![]() The two features are: first, serialization, and second, a narrative relation to the past.īy the term “serialization” I am obviously not talking about the practice of theme and variation, which has to it the ring of a somewhat leisurely and almost gentlemanly enterprise. Yet their import seems to me to have been less well-documented and that is what I intend to discuss. They are features which have been pointed to-in fact heralded-by those critics and artists who have concerned themselves with Conceptual art. In doing so it seems to me important to look at two special features of painting in the last ten years. At the present, we have reason to think that painters themselves are reacting to a change in objective conditions and it is to the symptoms of that reaction that I want to turn. Should those conditions change, so will it change-not just quantitatively but qualitatively. Rather, I see it as a function of conditions external to art itself which call it into being and which determine its meaning by defining how it will be used. Today, I no longer think of pictorial space as an entity of that kind. I would have presupposed that it had been the task of generations of painters to carry on such an analysis, and that as a critic it was my job to understand and respond to their findings. I would have thought that I was concerned with an objective category whose terms were discoverable through some kind of analysis. Therefore if, a few years ago, I had set about talking of pictorial space and its relation to literal space, I would have assumed that I was dealing with a question that was ontological in kind. They could be tested against experience in a way that other arguments (involving either the psychological response to, or the objective conditions of, beauty) could not. Arguments or judgments which began and ended with the nature of pictorial illusion were open to verification. Whether one took pictorial space as a function of perceptual or cultural givens, its role within the making and the viewing of art was clear, and from it one could derive a set of operable definitions. And that fact had to do with the nature of pictorial space. The different tone of modernism seemed to be a consequence of inhabiting a house of critical discourse built upon a rock of hard, irrefutable fact. For, at the heart of earlier esthetic argument, a note of worried imperative had always sounded-as though anxiety about trust were the price to pay for being the child of a broken philosophical home. ![]() FROM THE VERY BEGINNING, a tone of expansive confidence infused modernist analysis, so that the ear could detect immediately the distance between this new esthetic theory and the old. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |