I own Taschen's softcover 1994 Wassily Kandinsky book because Kandinsky's art was the first art I ever pointed to in a museum and said I liked. This happened at LACMA when I was I guess about 5 or 6. In 5th grade, as a class project that was part of some program called 'Art Docents' which made absolutely no sense, my classmates and I were instructed to render a copy of Kandinsky's 1911 painting of a running horse, entitled Lyrical. There was, for some reason, a contest involved, with a prize or something for the closest copy. A poster-size print of the painting was stuck on the blackboard, and we were all given some rough-textured paper and pastels. We all tried to make as close a copy of the painting as possible, and in the end, the class and teacher and visiting 'Art Docent' decided that I'd come closest to copying the lines, and this dude Eric [who was smart, attractive, and i think gay /edit: and i just remembered his name was Craig, not Eric] had come closest to copying the colors. We both got some kind of prize. Maybe just recognition actually. I remember standing at the front of the class with [Craig], holding up our horse drawings. I was actually very into horses at the time, and within a couple years, I would briefly own a horse.

I brought the drawing home, and I know I explained the whole business of the contest to my parents at the time, because I thought it was an absolutely ridiculous way to teach art and I hadn't even enjoyed doing it. Somehow, though, they forgot or weren't listening or whatever, and they were so impressed with this impressionistic drawing of a racing horse that they _framed_ it. It was only after it had been hanging framed for at least a few years that I finally had the chance to bring it up and explain it to them that it was a copy of a famous painting.

I swear to god, this is all true. I think the framed drawing is still in my father's office someplace. I'm going to check when I'm in California this Christmas.

I got the Taschen Kandinsky book for Christmas in 1994, after having been reminded of Kandinsky by the film Six Degrees of Separation, which includes a long, hilarious nonsense treatise on the paintings of Kandinsky and The Catcher in the Rye. In it, Donald Sutherland plays a Manhattan aristocrat obsessed with art, who rants, 'Kandinsky left areas of his canvas blank, if he had nothing to paint on them, rather than have imperfection.' [What else you need to know about the film: while very passionate about something or other, it has nothing to say about art. Will Smith, who reveals himself to be kinda shitty at playing queer in the first place, has a stunt double kiss Anthony Michael Hall because he was thinking, quote [Entertainment Weekly], 'What are my boys in Philly gonna say about this?' His character is a con man who claims to be the son of Sidney Poitier.]

Kandinsky left blank space at the apparent risk of imperfection? Blank canvas is perfect? You would think this meant Kandinsky left giant open spaces on his canvases. Kandinksy's canvases actually tend to be- i dunno, pretty full so far as canvases go? Of course Kandinsky uses what's called 'negative space', but not more than any other random artist. It's such a bizarre moment in that film. Everything the movie says about The Catcher in the Rye is similarly daft. At the end of the film, Will Smith supposedly hangs himself with a pink shirt. 'That burst of color,' Stockard Channing tears. Whatever.

In the fucking meantime?

Hello Prophet -->

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Wassily Kandinsky is a Killer K from whom Keith Haring follows explicitly. So far as I know, Kandinksy was the first visual artist to say he painted to the rhythm of music. With Kandinsky actually, that's an understatement; he modeled all his compositional rules for painting on those of music.

Kandinsky, one of most famous teachers at the Bauhaus, offered, i posit, this lesson to many people: if you can compose music, you can compose a painting. [So, it follows vice-versa, and hello Peter Murphy.] I don't know whether or not Kandinsky ever actually phrased it that way- 'if you can write music, then you can paint'- but the idea is implicit in everything he did.

Keith Haring quotes Kandinsky at several points in his journals and in an early gallery show proposal, only with reference to rather general ideas like essential joy and spirituality. Obviously, though, Keith H and Kandinsky share an understanding of music: something that moves. Keith H couldn't paint without loud musical accompaniment. He wrote that he shared the same concerns about movement that modern dancers do. I mean, he was a graffiti dude anyway: that eternal American artist carrying a boombox and wearing puffy white sneakers. You know him. He was New York of the 1980s.

I started drawing, more or less, because Keith Haring's journals told me that if I could dance, I could draw. Dancing is movements made in order to make shapes, and so is drawing. It turns out it's that simple.

studies by Kandinsky

Kandinsky was better than Keith H with the titles, but still, vast numbers are named things like 'Komposition VII'. Still, with some, he took the opportunity to say something. He wasn't one of the Great Titlists. It's too bad, sorta, because he definitely could have been.

Kleine Freuden, 1913
[Small Pleasures]

Der unbekannten Stimme, 1916
[To the Unknown Voice]

You never have to wonder what the most famous thing was that Wassily Kandinsky ever said. It is on every fucking thing you will ever see about him. Along with a self-portrait, it's the only thing on the back of the Taschen book. It interests me because I have to take out 'filled with happiness' and replace it with '...' to really make it meaningful. I mean, yeah, I am happy too, and so was Keith Haring, but I really don't think that illuminates anything here. The content can be filled with anything to be alive, even with nothingness, so long as it is filled in a way that can be recognized.

Anyway, excuse the dot-dot-dot, but roughly here is what he apparently stood for.

Wassily Kandinsky 1937:
'The content of painting is painting. Nothing has to be deciphered. The content... speaks to that person for whom each form is alive- i.e., has content.'

Later, a media theorist would attempt to say this more flippantly. He was trying to be sexy, probably. In the process, something important would be lost. This is what caused a later Killer K to fashion a slogan that would protect his work forever: 'The medium is not the message. The message is the message.'

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works from top, all by Wassily Kandinsky-
; cover for an issue of the Blaue Reiter Almanac, 1911
; Autour du cercle [Around the circle], 1940
; Schwarzer Fleck I [Black Spot I], 1912
; 1 study based on the movements of dancer Gret Palucca, 1926
; another study based on same, 1926
; Kleine Freuden [Small Pleasures], 1913
; Der unbekannten Stimme [To the Unknown Voice], 1916