Theory NOWTheory NOWA discursive site about the relevance of art theory now. Articles
Performance Art:
Recreation or Emulation 2006-12-02 02:12:06 Performance art, which gained dominance as an art practice in the 1970?s, was definitively about duration and presence. The performance act is time based certainly, and thus expresses itself in the duration of those actions by the performer(s), and our focus is on the physical body (presence) of the performance artist(s). The fact of the art object?s superfluity was already in the discourse, as stated in theoretical propositions laid out by Lewitt, Kosuth and other conceptualists. This paradigm shift from ?commodity objects? to a dematerialization of those objects may have been a factor in the move to performance by many young artists during this era.Marina Abramovic was one of those original performance artists of the ?70?s generation and she is practicing her art today. Her "Seven Easy Pieces" performance project undertaken at the Guggenheim Museum last year represents the most visible project of ?re-interpretation? of what can only be termed archival performance art ?pieces.?... More About: Performance , Recreation , Creation , Form , Perform
Constructs of Representation
2006-12-02 02:12:06 After conceptual art, minimalism and anti-form, artists began to realize that the materials and process of art making, the location and placement of objects, must be considered not only as elements of visuality but ruled by the conventions of a system of representation. Under the newly translated influence of theorists like Barthes, Derrida and Lacan, representation was further revealed as existing within institutional power structures, thus authenticity, meaning, sexuality, identity, even ?reality,? were revealed to be socially constructed and in perpetual flux within various institutional ideologies. Artists like Hans Haacke and Marcel Broodthaers would attack powerful interests by, respectively, exposing the complicit nature of wealth and power, and reflecting on the status of the art object under the reign of institutional commodity production.Mary Kelly embarked on a six-year quasi-scientific project that ?challenged conventional senses of the appearance and unity of the work... More About: Present , Presentation , Const , Cons , Resent
Photo-Text
2006-12-02 02:12:06 Photography has two functions in the discourse of art. First, it is an ?art form? itself, although Frederick Jameson seems to dismiss it as a true ?medium?; and second, it is the ?mass medium? by which other art forms are reproduced. Photography reproduces the art that we look at in magazines and books, and it helps us structure an identity for the art work through these reproductions. Setting aside Jameson?s argument for the moment, we might accept photography as an ?art form? briefly if we consider the photography of Stieglitz, Adams, Strand and Brassai. These photographic works were supremely descriptive or anecdotal, with their depictions of beauty or candid ?decisive moments,? respectively. This kind of ?high art? imagery might be theorized as a direct extension of Modernist ideals. Modernist art was premised on medium specificity and explored the expressive qualities of a medium. Modernism?s ?truth to materials? credo would be coupled with the above photographers? deliv... More About: Photo , Text
Signs Within Signs
2006-12-02 02:12:06 I have written elsewhere about the more controversial issues of appropriation, i.e., authenticity and authorship, so it may prove helpful to approach our topic from the viewpoint of semiotics, to grasp the appropriative technique as a play of images. The use of images dominates advertising and the first wave of photo-appropriationists (Kruger, Burgin, et al) re-formed the quoted sign (coupled with text) as new referents to foster markedly different readings about ideological structures of wealth, power, sex and politics.(1) Art history is rife with manipulations of borrowed imagery (from Braque and Duchamp, to Prince and Hirst) and I would like to differentiate earlier appropriative practices before proceeding. Modernist painters like Braque, Picasso and Schwitters used a formal ordering of borrowed imagery within their compositions. Indubitably, later theorists would proffer Marxist and/or socio-cultural views of these works, yet these painters treated newspaper clippings, ciga... More About: With , Signs , Sign
What Not To Paint
2006-12-02 02:12:06 The idea of the ?academy? of art in the seventeenth century, of ?aesthetics? in the eighteenth, of the ?independence? of art in the nineteenth, and the ?purity? of art in the twentieth, restate, in those centuries in Europe and America, the same ?one point of view.? Fine art can only be defined as exclusive, negative, absolute, and timeless. It is not practical, useful, related, applicable, or subservient to anything else. . . The art tradition stands as the antique-present model of what has been achieved and what does not need to be achieved again. Tradition shows the artist what not to do. . . The first rule and absolute standard of fine art, and painting, which is the highest and freest art, is the purity of it. The more uses, relations, and ?additions? a painting has, the less pure it is.(1)In his 1953 essay, ?Twelve Rules for a New Academy?, Ad Reinhardt made his defiant, arrogant and sometimes contradictory stand against the ?New York School,? the dominant model of abstrac... More About: Pain , What , Hat , Paint
Art Practice of the 1960s
2006-12-02 02:12:06 As the décollagist works of Jacques de la Villeglé attest, artistic practice in post-World War II Europe would be relocated in urban, collective, consumerist space as his grifted street posters embodied artistic intervention via the appropriative act. The random vandalizing of the ubiquitous posters by anonymous Parisians gained a new life of gestural repetition in Villeglé?s hands, as his disintegration of the pictorial relationships in the cinema /concert /product adverts gained a seriality and structure that also implied a cancellation of a ?completed? work. Further, the torn text of the posters was subject to an erasure of its semantic context, expressing different significance in fragmentation.Benjamin Buchloh has distinguished Villeglé as one of those post-WWII Parisian ?New Realist? painters who would seek a ?total dispersal of a centered Cartesian subjectivity and the discrediting of conscious control?(1) by making paintings beyond their intentional composition. Further s... More About: Practice
Prequel: In Advance of a Broken Arm
2006-12-02 02:12:06 Artist-theoretician Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe has boldly suggested that Marcel Duchamp?s readymades ?culminated a tradition of defamiliarization which runs throughout the art of the nineteenth century.? Gilbert-Rolfe selects Gustave Courbet?s 1850 painting, Funeral at Ornans, to explain how far Courbet strayed from ?the Academy,? by eliminating under-painting, using sign painting techniques and borrowing his composition from a political pamphlet. Moreover, Eduard Manet?s Bar at the Folies-Bergere continued the trend as Manet ?uses a technique reminiscent of the lithographed labels to be found, by then, on wine bottles, and obliges us to acknowledge that the painting is a thing, into which we breath space by way of conventions which we have learned, by using two perspectives instead of one, and in so doing, eliminating the possibilities for illusion which the audience had, over the course of the preceding four hundred years or so, come to expect.?(1)Thus, when Duchamp exhibited his snow... More About: Broken , Prequel , Vance
Theory NOW: A Continual Discourse
2006-12-02 02:12:06 I am initiating a little experiment with my Theory NOW blog to announce regular weekly discussions on specific topics of art theory, along with suggested readings for further investigation. My intention is to provide readers of this blog a better grounding for discussions on our topics, as well as outside sources. Since you are always welcome to join the discourse, I hope this weekly discussion will perhaps offer you a sense of intimacy within the framework of ?virtual reality.? For those of you who have the desire to do additional reading, I will provide a list of readings from the text that I ask my Corcoran College of Art + Design students to read. Of course, I would love for you to attend the Theory NOW course which I teach at Corcoran for you to gain the full experience of a structured course. This is not, of course, in any way an attempt to duplicate the ?Corcoran experience? or to attempt to offer a virtual class, but to establish a more directed approach to the ideas en... More About: Course , Disco , Disc , Conti
Discursive Practice and the Positivity of Knowledge
2006-12-02 02:12:06 ?In analysing a painting, one can reconstitute the latent discourse of the painter; one can try to recapture the murmur of his intentions, which are not transcribed into words, but into lines, surfaces, and colours; one can try to uncover the implicit philosophy that is supposed to form his view of the world. It is also possible to question science, or at least the opinions of the period, and to try to recognize to what extent they appear in the painter?s work. Archaeological analysis would have another aim: it would try to discover whether space, distance, depth, colour, light, proportions, volumes, and contours were not, at the period in question, considered, named, enunciated, and conceptualized in a discursive practice; and whether the knowledge that this discursive practice gives rise to was not embodied perhaps in theories and speculations, in forms of teaching and codes of practice, but also in processes, techniques, and even in the very gesture of the painter. It would no... More About: Practice , Knowledge , Know , Edge , Posi
Minimalist Theater
2006-12-02 02:12:06 A preliminary synopsis of Michael Fried?s influential and controversial essay, Art and Objecthood would outline these points:1. The emergence of a new, ?illusionary? visual mode in painting (Pollock, Newman, Louis) that acknowledged the literal character of the painting?s support, i.e. its flatness. Greenberg: ?Optical illusionary as opposed to sculptural illusionary.?2. Neutralization of that flatness by the literalness of the experience of pigment, foreign substances, etc.3. The arrival of a new mode of pictorial structure based on the shape of the support (Stella, Noland), i.e., shape determines structure.4. Primacy of the literal over the depicted; depicted shape became dependent on the literal shape.Fried?s analysis takes us to around 1965 and is a workable study of the seemingly ?positive? and ?logical? progression of an admittedly limited handful of painters working in the United States. But the real nugget of this essay comes in the seventh and final section, wherein F... More About: Theater , Mali , Mini , Minimal , List
Figuratively Speaking
2006-12-02 02:12:06 Although I cannot fully endorse the ?resurrection of the figurative? heralded by many since the rise of Neo-Expression, as my own proclivities lean toward the conceptual, linguistic and interactive in art making, I will take issue with Peter Halley?s assessment that ?these artists, and the art they produce, fail to recognize the complexity of the transformations that have taken place within the social.?(1)On the contrary, I suggest that certain contemporary artists working with the figure have been informed by the eruption of investigative knowledge on the ?social order,? including but not limited to the construction of the subject (Saville) and cognitive perception (Baselitz). These artists continue to make figurative painting relevant because of the supplemental and extraneous ?fields of knowledge? they bring to the studio and their work bears a much more concise examination, possibly using the general parameters which I will outline here in this limited essay.The approach to ?up... More About: King , Speak , Speaking , Peak , Figurative
Figuratively Speaking
2006-11-30 23:06:00 Although I cannot fully endorse the ?resurrection of the figurative? heralded by many since the rise of Neo-Expression, as my own proclivities lean toward the conceptual, linguistic and interactive in art making, I will take issue with Peter Halley?s assessment that ?these artists, and the art they produce, fail to recognize the complexity of the transformations that have taken place within the social.?(1)On the contrary, I suggest that certain contemporary artists working with the figure have been informed by the eruption of investigative knowledge on the ?social order,? including but not limited to the construction of the subject (Saville) and cognitive perception (Baselitz). These artists continue to make figurative painting relevant because of the supplemental and extraneous ?fields of knowledge? they bring to the studio and their work bears a much more concise examination, possibly using the general parameters which I will outline here in this limited essay.The approach to ?up... More About: Speaking
Contradictions in Supplemental Discourse
More articles from this author:2006-11-18 05:27:00 Much of contemporary art needs the supplement of theory to be approached, yet often a particular critical reading of an artist is rendered inaccurate by its theoretical position. Singaporean essayist Lee Weng Choy questions the privileging of ?only one reading? of an artist?s work and suggests that it is the contradictions in artwork that ?make it possible to speak to the work critically in the first place.?(1) I propose that even contradictions within a misguided critique of an artist can open the possibility of a different reading under close scrutiny. If we are to expand the discourse on contemporary art theory, we must question previously held yet problematic beliefs, always at the ready to re-write art history with supplemental critiques based on more stringent or diverse critical perspectives, especially points of view that counteract accepted and published critical positions. For instance, one accepted critical perception on the performance art of Paul McCarthy has to do w... More About: Disc 1, 2, 3, 4 |
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