Street Corner Shops and Kandinsky’s Aesthetics
An analysis of the movement of the Triangle of Life
INTRODUCTION
“Every work of art is the child of its age… Each period of culture produces an art of its own that can never be repeated. Efforts to revive the art principles of the past will at best produce an art that is still-born” -Kandinsky “Concerning the spiritual in art”
Kandinsky’s belief that abstract art came from the inside, as opposed to previous art forms that were purely external, sustained his defense that these new forms were the seed for the future itself. Above when Kandinsky refers to art principles my understanding is that he is referring to the feelings and living of the artist. As so, Kandinsky continues explaining that following past principles would result only in a similarity in form and a soulless work.
The game was no longer about shapeless emotions such as fear, joy, or grief, for example. In turn, the artist was to awaken subtler emotions in the viewer. As the artist needed to live a subtle life, this was to be accomplished by solely being able to create art for the purpose of art.
The engine that powers creation is a movement going forward and upwards. Gaining experience in life is the movement forward. As has been pointed out here on Medium, in photography, quantity over quality matters. Important knowledge, and ultimately breakthroughs, are the leaps upward, and this normally comes in peaks. Producing in quantity and having a daily discipline make up for a greater base for the experience, feeding creativity in a mechanism similar to a volcanic eruption.
For the past week, I’ve been exploring the neighborhood of Moscavide, right at the oriental frontier of the city of Lisbon, famous for the street stores that offer the visitor products and services of multiple trades and commerce.
On the first day, I took the Mamiya RB67. I shot some multi-exposures mostly on the train station; Negatives to be developed later. However, the streets with cars parked everywhere and narrow walks were becoming hard to frame.
On the second day, I started to notice there were street shops and restaurants on almost every corner of the city blocks. The geometry of the streets is perpendicular, on Google Maps I counted around thirty blocks of buildings in the neighborhood; fit in a square of five hundred meters by side. For this work, I shot thirty-one different shops in corners, and for sure my recording wasn’t thorough. So at least a quarter of the street corners are home to a shop in Moscavide.
So, on day three I took the D750 with the 20–35mm and shot the images for this story. During the selection, I concluded that different types of architecture prevailed. The final sixteen pictures are grouped based on the similarity of the facades.
THE MOVEMENT OF THE TRIANGLE
Kandinsky says the life of the spirit can be represented as an acute-angled triangle divided horizontally into unequal parts, the base being the lowest, greatest area segment. Slowly the whole triangle moves forward and upwards. Where the apex was today, the second segment is tomorrow.
This movement is fed by that which has no material existence or cannot be subjected to a material classification. Paving the road the artist rises higher in the triangle realizing through his feelings the spirit of the future. Along comes uneasiness and the need to take control of the loss of balance, shaken by the new ideas.
Kandinsky says on the higher grounds there is no longer this bewilderment. The artist boldly attacks the pillars which men have set up. When the artist turns his gaze from externals to himself morality is shaken, no matter the form being literature, music, art, or science. The apt use of a word and its repetition inside a poem will intensify harmony and bring to light the unsuspected properties of the word itself, ultimately depriving the word of its external meaning.
Street corners remind me of the triangle shape. The mix of activities represented by the shops and the architectural planes can be an analogy to the diversity of the arts of the same age. As the word in the poem, the repetition is intended to highlight the non-material sense of an object, marking that direct impression on the soul that reflects the capture of a moment and the uniqueness of the object photographed.
If you enjoyed this story you can check my own concepts on how I see black and white photography as an abstract art form in this next story:
