art statement
Legrady bio
Legrady cv
Legrady's work
on the CCCA
Art Database
Kingston Proze
AGO Book
launch
National Gallery
of Canada
collection
31works
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CATASTROPHY THEORY
Once upon a time, in a place far, far away, there lived a man Robert Storr who was a curator at the Museum of Modern Art. He said that in the 1960s the art world moved from the Cedar Tavern to the seminar room. Is there a problem? Yes, because art is non-verbal while seminars feast on discussion. Academics put s Descartes before the horse, intellectual statements before the non-verbal.
Catastropy Theory (1984) was my first project combining visual language and text. A large group was acquired by the National Gallery of Canada. Some forty years later, the concept led to a series of paintings, A Conceptual Ecology of Art, which embedded reflection of ideas discussed with Canadian conceptual artist Ian Baxter&.
We know that art is a value judgment. We know the etymology of art leads us to expressions like “the art of” medicine, “the art of” critical judgment, the art of painting, and such, that insist art is the mastery of a skill, coupled with intuition and a personal vision.
Sol LeWitt, an amazing visual artist. His legendary “Sentences on Conceptual Art” and “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art” were published in Artforum, where he said the idea os dominant, the execution ofthe work is perfunctory, while the appearance of the work was unimportant. He was wrong, of course he was wrong. The person who proved Sol Lewitt was wrong beyond the shadow of a doubt was, of course, Sol Lewitt himself, when he was deeply disappointed in perfunctory executions of his own work. He eventually realized that everyone has ideas, but few have ability, which tells us it is the execution which turns an idea into a work of art.
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