Sculpture, Arca
Maksud Arca
Arca merupakan hasil seni berbentuk 3 dimensi ( 3D ). Arca berasal daripada perkataan ‘ sculpture ’ yang beerti mengukir, memotong, menebuk atau melarik. Biasanya arca diletakkan di dalam suatu ruang untuk tujuan pameran. Nilai estetiknya dapat dihayati dengan pancaindera. Permukaan arca boleh dipegang dan arca boleh dipandang dari pelbagai sudut pandangan. Arca juga terdapat dalam bentuk realistik atau bentuk abstrak.
Banyak arca dicipta melalui tempahan untuk memperingati sesuatu peristiwa bersejarah, atau kehidupan seorang tokoh. Arca bertujuan sebagai seni awam yang dipamerkan di luar, tetapi kekadangnya juga dipamerkan di dalam bangunan awam untuk menegaskan sesuatu dengan cara yang lebih ketara daripada apa yang boleh ditekankan melalui penggunaan perkataan.
Menjelang abad ke dua puluh, apabila seni mencapai dimensi baru, arca berubah kepada ciri abstrak dan membuka era baru dalam peradaban arca. Kategori arca boleh dibahagikan kepada dua iaitu arca estetik dan arca berfungsi.
Ciri-Ciri Arca yang baik dan kreatif
Arca yang kreatif dan baik haruslah dihasilkan menepati tema dan tajuk yang ingin diketengahkan oleh pengkarya. Kebiasaannya pengkarya ingin berkongsi tema bersama dengan pengarca yang lain. Tema yang ingin diketengahkan seperti perkongsian maklumat, dokumentasi, lonjakan paradigma, cetusan emosi dan perasaan. Semua persoalan yang ingin diketengahkan haruslah ada pada arca yang dihasilkan dan mampu menonjolkan persoalan berkenaan melalui hasilan pengkarya.
Bahan binaan arca juga haruslah sesuai dengan tujuan hasilan. Dalam pengkaryaan arca, asemblaj mewakili karya yang agak bebas dan pelbagai penggunaan bahan dan media. Maka dengan itu kesepaduan dalam pelbagai penggunaan bahan dan media dapat menjadikan sesuatu arca yang kreatif dan menepati ciri-ciri sebuah arca bersesuaian denga tema.
Arca yang baik haruslah kukuh, kuat, selamat dan tahan lama. Sejarah arca membuktikan bahawa sebuah arca yang baik menggunakan alat dan bahan terdiri daripada kombinasi yang padat dan kukuh.
Pengkarya arca akan dianggap dapat menghasilkan sebuah arca yang baik apabila berjaya mempelbagaikan bahan yang diadun atau dipasang dengan baik. Arca khususnya asemblaj mengadunkan pelbagai bahan lalu membentuk kesatuan komposisi yang artistik.Arca yang baik dan kreatif juga haruslah berjaya mengaplikasikan asas seni reka, estetika dan etika pengkaryaan. Objek akan digubah berdasarkan asas seni reka. Apabila asas seni reka ini diaplikasikan dengan baik dan betul, penampilan karya akan menjadi lebih terancang dan rapi.
Akhir sekali yang paling penting dalam menhasilkan sebuah arca yang baik dan kreatif ialah arca berkenaan haruslah bebas daripada ciplakan atau plagiat. Sebagai pengkarya yang memahami hakikat keaslian, ciplakan adalah satu kelemahan lebih-lebih lagi jika penghasilannya bertujuan komersial. Arca yang dihasilkan haruslah hanya satu dan tiada ditempat lain.
MENIKMATI DAN MENGHAYATI SENI ARCA
JIKA arca boleh dinikmati di sekeliling ruang, boleh dihayati dan disentuh seluruh permukaannya, tentu arca itu suatu objek yang istimewa. Ia menawarkan kepada penikmat untuk menghayati bentuk, kepadatan, saiz, isipadu di samping meletakkan emosi rasa bersamanya. Tentu lebih istimewa lagi, apabila arca dijadikan penghias laman. Menggubah ruang menjadi lebih indah dan bermakna. Arca boleh diletakkan pada lantai, digantung, pindah alih, dibiarkan tetap atau dapat dipasang dan dibuka.
Fungsi arca dan manfaat kepada orang ramai juga tidak dapat dinafikan di samping keindahannya. Itulah interpritasi yang meletakkan nilai arca sebagai suatu objek seni dan berfungsi.
Perkataan arca yang berasal dari perkataan Latin ‘sculpere’ merujuk makna pada proses ukiran dan potongan. Dalam zaman Greek, bentuk tubuh manusia juga dianggap arca yang meliputi susunan fizikal iaitu harmonis, seimbang dan perhubungan jitu dalam keseluruhan bahagian. Segalanya ini adalah konsep penyusunan artistik yang menjadi sebahagian daripada definisi apa itu arca.
Peralihan masa, merubah perkembangan seni arca ke arah moden yang melihat perubahan sains dan mesin sebagai teknologi hinggakan arca distrukturkan menjadi abstrak dalam seni. Manakala fungsinya turut berubah dari nilai indah digabung kepada sifat yang berfungsi seperti automotif, telefon, peralatan industri, perabut dan bangunan. Namun sifat-sifat asli sesebuah arca itu masih kekal mengikut prinsip harmoni, kadar banding, keseimbangan dan kepelbagaian.
Jika demikian apakah perbezaan antara arca dengan sebuah kerusi? Arca boleh diolah daripada objek lain menjadi satu rupa wajah yang baharu. Himpunan objek-objek sedia ada atau komponen-komponen sebahagian daripada objek asal dieksploitasi dan diolah sebagai untuk kewujudan satu objek baharu. Jika kerusi diletakkan pada situasi ini, maka ia diberi tafsiran sebagai arca. Dengan kedudukannya yang boleh berfungsi serta sekaligus membawa nilai-nilai estetika dari segi reka bentuk, keseimbangan, pengisian ruang dan pembikinannya boleh membantu kita menjadi jelas.
Sejauhmanakah kerusi itu diterima sebagai arca? Ini merupakan persoalan penghayatan dan kefahaman konsep yang boleh dirujuk pada Joseph Kosuth yang menafsir kerusi dalam karyanya “One and Three Chaire”. Di dalam karya tersebut dijelaskan tiga perbezaan realiti pada sebuah kerusi. Pertamanya ialah realiti pada kerusi sebenar yang boleh disentuh dan boleh dilihat dalam fotografi dengan imej yang sama serta satu definisi, apa itu kerusi, petikan dari kamus, dicetak dan ditampal pada dinding. Realiti kedua ialah fotografi tentang kerusi sahaja, tetapi imejnya dalam ilusi. Realiti ketiga ialah definisi secara lisan yang jelas menerangkan tentang sebuah kerusi.
Kesimpulan yang dinyatakan oleh Joseph ialah idea tentang bentuk yang diberi definisinya telah meletakkan makna kerusi itu dalam minda dan ia adalah realiti berhubung konsepsual. Karya ini menonjolkan idea tentang sebuah kerusi menerusi pendekatan makna atau ‘signifying’. Dari hujahan ini kerusi boleh ditafsir sebagai arca dan cara Joseph berkreatif menyampaikan ideanya yang menjurus kepada seni yang dipanggil seni konsepsual. Aliran seni konsepsual mula diperkenalkan pada awal 1960-an yang mengenengahkan falsafah artistik secara ekspresif yang menjadi penerokaan kepada penganut seni Dada.
Contoh karya yang mengeksploitasikan objek-objek seni sedia ada yang digelar objek ‘ready-mades’ telah mengangkat seni arca ke arah dimensi baru. Seniman Marcel Duchamp telah mempelopori penerokaan ini melalui objek mangkuk tandas. Manakala di Malaysia, contoh terdekat ialah Piyadasa yang menjadikan kerusi sebagai arca dan digabungkan bersama sifat dan ciri-ciri dua dimensi. Melalui cara ini penampilan dan peragaan sebuah hasil seni arca boleh dikaitkan dengan pendekatan seni konsepsual.
Seniman seni konsepsual begitu taksub dengan idea atau konsep sebagai permulaan yang dianggap penting dalam sesebuah karya. Segala perancangan dan keputusan yang dibuat sebelum berkarya dianggap idea yang bernilai seperti sebuah mesin yang menghasilkan karya seni dengan meletakkan idea dalam minda itu lebih penting sebelum objek seni sebenar wujud.
Sebagai objek yang tergolong bercirikan seni arca proses pembikinannya menggabungkan kemahiran pertukangan sebagai kemahiran menghasilkan kraf yang sama seperti dilalui dalam proses membuat sebuah kerusi. Kepingan dan batang-batang kayu dipotong untuk djadikan sebuah kerusi. Dengan teknik pertukangan, pengalaman membuatnya melibatkan kemahiran bersama ilmu estetik.
Keyakinan ini meletakkan objek-objek kraf bertambah dan mengalami perubahan reka bentuk sama seperti lukisan dan arca. Objek-objek ini dipilih untuk menghiasi ruang dalaman bagi mengisi sebahagian daripada persekitaran. Objek seni arca ini dihormati dan diberi peluang selain melihat ia juga boleh disentuh sama seperti kita menghayati objek-objek seni halus yang lain. Kesimpulannya, kerusi itu adalah objek kraf yang sekaligus sebagai objek arca. Juga tidak perlu dipertikaikan kerana kerusi itu memiliki rupa bentuk tiga dimensi maka ia juga adalah sebahagian daripada arca.
Lebih jelas lagi dalam menghubungkan kerusi sebagai sebahagian daripada arca dapat dibuktikan melalui salah satu dari empat cara tradisi dalam mencipta sesuatu objek arca, iaitu:
• Mengukir ke atas bahan yang keras dan pejal.
• Membentuk model dari bahan lembut.
• Tuangan cecair lebur yang terbentuk objek keras.
• Pemasangan bahan yang boleh disambung.
Maka jelas di sini, kempat-empat cara mencipta tadi telah menepati cara merekacipta sebuah kerusi sekaligus sebagai sebuah arca. Untuk pemasangan perlu kemahiran pertukangan seperti membuat tanggam dan sebagainya yang ada pada seorang kraf, juga perlu ada pada seorang pengarca. Jika ia sebuah kerusi kayu, maka perlu ditanggam atau dipaku. Jika ia sebuah kerusi besi, perlu kemahiran memotong dan megimpal.
Bagi Frank Lloyd Wright pengamal seni Bauhaus, beliau mengabungkan binaan, kejuruteraan dan seni ke dalam reka bentuk yang berhubungan dengan persekitaran. Kesatuan dalam idea diekspresikan menjadi kerusi dan Wright meletakkan objek kerusi dengan keseimbangan formal bersama unsur-unsur yang ada di dalam arca seperti pengulangan, kadar banding dan kehalusan.
Manakala ciptaan kerusi oleh Michael Coffey pada tahun 1975 dapat dirumuskan sebagai sebahagian daripada bentuk-bentuk kerusi yang disusun semula secara bebas bagi melahirkan sesuatu yang baharu. Bentuk baharu yang menjadi objek arca masih berdiri dengan ciri-ciri sebuah kerusi yang dibantu sebahagiannya dengan konsep seni arca kontemporari.
Kesimpulannya tidak banyak beza antara arca dengan sebuah kerusi. Secara langsungnya kerusi begitu mudah dieksploitasi menjadi arca sehingga nilai kerusi itu lebih tinggi dari sifatnya yang asal. Segala-galanya menjadi realiti apabila dalam minda itu terbina idea dan konsep untuk menjadikan kerusi itu raksaksa, kerusi antik, kerusi eletrik, kerusi Yang diPertuan Agong, kerusi malas, kerusi roda dan sebagainya. Jika begitu adakah boleh arca juga dimanipulasikan menjadi sebuah kerusi?
Arca dari sudut psikologi terbina daripada kesedaran dan pengalaman yang berkaitan dengan hidup. Apresiasi terhadap seni arca bergantung kepada kebolehan mengamati dan mentafsir bentuk tiga dimensi itu sendiri. Cara ini, arca dapat diterangkan dengan mudah. Jika sebelumnya dianggap salah satu seni yang sukar untuk dijelaskan, lebih sukar lagi dalam membuat apresiasi berbanding seni-seni yang lain yang mana seni lain melibatkan bentuk-bentuk rataan dalam dua dimensi. Bagi kita yang penting ialah belajar melihat hasil seni arca bukan sekadar untuk memahami rupa bentuknya, tetapi perlu memahami jarak kedalaman bentuk arca itu dan secara ilusinya memperkayakan pengamatan. Di sebalik karya tiga dimensi, unsur apresiasi perlu diperkembangkan terutama makna dalaman yang setiap satunya berbeza makna.
Pada asasnya untuk mendapatkan kepuasan apabila menatapi sesebuah arca memerlukan sentuhan selain melihat dari dekat dan mengelilingi arca tersebut. Fikiran yang menggambarkan sesuatu bentuk itu rata dan persepsi tersebut sahaja tidak mencukupi tanpa penghayatan. Jika tidak, ramai lagi yang bukan sahaja ‘buta bentuk’ malah langsung tidak menggunakan fikiran dan emosi sebagai keperluan membantu memahami bentuk-bentuk tiga dimensi dalam keseluruhan karya seni arca.
Arcawan perlu memikirkan bentuk-bentuk di setiap sudut yang membawa pengertian dan saling berkait. Bentuk-bentuk dan bentuk dalam bentuk yang membawa fungsi secara keseluruhan, mudah atau sukar untuk diterjemahkan bergantung kepada cara menikmati dan menghayatinya. Untuk mendapatkan rupa bentuk yang padu seperti bentuk yang asli, perlu difikirkan saiz dan perkadarannya serta kesempurnaannya apabila dipegang. Secara zahirnya kesan visualisasi yang kompleks dari bentuk ke bentuk yang berada di sekeliling arca itu memerlukan setiap sudut itu boleh dilihat. Cara ini membuahkan kesan apresiasi yang bukan mata sahaja menjadi penat, tetapi minda turut letih berfikir tentang titik pusat graviti, berat isipadu, kesedaran tentang satahnya dan ruang yang diisi oleh rupa bentuk dan udara.
Pemerhati yang peka perlu juga belajar merasai satah-satah yang mudah di dalam rupa bentuk dan memikirkan aspek luaran dan dalaman isipadunya. Contoh sebiji telur, secara ideanya adalah signifikan kepada permakanan dan telur simbol kepada melahirkan zuriat. Begitu juga kepaduan kulit siput, cendawan, gunung, tulang dan sebagainya yang apabila dihayati dan diperhalusi dengan mendalam suatu pengalaman berguna tentang bentuk dan kombinasi beberapa bentuk, dapat membuka langkah yang lebih jauh dan lebih sukar dalam membuat apresiasi.
Manakala bagi Brancussi, sebahagian daripada nilai tanggapannya telah menjadi pegangan penting dalam sejarah perkembangan arca kontemporari. Beliau mempunyai misi yang istimewa melalui penumpuan awal pada rupa bentuk yang sederhana untuk menglahirkan sebuah arca. Dari bentuk selinder, beliau meneliti bentuk yang satu itu untuk menjadi sebuah arca yang bernilai. Cara beliau melihat satu unit bentuk yang kaku dan diubah menjadi hasil yang tersendiri dan unik. Satu unit bentuk yang statik perlu dipecah-pecahkan dan mengalami kombinasi bersama beberapa bentuk-bentuk lain dalam pelbagai saiz, arah dan bahagian dalam keseluruhan bentuk.
Contoh figura manusia dianggap objek yang menjadi tarikan. Boleh diamati lebih mendalam tentang setiap bentuk yang wujud secara semulajadi. Antaranya tulang belulang, otot-otot, perkadaran yang unik dan sebagainya. Apabila dihayati dan diperhalusi maka pengalaman yang sangat berguna tentang perihal bentuk dapat membuka minda untuk terus menjelajah, meneroka setiap rupa bentuk yang baru dari cipta Ilahi.
Manakala Henry Moore menganggap lubang dalam sesuatu arca sebagai sebahagian daripada olahan seni. Bagi Henry Moore apabila beliau memungut batu-batu berlubang di pantai inilah permulaan pengalamannya yang membuatkan beliau menghormati batu-batu itu. Ia ditipu oleh batu dan menyedari bahawa setiap permukaan dan lubang pada batu ada mempunyai rahsianya dan ada tenaga kuasanya yang tersendiri.
Sebenarnya Brancusi dan Moore, dua arcawan yang berada dalam zaman moden pada umumnya dianggap sebagai pencipta asas arca berkriteria organik. Walaupun kedua-duanya berbeza, tetapi mempunyai pendekatan yang serupa dalam meletakkan tujuan dan asas estetika dalam seni arca.
Dalam menikmati dan menghayati seni arca, semangat yang ditunjukkan oleh seniman adalah semangat daya cipta yang kuat dan dapat meluaskannya dalam kehidupan bangsa. Hasilan seni arca memberi manfaat tersendiri selain untuk tatapan umum, ianya merakam dan menyimpan kembali hasilan seni untuk khazanah generasi akan datang. Melaluinya dapat dikenali tamadun bangsa, penggunaan bahan-bahannya yang merefleksikan kesan sejarah.
Kombinasi seni dan sejarah membantu memperkukuhkan jati diri menjadi bangsa yang berjiwa halus dan menyayangi hasil seni. Sumbangan mengangkat seni arca oleh mana-mana negara bangsa adalah sumbangan positif terhadap daya kreatif seni dalam penampilannya. Dua unsur antara seni dan sejarah saling berkaitan dan melengkapi bagi penyempurnaan pembinaan peribadi sebagai satu bangsa. Bermula dengan generasi kini yang berusaha menggarap dan mengabadikan seni arca di persekitaran jabatan kerajaan, institusi kewangan, bangunan-bangunan sektor swasta dan korporat dapat membantu generasi akan datang menghayati dan mencintai seni arca. Mencintai khazanah seni sebagai bahan artifak sejarah, budaya dan kesenian bangsa adalah penghormatan yang termulia. Justeru itu penyediaan ruang dan penghormatan kepada arcawan mengabadikan hasil seni arca di persekitaran masyarakat dapat membantu mengangkat martabat seni. Biarpun arca yang simbolis, kelihatan simple tetapi cukup memberi erti kepada kesedaran seni.
About Me
- Hafiz Mohd Nordin
- Creative Designer,Primeworks Studio, Media Prima Berhad / B.A Hons Fineart University Technology MARA,Malaysia
Thursday, October 8, 2009
Tuesday, October 6, 2009
Seni Impressionism dan Post-Impressionism
Impressionism
Impresionisme adalah suatu gerakan seni dari abad 19 yang dimulai dari Paris pada tahun 1860an. Nama ini awalnya dikutip dari lukisan Claude Monet, "Impression, Sunrise" ("Impression, soleil levant"). Kritikus Louis Leroy menggunakan kata ini sebagai sindiran dalam artikelnya di Le Charivari.
Karakteristik utama lukisan impresionisme adalah kuatnya goresan berus, warna-warna cerah (bahkan banyak sekali pelukis impresionis yang mengharamkan warna hitam kerana dianggap bukan bagian dari cahaya), komposisi terbuka, penekanan pada kualiti pengcahayaan, subjek-subjek lukisan yang tidak terlalu menonjol, dan sudut pandang yang tidak biasa.
Seniman impresionisme pada awalnya terinspirasi oleh teori-teori Eugene Delacroix yang mulai merasakan ketidakpuasan terhadap perkembangan seni akademik pada masa itu yang terlalu berkonsentrasi kepada mahzab seni lukis klasik. Ia berpendapat bahawa lukisan tidak selamanya dibentuk dengan pengolahan garis secara berlebihan seperti dikembangkan oleh Inggeris selama bertahun-tahun. Sebaliknya pengolahan pengetahuan warna-warna dengan penuh teliti akan menghasilkan bentuk lukisan yang lebih menarik.
Namun Delacroix sendiri boleh dianggap gagal melepaskan diri dari pengaruh pakembangan seni lukis akedemik kerena bagaimanapun lukisannya sendiri masih berkonsentrasikan pada bentuk-bentuk secara ideal.
Kemudian beberapa pelukis secara radikal melanggar peraturan-peraturan akademik dalam pembuatan lukisan. Lukisan ini tidak lagi berkonsentrasi pada bentuk secara mendetail dengan mementingkan kontour, volume, dan garis. Juga meninggalkan pengamatan struktural bentuk suatu objek. Sebaliknya, suasana didapatkan dengan menangkap kesan (impresi) cahaya yang ditangkap sekilas oleh mata. Akibatnya bentuk objek menjadi lebih sederhana, tidak seperti lukisan naturalisme atau realisme.
Pada awalnya tidak hanya lukisan still life dan potret saja yang dibuat di dalam ruangan, tetapi juga pemandangan. Hal inilah yang kemudiannya mendorong seniman impressionism untuk menemukan bahawa ada kesan yang berbeza didapatkan jika lukisan dibuat di secara terbuka dengan suasana visual langsung bagi mengamati objek yang dibuat. Mereka menggunakan goresan warna-warna pendek, pecah, dan sekaligus murni (dengan erti tidak disengajakan untuk dicampur di atas palet) untuk memberikan nyawa kepada lukisan. Penekanan lukisan kemudian bergeser kepada kesan keseluruhan daripada detail-detail objek tertentu.
Perkembangan selanjutnya dari impresionisme adalah penemuan bahawa yang lebih penting daripada teknik impresionisme sendiri adalah perbezaan dalam sudut pandang. Impresionisme sebenarnya adalah seni pergerakan, pose, dan komposisi dari permainan kesan cahaya yang dituangkan dalam warna-warna cerah dan bervariasi.
Pada akhir abad 19, masyarakat mulai mempercayai bahwa impresionisme adalah cara pandang yang jernih dan jujur terhadap kehidupan, meskipun secara artisitik bukanlah pendekatan yang benar dalam pembuatan karya.Puncak gerakan seni impresionisme di Perancis terjadi hampir bersamaan dengan di negara lain, antara lain di Itali dengan pelukis Macchiaioli, dan Amerika Syarikat dengan pelukis Winslow Homer.
Impresionisme menjadi pelopor berkembangnya aliran-aliran seni modern lain seperti Post-Impresionisme, Fauvisme, and Kubisme.
Post-Impressionism
1885-1905 Post impressionism yg bergerak dari perancis.Tempoh post impressionism telah dicipta oleh pengkritik seni inggeris iaitu Roger Fry.Paul Cezanne,Georges seurat,Paul Gauguin adalah antara pelukis yang b’asal dari perancis kecuali Van Gogh dan kbykn mereka adlh bermula sbgai impressionist.stiap org drpd mereka menegaskan kesan figutif warna dan cahaya.
Teknik
Aliran ini adalah lanjutan daripada aliran impressionisme yg memilih perkara di persekitaran mereka sebagai hal benda.Bagaimanapun,ia mengadunkan eleman saintifik dan kajian analitikal thdp wrna dan cahaya.Ia lebih kpd warna-warna
simbolik,terangdan tidak begitu neutral.warna diaplikasikan secara pertindihan,kombinasi beberapa warna.teknik ini dgunakan untk mghasilkan warna ilusi kepada audian yg lihat.
Sebagai contoh: Teknik yang digunakan oleh Georges Seurat dalam “A Sunday Afternoon On The Island Of A La Grande Jatte”.Kalau Impressionisme pelukisnya menggunakan teknik yang serupa kapada tema ringan serta komited dengan tema sosial.Hal ini telah mempengaruhi aliran Kubisme dan Ekspresionisme.Ia juga dibawa dari Perancis pada tahun 1884.Pelukis menggunakan semua warna termasuk warna hitam.Hal benda yang telah di ubah akan di abadikan.
Gaya Seni
Tempoh post impressionism di cipta oleh pengkritik seni inggeris iaitu Roger Fry.
Paul cezanne, georges seurat,paul gauguin adalah orang perancis kecuali Van Gogh.Antara pelukis lain ialah Henry de toulouse-lautrec,paul gauguin,
camille pissarro,Henry rousseau.
Kebanyakkan daripada mereka bermula sebagai impressionists.Dimana segala hasil karya telah menerima kritikan yang hebat kerana menggunakan teknik dimana mereka merakamkan imej dengan mementingkan rakaman cahaya dan campuran warna yang menggambarkan kesan cahaya yang jatuh pada sesuatu imej yang dilukis..
Kemudian semasa aliran post impressionism, Gauguin bersama pelukis muda yang bernama Emile Bernard telah bersama-sama mencari kebenaran yang lebih mudah dan keindahan yang lebih tulen dalam seni.Berubah jauh dari dunia seni yang canggih di paris,dia sebaliknya mencari inspirasi dgn kaum2 luar bandar dgn nilai2 tradisional.Dia bersama Emile mengkaji warna buram,garis berat dan kualiti berhias kaca berwarna dan manuskrip kuno pencahayaan.
Mereka menjelajah dan mengkaji dengan bersungguh-sungguh dengan penuh perasaan tentang warna tulen dan garis.Gauguin menggunakan warna eksotik dan rasa keharmonian untuk mencipta puitis tahitians.Dari brushstrokes dia telah menggunakan baris-baris yang berlengkok2 serta warna yang bertenaga ke dalam catannya(berbanding pada masa impressionisme).Gauguin mewarna dengan penuh perasaan dan menggunakan warna yang bertenaga dan banyk menghasilkan catan nya dalam benuk lanskap semula jadi.
Antara Tokoh aliran seni ini:-
VINCENT VAN GOGH:
Name:Vincent willem van gogh
Born: 30 march 1853,Zundert,The Nethrelands
Died:29 july 1890. FRANCE
Nationality:Dutch
Field: Painter.
Movement: Port Impressionism
Works: The Potato Eatert, Sunflowers, The Starry Night, Irief, Potrait Of Dr Gachet
Van gogh telah menghabiskan masa remajanya dgn bekerja di sebuah Syarikat Seni Dealers.Selepas itu dia telah bekerja sebagai guru dalam masa yg singkat dan kemudianya telah menjadi seorang pekerja mubaligh dlm 1 daerah perlombongsn yang miskin.Dia tidak memulakan kerjayanya sebagai seorang artis sehingga lah pada tahun 1880 dia telah mula mengkaji warna-warna suram sehingga memasuki aliran impressionism dan neo impressionism di Paris.Van gogh telah mengeluarkan lebih 2000 hasil karyanya termasuk 900 hasil warna dan 1100 hasil lukisan dan lakaran.dia akhirnya telah memotong sebahagian telinganya kerana gagal dalam prsahabatannya dgn paul gauguin.
Impresionisme adalah suatu gerakan seni dari abad 19 yang dimulai dari Paris pada tahun 1860an. Nama ini awalnya dikutip dari lukisan Claude Monet, "Impression, Sunrise" ("Impression, soleil levant"). Kritikus Louis Leroy menggunakan kata ini sebagai sindiran dalam artikelnya di Le Charivari.
Karakteristik utama lukisan impresionisme adalah kuatnya goresan berus, warna-warna cerah (bahkan banyak sekali pelukis impresionis yang mengharamkan warna hitam kerana dianggap bukan bagian dari cahaya), komposisi terbuka, penekanan pada kualiti pengcahayaan, subjek-subjek lukisan yang tidak terlalu menonjol, dan sudut pandang yang tidak biasa.
Seniman impresionisme pada awalnya terinspirasi oleh teori-teori Eugene Delacroix yang mulai merasakan ketidakpuasan terhadap perkembangan seni akademik pada masa itu yang terlalu berkonsentrasi kepada mahzab seni lukis klasik. Ia berpendapat bahawa lukisan tidak selamanya dibentuk dengan pengolahan garis secara berlebihan seperti dikembangkan oleh Inggeris selama bertahun-tahun. Sebaliknya pengolahan pengetahuan warna-warna dengan penuh teliti akan menghasilkan bentuk lukisan yang lebih menarik.
Namun Delacroix sendiri boleh dianggap gagal melepaskan diri dari pengaruh pakembangan seni lukis akedemik kerena bagaimanapun lukisannya sendiri masih berkonsentrasikan pada bentuk-bentuk secara ideal.
Kemudian beberapa pelukis secara radikal melanggar peraturan-peraturan akademik dalam pembuatan lukisan. Lukisan ini tidak lagi berkonsentrasi pada bentuk secara mendetail dengan mementingkan kontour, volume, dan garis. Juga meninggalkan pengamatan struktural bentuk suatu objek. Sebaliknya, suasana didapatkan dengan menangkap kesan (impresi) cahaya yang ditangkap sekilas oleh mata. Akibatnya bentuk objek menjadi lebih sederhana, tidak seperti lukisan naturalisme atau realisme.
Pada awalnya tidak hanya lukisan still life dan potret saja yang dibuat di dalam ruangan, tetapi juga pemandangan. Hal inilah yang kemudiannya mendorong seniman impressionism untuk menemukan bahawa ada kesan yang berbeza didapatkan jika lukisan dibuat di secara terbuka dengan suasana visual langsung bagi mengamati objek yang dibuat. Mereka menggunakan goresan warna-warna pendek, pecah, dan sekaligus murni (dengan erti tidak disengajakan untuk dicampur di atas palet) untuk memberikan nyawa kepada lukisan. Penekanan lukisan kemudian bergeser kepada kesan keseluruhan daripada detail-detail objek tertentu.
Perkembangan selanjutnya dari impresionisme adalah penemuan bahawa yang lebih penting daripada teknik impresionisme sendiri adalah perbezaan dalam sudut pandang. Impresionisme sebenarnya adalah seni pergerakan, pose, dan komposisi dari permainan kesan cahaya yang dituangkan dalam warna-warna cerah dan bervariasi.
Pada akhir abad 19, masyarakat mulai mempercayai bahwa impresionisme adalah cara pandang yang jernih dan jujur terhadap kehidupan, meskipun secara artisitik bukanlah pendekatan yang benar dalam pembuatan karya.Puncak gerakan seni impresionisme di Perancis terjadi hampir bersamaan dengan di negara lain, antara lain di Itali dengan pelukis Macchiaioli, dan Amerika Syarikat dengan pelukis Winslow Homer.
Impresionisme menjadi pelopor berkembangnya aliran-aliran seni modern lain seperti Post-Impresionisme, Fauvisme, and Kubisme.
Post-Impressionism
1885-1905 Post impressionism yg bergerak dari perancis.Tempoh post impressionism telah dicipta oleh pengkritik seni inggeris iaitu Roger Fry.Paul Cezanne,Georges seurat,Paul Gauguin adalah antara pelukis yang b’asal dari perancis kecuali Van Gogh dan kbykn mereka adlh bermula sbgai impressionist.stiap org drpd mereka menegaskan kesan figutif warna dan cahaya.
Teknik
Aliran ini adalah lanjutan daripada aliran impressionisme yg memilih perkara di persekitaran mereka sebagai hal benda.Bagaimanapun,ia mengadunkan eleman saintifik dan kajian analitikal thdp wrna dan cahaya.Ia lebih kpd warna-warna
simbolik,terangdan tidak begitu neutral.warna diaplikasikan secara pertindihan,kombinasi beberapa warna.teknik ini dgunakan untk mghasilkan warna ilusi kepada audian yg lihat.
Sebagai contoh: Teknik yang digunakan oleh Georges Seurat dalam “A Sunday Afternoon On The Island Of A La Grande Jatte”.Kalau Impressionisme pelukisnya menggunakan teknik yang serupa kapada tema ringan serta komited dengan tema sosial.Hal ini telah mempengaruhi aliran Kubisme dan Ekspresionisme.Ia juga dibawa dari Perancis pada tahun 1884.Pelukis menggunakan semua warna termasuk warna hitam.Hal benda yang telah di ubah akan di abadikan.
Gaya Seni
Tempoh post impressionism di cipta oleh pengkritik seni inggeris iaitu Roger Fry.
Paul cezanne, georges seurat,paul gauguin adalah orang perancis kecuali Van Gogh.Antara pelukis lain ialah Henry de toulouse-lautrec,paul gauguin,
camille pissarro,Henry rousseau.
Kebanyakkan daripada mereka bermula sebagai impressionists.Dimana segala hasil karya telah menerima kritikan yang hebat kerana menggunakan teknik dimana mereka merakamkan imej dengan mementingkan rakaman cahaya dan campuran warna yang menggambarkan kesan cahaya yang jatuh pada sesuatu imej yang dilukis..
Kemudian semasa aliran post impressionism, Gauguin bersama pelukis muda yang bernama Emile Bernard telah bersama-sama mencari kebenaran yang lebih mudah dan keindahan yang lebih tulen dalam seni.Berubah jauh dari dunia seni yang canggih di paris,dia sebaliknya mencari inspirasi dgn kaum2 luar bandar dgn nilai2 tradisional.Dia bersama Emile mengkaji warna buram,garis berat dan kualiti berhias kaca berwarna dan manuskrip kuno pencahayaan.
Mereka menjelajah dan mengkaji dengan bersungguh-sungguh dengan penuh perasaan tentang warna tulen dan garis.Gauguin menggunakan warna eksotik dan rasa keharmonian untuk mencipta puitis tahitians.Dari brushstrokes dia telah menggunakan baris-baris yang berlengkok2 serta warna yang bertenaga ke dalam catannya(berbanding pada masa impressionisme).Gauguin mewarna dengan penuh perasaan dan menggunakan warna yang bertenaga dan banyk menghasilkan catan nya dalam benuk lanskap semula jadi.
Antara Tokoh aliran seni ini:-
VINCENT VAN GOGH:
Name:Vincent willem van gogh
Born: 30 march 1853,Zundert,The Nethrelands
Died:29 july 1890. FRANCE
Nationality:Dutch
Field: Painter.
Movement: Port Impressionism
Works: The Potato Eatert, Sunflowers, The Starry Night, Irief, Potrait Of Dr Gachet
Van gogh telah menghabiskan masa remajanya dgn bekerja di sebuah Syarikat Seni Dealers.Selepas itu dia telah bekerja sebagai guru dalam masa yg singkat dan kemudianya telah menjadi seorang pekerja mubaligh dlm 1 daerah perlombongsn yang miskin.Dia tidak memulakan kerjayanya sebagai seorang artis sehingga lah pada tahun 1880 dia telah mula mengkaji warna-warna suram sehingga memasuki aliran impressionism dan neo impressionism di Paris.Van gogh telah mengeluarkan lebih 2000 hasil karyanya termasuk 900 hasil warna dan 1100 hasil lukisan dan lakaran.dia akhirnya telah memotong sebahagian telinganya kerana gagal dalam prsahabatannya dgn paul gauguin.
Monday, September 7, 2009
Clement Greenberg
ART CRITIC
"... At this same party [a] friend introduced the then comparatively young art critic Clement Greenberg... Marianne seemed to be familiar with his writing and said, on shaking hands, "Oh, the fearless Mr. Greenberg."
-- Elizabeth Bishop in Efforts of Affection: A Memoir of Marianne Moore
Clement Greenberg (January 16, 1909 – May 7, 1994) was an influential American art critic closely associated with Modern art in the United States. In particular, he promoted the abstract expressionist movement and was among the first critics to praise the work of painter Jackson Pollock.
Greenberg was a graduate of Syracuse University who first made his name as an art critic with his essay "Avant-Garde and Kitsch," first published in the journal Partisan Review in 1939. In this article Greenberg claimed that avant-garde and Modernist art was a means to resist the leveling of culture produced by capitalist propaganda. Greenberg appropriated the German word 'kitsch' to describe this consumerism, though its connotations have since changed to a more affirmative notion of left-over materials of capitalist culture. Modern art, like philosophy, explored the conditions under which we experience and understand the world. It does not simply provide information about it in the manner of an illustratively accurate depiction of the world. "Avant Garde and Kitsch" was also a politically motivated essay in part a response to the destruction and repression of Modernist Art in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union and its replacement with state ordained styles of "Aryan" art and "Socialist realism."
In December 1950, he joined the CIA fronted American Committee for Cultural Freedom. Greenberg believed Modernism provided a critical commentary on experience. It was constantly changing to adapt to kitsch pseudo-culture, which was itself always developing. In the years after World War II, Greenberg pushed the position that the best avant-garde artists were emerging in America rather than Europe. Particularly, he championed Jackson Pollock as the greatest painter of his generation, commemorating the artist's "all-over" gestural canvases. In the 1955 essay "American-Type Painting" Greenberg promoted the work of Abstract Expressionists, among them Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Hans Hofmann, Barnett Newman, and Clyfford Still, as the next stage in Modernist art, arguing that these painters were moving towards greater emphasis on the 'flatness' of the picture plane. As part of his program to promote the principle of medium specificity in the arts, Greenberg stressed that this flatness separated their art from the Old Masters, who considered flatness an obtrusive hurdle in painting. Greenberg argued for a method of self-criticism that transported abstract painting from decorative 'wallpaper patterns' to high art. Greenberg's view that, after the war, the United States had become the guardian of 'advanced art' was taken up in some quarters as a reason for using Abstract Expressionism as the basis for Cultural Propaganda exercises. He praised similar movements abroad and, after the success of the Painters Eleven exhibition in 1956 with the American Abstract Artists at New York's Riverside Gallery, he travelled to Toronto to see the group's work in 1957. He was particularly impressed by the potential of painters William Ronald and Jack Bush, and later developed a close friendship with Bush. Greenberg saw Bush's post-Painters Eleven work as a clear manifestation of the shift from abstract expressionism to Color Field painting and Lyrical Abstraction, a shift he had called for in most of his critical writings of the period.
Greenberg's taste led him to reject the Pop Art of the 1960s, a trend clearly influenced by kitsch culture. Through the 1960s Greenberg remained an influential figure on a younger generation of critics including Michael Fried and Rosalind E. Krauss. Greenberg's antagonism to 'Postmodernist' theories and socially engaged movements in art caused him to lose influence amongst both artists and art critics.Such was Greenberg's influence as an art critic that Tom Wolfe in his 1975 book The Painted Word identified Greenberg as one of the "kings of cultureburg", alongside Harold Rosenberg and Leo Steinberg. Wolfe contended that these critics influence was too great on the world of art.
Eventually, Greenberg was concerned that some Abstract Expressionism had been "reduced to a set of mannerisms" and increasingly looked to a new set of artists who abandoned such elements as subject matter, connection with the artist, and definite brush strokes. Greenberg suggested this process attained a level of 'purity' (a word he only used in quotes) that would reveal the truthfulness of the canvas, and the two-dimensional aspects of the space (flatness). Greenberg coined the term "Post-Painterly Abstraction" to distinguish it from Abstract Expressionism, or Painterly Abstraction, as Greenberg preferred to call it. Post-Painterly Abstraction was a term given to a myriad of abstract art that reacted against gestural abstraction of second-generation Abstract Expressionists. Among the dominant trends in the Post-Painterly Abstraction are Hard-Edged Painters such as Ellsworth Kelly and Frank Stella who explored relationships between tightly ruled shapes and edges, in Stella's case, between the shapes depicted on the surface and the literal shape of the support and Color-Field Painters such as Helen Frankenthaler and Morris Louis, who stained first Magna then water-based acrylic paints into unprimed canvas, exploring tactile and optical aspects of large, vivid fields of pure, open color. The line between these movements is tenuous, however as artists such as Kenneth Noland utilized aspects of both movements in his art. Post-Painterly Abstraction is generally seen as continuing the Modernist dialectic of self-criticism.
This is Greenberg's last essay on modernism. In it he recants his "elegant" definition of the 1960 essay, and adds the conviction that modernism constitutes a kind of holding operation again the levelling and relaxing tendencies of middlebrow taste. In this it recalls (if memory serves) a remark by Samuel Johnson that criticism seeks to maintain standards in the face of their continual tendency to deteriorate.
-- TF
REFERENCE: - William Dobell Memorial Lecture, Sydney, Australia, Oct 31, 1979Arts 54, No.6 (February 1980)
"POSTMODERN" IS A RATHER NEW TERM. It's a catchy one and has been coming up more and more often in talk and writing about the arts, and not only about the arts. I'm not clear as to just what it points to except in the case of architecture. There we know more or less definitely what "modern" means, so we're better able to tell what "post" means when prefixed to "modern." Modern architecture means -- to put it roughly -- functional, geometric rigor and the eschewing of decoration or ornament. Buildings have been put up or projected lately that break with these canons of style, and therefore have gotten called postmodern. Everybody concerned knows what's meant, including the architects themselves.
Can postmodern be identified in an equally agreed upon way in any of the other arts? I haven't yet seen or heard the term applied in earnest to anything in recent literature. It's come up in connection with music, but haphazardly and with no agreement about what it means there. And from what I can tell it comes up hardly at all in talk about the dance or the movies. Away from architecture, it's in the area of painting and sculpture that I've mostly heard and seen postmodern used -- but only by critics and journalists, not by artists themselves.
There are reasons and reasons here. One possible reason is the return to the foreground of figurative or representational pictorial art. But there's been enough precedent, since De Chirico and surrealism and neoromanticism, for including figurative art in the modern. There have to be other, less obvious, and at the same time more general reasons for the currency of postmodern in talk about recent painting and sculpture. All the more because no critic or journalist I'm aware of who makes free with postmodern points to any specific body of work he or she feels really confident in calling that.
Now the post in postmodern can be taken in a temporal chronological sense. Anything that comes after something else is "post" that something else. But this isn't quite the way in which postmodern is used. It's supposed, rather, to mean or imply art that supersedes, replaces, succeeds the modern in terms of stylistic evolution, the way that the baroque succeeded mannerism and the rococo succeeded the baroque. The corollary is that the modern is over and done with, just as mannerism was over and done with when superseded by the baroque. But the problem for those who claim this becomes to specify what they mean, not by post, but by modern. Anything in its own time can be called modern. However, what we usually mean by modern is something considered up-to-date, abreast of the times, and going beyond the past in more than a temporally or chronologically literal sense.
Well, how are you to decide what is and what isn't modern in present-day art in a sense that goes beyond the literal one? There's no rule, no principle, no method. It comes down to a question of tastes, or else a terminological quibble. Different stylistic definitions of the modern have been proposed in every generation since the word first came into circulation as applicable to painting and sculpture in more than a merely temporal sense, and none of them have held. Nor have any of those offered by the proponents of the postmodern, whether stylistic or not.
I want to take the risk of offering my own definition of the modern, but it will be more in the nature of an explanation and description than a definition. First of all, I want to change the term in question from modern to Modernist -- Modernist with a capital M -- and then to talk about Modernism instead of the modern. Modernism has the great advantage of being a more historically placeable term, one that designates a historically -- not just chronologically -- definable phenomenon: something that began at a certain time, and may or may not still be with us.
What can be safely called Modernism emerged in the middle of the last century. And rather locally, in France, with Baudelaire in literature and Manet in painting, and maybe with Flaubert too, in prose fiction. (It was a while later, and not so locally, that Modernism appeared in music and architecture, but it was in France again that it appeared first in sculpture. Outside France later still, it entered the dance.) The "avant-garde" was what Modernism was called at first, but this term has become a good deal compromised by now as well as remaining misleading. Contrary to the common notion, Modernism or the avant-garde didn't make its entrance by breaking with the past. Far from it. Nor did it have such a thing as a program, nor has it really ever had one -- again, contrary to the common notion. Nor was it an affair of ideas or theories or ideology. It's been in the nature, rather, of an attitude and an orientation: an attitude and orientation to standards and levels: standards and levels of aesthetic quality in the first and also the last place. And where did the Modernists get their standards and levels from? From the past, that is, the best of the past. But not so much from particular models in the past -- though from these too -- as from a generalized feeling and apprehending, a kind of distilling and extracting of aesthetic quality as shown by the best of the past. And it wasn't a question of imitating but one of emulating -- just as it had been for the Renaissance with respect to antiquity. It's true that Baudelaire and Manet talked much more about having to be modern, about reflecting life in their time, than about matching the best of the past. But the need and the ambition to do so show through in what they actually did, and in enough of what they were recorded as saying. Being modern was a means of living up to the past.
But didn't artists and writers before these two look to the past for standards of quality? Of course. But it was a question of how one looked, and with how much urgency.
Modernism appeared in answer to a crisis. The surface aspect of that crisis was a certain confusion of standards brought on by romanticism. The romantics had already looked back into the past, the pre-eighteenth-century past, but had made the mistake in the end of trying to reinstall it. Architecture was where this attempt became most conspicuous, in the form of revivalism. Romantic architecture wasn't all that slavish, it wasn't the dead loss it's supposed to be, but still it didn't sufffice; it may have maintained a look of the past, but not its standards. It wasn't revised enough by later experience, or revised in the right way: as Baudelaire and Manet might have put it, it wasn't modern enough. There ensued finally an academicization of the arts everywhere except in music and prose fiction. Academicization isn't a matter of academies -- there were academies long before academicization and before the nineteenth century. Academicism consists in the tendency to take the medium of an art too much for granted. It results in blurring: words become imprecise, color gets muffled, the physical sources of sound become too much dissembled. (The piano, which dissembles its being a stringed instrument, was the romantic instrument par excellence; but it is as if precisely because it made a point of dissembling that it produced the wonderful music it did in romantic times, turning imprecision into a new kind of precision.)
Modernism's reaction against romanticism consisted in part in a new investigating and questioning of the medium in poetry and painting, and in an emphasis on preciseness, on the concrete. But above all Modernism declared itself by insisting on a renovation of standards, and it effected this by a more critical and less pious approach to the past in order to make it more genuinely relevant, more "modern." It reaffirmed the past in a new way and in a variety of new ways. And it belonged to this reaffirming that the balance was tipped toward emulation as against imitation more radically than ever before -- but only out of necessity, the necessity imposed by the reaffirmed and renovated standards.
Innovation, newness have gotten themselves taken as the hallmark of Modernism, newness as something desired and pursued. And yet all the great and lasting Modernist creators were reluctant innovators at bottom, innovators only because they had to be -- for the sake of quality, and for the sake of self-expression if you will. It's not only that some measure of innovation has always been essential to aesthetic quality above a certain level; it's also that Modernist innovation has been compelled to be, or look, more radical and abrupt than innovation used to be or look: compelled by an ongoing crisis in standards. Why this should be so, I can't try to account for here; it would take me too far afield and involve too much speculation. Let it sufffice for the moment to notice one thing: how with only a relatively small lapse of time the innovations of Modernism begin to look less and less radical, and how they almost all settle into place eventually as part of the continuum of high Western art, along with Shakespeare's verse and Rembrandt's drawings.
That rebellion and revolt, as well as radical innovation, have been associated with Modernism has its good as well as bad reasons. But the latter far outnumber the former. If rebellion and revolt have truly belonged to Modernism, it's been only when felt to be necessary in the interests of aesthetic value, not for political ends. That some Modernists have been unconventional in their way of life is beside the point. (Modernism, or the avant-garde, isn't to be identified with bohemia, which was there before Modernism, there in London's Grub Street in the eighteenth century, there in Paris by the I830s, if not before. Some Modernists have been bohemians more or less; many more others haven't been at all. Think of the impressionist painters, of Mallarme, of Schoenberg, of the sedate lives led by a Matisse, a T. S. Eliot. Not that I attach a particular value to a sedate as against a bohemian life; I'm just stating a fact.)
By way of illustration I'd like to go into a little detail about how modernism came about in painting. There the proto-Modernists were, of all people, the Pre-Raphaelites (and even before them, as proto-proto-Modernists, the German Nazarenes). The Pre-Raphaelites actually foretold Manet (with whom Modernist painting most definitely begins). They acted on a dissatisfaction with painting as practiced in their time, holding that its realism wasn't truthful enough. It seemed to belong to this want of truth that color wasn't allowed to speak out clearly and frankly, that it was being swathed more and more in neutral shading and shadows. This last they didn't say in so many words, but their art itself says it, with its brighter, higher-keyed color, which marks off Pre-Raphaelite painting in its day even more than its detailed realism (to which clearer color was necessary in any case). And it was the forthright, quasinaive color, as well as the quasi-innocent realism of fifteenth-century Italian art that they looked back to in calling themselves Pre-Raphaelite. They weren't at all the first artists to go back over time to a remoter past than the recent one. In the later eighteenth century, David, in France, had done that when he invoked antiquity against the rococo of his immediate predecessors, and the Renaissance had done that in appealing to antiquity against the Gothic. But it was the urgency with which the Pre-Raphaelites invoked a remoter past that was new. And it was a kind of urgency that carried over into Modernism proper and remained with it.
How much Manet knew of Pre-Raphaelism, I can't tell. But he too, ten years or so later than they, when he was starting out, became profoundly dissatisfied with the kind of painting he saw being done around him. That was toward the end of the I850s. But he put his finger on what dissatisfied him more "physically" than the Pre-Raphaelites had, and therefore, as I think, to more lasting effect. (From the seventeenth century on the English anticipated ever so much, in culture and the arts as well as in politics and social life, but usually left it to others to follow through on what they'd started.) Seeing a "Velazquez" in the Louvre (a picture now thought to be by Velazquez's son-in-law Mazo), he said how "clean" its color was compared to the "stews and gravies" of contemporary painting. Which "stews and gravies" were owed to that same color-muffling, graying and browning shading and shadowing that the Pre-Raphaelites had reacted against. Manet, in his own reaction, reached back to a nearer past than they had in order to "disencumber" his art of those "halftones" responsible for the "stews and gravies." He went only as far back as Velazquez to start with, and then even less far back, to another Spanish painter, Goya.
The impressionists, in Manet's wake, looked back to the Venetians insofar as they looked back, and so did Cézanne, that half-impressionist. Again, the looking back had to do with color, with warmer as well as franker color. Like the Pre-Raphaelites, like so many others in their time, the impressionists invoked truth to nature, and nature on bright days was luminous with warm color. But underneath all the invocations, the explanations, and the rationalizations, there was the "simple" aspiration to quality, to aesthetic value and excellence for its own sake, as end in itself. Art for art's sake. Modernism settled in in painting with impressionism, and with that, art for art's sake. For which same sake the successors in Modernism of the impressionists were forced to forget about truth to nature. They were forced to look even more outrageously new: Cézanne, Gauguin, Seurat, van Gogh, and all the Modernist painters after them -- for the sake of aesthetic value, aesthetic quality, nothing else.
I haven't finished with my exposition and definition of Modernism. The most essential part of it comes, finally, now. Modernism has to be understood as a holding operation, a continuing endeavor to maintain aesthetic standards in the face of threats -- not just as a reaction against romanticism. As the response, in effect, to an ongoing emergency. Artists in all times, despite some appearances to the contrary, have sought aesthetic excellence. What singles Modernism out and gives it its place and identity more than anything else is its response to a heightened sense of threats to aesthetic value: threats from the social and material ambience, from the temper of the times, all conveyed through the demands of a new and open cultural market, middlebrow demands. Modernism dates from the time, in the mid-nineteenth century, when that market became not only established -- it had been there long before -- but entrenched and dominant, without significant competition.
So I come at last to what I offer as an embracing and perdurable definition of Modernism: that it consists in the continuing endeavor to stem the decline of aesthetic standards threatened by the relative democratization of culture under industrialism; that the overriding and innermost logic of Modernism is to maintain the levels of the past in the face of an opposition that hadn't been present in the past. Thus the whole enterprise of Modernism, for all its outward aspects, can be seen as backward-looking. That seems paradoxical, but reality is shot through with paradox, is practically constituted by it.
It also belongs to my definition of Modernism that the continuing effort to maintain standards and levels has brought about the widening recognition that art, that aesthetic experience no longer needs to be justified in other terms than its own, that art is an end in itself and that the aesthetic is an autonomous value. It could now be acknowledged that art doesn't have to teach, doesn't have to celebrate or glorify anybody or anything, doesn't have to advance causes; that it has become free to distance itself from religion, politics, and even morality. All it has to do is be good as art. This recognition stays. It doesn't matter that it's still not generally -- or rather consciously -- accepted, that art for art's sake still isn't a respectable notion. It's acted on, and in fact it's always been acted on. It's been the underlying reality of the practice of art all along, but it took Modernism to bring this out into the open.
But to return to postmodern. A friend and colleague had been to a symposium about postmodern last spring. I asked him how the term had gotten defined at that symposium. As art, he answered, that was no longer self-critical. I felt a pang. I myself had written twenty years ago that self-criticism was a distinguishing trait of Modernist art. My friend's answer made me realize as I hadn't before how inadequate that was as a conveying definition of Modernism or the modern. (That I hadn't the presence of mind to ask my friend just how self-critical art could be told from art that wasn't self-critical was only incidental. We both understood, in any case, that it hadn't to do with the difference between abstract and figurative, just as we also understood that the modern wasn't confined to particular styles, modes, or directions of art.)
If the definition of Modernism or the modern that I now offer has any validity, then the crucial word in "postmodernism" becomes "post." The real, the only real, question becomes what it is that's come after and superseded the modern; again, not in a temporal sense, but in a style-historical one. But it's no use, as I said in the beginning, asking the critics and journalists who talk "postmodern" (which includes my friend); they disagree too much among themselves and resort too much to cloudy generalizations. And anyhow there's nobody among them whose eye I trust.
In the end I find myself having to presume to tell all these people what I think they mean by their talk about the postmodern. That is, I find myself attributing motives to them, and the attributing of motives is offensive. All the same, I feel forced to do so, by the nature of the case.
As I said, Modernism was called into being by the new and formidable threats to aesthetic standards that emerged, or finished emerging, toward the middle of the nineteenth century. The romantic crisis, as I call it, was, as it now seems, an expression of the new situation, and in some ways an expression of the threats themselves insofar as they worked to bring about a confusion of standards and levels. Without these threats, which came mostly from a new middle-class public, there would have been no such thing as Modernism. Again as I said earlier, Modernism is a holding operation, a coping with an ongoing emergency. The threats persist; they are as much there as they ever were. And right now they may have become even more formidable because more disguised, more deceptive. It used to be the easily identifiable philistines who did the threatening. They are still here but hardly matter. Now the threats to aesthetic standards, to quality, come from closer to home, from within it were, from friends of advanced art. The "advanced" used to be coterminous with Modernism, but these friends hold that Modernism is no longer advanced enough; that it has to be hurried on, hurried into "postmodernism." That it will fall behind the times if it continues to be concerned with such things as standards and quality. I'm not manipulating the evidence here in order to make a rhetorical point; just take a look at what these "postmodern" people like and at what they don't like in current art. They happen, I think, to be a more dangerous threat to high art than old-time philistines ever were. They bring philistine taste up-to-date by disguising it as its opposite, wrapping it in high-flown art jargon. Notice how that jargon proliferates nowadays, in New York and Paris and London, if not in Sydney. Realize, too, how compromised words like "advanced," as well as "avant-garde," have become of late. Underneath it all lies the defective eye of the people concerned; their bad taste in visual art.
The making of superior art is arduous, usually. But under Modernism the appreciation, even more than the making, of it has become more taxing, the satisfaction and exhilaration to be gotten from the best new art more hard-won. Over the past hundred and thirty years and more the best new painting and sculpture (and the best new poetry) have in their time proven a challenge and a trial to the art lover -- a challenge and a trial as they hadn't used to be. Yet the urge to relax is there, as it's always been. It threatens and keeps on threatening standards of quality. (It was different, apparently, before the mid-nineteenth century.) That the urge to relax expresses itself in changing ways does but testify to its persistence. The "postmodern" business is one more expression of that urge. And it's a way, above all, to justify oneself in preferring less demanding art without being called reactionary or retarded (which is the greatest fear of the newfangled philistines of advancedness).
The yearning for relaxation became outspoken in presumedly avant-garde circles for the first time with Duchamp and dada, and then in certain aspects of surrealism. But it was with pop art that it became a fully confident expression. And that confidence has stayed in all the different fashions and trends of professedly and supposedly advanced art since then. What I notice is that the succession of these trends has involved, from the first, a retreat from major to minor quality; and a cause for concern about the state of contemporary art is just that: the retreat from the major to the minor, the hailing of the minor as major, or else the claim that the difference between the two isn't important. Not that I look down on minor art, not at all. But without the perpetuation of major art, minor art falls off too. When the highest levels of quality are no longer upheld in practice or taste or appreciation, then the lower levels sink lower. That's the way it's always been, and I don't see that way changing now.
The notion of the postmodern has sprouted and spread in that same relaxing climate of taste and opinion in which pop art and its successors thrive. It represents wishful thinking for the most part; those who talk about the postmodern are too ready to greet it. Yes, if the modern, if Modernism, is over and done with, then there'll be surcease, relief. At the same time art history will have been kept going, and we critics and journalists will have kept abreast of it. But I happen to think that Modernism isn't finished, certainly not in painting or sculpture. Art is still being made that challenges the longing for relaxation and relief and makes high demands on taste (demands that are more taxing because deceptive: the best new art of latter years innovates in a less spectacular way than the best new art used to under Modernism). Modernism, insofar as it consists in the upholding of the highest standards, survives -- survives in the face of this new rationalization for the lowering of standards.
"... At this same party [a] friend introduced the then comparatively young art critic Clement Greenberg... Marianne seemed to be familiar with his writing and said, on shaking hands, "Oh, the fearless Mr. Greenberg."
-- Elizabeth Bishop in Efforts of Affection: A Memoir of Marianne Moore
Clement Greenberg (January 16, 1909 – May 7, 1994) was an influential American art critic closely associated with Modern art in the United States. In particular, he promoted the abstract expressionist movement and was among the first critics to praise the work of painter Jackson Pollock.
Greenberg was a graduate of Syracuse University who first made his name as an art critic with his essay "Avant-Garde and Kitsch," first published in the journal Partisan Review in 1939. In this article Greenberg claimed that avant-garde and Modernist art was a means to resist the leveling of culture produced by capitalist propaganda. Greenberg appropriated the German word 'kitsch' to describe this consumerism, though its connotations have since changed to a more affirmative notion of left-over materials of capitalist culture. Modern art, like philosophy, explored the conditions under which we experience and understand the world. It does not simply provide information about it in the manner of an illustratively accurate depiction of the world. "Avant Garde and Kitsch" was also a politically motivated essay in part a response to the destruction and repression of Modernist Art in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union and its replacement with state ordained styles of "Aryan" art and "Socialist realism."
In December 1950, he joined the CIA fronted American Committee for Cultural Freedom. Greenberg believed Modernism provided a critical commentary on experience. It was constantly changing to adapt to kitsch pseudo-culture, which was itself always developing. In the years after World War II, Greenberg pushed the position that the best avant-garde artists were emerging in America rather than Europe. Particularly, he championed Jackson Pollock as the greatest painter of his generation, commemorating the artist's "all-over" gestural canvases. In the 1955 essay "American-Type Painting" Greenberg promoted the work of Abstract Expressionists, among them Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Hans Hofmann, Barnett Newman, and Clyfford Still, as the next stage in Modernist art, arguing that these painters were moving towards greater emphasis on the 'flatness' of the picture plane. As part of his program to promote the principle of medium specificity in the arts, Greenberg stressed that this flatness separated their art from the Old Masters, who considered flatness an obtrusive hurdle in painting. Greenberg argued for a method of self-criticism that transported abstract painting from decorative 'wallpaper patterns' to high art. Greenberg's view that, after the war, the United States had become the guardian of 'advanced art' was taken up in some quarters as a reason for using Abstract Expressionism as the basis for Cultural Propaganda exercises. He praised similar movements abroad and, after the success of the Painters Eleven exhibition in 1956 with the American Abstract Artists at New York's Riverside Gallery, he travelled to Toronto to see the group's work in 1957. He was particularly impressed by the potential of painters William Ronald and Jack Bush, and later developed a close friendship with Bush. Greenberg saw Bush's post-Painters Eleven work as a clear manifestation of the shift from abstract expressionism to Color Field painting and Lyrical Abstraction, a shift he had called for in most of his critical writings of the period.
Greenberg's taste led him to reject the Pop Art of the 1960s, a trend clearly influenced by kitsch culture. Through the 1960s Greenberg remained an influential figure on a younger generation of critics including Michael Fried and Rosalind E. Krauss. Greenberg's antagonism to 'Postmodernist' theories and socially engaged movements in art caused him to lose influence amongst both artists and art critics.Such was Greenberg's influence as an art critic that Tom Wolfe in his 1975 book The Painted Word identified Greenberg as one of the "kings of cultureburg", alongside Harold Rosenberg and Leo Steinberg. Wolfe contended that these critics influence was too great on the world of art.
Eventually, Greenberg was concerned that some Abstract Expressionism had been "reduced to a set of mannerisms" and increasingly looked to a new set of artists who abandoned such elements as subject matter, connection with the artist, and definite brush strokes. Greenberg suggested this process attained a level of 'purity' (a word he only used in quotes) that would reveal the truthfulness of the canvas, and the two-dimensional aspects of the space (flatness). Greenberg coined the term "Post-Painterly Abstraction" to distinguish it from Abstract Expressionism, or Painterly Abstraction, as Greenberg preferred to call it. Post-Painterly Abstraction was a term given to a myriad of abstract art that reacted against gestural abstraction of second-generation Abstract Expressionists. Among the dominant trends in the Post-Painterly Abstraction are Hard-Edged Painters such as Ellsworth Kelly and Frank Stella who explored relationships between tightly ruled shapes and edges, in Stella's case, between the shapes depicted on the surface and the literal shape of the support and Color-Field Painters such as Helen Frankenthaler and Morris Louis, who stained first Magna then water-based acrylic paints into unprimed canvas, exploring tactile and optical aspects of large, vivid fields of pure, open color. The line between these movements is tenuous, however as artists such as Kenneth Noland utilized aspects of both movements in his art. Post-Painterly Abstraction is generally seen as continuing the Modernist dialectic of self-criticism.
This is Greenberg's last essay on modernism. In it he recants his "elegant" definition of the 1960 essay, and adds the conviction that modernism constitutes a kind of holding operation again the levelling and relaxing tendencies of middlebrow taste. In this it recalls (if memory serves) a remark by Samuel Johnson that criticism seeks to maintain standards in the face of their continual tendency to deteriorate.
-- TF
REFERENCE: - William Dobell Memorial Lecture, Sydney, Australia, Oct 31, 1979Arts 54, No.6 (February 1980)
"POSTMODERN" IS A RATHER NEW TERM. It's a catchy one and has been coming up more and more often in talk and writing about the arts, and not only about the arts. I'm not clear as to just what it points to except in the case of architecture. There we know more or less definitely what "modern" means, so we're better able to tell what "post" means when prefixed to "modern." Modern architecture means -- to put it roughly -- functional, geometric rigor and the eschewing of decoration or ornament. Buildings have been put up or projected lately that break with these canons of style, and therefore have gotten called postmodern. Everybody concerned knows what's meant, including the architects themselves.
Can postmodern be identified in an equally agreed upon way in any of the other arts? I haven't yet seen or heard the term applied in earnest to anything in recent literature. It's come up in connection with music, but haphazardly and with no agreement about what it means there. And from what I can tell it comes up hardly at all in talk about the dance or the movies. Away from architecture, it's in the area of painting and sculpture that I've mostly heard and seen postmodern used -- but only by critics and journalists, not by artists themselves.
There are reasons and reasons here. One possible reason is the return to the foreground of figurative or representational pictorial art. But there's been enough precedent, since De Chirico and surrealism and neoromanticism, for including figurative art in the modern. There have to be other, less obvious, and at the same time more general reasons for the currency of postmodern in talk about recent painting and sculpture. All the more because no critic or journalist I'm aware of who makes free with postmodern points to any specific body of work he or she feels really confident in calling that.
Now the post in postmodern can be taken in a temporal chronological sense. Anything that comes after something else is "post" that something else. But this isn't quite the way in which postmodern is used. It's supposed, rather, to mean or imply art that supersedes, replaces, succeeds the modern in terms of stylistic evolution, the way that the baroque succeeded mannerism and the rococo succeeded the baroque. The corollary is that the modern is over and done with, just as mannerism was over and done with when superseded by the baroque. But the problem for those who claim this becomes to specify what they mean, not by post, but by modern. Anything in its own time can be called modern. However, what we usually mean by modern is something considered up-to-date, abreast of the times, and going beyond the past in more than a temporally or chronologically literal sense.
Well, how are you to decide what is and what isn't modern in present-day art in a sense that goes beyond the literal one? There's no rule, no principle, no method. It comes down to a question of tastes, or else a terminological quibble. Different stylistic definitions of the modern have been proposed in every generation since the word first came into circulation as applicable to painting and sculpture in more than a merely temporal sense, and none of them have held. Nor have any of those offered by the proponents of the postmodern, whether stylistic or not.
I want to take the risk of offering my own definition of the modern, but it will be more in the nature of an explanation and description than a definition. First of all, I want to change the term in question from modern to Modernist -- Modernist with a capital M -- and then to talk about Modernism instead of the modern. Modernism has the great advantage of being a more historically placeable term, one that designates a historically -- not just chronologically -- definable phenomenon: something that began at a certain time, and may or may not still be with us.
What can be safely called Modernism emerged in the middle of the last century. And rather locally, in France, with Baudelaire in literature and Manet in painting, and maybe with Flaubert too, in prose fiction. (It was a while later, and not so locally, that Modernism appeared in music and architecture, but it was in France again that it appeared first in sculpture. Outside France later still, it entered the dance.) The "avant-garde" was what Modernism was called at first, but this term has become a good deal compromised by now as well as remaining misleading. Contrary to the common notion, Modernism or the avant-garde didn't make its entrance by breaking with the past. Far from it. Nor did it have such a thing as a program, nor has it really ever had one -- again, contrary to the common notion. Nor was it an affair of ideas or theories or ideology. It's been in the nature, rather, of an attitude and an orientation: an attitude and orientation to standards and levels: standards and levels of aesthetic quality in the first and also the last place. And where did the Modernists get their standards and levels from? From the past, that is, the best of the past. But not so much from particular models in the past -- though from these too -- as from a generalized feeling and apprehending, a kind of distilling and extracting of aesthetic quality as shown by the best of the past. And it wasn't a question of imitating but one of emulating -- just as it had been for the Renaissance with respect to antiquity. It's true that Baudelaire and Manet talked much more about having to be modern, about reflecting life in their time, than about matching the best of the past. But the need and the ambition to do so show through in what they actually did, and in enough of what they were recorded as saying. Being modern was a means of living up to the past.
But didn't artists and writers before these two look to the past for standards of quality? Of course. But it was a question of how one looked, and with how much urgency.
Modernism appeared in answer to a crisis. The surface aspect of that crisis was a certain confusion of standards brought on by romanticism. The romantics had already looked back into the past, the pre-eighteenth-century past, but had made the mistake in the end of trying to reinstall it. Architecture was where this attempt became most conspicuous, in the form of revivalism. Romantic architecture wasn't all that slavish, it wasn't the dead loss it's supposed to be, but still it didn't sufffice; it may have maintained a look of the past, but not its standards. It wasn't revised enough by later experience, or revised in the right way: as Baudelaire and Manet might have put it, it wasn't modern enough. There ensued finally an academicization of the arts everywhere except in music and prose fiction. Academicization isn't a matter of academies -- there were academies long before academicization and before the nineteenth century. Academicism consists in the tendency to take the medium of an art too much for granted. It results in blurring: words become imprecise, color gets muffled, the physical sources of sound become too much dissembled. (The piano, which dissembles its being a stringed instrument, was the romantic instrument par excellence; but it is as if precisely because it made a point of dissembling that it produced the wonderful music it did in romantic times, turning imprecision into a new kind of precision.)
Modernism's reaction against romanticism consisted in part in a new investigating and questioning of the medium in poetry and painting, and in an emphasis on preciseness, on the concrete. But above all Modernism declared itself by insisting on a renovation of standards, and it effected this by a more critical and less pious approach to the past in order to make it more genuinely relevant, more "modern." It reaffirmed the past in a new way and in a variety of new ways. And it belonged to this reaffirming that the balance was tipped toward emulation as against imitation more radically than ever before -- but only out of necessity, the necessity imposed by the reaffirmed and renovated standards.
Innovation, newness have gotten themselves taken as the hallmark of Modernism, newness as something desired and pursued. And yet all the great and lasting Modernist creators were reluctant innovators at bottom, innovators only because they had to be -- for the sake of quality, and for the sake of self-expression if you will. It's not only that some measure of innovation has always been essential to aesthetic quality above a certain level; it's also that Modernist innovation has been compelled to be, or look, more radical and abrupt than innovation used to be or look: compelled by an ongoing crisis in standards. Why this should be so, I can't try to account for here; it would take me too far afield and involve too much speculation. Let it sufffice for the moment to notice one thing: how with only a relatively small lapse of time the innovations of Modernism begin to look less and less radical, and how they almost all settle into place eventually as part of the continuum of high Western art, along with Shakespeare's verse and Rembrandt's drawings.
That rebellion and revolt, as well as radical innovation, have been associated with Modernism has its good as well as bad reasons. But the latter far outnumber the former. If rebellion and revolt have truly belonged to Modernism, it's been only when felt to be necessary in the interests of aesthetic value, not for political ends. That some Modernists have been unconventional in their way of life is beside the point. (Modernism, or the avant-garde, isn't to be identified with bohemia, which was there before Modernism, there in London's Grub Street in the eighteenth century, there in Paris by the I830s, if not before. Some Modernists have been bohemians more or less; many more others haven't been at all. Think of the impressionist painters, of Mallarme, of Schoenberg, of the sedate lives led by a Matisse, a T. S. Eliot. Not that I attach a particular value to a sedate as against a bohemian life; I'm just stating a fact.)
By way of illustration I'd like to go into a little detail about how modernism came about in painting. There the proto-Modernists were, of all people, the Pre-Raphaelites (and even before them, as proto-proto-Modernists, the German Nazarenes). The Pre-Raphaelites actually foretold Manet (with whom Modernist painting most definitely begins). They acted on a dissatisfaction with painting as practiced in their time, holding that its realism wasn't truthful enough. It seemed to belong to this want of truth that color wasn't allowed to speak out clearly and frankly, that it was being swathed more and more in neutral shading and shadows. This last they didn't say in so many words, but their art itself says it, with its brighter, higher-keyed color, which marks off Pre-Raphaelite painting in its day even more than its detailed realism (to which clearer color was necessary in any case). And it was the forthright, quasinaive color, as well as the quasi-innocent realism of fifteenth-century Italian art that they looked back to in calling themselves Pre-Raphaelite. They weren't at all the first artists to go back over time to a remoter past than the recent one. In the later eighteenth century, David, in France, had done that when he invoked antiquity against the rococo of his immediate predecessors, and the Renaissance had done that in appealing to antiquity against the Gothic. But it was the urgency with which the Pre-Raphaelites invoked a remoter past that was new. And it was a kind of urgency that carried over into Modernism proper and remained with it.
How much Manet knew of Pre-Raphaelism, I can't tell. But he too, ten years or so later than they, when he was starting out, became profoundly dissatisfied with the kind of painting he saw being done around him. That was toward the end of the I850s. But he put his finger on what dissatisfied him more "physically" than the Pre-Raphaelites had, and therefore, as I think, to more lasting effect. (From the seventeenth century on the English anticipated ever so much, in culture and the arts as well as in politics and social life, but usually left it to others to follow through on what they'd started.) Seeing a "Velazquez" in the Louvre (a picture now thought to be by Velazquez's son-in-law Mazo), he said how "clean" its color was compared to the "stews and gravies" of contemporary painting. Which "stews and gravies" were owed to that same color-muffling, graying and browning shading and shadowing that the Pre-Raphaelites had reacted against. Manet, in his own reaction, reached back to a nearer past than they had in order to "disencumber" his art of those "halftones" responsible for the "stews and gravies." He went only as far back as Velazquez to start with, and then even less far back, to another Spanish painter, Goya.
The impressionists, in Manet's wake, looked back to the Venetians insofar as they looked back, and so did Cézanne, that half-impressionist. Again, the looking back had to do with color, with warmer as well as franker color. Like the Pre-Raphaelites, like so many others in their time, the impressionists invoked truth to nature, and nature on bright days was luminous with warm color. But underneath all the invocations, the explanations, and the rationalizations, there was the "simple" aspiration to quality, to aesthetic value and excellence for its own sake, as end in itself. Art for art's sake. Modernism settled in in painting with impressionism, and with that, art for art's sake. For which same sake the successors in Modernism of the impressionists were forced to forget about truth to nature. They were forced to look even more outrageously new: Cézanne, Gauguin, Seurat, van Gogh, and all the Modernist painters after them -- for the sake of aesthetic value, aesthetic quality, nothing else.
I haven't finished with my exposition and definition of Modernism. The most essential part of it comes, finally, now. Modernism has to be understood as a holding operation, a continuing endeavor to maintain aesthetic standards in the face of threats -- not just as a reaction against romanticism. As the response, in effect, to an ongoing emergency. Artists in all times, despite some appearances to the contrary, have sought aesthetic excellence. What singles Modernism out and gives it its place and identity more than anything else is its response to a heightened sense of threats to aesthetic value: threats from the social and material ambience, from the temper of the times, all conveyed through the demands of a new and open cultural market, middlebrow demands. Modernism dates from the time, in the mid-nineteenth century, when that market became not only established -- it had been there long before -- but entrenched and dominant, without significant competition.
So I come at last to what I offer as an embracing and perdurable definition of Modernism: that it consists in the continuing endeavor to stem the decline of aesthetic standards threatened by the relative democratization of culture under industrialism; that the overriding and innermost logic of Modernism is to maintain the levels of the past in the face of an opposition that hadn't been present in the past. Thus the whole enterprise of Modernism, for all its outward aspects, can be seen as backward-looking. That seems paradoxical, but reality is shot through with paradox, is practically constituted by it.
It also belongs to my definition of Modernism that the continuing effort to maintain standards and levels has brought about the widening recognition that art, that aesthetic experience no longer needs to be justified in other terms than its own, that art is an end in itself and that the aesthetic is an autonomous value. It could now be acknowledged that art doesn't have to teach, doesn't have to celebrate or glorify anybody or anything, doesn't have to advance causes; that it has become free to distance itself from religion, politics, and even morality. All it has to do is be good as art. This recognition stays. It doesn't matter that it's still not generally -- or rather consciously -- accepted, that art for art's sake still isn't a respectable notion. It's acted on, and in fact it's always been acted on. It's been the underlying reality of the practice of art all along, but it took Modernism to bring this out into the open.
But to return to postmodern. A friend and colleague had been to a symposium about postmodern last spring. I asked him how the term had gotten defined at that symposium. As art, he answered, that was no longer self-critical. I felt a pang. I myself had written twenty years ago that self-criticism was a distinguishing trait of Modernist art. My friend's answer made me realize as I hadn't before how inadequate that was as a conveying definition of Modernism or the modern. (That I hadn't the presence of mind to ask my friend just how self-critical art could be told from art that wasn't self-critical was only incidental. We both understood, in any case, that it hadn't to do with the difference between abstract and figurative, just as we also understood that the modern wasn't confined to particular styles, modes, or directions of art.)
If the definition of Modernism or the modern that I now offer has any validity, then the crucial word in "postmodernism" becomes "post." The real, the only real, question becomes what it is that's come after and superseded the modern; again, not in a temporal sense, but in a style-historical one. But it's no use, as I said in the beginning, asking the critics and journalists who talk "postmodern" (which includes my friend); they disagree too much among themselves and resort too much to cloudy generalizations. And anyhow there's nobody among them whose eye I trust.
In the end I find myself having to presume to tell all these people what I think they mean by their talk about the postmodern. That is, I find myself attributing motives to them, and the attributing of motives is offensive. All the same, I feel forced to do so, by the nature of the case.
As I said, Modernism was called into being by the new and formidable threats to aesthetic standards that emerged, or finished emerging, toward the middle of the nineteenth century. The romantic crisis, as I call it, was, as it now seems, an expression of the new situation, and in some ways an expression of the threats themselves insofar as they worked to bring about a confusion of standards and levels. Without these threats, which came mostly from a new middle-class public, there would have been no such thing as Modernism. Again as I said earlier, Modernism is a holding operation, a coping with an ongoing emergency. The threats persist; they are as much there as they ever were. And right now they may have become even more formidable because more disguised, more deceptive. It used to be the easily identifiable philistines who did the threatening. They are still here but hardly matter. Now the threats to aesthetic standards, to quality, come from closer to home, from within it were, from friends of advanced art. The "advanced" used to be coterminous with Modernism, but these friends hold that Modernism is no longer advanced enough; that it has to be hurried on, hurried into "postmodernism." That it will fall behind the times if it continues to be concerned with such things as standards and quality. I'm not manipulating the evidence here in order to make a rhetorical point; just take a look at what these "postmodern" people like and at what they don't like in current art. They happen, I think, to be a more dangerous threat to high art than old-time philistines ever were. They bring philistine taste up-to-date by disguising it as its opposite, wrapping it in high-flown art jargon. Notice how that jargon proliferates nowadays, in New York and Paris and London, if not in Sydney. Realize, too, how compromised words like "advanced," as well as "avant-garde," have become of late. Underneath it all lies the defective eye of the people concerned; their bad taste in visual art.
The making of superior art is arduous, usually. But under Modernism the appreciation, even more than the making, of it has become more taxing, the satisfaction and exhilaration to be gotten from the best new art more hard-won. Over the past hundred and thirty years and more the best new painting and sculpture (and the best new poetry) have in their time proven a challenge and a trial to the art lover -- a challenge and a trial as they hadn't used to be. Yet the urge to relax is there, as it's always been. It threatens and keeps on threatening standards of quality. (It was different, apparently, before the mid-nineteenth century.) That the urge to relax expresses itself in changing ways does but testify to its persistence. The "postmodern" business is one more expression of that urge. And it's a way, above all, to justify oneself in preferring less demanding art without being called reactionary or retarded (which is the greatest fear of the newfangled philistines of advancedness).
The yearning for relaxation became outspoken in presumedly avant-garde circles for the first time with Duchamp and dada, and then in certain aspects of surrealism. But it was with pop art that it became a fully confident expression. And that confidence has stayed in all the different fashions and trends of professedly and supposedly advanced art since then. What I notice is that the succession of these trends has involved, from the first, a retreat from major to minor quality; and a cause for concern about the state of contemporary art is just that: the retreat from the major to the minor, the hailing of the minor as major, or else the claim that the difference between the two isn't important. Not that I look down on minor art, not at all. But without the perpetuation of major art, minor art falls off too. When the highest levels of quality are no longer upheld in practice or taste or appreciation, then the lower levels sink lower. That's the way it's always been, and I don't see that way changing now.
The notion of the postmodern has sprouted and spread in that same relaxing climate of taste and opinion in which pop art and its successors thrive. It represents wishful thinking for the most part; those who talk about the postmodern are too ready to greet it. Yes, if the modern, if Modernism, is over and done with, then there'll be surcease, relief. At the same time art history will have been kept going, and we critics and journalists will have kept abreast of it. But I happen to think that Modernism isn't finished, certainly not in painting or sculpture. Art is still being made that challenges the longing for relaxation and relief and makes high demands on taste (demands that are more taxing because deceptive: the best new art of latter years innovates in a less spectacular way than the best new art used to under Modernism). Modernism, insofar as it consists in the upholding of the highest standards, survives -- survives in the face of this new rationalization for the lowering of standards.
Saturday, September 5, 2009
SENI LUKIS DI MALAYSIA
PERKEMBANGAN SENI LUKIS DI MALAYSIA
Tahun 1930-an dan 1940-an
Seni halus (lukisan, catan, cetakan, arca dll) bermula pada tahun 1930-an dengan terciptanya catan awal oleh Yong Mun Sen, Abdullah Ariff. Pelukis Malaysia bebas daripada sebarang kongkongan kerana belum terdedah kepada aliran dari barat. Pendedahan hanya tertumpu kepada penghasilan rakan seperjuangan. Karya mereka mentah dan tidak halus kerana tiada bimbingan.
Tahun 1950-an
Awal tahun 1950-an, Malaysia mula mempunyai pelukis yang berkedudukan dan dedikasi seperti Yong Mun Sen, Abdullah Ariff, Cheong Soo Pieng, Khaw Sia. Alam seni halus Malaysia masih suram dan kurang memberangsangkan. Ketibaan Mohammed Hoessein Enas dari Indonesia telah membawa era baru dalam aliran naturalis dengan melukis figura manusia kepada pelukis tempatan.Tay Hooi Keat yang baru pulang dari United Kingdom memperkenalkan asas seni lukis seperti bentuk, garisan, rupa, warna, jalinan dan sebagainya.
Tahun 1960-an
Era 1960-an dikatakan merupakan penghasilan karya yang matang dari pelukis-pelukis Malaysia. Pelukis-pelukis bukan sahaja menganut aliran impresionis malah lebih berani dalam aliran ekspresionis, pop, konseptual, op dan lain-lain.
Tahun 1970-an
Pelukis seperti Redza Puyadasa, Sulaiman Haji Esa, Chong Kam Kow, Tan Teong Eng dan Joseph Tan telah menggegarkan dunia seni lukis tempatan dengan ungkapan-ungkapan yang mencabar.Catan hard-edge yang menegaskan kedataran dan tanpa isyarat yang dipelopor oleh Chong Kam Kow, Tan Teong Eng dan Tong Tuck Kan telah menjadi ikutan. Abdul Latif Mohidin telah menghidupkan pendekatan baru dalam lukisan.Karya catan masa ini mengandungi nilai ikon dengan tegasan monolitik.
Tahun 1980-an
Awal tahun1980-an mengemukakan bidang kanvas yang lebih luas dan menarik dengan munculnya catan pemandangan yang naïf, sambungan akademik aliran realisme dan karya-karya yang berprinsipkan mitos dan legenda yang kaya di rantau ini. Terdapat juga pelukis yang mendekatkan diri kepada subjek-subjek yang berkaitan dengan keadaan dan peristiwa yang berlaku dalam negara, warisan budaya serantau, sosial dan politik yang berkontekskan Islam.
Tahun 1930-an dan 1940-an
Seni halus (lukisan, catan, cetakan, arca dll) bermula pada tahun 1930-an dengan terciptanya catan awal oleh Yong Mun Sen, Abdullah Ariff. Pelukis Malaysia bebas daripada sebarang kongkongan kerana belum terdedah kepada aliran dari barat. Pendedahan hanya tertumpu kepada penghasilan rakan seperjuangan. Karya mereka mentah dan tidak halus kerana tiada bimbingan.
Tahun 1950-an
Awal tahun 1950-an, Malaysia mula mempunyai pelukis yang berkedudukan dan dedikasi seperti Yong Mun Sen, Abdullah Ariff, Cheong Soo Pieng, Khaw Sia. Alam seni halus Malaysia masih suram dan kurang memberangsangkan. Ketibaan Mohammed Hoessein Enas dari Indonesia telah membawa era baru dalam aliran naturalis dengan melukis figura manusia kepada pelukis tempatan.Tay Hooi Keat yang baru pulang dari United Kingdom memperkenalkan asas seni lukis seperti bentuk, garisan, rupa, warna, jalinan dan sebagainya.
Tahun 1960-an
Era 1960-an dikatakan merupakan penghasilan karya yang matang dari pelukis-pelukis Malaysia. Pelukis-pelukis bukan sahaja menganut aliran impresionis malah lebih berani dalam aliran ekspresionis, pop, konseptual, op dan lain-lain.
Tahun 1970-an
Pelukis seperti Redza Puyadasa, Sulaiman Haji Esa, Chong Kam Kow, Tan Teong Eng dan Joseph Tan telah menggegarkan dunia seni lukis tempatan dengan ungkapan-ungkapan yang mencabar.Catan hard-edge yang menegaskan kedataran dan tanpa isyarat yang dipelopor oleh Chong Kam Kow, Tan Teong Eng dan Tong Tuck Kan telah menjadi ikutan. Abdul Latif Mohidin telah menghidupkan pendekatan baru dalam lukisan.Karya catan masa ini mengandungi nilai ikon dengan tegasan monolitik.
Tahun 1980-an
Awal tahun1980-an mengemukakan bidang kanvas yang lebih luas dan menarik dengan munculnya catan pemandangan yang naïf, sambungan akademik aliran realisme dan karya-karya yang berprinsipkan mitos dan legenda yang kaya di rantau ini. Terdapat juga pelukis yang mendekatkan diri kepada subjek-subjek yang berkaitan dengan keadaan dan peristiwa yang berlaku dalam negara, warisan budaya serantau, sosial dan politik yang berkontekskan Islam.
Tuesday, August 18, 2009
OUT OF NOW
Fineart Photo: ZHANG PENG
Zhang Peng, Yi Fan No.1, 2006, Photograph, 120 x 120 cm
Zhang Peng's photographs look like stills from fantasy animation films; they are in fact documents of elaborate sets featuring little girls. Originally trained as a painter, Zhang approaches his compositions with a heightened sense of drama, using intense colours, theatrical props, and obscure angles of perspective to create a sense of artifice and illusion from reality.
Zhang uses the medium of photography to subvert its archetypal associations of perfect representations and sentimental keepsakes. Portraits of children that would normally convey hope and aspiration, through Zhang's lens, transform to grotesque distortions. In Gui Fei, a child dressed as a traditional bride appears manufactured and doll-like, her identity moulded and objectified by parental and social expectation. As in many of Zhang's photos, her eyes have been manipulated to enhance her 'flawless' appearance, referencing the 'westernised' feminine ideals disseminated in Asian media, as well as the increasing trend in plastic surgery.
Underlying themes of psychological pressure and alienation run throughout Zhang's work. His Yi Fan series pictures prepubescent girls in opulently beautiful yet ominous environments. Zhang draws from the devices of science fiction to create an aura of exotic premonition: entrapped by a barrage of arrows or wandering through a field with their heads encased in plastic, his futuristic youths become evocative terrains of vulnerability and corrupted innocence.
David Noonan
Beginning each of his screen prints by making a collage, David Noonan brings together an eclectic array of found imagery – sourced from film stills, books, magazines, and archive photos – to create dramatic scenes that suggest surreal narratives. These collages are then photographed and turned into large-scale screen prints, a technique remarkable for its sumptuous finish that relates to both artistic authenticity and mass media. Printed in harsh contrast black and white, Noonan’s images encapsulate the romanticism of golden age cinema, and its associations to memory, fiction, and modern mythology.
Approaching image making with an auteur’s indulgence, Noonan presents a fabricated vision that is awesome in its complexity. Using the liturgy of art itself as a departure point for invention, Noonan conceives his work as ‘documentation’ of plausible performances: his cast of characters are positioned as participators in highly elaborate artworks, invoking covert and futuristic ritual. Stylistically referencing Surrealism and experimental film, Noonan’s work poses as the aesthetic remnants of ‘lost masterpieces’, weaving his own extravagant fantasies into fabric of collective consciousness.
Piecing together plausible narratives from his readymade motifs, Noonan renders the intimacy of psychological space as indistinguishable from public cognisance. Using the qualities of photomontage to replicate the linear aspects of film, Noonan’s disparate imagery collates to convey a transient sense of time and space that is both theatrical and strangely insular. Through his process of screen printing, Noonan capitalises on the effects of transluscent layering and exaggerated lighting to replicate the flickering chimera of cinematic projection; an intangible illusion simulating the abstraction of dreams.
Zhang Peng, Yi Fan No.1, 2006, Photograph, 120 x 120 cm
Zhang Peng's photographs look like stills from fantasy animation films; they are in fact documents of elaborate sets featuring little girls. Originally trained as a painter, Zhang approaches his compositions with a heightened sense of drama, using intense colours, theatrical props, and obscure angles of perspective to create a sense of artifice and illusion from reality.
Zhang uses the medium of photography to subvert its archetypal associations of perfect representations and sentimental keepsakes. Portraits of children that would normally convey hope and aspiration, through Zhang's lens, transform to grotesque distortions. In Gui Fei, a child dressed as a traditional bride appears manufactured and doll-like, her identity moulded and objectified by parental and social expectation. As in many of Zhang's photos, her eyes have been manipulated to enhance her 'flawless' appearance, referencing the 'westernised' feminine ideals disseminated in Asian media, as well as the increasing trend in plastic surgery.
Underlying themes of psychological pressure and alienation run throughout Zhang's work. His Yi Fan series pictures prepubescent girls in opulently beautiful yet ominous environments. Zhang draws from the devices of science fiction to create an aura of exotic premonition: entrapped by a barrage of arrows or wandering through a field with their heads encased in plastic, his futuristic youths become evocative terrains of vulnerability and corrupted innocence.
David Noonan
Beginning each of his screen prints by making a collage, David Noonan brings together an eclectic array of found imagery – sourced from film stills, books, magazines, and archive photos – to create dramatic scenes that suggest surreal narratives. These collages are then photographed and turned into large-scale screen prints, a technique remarkable for its sumptuous finish that relates to both artistic authenticity and mass media. Printed in harsh contrast black and white, Noonan’s images encapsulate the romanticism of golden age cinema, and its associations to memory, fiction, and modern mythology.
Approaching image making with an auteur’s indulgence, Noonan presents a fabricated vision that is awesome in its complexity. Using the liturgy of art itself as a departure point for invention, Noonan conceives his work as ‘documentation’ of plausible performances: his cast of characters are positioned as participators in highly elaborate artworks, invoking covert and futuristic ritual. Stylistically referencing Surrealism and experimental film, Noonan’s work poses as the aesthetic remnants of ‘lost masterpieces’, weaving his own extravagant fantasies into fabric of collective consciousness.
Piecing together plausible narratives from his readymade motifs, Noonan renders the intimacy of psychological space as indistinguishable from public cognisance. Using the qualities of photomontage to replicate the linear aspects of film, Noonan’s disparate imagery collates to convey a transient sense of time and space that is both theatrical and strangely insular. Through his process of screen printing, Noonan capitalises on the effects of transluscent layering and exaggerated lighting to replicate the flickering chimera of cinematic projection; an intangible illusion simulating the abstraction of dreams.
UNVEILED: NEW ART FROM THE MIDDLE EAST
Selected artworks by Kader Attia
Kader Attia, Ghost, 2007, Aluminium foil, Dimensions variable
In Ghost, a large installation of a group of Muslim women in prayer, Attia renders their bodies as vacant shells, empty hoods devoid of personhood or spirit. Made from tin foil - a domestic, throw away material - Attia’s figures become alien and futuristic, synthesising the abject and divine. Bowing in shimmering meditation, their ritual is equally seductive and hollow, questioning modern ideologies - from religion to nationalism and consumerism - in relation to individual identity, social perception, devotion and exclusion. Attia’s Ghost evokes contemplation of the human condition as vulnerable and mortal; his impoverished materials suggest alternative histories or understandings of the world, manifest in individual and temporal experience.
Kader Attia, Ghost, 2007, Aluminium foil, Dimensions variable
In Ghost, a large installation of a group of Muslim women in prayer, Attia renders their bodies as vacant shells, empty hoods devoid of personhood or spirit. Made from tin foil - a domestic, throw away material - Attia’s figures become alien and futuristic, synthesising the abject and divine. Bowing in shimmering meditation, their ritual is equally seductive and hollow, questioning modern ideologies - from religion to nationalism and consumerism - in relation to individual identity, social perception, devotion and exclusion. Attia’s Ghost evokes contemplation of the human condition as vulnerable and mortal; his impoverished materials suggest alternative histories or understandings of the world, manifest in individual and temporal experience.
Friday, July 3, 2009
Minimalism in visual art
Minimalism
Minimalism in visual art, sometimes referred to as literalist art and ABC Art emerged in New York in the 1960s. It is regarded as a reaction against the painterly forms of Abstract Expressionism as well as the discourse, institutions and ideologies that supported it. As artist and critic Thomas Lawson noted in his 1977 catalog essay Last Exit: Painting, minimalism did not reject Clement Greenberg's claims about Modernist Painting's reduction to surface and materials so much as take his claims literally. Minimalism was the result, even though the term "minimalism" was not generally embraced by the artists associated with it, and many practitioners of art designated minimalist by critics did not identify it as a movement as such.
Kazimir Malevich Black Square, 1913, Oil on Canvas, State Russian Museum, St.Petersburg
In contrast to the Abstract Expressionists, Minimalists were influenced by composers John Cage and LaMonte Young, poet William Carlos Williams, and the landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted. They very explicitly stated that their art was not self-expression, in opposition to the previous decade's Abstract Expressionists. In general, Minimalism's features included: geometric, often cubic forms purged of all metaphor, equality of parts, repetition, neutral surfaces, and industrial materials.
Robert Morris, an influential theorist and artist, wrote a three part essay, "Notes on Sculpture 1-3", originally published across three issues of Artforum in 1966. In these essays, Morris attempted to define a conceptual framework and formal elements for himself and one that would embrace the practices of his contemporaries.
Dan Flavin, Site-specific installation, 1996, Menil Collection
These essays paid great attention to the idea of the gestalt - "parts... bound together in such a way that they create a maximum resistance to perceptual separation." Morris later described an art represented by a "marked lateral spread and no regularized units or symmetrical intervals..." in "Notes on Sculpture 4: Beyond Objects", originally published in Artforum, 1969, continuing to say that "indeterminacy of arrangement of parts is a literal aspect of the physical existence of the thing." The general shift in theory of which this essay is an expression suggests the transitions into what would later be referred to as Postminimalism. One of the first artists specifically associated with Minimalism was the painter, Frank Stella, whose early "stripe" paintings were highlighted in the 1959 show, "16 Americans", organized by Dorothy Miller at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The width of the stripes in Frank Stellas's stripe paintings were determined by the dimensions of the lumber, visible as the depth of the painting when viewed from the side, used to construct the supportive chassis upon which the canvas was stretched.
The decisions about structures on the front surface of the canvas were therefore not entirely subjective, but pre-conditioned by a "given" feature of the physical construction of the support. In the show catalog, Carl Andre noted, "Art excludes the unnecessary. Frank Stella has found it necessary to paint stripes. There is nothing else in his painting." These reductive works were in sharp contrast to the energy-filled and apparently highly subjective and emotionally-charged paintings of Willem De Kooning or Franz Kline and, in terms of precedent among the previous generation of abstract expressionists, leaned more toward less gestural, often somber coloristic field paintings of Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko. Although Stella received immediate attention from the MOMA show, artists like Kenneth Noland, Ralph Humphrey, Robert Motherwell and Robert Ryman had begun to explore stripes, monochromatic and Hard-edge formats from the late 50s through the 1960s.
Because of a tendency in Minimalism to exclude the pictorial, illusionistic and fictive in favor of the literal, there was a movement away from painterly and toward sculptural concerns. Donald Judd had started as a painter, and ended as a creator of objects. His seminal essay, "Specific Objects" (published in Arts Yearbook 8, 1965), was a touchstone of theory for the formation of Minimalist aesthetics. In this essay, Judd found a starting point for a new territory for American art, and a simultaneous rejection of residual inherited European artistic values. He pointed to evidence of this development in the works of an array of artists active in New York at the time, including Jasper Johns, Dan Flavin and Lee Bontecou. Of "preliminary" importance for Judd was the work of George Ortman, who had concretized and distilled painting's forms into blunt, tough, philosophically charged geometries. These Specific Objects inhabited a space not then comfortably classifiable as either painting or sculpture. That the categorical identity of such objects was itself in question, and that they avoided easy association with well-worn and over-familiar conventions, was a part of their value for Judd.
In a much more broad and general sense, one might, in fact, find European roots of Minimalism in the geometric abstractions painters in the Bauhaus, in the works of Piet Mondrian and other artists associated with the movement DeStijl, in Russian Constructivists and in the work of the Romanian sculptor Constantin Brâncuşi.
This movement was heavily criticised by high modernist formalist art critics and historians. Some anxious critics thought Minimalist art represented a misunderstanding of the modern dialectic of painting and sculpture as defined by critic Clement Greenberg, arguably the dominant American critic of painting in the period leading up to the 1960s. The most notable critique of Minimalism was produced by Michael Fried, a Greenbergian critic, who objected to the work on the basis of its "theatricality". In Art and Objecthood (published in Artforum in June 1967) he declared that the Minimalist work of art, particularly Minimalist sculpture, was based on an engagement with the physicality of the spectator. He argued that work like Robert Morris's transformed the act of viewing into a type of spectacle, in which the artifice of the act observation and the viewer's participation in the work were unveiled. Fried saw this displacement of the viewer's experience from an aesthetic engagement within, to an event outside of the artwork as a failure of Minimal art. Fried's opinionated essay was immediately challenged by artist Robert Smithson in a letter to the editor in the October issue of Artforum. Smithson stated the following: "What Fried fears most is the consciousness of what he is doing--namely being himself theatrical."
Other Minimalist artists include: Richard Allen, Walter Darby Bannard, Larry Bell, Ronald Bladen, Mel Bochner, Norman Carlberg, Erwin Hauer, Dan Flavin, Sol LeWitt, Brice Marden, Agnes Martin, Jo Baer, John McCracken, Paul Mogensen, David Novros, Ad Reinhardt, Fred Sandback, Richard Serra, Tony Smith, Robert Smithson, and Anne Truitt.
Ad Reinhardt, actually an artist of the Abstract Expressionist generation, but one whose reductive all-black paintings seemed to anticipate minimalism, had this to say about the value of a reductive approach to art: "The more stuff in it, the busier the work of art, the worse it is. More is less. Less is more. The eye is a menace to clear sight. The laying bare of oneself is obscene. Art begins with the getting rid of nature."
Minimalism in visual art, sometimes referred to as literalist art and ABC Art emerged in New York in the 1960s. It is regarded as a reaction against the painterly forms of Abstract Expressionism as well as the discourse, institutions and ideologies that supported it. As artist and critic Thomas Lawson noted in his 1977 catalog essay Last Exit: Painting, minimalism did not reject Clement Greenberg's claims about Modernist Painting's reduction to surface and materials so much as take his claims literally. Minimalism was the result, even though the term "minimalism" was not generally embraced by the artists associated with it, and many practitioners of art designated minimalist by critics did not identify it as a movement as such.
Kazimir Malevich Black Square, 1913, Oil on Canvas, State Russian Museum, St.Petersburg
In contrast to the Abstract Expressionists, Minimalists were influenced by composers John Cage and LaMonte Young, poet William Carlos Williams, and the landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted. They very explicitly stated that their art was not self-expression, in opposition to the previous decade's Abstract Expressionists. In general, Minimalism's features included: geometric, often cubic forms purged of all metaphor, equality of parts, repetition, neutral surfaces, and industrial materials.
Robert Morris, an influential theorist and artist, wrote a three part essay, "Notes on Sculpture 1-3", originally published across three issues of Artforum in 1966. In these essays, Morris attempted to define a conceptual framework and formal elements for himself and one that would embrace the practices of his contemporaries.
Dan Flavin, Site-specific installation, 1996, Menil Collection
These essays paid great attention to the idea of the gestalt - "parts... bound together in such a way that they create a maximum resistance to perceptual separation." Morris later described an art represented by a "marked lateral spread and no regularized units or symmetrical intervals..." in "Notes on Sculpture 4: Beyond Objects", originally published in Artforum, 1969, continuing to say that "indeterminacy of arrangement of parts is a literal aspect of the physical existence of the thing." The general shift in theory of which this essay is an expression suggests the transitions into what would later be referred to as Postminimalism. One of the first artists specifically associated with Minimalism was the painter, Frank Stella, whose early "stripe" paintings were highlighted in the 1959 show, "16 Americans", organized by Dorothy Miller at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The width of the stripes in Frank Stellas's stripe paintings were determined by the dimensions of the lumber, visible as the depth of the painting when viewed from the side, used to construct the supportive chassis upon which the canvas was stretched.
The decisions about structures on the front surface of the canvas were therefore not entirely subjective, but pre-conditioned by a "given" feature of the physical construction of the support. In the show catalog, Carl Andre noted, "Art excludes the unnecessary. Frank Stella has found it necessary to paint stripes. There is nothing else in his painting." These reductive works were in sharp contrast to the energy-filled and apparently highly subjective and emotionally-charged paintings of Willem De Kooning or Franz Kline and, in terms of precedent among the previous generation of abstract expressionists, leaned more toward less gestural, often somber coloristic field paintings of Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko. Although Stella received immediate attention from the MOMA show, artists like Kenneth Noland, Ralph Humphrey, Robert Motherwell and Robert Ryman had begun to explore stripes, monochromatic and Hard-edge formats from the late 50s through the 1960s.
Because of a tendency in Minimalism to exclude the pictorial, illusionistic and fictive in favor of the literal, there was a movement away from painterly and toward sculptural concerns. Donald Judd had started as a painter, and ended as a creator of objects. His seminal essay, "Specific Objects" (published in Arts Yearbook 8, 1965), was a touchstone of theory for the formation of Minimalist aesthetics. In this essay, Judd found a starting point for a new territory for American art, and a simultaneous rejection of residual inherited European artistic values. He pointed to evidence of this development in the works of an array of artists active in New York at the time, including Jasper Johns, Dan Flavin and Lee Bontecou. Of "preliminary" importance for Judd was the work of George Ortman, who had concretized and distilled painting's forms into blunt, tough, philosophically charged geometries. These Specific Objects inhabited a space not then comfortably classifiable as either painting or sculpture. That the categorical identity of such objects was itself in question, and that they avoided easy association with well-worn and over-familiar conventions, was a part of their value for Judd.
In a much more broad and general sense, one might, in fact, find European roots of Minimalism in the geometric abstractions painters in the Bauhaus, in the works of Piet Mondrian and other artists associated with the movement DeStijl, in Russian Constructivists and in the work of the Romanian sculptor Constantin Brâncuşi.
This movement was heavily criticised by high modernist formalist art critics and historians. Some anxious critics thought Minimalist art represented a misunderstanding of the modern dialectic of painting and sculpture as defined by critic Clement Greenberg, arguably the dominant American critic of painting in the period leading up to the 1960s. The most notable critique of Minimalism was produced by Michael Fried, a Greenbergian critic, who objected to the work on the basis of its "theatricality". In Art and Objecthood (published in Artforum in June 1967) he declared that the Minimalist work of art, particularly Minimalist sculpture, was based on an engagement with the physicality of the spectator. He argued that work like Robert Morris's transformed the act of viewing into a type of spectacle, in which the artifice of the act observation and the viewer's participation in the work were unveiled. Fried saw this displacement of the viewer's experience from an aesthetic engagement within, to an event outside of the artwork as a failure of Minimal art. Fried's opinionated essay was immediately challenged by artist Robert Smithson in a letter to the editor in the October issue of Artforum. Smithson stated the following: "What Fried fears most is the consciousness of what he is doing--namely being himself theatrical."
Other Minimalist artists include: Richard Allen, Walter Darby Bannard, Larry Bell, Ronald Bladen, Mel Bochner, Norman Carlberg, Erwin Hauer, Dan Flavin, Sol LeWitt, Brice Marden, Agnes Martin, Jo Baer, John McCracken, Paul Mogensen, David Novros, Ad Reinhardt, Fred Sandback, Richard Serra, Tony Smith, Robert Smithson, and Anne Truitt.
Ad Reinhardt, actually an artist of the Abstract Expressionist generation, but one whose reductive all-black paintings seemed to anticipate minimalism, had this to say about the value of a reductive approach to art: "The more stuff in it, the busier the work of art, the worse it is. More is less. Less is more. The eye is a menace to clear sight. The laying bare of oneself is obscene. Art begins with the getting rid of nature."
Tuesday, June 30, 2009
Art Exhibition at Cemeti House,Indonesia
Pameran Tunggal Handiwirman Saputra
27 Juni - 18 Juli 2009
Objects, Installation and Paintings
Handiwirman Saputra
Dalam tampak luar" silicon rubber dan cat akrilik, 30 x 30 x 10 cm, 2009
Deklarasi Estetik Ala Handiwirman
(Pameran Seni Rupa karya Handiwirman
27 Juni sampai dengan 15 Juli 2009)
Kurator : Asmudjo Jono Irianto
Mengusung kembali pergulatan artistik karya-karya Handiwirman ke Rumah Seni Cemeti, harus kita mulai dengan meneropong jauh ke belakang, kembali ke pameran tunggalnya bertajuk ‘Broken Heart’ - Desember 2002 lalu. Pagelaran tunggal dengan individualitas yang kuat, menebarkan aura inovatif yang segar, dan menjanjikan kepeloporan statement baru bagi seni rupa ‘object’.
‘Broken Heart’ Handiwirman kala itu merupakan deklarasi estetik, yang telah dengan jitu membongkar ulang pemahaman tradisi kriya, sekaligus menjadi tonggak kepeloporan statement seni rupa ‘object’ dalam wacana seni rupa Indonesia kontemporer.
Satu hal kongkrit yang selalu menonjol pada puluhan ‘object’ Handi kala itu,
adalah estetis.
Rekonstruksi tradisi kriya ala Handi tidak dilakukan dengan mengisi, menghias atau apalagi dengan mengolah dan menerapkan patron. Handi bermain dengan benda sebagai bahan, dan bahan sebagai semacam benda. Handi jelas tidak mendesain / merancang namun menggugat persepsi sosial benda dan bahan. Handi memprovokasi logika materialistik dan fetis. Merusak sekaligus menggandakan utilitas.
Dengan jujur benda-benda itu dikembalikan pada kodrat dasar bahannya, mendekatkan mereka pada proporsi dan intimitas keseimbangan gestur tubuh manusia, membongkar dan mengkonstruksi ulang logika-logika penyejajaran, pemaduan dan pembalikan serta perlawanan.
Dalam perkembangan yang radikal Handi acapkali menutup bahkan menyudahi pergulatan artistik bahan dan kebendaannya dengan mencampakkan ‘permainan’ ini jauh ke belakang, ke dalam jenjang revitalisasi tradisi modernisme : dengan melukis ‘still life’ seluruh permainannya.
Kini, mencermati sekilas, mempergunakan perspektif kesuburan eksplorasi dan ‘perayaan’ senirupa ‘object’, yang lagi getol diikuti bersama oleh puluhan perupa segenerasi, maka kepeloporan Handiwirman dalam deklarasi estetik ‘object’ di sini kabur! ‘Pengikut-pengikut Handi’, ramai-ramai menebarkan aksi produksi/reproduksi masal; dengan menjiplak ulang persepsi sosial kebendaan yang telah ada, ’set back’ kembali menuju semangat mengisi dan menghias belaka!
Industri Massal dengan ‘sovenirisasi’ benda-benda keseharian melalui pengerdilan ukuran-ukuran yang digantung bersama kunci motor, mobil dan handphone bermerk.
Di dalam politik senirupa sebaliknya, yang pernah tampil dengan gagasan menggelembungkan ukuran-ukuran benda tiruan sehari-hari tersebut secara ekstrim, telah dilakukan oleh Claes Olddenburg tahun 1970, perupa Amerika kelahiran Swedia yang terkenal dengan karya ‘public installation’nya.
Karya-karya Handiwirman yang baru, di tengah-tengah seakan-akan arus ‘set back’ gelombang produksi ini digelar di Rumah Seni Cemeti bulan Juni 2009. Rumah Seni Cemeti mengetengahkan Asmudjo Jono Irianto, sebagai analis yang suka-suka mendampingi dan menjadi partner ‘ngobrol’ uji coba pemikiran karya-karya Handiwirman.
Handiwirman, lahir di Bukittinggi Sumatra tahun 1975. Masuk ke pendidikan Seni Rupa Jurusan Seni Kriya ISI Yogyakarta dan aktif menjadi seniman perupa sejak itu.
Nindityo Adipurnomo 2009
THE HISTORY THAT YOU MUST KNOW
Pliny the Elder and ancient precedents
The earliest surviving writing on art that can be classified as art history are the passages in Pliny the Elder's Natural History concerning the development of Greek sculpture and painting. From them it is possible to trace the ideas of Xenokrates of Sicyon, a Greek sculptor who was perhaps the first art historian. Pliny's work, while mainly an encyclopaedia of the sciences, has thus been influential from theRenaissance onwards. (Passages about techniques used by the painter Apelles have been especially well-known.) Similar, though independent, developments occurred in 6th century China, where a canon of worthy artists was established by writers in the scholar-official class. These writers, being necessarily proficient in calligraphy, were artists themselves. The artists are described in the Six Principles of Painting formulated by Xie He.
Vasari and artists' biographies
While personal reminiscences of art and artists have long been written and read (see Lorenzo Ghiberti for the best early example), it was Giorgio Vasari, the Tuscan painter, sculptor and author of the Lives of the Painters, who wrote the first true history of art. He emphasized art's progression and development, which was a milestone in this field. His was a personal and a historical account, featuring biographies of individual Italian artists, many of whom were his contemporaries and personal acquaintances. The most renowned of these was Michelangelo, and Vasari's account is enlightening, though biased in places. Vasari's ideas about art held sway until the 18th century, when criticism was leveled at his biographical account of history.
Winckelmann and art criticism
Scholars such as Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717-1768), criticised Vasari's "cult" of artistic personality, and they argued that the real emphasis in the study of art should be the views of the learned beholder and not the unique viewpoint of the charismatic artist. Winckelmann's writings thus were the beginnings of art criticism. Winckelmann critiqued the artistic excesses of Baroque and Rococo forms, and was instrumental in reforming taste in favor of the more sober Neoclassicism. Jacob Burckhardt (1818 - 1897), one of the founders of art history, noted that Winckelmann was 'the first to distinguish between the periods of ancient art and to link the history of style with world history'. From Winckelmann until the mid-20th century, the field of art history was dominated by German-speaking academics. Winckelmann's work thus marked the entry of art history into the high-philosophical discourse of German culture.
Winckelmann was read avidly by Johann Wolfgang Goethe and Friedrich Schiller, both of whom began to write on the history of art, and his account of the Laocoon occasioned a response by Lessing. The emergence of art as a major subject of philosophical speculation was solidified by the appearance of Immanuel Kant's Critique of Judgment in 1790, and was furthered by Hegel's Lectures on Aesthetics. Hegel's philosophy served as the direct inspiration for Karl Schnaase's work. Schnaase's Niederländische Briefe established the theoretical foundations for art history as an autonomous discipline, and his Geschichte der bildenden Künste, one of the first historical surveys of the history of art from antiquity to the Renaissance, facilitated the teaching of art history in German-speaking universities. Schnaase's survey was published contemporaneously with a similar work by Franz Theodor Kugler.
Wölfflin and stylistic analysis
Heinrich Wölfflin (1864-1945), who studied under Burckhardt in Basel, is the "father" of modern art history. Wölfflin taught at the universities of Berlin, Basel, Munich, and Zurich. A number of students went on to distinguished careers in art history, including Jakob Rosenberg and Frida Schottmuller. He introduced a scientific approach to the history of art, focusing on three concepts. Firstly, he attempted to study art using psychology, particularly by applying the work of Wilhelm Wundt. He argued, among other things, that art and architecture are good if they resemble the human body. For example, houses were good if their façades looked like faces. Secondly, he introduced the idea of studying art through comparison. By comparing individual paintings to each other, he was able to make distinctions of style. His book Renaissance and Baroque developed this idea, and was the first to show how these stylistic periods differed from one another. In contrast to Giorgio Vasari, Wölfflin was uninterested in the biographies of artists. In fact he proposed the creation of an "art history without names." Finally, he studied art based on ideas of nationhood. He was particularly interested in whether there was an inherently "Italian" and an inherently "German" style. This last interest was most fully articulated in his monograph on the German artist Albrecht Dürer.
Panofsky and iconography
Today's understanding of the symbolic content of art comes from a group of scholars who gathered in Hamburg in the 1920s. The most prominent among them were Erwin Panofsky, Aby Warburg, and Fritz Saxl. Together they developed much of the vocabulary that continues to be used in the 21st century by art historians. "Iconography"--with roots meaning "symbols from writing" refers to subject matter n art derived from written sources--especially scripture and mythology. "Iconology" is a broader term that referred to all symbolism, whether derived from a specific text or not. Today art historians sometimes use these terms interchangeably.Panofsky, in his early work, also developed the theories of Riegl, but became eventually more preoccupied with iconography, and in particular with the transmission of themes related to classical antiquity in the Middle Ages and Renaissance. In this respect his interests coincided with those of Warburg, the son of a wealthy family who had assembled an impressive library in Hamburg devoted to the study of the classical tradition in later art and culture. Under Saxl's auspices, this library was developed into a research institute, affiliated with the University of Hamburg, where Panofsky taught.
Warburg died in 1929, and in the 1930s Saxl and Panofsky, both Jewish, were forced to leave Hamburg. Saxl settled in London, bringing Warburg's library with him and establishing the Warburg Institute. Panofsky settled in Princeton at the Institute for Advanced Study. In this respect they were part of an extraordinary influx of German art historians into the English-speaking academy in the 1930s. These scholars were largely responsible for establishing art history as a legitimate field of study in the English-speaking world, and the influence of Panofsky's methodology, in particular, determined the course of American art history for a generation.
Marx and ideology
During the mid-20th century art historians embraced social history by using critical approaches. The goal is to show how art interacts with power structures in society. One critical approach that art historians used was Marxism. Marxist art history attempted to show how art was tied to specific classes, how images contain information about the economy, and how images can make the status quo seem natural (ideology). Perhaps the best-known Marxist was Clement Greenberg, who came to prominence during the late 1930s with his essay "Avant-Garde and Kitsch".[6]In the essay Greenberg claimed that the avant-garde arose in order to defend aesthetic standards from the decline of taste involved in consumer society, and seeing kitsch and art as opposites. Greenberg further claimed that avant-garde and Modernist art was a means to resist the leveling of culture produced by capitalist propaganda. Greenberg appropriated the German word 'kitsch' to describe this consumerism, though its connotations have since changed to a more affirmative notion of left-over materials of capitalist culture. Greenberg later became well-known for examining the formal properties of modern art.
Meyer Schapiro is one of the best-remembered Marxist art historians of the mid-20th century. Although he wrote about numerous time periods and themes in art, he is best remembered for his commentary on sculpture from the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance, at which time he saw evidence of capitalism emerging and feudalism declining. Arnold Hauser wrote the first Marxist survey of Western Art, titled The Social History of Art. In this book he attempted to show how class consciousness was reflected in major art periods. His book was controversial when published during the 1950s because it makes generalizations about entire eras, a strategy now called "vulgar Marxism". T.J. Clark was the first art historian writing from a Marxist perspective to abandon vulgar Marxism. He wrote Marxist art histories of several impressionist and realist artists, including Gustave Courbet and Édouard Manet. These books focused closely on the political and economic climates in which the art was created.
The earliest surviving writing on art that can be classified as art history are the passages in Pliny the Elder's Natural History concerning the development of Greek sculpture and painting. From them it is possible to trace the ideas of Xenokrates of Sicyon, a Greek sculptor who was perhaps the first art historian. Pliny's work, while mainly an encyclopaedia of the sciences, has thus been influential from theRenaissance onwards. (Passages about techniques used by the painter Apelles have been especially well-known.) Similar, though independent, developments occurred in 6th century China, where a canon of worthy artists was established by writers in the scholar-official class. These writers, being necessarily proficient in calligraphy, were artists themselves. The artists are described in the Six Principles of Painting formulated by Xie He.
Vasari and artists' biographies
While personal reminiscences of art and artists have long been written and read (see Lorenzo Ghiberti for the best early example), it was Giorgio Vasari, the Tuscan painter, sculptor and author of the Lives of the Painters, who wrote the first true history of art. He emphasized art's progression and development, which was a milestone in this field. His was a personal and a historical account, featuring biographies of individual Italian artists, many of whom were his contemporaries and personal acquaintances. The most renowned of these was Michelangelo, and Vasari's account is enlightening, though biased in places. Vasari's ideas about art held sway until the 18th century, when criticism was leveled at his biographical account of history.
Winckelmann and art criticism
Scholars such as Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717-1768), criticised Vasari's "cult" of artistic personality, and they argued that the real emphasis in the study of art should be the views of the learned beholder and not the unique viewpoint of the charismatic artist. Winckelmann's writings thus were the beginnings of art criticism. Winckelmann critiqued the artistic excesses of Baroque and Rococo forms, and was instrumental in reforming taste in favor of the more sober Neoclassicism. Jacob Burckhardt (1818 - 1897), one of the founders of art history, noted that Winckelmann was 'the first to distinguish between the periods of ancient art and to link the history of style with world history'. From Winckelmann until the mid-20th century, the field of art history was dominated by German-speaking academics. Winckelmann's work thus marked the entry of art history into the high-philosophical discourse of German culture.
Winckelmann was read avidly by Johann Wolfgang Goethe and Friedrich Schiller, both of whom began to write on the history of art, and his account of the Laocoon occasioned a response by Lessing. The emergence of art as a major subject of philosophical speculation was solidified by the appearance of Immanuel Kant's Critique of Judgment in 1790, and was furthered by Hegel's Lectures on Aesthetics. Hegel's philosophy served as the direct inspiration for Karl Schnaase's work. Schnaase's Niederländische Briefe established the theoretical foundations for art history as an autonomous discipline, and his Geschichte der bildenden Künste, one of the first historical surveys of the history of art from antiquity to the Renaissance, facilitated the teaching of art history in German-speaking universities. Schnaase's survey was published contemporaneously with a similar work by Franz Theodor Kugler.
Wölfflin and stylistic analysis
Heinrich Wölfflin (1864-1945), who studied under Burckhardt in Basel, is the "father" of modern art history. Wölfflin taught at the universities of Berlin, Basel, Munich, and Zurich. A number of students went on to distinguished careers in art history, including Jakob Rosenberg and Frida Schottmuller. He introduced a scientific approach to the history of art, focusing on three concepts. Firstly, he attempted to study art using psychology, particularly by applying the work of Wilhelm Wundt. He argued, among other things, that art and architecture are good if they resemble the human body. For example, houses were good if their façades looked like faces. Secondly, he introduced the idea of studying art through comparison. By comparing individual paintings to each other, he was able to make distinctions of style. His book Renaissance and Baroque developed this idea, and was the first to show how these stylistic periods differed from one another. In contrast to Giorgio Vasari, Wölfflin was uninterested in the biographies of artists. In fact he proposed the creation of an "art history without names." Finally, he studied art based on ideas of nationhood. He was particularly interested in whether there was an inherently "Italian" and an inherently "German" style. This last interest was most fully articulated in his monograph on the German artist Albrecht Dürer.
Panofsky and iconography
Today's understanding of the symbolic content of art comes from a group of scholars who gathered in Hamburg in the 1920s. The most prominent among them were Erwin Panofsky, Aby Warburg, and Fritz Saxl. Together they developed much of the vocabulary that continues to be used in the 21st century by art historians. "Iconography"--with roots meaning "symbols from writing" refers to subject matter n art derived from written sources--especially scripture and mythology. "Iconology" is a broader term that referred to all symbolism, whether derived from a specific text or not. Today art historians sometimes use these terms interchangeably.Panofsky, in his early work, also developed the theories of Riegl, but became eventually more preoccupied with iconography, and in particular with the transmission of themes related to classical antiquity in the Middle Ages and Renaissance. In this respect his interests coincided with those of Warburg, the son of a wealthy family who had assembled an impressive library in Hamburg devoted to the study of the classical tradition in later art and culture. Under Saxl's auspices, this library was developed into a research institute, affiliated with the University of Hamburg, where Panofsky taught.
Warburg died in 1929, and in the 1930s Saxl and Panofsky, both Jewish, were forced to leave Hamburg. Saxl settled in London, bringing Warburg's library with him and establishing the Warburg Institute. Panofsky settled in Princeton at the Institute for Advanced Study. In this respect they were part of an extraordinary influx of German art historians into the English-speaking academy in the 1930s. These scholars were largely responsible for establishing art history as a legitimate field of study in the English-speaking world, and the influence of Panofsky's methodology, in particular, determined the course of American art history for a generation.
Marx and ideology
During the mid-20th century art historians embraced social history by using critical approaches. The goal is to show how art interacts with power structures in society. One critical approach that art historians used was Marxism. Marxist art history attempted to show how art was tied to specific classes, how images contain information about the economy, and how images can make the status quo seem natural (ideology). Perhaps the best-known Marxist was Clement Greenberg, who came to prominence during the late 1930s with his essay "Avant-Garde and Kitsch".[6]In the essay Greenberg claimed that the avant-garde arose in order to defend aesthetic standards from the decline of taste involved in consumer society, and seeing kitsch and art as opposites. Greenberg further claimed that avant-garde and Modernist art was a means to resist the leveling of culture produced by capitalist propaganda. Greenberg appropriated the German word 'kitsch' to describe this consumerism, though its connotations have since changed to a more affirmative notion of left-over materials of capitalist culture. Greenberg later became well-known for examining the formal properties of modern art.
Meyer Schapiro is one of the best-remembered Marxist art historians of the mid-20th century. Although he wrote about numerous time periods and themes in art, he is best remembered for his commentary on sculpture from the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance, at which time he saw evidence of capitalism emerging and feudalism declining. Arnold Hauser wrote the first Marxist survey of Western Art, titled The Social History of Art. In this book he attempted to show how class consciousness was reflected in major art periods. His book was controversial when published during the 1950s because it makes generalizations about entire eras, a strategy now called "vulgar Marxism". T.J. Clark was the first art historian writing from a Marxist perspective to abandon vulgar Marxism. He wrote Marxist art histories of several impressionist and realist artists, including Gustave Courbet and Édouard Manet. These books focused closely on the political and economic climates in which the art was created.
Saturday, May 9, 2009
The New Emperor of No-Brow
Is Takashi Murakami Japan's Andy Warhol—or its Walt Disney?
Murakami is often called the Japanese Andy Warhol. He's obsessed with celebrity and mass culture, and his art is packed with images drawn from Japan's leading popular art forms: manga and anime. And, like Warhol, he's largely hands-off, presiding over a factory staffed with assistants who fabricate what he calls his "art products": paintings, sculptures, helium-filled balloons, animated films, and wallpapered environments like this one, featuring his signature rictus-faced daisies.
But at this stage of his career, Murakami is looking less like Warhol and more like another great American artist-entrepreneur: Walt Disney. Warhol famously blurred the line between high art and mass culture, but there was always a trace of irony in his low-brow enthusiasms. With Murakami, that ironic distance is gone. He's not just commenting on consumer culture—he's creating it.
When "© Murakami" opened at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles last fall, much was made of the fully functioning Louis Vuitton boutique rudely plopped down in the middle of the exhibition. It was an intentionally provocative gesture and an unambiguous statement of Murakami's position that art and commerce can be mutually enriching activities. The boutique has been reconstructed in Brooklyn, and Murakami isn't kidding when he says that it's "the heart of the exhibition itself."
Murakami began working with Louis Vuitton in 2002, when the company's artistic director, Marc Jacobs, invited him to design his own version of the iconic LV monogram. He replaced the classic warm browns with a rainbow of pretty pastel colors and—presto!—the bags became an instant media sensation—and, for the rich and au courant, a must-have.While Vuitton was manufacturing the handbags and accessories he designed, Murakami worked with his bevy of assistants to create dozens of paintings, like this one, splattered with colorful LV monograms. This strategy of cross-branding and positioning products at different price points—a few thousand dollars for the handbags, a few hundred thousand for the paintings—is the key to Murakami's overarching vision as an artist, designer, and entrepreneur.
"Business art is the step that comes after art," Warhol wrote in 1975. "I started as a commercial artist and I want to finish as a business artist. Being good in business is the most fascinating kind of art." Warhol never truly fulfilled this ambition during his lifetime. Most of his business ventures lost money, and the widespread licensing of his images came only after his death. Now, with Murakami, the age of business art has arrived. Leaving behind the old-fashioned idea of art as an autonomous form of individual expression, Murakami has fashioned himself as a brand, a trademark, and a corporate identity.
In his as-yet-untranslated 2005 book, Geijutsu Kigyo Ron ("The Theory of Art Entrepreneurship"), Murakami attributes his spectacular international success to his business management skills and his strategic appraisal of the position of Japanese art in the Western art market. "You cannot create an art piece unless you know how to make and sell it," he writes. Elsewhere, he sums up his position with uncanny concision: "Art is the supreme incarnation of luxury entertainment."
Takashi Murakami. Tan Tan Bo, 2001. Acrylic on canvas mounted on board, 141 3/4 inches by 212 5/8 inches by 2 5/8 inches. Collection of John A. Smith and Victoria Hughes. Courtesy Tomio Koyama Gallery, Tokyo. © 2001 Takashi Murakami/Kaikai Kiki Co., Ltd. All rights reserved.
Murakami's art education started out along fairly conventional lines. He studied nihonga painting, a Japanese style that emerged in the 19th century in reaction to Western influences, and briefly tried his hand at anime. In the early 1990s, while finishing his Ph.D. at Tokyo National University, he set his sights on a career as a contemporary artist. His first successful works borrowed from otaku, the geeky male subculture of sci-fi anime, manga, and video games with an obsessive, pedophilic edge. In works like Miss ko2 (pronounced ko-ko), he borrowed otaku stereotypes—in this case, a leggy, bubble-eyed supervixen dolled up like a 1950s drive-in waitress—and rendered them as larger-than-life-size fiberglass sculptures. Hypersexual, garish, and slick, these oversized figurines owe a lot to Jeff Koons' sculptural enlargements of American kitsch icons like Michael Jackson and his pet chimp, Bubbles.
Murakami doesn't just appropriate existing characters—he also creates his own anime-style avatars. The first and most important of these was DOB, whose name is derived from the existential question that plagues toddlers everywhere: Dobojite dobojite? ("Why? Why?"). DOB has an O-shaped face and ears bearing the letters D and B. In early versions, like this painting from 1994, he looks a lot like Mickey Mouse, and that's no accident. Murakami has said that he created DOB as an "inquiry into the secret of market survival" and into the "universality" of characters like Mickey Mouse, Hello Kitty, Sonic the Hedgehog, and the anime icon Doraemon (a cuddly, catlike robot from the future). Murakami's DOB can be read as a critique of the Japanese cult of kawaii (cuteness), which he sees as an expression of postwar Japanese impotence—a retreat into infantilism. But the point was also to create a character that could successfully infiltrate that market. Like Disney, Sega, Sanrio, and other corporate "parents," Murakami has fought hard to protect his character's copyright. In 2004, he sued the children's clothing company Narumiya International for its use of a mouselike figure that resembled DOB and reportedly received a settlement of tens of millions of yen*.
Correction, April 17, 2008: The article originally stated the reported settlement was for tens of thousands of yen.
Over the years, DOB has sprouted multiple eyes and pointy fangs, morphing and mutating almost beyond recognition. (When in doubt, look for the telltale D and B on the ears.) At the Brooklyn Museum, he appears in numerous incarnations: as inflatable balloons, in paintings and sculptures, and in the form of various mass-produced gewgaws for sale in the gift shop. Though DOB started out cute, more recent variations reveal a darker, crazier, more sinister facet of cartoon cuteness.
In this painting from 2006, DOB floats on a ribbonlike wave against a mottled background that evokes traditional Japanese screen painting and lacquer ware as well as Warhol's oxidation paintings from 1977-78. Elsewhere in the show, there are recognizable references to Hokusai, Francis Bacon, Jackson Pollock, and Salvador Dalí. These high-art allusions seem calculated to appeal to a niche audience of critics, curators, and collectors who like their contemporary art to come equipped with a built-in historical pedigree. Murakami has this market pegged: Westerners don't care about "those vague, 'oh-what-a-beautiful-color' kind of impressions, as Japanese do," he writes in his book on art entrepreneurship. "They enjoy intellectual 'devices' and 'games' in art."
It's important to realize that for Murakami, museum art is only the tip of the iceberg. As critic Scott Rothkopf points out in his illuminating catalog essay, Murakami heads a multinational corporation, Kaikai Kiki Co. Ltd., that not only produces his art and art-related merchandise (plush toys, T-shirts, stickers, etc.) but also manages the careers of seven artists, operates an art fair in Japan, organizes touring exhibitions, produces animated films, pursues collaborative commercial projects (with Vuitton, Issey Miyake, and Kanye West, among others), and accepts corporate branding commissions. Kaikai Kiki now has about 100 employees, with an office in Tokyo, two studios in the Tokyo suburbs, and one in Long Island City, Queens.
Museum exhibitions like the one in Brooklyn fortify the Murakami brand, just as a gleaming flagship store on Madison Avenue helps move merchandise in mall outlets in less glamorous locales. And herein lies Murakami's genius as a marketer and art entrepreneur. As a better businessman than Warhol with more high-art credibility than Disney, he's figured out how to have his cake and eat it, too.Murakami has often argued that there is no indigenous tradition of distinguishing between high and low cultural products in Japan, where art is routinely exhibited in department stores and luxury merchandise can be seen in museums. In the 1990s, he coined the term Superflat to describe this condition of nonhierarchical flatness, linking it to the formal tendency toward two-dimensionality in Japanese art, from Edo screens to anime to his own depthless paintings, such as this DOB variation. For those of us who were reared on the idea that art is a special kind of luxury product—more contemplative, denser with meaning, somehow resistant to the status quo—Murakami's radical leveling of art and commerce can be pretty unsettling.
But there's also something exhilarating about the uncanny honesty of Murakami's approach and the sheer expansiveness of his ambition. His work feels historically important—not because of its formal innovations, which are fairly slim, but because it powerfully redefines what it means to be an artist in the 21st century. You can rail against the commercialization of art and the aestheticization of commerce. Or you can take a deep breath and bow to the new emperor of no-brow.
Murakami is often called the Japanese Andy Warhol. He's obsessed with celebrity and mass culture, and his art is packed with images drawn from Japan's leading popular art forms: manga and anime. And, like Warhol, he's largely hands-off, presiding over a factory staffed with assistants who fabricate what he calls his "art products": paintings, sculptures, helium-filled balloons, animated films, and wallpapered environments like this one, featuring his signature rictus-faced daisies.
But at this stage of his career, Murakami is looking less like Warhol and more like another great American artist-entrepreneur: Walt Disney. Warhol famously blurred the line between high art and mass culture, but there was always a trace of irony in his low-brow enthusiasms. With Murakami, that ironic distance is gone. He's not just commenting on consumer culture—he's creating it.
When "© Murakami" opened at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles last fall, much was made of the fully functioning Louis Vuitton boutique rudely plopped down in the middle of the exhibition. It was an intentionally provocative gesture and an unambiguous statement of Murakami's position that art and commerce can be mutually enriching activities. The boutique has been reconstructed in Brooklyn, and Murakami isn't kidding when he says that it's "the heart of the exhibition itself."
Murakami began working with Louis Vuitton in 2002, when the company's artistic director, Marc Jacobs, invited him to design his own version of the iconic LV monogram. He replaced the classic warm browns with a rainbow of pretty pastel colors and—presto!—the bags became an instant media sensation—and, for the rich and au courant, a must-have.While Vuitton was manufacturing the handbags and accessories he designed, Murakami worked with his bevy of assistants to create dozens of paintings, like this one, splattered with colorful LV monograms. This strategy of cross-branding and positioning products at different price points—a few thousand dollars for the handbags, a few hundred thousand for the paintings—is the key to Murakami's overarching vision as an artist, designer, and entrepreneur.
"Business art is the step that comes after art," Warhol wrote in 1975. "I started as a commercial artist and I want to finish as a business artist. Being good in business is the most fascinating kind of art." Warhol never truly fulfilled this ambition during his lifetime. Most of his business ventures lost money, and the widespread licensing of his images came only after his death. Now, with Murakami, the age of business art has arrived. Leaving behind the old-fashioned idea of art as an autonomous form of individual expression, Murakami has fashioned himself as a brand, a trademark, and a corporate identity.
In his as-yet-untranslated 2005 book, Geijutsu Kigyo Ron ("The Theory of Art Entrepreneurship"), Murakami attributes his spectacular international success to his business management skills and his strategic appraisal of the position of Japanese art in the Western art market. "You cannot create an art piece unless you know how to make and sell it," he writes. Elsewhere, he sums up his position with uncanny concision: "Art is the supreme incarnation of luxury entertainment."
Takashi Murakami. Tan Tan Bo, 2001. Acrylic on canvas mounted on board, 141 3/4 inches by 212 5/8 inches by 2 5/8 inches. Collection of John A. Smith and Victoria Hughes. Courtesy Tomio Koyama Gallery, Tokyo. © 2001 Takashi Murakami/Kaikai Kiki Co., Ltd. All rights reserved.
Murakami's art education started out along fairly conventional lines. He studied nihonga painting, a Japanese style that emerged in the 19th century in reaction to Western influences, and briefly tried his hand at anime. In the early 1990s, while finishing his Ph.D. at Tokyo National University, he set his sights on a career as a contemporary artist. His first successful works borrowed from otaku, the geeky male subculture of sci-fi anime, manga, and video games with an obsessive, pedophilic edge. In works like Miss ko2 (pronounced ko-ko), he borrowed otaku stereotypes—in this case, a leggy, bubble-eyed supervixen dolled up like a 1950s drive-in waitress—and rendered them as larger-than-life-size fiberglass sculptures. Hypersexual, garish, and slick, these oversized figurines owe a lot to Jeff Koons' sculptural enlargements of American kitsch icons like Michael Jackson and his pet chimp, Bubbles.
Murakami doesn't just appropriate existing characters—he also creates his own anime-style avatars. The first and most important of these was DOB, whose name is derived from the existential question that plagues toddlers everywhere: Dobojite dobojite? ("Why? Why?"). DOB has an O-shaped face and ears bearing the letters D and B. In early versions, like this painting from 1994, he looks a lot like Mickey Mouse, and that's no accident. Murakami has said that he created DOB as an "inquiry into the secret of market survival" and into the "universality" of characters like Mickey Mouse, Hello Kitty, Sonic the Hedgehog, and the anime icon Doraemon (a cuddly, catlike robot from the future). Murakami's DOB can be read as a critique of the Japanese cult of kawaii (cuteness), which he sees as an expression of postwar Japanese impotence—a retreat into infantilism. But the point was also to create a character that could successfully infiltrate that market. Like Disney, Sega, Sanrio, and other corporate "parents," Murakami has fought hard to protect his character's copyright. In 2004, he sued the children's clothing company Narumiya International for its use of a mouselike figure that resembled DOB and reportedly received a settlement of tens of millions of yen*.
Correction, April 17, 2008: The article originally stated the reported settlement was for tens of thousands of yen.
Over the years, DOB has sprouted multiple eyes and pointy fangs, morphing and mutating almost beyond recognition. (When in doubt, look for the telltale D and B on the ears.) At the Brooklyn Museum, he appears in numerous incarnations: as inflatable balloons, in paintings and sculptures, and in the form of various mass-produced gewgaws for sale in the gift shop. Though DOB started out cute, more recent variations reveal a darker, crazier, more sinister facet of cartoon cuteness.
In this painting from 2006, DOB floats on a ribbonlike wave against a mottled background that evokes traditional Japanese screen painting and lacquer ware as well as Warhol's oxidation paintings from 1977-78. Elsewhere in the show, there are recognizable references to Hokusai, Francis Bacon, Jackson Pollock, and Salvador Dalí. These high-art allusions seem calculated to appeal to a niche audience of critics, curators, and collectors who like their contemporary art to come equipped with a built-in historical pedigree. Murakami has this market pegged: Westerners don't care about "those vague, 'oh-what-a-beautiful-color' kind of impressions, as Japanese do," he writes in his book on art entrepreneurship. "They enjoy intellectual 'devices' and 'games' in art."
It's important to realize that for Murakami, museum art is only the tip of the iceberg. As critic Scott Rothkopf points out in his illuminating catalog essay, Murakami heads a multinational corporation, Kaikai Kiki Co. Ltd., that not only produces his art and art-related merchandise (plush toys, T-shirts, stickers, etc.) but also manages the careers of seven artists, operates an art fair in Japan, organizes touring exhibitions, produces animated films, pursues collaborative commercial projects (with Vuitton, Issey Miyake, and Kanye West, among others), and accepts corporate branding commissions. Kaikai Kiki now has about 100 employees, with an office in Tokyo, two studios in the Tokyo suburbs, and one in Long Island City, Queens.
Museum exhibitions like the one in Brooklyn fortify the Murakami brand, just as a gleaming flagship store on Madison Avenue helps move merchandise in mall outlets in less glamorous locales. And herein lies Murakami's genius as a marketer and art entrepreneur. As a better businessman than Warhol with more high-art credibility than Disney, he's figured out how to have his cake and eat it, too.Murakami has often argued that there is no indigenous tradition of distinguishing between high and low cultural products in Japan, where art is routinely exhibited in department stores and luxury merchandise can be seen in museums. In the 1990s, he coined the term Superflat to describe this condition of nonhierarchical flatness, linking it to the formal tendency toward two-dimensionality in Japanese art, from Edo screens to anime to his own depthless paintings, such as this DOB variation. For those of us who were reared on the idea that art is a special kind of luxury product—more contemplative, denser with meaning, somehow resistant to the status quo—Murakami's radical leveling of art and commerce can be pretty unsettling.
But there's also something exhilarating about the uncanny honesty of Murakami's approach and the sheer expansiveness of his ambition. His work feels historically important—not because of its formal innovations, which are fairly slim, but because it powerfully redefines what it means to be an artist in the 21st century. You can rail against the commercialization of art and the aestheticization of commerce. Or you can take a deep breath and bow to the new emperor of no-brow.
Tuesday, April 7, 2009
What is art?
How best to define the term “art” is a subject of constant contention; many books and journal articles have been published arguing over even the basics of what we mean by the term “art”.Theodor Adorno claimed in 1969 “It is self-evident that nothing concerning art is self-evident.”Artists, philosophers, anthropologists, psychologists and programmers all use the notion of art in their respective fields, and give it operational definitions that are not very similar to each other. Further it is clear that even the basic meaning of the term "art" has changed several times over the centuries, and has changed within the 20th century as well.
The main recent sense of the word “art” is roughly as an abbreviation for creative art or “fine art.” Here we mean that skill is being used to express the artist’s creativity, or to engage the audience’s aesthetic sensibilities, or to draw the audience towards consideration of the “finer” things. Often, if the skill is being used in a functional object, people will consider it a craft instead of art, a suggestion which is highly disputed by many Contemporary Craft thinkers. Likewise, if the skill is being used in a commercial or industrial way it may be considered design instead of art, or contrariwise these may be defended as art forms, perhaps called applied art. Some thinkers, for instance, have argued that the difference between fine art and applied art has more to do with the actual function of the object than any clear definitional difference.Art usually implies no function other than to convey or communicate an idea.
Even as late as 1912 it was normal in the West to assume that all art aims at beauty, and thus that anything that wasn't trying to be beautiful couldn't count as art. The cubists, dadaists, Stravinsky, and many later art movements struggled against this conception that beauty was central to the definition of art, with such success that, according to Danto, "Beauty had disappeared not only from the advanced art of the 1960’s but from the advanced philosophy of art of that decade as well."Perhaps some notion like "expression" (in Croce’s theories) or "counter-environment" (in McLuhan’s theory) can replace the previous role of beauty. Brian Massumi brought back "beauty" into consideration together with "expression".Another concept, as important to the philosophy of art as "beauty," is that of the "sublime," elaborated upon in the twentieth century by the postmodern philosopher Jean-Francois Lyotard.
Perhaps (as in Kennick's theory) no definition of art is possible anymore. Perhaps art should be thought of as a cluster of related concepts in a Wittgensteinian fashion (as in Weitz or Beuys). Another approach is to say that “art” is basically a sociological category, that whatever art schools and museums and artists define as art is considered art regardless of formal definitions. This "institutional definition of art" (see also Institutional Critique) has been championed by George Dickie. Most people did not consider the depiction of a Brillo Box or a store-bought urinal to be art until Andy Warhol and Marcel Duchamp (respectively) placed them in the context of art (i.e., the art gallery), which then provided the association of these objects with the associations that define art.
Proceduralists often suggest that it is the process by which a work of art is created or viewed that makes it art, not any inherent feature of an object, or how well received it is by the institutions of the art world after its introduction to society at large. Whereas if exactly the same set of words was written by a journalist, intending them as shorthand notes to help him write a longer article later, these would not be a poem. Leo Tolstoy, on the other hand, claims that what makes something art or not is how it is experienced by its audience, not by the intention of its creator. Functionalists like Monroe Beardsley argue that whether or not a piece counts as art depends on what function it plays in a particular context; the same Greek vase may play a non-artistic function in one context (carrying wine), and an artistic function in another context (helping us to appreciate the beauty of the human figure). '
What should we judge when we judge art?
Art can be difficult at the metaphysical and ontological levels as well as at the value theory level. When we see a performance of Hamlet, how many works of art are we experiencing, and which should we judge? Perhaps there is only one relevant work of art, the whole performance, which many different people have contributed to, and which will exist briefly and then disappear. Perhaps the manuscript by Shakespeare is a distinct work of art from the play by the troupe, which is also distinct from the performance of the play by this troupe on this night, and all three can be judged, but are to be judged by different standards.
Perhaps every person involved should be judged separately on his or her own merits, and each costume or line is its own work of art (with perhaps the director having the job of unifying them all). Similar problems arise for music, film and even painting. Is one to judge the painting itself, the work of the painter, or perhaps the painting in its context of presentation by the museum workers?
These problems have been made even more difficult by the rise of conceptual art since the 1960s. Warhol’s famous Brillo Boxes are nearly indistinguishable from actual Brillo boxes at the time. It would be a mistake to praise Warhol for the design of his boxes (which were designed by Steve Harvey), yet the conceptual move of exhibiting these boxes as art in a museum together with other kinds of paintings is Warhol's. Are we judging Warhol’s concept? His execution of the concept in the medium? The curator’s insight in letting Warhol display the boxes? The overall result? Our experience or interpretation of the result? Ontologically, how are we to think of the work of art? Is it a physical object? Several objects? A class of objects? A mental object? A fictional object? An abstract object? An event? Or simply an Act?
What should art be like?
Many goals have been argued for art, and aestheticians often argue that some goal or another is superior in some way. Clement Greenberg, for instance, argued in 1960 that each artistic medium should seek that which makes it unique among the possible mediums and then purify itself of anything other than expression of its own uniqueness as a form.[16] The Dadaist Tristan Tzara on the other hand saw the function of art in 1918 as the destruction of a mad social order. “We must sweep and clean. Affirm the cleanliness of the individual after the state of madness, aggressive complete madness of a world abandoned to the hands of bandits.”Formal goals, creative goals, self-expression, political goals, spiritual goals, philosophical goals, and even more perceptual or aesthetic goals have all been popular pictures of what art should be like.
The value of art
Tolstoy defined art, and not incidentally characterized its value, this way: "Art is a human activity consisting in this, that one man consciously, by means of certain external signs, hands on to others feelings he has lived through, and that other people are infected by these feelings and also experience them."
The value of art, then, is one with the value of empathy.
Other possible views are these: Art can act as a means to some special kind of knowledge. Art may give insight into the human condition. Art relates to science and religion. Art serves as a tool of education, or indoctrination, or enculturation. Art makes us more moral. It uplifts us spiritually. Art is politics by other means. Art has the value of allowing catharsis. In any case, the value of art may determine the suitability of an art form. Do they different significantly in their values, or (if not) in their ability to achieve the unitary value of art?
But to approach the question of the value of art systematically, one ought to ask: for whom? For the artist? For the audience? For society at large, and/or for individuals beyond the audience? Is the "value" of art different in each of these different contexts?
Working on the intended value of art tends to help define the relations between art and other acts. Art clearly does have spiritual goals in many contexts, but what exactly is the difference between religious art and religion per se? The truth is complex - Art is both useless in a functional sense and the most important human activity.
It has been said, that a Vogon Starship arriving at the earth and ordering its destruction would ask what use is humanity? The only justification humanity could give would be a Shakespeare play, a Rembrandt or a Bach concerto. These are the things of value which define humanity itself.
Aesthetic universals
The philosopher Denis Dutton identified seven universal signatures in human aesthetics:
1.Expertise or virtuosity. Technical artistic skills are cultivated, recognized, and admired.
2.Nonutilitarian pleasure. People enjoy art for art's sake, and don't demand that it keep them warm or put food on the table.
3.Style. Artistic objects and performances satisfy rules of composition that place them in a recognizable style.
4.Criticism. People make a point of judging, appreciating, and interpreting works of art.
5.Imitation. With a few important exceptions like music and abstract painting, works of art simulate experiences of the world.
6.Special focus. Art is set aside from ordinary life and made a dramatic focus of experience.
7.Imagination. Artists and their audiences entertain hypothetical worlds in the theater of the imagination.
It might be objected, however, that there are rather too many exceptions to Dutton's categories. For example, the installations of the contemporary artist Thomas Hirschhorn deliberately eschew technical virtuosity. People can appreciate a Renaissance Madonna for aesthetic reasons, but such objects often had (and sometimes still have) specific devotional functions. 'Rules of composition' that might be read into Duchamp's Fountain or John Cage's 4'33" do not locate the works in a recognizable style (or certainly not a style recognizable at the time of the works' realisation). Moreover, some of Dutton's categories seem too broad: a physicist might entertain hypothetical worlds in his/her imagination in the course of formulating a theory.
Increasingly, academics in both the sciences and the humanities are looking to evolutionary psychology and cognitive science in an effort to understand the connection between psychology and aesthetics. Aside from Dutton, others exploring this realm include Brian Boyd, Noel Carroll, Nancy Easterlin, David Evans, Jonathan Gottschall, Paul Hernadi, Bracha Ettinger, Patrick Hogan, Elaine Scarry, Christine Buci-Glucksmann, Wendy Steiner, Robert Storey, Frederick Turner, and Mark Turner.
Reference:
Zangwill, Nick. "Aesthetic Judgment", Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 02-28-2003/10-22-2007. Retrieved 07-24-2008
Clement Greenberg, “On Modernist Painting”
Lacan, Jacques, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book XI), NY: W. W. Norton & Company, 1998. ISBN 0-393-31775-7.
Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Judgment
Consider Clement Greenberg’s arguments in "On Modernist Painting" (1961), reprinted in Aesthetics: A Reader in Philosophy of Arts
The main recent sense of the word “art” is roughly as an abbreviation for creative art or “fine art.” Here we mean that skill is being used to express the artist’s creativity, or to engage the audience’s aesthetic sensibilities, or to draw the audience towards consideration of the “finer” things. Often, if the skill is being used in a functional object, people will consider it a craft instead of art, a suggestion which is highly disputed by many Contemporary Craft thinkers. Likewise, if the skill is being used in a commercial or industrial way it may be considered design instead of art, or contrariwise these may be defended as art forms, perhaps called applied art. Some thinkers, for instance, have argued that the difference between fine art and applied art has more to do with the actual function of the object than any clear definitional difference.Art usually implies no function other than to convey or communicate an idea.
Even as late as 1912 it was normal in the West to assume that all art aims at beauty, and thus that anything that wasn't trying to be beautiful couldn't count as art. The cubists, dadaists, Stravinsky, and many later art movements struggled against this conception that beauty was central to the definition of art, with such success that, according to Danto, "Beauty had disappeared not only from the advanced art of the 1960’s but from the advanced philosophy of art of that decade as well."Perhaps some notion like "expression" (in Croce’s theories) or "counter-environment" (in McLuhan’s theory) can replace the previous role of beauty. Brian Massumi brought back "beauty" into consideration together with "expression".Another concept, as important to the philosophy of art as "beauty," is that of the "sublime," elaborated upon in the twentieth century by the postmodern philosopher Jean-Francois Lyotard.
Perhaps (as in Kennick's theory) no definition of art is possible anymore. Perhaps art should be thought of as a cluster of related concepts in a Wittgensteinian fashion (as in Weitz or Beuys). Another approach is to say that “art” is basically a sociological category, that whatever art schools and museums and artists define as art is considered art regardless of formal definitions. This "institutional definition of art" (see also Institutional Critique) has been championed by George Dickie. Most people did not consider the depiction of a Brillo Box or a store-bought urinal to be art until Andy Warhol and Marcel Duchamp (respectively) placed them in the context of art (i.e., the art gallery), which then provided the association of these objects with the associations that define art.
Proceduralists often suggest that it is the process by which a work of art is created or viewed that makes it art, not any inherent feature of an object, or how well received it is by the institutions of the art world after its introduction to society at large. Whereas if exactly the same set of words was written by a journalist, intending them as shorthand notes to help him write a longer article later, these would not be a poem. Leo Tolstoy, on the other hand, claims that what makes something art or not is how it is experienced by its audience, not by the intention of its creator. Functionalists like Monroe Beardsley argue that whether or not a piece counts as art depends on what function it plays in a particular context; the same Greek vase may play a non-artistic function in one context (carrying wine), and an artistic function in another context (helping us to appreciate the beauty of the human figure). '
What should we judge when we judge art?
Art can be difficult at the metaphysical and ontological levels as well as at the value theory level. When we see a performance of Hamlet, how many works of art are we experiencing, and which should we judge? Perhaps there is only one relevant work of art, the whole performance, which many different people have contributed to, and which will exist briefly and then disappear. Perhaps the manuscript by Shakespeare is a distinct work of art from the play by the troupe, which is also distinct from the performance of the play by this troupe on this night, and all three can be judged, but are to be judged by different standards.
Perhaps every person involved should be judged separately on his or her own merits, and each costume or line is its own work of art (with perhaps the director having the job of unifying them all). Similar problems arise for music, film and even painting. Is one to judge the painting itself, the work of the painter, or perhaps the painting in its context of presentation by the museum workers?
These problems have been made even more difficult by the rise of conceptual art since the 1960s. Warhol’s famous Brillo Boxes are nearly indistinguishable from actual Brillo boxes at the time. It would be a mistake to praise Warhol for the design of his boxes (which were designed by Steve Harvey), yet the conceptual move of exhibiting these boxes as art in a museum together with other kinds of paintings is Warhol's. Are we judging Warhol’s concept? His execution of the concept in the medium? The curator’s insight in letting Warhol display the boxes? The overall result? Our experience or interpretation of the result? Ontologically, how are we to think of the work of art? Is it a physical object? Several objects? A class of objects? A mental object? A fictional object? An abstract object? An event? Or simply an Act?
What should art be like?
Many goals have been argued for art, and aestheticians often argue that some goal or another is superior in some way. Clement Greenberg, for instance, argued in 1960 that each artistic medium should seek that which makes it unique among the possible mediums and then purify itself of anything other than expression of its own uniqueness as a form.[16] The Dadaist Tristan Tzara on the other hand saw the function of art in 1918 as the destruction of a mad social order. “We must sweep and clean. Affirm the cleanliness of the individual after the state of madness, aggressive complete madness of a world abandoned to the hands of bandits.”Formal goals, creative goals, self-expression, political goals, spiritual goals, philosophical goals, and even more perceptual or aesthetic goals have all been popular pictures of what art should be like.
The value of art
Tolstoy defined art, and not incidentally characterized its value, this way: "Art is a human activity consisting in this, that one man consciously, by means of certain external signs, hands on to others feelings he has lived through, and that other people are infected by these feelings and also experience them."
The value of art, then, is one with the value of empathy.
Other possible views are these: Art can act as a means to some special kind of knowledge. Art may give insight into the human condition. Art relates to science and religion. Art serves as a tool of education, or indoctrination, or enculturation. Art makes us more moral. It uplifts us spiritually. Art is politics by other means. Art has the value of allowing catharsis. In any case, the value of art may determine the suitability of an art form. Do they different significantly in their values, or (if not) in their ability to achieve the unitary value of art?
But to approach the question of the value of art systematically, one ought to ask: for whom? For the artist? For the audience? For society at large, and/or for individuals beyond the audience? Is the "value" of art different in each of these different contexts?
Working on the intended value of art tends to help define the relations between art and other acts. Art clearly does have spiritual goals in many contexts, but what exactly is the difference between religious art and religion per se? The truth is complex - Art is both useless in a functional sense and the most important human activity.
It has been said, that a Vogon Starship arriving at the earth and ordering its destruction would ask what use is humanity? The only justification humanity could give would be a Shakespeare play, a Rembrandt or a Bach concerto. These are the things of value which define humanity itself.
Aesthetic universals
The philosopher Denis Dutton identified seven universal signatures in human aesthetics:
1.Expertise or virtuosity. Technical artistic skills are cultivated, recognized, and admired.
2.Nonutilitarian pleasure. People enjoy art for art's sake, and don't demand that it keep them warm or put food on the table.
3.Style. Artistic objects and performances satisfy rules of composition that place them in a recognizable style.
4.Criticism. People make a point of judging, appreciating, and interpreting works of art.
5.Imitation. With a few important exceptions like music and abstract painting, works of art simulate experiences of the world.
6.Special focus. Art is set aside from ordinary life and made a dramatic focus of experience.
7.Imagination. Artists and their audiences entertain hypothetical worlds in the theater of the imagination.
It might be objected, however, that there are rather too many exceptions to Dutton's categories. For example, the installations of the contemporary artist Thomas Hirschhorn deliberately eschew technical virtuosity. People can appreciate a Renaissance Madonna for aesthetic reasons, but such objects often had (and sometimes still have) specific devotional functions. 'Rules of composition' that might be read into Duchamp's Fountain or John Cage's 4'33" do not locate the works in a recognizable style (or certainly not a style recognizable at the time of the works' realisation). Moreover, some of Dutton's categories seem too broad: a physicist might entertain hypothetical worlds in his/her imagination in the course of formulating a theory.
Increasingly, academics in both the sciences and the humanities are looking to evolutionary psychology and cognitive science in an effort to understand the connection between psychology and aesthetics. Aside from Dutton, others exploring this realm include Brian Boyd, Noel Carroll, Nancy Easterlin, David Evans, Jonathan Gottschall, Paul Hernadi, Bracha Ettinger, Patrick Hogan, Elaine Scarry, Christine Buci-Glucksmann, Wendy Steiner, Robert Storey, Frederick Turner, and Mark Turner.
Reference:
Zangwill, Nick. "Aesthetic Judgment", Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 02-28-2003/10-22-2007. Retrieved 07-24-2008
Clement Greenberg, “On Modernist Painting”
Lacan, Jacques, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book XI), NY: W. W. Norton & Company, 1998. ISBN 0-393-31775-7.
Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Judgment
Consider Clement Greenberg’s arguments in "On Modernist Painting" (1961), reprinted in Aesthetics: A Reader in Philosophy of Arts
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