Foreground: Deb Covell, “Nowt to Summat”, 2014; background: Simon Callery, “Wiltshire Modulator”, 2010
Natasha Kidd – Overfill (2015)
Alaena Turner – Secret Action Painting 7 (2015)
Krauss:
- Sculpture began with meaningful commemoration, plinth separation in the site/space from the representation situated on the plinth
- Modernism is when this meaningful commemoration representation broke down with the emphasis on objectivity
- In Modernism, sculpture becomes nomadic and self-referential
Brancusi – Beginnings of the World (1924)
Gordan Matta-Clark – Conical Intersect (1975)
- Idealism of Modernism, with the idea of the ‘Disembodied Vision’
In effect, the operator’s eye has become “disembodied.” …. creating a perceptually seamless whole in which vision – The Disembodied Eye: Consequences of Displacing Perception From Action
Greenberg discourse:
- Development of an optical space in painting, rather than a tactile one
Greenberg – Manet as the first ‘Modern Painter’ (flattening of the painting so it become less able to enter the space physically, so you can only travel through with your eyes, i.e. optically)
Characteristics:
- Little perspective
- Angles Painting
- Few Mid-Tones
- In-Evidence brushwork
Similar Artists:
Cezanne (Bathers)
Picasso (Les Demoiselles)
Jason Pollock (Full Fathom Five)
Ad Reinhardt (1955) – ending Modernism with the monochrome, bounded surface
Ad Reinhardt, Abstract Painting No. 5 (1962)
- Internal Critical Process in painting where in Modernism painting had to define itself completely and totally
“Aesthetic quality didn’t depend on a specific viewer”, as argues Greenberg. Modernism viewer is a critical viewer which anyone can posses this quality
- “Emergence of the intense/exacerbated tendency of the self critical tendency of Kant – Kant as the first real Modernist”, argued Greenberg
- Subjectivity in Action vs Contemplative Subjectivity
- Synonyms become to generate more concrete forms of meaning, structuring your perception
- Interested in the ‘KNOW HOW’ of making work
Free, perceptual intensities that once free form the identities of painting they become mobile and can become used in things other than painting, but still bear that inherent relation to painting
Diego Valesques – The Maids of Honour (1656-7)
- History painting isn’t a series of forms that relate to each other in a historic form (as Greenberg thought), but instead takes one element of painting – see diagram – and does something different with it)
Knowledge/Know How is creation from action isn’t of merely implying theories
Mallarme – Un Coup dr Des (1897)
The Tower of Babel – Brugel
Vermeer – The Art of Painting (1662-8)
Lecture Notes:
Underneath all reason lied delirium and drift
Leotard: Art & Politics (1991, pp.18-19)
- The ‘plastic’ function of the line.
- ‘seen’ rather than ‘read’
- A figure on a ground, rather than an arbitrary mark
- visible by virtue of a certain ‘resistance’
- …the line marks a figural space, it has the quality of a trace of the unrecognisable…
- …it evokes an unreadability…
- Yet the line has no concept, its purely plastic
Juan Uslé