of microtransistors within blocks of matter (the aura of the digital in action).

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story © Michael Betancourt | published March 22, 2011 | permalink |  |  

This billboard is planted next to a major intersection here in Savannah, Georgia. What I find disturbing about it is the close relationship it has to a nearby (1 block away) highway on ramp/overpass where you can see people holding up very similar signs to what we see in this ad.

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story © Michael Betancourt | published March 21, 2011 | permalink |  |  

Here's a question that's not getting asked about all the FED's QE programs: where are these funds going since they do not appear to be causing significantly large price inflation in the United States? This is not simply an issue of "follow the money."

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story © Michael Betancourt | published March 20, 2011 | permalink |  |  

An Excerpt from The History of Motion Graphics:

The abstract films produced by Viking Eggeling (1880 – 1925) and Hans Richter (1888 – 1976) between 1920 and 1926, unlike the work of Ruttmann, begin with—and steadily explore—a geometric formal language. Both Richter and Eggeling were working on similar problems and arriving at similar solutions when they met in 1918; however, Eggeling had made more progress in the development of a systematic abstraction. The initial version of this language was being developed independently by Eggeling in his paintings, and theoretically as the Generalbass der Malerei, (1918, “Bassline Painting); a more formal version would be published as a pamphlet in 1920 under the title Universelle Sprache (“Universal Language”). Their relationship was discussed by Laszlo Moholy-Nagy in his book Painting Photography Film written in 1924, and published in 1925:

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