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Tag Archives: aesthetics
Order inside and out
I keep thinking about a quote from Emerson that I’ve used elsewhere on the blog: “I would write on the lintels of the doorpost, Whim. I hope it is somewhat better than whim at last, but we cannot spend the … Continue reading
Abstraction is so over
Bruce Hainley is a critic I have a lot of time for. Oddly, many of my friends don’t understand why. I get where he is coming from, and it’s the right place. If I was in a down mood his … Continue reading
Posted in Current Affairs, Ethics of Abstraction, Uncategorized
Tagged abstract art, abstraction, aesthetics, backstory, meaning, nature, sex, society, subjectivity, value
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Conceptual Antagonist
The following remarks by Clement Greenberg, from 1971, give the most astute definition of conceptualism, or at least of the kind of conceptualism worth paying attention to: “…art, put to the strictest test of experience, proves to mean not skillful … Continue reading
Questionable or Not
On the British web site abstract critical there is more debate about Frank Stella. I’m on his side but most aren’t. Much of the criticism seems to be based on a perception that the work does not hold together formally—the … Continue reading
Abstraction as Child of History
Any working definition of abstraction that I am likely to come up with will be a description of my own paintings—that can hardly be avoided. Recent intense looking at Frank Stella has provoked some ideas, but his work is not … Continue reading
Posted in American Modernism, Italian Art, Principles of Abstraction
Tagged abstract art, abstraction, aesthetics, emergence, Frank Stella, illusion, knowledge, Linsley, nature, the inhuman, value
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The Contingent
Another important concept stressed by Stephen Jay Gould, one that is very much relevant to art, is contingency. He is talking about the possible pathways of evolution, but in art we could say that all works begin contingently and move … Continue reading
Science and Aesthetics
From Walter Benjamin: The place occupied in Goethe’s writings by his scientific studies is the one which in lesser artists is commonly reserved for aesthetics. This aspect of Goethe’s work can be appreciated only when one realizes that, unlike almost … Continue reading
Powers of Art
One can exert oneself and make many sorts of things in a life. One can make artworks, which do nothing, but just are what they are. Or one can build institutions, or social structures or change life for the better—decrease … Continue reading
Posted in Abstraction and Society, Current Affairs, Ethics of Abstraction
Tagged abstract art, abstraction, aesthetics, illusion, meaning, Smithson, society, value
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Kitaj’s Diasporic Literariness
Been reading R.B.Kitaj’s Second Diasporist Manifesto. I read the first one many years ago and found it unsatisfying, but this one is so optimistic and cheerful, it’s a pleasure. The change is that he unreservedly proselytizes a Jewish art—previously he … Continue reading
Turnaround
Diedrich Diederischsen‘s article in the September Artforum offers a welcome confirmation of my own ideas about non-participation: “Unfortunately, contemporary attempts at the creation of resistance, especially in the hysterical versions of activist political art that desires direct and unmediated action, … Continue reading
Ethics of Art
Over the last few months this blog has been circling around some ideas in aesthetics that may help to newly define the value of abstraction. Concepts such as non-identity, the inhuman and organic formalism have been presented. I was just … Continue reading
Indefinite Feeling
Stella’s remarks, quoted in the previous post, continue: “What abstract painting can do better than anything else…[is evoke]…that sense of recognition that’s indefinite yet ecstatic at the same time.” I distrust this vagueness and non-specificity, though he is right that … Continue reading
Things as they are
I’d like to return to a piece by Elizabeth Murray included in an earlier post, because it demonstrates something important about American art. The right hand part has three zig-zags and one curve, the left hand part has three curves … Continue reading
A Critical Theory
In the Affendämmerung, or twilight of the apes, What is more fitting than that man should for reassurance turn to japes? In chaos sublunary What remains constant but buffoonery? Ogden Nash
Non-Identical
Still tracing the boundaries of my concept of the inhuman. If we could use the word “nature” the way it was used in philosophy and science in the 19th. century for example, I would much prefer that. But today nature … Continue reading
All Too Human
The concept of the “inhuman” can’t be taken too literally. Unlike some science fiction dreamers, I don’t advocate that people should become inhuman, more than human or part machine. I don’t see how an artist can be anything other than … Continue reading
Off the coast
Following from the previous post, the word “critique,” is very problematic. I doubt if anyone in the art world has any real idea what it means. It’s doubly difficult in that whoever thinks there is a stable meaning automatically misses … Continue reading
Art is social
Following the nautical theme, one can go sailing over the horizon and end up somewhere outside. The following thoughts, also torn out of Conrad, complement nicely an earlier post, Society is Abstract. “Few men realize that their life, the very … Continue reading
Art and the Inhuman
Following on from the previous post, the way that paintings overcome the necessary limits of a single work attributable to a single author is through the objectivity of the aesthetic, but this is not well understood today because both viewers … Continue reading
Heilman’s critics
I want to express my disagreement with Heilman’s work, yet I find myself having to defend her from her admirers. She has taken a beating over the years, and suffered more than her share of critical neglect, yet today her … Continue reading
The market in meaning
If, as Boris Groys suggests, art has definitively become discourse, then the position I laid out in the previous post must seem pretty rearguard to some. Actually, it isn’t clear yet whether the transition from objects to discourses has been … Continue reading
No Aura
A critic should be judged by the quotient of pain he or she can inflict. Here again is Boris Groys: “For those who devote themselves to the production of art documentation rather than artworks, art is identical to life, because … Continue reading
Aura
The concept of aura is a beautiful one; as Groys and others have pointed out, it is an aspect of the here and now experience of a particular object, or more properly of the loss of such an experience, and … Continue reading
Discursive objects
Listening still to Boris Groys, whose ideas should by rights be central to this blog. He says: “We see artworks as incarnating art. The famous distinction between art and non-art is generally understood as a distinction between objects inhabited and … Continue reading
Backstory as documentation
The concept of backstory is an interesting one, but as the comments on some recent posts have shown, far more interesting to many people is the condition of art as a discursive practice. Perhaps one of the strongest exponents of … Continue reading
Posted in Abstraction and Society, Conceptualism and Painting, Uncategorized
Tagged aesthetics, backstory, Boris Groys, emptiness, knowledge, labor, meaning, society
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Emptiness and need
The previous post touched on one of the reasons why abstract pictures might need titles, or maybe it is the psychological aspect of the objective problem noticed by Frank Stella in his book Working Space. As he said: “We often … Continue reading
Posted in Abstraction and Society, American Modernism, Principles of Abstraction, Uncategorized
Tagged abstract art, abstraction, aesthetics, feeling, form, Frank Stella, Gego, meaning, society, space, value
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Poverty
Another quote from my favorite literary critic: “We dwell in poverty, and we are that poverty, for our imaginative need has become greater than our imaginations can fulfill.”
Angelus Novus
If we accept Benjamin’s reading of Klee’s Angelus Novus, that it is moving backwards into the future while watching the increasing pile up of wreckage we call modernity, then it is also looking at us, who are a little further … Continue reading
Future Retrospect
Backstory as context stays in the here and now, and so keeps faith with modernism. Backstory as nervous anticipation of future criticism is a retrospective literary mode, and as such recalls Benjamin’s angel, who is always looking backward as he … Continue reading
A Constant Unknown
Start from the position that the backstory or critical pre-text, or in fact any of the textual elements of the discursive mode, are ways to make explicit what is unknown (unconscious?), implicit, suggested or unspoken in the work of art, … Continue reading