In the early 2000s, this interest in layers became more literal with the introduction of stencils into his work. The same deconstructive processes can be seen in his creative influences of Jose Parla and Cy Twombly. The physical architecture of the city was a constant inspiration, the elaboration and destruction of each generation contributing to the urban infrastructure. Growing up in Oslo Norway, Martin was an active part of the emerging graffiti scene of the early 90’s which at the time maintained zero tolerance. His works can be seen to mirror the rise and fall of the streets, as he symbolically recreates the urban environment, then vandalises it to reveal his vibrant transformations. Over the past decade, Martin has developed an unmistakable aesthetic combining abstract movement with figurative stencilled compositions. Martin’s writings and interviews reveal that her most important sources were Daoist and Buddhist texts published in the 1950s and early 60s, readings that helped Agnes Martin quiet and empty her mind and open herself to the creativity and freedom so essential to her art.Martin Whatson (b.1984) is a Norwegian street artist best known for his calligraphic scribbles in grayscale voids. This helps explain Martin’s unusual receptivity to Daoist and Buddhist perspectives that attracted so many American artists and writers in the years following World War II. These authors who shaped Martin’s conception of herself and her work were themselves influenced by Asian philosophical systems. Transcendentalist philosophy, especially Elizabeth Palmer Peabody’s remarkable Record of a School (1835), would have been important as well. Books by the American Pragmatist philosopher and educator John Dewey, author of Art As Experience (1934), nourished Martin’s early teaching career. Reared in a Calvinist religious environment, Martin was attracted to the work of the rebellious Puritan allegorist John Bunyan (author of The Pilgrim’s Progress), and the even more rebellious visionary artist-poet William Blake (who created watercolor illustrations for Pilgrim’s Progress). In “Readings for Writings" Jacquelynn Baas analyzes the origins of Agnes Martin's personal philosophy as published in her influential book, Writings (1992). Finally, it clarifies, through some elements of their personal histories, the connections of the three artists within the New York art world and with each other. The thesis works with Fredric Jameson’s theorization of the relationship between the postmodern and late capitalism, as well as Caroline Jones’ account of the modern “egotistical” sublime and the postmodern “performative technological sublime,” to argue that postmodern practice was a response to the rigidities of modernism and formalist criticism. It also considers the roles of gender and sexual identity within sublime aesthetics. It addresses the historical development of the concept of the sublime, and the redistributions of that concept among Newman, Martin and Warhol. This thesis is an investigation of historical notions of the sublime and their culmination in both the “modern sublime” (demonstrated in the work of Barnett Newman and Agnes Martin) and the “postmodern sublime” (particularly through the practices of Andy Warhol).
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