Dennis Hollingsworth

Rethinking the Present

I'm following with interest a conversation between three bloggers:

Miguel S?nchez at Modern Kicks,
Timothy Quigley at Asymptote and
Dan at IconoDuel

They seem to be asking the "were are we now?" kind of questions, making calls to re-think the present. They link to other blogs like Todd Gibson, who is looking for an honest way to talk about art today:

Both my semester with the aesthetic fascists and my second-hand exposure to Derrida's hit-and-run pedagogy showed me the type of criticism I didn't want to write--criticism that was abstruse, that ignored its purported subject as it focused on its own process, that used works of art to further external political agendas, and that--frankly--no one wanted to read.

Kimball's diatribes and Derrida's dissembling showed me that I wanted to engage, really engage, with works of art. I wanted to look at them closely. To situate them firmly in the richness of their historical context. (If race, class, and gender were involved there, OK.) To ask what their creators were trying to do through their creations. To trace what happened once the works left their creators' hands and went out into the world on their own. And to understand how viewers related to these works in our age.

Qugley wrestles with his doubt about our ability to questions in response to the previous post that are too good to be buried in the comments section.

In rejecting Danto's notion of a pluralistic, posthistorical mode, what do you see as the implications for contemporary criticism? Is it still resigned to cast about in the wake of Western Art's post-grad growing pains, or should it be capable of a greater agency in working through it? Or is the stagnation of criticism more fundamental to the very "problem" itself? [?]

These are, indeed, "the big questions". It's unfortunate, perhaps, but I don't honestly think we're in a position to answer them, i.e. to provide sufficient explanation and understanding of the current situation to enable us to overcome their hold on us and their demand for immediate attention. That we feel their claim on us suggests, of course, that criticism matters, that it plays a valuable role in our social and cultural lives, that it gives back more than it takes from us in time, nerve, and effort.

These guys can get hardcore and right now, they've thrown down the challenge to re-deep read their Greenberg and Lyotard:

Greenberg argues that when cultural forms are challenged in a society, the standard artistic response is to rigidify (by means of "academicism") the fine points of style and form, theme and variation. There was, however, acccording to Greenberg, a more critical and progressive response to the crisis of artistic tradition in western european art. In the late 19th century, artists outside the mainstream defined themselves in opposition to the bourgeoisie by drawing on revolutionary political ideas. The nascent avant-garde (he claims) broke free of society, eventually rejecting its political foundation in favor of a cultural goal -- to move art "forward" on its own terms as "art for art's sake". This involved a belief in, and search for, "absolutes" beyond content.

At this point, I'm wondering if the art world isn't hung up on the 19th century.... and therefore, Marx. Calls for social change seem to reflect this. It's funny how much Marxism undergirds so much of art theory, and the historical consequences of it's repeated failures (100 million deaths for example) seems to be inconsequential.

Here's how Quigley ends his most recent post:

It seems to me the issue here is not so much, as Miguel suggests, in the opposition of realism and abstraction, but in the question of what gives rise to meaning and value in art. It's obvious that modern artists gave unprecedented attention to the mediums in which they worked. In the 19th century, this constituted a radical move away from the tradition and conventions of the time. In challenging the standards for representation of the visual world and introducing spatial incongruities, abandonment of local color, dramatic emphasis on surface features and two dimensionality, Manet, Monet, Cezanne, Derain, Kandinsky, and others rejected the art of the bourgeoisie, disrupting the comfort associated with it.

So the question here is how and why the particular qualities of the new art acquired the significance and values they did. What did flatness, to use the most obvious example, represent and why did it have such appeal for artists and critics in the 20th century? What was so important about "purity" in art? Why were so many drawn to it as a concept around which to organize a practice or discourse? And -- here's the question distinguishing Greenberg from Fried from Meyer Schapiro from T. J. Clark, etc. -- with reference to what can these questions be answered? To what extent is it necessary to go beyond the history of style, or the subjective intuitions of the viewer?

There's so much, the best thing to do is start with Quigley's link above and click away until you noodle through the older posts between all three. Somewhere along the way, Miguel Sanchez puts it plainly:

- If we are to look back at the art and criticism of the 1960's to help "re-think the present", I think it's also important to consider the institutional conditions of the art world then and have they have grown, changed and developed in the time since. We do a lot of this sort of thing all the time - commenting on news reports of jet-setting collectors, the changes in the art market, museum growth and development, and the rest. But too often observations of these phenomenon are wrapped up in narratives of cultural decline, or the myopia of business reporting. Something larger and broader is needed than ad hoc comments, something that provides a full assessment of the structures of the art world and how they have developed - a sociology of contemporary art. Not with the idea of getting where wants to go by some sort of materialist reduction, but to try to see the lay of the land before moving more abstractly. There are a lot of articles that grab at pieces of the picture, and we all have a partial view of what we observe around us, but a more comprehensive take would help. Lots of luck.

(Emphasis mine)

A map!

He wants a map.

OK.

I think I have one for you here... (Now hold on there whilst I whip out my metanarrative!)

Let me see.... (stay tuned, I'll draw a map in another blogpost)

Posted by Dennis at February 3, 2005 12:39 AM