The changing nature--and place--of art in America is the subject of this article by Kurt which appeared in the April, 1967 edition of Art International magazine. "...it comes as no surprise," writes Kurt, "that our attention and energies are shifting from painting (associated with our visual, literate, mechanical world) to sculpture, music and architecture (associated with the tactile and auditory modes of total, instantaneous perception characteristic of our electric/electronic age)." He sees this McLuhanesque shift in the work of sculptor Carl Andre, with whom he begins his essay, but then moves on to matters of art theory and the work of Iain Baxter.
Bernice Wenzel & Kurt Von Meier Lecturing at UCLA 5/9/1966
This 1966 lecture is entitled: The Human Agenda: "Prospects for Control of the Brain". It's been made available from the archives of the UCLA Communications Studies Department, digitized by the university in 2013. This is an audio recording, not a video. Kurt's comments begin around 36 minutes into the program. He speculates that if the human brain can be "programmed" by computer with the aesthetics of a given artist, would the art that is created be less human? Note that both Kurt's and Professor Wenzel's last names are misspelled in the title.
Dear President Gerth
During 1994, two students sent letters to the Chair of the Art Department, Dr. W, expressing concerns with Kurt's classes and style of teaching; the letters were added to Kurt's personnel file. When he learned of this, Kurt complained that the Chair and Dean's actions were inappropriate, and he appealed the matter to the University President, Donald Gerth. Kurt's letter (excerpted) is characteristically erudite and forceful, speaking not only to his teaching methods and the intent behind them, but also the unfortunate tendency of the then Art Department Chair to attempt to force Kurt to use teaching methods which in his opinion "seeks to impose its elitist, sexist, racist views by claiming for its authoritarian methods the only academic validity: indoctrination with names and dates of the canonical works of art as memorized by rote."
Aesthetics and Criticism - Working Notes - Art 102
These "working notes" from 1994 include Kurt's thoughts about the disciplines of aesthetics and criticism, and what students need to master in order to prevent such disciplines from becoming merely subjective exercise. He writes, "It is misleading to think of senses as clear-cut subdivisions of our psyche, however practical & useful for analytical purposes. This warns us about taking our modes of analysis to be characteristics of that which we are supposed to be examining." He goes on to include a lengthy list of published resources attendant to the topic. A earlier variation of these notes is also available, for the same class in 1993.
Kurt plays the Shenhai
Kurt majored in Middle Eastern Studies while pursuing a major in International Relations prior to changing his major to Art History. He studied Persian, and Islamic culture and later traveled to Afghanistan. Somewhere along the way, he acquired a shenhai, a Pakistani wooden, double-reed wind instrument similar to an oboe. This recording takes place outdoors, with students in attendance. Of course, to properly invoke the magic, Kurt must arrange his blanket first. The year is likely in the early 1970s. At the end, ask yourself: is that Kurt von Meier or John Coltrane?
Unity and Alienation in Art & Letters
In this short essay, a book report if you will, Kurt writes about casting the I Ching and two books on his work table at that time, Kenneth Rexroth's More Classics Revisited and Wendy Steiner's The Scandal of Pleasure: Art in an Age of Fundamentalism. He gathers his comments together under the umbrella of "unity and alienation," a recurrent theme in his writing and teaching, and a set of feelings that spurred his personal interest in esoteric practice.
The Medieval Approach to Narrative Structure: A 1966 Lecture at UCLA
Kurt's lectures at UCLA during 1966 were carefully transcribed as class notes, and luckily have been preserved within his archived material. This particular lecture from October 14, 1966 was lecture 5 in his undergraduate Art 1C class in Art History. And the history of Art History itself is the topic of this lecture.
Gender Bias in the Discipline of Art History
As was so often the case, Kurt stepped forward to urge the University to assume a leading role in social and cultural transformation, in this case gender bias. He wrote a critique and set of recommendations about Sac State's art history program while Art Department Chair, a portion of which is excerpted here, and sent it to the President of the university. "Gender bias in the discipline of Art History is real, exists and persists on several different levels," he wrote, "and requires the thoughtful attention of peers, academic administrators and students as well as future textbook authors." In the light of issues surrounding gender bias today (2018) Kurt's observations were, as usual, progressive and timely.
Jules Olitski and Roy Lichtenstein
In his article for the October, 1967 edition of Art International, Kurt begins with lyrics by singer Chuck Berry and then proceeds to critique the "spray painting" work of Jules Olitski, and the catalog text accompanying an exhibition of Olitski's work. "Since an ambitious case has been made for Olitski in the history of color handling and spray techniques, it is worth pointing out that he wasn't that early, nor has he proven to be that influential. It may also be that he just isn't that good." Kurt then goes on to discuss an exhibition of works by Roy Lichtenstein; "One of the strongest formal motivations for the so-called comic-book style, is its great sense of immediacy and total impact."
A Sample of Kurt's Class Preparation
As these notes from 1986 amply demonstrate, even after 20-plus years of teaching Kurt continued to make careful preparation for his classes. Though he often made notes in his ever-present blue-lined paper notebooks, in the 1980s he also kept notes by computer.
This particular batch found in his archives--in preparation for his Creative Art and Mythology class 113-D--were printed on perforated, punched paper designed for use in a "daisy-wheel" printer. There's a good deal of solid art history contained within these pages.
On Breaking into Art Criticism
In 1965, the young, brash and mostly unpublished UCLA Assistant Professor of Art, Kurt von Meier, was anxious to get into print. He walked into the offices of Artforum magazine in Los Angeles, and walked out with an assignment to review "Art Treasures from Japan". "For me," Kurt recalls, "that was something of a big Chutzpah ploy--although it would have passed for next to naught in the cannibalistic New York context." In this frank, personal, irreverent, and until now unpublished recollection, circa 1967-68, Kurt provides a sense of the feelings, difficulties and challenges he faced breaking into the world of art criticism.
The True Story of Tantradine International
Here's another installment of Kurt's fictional (though also biographical) tale about Norman Akaya and his uncle, Jose Que (who just happens to share a piece of Kurt's history). Written in 1982 (a particularly prolific year of writing) the tale allows Kurt to segue into a range of topics and geographical locations. Fantasy and fact-filled; Norman Akaya later appeared in Omasters.
Letter to CSU Chancellor W. Ann Reynolds
The only predictable thing about Kurt von Meier was his unpredictability. One can only imagine the thoughts of CSU Chancellor W. Ann Reynolds upon reading Kurt's report on his presentation at an Art Faculty Institute meeting at Kirkwood near Lake Tahoe in 1988; he proposed giving the esoteric wisdom traditions a home within the California university system and described the Mongolian Chua Ka massage technique.
Some Noise about Hidden Noise
The mystery of Duchamp's With Hidden Noise rattled around inside Kurt's head for decades, as this biographical account reveals. That this was so also reveals something about Kurt von Meier--that finding the source of the "hidden noise" within himself became something of an obsession. It's displacement into an object of sculpture cannot disguise the intent of his meticulous record-keeping and documentation of his own life, a strand of yarn stretching back over many decades.
The Form Body of Norman Akaya
For Kurt, life was a self-referential paradox; he never stopped examining its mystery or searching for the key to its understanding. This story written in 1982 is the first in a series featuring the character Norman Akaya, a play on Nirmanakaya, what Buddhists call the Form Body of the Buddha (one of the three Kayas, along with Dharmakaya and Sambhogakāya), what we conventionally call the appearance of reality. More to follow.
Painting to Sculpture: One Tradition in a Radical Approach to the History of 20th Century Art
"Perhaps we need a radical approach to history now, at this time, to make some sense where other worn-out and irrelevant historical approaches manifestly fail." So Kurt von Meier begins his exploration of the "inter-realm" between painting and sculpture. "The more we begin to challenge our own simple-minded propensity to file away works of art into one or another air-tight category, in practice the more we tend to discover about values and meanings the work might contain." This essay, which appeared in the March, 1968 edition of Art International magazine, was a feature article, as opposed to his regular Letter from Los Angeles.
Why Offer a Graduate Program in Art History?
In response to a request from the Art Department Chair, Kurt made his case in support for creating a graduate program in art history at Sacramento State University. In doing so, Kurt calls upon various studies and writings; "Contemporary educational overspecialization has led to a decline in the liberal arts requirements and programs in which Western humanistic values and ideals have traditionally resided. ...This has led to an educational value relativism and subjectivism in which one value is no better than any other--the pursuit of truth and wisdom is educationally of no more value than, for example, taking a real estate degree."
Rock & Roll: An Art History - 1954-66
Here's what the story of Rock & Roll looks like to art historian Kurt von Meier: "The rise of r&r can be seen as reflecting and documenting the growth of an entirely new dimension of artistic expression, wherein the concept of "Art" has once again become integrated into the "Life" of people in the real world." And: "Histories are invented--they can be accurate and, at the same time, as much works of art, as just weak and wishful thinking posing as factual record. The relating of events to arbitrary structures is a forceful reminder of the limitations encountered by mechanistic approaches to the humanities." Using his academic disciplines, Kurt explored the roots of R&R in preparation of writing a book; this material was published in the October, 1969 edition of Art International magazine. Images and links have been added.
BYNOS
"The name of this file is written: BYNOS, and when called may sound like 'by the numbers,' since that is what it means." So begins this short, and somewhat cryptic essay by Kurt, written in 1986. Kurt, in his endless quest to discern the message and meaning beneath that commonly perceived, believed that forms of truth can be disclosed "by the numbers," often esoteric truths. BYNOS is jam-packed with fascinating references, despite its brevity, as well as a bit of von Meier macaronic poetry.
Audio Lecture: Kurt Schwitters
Schwitters used the word MERZ to describe the style of his work, derived from the second syllable in the German word for commerce.
Iconoclastic but not malicious or mean-spirited; this is how Kurt describes the ground-breaking Dada-period artist Kurt Schwitters. This lecture delivered at UCLA in 1965 is straight-up art history; for those of you who are interested in the history of Dada and its relationship to art and life in the world of the 1920s, this recording provides a stream of Kurt's observations, understandings and insights. He does this as he describes a series of projected slides, their content, style and context. Picasso, Braque, Moholy Nagy and the cubists also are discussed.
The recording runs about 45 minutes and takes a few moments to load.
Here are some links associated with the work of Schwitters:
Wikipedia (Schwitters)
Wikipedia (Art Style - Dada/Merz)
Google images