CONTEMPORARY ART NEEDS A FIELD WITHIN WHICH ONES PRACTICE CAN BE DEFINED.
This field was provided by post modernist art, especially postmodernist sculpture.
Modernism is art about art. The journey towards making a work of art was as important as the work itself. This was the theory of influential art critic Clement Greenberg, ‘the essence of modernism lies in the use of the characteristic methods of a discipline to criticize the discipline itself, not in order to subvert it but to entrench it more fully in its area of competence,’ 1.
By the 1950’s modernism was a flagging art movement. Rosiland Crause described sculpture as collapsing in on itself as a result of modern art disrupting it from its traditional function.
Sculpture Crause describes pre modernist sculpture as site specific and monumental, a ‘historically bounded category and not a universal one’, p33. Sculpture according to Crause was representation, symbols and marking, normally figurative and vertical. Their pedestals mediating, ‘between actual site and representational sign’, p33. Modernism saw sculptures being multiplied and moved from site. It was no longer monument it was homeless and nomadic.
Postmodernism saw a new approach to sculpture. A discipline that revisited materials, technique and explored sculptural ideas and technology. Crause formulates or structures the possibilities of Post-Modern sculpture using concise mathematical diagrams.
She states ‘that the expanded field of postmodernism happens at a specific moment in the recent history of art’, p44. This was the late 1960’s; artists were looking to be diverse and open. Many artists looked to reject the gallery and curator as a frame. ‘For one after another Robert Morris , Robert Smithson, Michael Heizer, Richard Serra, Walter De Maria, Robert Irwin, Sol Le Witt, Bruce Nauman....had entered a situation the logical conditions of which can no longer be described as modernist’, p41. ‘Some artists moved the earth to create great colossal primal symbols while others punctuated the horizon with man-made signposts,’ 2. ‘Although primarily sculptural, this tendency also encompasses performance and conceptualism. In all cases, mapping, photographic documentation and or text-based accounts are an intrinsic part of the work,’3.
Sculpture had become the practice most artists, could slip in and out of and define their art by.
1. Clement Greenberg, ‘Modernist Painting’, Arts Yearbook IV, New York, 1961; reprinted in Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology, op. Cit. P. 70
2. Brian Wallis, Land and Environmental Art, ed. Jeffery Kastner, Phadion Press Ltd, 1998, reprinted 2001, 2
3. Brian Wallis, Land and Environmental Art, ed. Jeffery Kastner, Phadion Press Ltd, 1998, reprinted 2001, 2
Monday, April 13, 2009
IMAGE AND WORD
‘...to an ever greater extent our experience is governed by pictures, pictures in newspapers and magazines, on television and in the cinema’ 1. A quote from Douglas Crimp, who believed that our experience of reality is organised by the images we make of it. What Crimp fails to acknowledge is the importance of word.
I believe that image and word are inseparable and coexist side by side.
Are poetry and painting independent arts? W.J.T Mitchell asks in the first chapters of his book, Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology. Or are the image and word one because beneath word is image which is an impression of outward experience.
Mitchell questions what sense we can make of icons. He looks at whether there is a hierarchy between image and word.
Mitchell starts by quoting Mark Twain who believed that painting needed a title for explanation. That without one the art could be open to any number of interpretations. Twain refers to Guido Reni’s painting of Beatrice Cenci which he felt could just as easily be seen as ‘girl with hay fever; or young girl with her head in a bag’40. What, Twain fails to acknowledge is that the people of the time would have known the story and instantly recognised the figure? In the Renaissance symbols were used to tell stories in art they helped to tell the viewer what to think.
The problem is that painting cannot stand outside pictorial and verbal traditions. People want to see through the brain using words, symbols, or narrative. In other words brainwork is structured by language; we need words to structure our thinking. Therefore often the subtleties of art are overlooked. Francis Bacon said, “The task of painting is to render visible forces that are not themselves visible”2. Mitchell called it the ‘painting of the invisible’40. We can think of it as subtle levels of understanding, emotional experiences, and conveying ideas through the imagination.
The word and image are different modes of representation but they are two sides of the same coin. One is culture and the other is nature. The alienation between them is a modernist concern. A time of industrialization when those involved in all forms of art, felt traditional methods of expression were outdated. Modernist artists such as Cezanne, Picasso and Matisse wanted to move beyond Realism and focus on more subtle forms of narrative.
The struggle is not to heal the split between words and image but to allow them to work together to enable our understanding.
1. Colin Trodd, Postmodernism and Art, The Routledge Companion to Postmodernism, ed. Stuart Sim, London, Routledge, 1999. 91
2.
‘...to an ever greater extent our experience is governed by pictures, pictures in newspapers and magazines, on television and in the cinema’ 1. A quote from Douglas Crimp, who believed that our experience of reality is organised by the images we make of it. What Crimp fails to acknowledge is the importance of word.
I believe that image and word are inseparable and coexist side by side.
Are poetry and painting independent arts? W.J.T Mitchell asks in the first chapters of his book, Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology. Or are the image and word one because beneath word is image which is an impression of outward experience.
Mitchell questions what sense we can make of icons. He looks at whether there is a hierarchy between image and word.
Mitchell starts by quoting Mark Twain who believed that painting needed a title for explanation. That without one the art could be open to any number of interpretations. Twain refers to Guido Reni’s painting of Beatrice Cenci which he felt could just as easily be seen as ‘girl with hay fever; or young girl with her head in a bag’40. What, Twain fails to acknowledge is that the people of the time would have known the story and instantly recognised the figure? In the Renaissance symbols were used to tell stories in art they helped to tell the viewer what to think.
The problem is that painting cannot stand outside pictorial and verbal traditions. People want to see through the brain using words, symbols, or narrative. In other words brainwork is structured by language; we need words to structure our thinking. Therefore often the subtleties of art are overlooked. Francis Bacon said, “The task of painting is to render visible forces that are not themselves visible”2. Mitchell called it the ‘painting of the invisible’40. We can think of it as subtle levels of understanding, emotional experiences, and conveying ideas through the imagination.
The word and image are different modes of representation but they are two sides of the same coin. One is culture and the other is nature. The alienation between them is a modernist concern. A time of industrialization when those involved in all forms of art, felt traditional methods of expression were outdated. Modernist artists such as Cezanne, Picasso and Matisse wanted to move beyond Realism and focus on more subtle forms of narrative.
The struggle is not to heal the split between words and image but to allow them to work together to enable our understanding.
1. Colin Trodd, Postmodernism and Art, The Routledge Companion to Postmodernism, ed. Stuart Sim, London, Routledge, 1999. 91
2.
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